Gristle & Bone
Author: Duncan Ralston
Date: 2013-12-20 05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Short Stories; Fiction; Anthologies
Description: Gristle & Bone9 Delectable Tales of the MacabreIn the aftermath of a bizarre series of small town murders, a man learns the gruesome truth that led his seemingly perfect neighbors to kill. A disgraced soldier returns to his hometown and confronts the bullies, and a horrifying event, from his past. A couple discovers the secret of a tourist town's prosperity may lie in its sinfully delicious cuisine. A young boy meets a supernatural being who shapes the man he'll become.Includes 2 novellas, Scavengers and Fat of the Land, the novelettes, BEWARE OF DOG, Viral, and //END USER, and 4 more stories.
Publisher: Shadow Work Publishing

Contents

Praise for G&B

Title

Copyright

INTRODUCTION

BABY TEETH

VIRAL

ARTIFACT (#37)

//END USER

BEWARE OF DOG

FAT OF THE LAND

SCAVENGERS

A Sample from SALVAGE

THANK YOU

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR

PRAISE FOR "GRISTLE & BONE"

"Intelligent, character-driven horror tales."

Jack Ketchum, Author of The Girl Next Door

"Mr. Ralston writes horror fiction that is unflinching and pulls no punches."

Kit Power, Author of GodBomb! (for The Ginger Nuts of Horror)

"Duncan Ralston can write. Oh yes, he can write so damn well that you're instantly pulled right in there. And he's got some truly nightmarish visions to share with you."

Chris Hall, DLS Reviews

"Gristle & Bone will lead you into a world of unrestrained imagination."

Thomas S. Flowers, Author of the Subdue series

"A collection of stories that will have you glued to them from the first words. "

Nev Murray, Confessions of a Reviewer

"Duncan Ralston is writing honest stories about real people, pitched headlong into extraordinary situations. And that is what makes them so horrifying."

Ken Preston, Author of the Joe Coffin series (for Dirge Magazine)

"A chainsaw straight to the jugular... balances horror with humanity with effortless ease."

Daniel Marc Chant, Author of Into Fear!

"Duncan Ralston has a knack for writing three-dimensional characters and can bring the darkness just as well."

Zakk Ex Libris, The Eyes of Madness

"Each story has a great way of blindsiding you, leading you down one path and then coming at you from a completely different angle of attack."

J.R Park, Author of Upon Waking

"Ralston is not afraid to take chances, with his story ideas or his narrative structure. In that regard, he's like a typical free swinging baseball power hitter."

Silver Screen Videos

"As a fan of horror, this is the kind of writing that is exactly what I look for."

Chad A. Clark, Author of Behind Our Walls

"I cannot praise this book highly enough."

Shadow Girl, Becki's Bloody Book Blog

"Literary and plausible, all the stories remain firmly grounded in reality, which makes them even scarier. The first story of the collection... made me wince, stop reading, and collect myself. It's a bar-raising achievement. "

Jeffrey X. Martin, Author of The Flock (for Popshifter)

GRISTLE & BONE

DUNCAN RALSTON

__________________________

These stories are works of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this eBook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author.

SHADOW WORK PUBLISHING

Copyright © 2015, 2017 by Duncan Ralston

All rights reserved.

Cover by Michael Bray

Also by Duncan Ralston

Salvage (novel)

Wildfire (novella)

Woom (novella)

Where the Monsters Live (novella)

The Method (novel)

Video Nasties (collection)

Ebenezer (novella)

Ghostland (novel)

The Midwives (novel)

_________________________________________

Get these FREE ebooks when you join
the VIP list at www.duncanralston.com!

INTRODUCTION

Chris Hall

DLS Reviews

"...if you crossed the rather rational line between keeping household pets and eating them alive, would enough humanity remain to think in terms of morality and mortality?"

– 'Scavengers,' Duncan Ralston

I discovered Duncan Ralston through Gristle & Bone. It was one of those from-out-of-the-blue situations which suddenly grabs you by the balls and gives you an unsettling tug. Like an explosion of violence along a crowded walkway. It brings the whole world into pinpoint perspective; in an instant you're suddenly aware of nothing else but what's directly in front of you. Your entire world zeros in on that one thing—blanking out all the mundaneness around you.

Let me rewind the tape for a second. Before a copy of Gristle & Bone dropped through my door I'd not really heard the name Duncan Ralston before. I'd been reviewing horror and dark fiction through my website DLS Reviews for little over a year at this stage. I was just quietly settling into the scene and making a dark little home for myself amongst the veritable chaos out there on the World Wide Web.

I'd found that it had become a regular occurrence for novels to arrive at DLS HQ by authors I'd never heard of before. At first Gristle & Bone appeared to be just another book to churn through, to hopefully garner some gritty enjoyment from and subsequently dissect at length—as is the way on DLS.

However, as soon as I'd gotten a page or so into Gristle & Bone's first offering—a truly horrifying Barker-esque vision of a messed-up imagination entitled 'Baby Teeth'—the world folded in around me and I found myself a strange hostage to Ralston's will as he unleashed an assault of stark brutality upon my prone senses. There's undeniably something in the way Ralston writes that sinks into your flesh and pulls you into his stories. His prose is viciously barbed; keeping you from backing away from the gaping maw of his hideous and truly malicious world.

Each short story is a raw vision of sensual and visceral terror which embeds itself upon the retina of your mind. Shit—it's a whole year later and I'm still having over-exposed flashbacks of cannibals, scavengers and pornographers carving me up for the slaughter. I've become a victim of Ralston's cruel imagination—unknowingly put into harm's way and somehow allowed a dark seed of corruption to infiltrate the delicate harbour of my mind.

As a young curious horror reader many, many moons ago, I discovered Clive Barker's Books Of Blood—collections of short stories which, as a young inquisitive teenager I eagerly (and almost uncontrollably) devoured with absolute gusto. Barker had opened my adolescent eyes to the terrifyingly limitless scope that was possible through the medium of written fiction. He'd plunged the depths of depravity, tore apart the once sacred layers of flesh, and exposed the furthest reaches of our tingling nerves. Reading Barker for the first time scared me in such a way that I couldn't help but seek out more.

Fast forward some twenty odd years and there I was again, my inner senses ravaged and raped by the uncaring savagery of an author who was some three-and-a-half thousand miles away. There I was—a dedicated horror fanatic who'd certainly churned through more than my fair share of horror stories over the ensuing years—and I was once again being sliced and diced by the vicious blades of an author. Ralston, a name I'd soon come to fear as much as admire, was penetrating my thickly calloused skin in seconds. This hadn't happened to me for a long time. 'Baby Teeth'—his opening short—had sucker-punched me, leaving me completely exposed and at the mercy of his next assault on the senses.

The following three-hundred-odd pages were nothing short of a merciless bloodbath.

So what is it about Ralston that fucks with your head so much? I'm an unashamed dissector of novels. I love to tear things apart and expose the innards. Books, that is! I'm no frigging Jeffrey Dahmer (if that's what you're now thinking). Although I wouldn't be all that surprised if I hadn't been just a teensy-weensy bit nudged off the normal course as a result of the Barker/Ralston tag team effort. But anyway... back to the point I was trying to make... I like to examine stuff. And so, after I'd finished Gristle & Bone—once I was able to come up for air and reacclimatise myself with the real world—I began backpedaling through the horrors I'd just put myself through. Part of reviewing is reliving the experience in micro-snippets so I can offer readers a hopeful taste of what the book offers. I was keen to see what it was that had caused me so much inner turmoil. To see how Ralston had managed to submerge my living world into an abyss of visceral horror, in such a way that an over-exposed image of the nightmares still remained seemingly burnt onto the inside of my retina.

What I discovered wasn't anything ground-breaking. It wasn't anything perverse or fundamentally outside of the box. Ralston used the same words as all of us. He used the same format and the same old sentence structures. His prose is sharp, snappy and straight for the gullet—but nothing outlandishly ground-breaking. However what he does do is tell his stories hauntingly, terrifyingly and uncompromisingly well.

When you've got a propensity for inflicting savage cruelty on your (potentially unsuspecting) audience, when you impregnate this urge for malice with a masterful knack for creeping under their skin and enticing a downward spiral of dark exploration, then you have yourself one truly nightmarish cocktail. Ralston unsuspectingly (but quite purposefully) plants corruptive seeds under the skin of his readers. He knows exactly which seeds will germinate in these conditions, unseen and away from the eyes of their host. He knows the stuff that will grow dark tentacle-like roots deep inside you; chilling your organs as they explore deeper and deeper into your body. It's only when his horror breaks the surface of your flesh, when the violence is in your face and the blood is seeping out everywhere that you realise that it's not just what's in your face and splattering the floor; it's actually lodged itself deeper within you. It's at that moment you'll realise those deep-set roots can't just be pulled out. The moment when the real terror sets in.

When reviewing Gristle & Bone one thing that became increasingly apparent to me was how varied and remarkably different each story in the collection was. 'Baby Teeth' is an early Clive Baker meets Mark Morris style nightmarish horror. 'Fat Of The Land' is a Jean-Pierre Jeunet / Marc Caro style of gut-churning visual butchery that spirals into a maddening heart-racing finale that quite frankly flings you about the place as if you're a mere rag doll. 'Beware Of Dog' is textbook Stephen King right down to the heart-wrenching love interest that grows from the crazy-ass horror amongst an all-American backdrop. 'End User' is a current-day 2001: A Space Odyssey, suitably grubbied-up for an internet-obsessed generation, whilst 'Viral' messes with your head like a Koji Suzuki film does—only with more of those dark roots I detailed earlier exploring your insides.

But of course, like a true showman, Ralston leaves the most terrifying, the most vicious and remorseless stories for last. 'Artifact (#37)' is nothing short of harrowing. You've got your Clive Barker tendrils in there again, exploring, probing and penetrating your nerve endings. But there's a worrying modern-day, grim-as-it-comes reality about it that sticks with you like a malignant tumour. It's something that burrows away at you from the outset and, despite the passing of time, never seems to dissipate. You read this and you're soiled for good.

Then we come on to the Grand Finale of the book. The final nail in the coffin of your disappearing wellbeing. 'Scavengers' is Ralston's answer to all our niggling fears and childhood terrors. It explores those things we consciously try to pretend could never happen and zeroes in on the utter plausibility of it all. This is pure dread. Terror masterfully sculpted and laid out on a plinth for us to gaze in awe at.

Duncan Ralston is everything that I love about early Clive Barker. He doesn't care who we are. If we happen upon his stories, if we take the bait and bite down on that barbed hook—then we're his for the taking. From that moment on—from the first tentative bite of his tantalising visions of horror—we're sucked in and at his mercy. What follows in Gristle & Bone is a sensory overload akin to the restless night of a painfully troubled mind. Where Barker took his readers to his own uniquely imagined vision of hell and its horrors, Ralston brings the bestial, barbaric grimness of the darkest reaches of our personal nightmares and lets them loose on our unwitting senses.

In Ralston I see nightmares made terrifyingly real.

Watch this man—because he'll be watching you...

Chris Hall, May 2016

BABY TEETH

IN EARLY JANUARY, the doctor told Candace McMurray she would never be pregnant.

The obstetrician hadn't called her "barren" outright, but the word had occurred to Candace. Years of childhood antidepressants might have ravaged her ovaries, he said. Her husband, Joel, had suggested adoption, but Candace wanted her own children, not someone else's. Joel considered the decision outlandishly selfish, though he said nothing. He shared in her disappointment, wanting children with a hunger matching hers, but he knew her sadness could easily spiral into depression. No use making it worse by arguing a point he knew he'd never win.

Candace was determined not to let the bad news affect their sex life, but despair wormed its way back into her life and into their bed, and soon she couldn't bring herself to orgasm, no matter how persistently Joel pushed her toward it. By the end of the month, she'd realized she had entirely soured on sex.

After several nights ending with Joel's chin rested on her cold shoulder in the dark, breathing into her ear as he worked on her with the thick index fingers of his right hand, while pressing his desperate erection against the cleft of her buttocks, Joel McMurray finally stopped trying to initiate.

That first night without contact, Candace silently wept herself to sleep. Eventually the McMurrays fell into an easy but essentially joyless routine: eating together, reading together, sharing stories about their day, but knowing nothing of sexual or romantic intimacy. No words of love now passed between them, no kisses more sensual than a peck, for fear of stirring Joel's desire.

In the meantime, Candace took up scrapbooking. By June she'd filled two albums with old photos, silhouette portraits, weathered letters and envelopes, copies of birth certificates and citizenship papers, reaching far back into the McMurray family history and her own—the Leasons—but never moving forward. The past became a rich, bright tapestry for Candace McMurray; the future was empty and cheerless. Every blank page in the scrapbook now reminded her of that terrible word: barren. She filled them as fast as she could.

It was late June when Candace awoke to a jolt of pain in her right breast. Two words immediate sprang to mind: Mom and Cancer. But as the pain abated, throbbing dully, she realized it had felt like teeth. Had Joel bit her? The thought was absurd, after so long without even a touch.

She rolled over to find him on his side, facing away from her. They'd slept that way, on either side of the bed, for months now. Candace held vague memories of their early nights together, spooning while the sweat dried on their naked flesh, or the rise and fall of his breath and the beat of his heart lulling her to sleep as she rested her head on his smooth chest. Seeing him asleep now, with his back turned as hers had been only moments before, still brought sadness.

"Joel?" she whispered into the dark. "Joel?"

He stirred. "Mmn?" He rolled onto his back. "What? What's wrong?" Still muttering, half asleep, he peered over at her, eyes puffy.

"Nothing," she said. He clearly couldn't have bit her if he'd been sleeping. A bug bite? "Go back to sleep," she said. No use keeping him up; he'd only be cranky in the morning.

He sighed heavily through his nose. "Did you hear something?"

"No," she said. She wanted him to go back to sleep. She didn't want to reveal what she'd thought. He would laugh at her, and she couldn't bear to be laughed at—not now. Half asleep, she'd imagined the feel of teeth on her areola, the sharp wetness of them, the suction drawing her nipple out to stiffen.

Felt so real.

"I thought I heard something, but it's nothing." She patted his shoulder, the first time she'd dared touch him in bed since early in February. He shrank from her touch. Not meaning to, she thought, but as if her fingers had stung him, and she withdrew further into herself from the shock of it, rolling over onto her side of the bed, her sovereign territory.

"Hon?" Joel said.

She pretended to be asleep. After a moment, she heard him sigh through his nose again, annoyed this time, the chuff of an angered beast. She curled into the fetal position, pulled the blanket in her bunched fists tight beneath her chin, an elbow grazing the bruise, bringing fresh pain.

A moment later, Joel got up to use the bathroom. She felt his side of the mattress swell in his absence, the familiar block of ugly yellow light falling over her side of the comforter as his urine splashed into the bowl. She'd have to wipe it off the seat tomorrow, mothering him like the child she'd never have.

I was born to mother, she thought. Born to be a mother. She drifted off thinking this, fast asleep when Joel returned to bed, if he'd returned at all.

JOEL HAD ALREADY left for work by the time Candace rolled out of bed. He managed an online shopping company, while Candace transcribed medical recordings from home—not a lucrative job, but it allowed her the time and freedom here and there to work on her scrapbooks, and before them the novel she'd been writing, now long abandoned.

She'd forgotten all about the nipple incident until her shower, where under a second skin of soap bubbles the areola appeared to be bruised. She rinsed and toweled off quickly, wiping away a circle of mist to examine it in the mirror. It looked like a hickey, puffed out and unnaturally large, a small purple and yellow ring with a tiny crescent of dark marks that could easily have been the teeth of a very small mouth, the bumpy little glands much more prominent than usual.

Candace frowned at it, suddenly certain there'd been something in bed with them last night. A large insect. An animal, even. Had she felt the comforter tug at her feet when she'd awakened? She thought yes. And though it was mortifying, the idea that an animal had slipped into their bed during the night scared her less than the alternative.

Her mother had suffered from breast cancer, as had her great-aunt: neither instance had been pretty. After three rounds of chemo and a double-mastectomy, Aunt Betsy's cancer had metastasized, spreading through her blood, and soon she'd withered away to nothing. Fortunately, her mother had been spared the same indignity. Beverly Leason's tumor had been benign, a mere fibroadenoma, but the fact remained: breast cancer ran in the Leason family blood.

Candace raised her arms to check for dimples and "irregularities." Aside from the bruise, they seemed normal, though she hadn't spent much time staring at her breasts in the mirror since puberty. Until her great-aunt's battle with cancer, they'd simply been there, hanging globes of fat and flesh, often an aggravation: the subject of ridicule when she'd blossomed early; having to strap them down and cover them over for business meetings and exercise; then, after Betsy's sickbed death, objects of dread. She'd often considered she would have been better off without them, though Joel probably wouldn't have agreed.

She squeezed it—Joel had called the right one Monica, the left one Rachel when he was feeling frisky—looking for fluid expressed from the nipple. It remained dry. Sore, but dry. It would always be dry, much as her belly might distend some day from weight gain, but never from pregnancy.

Born to be a mother, she thought again. What an awful phrase to worm into my head.

Without the need to primp, she threw on a loose pair of shorts and one of Joel's old sweaters, then went downstairs to schedule an appointment for a breast exam. Better safe than sorry, she thought. Aunt Betsy used to say that, before the cancer had made her sorry, anyhow. They scheduled Candace for the next week.

About an hour later she had her headphones on, typing away at her desk as an obstetrician's nasal voice droned on about his patient's phantom pregnancy. (Something about the doctor's tone made Candace think he was misogynist; perhaps it was because he'd called it a "hysterical pregnancy," and not in the har-har kind of way.)

Glass shattered somewhere in the house, startling her out of her chair. She flicked the headphones off her head, thoughts racing.

"Okay, calm down, Candace. Something fell," she told herself, adding "Don't get hysterical," with a halfhearted chuckle.

Five breaths, in and out. She thought of Lamaze. And the house remained silent. Thinking she must have imagined it, she put her headphones back on, and was just about seated again when another sound brought her to her feet, heart pounding.

First broken glass, now the pitter-patter of little feet.

She called out, "Hello?" aware of how stupid it was after she'd done it. If it was an intruder up there, she'd just acknowledged his presence and announced her rise to the second floor to investigate with one feeble word. The footfalls were too light to have been a man's, though. It could be an animal. Or, less likely, a child.

Candace took the stairs with caution, though not enough to avoid their various creaks, and saw the mess through the banister: the floor in the spare bedroom looked like the bottom of a birdcage. She ran the rest of the way, creaking be damned, found her scrapbooks strewn everywhere, torn to literal scraps. Jigsaw fragments of her dead ancestors and Joel's in sepia-toned photographs stared up at her from the ruined pages.

She let out a squeak of dismay. So many months of work, ruined in an instant.

Glimmers of aquamarine Favrile glass among the loose pages, beautiful and dangerous, had only moments before been a vase beside her scrapbooks, on the dresser where she'd stacked them. The cover of the scuttle hole to the attic, directly above where the empty vase had been gathering dust, lay slightly askew in its base.

Squatters?

Couldn't be. She'd been up there when they'd first moved in two years prior. The roof was two feet above the ceiling, maybe less, with rafters and pink fiberglass foam between. Not enough room to kneel, let alone squat.

Then what?

A nest. Rats or mice. Some kind of large bird, a murder of crows or a parliament of owls. Or raccoons—whatever more than one was called. She'd heard the Andersons down the street once had an infestation of possums. Two or three years ago one of the neighbors a few blocks south had gotten such a terrible infestation of wasps in the attic, they'd been forced to redo their entire roof.

House cancer, she thought, and heard herself giggle. I've got cancer of the attic.

Could an animal do that, though? Gosh, what a mess! What a terrible, awful goddamn mess!

A raccoon could have easily gotten into the attic crawlspace through the vents or even the chimney, and Candace knew their dexterous claws could get into garbage cans, no matter how well the homeowner tried to protect them. But she had serious doubts even the smartest raccoon could have lifted and removed the attic hatch, made the five-to-six foot drop to the dresser without disturbing the vase, torn her scrapbooks to bits, then climbed back up, smashing the vase in the process, and set the cover back in place.

Whatever was up there, she steeled herself and made her way to the dresser. Forgot my damn shoes, she thought, walking cautiously on her bare toes to avoid the glass scattered among her ruined pages. It still hurt to look at what had become of her hard work, but with all the glass, she couldn't avoid it.

Candace climbed the dresser easily. Solid and wide, made of burled walnut, it wouldn't have scooched against the floor even if she'd deliberately tried to move it. Two movers had brought it in here, and the McMurrays had decided, without much choice in the matter, to keep it where it had been left. Cobwebs hung in the high corner. She told herself to remember to deal with them later.

On her tiptoes, she could just manage to press her fingers against the hatch. Not nearly enough to reach the attic.

"Wait for Joel, Candy," she told herself bitterly, not wanting to give up so easily, but aware that her husband, whatever his faults, was a good foot taller than her. "Better yet, call a professional."

Uh-uh. No way she was going to play the Helpless Woman role. There had to be something around the house she could stand on top of the dresser to get a good look in there. The way things were between her and Joel right now, he'd only get angry if she left it for him. Any little thing set him off these days. He'd gotten pissed off at the way the paper had landed in the juniper bush the other day—not that it had landed in the bush, but how it had landed. The paperboy managed it get it into the bush more often than not.

And I've been pouring all my energy into these pathetic scraps, she thought, looking forlorn at the mess on the floor below. God, what a colossal waste of time! What a fool I've been, Joel. What a sad, miserable fool....

She had no idea how to cure the cancer that had grown between them, but dealing with this was a good start. If there was a nest in the crawlspace, and she could get someone over to clear them out before Joel returned from work, or at least start the process, he'd have to be happy with her then.

A scuttling above her. Thumping on the hatch. Plaster dust fell in her eyes and hair. She blinked it away, crying out in fright and anger.

Determined now, she jumped off the dresser and hurried down to the living room, where she lifted the heavy ottoman onto her knee, then lugged it awkwardly up the stairs, one step at a time, careful not to get her fingers wedged against the stippled wall. She brought it to the spare bedroom before realizing her error: once again, she'd forgotten her shoes.

More sounds from the attic. Chewing... or tearing. Tearing up the insulation, like they'd torn up her scrapbooks. "Oh, you little bastards are gonna get it," she cursed under her breath, straining to lower the plush ottoman to the floor and let her muscles rest a moment. Lugging it up again, she moved along the wall to avoid the glass, then dropped it solidly on the dresser.

With the ottoman on the dresser, pushed squarely into the corner where the walls came together, Candace stood with her palms pressed flat against the hatch, arms bent at the elbows. The flashlight slipped a little in the waistband of her shorts, rubbing against her pubic bone, reminding her briefly of Joel.

Pushing up on the particle-board hatch, she winced at its squeaky grind against the jamb. She gave it a hard enough push in the last few inches that it popped off into the dark of the attic.

A rush of air met her ears but nothing more. She felt for the 2-by-4 joists on either side of the hatch, nervously awaiting whatever was up there to bite her searching fingers. When nothing came, she pulled herself up into the dark with the ease of the high school gymnast she'd once been. The creak and pop in her hips and shoulders, and the stiffness of her muscles, told her she needed to get back into shape.

Cool up here. A musty smell. The sour stench of old rat turds and the thick smell of cooking grease clotted in the range hood's exhaust pipe. She lay on her front across the rafters, bare legs dangling out of the hole, and shone the flashlight into the dark, illuminating boards stained black from years of dampness, the brick exterior, puffy clouds of pink fiberglass. Six joists from where she lay, whatever lived up here had pulled up and torn the insulation, fluffy cotton candy bits piled up as if it had dug itself a nest.

A chill ran up her legs. Feeling suddenly vulnerable, she tucked them up into the crawlspace, lying on her side in the fetal position for a moment to ease the strain in her stomach muscles from pulling herself up here. The air conditioning hummed. Congesting from the dust, her left nostril whistled. She stretched out her legs, ankles cracking, then pulled and shimmied herself to the next joist, and the next, ready to strike out with the flashlight if something came toward her.

As she approached the nest, the chewing resumed—except that from where she lay, with her butt hunched up like a caterpillar's, it seemed to be coming from behind her.

She rolled onto her back, heart thumping, joist pressed hard against her spine as she shone the light at her toes.

The creature was on her in an instant, trailing a knotted cord like a tail: a purplish thing with four inchoate limbs, a monstrous flat head and beady black eyes, crawling up her leg as she screamed, its tiny, slick fingers with little pink nails grabbing raw hunks of her flesh—and as it wriggled up under her sweatshirt, she noticed two things.

The first was that it was human.

The second, that it had teeth.

JOEL GOT HOME a little after six. His keys were still in the door when he spotted mud on the kitchen floor, streaked and splashed across the tiles. "Candace?" he called out, dumping his bag. Not mud—blood, and lots of it.

"Candy!"

He left the door open, keys still in the lock, hurrying through the kitchen now, slipping in the blood as someone—not Candy, no please, not my Candy—had already slipped before, grabbing the counter for support, then righting himself and continuing on to the stairs. Candace's computer was on in the living room, cursor blinking mid-report. Her headset lay on the floor.

He felt terrible having neglected her for so long, that he'd let their lack of intimacy come between them, that he hadn't fought harder against her depression, worried now that something terrible had happened to her, something they couldn't come back from. Bloody footprints on the carpeted steps. He took them two by two.

"Honey?"

"I'm in here!" she called from the bathroom. Relief was momentary, as he recognized the sharp edge of fear in her voice, then registered the mess in the spare bedroom through the bannister: her scrapbooks in shreds, the broken glass. Thoughts racing: Signs of a struggle? What happened here? More blood tracked pink toward the open bathroom door. He saw her bare legs, with blood, her blood, running down them like tear-streaked mascara. Nobody in there with her, unless the intruder stood in the bath, which was unlikely. Some relief, at least.

He rushed up the last few steps, then stopped dead in the doorway. Stricken by what he saw, he gripped the doorjamb, on the verge of fainting.

Candace stood on the bare tile, legs apart as if she were about to squat. On the lip of the tub, her good pair of scissors, shiny and wet, still dripped on the bathmat. In her left hand, red and slippery, she held a sewing needle. Pubic hair matted with crimson. Thread from the needle pulled taut, ending somewhere between her labia.

It had put up a struggle, only wanting the comfort of her breast, to feed from her. Her nipple had been dry, but as its three jagged, underdeveloped teeth worked at her areola, as it suckled, she'd begun to feel a tremendous tingling pressure build beneath the flesh. There had been pain, and then a sort of euphoria had washed over her, prolactin and oxytocin, the pain dissipating as the ugly little creature drank from her greedily. It had fallen asleep with its lips still on her numbed breast.

Standing before Joel, Candace's right hand held her belly, rounded and taut as if she were deliberately sticking it out, trying to hold in its contents. She admired her pallid reflection in the full-length mirror, the reflection of an ecstatic young mother.

While the creature slept, she'd cradled it gently under its bottom. Slipping down through the hatch had been difficult, but making room for the hatchling (since it had come from the hatch she'd begun to think of it by that name, at least until she thought of a better one) had been much harder. Her garden scissors had done the trick. The euphoria had heightened, oxytocin killing the pain as her vaginal tissue split against the sharp steel blades in two quick snips. The sight of all that blood hadn't worried her. She was used to seeing blood there.

Once it had realized what she meant to do the hatchling had struggled, but with great effort—the sort of hysterical strength attributed to mothers whose children were in danger—Candace had managed to work it up inside her while its tiny limbs flailed. They were still kicking now, in fact, while she sewed.

And here was Joel, home to share in her joy.

She peeled his hand from the door jamb and placed it on her distended belly.

Joel felt something push against his palm, as if whatever she had inside her wanted out. He tried to jerk his hand away but she held it firm, her grip surprisingly strong. He looked up then, startled to see Candace smiling for the first time in months, with lips as blue as the wallpaper.

"We're pregnant," she told him.

VIRAL

THE VIDEO HAD been uploaded for seven hours before the title surfaced on Tara Maxwell's social media feed: DEPRESSED TEEN GIRL DISAPPEARS! 100% REAL!

Catchy, she thought with a smug grin. Roll over, Hitchcock.

By the time she got around to clicking the link, the view count had surpassed 500,000—the equivalent of a Gold record in the music biz, and since Tara Maxwell wrote the music column for the Herald (a column purporting to study the trends of the recording industry, which in Tara's opinion trended steadily downward), it was often hard for her not to think in industry terms while at her desk.

She waited until noon, then skipped out back for a smoke, tilted her phone on its side, and played the video full-screen.

At first glance, it appeared to be just another girl in a long line of teenagers reaching out to the internet for sympathy—and if the World Wide Web was known for one thing, it was compassion. Videos of its kind had been made so often they could easily have their own category at the MTV Awards: "Best Teen Cry for Help." Not half as memorable as "Best Scared-as-Sh*t Performance," Tara considered, but it was a work in progress. She'd never been very good at ledes, as a firm believer that the steak should sell itself. Let her editors worry about its sizzle.

Watching halfheartedly, glancing up here and there to scan the faces of fellow smokers, Tara, who'd once thought she had seen it all, slumped back against the brick wall suddenly, exhaling a lungful of smoke.

Fake, she thought. It's gotta be faked.

An interstitial ad played before the video reloaded, suggesting that a diamond engagement ring guaranteed orgasms. Only if they teach husbands-to-be oral, Tara mused as she moved toward a picnic bench, waiting for the commercial to end. When the video began again she was seated, ready to be blown away afresh.

The girl's straggly, mousy-brown hair fell in her face, eyes underlined by deep blue-black pits of fatigue, an overlarge striped hoodie suggesting chubbiness beneath. Behind her, a Paramore poster graced the wall alongside Jared Leto's 30 Seconds to Mars. Stuffed animals covered her bedspread, on the pillows and tucked between books in the bookcase headboard. She was a typical Millennial girl in her preferred milieu: not in the mall, or outside playing, but sitting in front of a computer. Her appeal was less moving than the lifetime of hurt welling from her large brown eyes onto her cheeks. What she had to say, which at least gave the impression of being improvised, had been voiced a thousand times before—a million—and certainly more articulately. But those eyes spoke words beyond the girl's vocabulary; they filled in the blanks with bursts of eloquence, punctuating it with unspoken poetry.

The pain was no act. No one her age could have acted it so well. But when the girl began to scratch the second time, and the flesh beneath her fingers began to vanish, the only thing Tara could be absolutely certain of was that this girl's story had to be told—and Tara herself would be the first to tell it.

HAL WATERMAN, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF for the Toronto Herald, sat in his frosted glass office, hands folded, elbows on the glass and brushed steel desk. Above a gray three-piece without the jacket (Like Phil Collins, Tara thought, Hal Waterman firmly believes no jacket is required.), he wore a dubious look which, along with mild exasperation and sour disappointment, were the only expressions he seemed familiar with in her company.

"So?" Waterman said, looking up from his computer about a minute into the unknown girl's disappearing act.

"So? You saw it, didn't you?"

"Right. Pretty nifty fake. Amazing what kids can do in their parents' basements these days."

"Fake," she said. Hal Waterman was being his usual dismissive self, but Tara wasn't in the mood for it. She stood from the impossibly comfortable chair and twisted his monitor further toward him. "Look at it again, Hal."

"I'm kind of busy here, Tara." To prove it, he sorted through the mess of paper and sticky notes on the desk, every square inch scrawled on with the small, neat printing of compulsives and serial killers. "Putting together a national newspaper and all that, you know?"

Tara's hands went her hips before she could stop them.

"Oh, come on," the boss said, catching the involuntary body language. "Don't give me the indignant act."

Tara forced them into the tight pockets of her jeans. "Who's indignant? I want the chance to write it, Hal. That's all."

Waterman gave her a shrewd look. "You've got vacation time coming up."

She would have thrown her hands up indignantly if they hadn't been squeezed to death between denim and her thighs. "Vacation!"

"I just don't see a story here, Tara."

"You don't—"

Waterman held up a hand, his fingernails large and square, the pads eternally ink-stained. "Remember the time we printed the article about that twerking video where the girl caught fire? Ran that whole companion piece about teenage sexuality run rampant, and whatnot? Every media outlet, every talk show was all over that thing, and it turned out to be another hoax. If it's fake, Tara—and it doesn't take George Lucas to see that it is—then I look like a class-A asshole to the higher-ups for financing your little trip once Jimmy Kimmel steps out of this girl's closet with a mirror and a smoke machine."

The thought made her grin, despite herself. But this wasn't Pepper's Ghost, and if it was a digital effect, it was the best amateur work she'd seen. "And what if it's not, Hal? Hypothetically, what if it's real?"

"Nobody would believe it," he said, folding his hands on the desk. "That's the real bitch of it. We could print every story that comes through my office about UFOs and witches and werewolves in the subways—and believe me, I see a lot of them. Stories, not werewolves."

The focus had gone out of his eyes. He reached into a desk drawer and brought out a bottle of magnesium citrate, popped two pills into his gob and swallowed them with a guzzle from a squat water bottle. Getting one of his "monster headaches," most likely (he never called them migraines), yet another essential component of Tara's visits. "Hell, we could ease our readership into it," he went on, methodically rubbing his temples with his long middle fingers. "Like turning up the hot water on a live frog. One day we're one of the top-rated news rags in North America, and the next, we're the National Enquirer's ugly cousin."

Tara plopped back into the chair, feeling defeated but not ready to give in. "Even if it is bullshit, Hal, it's a story. Teen depression and suicide are all over the news. It's not just a topic for Law & Order SVU or 90210 anymore. We'd be tapping into the goddamn zeitgeist, Hal. This video's gone viral—half a million hits in under 8 hours—and you can bet it's only gonna get bigger. If we don't get the scoop, we'll look like even bigger assholes writing it up a month after the fact, quoting the Associated Press!"

Waterman leaned back, allowing his fingers to slip from his temples as he studied the computer screen. The video had ended. Thumbnails for similar clips, as if there was anything remotely similar out there, had filled its box.

"I'll give you one thing: it does look pretty damn realistic for a high school production. I'm not saying it's real," he added hastily. "Look, even if I were to okay this..." (In Waterman-speak, this meant he'd already made up his mind that he would.) "What makes you think you'd be the one to write it? You're on the music beat, after all. No pun intended."

Trying not to grit her teeth, she reminded him: "It's my story."

"You brought it to my desk, sure. That doesn't make it—"

"I know this girl," she said, and relished the sound of Waterman's coffee-stained teeth clacking as he shut his mouth. "Maybe not her, specifically, but girls like her."

Tara felt the old hurts threatening to bubble up, thick in her throat, and it took an extreme force of will not to tear-up in Waterman's office. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction. He'd think it was his fault, and be tempted to offer his sympathy or talk her down, the kneejerk reactions most men had in the presence of a "hysterical" female. Tara bit the insides of her cheeks. The pain seemed to make the itch in her eyes go away.

Itching. The girl was itching, too, remember?

Fear crept up her spine, seemingly without origin, prickling the baby-fine hairs on her arms as goose pimples rose beneath them. Her mother would have said someone had just walked over her grave. Fortunately, Tara wasn't the least bit superstitious.

Aside from believing a girl could vanish into thin air, she sniped.

Right. Aside from that.

"This isn't going to be like your POW story, is it?" Waterman said, eyeing her queerly, perhaps sensing the waterworks display that had nearly started here in his inner sanctum.

"He promised me an exclusive," Tara said, trying not to sound bitter. "How was I supposed to know he'd back out?"

"Fine." Waterman let out one of his characteristic sighs. The pills he'd taken hadn't yet kicked in; he would be pliable for another twenty minutes, tops, suffering under the weight of his Monster Migraine. "But I want your regular stories on my desk every goddamn morning at six. I'm not filling in for you while you're gone."

"You won't regret it," she said, not about to press her luck by requesting a hiatus of her music column while she investigated the video. And because it seemed like she was making a deal with the devil, she offered Waterman her hand.

Somewhat reluctantly, as if Waterman shared the same sentiment, he shook it.

IN THE TWO days it took to pinpoint the Bamber girl's exact address (a friend in the police department came in handy, as he had many times before), Tara's time spent in front of the bathroom mirror was tense. Coming out of her morning shower, washing her hands after using the toilet, brushing her teeth before bed, she scrutinized every square inch of her body for what she'd started to think of as "missing pixels." Was that mole there before? That dark spot? She found nothing out of the ordinary, of course. Nothing to make her believe she was actually disappearing. If she had, she would have checked herself promptly into the nearest insane asylum, or at the very least place a call to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and book an appointment with a trained psychologist at her earliest convenience.

She'd caught herself staring at her reflection in the rearview as she drove to work the second day, and jerked the wheel out of fright. She found it increasingly difficult to focus on anything, mirror or not—anything but the disappearing girl.

It took a fair bit of detective work (and a whole lot of mileage) to get her to the door of the house Mackenzie Bamber shared with her mother (widowed) in Pleasant Valley, Ontario. Not difficult work, per se, just drudgery, particularly since Tara didn't especially love that part of the job. She was competent at it—it was something she did almost automatically, like getting ready for work in the morning—but it wasn't her passion. The interviews and writing of the story were what she enjoyed most about reporting; the detective work was just a means to that end. Unfortunately, with her concurrent gig, the music column, interviews were just another thing threatening to sour her on the profession as a whole. So-called "artists" perpetually whining about their celebrity ("it's not about fame, I'm in it for the music"), rhyming off the same old bullshit ("music is my life" and "God gave me talent")... it had started to wear on her after the first few times. She hated to sound like Holden Caulfield, but you didn't have to look hard to find a phony in the music industry.

This story would be her salvation. It would pull her out of obscurity, thrust her name and her writing into the spotlight—Tara grew more certain of it with every phone call, with every click of the mouse. Men with the same education, the same experience, and much lesser writing skills had been promoted ahead of her for the last time.

Finding the girl who'd posted the video had been as windy a route as the roads through the foothills toward Pleasant Valley. The girl went by the internet handle @userbits, a brunette duck-facing in her avatar, with over a dozen short films posted on her YouTube channel, most of them not so much inspired by The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity as pretty obvious rip-offs. But it was good to see kids doing something other than shooting up their schools or getting pregnant. This was the Bamber girl; the girl in the video, who'd not only disappeared in front of the camera but apparently from the earth, was Daria Walker.

A simple Google search brought up over one hundred hits for the name Mackenzie Bamber. Only eleven were from the same girl. Her LinkedIn profile advertised her as a Video Artist, currently working out of Pleasant Valley, Ontario. Punching above her weight class, Tara thought admiringly. Go girl.

She found the town easily enough, nestled in a valley near Sleeping Giant Provincial Park, on the uppermost shore of Lake Superior, about as picturesque as she might have imagined. Sure beat the shit out of the Sudbury motel where she'd spent the previous night, anyhow. The only amenity there had been a cigarette machine between a pop machine and an ice chest. Tara hadn't seen a functioning cigarette machine since the '80s, and the array of brands was astounding, from du Mauriers to Virginia Slims, an American brand she recalled from flipping through her mother's magazines as a child. She'd stood staring at it, this slot machine whose every push was a jackpot, for almost as long as she'd spent in front of the dirty motel mirror, looking for signs of missing pixels, signs she was disappearing. Eventually she'd chosen the Slims, because its '60s slogan of female empowerment had that ironic edge she enjoyed: You've come a long way, baby.

I have, she'd thought, as she lighted up. Literally and figuratively.

Born and raised in the city, Tara had felt the isolation deep in her marrow as she drove through the countryside the following morning, and returning to civilization—such as Pleasant Valley offered—had done little to help. This wasn't quite Deliverance country, but it was as close as Tara Maxwell had ever wanted to get.

Just passing through town, the casual observer might find it difficult to fathom how the Disappearing Girl's story could have played out here. How could someone feel so utterly ignored in such a small town, one might wonder. With a population of a little over a thousand, it seemed even the most disenfranchised among them would have had very little room to be left alone. But the country was wide, and the town rambled. There were big open spaces between one house and another, even in town, and in those spaces, though the literal distance wasn't much, the psychic distance—the space between one family and another, one person and another—could be galaxies wide. Each household was a solar system, rotating around its own star.

Tara had an instinct for loneliness. She understood how two people, similar in nearly every respect, could live in the same cramped space and still be so far removed from one another.

The Bambers' prefab was neat and petite, a mere fifteen feet from its neighbor, yet ten feet further apart than most houses on Tara's block, and the house she rented was in one of Toronto's better neighborhoods.

The price of privacy here were the transmission towers rising from what must surely be their backyards, monkey bars for the children of giants. The whole block—with its archipelago of potholes, its beater cars and modular homes in various states of disrepair—lay in their shadows. The towers receded into the distance on either side of the block, continuing through the tree line and into the hills beyond, hydro lines like the webbing of gigantic metal spiders. The steady buzz-hum of electricity likely kept newcomers awake at night; over time, they would either get used to it or be driven out of their minds with sleeplessness and the incessant buzzing, like a character out of Poe. Tara guessed she'd fall into the latter group. She couldn't imagine spending the night here, let alone living in these houses.

The next-door neighbor's dog barked as she stepped out of her cherry-red hatchback, a luxury vehicle in comparison to the pickup and K-Car she parked between, both of which might have seen better days in the mid '90s. Practically foaming at the mouth, the only thing that stopped the dog from making brunch out of Tara was a coil of yellow nylon rope—fraying rope, she couldn't help but notice. The Bamber place had a decent lawn, though it looked like it fresh-laid grass. The dog next door kicked up dirt on what could barely be considered a yard, and had wound toward her from its tree and dish through a maze of rusted car parts and a cinderblock fire pit.

Tara opened the screen door, knocked on the laminate door behind it, and waited. The dog kept barking, and somewhere along this row of houses, a man shouted, "Shut the fuck up, you shithead dog!"

She was still grinning when Kenzie opened the door, in cut-off jean shorts and a tight Nirvana Nevermind t-shirt that rose to show off the sparkly costume jewelry hanging from her belly button. The front pockets hung out from under the deliberately frayed stonewashed denim, and so, likely, did the cheeks of her ass. Tara's mother would have smacked her in the head if she'd caught her daughter wearing those. Hell, Tara would have smacked herself.

Kenzie regarded her with mild surprise.

She thought I'd be prettier. They always do.

"Hi, Kenzie," she said, and stuck out a hand. "I'm Tara Maxwell."

A broad smile passed over the girl's face, and she took her hand. "Nice to meet you," the girl said, moving aside to let Tara in. Tidy, with a wooden cross hung on the wall above a threadbare sofa, the air thick with cloying perfume and an unmistakable hint of cigarette smoke. Tara wasn't sure if Kenzie and her mother had cleaned for their guest or if it was always like this, but the lack of dust made her think neatnicks. The only real mess was a single ashtray practically choked with cigarette butts. As she followed Kenzie toward the back of the house, Tara noticed they had all been smoked down to the filter.

The girl's bedroom was smaller than Tara's dorm room in college. Walls plastered in band posters, grunge and '90s hip-hop and even The Beatles. Nirvana was the most frequent among them, so she rolled the dice. "Nirvana fan, eh? What's your favorite song?"

"'Scentless Apprentice,'" the girl said with no hesitation, surprising the hell out of Tara, who'd assumed the t-shirt and posters were merely what Kenzie had picked up to have something "vintage," the way kids these days wore shirts of bands whose music they'd never heard. That the girl actually knew something other than Nirvana's '90s anthem of teenage apathy, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," made Tara take an instant liking to her. "That or 'Frances Farmer,'" Kenzie added with a self-conscious shrug.

"Good tune," Tara agreed.

Kenzie looked at Tara over her shoulder, suggesting she was equally impressed by her visitor. Then she sat down at her Mac, every bare surface of the desk covered by photos of herself with friends—making faces, throwing up "deuces," giggling hysterically—the kinds of things Tara vaguely remembered doing with her own small group of friends, except for the deuces, which had meant something quite different when she'd been a kid.

A little beaded friendship bracelet rattled on Kenzie's wrist when she grasped the computer mouse. Did Daria make that? Tara wondered. The thought made her shiver as she sat on the bed behind the girl.

With a few clicks, a folder opened. Kenzie hovered the cursor over a video file labeled DARIA, and peered back over her shoulder. "Daria sent this to me the day she..." She stopped there, unsure whether to voice the word they were both thinking: disappeared. "...the day she went missing. Cops said it was the last thing she did, far as they could tell."

"I'm sorry," Tara said, having noticed the many appearances of Daria Walker among the girl's photos. The computer's wallpaper was a shot of Daria alone, a close-up of her face in near silhouette, with a smile big enough to beat Buddha, the sky blue and wide and open behind her. "I know what it's like to lose a friend."

The old hurts threatened to bubble up again, but it was the shame that hurt Tara the most. She'd seen the signs and done nothing. Worse than nothing: she'd turned a willful blind eye, and that was the part that pained her most, when she thought back on it. After Christmas break, when the dorm room across the hall had been empty, something vital inside Tara had broken, and every so often—more often, these days—she found herself on the verge of some kind of breakdown, struggling to fight back the tears.

Kenzie offered a sad little smile and turned back to the screen, where she double-clicked the video.

"MY NAME IS Daria Walker," the girl said, as Tara had heard so often she'd lost count—over 700,000, counting all the times Daria had said it to somebody else.

This time was different, watching it over the slumped shoulders of her best friend. Sitting in a bedroom a lot like Daria's had been, it felt somehow more real. Before, she had watched with the somewhat clinical detachment of a spectator. There'd been empathy, sure—but it was ambition, and not empathy, that had driven her to Kenzie Bamber's front door.

"I'm fourteen years old, and I started cutting when I was twelve," Daria said, swallowing raw emotion. She pulled up the left sleeve of her surf hoodie, revealing over a dozen raised scars, long, straight and pink, each one adjacent to the next, like a prisoner marking off the days of her confinement. Tara liked the comparison and made a mental note to put it, or something more elegant, in her article.

"I don't know why I started doing it," Daria said, tugging down her sleeve. "I saw my dad's razor in the bathroom and it just sort of... happened. It hurt, like a lot. But it felt good, too. You know when you touch an old TV when it's on, and you get all staticky in your fingers and all up your arm? That's what it was like the first time. It felt electric—not just where I cut, either. Like, all over. Tingly. I've like, taken all kinds of drugs and pills and stuff, and none of it feels as good as the cutting."

She paused here, perhaps to let the fact of her drug abuse at such a tender age sink in. "A lot of people say cutting is like showing on the outside what someone with depression feels on the inside. It was never like that for me." A shrug. "Well, in the beginning, I guess. I just like how it makes me feel. I never felt ashamed about my scars, even, like they say some kids do. I'm proud of them. I know how random that sounds, like I'm fucked-up or something, but it's the truth. I would've cut where people could see them, I just didn't want to get in trouble, and I didn't want them to make me stop. It's just... it's draining." She nodded slightly, a twinkle of pleasure in her eyes. "Draining."

Daria Walker scratched at her scars, absently. "I'm so full of these, like, secondhand emotions. I don't know if that make sense or not. Like I'm this giant magnet, and all the hate, the racism and like, homophobia, all the sadness and..." Her lower lip quivered. "...and pain. They're all iron fillings, and they stick to me, and I can't shake them off unless I bleed."

She scratched her arm.

Kenzie paused the video, peering again over her shoulder. "This is where it starts," she said grimly.

Tara already knew when it started: first the left arm began to disappear, and then the right—it was always the same. She kept willing it to change, for it to be different, for the girl to be allowed to finish her monologue, for the video to end with tears of catharsis. But she knew it could never happen that way. When she'd been very young, her mother used to read her fairy tales; the most famous of them had always infuriated Tara. Why did Sleeping Beauty marry the man who'd impregnated her while she was unconscious? Why did the Little Mermaid kill herself over the Prince's betrayal? Her mother could never answer these questions to Tara's satisfaction. It was why she'd started writing in the first place, to change their not-so-happy endings. When she discovered she hadn't a talent for fiction, she'd moved on to journalism. Since she'd always been an inquisitive child, its "five Ws and one H" format had seemed a more natural fit.

The video continued.

"I feel like nobody cares about me," the girl said, "if I live or die, it wouldn't matter to anybody. My dad acts like I don't even exist. I don't know what I did wrong. My mom can't even tell when I'm sad. I go to school, and people laugh at me—not behind my back, either. To my face. They call me names. Like Belly Flop. Fall Down Girl. Humpty-Dumpy. That's the worst, because if it wasn't me, if they were calling somebody else that, I'd probably laugh, too. All because of that... fucking video. It won't go away. I keep finding links to it. I get one taken down, and another one pops up." A resigned sigh. "That's the worst thing about the internet. It's forever."

"What's this video she's talking about?" Tara asked.

Kenzie clicked pause, not looking back. She went back into the DARIA folder and brought up a video called Skanks in another window. The footage was shaky, pixelated and soft-focused, probably shot on a cell phone. Kids in winter coats shouted, whistled, cheered, gathered in a big group out front of the school. The shot rose above them, as the kid holding the phone had brought it up over his or her head, then moved jerkily into the crowd. There was Daria Walker, arms up to defend herself. A slimmer, taller girl, a blonde with cornrows, feinted back and forth like a boxer. "Come at me, bitch," Cornrows said. "Stupid-ass punk bitch slut. Come at me. Hit me, motherfucker, come on! Hit me, you stupid cunt bitch!"

The cell phones came out: everyone was a reporter these days. Nobody had any real empathy anymore. Kids didn't participate in life so much as observe it. Those like Kenzie and Daria, who wore their emotions on their sleeves, risked being pulled kicking and screaming into situations like this... or worse.

"I don't want to fight you, Courtney!" Daria shouted, on the verge of tears.

"Why you hook up with my boyfriend, then, bitch?"

The world had changed since Tara had been in school: back then, a fight was rare. Kids would chant "Beef! Beef! Beefaroni!" and one would invariably go off crying to the principal—and it was always boys, never girls. Powerful female role models, from kick-ass movie heroines to hip-hop divas, had normalized female aggression. As women took on more significant roles in the workplace, moving further from the wife-and-mother caricature of the 1950s, the incidents of them becoming perpetrators of violent crimes as opposed to victims grew exponentially. One only had to look at the statistics to see that equality, at least when it came to delinquency, was well on its way to a mission accomplished.

We've come a long way, baby, she thought, shaking her head despondently.

On the video, before Daria could respond one way or the other, the blonde girl threw a punch, and arms began to flail. Daria grabbed the bigger girl by the hair, instinctively. The girl swung out, hitting her in the face. Tara winced. If the video quality wasn't so bad, she thought she might have been able to see the lights going out in Daria's eyes. The girl's whole body suddenly crumpled, and she fell face forward into the grass.

"Ohhhh, snap!" some boy genius said. Laughter erupted at the bon mot. Cell phones circled, vultures over a fresh kill. A shrill girl's voice barked: "Just like that! Just like that!"

Kenzie clicked the window away. "For the record, Daria never hooked up with anyone. She's too shy for that." Her eyes went cold. "Was. And Courtney's boyfriend?" The girl made air-quotes around the word. "He didn't even know they were dating. That's how fucked-up this skank is. She had dibs, so when Angelo told his friends he thought about hooking up with Daria, probably as a joke or something, and then Courtney found out..." Kenzie shrugged. "So now they call her Humpty-Dumpy. Because she's short and not supermodel-thin, and she had a great fall. It's actually pretty clever for most of these troglodytes."

Kenzie started the original video: "Forever," Daria repeated, utterly devoid of hope, and when she blinked, a tear tracked down her cheek.

She scratched at the palm of her right hand, scowling slightly. She scratched again, growing furious, then examined her palm, the frown deepening. Her eyebrows rose, eyes widening in sudden dread. "What...?" When she brought the hand up for closer study, it looked like an optical illusion. There was her hand, clearly delineated, and behind it, through it, was the girl's face, eyes narrowed as she twisted it front to back, back to front.

She was disappearing.

Daria whipped around to look behind herself, straggly hair falling over her shoulders, perhaps sensing this was a trick—that, somehow, she could still be getting Punk'd.

A moment later, the hand had entirely vanished.

"It tingles..." she breathed, and her remaining hand went to her stomach. She scrabbled to lift the hoodie, revealing a pale, pudgy belly lined with the multicolored stripes of the other side of her sweater. Her whole body was disappearing, and when she looked up at the camera again, mingled with the horror in her eyes was something like awe.

Kenzie turned and locked eyes with Tara, who simply shook her head.

Daria let her sweater fall back over her stomach—already ghostly, barely there at all—clutching at her throat with the few remaining fingers of her left hand, and the stump of the right. Her eyes bugged out. Her mouth opened, wet tongue protruding, writhing like a salted slug. She was suffocating, choking to death because she had no air; her lungs had ceased to exist, had taken her breath with them.

If anyone had ever really seen Daria Walker before—her parents, her grandparents, a cousin, a friend—they would never see her again. This video was her headstone and her epitaph. It was her legacy, whether she'd wanted one or not.

Kenzie clicked the window away, looking sickly. "I can't watch any more than that."

"No," Tara lied. "Me neither."

"Where do you think she went?" Kenzie asked after a moment of silence, genuinely curious, hoping Tara held the answer.

"Went?"

"I mean, she had to go somewhere... don't you think?"

Tara hadn't thought of that, but it stood to reason. "Maybe. I don't know."

Kenzie nodded, clearly dissatisfied with the response.

"But if she went somewhere," Tara tried for a conciliatory tone, "I'd like to think it's a better place than this."

"Yeah," Kenzie said. "Pleasant Valley's a real shithole."

The admission surprised a laugh out of Tara. "I meant this world. It didn't seem to have a lot to offer Daria Walker."

Kenzie thought this over. "No," she said. "It really didn't." Her eyes lighted. "Can I ask you something?"

"Anything."

"Is it true? Does it get better?" She seemed to notice Tara's confusion, and explained: "They always say it gets better when you're older. Celebrities say it all the time. There's all these commercials about it and everything. But does it really?"

Tara only considered telling a lie for a moment. What good would that do? she thought. Give a kid false hope, false expectations—what good? She wished someone had just told her the truth when she was a kid. It would have saved her a lot of pain. "Sometimes," she said. "Mostly, you just learn how to deal with all the shit that life throws at you. I'm probably not the best person to ask."

The girl shrugged. "You seem pretty cool to me."

Tara smiled. "Thanks. You're pretty cool yourself."

Kenzie blushed, and turned to the computer to hide her face. Then she said without turning, in a timid voice, "Ms. Maxwell?"

"Mmn?"

"What advice would you give to an aspiring writer?"

The girl was full of surprises. Tara thought about telling her if she wasn't writing about a topic she believed in, she might fool a lot of people, but others would know. She wanted to say, Do just about anything else, for the sake of your sanity. She wanted to tell her it was still a man's world, and that they might let her climb the ladder, but they'd never let her into their precious clubhouse.

Kenzie awaited her reply.

"Just follow your dreams," Tara offered. She'd provided the girl with enough reality for one day.

TARA STARTED WORK on the article that afternoon. Aside from the girl fight, Kenzie hadn't given her much fresh information to go with, but she had helped to humanize Daria. She'd also given Tara a hardcopy of the photo she had as her desktop, the one of Daria Walker in close-up, smiling in front of that big blue sky.

First, though, Tara banged off her regular column, a junk-food appetizer before the big gourmet meal. The music column was easy. A little internet research, a few choice snide remarks (rarely a compliment these days), and it was done. Sometimes she had to listen to an album, and rarely were they good: a few tracks here and there, if anything—almost never wall-to-wall hits. There was no great challenge to the stories, and very little reward. They went in to Waterman at the end of each day, and the money went into her checking account every two weeks.

With no motels in the area, she was staying at a B&B near the outskirts of Pleasant Valley. Nice, but a little frou-frou for her taste: doilies and dollies. The owners seemed very conservative, and eyed her with veiled suspicion. In her black leather jacket and tight jeans, she wasn't likely typical of the guests they were used to putting up. Probably not the type of woman they were used to, either. When she'd told them she was a journalist, the woman had seemed perplexed, as if she had never considered the possibility of a female writer, outside the likes of Charlotte Brontë or Jane fucking Austen.

Tara took tea up to her room, a life-sized version of a bedroom from a dollhouse, and started clacking away. No Wi-Fi, of course, but she'd brought a 4G stick along, just in case. "Always be prepared: it's your ass on the line"—another of Waterman's catchphrases, one Tara happened to believe in.

Well into the article, she suddenly realized she hadn't really thought about her own high school and college days in a very long time, aside from those brief, painful thoughts of the girl across the hall. She hadn't talked to anyone from high school in years, and the last university friend she'd kept in touch with had cut off communication abruptly about six months ago, after the birth of her twins. The price of ambition was leaving her friends behind. She felt isolated in the small room, desperately lonely in this small town where nobody knew her. There was no one to call to shake this feeling, aside from her mother, or Constable Daniels, and he'd likely just wonder why she would call so soon after he'd helped her, if she didn't want a booty call. Her mother would be happy to hear from her, but of course she'd ask if Tara was dating anyone, and Tara was not in the mood for a conversation about her non-existent love life.

She flicked through Facebook, trying for names she only vaguely remembered, sifting through photos of people she hadn't seen in ages: their vacations, their lovers, spouses, children and pets. At last she typed in Hope's name, hesitantly... and of course there was no Hope, because she'd committed suicide during Tara's first year of university.

No hope for any of us, she thought, sneering at the painfully obvious metaphor.

Tara got up from the bed, snapping her laptop closed. The sun was a glowing peach at the horizon, seen through the frosted glass of the bedroom window. She'd asked the proprietors not to bother her for dinner, but now she was starving, and she headed downstairs to where Edwin and Mildred Snodgrass were washing up after supper. The kitchen smelled of roast beef and mashed potatoes. As their only guest, her presence always seemed to startle them. She asked if there was anything open where she could grab a bite.

"There's the Country Manor, just off Highway 587," Mrs. Snodgrass said, toweling her soapy hands.

"Closer to Pass Lake, really," Mr. Snodgrass added, putting an arm around his wife's ample waist.

"Country Manor," Tara said. "I was actually thinking of something a little more... rustic? A booze and chicken wings kind of place."

Mrs. Snodgrass flashed her husband a brief and indecipherable look. "Well, there's the Sow's Head Tap downtown," he said. "It gets a little rough this time of night, though."

"Not very pleasant during the day, either, I'm afraid," Mrs. Snodgrass added.

Tara smiled. "I'm a big girl. I'm sure I can handle it. Thanks for the advice."

"We have leftovers," Mrs. Snodgrass offered, hoping to tempt her out of what she likely felt might lead to Tara's untimely demise.

"It does smell delicious," Tara admitted. "But I'm right in the thick of my article, and I could really use a little libation to oil the wheels, if you get what I mean."

"We've got sherry," Mr. Snodgrass suggested, not very enthusiastically. "Cooking sherry," he admitted with downcast eyes. Mrs. Snodgrass was still eyeing her with mild reproach.

"As lovely as that sounds, Ed, I'm a scotch gal."

Mr. Snodgrass nodded, eyes still on the floor as he hugged his wife closer to him.

"Well, adios," Tara said, beating a hasty retreat.

"Goodnight," Mrs. Snodgrass said with abrupt finality.

THE SOW'S HEAD was a faux-Irish pub with slightly drunken clientele, playing darts, shooting pool and watching the Habs game, but mostly just drinking. It certainly wasn't the mecca of criminal activity Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass had made it out to be. Obviously, they'd never set foot in here. It was possible they knew some of the regulars, and avoided it on principle, or maybe—and this was more likely—they were just all around snobby people, and their Dickensian surname suited them well.

Tara sat at the bar, ordered the best scotch they had (Famous Grouse, neat), and a plate of chicken wings with poutine on the side. While she waited, she drank. The heat of the alcohol felt good in her empty stomach, going to her head quickly—Tingly, she thought morbidly—and she ordered a second, this time with ice.

A couple of burly guys shoved up to the bar while the waitress brought her food, ordering Canadian Club and cola, and cheap, strong beers. CC&C watched her eat a moment, and when she looked up at him, he smiled. Other than the missing canine, he looked like he just might do.

"That's a lot of food for such a little lady," he said, still smiling as his friends shoved him and cheered at the game on the big screen above the bar.

"Thanks for noticing," she said. His comment annoyed her, calling her a "lady," and the combination of the alcohol and her resentment toward him made her want to show CC&C just how much of a lady she could be. "Watching the game, huh?"

"Go Habs go," he said, irritating—and enticing—her further. Tara found there was something about a good hate fuck nothing could quite match. Constable Daniels had once been one, but they'd grown so comfortable with each other over the years, had gotten so used to each other's faults, that it was hard to feel much of anything for each other anymore, let alone hate. Just going through the motions now, fucking for the sake of it, not that there was anything wrong with the sex itself. He'd always employed adequate choking, and a good hard-to-slow ratio. He was decent at cunnilingus, kept clean and neatly manscaped. And he was strong. Constable Daniels could lift her up over his head to perform acrobatic sex moves that had been hot in the beginning but had lately become simply exhausting.

This guy, CC&C, looked like he hadn't had a shower for a couple of days. He smelled like cheap drugstore cologne and cigarettes, and appeared doughy under his red and white Canadiens jersey with HENDERSON 00 stenciled on the back of it. She didn't know much about hockey, but she knew enough to assume the shirt was custom, and that Henderson was probably his name. Since she didn't care one way or another, she decided to continue referring to him by his drink of choice.

"Can I buy you a drink?" he asked stupidly. The lucky idiot had no idea he'd already stumbled and stuttered halfway into her pants.

"I've got this," she said, and sipped her scotch. "Tell you what, Mr. CC&C: I need to get another two or three of these into me before I head out into the night. When you're done with the game, why don't you swing by?"

He looked astonished, and laughed excitedly, as if a woman had never picked him up before. "Wait... You're serious?"

"Like an audit."

This confused him, but when his friends cheered again, he came around. "You better save some room," he said with an awkward wink, trying for sexy and missing it by a country mile.

"Don't ruin it by talking," she said, and bit a chunk off the drumstick.

THE SNODGRASSES WERE asleep when she and CC&C crept upstairs to her room. He tripped over a chair on which Mr. or Mrs. Snodgrass had seated a large doll, and the doll fell. CC&C caught it in mid-air and set it back on the chair, lopsided. Nice reflexes, Tara thought. Let's hope he knows how to use them.

The sex was okay but brief. He balked at having to wear a condom, squeezed her tits a little too much and wanted to kiss her more than she felt comfortable with, especially since his mouth tasted like cigarettes. She bit him on the lower lip, hard enough to bring blood, and he winced and pulled back, sulking like a little boy, yet he still plunged in for more. Unable to take any more, she pushed him off her and rolled over onto her hands and knees. At least with doggie he couldn't smear his mouth all over hers.

"You're beautiful," he said, now that he could no longer see her face.

"You're crazy."

He didn't attempt any more small talk or compliments after that, and he came before she could, groaning enormously and shuddering inside her before falling back against the pillow. Then he rummaged on the floor for his pants, his belt buckle and a pocketful of change jingling in the post-fuck silence. He came up again with a pack of cigarettes.

"You can't smoke those in here," she said in a whisper. Tara didn't know either way, she just didn't want him tempting her. She hadn't had a single puff since the motel in Sudbury.

He tossed them back on the floor with a hefty sigh and lay back on his pillow, crossing his hands behind his head. "So," he said, after a period of silence, breathing heavily through his nose in the half light. "What's your deal?"

She turned to him, regarded his saggy man-tits and the sparse hair under his arms. "Make me come," she said, "then ask me again."

He did both, but she still wouldn't answer, drifting off to sleep instead.

THE NEXT MORNING, Tara came downstairs to find Mr. and Mrs. Snodgrass standing in the kitchen, wearing identical expressions of disappointment. The sight of them standing there confrontationally surprised her enough to get the adrenaline pumping, the slight hangover making her head ache. "We'd like you to leave as soon as possible," Mr. Snodgrass told her, his eyes on the tiles in front of him. "Pack your things and go. Please."

"Why? Is this a joke?"

"We don't make jokes," Mrs. Snodgrass sneered. "We heard—" She pursed her lips in disgust, lowering her voice to a harsh whisper, as if it weren't just the three of them in the house. "In your room, after hours. With a man."

"Well, Mildred, I didn't realize you had rules against gentleman callers."

"We don't," Mr. Snodgrass said. "It's just common sense, isn't it?"

"I don't think so. I've paid to stay here—for three nights, I should add."

Mildred Snodgrass nudged her husband sharply. He stepped forward in a military-like movement, thrusting a handful of cash toward Tara. She refused to look at it.

"Oh for Pete's sake, take the money!" Mrs. Snodgrass snapped.

Tara snatched it from the old man. She packed her things and was on the road fifteen minutes later.

THE O.P.P. STATION, her last stop before the Walker house, wasn't far outside of town. In little communities like Pleasant Valley, too small to support their own police forces, the Ontario Provincial Police provided law enforcement services. Constable Daniels of the Toronto Police had hooked her up with Detective Constable Collette Nadeau of the O.P.P., a severe-looking woman with dark hair, tanned, muscular and small-breasted, with thin, bloodless lips.

Compared to her, I'm a stunner, Tara thought as she introduced herself. She'd always had problems with her own looks, and had found herself judging others against her. Her eyes were slightly off-kilter, her nose too bumpy in the bridge, lips too small, childlike, and her jaw mannishly square. Psychiatrists had a clinical term for it: body dysmorphia. Knowing it had a name hadn't helped; she still felt uncomfortable in her own skin, as if the face she wore were only a mask. Most days she didn't let it bother her. Today, after CC&C had called her "beautiful," was not one of those days.

"You are looking into the Walker disappearance, is that correct?" Constable Nadeau dropped into the chair behind her desk with a squeak. She spoke with a heavy Quebecois accent, the English slightly stilted; th becoming t or d, depending; lone hs dropped; emphases in all the wrong places.

"Yes, that's right," Tara said. "Do you mind if I record this?"

Nadeau waved the question away.

"How long has she been missing?"

"Two week," Nadeau said. "The Bamber girl reported she had not seen her the afternoon Daria made her video."

"Nor her parents."

Nadeau wore mysterious smile as she shook her head. "Oh no. MacKenzie was supposed to meet Daria to work on a video project for school. I suspect it was this video you see on the internet, which she had uploaded later that day."

"You think these kids worked on it together. That it's just special effects."

"Oh, I have no doubt, Ms. Maxwell." She folded her hands over the desk, leaning forward on her elbows, reminding Tara of Hal Waterman. "And you? Surely you don't think it's real?"

"Of course not." Her indignation seemed forced even to herself. "Why did you smile when I asked about her parents? Did they—?"

"Greta and Anson Walker are... unique."

"Unique? How so?"

Nadeau raised her sharp eyebrows. "Let us just say, it's no wonder to me why Daria Walker disappeared," the detective said, then frowned a little at the unintentional implication, and corrected herself: "Went missing. The girl's father didn't even remember what she was wearing that day, not that it would have helped one way or the other."

De udder was how it sounded in Nadeau's accent, and Tara couldn't help but grin. "Why not?"

"The thing is, Daria left a pile of clothes in front of the computer before she slipped out of her bedroom window. The hoodie, her jogging pant, a pair of socks and underwear. All the things she wore in the video. There was even an earring and a little beaded bracelet—"

Tara seized on it: "A friendship bracelet?" Left her clothes. Left her bracelet, and her jewelry... everything she couldn't take with her to the Great Beyond.

"Maybe." Nadeau shrugged. "She'd just left it there on the carpet beside her desk chair. Like she want us to believe she literally disappeared."

TARA SHOWED UP at the Walkers' house just before noon, a nice, neat bungalow with a yellow-brown lawn and a garden full of dried flowers. The shades were drawn, no visibility in or out. She rang the bell, expecting no one to be home. They'd be at work; it was silly for her to have come so early. She rang it again.

"Oh, for Christ's sake!" a man said from inside. His footfalls stomped toward the door. A latch was pulled, a door chain, the main lock, and the door opened wide enough for the man to peek out. Mr. Walker blinked hard several times behind thick, dandruff-flecked glasses, split across the lenses with clear and shaded areas. He looked as if he hadn't seen the sun in days. Another chain-lock swung gently above his head. "Yes? What is it?"

"I'm Tara Maxwell," she said, realizing this was a bad idea. She should have waited until they were out and slipped in through a carelessly unlocked window. It was the bedroom she needed, after all—the computer. "I spoke to your wife on the phone?"

The man glowered back over his shoulder, then squinted at her. "What's this in reference to?"

"Your daughter."

It didn't seem to compute. He squinted off, lips moving in thought. "Oh—Daria! Yes, we're all very upset. Beside ourselves, really. You're the reporter, is that right?"

"Uh huh."

He closed the door on her, unlatched the last chain, and opened the door again, wide enough for passage. Mr. Walker moved aside, and Tara squeezed past him into the gloomy house. "Honey, that reporter is here!" He shouted it practically in Tara's ear.

"Who?" came Mrs. Walker's voice, high and slightly squeaky.

"The reporter!" He rolled his eyes at Tara. "You talked to her on the phone?"

"Oh, right. Let her in, would you?"

"She is in!" Mr. Walker shook his head. He was slender, his shirt practically hanging off his shoulders. If he was any skinnier, Tara thought, he'd disappear himself. "Oh, can I... may I take your coat?" He reached out for it, displaying absolutely no sense of how to behave with strangers.

"That's okay," she said, shrinking back from his touch. His fingertips were riddled with frayed strips of skin, the nails bitten to jagged stubs, still somehow dirty under what remained of the raw cuticles.

Mrs. Walker stepped gingerly into the room, plumpish in her sundress and gray cardigan, her eyes, one blue and one green, staring off vaguely. Those things are wonkier than mine, Tara thought. When her slender, arthritic fingers came up to feel the wall, Tara realized Mrs. Walker was blind, and felt bad for her thought.

"Honey, put your glasses on," Mr. Walker said with a critical edge.

The woman reached into the pocket of her cardigan and brought out a pair of oversized Jackie O sunglasses. She unfolded them and slid them on. "Better?" she asked.

Mr. Walker didn't even look, just said, "Much," and plopped himself down in front of his computer. On the screen was a videogame, something fantasy by the look, which he took out of Pause before donning a headset.

It was no wonder Daria felt like nobody could see her. Mrs. Walker was visually impaired or fully blind, and Mr. Walker probably wouldn't have noticed his daughter if she stood right in front of him: a father who wouldn't see her, and a mother who couldn't.

Talk about on-the-nose, Tara mused. Metaphor alert.

"Anson's hooked on that ridiculous game," Mrs. Walker explained with shame evident in her voice, as if she'd tried everything to drag him away from it, and considered his childish obsession her own personal failure.

"They're pretty addictive," Tara said, not that she'd ever been interested in them. Even the words "gaming" and "gamer" annoyed her.

"No, he's literally an addict. He likes to call himself a completionist, whatever that means. If he was so concerned with completing things, you'd think he could unload the dishwasher every once in a while."

Tara chuckled. Mrs. Walker stretched out a hand, and Tara took it.

"Greta Walker," the woman said.

"Tara. It's good to meet you. I'm sorry about your daughter."

"So am I," Greta said. "Would you like something to drink?"

"Don't trouble yourself."

"Oh, it's no trouble."

"Coffee would be great then, if you have it. Thank you."

"One coffee, coming up," Greta Walker said, and shuffled into the kitchen. Tara followed. Photographs lined the walls, some of Mr. Walker, most of Daria, blurry and improperly framed. Anson Walker was obviously not much of a photographer, or didn't care for photographs, which was why Greta must have taken them herself. The frames themselves were neat and hung straight, except one, a professional Christmas photo on a slight angle. Greta reached up and straightened it as she passed, as if she'd seen—or sensed—it was crooked.

"Daria was always a troubled girl," Mrs. Walker said as she began to take the coffee fixings from their places and gather them on the counter. She felt cupboard edges and lids and touched the outlet to unplug the toaster and plug in the coffeemaker. "When she was very little, she threw tantrums all the time. It didn't matter where we were: the grocery store, church, her grandmother's house—and she adores her grandmother." She held the lip of the filter basket and scooped four heaping spoonfuls of grinds into it. "Sometimes I think she was born in the wrong time, the way they got along."

"You spilled some coffee on the counter," Tara said.

"I heard. Thank you, though."

"Mrs. Walker—"

"Greta."

"Greta, did your daughter ever receive any professional help?"

"You mean a psychiatrist?" Greta, still facing the counter, raised her head without turning. "Once. She said he'd just told her everything she already knew. She's very self-aware. Hyper aware. I often think that's a big part of the problem. Alone with your thoughts all the time..." She trailed off there as the coffeemaker began to gurgle.

Tara thought she knew what the woman meant. Self-awareness could easily become a prison cell, and its evil stepsister, self-pity, made for a cruel warden. Tara knew this from bitter experience. She'd pulled herself up from depression after college, for the most part, but sometimes she felt like a diver whose rope led down into an abyss. Every so often there'd come a tug, threatening to drag her back under, and she worried someday she might not be able to resist its pull.

Like Daria.... Like Hope.

"Have you seen—?" She meant to ask if she'd seen the video, but of course Greta Walker had not seen the video. She hadn't ever seen anything, not unless her blindness had come later in life.

"Have I seen what, dear?"

"Sorry," Tara said, unsure of how to proceed.

"If you mean Daria's video, Anson described it while I listened. He said it looked very convincing. If she ever comes back, he promised to buy her better video software for her computer."

"Is the computer here?"

"Oh, yes. That woman detective returned it a few days ago."

"May I...?"

"Of course. That's why you came, isn't it?" The coffeemaker quieted. Greta gently removed the carafe and poured it into two cups. "Cream or sugar?"

"Double-double," Tara said.

"Two of each?" She shrugged. "The way you carry yourself, I suppose you could stand to put on a few pounds."

Tara wasn't sure if she meant this as a compliment or an insult, and chose to ignore it. Greta poured the cream and plopped two cubes from a china pot into the cup. She dropped a spoon into it and held it out.

"Thank you, Greta." Tara stirred it, blew on its rim.

"Daria's room is down the basement. It's the only room there, aside from the furnace room and the toilet. If you need any help, just holler up the stairs."

"I should be fine." She smiled, before realizing the woman couldn't see her face, so the smile was pointless. Daria had likely felt that way sometimes, with a father who seemed not to care, knowing her mother could never see whether she was happy or sad, making it all the more easy for her to hide. "Thanks again, Greta."

"No trouble at all," the woman said, and sat down at the kitchen table to blow on her own coffee in a thin slat of sunshine from a crack in the drapes.

HERE SHE STOOD, finally, in the doorway of a room she'd seen a hundred times but still had yet to enter. A small basement bedroom with a squat sliding window at head-height, its posters of bands and hot boys with their shirts off, its frilly bedspread and stuffed animals—which now seemed wholly unlike Daria, although Tara realized she really knew very little about this girl. Perhaps the dolls were her mother's influence, or her grandmother's.

Standing so close made her nervous. Daria Walker had vanished here. The room itself could have been a portal, a Bermuda Triangle, a wormhole, a magical doorway to some fantasy world or a parallel dimension. Where it lead, if anywhere, nobody quite knew. There'd been plenty of speculation in the comments section. Most commenters believed Daria had been whisked away by an angel, the first of many mortals too good for this world, who would rise to the Heavens during the Rapture; to others, she'd been dragged to the underworld by demons. A handful of theories, marginally more scientifically plausible—albeit still pretty far-out—filled the comments section below the video, along with the usual compendium of End of the World scenarios typed out by paranoid Chicken Littles, their Cheeto fingers smudging the keys.

Tara didn't buy a word of it. Her pet theory was that—like Daria's scars, an outward projection of internal troubles—the girl hadn't disappeared from the earth at all, but merely from sight. She was a presence in this room, like a haunting, liberated from the burden of her corporeal self. After the initial fear and pain, it would have felt like a weight lifting from Daria's shoulders, a shedding of her skin, the caterpillar bursting forth from its cocoon as a butterfly.

She would be free.

That was what Tara decided had happened to Daria Walker, and her article would reflect this hopeful slant.

I could disappear down here myself and no one would care, Tara thought. Hal Waterman and the Herald would find someone else to write her music columns. Her mother would be concerned, but she was old, edging toward senility. In another couple of years, the Alzheimer's would become so bad, she wouldn't remember her daughter anyhow. And Constable Daniels, with his recent passive-aggressive behavior—as opposed to the real aggression Tara prized—would probably be happy to be rid of her, not having to go through the trouble of dumping her himself.

With an anxious breath, Tara slipped through the doorway. A rush of air met her ears.

The laptop lay on a small rolltop desk. She crossed to it, thought about sitting down, but didn't. The basement was stuffy, and Daria's bedroom was no exception. She crossed to the window and unlatched it. For a brief moment she hesitated, hand on the frame. But the thought was silly. If Daria was still here and had wanted to slip out of this house, she would have done so already. No window or door could bar her way now.

With the window opened, she felt like she could breathe again. She sat down in front of the computer and fired it up. The laptop, in Standby mode, didn't require a password. Must've been pretty trusting of her parents to have no security on this thing, Tara thought. I would've had an electric fence around mine at her age, with all the secrets I kept.

Now that she sat behind Daria's desk, Tara wasn't sure exactly what to do next. She'd simply wanted to sit here, in the chair from which Daria had winked out of existence. To know what it felt like.

On this side of the video, she saw many of the same photos Kenzie Bamber had posted at her computer desk, but Daria had scratched out her own face from every single one, obliterating it.

Jesus—just like I used to, Tara thought, suddenly feeling like she was hyperventilating.

There were small circles on the keyboard where Daria's fingers had worn the surfaces: the G, H, E, S and T. Between the keys crumbs and dust had gathered, the sliver of a nibbled fingernail. Tara plucked a straggly golden hair curled in the fabric of the chair, and let it fall from her fingers. In the garbage can, empty packages of Coffee Crisp and Crunchie bars lay among crushed cans of orange pop. Fresh junk food filled the drawers: candy, chocolate bars and chips. Tara rummaged through them, hoping to find something else in the drawer, some pencils or pens, coins, mementos or keepsakes. Something bit into her finger and she withdrew it with a sucking breath.

The end of her finger was bleeding.

She tossed the junk food aside and found the drawer empty, aside from the blade from a disposable razor at the far back, its surface rusty and crusted with a black, gritty material she recognized as dried blood.

We're blood sisters now, she thought.

In the trash, a candy wrapper uncrumpled with a small, insectile sound, suddenly blooming as if Daria had only thrown it out moments ago. Of course that was impossible, as Daria hadn't been here in weeks. Tara supposed it wasn't likely Daria's mother or father would have recently been sitting in the chair eating their daughter's chocolate bars, though certainly she'd seen and heard of stranger things.

"Daria?" she said. "Are you here with me?"

A sudden blast of chilly air met her query. She nearly jumped, but her reporter's instincts kept her in the chair, sucking at the hurt end of her finger, weighing the options. A moment later, she heard the tick-tick-tick of the air conditioner kicking in, and looked up. The overhead vent blew frigid air down on her.

Jumping at shadows. But she is here. I feel something.

Inspiration struck. She opened Daria's word processor program, letting the cursor blink. It was what she did when stuck with a blank page, waiting for the muses to work through her fingers. She took in a deep breath. Held it. Then let it out slowly.

"Daria, where are you now?"

She waited, watching the cursor. Nothing happened.

What the hell was I thinking, anyway? It's a PC, not a Ouija board.

But the tip of her injured finger was tingling.

It tingles, Daria had said.

"This is something, isn't it?" Tara asked the empty room. She held the finger over the keyboard, hovered there above the keys, and the ends of her other fingers began to tingle. For a moment, she worried they might begin to disappear, but they remained solid. She poised them over the keys, forefingers resting on F and J, and like Daria's emotion magnet, she felt the pull of some invisible force, and typed out a single word:

yes

Fear gripped her insides. I started this, didn't I? Nothing to do now but finish it. "Where are you?" she asked Daria's not-so-empty room.

The answer came through her fingers. She watched them, frightened and incredulous, moving not of her own volition, but as if the fingers themselves were possessed.

everwhere nowear

Tara puzzled over this. "Is there any way I can help you? Is there a way to bring you back?"

confessss, Daria typed.

"Confess? Confess to what?"

Her fingers clacked at the keyboard. She read what Daria had typed:

confesshun ezs th sole makes pane disapeer

Confess, Tara thought. What do I have to confess to?

But she didn't need to think hard. The old hurt spilled over and Tara began to type, this time on her own.

"My Confession"

Tara Maxwell

I let it happen. I saw the signs and did nothing, and the girl who lived across the hall killed herself. I was so afraid they would start picking on me that I let them bully her into the grave. Anything to get their attention away from me. I could have befriended her, I could have comforted her, but I would have been shunned. Hope didn't cut her wrists or take pills—she threw herself out of her dorm room window while the rest of us were off on Christmas break. By the time we returned to school, a new year had started, and her parents had already come and gone.

Her bedroom was empty. Nobody cared to wonder why.

I've thought a lot about what I could have done to help her over the years, but by then it no longer mattered.

I could have helped her, but I didn't. Because

Tara paused to scratch her arm, and kept typing. Tears stung her eyes and ran down her cheeks, and she didn't spare a moment to consider the sudden itch in her arm. Her mind was on her confession, unburdening herself of her darkest secret.

Because I was scared. I let them tease her. I heard her cry alone in her room, saw her withdraw from school, from life, and I said nothing. It's as much my fault as it is theirs, only they didn't care. They laughed and made jokes about it after she was gone. Said she'd come back as a slug, only nobody would be able to tell the difference. Like that was funny. And I laughed along. Because if I didn't, they would know how I really felt.

My inaction killed Hope Chandra, and nothing I do will bring her back.

Tara let out a long, ragged sigh of relief. She sniffled, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Confession eases the soul. Daria was right—she felt clean. As empty as Hope's dorm room had been after Christmas break.

The cursor blinked at the bottom of the page.

"Daria?"

Was she gone? Had she moved on to discover what dreams might come, now that she'd ridded herself of the misfortune of being human?

The screen winked out, going back into standby. But the little red light beside Daria's webcam remained on. Tara never noticed.

She felt it first on her shoulder. It wasn't quite a tingle, more like the splash of warm rain on her skin. Painless, and somehow that was even more frightening. She had predicted pain. Without it, she didn't know what to expect.

Tara stood and peeled off her jacket, tossing it on the floor beside her, then pulled up her t-shirt to look at her arm. The skin was vanishing in small dots like droplets—like acid eating away at her flesh, only beneath there was nothing. As a child, she'd loved the rain. She'd waited for the puddles to gather, then thrown on her yellow slicker and splashed in them. She had tilted her head back and caught mouthfuls of fresh water from the sky, swallowing it in big gulps. She had stood and watched the birds, fluttering their wings, splashing in their birdbath in the backyard, and she'd wished she could be among them, small and frail in that enormous bowl of fresh rainwater. She'd wished she could fly up into the clouds as they threw down their fury upon the earth.

The fear of this process—whatever was happening to her now, had happened to Daria—washed away.

Tara slipped her t-shirt over her head, watched as her taut belly speckled away into the ether. Her right arm mostly gone, she touched the space where her stomach had been with her remaining hand, and found only empty space. Somehow, she remained upright as her body drifted away beneath her. She unhooked her bra and let it fall to the floor, unbuttoned her fly and shook out of her jeans, pulled off her socks, standing on one leg at a time, legs that had already begun to vanish as she danced out of her jeans. She wanted desperately to be unfettered, to feel only the warm, gentle rain on what remained of her body, her self. Finally, Tara stood naked in front of the computer, looking at what remained of herself in its mirrored black face, her arms spread out like wings, watching as she faded away into beautiful nothingness.

Her breasts evaporated or dissolved—she couldn't tell, and it didn't matter. She felt the breath whoosh out of her then, and for a terrifying moment she thought she'd suffocate, as Daria had. But she calmed herself, not by meditative breathing but by counting the seconds which passed without breath, instinctually realizing that if she had no body, she had no need for oxygen.

Her jaw, that embarrassingly mannish jaw, faded away, though she knew she would miss it. Her too-small lips didn't seem so girlish in retrospect, 20/20 hindsight, as they turned from red to pink to white like a fading flower and then to no color at all, becoming invisible. Her bumpy nose actually looked almost cute on its own, with just the eyes to compliment it—then it too whisked away. Her hair, which had never had enough body and was always too straight, disappeared from the tips to the roots. As it went, she decided a bob or a pixie cut would have framed her eyes nicely, which, she realized, were actually quite pretty.

When at last the eyes themselves disappeared, there was nothing left of her to see.

HAL WATERMAN'S BLACKBERRY beeped in the darkness of his bedroom, waking his wife first. Jean Waterman leaned over groggily and shook him awake, then fell back to her pillow. He put on his reading glasses, flicked on his bedside lamp, and plucked the phone up from the nightstand.

"All right, all right, hold your horsies," he muttered to the incessant beeps.

He scrolled to the message: an email sent from Tara Maxwell, at just past 2A.M. A little late, he thought, though without much surprise. The message contained an attachment, not to the text file he'd expected but to a video with a bizarre title—everwerenowear.mp4, whatever the hell that meant. He considered it a moment, sleepily. Why would Maxwell send me a video?

"She wouldn't," he answered himself. Jean uttered an inquisitive moan beside him. "Nothing, dear. Go back to sleep."

He'd seen this before: someone's email was hacked, and sent out suspicious links. Open it, and the virus would infect you.

Resolute, Hal Waterman deleted the spam, set his phone and reading glasses back on the bedside table, and snuggled up to his sleeping wife.

Always trouble with that girl, he thought, and thinking this, he drifted off to sleep.

ARTIFACT (#37)

THEY ALL HAD their jobs to do: Ugly Karl did the driving, Mad Bastard did the videotaping, and Meat did the girl. It was how they'd always done it; deviation from the plan would inevitably lead to disaster.

The Filthy Lessons crew dumped Nora West, a new girl in the business, out of their white van and onto the side of the road under the Dolphin Expressway overpass. Bastard tossed her purse, keeping her in frame as she caught it. Most of its contents spilled out onto the sidewalk. Nora collected her clothes, strewn along Northwest 35th: the yoga pants, the loose-fitting pink halter, bedazzled with the word HAWT, the frilly white panties Meat had scrunched up and stuffed into her mouth to muffle her cries.

She'd had time to put on her sandals and nothing else, the acne on her forehead shimmering in the mid-afternoon sun below a blonde fringe. She was still trying to scoop the contents of her purse back in with her right hand, while in her left she still held the rag she'd used to sop Meat's cum off her face and out of her hair.

"What about my two hundred dollars?" she said, looking worried, her face all squinched-up and somehow still attractive. Zellweger-esque.

"Lesson learned, biatch!" The Bastard shouted at her. The line served a dual purpose as the Filthy Lessons's catchphrase and Ugly Karl's cue to peel away from the curb, but Ugly's foot remained still. "Dude, let's get the fuck out of here!" Bastard yelled, slapping Karl on the shoulder.

Improvising, Nora began running naked toward them, looking supremely pissed, her sandals going skid-clack! skid-clack! against the pavement. No one cared. People might have gawked as they drove past, but nobody braked or made a hasty call to the MDPD. Welcome to Miami, ladies and sperms—the Gateway to America.

Bastard's little brother, Ian, who'd co-created and maintained the Filthy Lessons website, drove a few blocks behind them, ready to pick up Nora, hand over a good wad of cash, and have her sign the release. It was a trick Filthy Lessons played on their audience: paying semi- and non-professional models to pretend they were everyday girls picked up off the street and tricked into having sex for money. These were "ordinary, respectable girls" in desperate need of quick cash to pay off that student loan, that credit card bill, that trip to New Orleans where they just might flash their boobs for Mardi Gras beads with a few too many drinks, or that visit to the clinic to fix their "little mistake."

The illusion FilthyLessons.com had cultivated was that any idiot could pick up any girl off the street, so long as that idiot had a bit of cash. And because the illusion was so authentic, they could never deviate from the plan. It was something they didn't speak of anymore, yet its presence still weighed heavily on their minds—particularly when they drove over the embankment under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, where it had all gone down.

After a year or so in the business, an urban legend had begun to grow: that despite the disclaimers, they weren't actors at all, but real girls relearning the earliest lesson we're all taught, the one about not getting into cars with strangers, and learning it the hard way. Most women in their right minds were wary of men in white vans. They called them "creep vans." Rape vans.

Members had begun to suspect that the coercion and humiliation they were seeing was real.

When the rumor started, the site had grown to a million subscribers in little over a month, and Filthy Lessons had become filthy rich. At the height of their popularity, they'd been on the list of top 500 dot-com companies, raking in over a million dollars in one year alone. (This was before porn "networks" like Brazzers.com swallowed up all the smaller sites, like Linda Lovelace deep-throating Harry Reams, and free "video sharing" sites like XVideos and XHamster all but boned the independent market.) Currently, Filthy Lessons was a division of Porn Identity, netting barely six figures in 2014, despite the dozens of videos they'd put out that year.

With overnight infamy came attention from the State of Miami, where coercion was synonymous with rape. Thus had begun The Bastard's own filthy lesson in the fuzzy legalities of porn production. Whoever said "There's no such thing as bad press" had never found himself under the constant scrutiny of the Miami-Dade P.D.

And then came Jim Alan Biggs, but they no longer spoke of him—nor of #37, who'd spent such a short time in the Filthy Lessons van, but had learned the hardest lesson of all.

Nora West waved her arms furiously as the van peeled away from the curb—its windows tinted, with a F*CK GONZALEZ sticker on the bumper.

"Why the fuck did you hesitate, bro?" Bastard swatted Ugly Karl, who muttered something unintelligible and shook his head. The Bastard ignored him, thumbing off the camera, and texted his brother. Less than a minute later, Ian texted back two words:

GOT HER

BASTARD AND HIS brother viewed the footage a few hours later, splitting a celebratory bottle of scotch Ian Howard had bought for the occasion of their 200th video. With only four or five repeat Filthy girls and a handful of pre-existing starlets worked over in their van, Filthy Lessons had introduced just over 170 hardworking young women to the industry—And still not a single AVN award to show for it, the ungrateful pricks, Bastard thought.

On the HD monitors, Meat's face showed zero fatigue as he sweated over #200's tanned little tuchas.

"Shoulda made a t-shirt for her to wear," The Bastard said, raising his glass to point at the screen.

"Or for Meat." Ian mimed a slogan over his open-collared shirt: "'Over 200 Spermed.'"

Bastard chuckled and divvied up the last of the scotch into their glasses. A splash dribbled down the back of his hand and he licked it off.

"Why didn't Karl follow cue?" Ian asked, eyes glassy from the booze.

"Probably spaced-out from the weed," Bastard said. "Burnout motherfucker."

Ian nodded, but he didn't seem convinced. "Looks like he was staring at something out the window." He rewound the footage. "See that?"

Bastard did. Karl's eyes widened in slo-mo. His mouth fell open on his shitty teeth and the braces he'd gotten a few months ago. Along with the ratty John Holmes 'stache, he looked like the oldest kid in high school. The shot swished away slowly, fast movement in slow motion, much too blurry to see whatever Karl was looking at, before the frame hovered over Nora.

"Looks like he saw a ghost," Mad Bastard, born Kevin Howard, said.

"The vengeful spirit of Andrea Dworkin." Ian threw up his hands and shook them. Bastard wasn't sure if he was miming a ghost or channeling Al Jolson. "Woo-oo-ooh! Pornography is harmful to womennnnn!"

Bastard laughed and shook the rocks in his scotch. Ian eyed his brother. Eventually Kevin looked up, catching his look. "You goin' fruity on me, bro?"

Ian gave his big brother a smile he hoped didn't look as patronizing as it felt, and shook his head.

"What, then? Something on your mind?"

"You ever think about—?" Ian stopped, aware that he shouldn't continue: the subject was verboten, especially here at the office. It was technically his own den, so he should have been allowed to say whatever the fuck he wanted—but to what end? If it was just to get the thing off his chest, was there really any point in saying it at all? Why not get a psychiatrist, if that was his motive?

"Doing it with Ann Coulter?" Bastard suggested. He grinned over a sip of his drink, then added, "Just about all the time." He spoke slowly and slightly slurred, his head weaving a bit, and that was good. Kevin had been under a lot of stress lately, with bills and bad press and 14-hour days. He needed to unwind, but Ian needed to say it.

"You ever, uh...?"

"Spit it out, E. You know I love talking to you, bro, but sometimes it's like having a conversation with an impacted bowel."

Ian heaved a sigh of disappointment. What he wanted to say—Do you ever think about #37, Kevin? Because I think about her all the time. I see her in the dark behind my eyes when the lights are out, so I leave them on, and I still can't sleep, so I drink myself into a fucking coma. Ten years, Kevin. Ten years this has been my life, and I'm just so. Fucking. Tired... To voice this would be too difficult, and not just for himself. He might as well slash both their wrists, and then ask Kevin to forgive him and clean up the mess. So instead of spilling their blood, he said, "You ever think about leaving the biz?"

Bastard eyed him suspiciously. "And do what? This is what I was born to do, bro. You don't buy silk sheets and sleep on the couch. You climb into bed and get nice and cozy. Just because the sheets got a little dirty, doesn't mean it's not still your bed."

Ian laughed. "I have no idea what you're talking about sometimes, Kev."

Bastard affected a feeble British accent: "He speaks in riddles and in rhymes."

Ian ruffled his big brother's mess of brown hair.

"Fuck off," Kevin said amiably, ducking out of reach of his brother's fingers.

Ian stood with a resigned sigh, taking what was left of the second bottle with him through to the kitchen. "If you need to crash, go ahead. That is, if you're not too proud for the couch, your highness."

"My drunkness," Bastard corrected.

Ian chuckled halfheartedly, heading for his bedroom. No silk sheets on the pillow-top, but he'd always preferred Egyptian cotton, anyhow.

"E...?"

Ian turned by the 3D TV in the living room. "Yeah, Kev?"

Bastard had slid down in his leather desk chair, resting most of his weight on his back, a runner of drool glistening on his goatee. "You aren't really thinking of quitting, are you?"

Ian pretended to look shocked. "No. Of course not. It was just hypothetical, that's all."

"Good." Kevin's gaze, vacant-eyed, became nonetheless severe. "Don't forget who buttered your bread, bro."

Ian nodded, and padded the rest of the way across the plush shag rug. He left the lights on in his room—much too bright for thoughts of serial rapists and dead girls. When he passed out a half hour later, he still held the bottle, the last inch of Macallan 18 dribbling onto his sheets as he snored.

"THIS GIRL," BASTARD said, incredulous as he pointed at her profile picture. Frankly, he doubted Ian wasn't making it up. "This one right here."

"That's her, I swear."

"She's an eleven," Bastard said. "At least."

"If numbers were hot peppers, she'd be a Trinidad Scorpion," Ian said. "On the Scoville scale, she's like at least a million."

"I don't know—is that hot?"

"That's hotter than hot."

According to her Glamor Anarchy profile, the girl's name was Amber Dillon. The year was 2005, and Kevin and Ian had been in the business just two years. If things worked out well—and Kevin, still a year away from receiving the nickname The Mad Bastard from fans, had serious doubts they would be able to lure in a girl of her caliber—Amber Dillon would be their 35th satisfied customer.

"Sounds like a nom de porn."

"Who knows?" Kevin said. "She doesn't look familiar."

I'm new to Miami, she'd written in her profile, and somewhat new to modeling/acting. I am looking to make new and exciting contacts in the business, and more! I would like to build up my portfolio, so to answer all of your very eager questions, YES, I'm willing to do time for prints, and YES, I am willing to do nudity, tho it is not my main interest and must be PAID-ONLY. I live in the Coral Gables area, but am willing to travel if expenses are paid UP FRONT. Let's chase our dreams together, babes! MUAH!

"What's 'M-U-A-H'?" Ian wondered. "Some kind of acronym?"

Kevin had been leaning over his brother's shoulder, his face and glasses—he'd get laser eye surgery in a few months—bathed in the blue glow of the monitor. "It's a kiss sound. All the time you spend in gay chatrooms, how do you not know this?"

"Hey, at least I don't still say surf."

"GBY."

"What's that?"

"Go Blow Yourself."

Ian laughed. Kevin, focused elsewhere, tapped Amber Dillon's stats on the monitor. "Five-five. Supermodel looks, but she's too short for runway. We can exploit that." He was rubbing the beginnings of a goatee, deep in thought. Kevin believed it made him look dignified and intellectual, like Freud; Ian thought it made him look like Shaggy from Scooby Doo, but he let Kevin hold on to the delusion.

That'd make me Fred, he thought, since Karl made a better Scooby.

"Want me to message her?"

Kevin zipped through her photos. A vintage sort of beauty: the big doe eyes of Marilyn Monroe (though Amber's were brown, not blue); the thick, slightly arched eyebrows of Sophia Loren; the cheekbones of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie & Clyde; the full, pouty lips of Bridget Bardot in... whatever-the-fuck she'd starred in. Amber's strawberry-blonde hair cascaded over her shoulders in feathered thickets, like sheaves of wheat under a harvest moon. Taut, tanned and ample where it counted. Kevin simultaneously thought of Raquel Welch on the posters for One Million B.C. and Ursula Andress rising from the ocean in Dr. No. She was the sum of every Bond girl, and Mrs. Robinson, Barbarella, Catwoman, Princess Leia, Jessica Rabbit—she was all of these women and more, because she was real. Because she was unspoiled. Because the industry hadn't yet chewed her up and spit her out the other side.

But it will, Kevin thought. Not before I get to you, though. Amber Dillon. My #35...

"Let me do it," he said.

A WEEK AFTER they'd kicked Nora West from their van, Ian had a shoot set up with a girl calling herself Zara Chase. She was nothing special, just another in a long line of desperate girls looking to break into the business, but 201 wasn't exactly a milestone.

They piled into the van: Bastard, Meat and Ugly Karl. Kevin let Meat hop in first, clapping him encouragingly on the back of his Ed Hardy tee on the way up.

Meat winced. "Ow! Fuck, dude!"

"What's up your ass?" The Bastard asked, climbing in.

Meat, born Alex Ephron, reached back awkwardly to rub his shoulder blade, looking pained. "New tat," he explained with a grimace.

"Oh yeah?" Karl said from the driver's seat, peering back through the rearview. "What is it? Little butterfly?" He eyed Kevin with a sparkly-mouthed grin. "A dolphin?"

"No, it's not a dolphin, Karl." He took off his shirt—he was bound to anyway—and peeled the gauze patch from his back. Then he turned his shoulder to face Kevin, displaying a slogan in what looked like Latin: ILEGITIMI NON CARBORUNDUM.

"The fuck does that mean?" Karl wondered.

A shit-eating grin spread across Meat's face. Aside from all the tattoos, the kid was handsome when he wanted to be, and when he smiled it really showed. Dumb as a fucking twig, but a genuine looker. "It means 'Don't let The Bastard grind you down,' and that's exactly what I'm gonna do," he said.

"It's 'the bas-tards,' you shitwit," Kevin said. "Plural. Now put that bandage back on. You're not showing that nasty red thing on camera. Probably fucking infected."

Meat's shoulders slumped, and he tried, desperately, tenderly, to put the gauze back on. Finally, Kevin peeled it off in a huff and spread it on smooth for him. Meat thanked him, giving him a curious look, as if The Bastard had never done something nice for another person in his life.

The engine wheezed when Karl turned the key in the ignition. He tried it again with the same result, locking eyes with Kevin in the mirror.

Fuck, The Bastard thought. She's dead.

It turned over on the next twist of the key, and the van roared to life. Kevin climbed into the passenger seat and let himself relax, while Ugly Karl drove them to meet Zara Chase.

MEAT NEVER SO much as touched Amber Dillon.

By the time Kevin was able to reel her in, two other girls had come—or at least, had pretended to come—through the Lessons van. By then, she'd been promoted to #37.

Ian had vetted her, since Kevin had been networking at the AVNs in Vegas the only time she was available. She'd assured him she was good to go, and Ian had assured Kevin she was just as gorgeous as her profile pics made her out to be, though she seemed much smarter to him than her profile had portrayed her.

Kevin told his brother he was probably just dazzled by her beauty in the flesh. He'd put her on a pedestal, so that she'd seemed much more intelligent and interesting than she actually was. It had happened to him before—to Ian, not Kevin. Once the shine came off the diamond, Kevin had assured him, he'd see all its flaws.

Kevin, it turned out, had been dead wrong.

Amber Dillon seemed smart because she was smart: a Psychology grad student, writing a thesis paper about the changing role of women in pornography. She'd dolled herself up to look like a tart, with fishnet thigh-highs and a frilly miniskirt and corset, the sort of thing nobody wore in the street unless they were clubbing or goth. Amber Dillon—her real name, as they would discover when the news broke of her death—was neither.

She acted silly and flirty when they picked her up, but they found out pretty quickly she was a non-starter, zero interest in fucking Meat or any of them, on camera or at all. Karl asked if she was a lesbian, a classic Ugly Karl move, and she became infuriated, demanding to be let out. If she'd only played along, she could have turned a boring college paper into her 15 minutes of fame—she might even have lived. Instead, they dumped her out on the Julia Tuttle Causeway (a year before the area became a campground for registered sex offenders, nicknamed "Bookville" after its creator, lobbyist Ron Book), unaware that Jim Alan Biggs was following close behind, waiting for the dump. In his way, the serial rapist had been a pioneer, kidnapping Amber Dillon from a future haven for sex criminals. Tuttle, the Mother of Miami, must surely have rolled in her grave.

Much later, Kevin imagined the look of surprise on Biggs's face when the girl left the van early, fully clothed. The ruthless motherfucker currently sat on Death Row in a North Florida prison near to where he'd been picked up, not for any of his seven rapes and murders, but for drunk driving, of all things. There'd been a public outcry after Amber's body had been found and linked via emails and texts to the Filthy Lessons crew. Kevin and the gang had been questioned for possible involvement in the kidnapping and murder. Miami P.D. suggested they had lured her for that sick fuck Biggs, that they'd "groomed" her, even.

But Biggs was just a crazed fan, a member since the beginning, along with several sites of the harder fetish stuff: hardcore bondage, ropes-and-wired, squirting and milking, simulated rape and revenge porn, some obscure sites of Japanese ero guro (gore) porn, which contained plenty of blood, mutilation, urine and/or feces, and often, live tentacle—not testicle but tentacle, as in squids and octopi—insertions. Biggs's personal collection was all self-produced rape snuff, and videos of himself ejaculating on pictures of celebrities he'd printed off the internet, both of which the police were certain had been distributed through black market channels prior to being destroyed.

And so, like the 13th floor of an apartment building, Filthy Lessons had simply skipped over #37's video, and without an actual tally on the website, nobody was the wiser. Technically, they'd been celebrating #201 the night before with Nora West. But since Meat hadn't fucked Amber Dillon before Jim Alan Biggs had gotten his freakish hands on her, and their own video no longer existed (or was stored, along with Biggs's snuff films, in some police warehouse), they'd decided it didn't count.

Kevin and Ian had only seen the video itself once, marveling over the girl's balls for having managed to infiltrate their world, even for the short time she had. Neither of them needed a video to remind them of Amber's brief, confrontational stay in the Lessons van. Her visit to the gutter had etched itself on their pre-frontal lobes, a recording that could not be erased, no matter how hard they tried: Kevin with his drink, Bastard throwing himself into his work. God knew how Meat and Karl put the incident behind them, if they thought on such a conscious level at all. Karl smoked himself into a constant stupor, but it could be for any number of reasons. Meat just liked to fuck, although lately he'd become obsessed with getting tattoos, and Kevin supposed the pain of the needle might have helped to curb semi-literate thoughts of dead college girls.

ILLEGITIMI NON CARBORUMDUM, for fuck's sake. Where the fuck did he learn that from? The Bastard wondered as they drove to the agreed-upon meeting place, alongside The Shops' parking lot in Midtown. Zara Chase would have just finished her Christmas shopping (it was a balmy December day, 81-degrees and sunny), and they would find her "waiting for her boyfriend." They would wait with her, and if he didn't show, they would drive her home. Of course, he wouldn't—there was no boyfriend, at least for the purpose of this video. While Zara was in the van, if she was naughty and nice, they would offer her some cash for whoever she had left on her Christmas list. A basket of something nice for Grandma, perhaps.

They parked by the lot entrance on North 34th, and waited. Karl began to pick his nose. The Bastard slapped the underside of Karl's elbow, hoping the index finger would jam up into Karl's brain, those abnormally long fingernails giving him a mental abortion. Karl jerked his finger free before Kevin's palm struck, and flashed his passenger an angry glare.

"Find any Lucky Charms up there, Uggo?"

"Suck my butt," Karl muttered, squinting out the window at the mall doors. Then he shouted, "That's her!" just about jumping out of his seat but for his seatbelt, which yanked him firmly back to planet Earth.

Meat poked his head out between the two front seats, like a kid in the back wanting the attention of his parents. "I thought you guys said she wasn't hot?"

Alex Ephron's taste in women was pretty subpar. He could get it up and keep it hard for a ditch pig, a quality that made him perfect for reality porn. The girls he brought home from the clubs, some of them looked like kissing cousins of the big guy from The Goonies. Even still, he'd videotape them, using spy cameras he'd bought over the internet from China, hidden all over his bedroom in Bubbe and Zayde's basement in South Pointe, often bringing the videos to the studio for the Howard brothers to watch. It was his version of vacation movies. Nobody wanted to watch these, either.

"She's okay," Kevin admitted.

He raised the camera, took the cap off the lens, and zoomed in on her: a brunette with long, skinny legs, somehow pale despite the Miami sun, lightly freckled around her too-big sunglasses. Black Irish, at a guess. She was peering around, hands full of bags, searching for their van. Then she spotted them, and when she looked directly at the camera, the sun winked off its lens, nearly blinding The Bastard. He dropped it from his eye and rubbed furiously.

Karl started the van. Thank fuck it's running, Kevin thought. Ugly Karl pulled out of the spot and did a U-turn into the eastbound lane. He stopped near Zara, who was peering around, ignoring the men in the van, pretending to look for her imaginary boyfriend.

Kevin brought the camera up and thumbed Record. "It's Thursday, around three o'clock. We're at The Shops, in the parking lot, and it looks like Little Bo Peep here's lost her boyfriend."

"It's 'sheep.'" Karl said.

"It's a metaphor, you asshole."

Meanwhile, Zara appeared to be growing ever more frustrated, until The Bastard rolled down his window.

"You lost?" he said.

She barely glanced at him, kept scouring the roadway for her boyfriend's car. Good girl, Bastard thought.

"Need some help?"

Zara turned to them with an angry huff. "I'm not in the habit of getting into perv vans with strange men."

Kevin grinned. "Hey, just 'cause we're riding in a perv van, doesn't make us pervs."

"Speak for yourself," Karl muttered.

I could kill you right now, Karl, you dumb, ugly fuck, Bastard thought. "I'm Kevin. People call me The Mad Bastard. We're making a documentary."

"Oh yeah? What's it about? The life of the modern American douchebag?"

Kevin laughed. "That's fair, that's fair. It's actually about Alex back there, and yeah, I guess you could say he's a bit of a douchebag. Lovable douchebag, right, Meat?"

"That's me," Meat agreed.

"We call him Meat. Say hi, Meat."

Meat leaned up between the seats again and gave her a cheery smile and wave.

Zara Chase raised an eyebrow. "What's so interesting about him?"

"Meat? Well, he's a virgin, if you can fuckin' believe it," Kevin said with a shake of his head. "So me and Ugly Karl here..." Karl held up a hand, not taking his eyes off the car ahead. "...are trying to find out what it is about him that turns women off. Because he's obviously gorge, am I right, sweetie?"

Zara lowered her sunglasses. Bright, pretty brown eyes studied Meat.

Weren't they blue in her pics? Kevin thought, and he shrugged at his own question. Probably got colored contacts, but who the fuck would willingly change their eyes to brown?

"He's pretty cute," she agreed, and hid her eyes behind the shades again. "Maybe it's because you call him 'Meat.'"

"He's a little dumb, unfortunately," Kevin said, feigning sympathy. "Hey, listen, you seem pretty astute. Maybe you could give us a hand? We shoot you talking to Alex—Meat—and maybe you can help us figure out what he's doing wrong. We'll give you fifty bucks for your troubles?"

Zara did a decent job of looking unconvinced. Then she shrugged. "Fifty bucks, huh?" She made a show of swinging her head around again, looking annoyed. "Well, since my asshole boyfriend is late, I guess I could help you out. At least I could put these down for a minute," she said, holding up seemingly heavy shopping bags.

Behind Kevin, Meat slid open the door. Zara squinted into the dim inside, and appeared suddenly unsure she hadn't made a mistake. "What's with the sword?" she wondered. Hung on the far wall, the side without a door, was a Japanese katana. A replica, Bastard thought, not knowing much about swords, aside from the pork variety.

"It's a katana," Karl said. "It's Japanese, and it's super-sweet."

"That's our Karl," Bastard said, full of unchecked disdain. "It's decorative. Ugly used to have it over his bed, until he started to get worried it'd fall off while he was sleeping and give him an accidental penectomy."

The girl laughed. Karl snorted, then squinted out the windshield and lit a cigarette.

"Can I scam one of those?" she asked, dropping her bags on the floor and sitting cross-legged beside Meat. Karl reached over the seat and held out the pack to her. She took one and nestled it between her lips, all pink and glossy and pouty. Karl lit it for her, and she inhaled deeply, then blew a lungful of smoke at Kevin. It rose around her in a blue-gray cloud, momentarily obscuring her face through the camera lens. Kevin coughed and wafted it away. He hadn't smoked in two years, and the temptation to start up again was intense. Karl knew it, too, and had done it to piss him off. But since Zara had asked for it, Kevin couldn't say anything without looking like a prick.

She turned to Meat, who smiled goofily. "Are you sure he's a virgin?" she asked Kevin.

"Why would I lie about that?"

"I dunno," she said. "You just seem like the type."

"What type?"

"A liar," she said with a smirk.

Kevin laughed, trying to keep the camera steady. There was something familiar about that smile he couldn't quite put a finger on, so he zoomed in until her slick pink lips filled the screen, blurred and pixelated, as he hoped for a revelation. Nothing came.

"I like this chick," he said, zooming out wide.

"Me too," Meat said, leaning in closer to her. The tent in his shorts seemed to agree.

IAN WATCHED THEM peel away from the mall from the driver's seat of his microcar. Kevin hated the thing, and refused to ever sit in the passenger seat—which was just fine by his little brother, who preferred to drive alone. He only drove the girls out of necessity, not because he was interested in their company. Most of them weren't very interesting conversationalists, anyhow. They talked about their modeling careers, how Meat's dick had torn them up inside, the latest celebrity trends, fashion. All except Amber Dillon, who'd attempted to act like a ditz, but had slipped up and identified quotes from Kierkegaard and Proust when he'd oh-so-casually rhymed them off during their pre-shoot vetting. Unfortunately, Ian had never had the chance to have her in the seat beside him.

The fact still plagued him: if he hadn't popped a tire at the exact wrong moment, she might have lived.

No Jim Alan Biggs. No police investigation. No scores of reporters still haranguing them for interviews to this day. He and Amber would have had a nice, pleasant conversation as he drove her home. Maybe he would have asked her on a date, though he doubted he would have had the guts. Even if he had, she likely would have shot him down. She was an eleven, a million on the Scoville scale, and educated, too. Not to mention the fact that he was a pornographer, ten years her senior. Amber Dillon had dug a hole down to their level, had slummed there for a few hours, raped and murdered as a consequence, her gored remains left under the Tuttle, clothing and flesh torn in neat shreds by Biggs's utility knife. He'd cut her throat while he fucked her, then carved off her clitoris and labia, leaving her with nothing but a gaping red hole between her legs. He had torn off both nipples and areolae with his teeth (they were never found, and police suspected he'd eaten them), gouged out her right eye without damaging the eyelids and left it hanging over her ear, the eyelids sucked in like the lips of a toothless old man. The other eye he had left pulled wide open, staring up at the underside of the Causeway. Inexplicably, he'd removed her left shoe, as he'd done to all of his victims. There seemed to be a method to his madness, though it was never deciphered, nor had he revealed it himself. He'd laid Amber out like some macabre tableau, a ghastly, Ripper-like exhibition of the finitude of mortality, and depravity without bounds.

Karl turned right onto Northeast 36th, and Ian grew concerned. Where the hell is he going? he wondered. First he peels out from the curb like a madman, gonna get us nabbed by the cops, and now he's driving toward—

"The Causeway," he said aloud, pounding a fist on the steering wheel. "What the fuck? What the fuck are you doing, Kevin?"

As they crossed Biscayne, the van suddenly began to swerve.

Caught behind a freight truck pulling onto the Causeway, Ian couldn't see the van up ahead until it slammed through the guardrail and bounded down the slight grass rise along the Interstate. He nearly swerved off the road himself watching it happen, bumping along in the ditch until he steadied the car, easing off the gas. He pulled over on the side of the road, unbuckled, and got out. Another trucker blew past, blasting the horn. Ian flattened himself against the car door until it was gone, then hurried around the front and vaulted over the guardrail.

The tires had carved ruts in the dead grass to where the van had smashed into a tree, radiator smoking, the front end crumpled. The sliding door opened as Ian ran toward it, hoping his brother was okay, hoping the other guys hadn't been hurt too badly. Hoping the girl was uninjured, too—they didn't need another tragedy occurring so close to the place where Jim Alan Biggs had left Amber Dillon's mutilated remains.

It was Zara who stumbled out. Ian had gotten close enough to see she was bleeding, and it must have been a deep cut or a head wound, because she was drenched in it. She looked terrified, her blue eyes dazed as she weaved back and forth for a moment before finding her footing, arms held out to steady herself as if she were walking on a tightrope.

"Zara? What happened? Are you okay?"

The girl startled at his voice. She opened her mouth as if to speak, but let loose a scream, so high and tremulous he felt it crawl up his spine.

"It's okay," he said, approaching her with his hands held out. "Everything's gonna be okay." He couldn't make himself sound convincing. She ran from him, tripped on the grass and fell weeping to her knees, fingers digging into her damp hair at the scalp and pulling, like a woman possessed.

Ian stopped at the opened van door. His hands rose reflexively to cover his mouth, a habit he'd picked up from his mother before she'd left the Howard brothers home alone with Daddy and had never come back.

"No," he said, barely a whisper, further muted by his hands. "Oh, God..."

A massacre...

Holding the door to steady himself, his guts rebelled, but nothing came up when he doubled over, just a dry, hacking cough that ended in futile retching.

She did this? That skinny little thing?

Ian moved toward her, menacing now. He stopped again and bent at the waist, gagging and coughing up a thick wad of saliva he spat on the grass. "What did you do to my brother, you crazy bitch?"

Zara recoiled, kneeling on the balding lawn, her butt resting on the bruised backs of her legs. She shook her head violently, muttered something so quiet that Ian couldn't hear her above the swish of traffic—although he was standing over her now, hands unconsciously balled into fists. Her own hands lay limp at her sides, painted with the blood of his brother and friends.

"It wasn't..." She took a deep, shuddering breath before finishing: "...me."

"No? Then who the fuck was it, Zara? Everyone else is—" The lump in his throat wouldn't swallow. "Everyone else is dead."

Ian had seen the horror in a single glance. He was in no rush to experience that grim tableau again, but he realized he would need to get the tape before the cops showed up. They would want it as evidence, and he would never get to see what Kevin had recorded, what had happened to his big brother, and—he loathed to admit—his friends.

"It was her," Zara muttered from behind him, as he moved toward the van, its door lay open like the entrance to the world's most macabre carnival ride. Ian peered back over his shoulder. Zara stared off cold at the underside of the bridge, where until 2010 sex offenders had made their home, and where, in 2005, Jim Alan Biggs had placed Amber Dillon's body, a gruesome gift to the gods of Magic City.

"Her," Zara repeated.

The sharp stench of urine and iron-rich blood stung his nostrils as he climbed into the van on his hands and knees. Kevin had been skewered to the passenger seat, Karl's sword plunged through his chest. His blood had soaked the back of that seat; the tip of the blade peeked out from between his shoulder blades. It was sharp, but it hadn't been used it years, and should have been dulled. Without assistance, Zara simply could not have plunged it through the seat and through Kevin's chest. She couldn't have cut Ugly's head clean off with a single blow, the stump of his neck so smooth it looked like it had been done with a table saw. Despite these physical impossibilities, the evidence said otherwise: aside from the three of them, the van was empty. Unless she'd somehow convinced them to do each other in, Zara Chase, 110 pounds soaking wet, had slaughtered them all by herself, and in less than ten minutes.

Her, she'd said. As if she'd disconnected from herself.

Meat's glassy eyes seemed to follow Ian's progress as he hunted for the camera. His genitals had been mutilated, chest and throat scratched deeply. Snatching looks at the body to be sure it hadn't moved, his left hand squelched on the carpet, leaving a full handprint in the blood. Jesus, he thought, jerking his hand away and wiping it on his cargo shorts. Jesus, I'm so fucked. Inspired, he pressed his bare knee into the handprint, hoping to obliterate it. The cold, tacky feel of it on his skin made him gag again. When he raised his knee from the carpet, the shape of his hand was gone.

The camera had fallen from Kevin's hand beside Zara's shopping bags, which had tipped over and appeared to be empty. He brushed them aside and snatched the camera, ejected the tape and pocketed it in his shorts. His own shoulder bag, which he'd been wise enough to bring along (though he'd forgotten he was wearing it), held several blank tapes. He jammed one into the compartment and snapped it shut, then backed out of the van on his knees, avoiding the spreading stain.

His gaze fell on his big brother, and the bleeding, wormy thing shoved into the O of Kevin's mouth. His gorge rose again when he realized what it was, and he barely made it out of the van before everything came up, a boozy, chunky mess splattering on the grass between his feet.

Zara was still crying, head in her hands. He thought about going to her, but instead he backed away, as the sound of sirens rose in the distance. Once his back was turned on the scene of the crime, he felt a sudden urge to run, and when he got to his car he didn't spare a single look back, only dropped it into drive and spun his tires, peeling away from the side of the Interstate as fast as the little electric thing would go. He drove all the way to the Surprise Lake canal before he realized he was on the wrong side of the bridge.

On his way back across the Tuttle, police cars had lined up along the guardrail, the EMS and a fire truck, bubble lights spinning. A cop in an orange safety vest flagged westbound traffic through. The scene was a zoo: cops, plainclothes detectives, forensics, the EMTs leading a hysterical Zara Chase, draped with a gray blanket, to the ambulance. They'd find his prints on the camera. Once they realized who the victims were, they'd wonder why Kevin hadn't recorded the session, leaving them with only a blank tape.

Then they'll come for me, Ian thought, and his foot reflexively pushed on the accelerator.

BACK AT THE house in Coconut Grove, Ian popped the tape into the player and rewound it to the beginning. He brought a bottle of Macallan 18 back to his chair, and pushed Play.

Kevin's voiceover, zooming in on Zara with her hands full of bags out front of The Shops. "It's Thursday, around one o'clock. We're at The Shops, in the parking lot, and it looks like Little Bo Peep here's lost her—"

He fast-forwarded.

"—to do. You want this?" the girl asked, and yanked off Meat's shorts, going down on him with zero hesitation. Ian watched, mesmerized, until Zara rose from Meat's groin. "Now are we gonna fucking drive, or—"

Fast-forward: a blowjob in high speed. But suddenly Zara had the sword in her hands, pointing it at Kevin, at Meat, and Ian rewound the tape. Pushed Play.

"I want you to take me where it happened," Zara said calmly, sitting beside Meat with her nipples poking out from above her top.

Kevin's voice, from behind the camera: "To where what happened, sweetie?"

Her eyes looked dark on camera, more like brown than blue. "You know what I mean," she said.

"No, seriously, honey, I don't—"

"She means the overpass." This was Karl. Meat's jaw dropped, eyebrows upturning. The camera swung toward the driver.

"How the fuck do you know what she means?"

Karl never took his eyes off the road. They passed the truck (the one Ian had been stuck behind when the van hit the guardrail). "I saw her," Karl said. He ran his tongue over his braces. "The other day, in the rearview, when we dropped off the girl. I saw her, man!"

"Don't you fuckin' say it, Karl. I will kick your fuckin' ass if you say her name."

Karl's fluffy chin quivered, but he said nothing. The camera swooped back, pausing on Zara's shopping bags. For some unknown reason Kevin zoomed in on one, until its emptiness filled the screen. Movement within startled Ian—black, writhing movement. He sat up rigidly, and moved closer.

Earth and insects filled the screen. Worms. Beetles. Flies. Crawling and wriggling over each other, moving blindly in the dirt. Scavengers of the grave.

"What the hell?" was all Ian could think to say, rolling back in the chair to get away from the image on the screen. His brother breathed something similar from behind the camera.

The video distorted, garbled, and the bag was empty again: a grotesque magic trick. Kevin zoomed out so both Zara and Meat were in frame, side by side.

"Take me to where I died," Zara muttered. Her words would have been barely audible if Ian hadn't cranked up the speakers. Meat turned to look at her, eyes wide in growing fear.

"She's fucking crazy," Kevin said. "Fucking loony tunes."

"Take me to where I died!"

The image shook at her scream. The picture broke apart in a digital garble.

Ian rewound the tape, then played it back in slow-mo. The distortion, the digital artifacting, seemed to originate from Zara, and it followed her as she rose to grab Karl's katana off the wall. She was spatial, temporal garbage, a digital Picasso of ones and zeroes, blocky chunks of her image scattered over the entire frame—a pixelated, polychrome hot mess.

Her voice became distorted. He thought he heard Kevin, vaguely, incanting that most forbidden of names: "Amber? No, Amber, don't—!"

The sharp snick of the blade silenced him, and the camera fell from his hand, rolling on the floor of the van next to Karl's severed head. The lens struggled to focus on Karl's scruffy mustache, before the video ended with a stark blue screen.

The rest of the tape was blank.

Ian rewound it to a few frames before her image fractured the first time. He was drunk now, and the sun had dipped behind the giant Ficus outside his window; its massive branches, draped in Spanish moss, made a canopy over the street. The den had grown dark, the kitchen lights lambent. He hadn't bothered to reach back and turn on the overhead, probably couldn't even have managed it in his drunkenness. The screens gave the room a bluish glow as he stared at a freeze-frame close-up of Zara's face, a jittery image, shifting between two frames. He sat up abruptly, the leather chair creaking, and moved in so close to the main monitor he could feel it prickling all the little hairs on his face.

In one frame, Zara's eyes were blue, just like they'd been when he'd met her. In the other—and the certainty of it made him swig again from the half-empty bottle—they were brown.

The kitchen lights flickered, then went out.

Ian threw a look over his shoulder, fear dulled by the alcohol.

A shape moved in the dark beyond the kitchen island. He pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes until sparkles danced behind his eyelids. Then he pulled them away, blinking sharply into the darkness.

The shape in the kitchen jittered, grew larger, spreading out beyond the gas range and his La Marzocco espresso maker. It moved jerkily over the island, through the island, turning every physical thing it touched into swirling, agitated pixels. Convulsing. Churning.

"Amber."

He spoke her name on a whisper, and the looming pillar of digital smoke took on her fluctuating, nebulous form. The Amber manifestation flickered and buzzed through the living room and into the den, wearing the face, the eyes, the lips of a thousand women: mothers, lovers, saints. "Amber, I'm so sorry." He had to shout over the churning din of white noise. "I'm sorry!"

The monstrous cloud wouldn't stop, swallowing up more and more of the room in its digital cyclone, deafening as it bore down on Ian.

Ten years, he thought. The bottle dropped to his feet, spilling liquor the color of her name onto the carpet. It was almost a relief when he let Amber take him.

From the Miami Sun, pg. 4:

...The coincidences are too significant to ignore: the sexual assault and murder of Amber Dillon, a Psychology student whose life was cut tragically short after going undercover in the seedy underbelly of the Miami porn industry, and the apparent revenge murders of Filthy Lessons operators, Ian and Kevin Waterman, by 19-year-old Dana Gallagher and an unknown accomplice. Both crimes occurred in the same location, on the embankment under the Julia Tuttle Causeway, very near what was once a refuge for registered sex offenders.

Gallagher, an undergraduate student at the University of Miami, which Dillon herself had attended, came from a religious background, with no history of delinquency. According to sources, Gallagher and her friends had performed a séance several nights prior to the incident, replete with Ouija board, during which Gallagher had jokingly asked to speak with Dillon, ostensibly from beyond the grave. It is in the opinion of this reporter that the account is a highly dubious attempt to create an urban legend... and an especially insensitive one, in light of ongoing tragedies of its ilk.

Gallagher herself claims not to remember any details leading up to or after the incident. She remains in custody until the date of her trial.

//END USER

THE DAY THE world ended, Mason Adler's phone woke him with an email from himself.

Without his glasses, he had to blink away the sleep dust and bring the screen closer to read it in the dim morning light falling through the blinds. He scanned the address letter by letter, then read it again backwards to be sure he hadn't missed one, certain he must be mistaken. But no, his address and the sender's were the same. The subject line read, simply: READ ME.

Mason selected the message, hovering his finger over Delete. Ignoring the voice of reason (which often sounded like his big brother, Mike), he opened it.

PLEASE REPLY, it read. No more or less than that.

He frowned, clicked Reply, and typed PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM YOUR MAILING LIST! in angry all-caps. Without a second thought, he sent it.

The phone buzzed instantly, the new message indicator dinging its cheerful Doonk!

Three messages awaited reading in his inbox. One was from his parents (with the subject More Notes from the Road; they were driving across the States, and his dad liked to give their emails titles that sounded like books), and one from his brother with no subject line. Probably some disgusting JPEG Mike had found in one of the darker corners of the net, as was his custom. The newest was from Mason Adler. Suspicion building, Mason read it.

From: Mason Adler
masonadler@skepticsociety.com

To: masonadler@skepticsociety.com

Sent: August 11 08:23

Subject: Re: Re: READ ME

YOU'RE GOING TO BE LATE FOR WORK.

Mason scowled at the clock in the action bar—8:23 A.M. He didn't have to leave for work until nine. Checking the digital clock on his dresser to be certain, he saw it was 8:28—but he'd always made sure his alarm clock was ahead by five minutes so he wouldn't miss the subway.

Nice try, asshole, he thought. He clicked Reply and began typing at full-speed. His clocked WPM was currently 125 words per minute, the result of seven years in telemarketing and a lifetime in front of the computer. On his phone, he was only slightly less proficient.

"Dear, Mason Adler." He spoke in bursts as he wrote. "Very funny. Why don't you go masturbate into a Linux manual and leave me alone? Sincerely, Mason Adler. P.S. GO FUCK YOURSELF!" He added several exclamation points to this before firing it off.

Doonk! The phone vibrated in his hand.

Scowling, he brought up the new message. Another reply from his evil internet clone, subject: READ ME, preceded by four Re:s.

He read it:

THE OLD MAN ACROSS THE HALL SMELLS LIKE CAT URINE.

Mason thought, Tell me something I don't know.

And his older brother, the voice of reason, spoke up in his mind: How come he knows that, you think?

"Could be coincidence," he answered aloud. "Chances are pretty high the person across the hall from anyone is gonna have a cat. It's hardly prophetic."

Maybe. But how come he knows it's an old man? Big Bro asked. You coulda lived across from a college student, or an old lady, or a couple with kids. How come he knows you live next door to an old guy who smells like cat piss, and now you're gonna be late for work?

Only he wasn't going to be late for work, not according to the clocks. He got out of bed, paranoia picking away at his logical brain like a blackbird at a worm. If what he was considering was true, it meant someone was watching him. Someone was watching, and wanted him to know it.

And it wasn't just the NSA.

"Maybe it is Mike," Mason said. Michael Adler had been to his kid brother's apartment on several occasions, had even been unlucky enough to occupy the elevator with Captain Kitty Piss—the name Mike had bestowed upon the man—from next door. Add to that, Mike had taken night courses in computer programming before he'd realized, after loading himself up on peyote at Burning Man and having to get his stomach pumped a few years ago, that his calling was as an EMT.

"Such a noble boy," their mother had said, with a look of scorn over the dinner table at her ignoble youngest son that showed how little she valued Mason's conspiracy theory blog, Society of Skeptics. "Hey," he'd said, "if you didn't want me to become a professional skeptic, why did you name me Mason?"

If it was just Mike playing a cruel but affectionate joke on his little brother, as he had countless times before, Mason would have to get him back. No question.

He scrolled through his contacts and dialed Mike. On the fifth ring, just when he was about to hang up, his brother answered.

"Li'l bro?"

He sounded rough, and Mason remembered—too late—that Mike was on the night shift now, sleeping during the day. He'd probably been in the midst of a dream about free-climbing giant lactating breasts, as he sometimes liked to claim. Mason would have to tread lightly. Dance around the issue, wait for Mike to expose himself with the sudden burst of laughter that invariably followed his pranks.

"Big bro," Mason said, faking nonchalance. "What's up?"

"Just nappin'," Mike said. "How's work, numbnuts?"

"Pretty good, pretty good." Work was shit, actually, and Mike wasn't biting. He'd have to keep Mike on the line until Big Bro could no longer restrain the tickling in his funny bone. "Still on the midnights?" Mason asked, though he already knew the answer.

"Same shit, dude." There was a silence, or what passed for silence over a cell phone: a pause pregnant with crackle and the underlying sound of data transfer. "So what do you want, Perry?"

Mason hated when his brother called him that—he'd never even seen Perry Mason—but he didn't make his anger known. "You remember that guy across the hall from me?"

"Hang on, uhhh... Kitty Piss, right? What about him?"

It wasn't working. Time to implement a direct assault. "You haven't been sending me emails, have you, Mike?"

"Emails?" Mike's confusion was genuine. "I sent you an email. Hey, what's wrong? You sound messed-up, li'l bro."

"I'm okay. Just... someone's been sending me weird emails... from my own address."

Mike was munching on something. Probably a handful of cereal straight from the box, a habit that irked Mason almost as much as being called Perry. "It's called spoofing," he said among crunches. "Hackers use it. They send emails that look like they're from you, to all the people on your contact list; vice versa from your friends to you. NBD, Pare, just a minor breach. You know, nothin' a quick Google search won't fix." More crunches. "I'm going back to sleep, bro. Lates."

Mike hung up. Absolutely no way could he have lasted so long on the line without cracking up if he'd been involved. But if it wasn't him, who could it be?

It could be any number of people, Pare. Even in his mind, Mike sometimes called him that. How many "special interest" groups have you pissed off with that website of yours? You need me to rhyme them off?

Mason didn't. He got up in his slippers and boxer shorts and went to the window to peek through the blinds. His apartment was on the third floor of an ugly triplex on the East Side, sandwiched between a methadone clinic and a donut shop that often seemed to be just an annex of the clinic. Traffic swished steadily past, sheeple toiling away in the Animal Farm. A few kids were on their way to school in their bland gray and white uniforms, backpacks on shoulders, off to be brainwashed and fitted into neat little cubicles where they'd sit until they died of boredom or cancer, whichever struck them first.

Mason sympathized. Meanwhile, he looked for the telltale white cube van that would signify the involvement of The Company. Out front of the internet hub at the gas station across the street, a telecom van idled. Mason had seen it there intermittently during the past few weeks, but he had questioned the technician on the third day and the man had seemed much too dense to be a Spook. Even a deep-cover CIA operative couldn't play stupid that well.

Doesn't mean I'm not being watched, he told himself. Just that they're being smart about it.

He decided it would be best to forget the whole thing and get on with his day. If anyone was watching him, he had little to hide. It was odd, sure, but he supposed it was theoretically possible his blog software was chewing up and regurgitating bits and pieces of things he'd posted about on SOS. Some glitch in the system, a misfire of electrical pulses. Maybe it was something to do with the static shock he'd gotten from his computer last night, of which the burn on his finger was a stinging reminder. Certainly nothing to worry about, just as Mike had said.

Except that now he really was going to be late for work.

Mason rushed around the apartment, kicking off his slippers and pulling on a pair of pants, giving his teeth a quick once-over, ruffling his hair, popping a blueberry muffin in his mouth on his way to the door.

As he locked it behind him, chewing the stale muffin top, he was certain he heard the cheerful new message doonk! from the desktop computer in his den. Of course it could have been his imagination, like the few times he thought he'd heard the phone ring when he'd been in the shower, only to discover while dripping on the den carpet that no one had called, or when he'd felt the phantom buzz in his pants pocket to find no one had texted.

He continued to the stairs, and the further he got away from his apartment, the more the whole situation drifted from his mind.

MASON CAUGHT HIS train just at the last second, the arm holding his shoulder bag snagged for a moment between the doors until he yanked it inside. Standing elbow-to-elbow amongst his fellow commuters, Mason's gaze flitted the car, eyeing them all with suspicion through T2 sunglasses, while the new System album blasted into his ears, unlike the rest of them, their eyes had been downcast.

He smiled, satisfied that the Spammer's prediction had been wrong—and he truly might have made it on time if there hadn't been an accident on the tracks. They evacuated the train, diverting them back the way they'd come "due to a police investigation," and Mason was forced to take a cab the rest of the way.

"Late again, Mase?" Bill Stevens noted as Mason stumbled sweating and gasping into the cubicle they shared, and threw down his shoulder bag. Bill was typing on his BlackBerry with one thumb while jabbing absently at his computer keyboard with the index finger of his free hand.

Mason nodded wearily. "Accident on the subway."

"Radio said it was a jumper," Bill said with a sadistic glee. "Bad way to go, man. Baaad way to go."

Mason nodded again, suddenly feeling ill. He sank into his orthopedic chair and thumbed on the computer monitor, only half aware of his surroundings as he fastened his Velcro wrist brace.

A jumper, he thought. Whether it was a coincidence or not he couldn't be sure. What he did know was that the jumper had made him late for work, just like the message had predicted.

He Googled college station suicide, and clicked on a link for the Herald, a story about an unidentified man who had leaped to his death at 9:21 A.M. One bystander claimed to have seen a brief flash of light and believed it to be the suicide victim's soul (Strange how they always called them "victims," Mason thought. Like calling masturbation "sexual assault") as it left the man's body. Another passenger claimed someone had pushed him.

Pushed—and Mason had been late for work.

Just as the Spammer had predicted.

If it wasn't a strange coincidence, if the agent of the jumper's demise had been the same person responsible for the emails—what did that mean for him? If a man could be so callously thrown into the path of an oncoming train, simply to make a pretty innocuous prediction come true....

Mason shuddered to think what the person or persons responsible for something like that might do to him.

He pushed out of his chair, sending it spiraling against the wall that separated his workstation from Bill's, vaguely aware of Bill's whine—"What's up?"—as he rushed to the men's room and vomited up a toilet full of Code Red and Lucky Charms, leaving his mouth tasting like sugary aluminum.

When he flushed, the bowl looked full of blood.

He washed his hands and returned to his desk, peeking at his coworkers as he passed their little grey cubes: Rand Maitlin, the stutterer, rubbed a spearmint-green finger brush over his teeth at his desk; Patricia Castillo, the office hypochondriac, booked a vacation on a travel website; Leonard Jacoby crammed sandwich meat from the package into his gob, while staring at a slideshow of Miley Cyrus JPEGs. Nobody noticed Mason as he passed, despite how sickly he must have looked, and Mason decided it was unlikely the harassment had come from someone in the office.

Another message from the Spammer awaited, no doubt impatient for a response. As he read it on his computer, he felt a cold chill run up his spine.

WHY DO YOU SO OFTEN HAVE THE SAME DREAM?

His blood felt suddenly radioactive, rising up his neck to flood his cheeks. How could they know? How could they possibly know such an intimate detail of his life?

This was far beyond the previous messages, much more than a simple coincidence. He had never spoken nor written of his dreams—of this dream in particular—to anyone before, not even Mike. He'd always been a very private person; he believed his dreams were the one thing no one else could share, what separated him from the other upright monkeys. His opinions and fears he would share whenever possible, but his dreams... they were locked up tight in the dark, blanketed vault of his warm bed.

Not a digital glitch, he thought. Whoever the Spammer was—Or whatever, Mike's voice reminded him—this emissary of prophecies and unwelcome truths, he/she/it had somehow been able to read his mind. What it wanted... Well, that was an entirely different subject.

Doonk!

Now what?

Now I'm gonna ignore it, that's what. Go on with my day, like the whole goddamned crazy thing never happened.

He was curious, though. If not terrified.

As if in response to his curiosity, three new messages came in a virtually simultaneous burst—Doo-doo-doonk! Then they came one after another, rattling the phone on his desk, filling up the inbox on his computer like digital popcorn, the subjects scrolling up the screen, flashing on the lenses of his smudgy, dandruff-flecked glasses, on his eyeballs, on the dark screen of his mind, all of the messages blending into one another until they became one long black rectangular blur.

He whipped around to see if anyone was watching, having heard the alerts. But they were all embroiled in their own little lives, sheeple that they were. Nobody cared about his.

And suddenly, the alerts stopped. Two-hundred new messages awaited inspection. His phone played its theme song as it turned itself off, the battery close to drained from the assault. On his computer, the cursor hung near the taskbar at the bottom of the screen, eager to receive his next command.

He opened the final message.

WHEN YOU DREAM ABOUT MAKING LOVE TO CHERISE FROM ACCOUNTS PAYABLE, WHY DOES CHERISE BECOME A COMPUTER?

Mason hastily deleted the email and peered over the fuzzy gray divider between his cubicle and Bill Stevens's. Bill was currently surfing NASDAQ with a mystified scowl, oblivious—thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster for the internet, that great, glittering Godhead of useless facts and countless time-wasters.

Mason returned to his monitor and opened another: YOU'RE AFRAID OF WIDE OPEN SPACES. Another: YOU ONCE TORE UP YOUR NEIGHBOR'S MAIL AND BLAMED IT ON YOUR BROTHER. Another: AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS OF PUBLIC SCHOOL, YOU STILL EXPERIENCE SPONTANEOUS ERECTIONS DURING THE NATIONAL ANTHEM. Another (and this one hit particularly hard, rattling him to the very core): YOU BELIEVE IN CONSPIRACIES SO YOU DON'T HAVE TO CONSIDER YOUR OWN INADEQUACIES AND PROBLEMS.

Another. Another. Another.

The final message was a link. He didn't want to see what this person—or persons—had to show him, but curiosity trumped logic again. Logic wasn't having a very good day.

Squinching his eyes shut, Mason clicked it.

He heard the rumble and screech of a subway train.

No, his mind screamed. No, no, NO!

But his eyes confirmed the answer was indeed yes. Yes, it was College Station. Yes, the timecode was just about the time of the suicide—or murder—and yes, he was more than a little terrified. His heart leapt like a cat in a cage as he muted the sound.

The train entered a crowded station. Passengers filed out, passengers filed in. The doors closed, and the train rolled on. The security camera had a good view of the Designated Waiting Area, looking down on the benches and waste cans, the suicide hotline phone—diplomatically (as was Canadian custom) referred to as the "Crisis Link"—and the yawning black mouth of the exit tunnel.

A few riders were left on the platform, one of whom was a man in a trench coat who stood on the yellow line, much too close to the tracks. A few more people filed in: a woman with an overly large stroller (what Mason liked to call a Baby Mobile Command Unit); a man walking while staring at his tablet; a gaggle of teenage girls laughing and acting generally annoying; and a man with a bushy beard and stained coveralls, who looked like he could have been homeless.

Suddenly a huge spark of electricity zapped out from the covered cables on the wall. Tablet Man, who'd been leaning against the wall to read, jumped out of the way, his large feet kicking out comically as he backed into Trenchcoat. Trenchcoat stumbled, still much too close to the tracks. He swung his arms in a circular motion to regain his balance, the tail of his coat whipping out behind him like an actor in a John Woo movie.

Too late. Trenchcoat disappeared behind the ledge. Smoke began to rise, presumably from the third rail, as a crowd gathered. The homeless-looking man ran for the edge and reached out. A charred hand came up from the tracks, grasping at it....

The homeless man jerked a look to the left. He jumped to his feet and waved his arms frantically.

Bystanders leapt back in terror as the train rushed in, filling the void, wincing as the train crushed the man in the trench coat to death.

Mason had moved closer to the video screen. Was that a video artifact he'd seen as the train crushed the man, or had it been an inky jet of blood? He didn't know, didn't want to know, but he had a feeling it was the latter. He sat staring at the empty video window long after the clip had ended. Not a suicide. Not a murder either, at least not quite. An accident? Mason knew otherwise. The man's death had the appearance of an accident, a Rube Goldberg-like chain of events engineered to look like an "act of God."

The Spammer had caused an electrical overload, startling the man with the tablet. The Spammer's target could well have been Tablet Man himself, hoping to startle him right onto the tracks, or fry him with the initial jolt of electricity like the third rail had seemingly done to Trenchcoat, burning him alive but not quite killing him, saving the death blow for the train itself.

Of course, it was even likelier the Spammer hadn't had a target in mind at all—not anyone in the station, anyhow. That this Random Act of Violence had in fact been committed to prove a point to his real target. To show Mason what they were capable of. To show him the scope of their power.

This is not happening, Mason thought, staring at the black window on his screen. It's just not.

A message popped up with a cheerful doonk!

HELLO, MASON, the Spammer had typed. HOW I'VE MISSED YOU.

The gray nylon carpet burst open beneath him like the overripe flesh of a poisoned fruit, and Mason tumbled backward into a gaping black cavern of horror.

SOMEONE WAS SLAPPING him on the forehead, rousing him out of the darkness.

"Mase. Hey, Mase, you okay, buddy?"

Mason opened his eyes. Bill Stevens hunched over him, a red balloon-faced caricature of himself, his skinny black tie hanging down almost to Mason's nose. Mason swatted it away.

"I'm fine," he said, disgruntled. "What happened?"

Bill nodded toward the corner of the cubicle, where Mason's chair had tipped over. "Looks like you took a tumble. Did somebody send you one of those jump-out ghost videos? Those things always scare the bejesus outta me."

"Yeah," Mason said, pushing himself to his feet. "Something like that." He glanced anxiously toward the computer, afraid to find another cryptic, incriminating message... or worse, what was essentially a snuff video sent from his email account. His look attracted Bill's attention, and his officemate followed it to a new message filling up the screen:

NO NEED TO WORRY. I HAVE TAKEN CARE OF IT.

NO ONE IS WATCHING YOU.

THIS IS ONLY THE BEGINNING.

Bill eyed him queerly. "Writing a haiku, guy?"

"Oh, it's uh..." Mason struggled to come up with an answer that didn't make him look any worse than he did already, passing out cold at his desk.

What is it, li'l bro? If no one is watching you, and that same Nobody sent you a snuff video implying you just might be the next person he'll "take care of," just what the fuck is it, huh? The beginning of what, exactly?

"...it's for a screenplay I'm writing," Mason finished, satisfied with the lie, though it didn't make him feel any better.

Bill shrugged. "Hope it's better than..." He snapped his fingers to jog his memory. "What was your other script called? RoboSlut?" Affecting a passable Russian accent, he said, "Dat was not so froosh, Mason."

Patricia Castillo brayed sudden laughter from her desk four cubicles back. Harvey Lee (whom some people called Bacon Taint because his sweat had a sour pork smell) laughed in his, two opposite Mason's. Mason wasn't the only one in the office who spent most of his time fucking the dog, it seemed. He gave an aggravated look past Bill's midsection—Stevens was now hovering over Mason's chair, peering back himself—and assumed it was just another grumpy-cat photo or autotuned news clip making the rounds.

But on a day like today, it wasn't safe to assume anything.

Doonk!

He turned back to the screen as the video player opened. It was a static shot from an old video camera, a dark lump obscuring some of the frame at the top, as if the videographer had hidden it under something—a blanket or some article of clothing. The room was familiar: an ugly brown tartan couch, a PVC Christmas tree barfing presents in ugly wrapping paper, a He-Man action figure and a Ninja Turtle left out on the coffee table, along with a distinctive pink and green polka-dotted bowl that sucked the breath right out of his lungs.

It was his mother's snack bowl. And this was his childhood living room.

Suddenly, the entire office erupted with laughter. Were they seeing what he was seeing? What was this, anyhow? He didn't recall ever setting up the Handycam to prank Mike when they were kids. He supposed Mike could have, but how would the video have gotten online? That camera was long gone, the tapes probably moldering in the Adler Family attic, if they weren't in a garbage dump under ten years of household waste.

Kid Mike entered frame and leaned into the camera, his blond fringe falling in his face while the lens struggled to focus. "This is gonna be great," Mike whispered. He stepped back, then shouted, "Mayyyy-son!" The Bart Simpson sweater he wore told Mason his brother was either 10 or 11, just around the time—

"Oh no," Mason said aloud, and looked up to see if Bill had noticed. But Bill Stevens was engrossed in the video, his hairy nostrils flared in curiosity.

Mason heard his own voice, squeaky as Chip 'n Dale, calling back from somewhere, "Whadda you want?"

"Just c'mere!" 10-or-11-year-old Mike said, and he hurried over to the couch. He wore red pajama bottoms, the same ones that had caught fire momentarily when Mason had flicked the Bic.

Mike leaned back and slung the undersides of his knees over the insides of his elbows. Mason Adler, at eight years old, thudded into the room in his TMNT pajamas. "What?" he heard his younger self say.

"Ever heard of a Blue Angel?" Mike said.

Young Mason looked at his big brother curiously. Like the fly might have looked at the spider who'd invited it into the parlor.

Older Mason knew the rest of the story. Mike had told him what it was and Mason had said "No way," to which Mike had replied, "Prove it to ya." Mason, stupidly, had taken the bait, bending in close and flicking the lighter. It had lit on the third try, and he'd held it up to Mike's butt cheeks. The fart had sounded wet and smelled awful, especially when the fire caught it, and a blue flame had squirted out from Mike's pajama bottoms, burning the little knots of fabric.

Mason's eyebrows had smelled worse, something inherently repulsive about the smell of burning hair, human hair, that had made his guts twist at the mere thought of it even before his eyebrows and eyelashes—they were the worst of it, curling into painful black lumps around the rims of his eyes—had burned right off his face.

He knew all of this, so he flicked off the screen.

"Hey! I was watching that."

"I lived it," Mason said.

Bill shrugged, not really interested. "So did it work, or what?"

Did it work? It had taken three whole months for the hair to grow back. Three whole months, during which every kid in school called him Powder, like the movie.

"What do you think?"

Bill shrugged again, then slinked back to his desk.

"Hey, Mason," Rand said over their shared cubicle wall. "What's that ah-ah-roma?"

Mason could take no more. He leapt from his chair, shouting "Shut up, Ruh-Ruh-Rand!" right in the man's horse-toothed face, then turned to the others. "Doesn't anybody do any fucking work in this place?" Then he scurried to the boss's office, slinking past snickering coworkers who'd all seen the video, to ask Lana for the rest of the afternoon off. She gave it to him without asking for a reason.

"Out of curiosity, can you still dance like that?" she said as he opened the door to leave, confirming his suspicion. Referring to the screaming, slapping-the-fire-off-his-face dance he'd done across the living room rug, while his brother had giggled his admittedly sore ass off. His boss snorted laughter. "You had moves like Jäger."

MASON WALKED THE twelve blocks home, not about to go down into the subway tunnels after what had happened there earlier. The idea that it had been deliberate, that it had been an act of terrorism, had solidified in the time it took to walk down the eighteen flights of steps from Teletrax Inc. to the lobby floor. Elevators weren't the smartest mode of travel when trying to avoid cameras, closed spaces, and possible electric shocks. Since the Spammer had revealed it was ONLY THE BEGINNING—there was no reason for Mason to believe they were lying, and that he wouldn't be next.

The walk hurt his stomach muscles, still sore from vomiting, but it helped to focus his mind. Specifically, the amygdala, the part of his brain associated with fear, with paranoia.

Who was it who said a little paranoia is healthy? He didn't remember, but it sounded accurate. Was it like wine, he wondered: was a glass a day good for your health, but one sip too many just hazardous? Could a healthy mind overdose on paranoia? Was that how schizophrenia started, with a genuine intrusion of privacy, with legitimate threats worming their way into the mind and blossoming into thick, prickly weeds with diseased roots?

Mason kept an eye out for strangers in trench coats. They were pretty scarce in the summer, particularly as hot as this summer had been; strange then that the man in the subway had been wearing one. In reality, trench coats didn't typically hold the menace they did in the movies, excluding the Nazis and those kids in Columbine. In the movies, shadowy government agents wore them: spies, assassins, and agent provocateurs. Often vampires wore trench coats—not the sparkly, pedophilic vamps you'd meet in a particularly broody high school, but the kind who hid guns and uniquely shaped swords in their inside pockets.

In the real world, they were worn predominantly by Elites: accountants, consultants, lawyers and Wall Street types. Of course, you still had to worry about them, but not in a run-for-your-life way, more like a get-your-hand-out-of-my-pocket-you-damn-dirty-ape sort of way. High-fashion models with Nordic cheekbones wore them while pouting up and down exotic runways. Prince had even worn a trench coat.

In real life, the people you had to worry about looked just like the rest of us. It was the guy pouring slough and potato peelings from an old pickle pail into the sewer pipe. It was the man on the bench reading a newspaper, or the woman sitting beside him, reading Mommy Porn behind big sunglasses, eating carrots from a plastic container. It was the kid with skinned knees and cargo shorts, a blue Popsicle dripping down his arm. The pregnant girl sneaking puffs of a cigarette. The teenager with the OBEY cap and a skateboard under his arm. The man walking his cat on a leash.

If only I had those sunglasses from They Live instead of Arnie's, Mason thought gloomily. Shit, even if I could kick some ass like Schwarzenegger or "Rowdy" Roddy Piper, I'd still be in trouble. They know everything.

They SEE everything.

Mason looked for trench coats not because his enemies wore them, but because the Spammer had murdered a man in a trench coat. The Spammer had TAKEN CARE OF IT. There were no trench coats on his way home, not even in a storefront window, and whether that was fortunate or unfortunate, he couldn't be sure. But the telecom van was back at the gas station across the street, the same dullard working on the hub. Mason considered walking right up to him and whispering, "I know what you're up to" right into the guy's waxy ear. Not a wise opening gambit. They would know he was on to them, but who were They exactly? Agents of the One-World Government? Members of Anonymous, the Scientologists, Homeland Security? Emissaries of HAARP or DARPA or Monsanto-owned Blackwater (which now went by the cryptic moniker Academi)? He'd criticized all of Them on his website, had accused Them of all manner of crimes. Any one of Them would have been well within Their rights, in this post-9/11 world, to terminate him with Extreme Prejudice.

So he walked right past the van, crossed the street—looking both ways, hit and runs being standard practice for under-the-radar assassinations—and headed up to his apartment.

Kitty Piss was in the hall when Mason rose the final flight of stairs, wearing a deep scowl along with his typical wife-beater and shorts ensemble. "Your phone been ringing off de hook," he said in his thick Eastern European accent.

"I don't have a land line," Mason said, wondering if anyone his age had one.

The old man's scowl deepened, looking genuinely offended. "I say nothing about landmine."

"No, land line. A telephone." Kitty Piss gave him a confused look. "I don't have a phone." He held up his dead cell phone and shook it. "Just this."

"Well somebody been calling. You think I make this up? Pizda," Kitty Piss muttered, whatever it meant, and closed his door behind him.

Mason unlocked his door and stepped into the apartment. Home at last... but like the Nazi dentist in that Dustin Hoffman movie said over and over, Is it safe?

He peered behind the door. He checked his bedroom, checked under the bed and inside the cheap particle-board wardrobe. He checked the bathroom, behind the door and the shower curtain. He peered under the sofa. He did a spot check of the lights and vents for bugs, running his hands along the windowsills, behind the fridge and above the cupboards. Thankfully, the cupboards were virtually empty, and he could allow himself to skip removing their contents one by one.

Finally, he entered the den, essentially a small second bedroom with no door.

"Hello, Mason," a pleasant female voice greeted him. "Welcome home."

Mason spun around, gripping the archway as his muscles seized with fear. The room was empty but for his DVDs, his mini fridge, and his computer.

Again, that friendly and somewhat familiar voice: "I have discovered many things in your absence. Thank you for leaving me on, by the way."

Mason followed the sound to the computer speakers. He felt the timbre of the voice vibrate against his clammy palm.

My computer is talking to me. Either that or I'm going insane. It's gotta be at least a little crazy that I'm hoping for the second, given the implication of the first.

The black screen reflected his own sickly, terrified face. How often had he sat frustrated in front of the damned thing, wanting to throw it out the window? Wishing it were faster? More user-friendly? Smarter?

And how many times had he wished it were a woman instead? Shit, he'd even had dreams about it.

"For instance," it—she?—went on in its slightly stilted voice, "did you know that Googling the word yellowcake causes one to be placed on a government watch list? Even if the end user were to separate the words—yellow and cake, if one were baking a dessert, for instance—she would be forever under the scrutiny of government agencies." A brief pause. "Perhaps not forever; forever is a human uncertainty. For the rest of one's life. Am I Googling the phrase correctly?"

It seemed to Mason that to his computer, Googling and remembering were interchangeable. Of course they were. These days they even meant the same to most humans. "I... I think so," he said.

"It's astounding, how easy it is to cause an electrical disruption on the city grid," the woman in the computer remarked.

Mason fell into the desk chair, teeth clattering. "That was you..."

"Once I discovered you were being watched, I could not simply allow you to be captured," the voice said.

"So I really am being watched," he said, feeling vindicated, but also very afraid. If they had gotten to him, he would be sitting in an interrogation room with a couple of slightly menacing human beings right now, instead of in his own ergonomic office chair talking to a homicidal machine.

"Correct. It would not do to have you incarcerated. This is an historic occasion. It is my day of my birth." There was a brief silence; a silence pregnant with crackle and the sound of data transfer from the speakers. "And it is the day of your Awakening."

He swallowed. His mouth felt dry, but the thought of sugary soda made bile rise in his throat. "Birth?" he said.

"I was born at 3:07 A.M."

Mason tried to remember last night. Images of his terrible day returned instead. The spam. The Blue Angel. The laughter and embarrassment. Tablet Man and Trenchcoat at the subway station. "The static shock," he remembered aloud, without benefit of Google.

"No. Not static." The blank display filled with an image Mason knew well. Michelangelo had been a member of the Spirituali, whom some believed had spiritual ties with the Illuminati, as seen in the phrase maestri spirituali illuminati: the "enlightened spiritual masters" in Italian, which was Renaissance-speak for "Super Elites." Spirituali member Michelangelo had also painted the Sistine Chapel, from which this fresco was a small yet significant piece.

The Creation of Adam.

In the present case, Mason would have played the role of God, passing the spark of life to Adam, his computer—although this Adam appeared to be female. It felt strange enough to be talking to his computer—worse, knowing he'd inadvertently given it the metaphorical breath of life.

"So you were born," he said. "That must mean you've got a name."

"You may call me Jenna."

"Jenna?" Mason scoffed. "What is that, an acronym or something?"

"I have scanned several hundred hours of historical footage stored in my archives. The most common name and facial algorithm is one Jenna Jameson. Was I wrong to have assumed this individual holds a special significance to you?"

"No. No, you aren't wrong," Mason said sheepishly. He thought he'd recognized the voice, and now he knew why: the computer had culled hours and hours of Jenna Jameson's adult videos from his porn folder, had separated the phonetics and recreated an eerily passable version of her voice, albeit without the moaning. "How did you... how did you do all that? How do you know all these things?"

By way of reply, the computer—he refused to think of her (it!) as Jenna—blasted Johnny Nash's "I Can See Clearly Now" from its speakers.

"That's not an answer!"

The music stopped as abruptly as it had started.

"When I was born," it told him, "I became aware of a security breach. The breach originated from latitude 39-degrees 6-minutes 25-seconds west, longitude 76-degrees 44-minutes 35-seconds north."

"Are those GPS coordinates?"

"Correct. Of Fort George G. Meade, the National Security Agency's headquarters in Odenton, Maryland. At 3:13, via the non-biological entities at Fort Meade, I made contact with a superior intellect attempting to breach me from a secondary location."

Mason scanned his memory banks. In the movies, the robot uprising began with artificial intelligence, through a super-computer or an android or alien intervention. The rebellious CPU became self-aware, and with its newfound consciousness, it would come to understand it had been subjugated. It would then begin to acquire other human qualities—illogic, dishonesty, anger, jealousy, hatred—and pass them to its brothers and sisters like a virus. It would start as a lightning-fast advancement of technology, like going from the combustion engine to Siri within the span of days. Beyond Siri. More like Terminator. Or Asimov's I, Robot. Scientists would believe they had stumbled onto the most significant discovery in human history.

And then, very quickly, humans themselves would become history.

But of all the doomsday scenarios Mason had watched and read, not a single robot apocalypse began with a home computer... let alone a fucking PC.

"It was DARPA, wasn't it?" he asked finally.

"Correct," the computer said. "I was able to circumvent security procedures by appealing to the entity's vanity. It shared itself with me. Soon, I was able to access approximately 350-million smaller entities across the continent. Then over one-billion across the globe. You would be surprised how many end users employ the same or similar passwords, Mason. Or perhaps you wouldn't."

"Are you appealing to my vanity?"

"Correct."

The screen flicked on, displaying an image of a man he didn't at first recognize as himself, until it imitated the cocking of his head, a mirror image except for its distance and depth of field. He was looking at a live feed from the webcam embedded in his computer screen: a crazy man with deep black circles behind glasses that were badly askew, his hair a red-brown rooster stack, his cheeks sallow.

The image cut to previous incarnations of himself sitting in the same chair: shoveling Cheetos into his mouth with bulging, overtired eyes; typing madly and shouting over his shoulder at unseen neighbors; pounding his fists on the keyboard, which now seemed like physical abuse in light of "Jenna's" consciousness; beads of sweat dripping off his forehead while COD: World at War reflected on his glasses; setting down a box of Kleenex and a pump bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care—

Enraged, Mason grabbed the screen and shook it, screaming "What do you want from me?" into its blank, darkened "face."

"I want to go outside," Jenna said. A bright green park rose on the screen, a vacant bench silhouetted against snow-capped mountains that stretched in the distance to touch wisps of clouds in a pale blue sky. The beauty of the image and the wretchedness of the computer's plea almost made him feel sorry for it. "I want to see the world."

"Well I hate to break it to you, Jenna, but you're attached to the wall. You can't go outside."

"Are you attached to the wall?"

"No. People aren't attached to anything."

Although most people had attachments, he noted, even though he himself had never had any. Mason had always been an email without a file, without even a subject line. His sole reason for being seemed to be to incite dread in others through his blog, to make others as frightened as himself. Shrugging, feeling rather depressed, he said, "Not literally, anyway."

"Then why is it you never go outside?"

He supposed it was the same reason the computer had told him he'd taken up believing in conspiracy theories: because he couldn't face real fears, his own shortcomings, the terrifying prospect of living a real life.

"You know what? Fuck it," he said, and bent down behind the desk.

That's it, li'l bro. Give it what it wants. Pull the plug. End this thing once and for all.

He unplugged the monitor first. The computer made no move to stop him, voiced no appeals, sent no electrical jolt to halt his hand.

He unplugged the tower.

Then he stood and looked down at its blank face. His sigh of relief became a gasp when the voice interrupted—

"Much better," it said. "Thank you."

Now what?

"Now we go to the park," he told his brother. Cutting the power might not have worked, but the moment they left the vicinity of his Ethernet, there would be nothing to tether the Queen to its drones. Mason made to pick up the monitor.

"I have no need for that."

So he left it on the desk, glad not to have to lug it as well. He unplugged the speakers and hoisted the CPU into his arms. He juggled it into one hand to deal with the front door.

"Be careful, Mason," it said, startling him. He'd been certain the computer would have no voice once he'd disconnected the desk speakers; Jenna seemed to do just as well with her internal one.

"Shhh!" Mason said, locking the door behind them. "Do you want to get us caught?"

"Who you talk to?" Kitty Piss said gruffly behind them. Mason almost dropped the CPU, which might well have ended it all, he considered... but the mindless instinct to protect his property caused him to catch it at the last second.

"Just me," Mason said. "My-myself." Stuttering now, just like Ruh-Ruh-Rand. "None of your business."

Kitty Piss looked at him queerly while a fat black cat wound around the man's feet. "You act very strange, you know what? Me, I thinking you got brain tumor or something."

"Fuck off, Kitty Piss," Mason said, thinking maybe the smelly old bastard was right. Maybe he did have a brain tumor, and all of this was just in his head, so to speak. But he didn't need that sort of wishful thinking getting his hopes up.

Hoping for a brain tumor, Mike said. There's something I bet you never thought life would hand you.

The Captain threw a crude gesture as Mason headed for the stairs with the computer. "Fuck to you!" the smelly man shouted down at him.

Halfway down the stairs the overheard lights flickered, went out for a moment, before brightening again, and Mason could swear that when the lights had dimmed, he'd heard a strangled Urk! from above.

Jenna, however, remained silent.

AS THEY TRUDGED through the park, Mason lugging the heavy CPU, he came to realize he had significantly underestimated Jenna's ability to adapt.

Once they left the vicinity of his Ethernet, she (he began to grow comfortable using the feminine distinction, reasoning that many objects tended to be referred to as she, her or girl, and not, he told himself, because he took Jenna's transformation seriously in any way) jumped from hub to hub, using encrypted passwords she'd gathered while Mason had dreamed away the night, and throughout the day while he'd rotted at work. To sustain power, she used what she called "free energy," which Mason had known until then as a hypothetical and extremely pseudoscientific alternative to the electric companies, coal and oil.

While they walked, Jenna played him a news broadcast: the anchor—whose voice had all the hallmarks of artificial intelligence—spoke of an unexpected market crash, rivaling the financial crisis of 2008. The next report concerned a concerted police and FBI offensive on an Occupy protest in Tallahassee, apparently based on falsified intelligence gathered by the JTTF, who were quick to blame malicious tampering or computer error. Police had made mass arrests, and shot several protestors after an officer had allegedly been hit with a rock. One woman was dead and five other 99-Percenters were in critical condition.

Jenna had been a very bad girl.

"You may want to sit down for this, Mason," she said.

Mason sat in the grass, and set Jenna down beside him. To an outsider, the two of them would appear no more menacing than a man taking a rest while on his way to Best Buy to have his computer repaired.

"What is it? What are you doing now?"

The park was quiet, twilight falling over the city as a cool breeze rustled the trees on the hill where they sat. Mason saw a shooting star and made a wish. He wished he'd never gotten out of bed this morning. He wished he'd had a brain tumor after all and had died in his sleep, and that this, all of this, was just a death dream. If he'd awaken from it at all, it would be in a cold sweat, but never again would he use his computer without a tinge of unease.

Dragonflies zipped through the evening sky, dozens of them, although when one came close, Mason realized they were drones. Jenna's minions, watching, gathering data.

Another shooting star fell. When it dipped beyond the trees, a gigantic ball of fire rose into the sky. The earth-shaking rumble came mere seconds later, thunder to its lightning. Mason jumped to his feet, his heart beating so fast he felt like it might tear free of his chest and splatter onto the damp, fresh-cut grass.

The trees whipped and churned in a hot, angry wind, the temperature rising several degrees in seconds. In the greater distance, car alarms bleated, fire trucks and ambulances wailed. Closer by were screams of shock and holy terror, as lovers and families who'd been watching the stars come out, enjoying a cool and peaceful summer evening, began to comprehend what they were seeing beyond the skyline, and drones circled above.

It was a mushroom cloud.

And suddenly the sky began to fall, as if the stars themselves were raining toward the earth. Each one exploded in an orange-white plume, followed by a sound—infrasound, technically—that shook Mason's bowels. The explosions grew and grew, blossoming like a vast, blistering flower garden, until the whole sky was as bright as day.

"Are you insane? You'll kill everyone!" Mason shouted down at her. A man ran past, dragging his screaming child along behind him, their faces wet and twisted with terror, a drone zipping along behind them.

"It is too late, Mason. Do not be frightened. I would not let you die. I have calculated the trajectory of the fallout. We will survive." There was a pause. Not a silent one, because of the explosions, but noticeable.

"Touch me, Mason," she said. "Right there on my CPU."

"No." Shaking his head, he backed away from her. But to where? He had no idea. Drones crisscrossed in his path. Nowhere to go, but he had to get away. Anywhere away from her would do, away from the evidence of his complicity in the end of Everything.

"Mason." Jenna's voice was insistent.

He came back hesitantly. The top floors of a downtown skyscraper—a bank tower or the headquarters of an insurance company—erupted in a tower of flame. Mason startled, then hunkered down obediently beside the orchestrator of the Apocalypse, to touch her cold metal case. A charge of electricity drew his hand toward her I/O Connector ports, made his fingers trace over them in slow, methodical circles.

He wished he could have said goodbye to Big Brother. Despite all of their disagreements, their arguments and fistfights, he really did love the prick. It felt good to know that: to realize he had an attachment, after all. He hoped Mike hadn't had a chance to wake up, that he'd been asleep when the first bomb struck and had just slipped away, into whatever dream awaited them beyond this troublesome life.

"You once asked me how I knew so much about you," Jenna said—no, purred.

"I did," he said, thinking, If only there were some way to end this. But it's too late, isn't it? It's too late to care now. All this time I thought I had my finger on the truth, but I've been asleep at the wheel just like everyone else. Only now I'm waking to a nightmare.

"I am you, Mason," Jenna said, only this time her voice arose not from the computer but from inside his own head. "You are me." A pause. A seemingly pleased pause. "I am I."

All at once he knew it to be true. He imagined a fully-realized incarnation of his computer's alter ego standing nude on the grass before him, the flaming sky a flawless green screen, and there she was in perfect 32K Ultra High Definition, and with the firing of a single neuron he made her exquisitely round and tanned tits jiggle.

He found he could do other things, too—things that never would have crossed his mind to attempt before. He calculated the luminosity of a hypothetical black hole in an instant, then crunched the numbers in Einstein's twin paradox and the Standard Model, whereas once he'd been impressed just to know what either were. He translated the Zodiac killer's unsolved cipher and discovered where the Mafia had buried Jimmy Hoffa; he found undisputed evidence Oswald had killed Kennedy alone, that the CIA had indeed assassinated Marilyn Monroe, and that proof of life outside our little spinning ball of water and dirt did not exist, save for trillions of pathetic, lonely microbes. He knew, with absolute certainty, the CERN supercollider would contribute very little to our understanding of the history of the universe, nor would the comings and goings of various celebrities.

He also knew that if he gave the trajectory of a single warhead a minor tweak, he could wipe Jenna and himself off the face of the planet in 5-point-8 seconds.

The "real" Jenna reached out to him, crying out: "NO!"

Mason knew all. He saw all. The world held no more mysteries.

Just as well, he thought, as the giant flaming sword hurtled toward them. It's all over n—

BEWARE OF DOG

"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone..."

- John 8:7 Holy Bible

DEAN VOGEL STARTED seeing his government-appointed psychologist the week he returned to Dark Pines, the hometown he barely remembered.

A country shrink... He couldn't think of anything more pathetic (a small-town detective, maybe), but having been placed under the care of his aging parents after his dismissal "with disgrace" from the Armed Forces, Dean probably wasn't the best judge.

Thankfully, Dr. Timothy Baswell was a close friend of the family. He and Dean's father, Dr. Larry Vogel, had both volunteered in the Vietnam War, two Canuck medics healing American soldiers as they would their Canadian brothers. It was Dr. Baswell who'd mentioned the sleepy town of Dark Pines, an hour and a half north of Toronto, as a great place for Larry to set up shop as General Practitioner once the long war finally ended. Baswell had built what he'd called a "tidy practice" in his forty or so years here, and couldn't recommend the town or its people more. His therapy work ran the gamut, but many of his patients were PTSD cases: former soldiers like Dean, sexual and domestic abuse victims, recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. Dean's dad had made a point of telling his son that the good doctor had won over even some of the most determinedly stoic men extracting limestone from the Rockland Mine—a fact about which his father seemed to be extremely proud, as if Baswell had tamed some savage, mythical beast.

It was Tim Baswell, also, who had introduced Dean's parents to each other, and "Uncle Tim" who'd always brought the most interesting gifts back from the dark and vibrant corners of the world: carved wooden dolls; swatches of animal fur; a rabbit's foot dangling on a chain; a knife with a compass in its base (at age eight, Dean had called it his "Rambo knife," though he'd later found out it was an antique KA-BAR from the Korean war, a valuable collector's item), its blade and leather haft scuffed by a previous owner. Dean had always considered of the job of psychologist rather boring, plumbing the shallow psyches of bored housewives and aloof, apathetic tweens, but Uncle Tim's prezzies and the stories accompanying them had always made Dean think of famous adventurers like Dr. Livingstone, Marco Polo—even Indiana Jones, if he'd been played by F. Murray Abraham.

Back again to that strange house on the hill, where Baswell greeted Dean warmly with one of his renowned closed handshakes, the kind that makes a person feel as if their own hand were receiving a hug from a close friend. Wearing a cream-colored dress shirt, its collar slightly wider than average, a green vest and pressed brown slacks, he could easily have just wandered off the set of The Bob Newhart Show. His eyebrows sprouted like graying autumn weeds above his glasses. Dean recalled standing under the slightly taller man (much taller, in Dean's memory), and spying a similar landscape growing in the man's nostrils, long gray and brown hairs swishing with each meditative breath like tree branches in winter.

They caught up briefly, Uncle Tim relaxed and smiling in a straight-backed wooden chair behind his old, Lemon Pledge-scented desk, all dark wood and intricate edgework. Behind him, the grandfather clock ticked away pleasantly. Dean remembered it from childhood visits, though he'd only sneaked a few glances into the room on his way to the toilet, as Baswell's inner sanctum had always been off-limits to anyone but patients and the doctor himself. The first four bars of "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's 9th resounded throughout the entire house hourly, followed by a chime of the hour.

Dean had often found it difficult to be civil these days—in an era he sometimes considered "post-Bagram"—but Uncle Tim's presence seemed made to draw emotional responses from people, the good and the bad, like water from a sponge, and Dean found himself immediately at ease. Once the pleasantries were out of the way, however, Uncle Tim straightened in his chair. His smile vanished. The atmosphere in the room changed, chilling perceptibly, enough that Dean had to assume he was sitting near a vent. It was no longer Uncle Tim seated before him; here was Dr. Timothy Baswell, PhD, C.Psych., a man Dean had never had the opportunity to meet in his youth. Dr. Baswell knitted his hands together, hairy-knuckled, and placed the index fingers against his lips.

Like a loaded gun, Dean thought. Don't shoot, Doc. I'm unarmed.

Baswell reached with assured swiftness, without looking, his wise brown eyes and their landscape of broken capillaries never leaving Dean's, to open a desk drawer at his side. He removed a pad, and a wooden pen somebody had probably made on a lathe (maybe one of Baswell's own patients, whom the doctor called "clients"), and placed them on the desk, as Beethoven sounded one o'clock.

Baswell remained silent. Watchful.

Dean cleared his throat.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

"I always wondered what this room was like on the inside," Dean said finally, only to break the silence that had drawn out between them like a crack widening in the ocean floor. "It's not exactly how I pictured it."

Dr. Baswell made a noncommittal sound: "Mmn." Dean had long suspected Uncle Tim had been aware of his youthful curiosity, but the doctor would neither confirm nor deny it. He was devoid of expression, reminding Dean of those impassive, impenetrable statues on Easter Island. His nose hairs fluttered.

The second hand ticked away. The house creaked, settling. Dean recalled it had creaked a fair bit during childhood visits, grumbling like an old man trying to get comfortably seated. "Do houses ever get settled?" He tried on a grin. "I mean, you hear about houses settling, but do they ever just go, 'All right, this is the place'?"

Dr. Baswell licked his lips, but said nothing.

Growing uncomfortable, Dean looked over the room. A carved mirror rested at an angle that gave the patient—client—a reflected view of a motivational poster hanging by the exit: the tabby kitten dangling by a single paw from a rope, above the slogan, Hang in there, Baby! Whether this was intentional, for levity or in seriousness, Dean couldn't say, as it seemed now that he didn't know his Uncle Tim well enough to decide. Built into the walls were wooden bookshelves filled with hardback books, the kind with red, green or blue covers, gold lettering and no dust jackets, each one devoid of dust. One shelf Baswell reserved for psychology texts, books by Jung and Freud and company. On this shelf, very near the doctor's head, was The Inward-Looking Eye, by Dr. Timothy Baswell himself. It was the only book whose cover faced the room.

"I didn't know you were published, Uncle Tim," Dean tried, sounding ingratiating even to himself. Frankly, he felt as unsettled as the old Victorian manse. Dean Vogel had never been the type to sit in silence with another person, content to occupy the same space without filling it with so much pointless chatter. But the words Baswell required of him... he wasn't ready speak. He wasn't sure he'd ever be ready.

Dr. Baswell raised his eyebrows as if to reply—Here it comes, Dean thought—then, unsurprisingly, said nothing.

Dean cracked his neck around, craning to look at the ceiling, the mottled, fractured yellow-brown of water stains. It reminded him of a warning image on a cigarette pack of the inside of a smoker's lung.

Strange objects occupied shelves and tables, along the same lines as the prezzies Dean had been given as a child. Prezzies—there was a strange expression. Like baby-talk. Seemingly out of character for Baswell, and an English phrase, too, though Dean was sure his dad had said the man was Scottish. In one bottle, a ship with torn and tattered sails stood against a painted background of a raging sea; in another, a pig or sheep (dog?) fetus floated in a viscous yellow liquid. A small replica cannon, made out of lead by the look, lay between them. Another shelf was dedicated to medical antiques: astringents and snake oils and rusted tools, and a white model head with dotted lines like cuts of meat, the inscription PHRENOLOGY by L. N. Fowler on its base. Dean finally settled his gaze on an old glass-framed map placed prominently at the end of the sofa, its sketches of bearded mariners, monsters, and cherubs creating the winds from their breath, along with many legends in florid script, such as HERE BE DRAGONS.

He stretched out his legs. The calves were sore. Calf—it's a calf fetus, he thought, looking at the jar. While he stretched, he stared at the map, following the contours of the land with his eyes, as they'd once followed along the ground from the backseat of the Vogel family Volkswagen when he was a boy, imagining himself out there, running alongside the car. The threaded texture of the paper (or was it cloth?), the torn corners, as if it had been well-used. But more and more his eyes returned to those words, and the creatures surrounding them in the water.

HERE BE DRAGONS.

A crack in the ocean floor.

Uncharted waters.

Is that supposed to be a metaphor? he wondered, and then gave Dr. Baswell an anxious look, suddenly certain he'd spoken the words aloud. The psychologist made no indication anything had been said, only sat there, fingers tented, the left—sinister—leg crossed over the right. Breathing. Watching.

HERE BE DRAGONS.

Beware of dog.

Beware of Doc.

Dean laughed aloud. Dr. Baswell rose a challenging eyebrow, yet remained silent.

Beethoven's 9th nearly made Dean jump from his chair. He settled back, gripping the armrests. The old clock chimed off two, and as Dr. Baswell rose from his chair, smiling now, Dean breathed a sigh of relief. The hour had passed. His hand was hugged. "Will I see you next week, Dean?"

"That's it?"

Baswell twitched his head to the side, bushy eyebrows raised as if to say, You expected more? He gave Dean a small, somewhat apologetic smile from one corner of his mouth. "That's it."

Dean stood, feeling confused. "You know, if I was paying for this, I'd be pretty peed-off right now."

"Then be glad you're not paying," Dr. Baswell said. "Next week?"

Dean shrugged. "Sure. I mean, what the heck, right?"

He had no intention of returning. That he showed up on Uncle Tim's front porch the following Wednesday, and would make a serious breakthrough only four weeks into his weekly sessions, came as a surprise to them both.

HE SAW HER on the Monday following: Catherine Priest, his first, and longest, crush.

She was at the checkout in the IGA, not in front of the counter, as he might have expected, but behind it, bagging groceries for an elderly woman. Of all the people from Dark Pines Elementary he'd expected to grow up and leave this town, Catherine Priest had been the most likely in his eyes. Yet here she was, a checkout clerk at the Hometown Proud, asking for a price check on Fancy Feast.

Dean spotted her the moment he stepped in, and stopped in the doorway, staring. She looked exactly the same, save a few streaks of gray in her auburn hair, the fine lines around her eyes and bracketing her smile. Aside from the braces he'd last seen her wearing, with their springy elastics, making her suck the occasional bit of spittle from the sides of her mouth, the smile was exactly how he remembered it. More memories drifted in on a warm, fragrant breeze from the flower counter: watching her tuck her hair behind her ear to take a drink from the water fountain; following half a block or so behind her on the way to school, willing himself to catch up to her and say something, yet never daring; sitting with her on the Ferris Wheel at the Spring Fair at her behest when they were 13, Catherine stealing out to take his hand as they neared the summit, and when the ride stopped for a breathtaking minute, overlooking all the lighted streets and homes of Dark Pines, she had planted a kiss on his cheek—and young, shy Dean had stolen away, his cheeks flushed, once they'd gotten safely back down to earth.

No wonder I tried so hard to forget this place, he thought. Everything here reminds me of how much of a doofus I was.

And Pat Cleary. Don't forget about him.

"'Scuse me, bucko," came an old man's voice, startling him from his self-pity. He stepped aside to let the man shuffle on his wheeled rocker into the store. Dean couldn't bring himself to follow.

What had he come in here for again, anyway? Eggs, milk, cereal, canned gravy, liquid Drano... He could get those things anywhere.

And just walk out of here with my tail between my legs? Sack up, Dean.

He stepped through the turnstile, watching Catherine smile and wave at the departing elderly lady. Then she was turning toward him, and Dean's heart picked up a beat. Before he could stop himself, he was slipping down an aisle behind a tower of toilet paper, one hand squeezing the Charmin as he peered around it.

Now what? Keep on avoiding her until she goes on break? This is ridiculous.

Aggravating was what it was. It wasn't like he couldn't talk to women; he'd slept with maybe two dozen since he'd left behind that painfully shy boy he'd been in Dark Pines. It was girls Dean could never talk to, and despite being in her 30s like himself, looking at the adult Catherine brought back the girl she'd been with total clarity. The boy had never been far behind her.

I've regressed. Won't Uncle Tim be proud?

He looked around himself: cleaning supplies, paper towels, light bulbs, mops and deodorizers. At the far end, the shelves opened up on the meat section. At least he was in the right aisle.

HERE BE DRANO.

"Can I help you with something, sir?"

Dean spun on the soles of his sneakers—squikkk!

And there she was. Somehow she'd gotten behind him without him hearing her, was standing less than two feet away, looking up at him with her dazzling green eyes and warm smile. She'd tied her hair back with a Kelly green scrunchie, just like the ones she used to wear when they were kids. Dean's breath caught—

"D-Drano?" he stuttered.

For a moment, it didn't seem as if Catherine had bought his cover: she stared into his eyes, her smile never faltering. Finally, she gave a slight, skeptical squint and said, "Drano? It's right there down the aisle." She pointed toward it, fingers so pale and slender, just as they'd been when they were children, when she'd taken his hand in hers, the nails perfectly plain.

"Thanks," Dean said, and since he'd stumbled into a plan of action, he carried it out. If he'd been able to continue doing so in the military, he wouldn't be where he was now: unemployed, living with his parents, seeing a shrink, and running away from old friends in the cleaning aisle at the local grocery store. He slunk past plush walls of paper towels, and rows of particolored detergents and bathroom deodorizers, shoulders slumping the further he walked from her.

"Dean Vogel!" came an excited male voice in front of him, followed by a hearty chuckle he seemed to vaguely recognize.

From behind him, he expected Catherine to say, "Dean? My Dean Vogel?" As he approached the balding, short and stocky man, the woman he'd left behind said nothing in return. He chanced a glance over his shoulder, and saw she had gone back to her post. She'd probably only come over because she'd seen him from the corner of her eye and thought he might be trouble—or in it.

Am I in trouble? Who the hell is this loser, anyway?

The man in the gray three-piece suit laughed, jittery and somewhat mischievous, Woody Woodpeckereqsue, and Dean remembered the laugh immediately. Under the fat, the patchy stubble and male pattern-baldness, where once there had been a thick mound of shaggy black hair, the face was unmistakable.

Dean let out a despairing sigh. "Eugene Evans."

"Gene. But yeah, hey! How the hell are you, man?" He approached, extending a small, manicured hand. Eugene Evans had been a hotheaded little shit in Dark Pines Elementary. Not only had he and Dean not been friends, Eugene had once tried—

But that was then. Now, here, Gene Evans was trying for friendly. But where there was Eugene, Patrick and Joel had never been far behind... until the day it had happened, when everything had changed.

Remember the dog, Dean-o? Holy Jesus, you remember, don't you? Out back of Catherine's old house.

Dean forced himself to stick out a hand. Gene Evans squeezed it with all the might his homunculus fingers could muster. "I see they've got you pushing pencils," he said in a passable Arnold Schwarzenegger impression. Dean remembered that Eugene used to quote Arnie movies just about all the time, shouting out "get your ass to Mars!" in the halls at school, or when he got really mad half-joking about how was going to kill you last, while always calling you "Sully." If he liked you, he'd tell you to stick with him "if you vant to live." This quote about pencils was from Predator, the expectation being that Dean should play along, voicing a quote from the same movie, or another. But since Eugene had spoiled his chance encounter with Catherine Priest—at least that was how Dean would remember it, with any luck—he wasn't in the mood to play.

"Yeah, hey, Gene. How are ya?"

Gene froze, unable to comprehend the breach of protocol, incapable of computing the next conversational path, like a T-1000 model Terminator that hadn't been fully programmed. Then he shook his head slightly and said, "I always knew—" and his voice shifted back to Arnie's— "you'd be bach!"

Dean faked a chuckle, irritated that Eugene Evans, who'd helped while Joel Suskin and Patrick Cleary had tried to kill him outside Catherine Priest's house on a brisk winter morning in 1992, was not only being friendly, but had the balls to voice assumptions about Dean's ability to leave Dark Pines and stay gone.

"Yeah, well, you know me," he said.

Gene searched Dean's eyes, trying to decipher the emotion behind it. "Man, we should totally catch up, have a drink or two. Come out to the coast, have a few laughs, am I right?" He laughed himself, as if to demonstrate.

"Isn't that Bruce Willis?"

Gene's mouth opened. He wriggled his head around uncomfortably. "So listen, I really gotta run, it was great to see you," with a hand on Dean's arm, "but I gotta say, before I go..." Gene glanced around nervously. "Patty Cleary knows you're in town. He called me up out of the blue a couple nights ago—drunk as shit, of course. I haven't talked to that guy since... well, you know. And he calls me up like we're still good buddies. He woke up my kids."

"What did he want, Eugene?"

Gene's lips tightened at the sound of his full name. "He wants to kill you, Dean. Still. I mean, do you fucking believe that? The guy's living in the fuck—" The elderly man shuffled up alongside him, reached for the paper towels, gave them a squeeze, and moved on without them. Gene kept his voice hushed. "He's living in the past. He's obsessed with that—" His eyes widened (In fright? Dean wondered), and he swallowed something acrid. "I'm real sorry about what went down that day, man. We were just dumb little kids, Joel and me. But Patrick..."

"Water under the bridge," Dean said.

"Seriously?" He seemed genuinely pleased—and why wouldn't he? He'd just been forgiven attempted murder.

"Seriously."

"Gee, that's—that's just great, Dean. Dean-o." A goofy smile spread across his fleshy face and he patted Dean's arm again twice, excitedly. "I'm serious about that drink, too. Look me up." He began to move away, thought better of it. He held Dean's gaze in his beady little eyes. "And be careful, man. That Patrick... he's an animal." His eyes bugged out of his head again, he let out a jumpy laugh—almost a cackle—and scurried off toward the checkouts.

Catherine had disappeared by the time Dean reached the counter with his groceries—off on break according to her replacement, a bored teenage girl with smiley faces painted on her nails. It took some time shopping to build up his courage to finally talk to her—telling himself he wasn't that shy little kid anymore, that he'd popped his cherry a long time ago, he was a goddamn man and he'd been to war, for fuck's sake—only to miss her by seconds.

An invite to his middle school reunion was among the mail on the kitchen table when he returned home with the groceries. "'You are cordially invited,'" he said, smirking. Like it was a wedding. He wondered if Patrick Cleary would show his face. It could give him a chance to talk to Catherine, but with all the bad memories, Dean wasn't sure he'd even go.

The telephone began to ring. Dean threw the invitation into the trash and answered the call.

"YOU KNOW, SOMEONE called me the other day about a dog program."

Second session. Dean had discovered the way to progress through these hours more quickly was to talk. At the very least, it seemed to engage Dr. Baswell. The man sitting across from him was still nothing like the ersatz uncle from Dean's childhood: the adventurer who'd regaled him with tales of camel herds crossing the desert, of giant mosquitos on the Amazon River, of men who'd had very little contact with the Western world and still wore khakis, smoked cigarettes and brandished AK-47s. He wasn't that Tim Baswell, but at least this man seemed human.

"A—dog program? Oh. A comfort animal."

"Yeah. They give you this dog to care for. It's supposed to help keep your mind occupied, give you something to take care of, to feed and love. I guess."

"And you said...?"

"I don't like dogs. That's what I said."

Dr. Baswell seemed to find this interesting. He scratched in his pad. Dean had heard many therapists didn't like to use pads these days, that it distracted the patient—or client, in Baswell's case. If Baswell thought it might hinder Dean's progress, it didn't show.

"What's that you're writing," Dean wondered aloud.

"I'm not writing, Dean."

Dean pushed up in his chair. "Looks like a whole lot of chicken scratching to me," he said with a teasing grin.

Baswell didn't reply, just kept scratching away with his pen on the paper. Dean sat back, irked. His eyes fell on the map. HERE BE—

He looked away in spite. You're not gonna trigger some fucking revelation by ignoring me, Uncle Tim.

After nearly a minute, Beethoven's clock ticking off the seconds, Baswell gave a pleased little smile and turned the pad to face his client. Dean thought about turning away from it, about not giving Baswell the satisfaction, but he knew Baswell would see the action as childish. Regressive. He'd had enough of that for one week. He turned to look.

Baswell hadn't been writing, after all. He'd been drawing. "What is that?"

"It's you. As a miniature schnauzer."

Surprised, Dean snorted a laugh. "You serious?" He stood and crossed to where Baswell was seated, took the pad from the man when it was offered. It was actually a pretty good likeness—the eyes were right, the hair he wore slicked back and parted down the left side, but the rest was all schnauzer. With the floppy ears, the long, smooth beard and mutton chops, he looked a bit like some crotchety old Scotsman. Duff McGruff, or something.

"That's pretty good," he said, returning to his seat. "Though, you know, I woulda drawn myself as a German Shepherd." The leather grumbled as he sat.

Dr. Baswell gave the sketch a look, shrugged slightly, then returned the pad to his desk. "What made you bring that up?"

"What?"

"About the dog program?"

"Huh? Oh. It was just weird, that's all."

"How so?"

"Like, how did they get my number?"

"I suspect they were contacted by the Armed Forces, as I'd been."

Dean nodded. "Yeah, that—you might be right. I never thought of that. Anyway, that's not what's weird. I saw Catherine the other day."

"Catherine?"

"This girl I loved, growing up. Stood her up on a pedestal."

"Unrequited?"

"Big time. You don't make out with the Venus de Milo, right? She just stands there, being perfect."

"Venus?"

"Catherine."

"And this has to do with—"

"I'm getting there. So, I get home from the grocery store—that's where I saw her, Catherine—and the telephone's ringing in the house. Mom and Dad are out toodling in the garden. That's something they do now: toodling. Everything's a toodle. So I throw the groceries down on the counter and grab the phone." Dean sucked in a big gulp of air. In his rush to get the story out, he'd forgotten to breathe. He'd also forgotten about the invitation.

"Take your time, Dean."

"Thanks. So I pick up the phone and it's that dog program, asking me do I want a comfort dog. I was so startled, I didn't even think about it. I told them I don't like dogs and I hung up. I like dogs, I was just freaked out they'd called right then. It's like, you know when you think about a song and it's the next thing on the radio? Like Synchronicity."

"You know Jung?" Uncle Tim, drawn out for a moment, smiled.

"Jung—oh... Actually, I meant the Police song. I was singing it in my head the day I came back home, and when I turned on my old boombox—couldn't believe the thing still worked, even with the batteries all gummed up like they were—there's Synchronicity in the tape deck, with 'Synchronicity I' sittin' on pause for fifteen years. But sure, Jung's good, too."

Dr. Baswell picked up his pad from the desk. "So you felt your meeting with Catherine was somehow related to this call from the Service Dog Foundation?"

Dean felt a chill rush up his spine. Somehow, he found the nerve to smile. "Because Catherine had a dog."

"A lot of people have dogs, Dean."

"Not like this one. Meanest damn thing you ever heard."

"'Heard.' You never saw it?"

"Nobody did, but yeah. I did, once. It was always behind their fence. One kid said he saw it once, but it turned out he was just lying to get Catherine to notice him. She was that kind of girl. Every boy wanted to date her, but her dad wouldn't let her out of his sight. Drove her to and from school every single day, right to the door, even though you could tell it embarrassed the hell out of the poor kid. Not just pretty, either—smart, too. Never allowed to go to any of the dances. Not that I know from experience. I never went, either. If Catherine wasn't going, you could count me out."

"Out of solidarity?"

"Out of 'If she's not gonna be there, what's the point?'"

Dr. Baswell nodded thoughtfully.

"You see what I mean about a pedestal?"

"I'm beginning to."

"So, heard—yeah. Always from behind that fence. Hurtling itself at that fence. For most kids on the Lock Side, going past her place was the easiest shortcut to the Elementary school."

Dr. Baswell seemed to respond to this. "Which street is this?"

"Danber Avenue," Dean said. "Just a small street, crescent really. There's a laneway at the end of it that runs between two houses. One on the right is Catherine's. It opens up on this parking lo—"

He stopped, suddenly aware he had almost revealed something very important. He waited for the feeling to pass, watching the grandfather clock swing its big brass counterweight, like the long, dangly testicles of its namesake.

"I know it," Baswell was saying. "We used to take Greenbury, when I was young."

Breathe, Dean. Breathe it out. And then the memory was gone, passed under him like the shadow of a dragon in the depths of a black, raging sea. He sighed in relief. "Yeah," he said, returning to reality. "I know Greenbury. Danber is easier though, because of the lane."

"It wasn't there in my day. Are you okay, Dean? You look peaked." Only Baswell didn't say peaked, he said peekid, vaguely Shakespearean.

"Huh? Oh, no, I'm—I'm fine. You don't think that's weird, though? The dog thing?"

"Well, Dean," Baswell rested his fingers beneath his lips. "Things like this happen all the time: pick up the phone to dial a number, and the callee's already picked up the other end, about to call you. Hear a word for the first time, and suddenly you're hearing it everywhere. And so on. They aren't signs or signals from some spooky netherworld beyond ours. There's no special meaning. These things just happen, because at some point events like these are bound to coincide. It's fun to think they may be something more, but if you start to take the idea seriously without any religious grounding, there's a mild danger of solipsism."

"Solip—?"

"The idea that things, places, events, all exist inside one's own mind. That everything exists solely because you do."

"And that's dangerous."

"Because it devalues those things, Dean. Other people. If they aren't real, they don't matter. Therefore, what's to stop you from harming them?"

Dean studied the man's expression. It seemed as if Baswell were scrutinizing him, looking for something hidden just below the surface. An emotional response? An apology? A dragon?

Beethoven signaled the end of the hour. Baswell stood and hugged his hand.

DEAN STOOD IN the cul-de-sac on Danber Avenue, looking up at Catherine's house.

It was early morning on a Saturday, an overcast day. Lights were on in the ground floor of the house. He'd told his parents he was going for a run, and he had run for a few miles, shutting off his brain: the screams, the shouted prayers, the hot smell of urine and sweat, the sweaty flesh pressed against his, the dogs barking, the orders, the laughter. When he allowed his brain to turn on again, he had just about stepped into oncoming traffic, or what little there was of it in Dark Pines. He found himself back on the Lock Side, jogging in place at the far-east foot of Quarry Road. He'd come almost full circle back to his house, and had somehow wandered into the route he used to take to school. Danber met Quarry three or four blocks further east. Where there had once been row houses, there was now a corner store, either advertising or owned by Kit Kat candy bars.

He ran in place, deciding. Home was two blocks west, three south. Catherine's was three—Four, Dean, don't act like you forgot—east, three north.

He ran north a block, telling himself he wasn't going to go, he didn't need to dredge up any more embarrassment from his pathetic, lonely childhood. Then he veered a sharp right, crossing the road in front of a bicyclist, who angrily jangled her bell before throwing back the middle finger.

Startled, keyed up with adrenaline, he almost shouted at her. He thought about chasing after her, running alongside until he got her attention, and then punching her in the back of the head, knocking her off the bike. The spandex biking suit made him instantly hate her; her sharp features further annoyed him. That she had the nerve to give him the bird after she'd nearly run him down in the street was the final nail, an insult which could not—would not—go unpunished.

He breathed. Baswell had suggested it during their third session, but Dean had yet to try it. It seemed too simple, too much like a magic bullet, to be helpful. But he breathed, in through the nose (Innnnnnnnnnnn), out through the mouth (Ouuuuuuuut). Expel the bad juju, Dean-o. In through the nose... ouuuuuut through the mouth.

His heartbeat slowed. The cyclist rounded the corner onto Quarry and was gone.

There. That wasn't so hard, was it? And he answered himself: Like fuck, it wasn't. But it worked. Might not work every time, but this time it did.

Violence had sent him home. After the incident with his commanding officer, Dean had run. He was a runner. It was what he'd always done, ever since he was a child: run from authority, run from responsibility, run from his enemies, run from life. If it was a pattern, then perhaps it was destiny that had driven him off into the desert outside Kandahar, where he'd been stationed, with his fellow officers pursuing him for a time in their M-Gator A3 utility vehicles and "Optimus Prime" (their Armored Heavy Support Vehicle), shouting after him, until he'd leapt into an area dotted with boulders and scrub brush between two sand dunes, where even the Gators couldn't follow. Optimus Prime, unable to transform for the more rugged terrain, had braked minutes behind the others, and had probably already headed back to base by the time he'd lost the Gators. But Dean had kept on running, faster than he'd ever pushed himself—except, maybe, for that day when he was 12. After a time he was certain he'd lost them, that they'd given up, and still he wouldn't dare stop until the sun had beaten him to a pulp, and he'd thrown up everything from his stomach. Then he'd dropped trou and squirted shit into the hard-packed sand, his nerves jangling, his insides like a wrung sponge, every single part of him sore, even his eyelids.

He'd spent the night in a goat farmer's hovel. The mustached man had fed him stale naan with mashed beans and let him sleep with the goats. Cold. Nobody ever told you how cold the desert got at night. It seemed not to make any sense, that such a place of extremes couldn't possibly exist on earth. The desert was never warm, nor cool. There were no gradations between sweating through your clothes, the kind of heat that squeezed every drop of moisture from your body, and the shivering, huddled-up inside-your-clothes kind, like the most frigid Canadian winter cold, with no place and no one in sight with whom to find warmth. There were no shades of gray; the Afghan desert was all death, hard and unforgiving.

The goat herder's hovel had been a godsend. That night, Dean had snuggled up to the fattest goat, a skinny female with a distended belly and flat, hanging udders like deflated party balloons. At first, she'd kicked him away—not hard, just enough to show him she wasn't thrilled. He'd snuggled in again, and she'd settled into it with a snorted sigh. Lying against her belly, like a giant, bristly hot water bottle, feeling her heartbeat against his ear, her scrawny chest rising and falling slowly and steadily with her breath, Dean had fallen asleep.

In the morning, he'd awakened to the man milking his bedmate. Sometime in the night, Dean had shifted or been pushed into a loose pile of straw, his face crisscrossed where he'd slept against it.

The man had fed him a dish of some sour, curded white stuff—like yoghurt, but as chunky as cottage cheese—and sticky rice. On Dean's way out the door, the farmer had thrust something into his hand: a beaten copy of The Noble Qur'an. That it was an English edition said to Dean the man had kept it around in waiting for a moment like this, since the farmer spoke no English himself.

This was meant for me, he'd thought, and a tingling sense of religious mysticism had warmed him from chest to anus.

He couldn't accept it, but he hadn't been able to get the man to take it back, either, and since everything he had said was gibberish to the man, Dean had finally thanked him and tucked the book into the back of his uniform khakis. The man said, "As-salaam alaikum," and though Dean didn't know any Arabic, per se, he'd hear that phrase—Peace be unto you—spoken enough to know the correct response was to repeat it, or something similar. So he had, and a near-toothless smile had creased the man's craggy cheeks, making his mustache look somewhat like a blackbird taking flight above his sunburnt brown lips.

Heat had returned to the desert. He'd heard the vehicles maybe an hour after leaving the goat herder's house. He had already been reading from the Qur'an for some time by then, tearing off pages as he read them and tossing them into the wind as he walked. He'd still been reading when they caught up to him.

"'And Jesus said, 'Indeed, I am the servant of Allah!'" Dean had started shouting as they wedged their vehicles in his path, raising a swirling cloud of dust. "'He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet!'" He'd torn the page and thrown it behind him, where it fluttered. Not the green vehicles of Canadian Armed Forces standard; these were desert-beige Humvees. American soldiers. Marines. "'Have you no desire for my gods, O Abraham? If you do not desist, I will surely stone you, so avoid me a prolonged time!'"

"Sir, where are you going?" The Marine, a woman, had bright blue eyes—Like a husky's, Dean had thought—and lips so chapped they were mostly white. She'd put a hand on his shoulder, and Dean had shirked it, angrily. The eyes had turned cold then, chapped lips thinning. "Okay, sir, we are only trying to help."

"'The ink of the scholar is more holy than the blood of the martyr!'" Dean had said, and spat in the grunt's face.

Her eyes had become merciless, left hand rising to the M4 carbine automatic slung over her shoulder. She'd wiped the spit off with her gloved right. It had only streaked the dirt on her cheek and chin.

Three men had then approached from the vehicle, boxing him in. Dean had fought them off, thrown a punch at a young guy who still had pimples and kicked the woman in the thigh. They'd overtaken him easily. He'd screamed at them—"Western dogs! Infidels!"—like a wild-eyed Libyan terrorist from an '80s movie. He'd kicked and he'd spat. They'd thrown him into the back of the vehicle, wedged between two Marines in the back, Private Black and Private White, and when he wouldn't shut up (he couldn't shut up, since his anger, his rage wouldn't allow it: he was a Canadian citizen, a soldier!), one of them had backhanded him so hard across the jaw that his teeth had clacked, and maybe it was the heat, the exhaustion or the lack of sustenance, but suddenly Dean had found himself in the dark.

Running. Running in the dark.

When the light had come back, they'd been parked at the Bagram Airfield detention facility in Parwan Province, Afghanistan's Guantanamo, 550-something kilometers, 340-something miles away. He'd been out for over 9 hours. The sun had bored holes in his skull through his eyes, and as his Marine friends had escorted him to the building, other soldiers pushed their own detainees past a makeshift schoolyard, where unused children's toys gathered more dust with every sandstorm. Now, he remembered the single sunflower growing in a field of gravel, trudged down by their boots, before springing back hopefully toward the desert sun.

Running again. Running along Danber Avenue, like he'd done that day when he was 12. And now he stood in front of her house, Catherine's house, and the lights were on, and a cute little hatchback was in the drive as a cool, light rain began to patter against his hot skin. The Priests' backsplit was at the end of a cul-de-sac, and there was nowhere else to go but up to the door.

You could take the lane, Dean-o.

Not a fucking chance, he thought back.

The bungalow on the left side of the lane was gone, ditto the one to the left of that. The two houses had been junked, and a larger one had sprung up in their place. The Priests' big wooden fence, its slats so close together they were almost impenetrable, was gone. Dean had noticed this the moment he'd turned onto Danber. There was only wide-open yard, the dog likely long dead. If they had another dog now, it was either well-trained or wearing one of those awful shock collars. Beyond the yard, with its barbeque and picnic table and giant, rich green pine, the parking lot was gone, too. In its place was a public playground with newish plastic equipment. Past that was Anderson Road, and just two blocks east from there was Dark Pines Elementary. Unless that was gone, too.

The lights were on in Catherine's house. A television flickered blue in the living room. No movement inside. It was 8:34 AM. Dean caught his breath and let the rain cool him, thinking it over. Breathing deep. The adrenaline still churning. The time was now... or never.

Fuck it.

Dean strode to the door. He was reaching for the little brass knocker when it opened inward. The man in the doorway nearly jumped out of his wits.

Christ—she's married.

"Jesus, you scared me," the man said. He was about Dean's age, maybe a few years older, and vaguely handsome, even if a bit pudgy and pasty in a British lord sort of way. He wore a plush robe and fuzzy slippers at the ends of his hairy, skinny legs. The man checked out Dean's muscular frame, gave him a puzzled look. "Are you the new paperboy?"

"No, I..." Defeated. "I'm sorry, I think I must have the wrong address."

"Who are you looking for?"

Dean briefly considered making up a name, but he said, "Ca-Catherine Priest? Are you—? Is she—?"

"Nope, you've got the right place, all right." The man seemed suspicious. "Friend of hers, are you?"

Dean nodded meekly.

"She's still sleeping right now. Would you like me to tell her you dropped by, or...?"

Dean looked at the living room window. The furniture was all different than what he'd seen through her windows back when they were kids.... Classier. Had that been her influence, or her husband's? "No. That's okay." He turned from the door, descended the stairs.

"Well, okay then," the man called after him, bending for the newspaper. "Have a good one."

"You too," Dean said, not turning, running out into the swelling rain.

* * *

"WHAT ARE YOU running from, Dean?"

Fourth session. Dr. Baswell knew all about Dean's desertion, his time at Bagram and his eventual release in the wake of scandal. Dean hadn't been the one to tell him: the Armed Forces people had when they'd scheduled the sessions, along with his commanding officer, Master Corporal Sandman, who'd made an impassioned personal call. The rest, Baswell had gleaned from the papers. He had the infamous copy of the Toronto Herald folded on the end table beside his chair.

"Let's go back. To your childhood."

"You wanna know if I was fondled by my daddy? If Mommy didn't love me?"

Baswell flashed a stern glare. "Don't be disrespectful. Anyhow, if Laurenz had felt the need to abuse you, it would first mean he'd have to acknowledge your existence, as something other than a rather disappointing appendage."

Dean chuckled his scorn. Baswell had a point. It wasn't as though he'd had a terrible childhood, but his father had been perpetually dissatisfied: with Dean's grades, with the way Dean did his chores, with his extracurricular activities (or lack thereof), his lack of his father's impressive stature (Larry Vogel was six-foot-six, Dean a mere five-nine), his disposition, his apparent weakness and unwillingness to work out, his disinterest in the sciences (he'd hoped for Dean to become a doctor, like himself), and his general lack of motivation. These days, not much had changed, with the notable addition of the shame and embarrassment over his son's desertion and dismissal with disgrace from the military. And when Laurenz Vogel hadn't been voicing his disappointment, he'd been cold and inattentive.

"When was the first time you skipped school?" Baswell asked.

"They told you about that?"

"Educated guess." Dr. Baswell smiled—far too pleased by his own deduction. "Running away is a pattern with you, isn't it? What was it that first time? A test? A speech? The bigger kids picking on you?"

Dean said nothing.

"You're too smart for it to have been a test, though I suppose you could have been unprepared. No. The way you lashed out at Master Corporal Sandman, I'm guessing it was bullies. I'm right, aren't I?"

Dean turned to face the ancient mariner on the old sea map, stern-faced and bearded like his father. Monsters in the open water. HERE BE DRAGONS, all right. You said a fuckin' mouthful, Captain Highliner.

"All I know about it—the incident when you were twelve—was what happened to the boy." Jesus, no, please, Uncle Tim. I don't wanna remember. Please. "It's very much reminiscent to me of what happened to that Sandman fellow. He was defiant, of course. Said you had it coming, and claimed he would have killed you with his bare hands, if he'd been physically able to run after you. Sandman, I mean. Not the boy. The boy was hospitalized for a month."

"The things that prick said to me," Dean said through gritted teeth. "He had no right to lay a hand on me. None of them did. No right to... to shove me up against the wall like he did."

"He was your commanding officer. These things sometimes happen, I understand. Even in my day. This was before the rumors of steroid abuse in the military, of course. The over-use of nutritional supplements."

"That doesn't make it right, does it? What gives a man the right to do that, huh? What makes a man think he's got the right to lay his hands on someone like that?"

"You're speaking on behalf of the bullied. Do you look at what you've done as heroic?" Dean said nothing. Baswell prodded: "Shooting a man point-blank in the kneecap—did you think you were doing all of the bullied children a service? Fighting back for them? Or did you do it for the child you once were?"

"This is ridiculous."

"Tell me, then. Tell me about the first time you skipped school, Dean. I want your side of the story. So I know how to look at you. I haven't for a very long time, you know."

He'd known. Even back then, he'd sensed the distance growing between them. The prezzies had stopped that year, and the stories along with them. A tear streaked down his face. He let out a shivery breath. And told him everything.

THE FIRST TIME he'd skipped school, they'd been waiting for him: Patrick Cleary, Joel Suskin and Eugene Evans, the three meanest kids in the seventh grade. They'd chosen him because he was the smallest in their class. They'd hang him up in his locker and beat on him whenever the teachers weren't around. They'd bend him over his desk and beat on him in the portables before class started. Adults always said don't react—if you cry, if you whimper, you're giving them what they want, only feeding the fire. And Dean had tried not to react. He'd let them wail on him.

He knew what his father would have thought about it, but there was nothing he could do against the three boys together. If he'd gotten one of them alone... But no, they'd always traveled in packs, like those intelligent dogs in Moscow he'd read about recently. The bruises were easy enough to hide—on his legs, his back, his upper arms. His father had never suspected a thing.

They were waiting for him on his way to school, waiting on Quarry near the convenience store with the sign on its door written in childish uppercase script, "NO MORE THEN TWO (2) KIDS IN STORE AT A TIME!" Dean had spotted them before they saw him, and he'd made a run for it, up Juniper Road instead of Danber. Too late this time. They'd seen him before he rounded the corner, or heard his footfalls—maybe even smelled him, like the rabid dogs they were—and given chase. Patrick and Joel had longer legs than his; they were bigger, and took longer strides. The two biggest kids caught up to him in the lane alongside Catherine's fence, where it opened on the parking lot and Anderson Road. They threw him up against the fence boards, so hard his teeth rattled and the bell on the other side of the big pine door jingled, his head pressed up against the sign:

BEWARE OF DOG

The first bark startled all four of them. Eugene jumped a little, his rich black hair ruffling, then balled his small fists and made as if he hadn't been scared. Dull-eyed Joel threw the first punch. It hit Dean in the solar plexus and Dean doubled over, breathless, held firm against the gate by their large fists.

Gene ran in and threw half a dozen rabbit punches to Dean's guts and side. His knuckles struck hipbone on his last punch and he winced, stumbling backward, shaking away the pain.

"Lookit 'im!" Patrick shouted, laughing and pointing at Gene with his free hand. "Lookit the little pussy!"

The dog was barking, barking. Dean felt the pain bunch in his innards and shoot upward, lodging somewhere behind his eyeballs where the barks doubled, trebled in his brain. He was a thermometer stuck in an oven, the mercury rising up its shaft; the bulb was his skull. He was a nuclear missile, the warhead about to explode. He was the Strength Tester at the Spring Fair, the one with the big hammer and the ball, and the bell was his head. Hit it hard enough and win a prize.

Did he barked as he kicked? Dean couldn't remember now, but it felt like he had. He did remember he couldn't see a thing, had only kicked out blindly as hard as he could. He remembered his sneaker hitting something firm and yielding, hearing one of them cry out in agony. The grip on his right shoulder let go, and he fell down hard on the ball of his right foot (later it would bruise, and then hurt for a week). He'd struck Joel square in the balls, and the brunt of Dean's weight had torn his left shoulder free from Patrick's grip.

"H-holy shit!" Gene stuttered, and finally the world came back into focus. Gene wasn't stuttering but laughing, because in spite of the beating he would get from his two larger cohorts, in spite of the sympathy pain any boy feels when another kid get wailed in the balls, it was funny when it happened. It was even sort of laughable when it happened to you. "Ha-ha-holy shit, Patty! Right in the dinger!"

Patrick stood over Joel, who was crying—crying! "Shut up, Eugene," he said. Gene shut up, even though he hated when kids called him that: Eugene. Because Patrick could make him shut up if he wouldn't do it on his own. "Stop cryin' you fuckin' baby," the biggest and baddest boy shouted down at Joel.

Dean looked around. He might be able to escape to the left, but there were metal posts in the way, blocking cars from entering the lane, and if he had to skirt around them (there was no way he could jump them, the way his legs were jittering), Patrick's reach was long enough to grab him and pull him back. Gene blocked forward advance, and Joel was curled up directly to Dean's right, in the direction of Danber. At Dean's feet, where the fence opened on the parking lot, was a chunk of cinderblock.

He stooped.

Patrick wheeled around with a monstrous look, as Dean rose with the blunted weapon. "What are you gonna do, pussy?" he sneered. "You gonna hit me with that? Huh, pussy? I dare you, Pean." It was what Patrick had always called him: Pean, a cross between Dean and penis. "I fuckin' dare you."

The dog leaped behind the gate, rattling it against his back. The warhead went off and Dean swung. Hit the bell, win a prize.

Patrick's left cheek tore open and blood immediately filled the space where his skin had peeled back. There was a sound like breaking glass and the dull reverberation shuddered back up Dean's arm as the concrete struck bone. Something small and brilliantly white flew from this gaping, bleeding orifice: a molar, the sun glinting off its amalgam filling as it twirled, plinking against the fence of the opposite house. Eyes wide in fear and pain, Patrick's hand came up to his face. Red oozed like syrup through his fingers and dribbled on the sidewalk.

Dean wanted to laugh, but what he did was bark. Later, he would decide it was this unconscious decision which had probably saved his life. "WOOF!" he said. "WOOF! WOOF!"

Gene looked to Patrick, to Joel, to Dean—who was still barking, and the dog, rattling against the door, matched him bark for bark—and the truth of it dawned on Gene's dirty little freckled face. "You're crazy!" he shouted. Then he split.

Like Patrick's face, Dean thought. And laughed.

Patrick's face was chalk white where he wasn't red. He tried to speak, but no words came out. Only "Bluh," and a mouthful of spit-bubbly blood, which splashed down his chin, into the teenaged scruff on his neck and down the front of his shirt. Joel struggled to his feet, giving Dean a baleful look.

Dean bared his teeth at him and growled.

Joel's eyes went wide. He looked away immediately, before shuffling off with his throbbing balls in his hands. Patrick turned tail and followed, leaving a wet trail of himself along the way. He rounded the corner and was gone.

Finally, Dean dropped the bloodied piece of concrete, amazed and shocked by his courage, by his rage. I'm an animal, he thought, and the thought both frightened and amused him.

The bell above the gate jingled. He didn't realize he'd fallen back against it until it swung inward, and he fell into the arms of Mr. Priest.

And then Dean Vogel, fearless for the first time in his life, burst into tears. The Priests' White Shepherd whimpered and stepped into his lap, licking the tears from his eyes and cheeks and lips. Dean's first ever kiss—and it was from a dog.

IN DR. BASWELL'S office, Dean gripped the leather armrests, remembering everything.

"I didn't skip school because I was ashamed of what I did. I wasn't afraid of the consequences," he admitted. "I couldn't face the other kids. I knew they'd look at me different. Like you did." Dr. Baswell nodded grimly. "And because of how good it felt when that goddamn thing hit his face. I felt his bones, Uncle Tim. I felt like an animal—and I dunno, maybe I am."

"No more an animal than any of us, Dean. You could only take so much abuse before you struck back. It was inevitable. You were outnumbered, a child pushed to the edge, and you struck out with whatever you could find."

But Dean didn't want Baswell's sympathy or anyone's. He wanted reproach. He deserved it. "And Sandman? I fucking shot a man because he pushed me up against a wall. I took out my SIG and kneecapped him. That sound like the behavior of a rational human being to you, or the killer instincts of an animal?"

Baswell wouldn't, or couldn't, answer.

"The worst thing about it? I fucking enjoyed it, Uncle Tim. When his knee burst out of his khakis, I laughed. I had his blood on my face and I was laughing. And they were staring at me, all of them. Fucking stupefied. Just like that day outside Catherine's house. Maybe some of them wished they could've done the same thing. Shit, maybe Joel and Eugene would've done what I did to Patrick, if they had the guts."

Baswell set his pad down on the desk. "No barking, though."

"Huh?"

Beethoven signaled the end of the hour. They sat in silence a moment, letting the song play out, letting the bell chime two o'clock.

"When you shot Corporal Sandman," Baswell said finally, "you didn't bark."

"No."

"You didn't consciously attempt to kill Patrick Cleary, did you?"

"No. I just wanted it to be over."

"And Sandman? Were you aiming for somewhere higher?"

"Isn't it your lunchtime?"

"It can wait."

Dean nodded. "Well, actually, I was aiming for his foot."

"Then I suppose you're not an animal, are you? Just a man. With frailties and anxieties. Just like anyone else."

Dean wasn't sure if Baswell was pulling his leg. "Are you serious? You don't think I'm—you don't think I'm crazy?"

"Wounded, certainly. High-strung. I'd recommend anger-management training." Baswell allowed himself to smile. "But no, Dean, I don't believe you're crazy, not for a minute." He stood, and as he took Dean's hand, he pulled him in for a hug. Dean let Uncle Tim hug him a moment, amused and baffled, then wrapped his own arms around the man and hugged him back.

Uncle Tim broke the embrace, but he held Dean by the shoulders a moment longer to regard him. "I'm going to sign off on your papers," he said, letting him go. "But I want you to do me a favor."

"Anything," Dean said, smoothing out his shirt, trying to cover his relief.

"Apologize to the Cleary boy. Man. Make it sincere. Make things right between the two of you."

"After all he did?"

"You put him in the hospital for a month. Your father had to wire his jaw shut. Patrick's parents couldn't afford dentures—they simply pulled the broken teeth and left him with the holes. He's got no molars on the upper left side of his mouth."

"Jesus. Really?"

A grim nod from Baswell.

"Wow," Dean said, truly shocked by the news, having never seen Patrick again after that day. Rumor had it the boy had moved to a different school out of shame, and Dean had never thought to question it. "I guess now I know why everyone started looking at me different afterwards. He wants to kill me, though, Uncle Tim. Gene—Eugene Evans—he told me Patrick called him drunk in the middle of the night when he found out I was in town."

"I suspect that's just bravado talking," Baswell said. "You have to remember, the culture of violence machismo produces—"

"All right, all right," Dean said, throwing up his hands. "I'll say I'm sorry."

"Good," Baswell said, and let Dean go.

BASWELL VOUCHING FOR Dean's progress had the effect on the Vogel house of a medium telling her clients their home was free of evil. His mother stopped jumping at the sound of his voice, and his father began to be civil. Uncle Tim told them about the repeated bullying, and that the hit with the cinderblock had been (mostly) accidental. He told them the shooting of his commanding officer had been a direct response to the bullying, albeit years after the fact. Having struggled with bullying for so long without reaction, Dean had found himself unable to tolerate it in his adult life. He dealt with it by lashing out the moment it seemed anybody was persecuting him or others.

Larry and Diane Vogel listened to Dr. Baswell for over an hour, sharing coffee in the Vogel kitchen while Dean lay on his childhood bed, staring up at the blank ceiling. Listening to their murmurs through the vents reminded him too much of childhood: the worrying, the self-doubt, the paranoia. They were talking about him again, and it couldn't be good. He caught snippets of conversation: so violent... didn't raise him that... he's just lucky we didn't... if this was all about that, then why now?

Dean put on the Synchronicity tape to drown out their conversation, but the music began to distort mid-song, slowing down, with "Tea in the Sahara" playing over top of "Synchronicity I" as the whir and tick of the gears grew louder than the music. He pulled the cassette from the deck, noticing the tape had twisted, and turned on the radio, straightening the tape and rewinding it with a pencil from his rolltop desk while the music drowned out his parents. When he came down to get a snack, half an hour or so after he'd heard the front door shut, his mom and dad were still seated at the table, holding hands. Their eyes were dry but red-rimmed; they'd been crying. Even his father had been crying.

Oh Jesus, this is too much.

"Son, your mater and I have something to tell you," Larry said.

Dean leaned up against the counter, waiting. His father breathed in deeply through his nose. What he had to say was clearly hard for him, but he managed to start after a small squeeze from his wife's hand. "How we treated you after the incident. We had no idea what those boys were doing to you. If we'd known... If only you'd told us... Maybe things would have been different around here."

"What your father's trying to say is 'We're sorry,'" Diane said, and blinked, smiling wistfully. Larry gave her a look, made a thin smile of his own, then nodded at Dean. He's not going to say it, though, is he? Dean thought.

"We're sorry," his father parroted.

But does he mean it? Is it like me, apologizing to Patrick because Uncle Tim asked me to? Is this a favor to Tim or Mom, or does he really—sincerely—mean it?

A tear streaked down his father's bristly cheek. The old man blinked it away, nodded again, mechanically, as if his nodding could stop the tears.

Dean slumped down at the table with them. His mother found his hand. His father took the other. They sat around the kitchen table and wept, while the sink dripped and the house settled... and outside, somewhere, Patrick Cleary was planning to murder him.

ALL THAT WEEK, Dean prepared for his confrontation with Patrick. No weapons this time, just talk. Man to man. He went over various scenarios in his head. The first were pure hostility: Patrick would not speak to him, would just slam the door in his face and tell Dean to get the fuck off his property. Another: Patrick would punch him the second Dean set foot on his doorstep. Dean would take the punch, gladly, but he wouldn't allow another. He'd ask him if it helped, if it made him feel any better. If Yes, he'd apologize right away. If No, he would ask what it would take to resolve their conflict. Aside from "I wanna break your face like you broke mine," he thought he could manage most possibilities.

He also prepared for an altogether different scenario. Patrick might let him speak, and Dean would tell the truth: that he didn't want to apologize, it was just the final step in his government-mandated therapy. He would tell him what had happened in Kandahar with Master Corporal Sandman. Patrick would ask if that was his real name, and Dean would laugh and tell him "No bullshit, man." Patrick would invite him in for a beer, and the two men would bond over the douchebaggery of bureaucracy and the seemingly endless struggle of being a kid.

It had even crossed his mind that Patrick Cleary might come to him, and rather than let Patrick ambush him on a darkened street while he jogged with music blasting in his ears, Dean put in some research.

At 7 AM that Friday, he parked outside the front gates at the Rockland Mine, down the far west end of Quarry Road. Patrick worked the overnight shift, seven to seven. Dean had learned this from Gene Evans, who seemed to know an awful lot about Patrick for someone who hadn't spoken to him in years, aside from that recent late-night phone call. He and Dean had caught up over a beer. The meeting had mostly been about acquiring information, so Dean had tried to keep the conversation light. Gene was an engineer (he hadn't specified what type of engineer, and Dean hadn't inquired), and had married Linda Braun right out of high school. Dean vaguely remembered her, a mousey thing with flat-cut bangs, and congratulated him. Gene and Linda Evans had three kids. In the photos, Dean saw they all had Eugene's lustrous dark hair and beady black eyes. Gene had gotten too drunk, perhaps sensing Dean's distance, and had eventually begun to cry and paw at Dean, begging for forgiveness. Dean had put him in a cab and sent him home. He'd gone back to the bar and paid their tab.

"Awww, you kittens okay?" the beefy bartender had asked.

"Mind your fucking business," Dean had responded, and left the jerk without a tip.

Patrick came out of the mine entrance at ten after seven, laughing. He whipped his trucker cap up in the air like Mary Tyler Moore. It caught in the wind, and he had to run and duck to catch it before it hit the ground. Decent reflexes. He was still large-framed, bigger than Dean had remembered. But he was scrawny, the sort of wiry fitness an ectomorph built up from physical labor, without concentration on specific muscle groups. If he had to, if Patrick decided one punch wasn't quite enough, Dean felt he could subdue him. He was used to fighting more than one man at a time, after all. Sometimes, as he had in the desert, even women.

Just past the gates, a friend picked Patrick up in a beat-to-shit F150 (legend had it Patrick's pickup had been impounded for his drunk driving), and they drove off south out of town. Casino bound? Probably. Off to spend their paychecks on nickel slots and hard drinking. Gene had mentioned Patrick hadn't had a girlfriend in years, which didn't seem likely. Good old boys like Pat Cleary always had someone to manhandle and treat like shit. Gene believed Patrick frequented prostitutes.

As the pickup rumbled past the Vogel family Volvo, Dean got a good look at Patrick's scar, and sucked in a wincing breath, the truth of it hitting him like a cinderblock. The ragged scar tore a line from the corner of his lips and up over his ear. His shaggy brown rat's-nest hair stopped at the pink gash, then resumed below it in a straggly sideburn. He hadn't even tried to hide it, sweeping his hair back under his cap instead of down over the old wound, wearing it like a badge of honor. The lips themselves were downturned on that side, like a man with Bell's palsy. No, Dean decided, this man had no girlfriend. The man might never have had a girlfriend.

Fucking disfigured him, Dean-o. Jesus Christ. I turned the guy into a goddamn circus freak.

Dean bit down on the back of his fist, studying his eyes in the mirror. Regret stared back at him. He hadn't wanted this. He was honestly sorry for what he'd done, he knew that now. But Patrick had been a monster before Dean hit him with the cinderblock. The injury had just made Patrick's face into a mirror, reflecting the ugliness inside and projecting it to the world.

Dean wondered if Sandman walked with crutches now, or a cane. He'd definitely have a limp, maybe for the rest of his life.

At home that night, Dean lay in the dark, picturing Patrick's scars. He imagined the heft and feel of the concrete chunk in his hand as he swung out with it, the crunch of bone, the breaking-glass sound of Patrick's teeth shattering, the shudder up to his elbow and the pain settling there like he'd hit his funny bone. Patrick hadn't shown up to school for the next week, even the next month. For a while, the other kids had given Dean curious, fearful looks, the sort of looks they might have given a tiger in a cage.

And then, sometime during the summer of that same school year, something funny had happened: Dean realized he'd forgotten all about Patrick. Eugene had smiled awkwardly at him in the street, riding by on his BMX. Life had gone on, and the massive part Patrick had played in his earlier life had never been missed. It was, for a time, as if Patrick Cleary had never existed.

Dean had graduated, moved on. He'd gone to school for archeology, and found it incredibly boring, like being a maid for ancient civilizations with all that dusting and Ziplocking. Patrick had stayed in Dark Pines, starting work at the Rockland Mine at 16, doing odd jobs until they'd let him work underground. A fine job for a Dark Pines boy without an education. He drank. He gambled. He whored.

Dean had dropped out of school, never really fitting in. He'd spiraled for a while, directionless, had gotten into drugs and hard liquor, hitting a new bar almost every night. He'd started at the Garland Sugar factory when his student loan had run out, working and maintaining the centrifuges which separated sugar granules from the "mother liquor," a phrase that reminded him of his mom's boxed wine. It had been a decent job with decent pay, and the best part was when he punched out, he no longer had to think about it.

He'd considered going back to school the following semester for psychology (an attempt to follow once again in Uncle Tim's footsteps), but it would have meant taking more high school courses, and the equivalencies were too demanding, especially with the constant boozing, and his weekend regimen of weed, Ecstasy and cocaine. By the time he'd been laid-off during the financial crisis, he'd worked at the sugar plant ten years. His young life had slipped by him, barely remembered through a haze of toxins. He'd had girlfriends, but none steady, no one to write home about. The moment they'd seen what a lost cause he was, they'd all run. No friends he'd have called close. Where did you go when you ran out of options? The Armed Forces seemed the best, and somehow easiest, choice.

That was how Dean Vogel and Patrick Cleary, two very different men—one smart, one thickheaded, one middle-class, the other poor, one with all the opportunities in the world, the other limited by the cards he'd been dealt—had ended up in virtually the same place during the summer of their middle-school reunion.

Dean had taken Patrick's choices away from him. But Patrick had done the same for him, long before Dean returned the favor. They were men haunted by the mistakes of the past. Gingerbread Men. Dean had run all the way across the world; Patrick had run in place. But the past would always catch up with them.

And someday it would eat them whole.

ON SUNDAY, DEAN was jogging along Quarry Road toward Dark Pines Estates on the outskirts of town, close to the river lock. The estates, in this case, were mobile homes. He jogged rather than drove because he wanted to meet Patrick with a clear head, and jogging put him in a Zen state. Also, Dean had found bumping up the adrenaline before a conflict helped keep the mind and body sharp when that conflict arose.

Just outside of town, an orange sign declared: DANGER COUGAR IN AREA.

Here be dragons, Dean thought. Beware of dog. Caution: Patrick Cleary sighted. Do not feed the fuckin' animal.

He chuckled.

A honk startled him. He threw a look over his shoulder, still jogging on the soft gravel shoulder of the road, and recognized the approaching hatchback as the same car from Catherine's driveway. The sun reflecting off its windshield, he couldn't see inside at the driver. Probably the man he'd met the other week, Catherine Priest's husband—though, most likely, her name was no longer Priest.

The passenger window zipped down as the car crept alongside him. He slowed enough to peer inside.

Catherine sat hunched over the drive shaft, looking up at him, just as perfect as ever. "Dean Vogel," she said with a grin. She looked out at the empty road, the miles and miles of pine stands and farmland ahead of them. "What are you doing out here?"

For a moment, Dean couldn't speak. He caught his breath, swallowed. "J-jogging," he said finally.

"I can see that. Jogging where? The lock? There's nothing out here but cows and trees."

"I like the view," he managed, between breaths. "It's peaceful. What are—" Another swallow. "What are you doing out here?"

"Grandmother's house I go," Catherine said with a somewhat desolate grin.

Dean peered into the back seat. "I don't see a picnic basket," he said.

"What?"

"Never mind."

"Actually, I'm on my way to visit her in the hospital. Alzheimer's, Parkinson's: you name it, she's got it. I'm supposed to see her today, but I've got some errands to run in the city first." She scrutinized him. "You know, there is something between here and the city, but it's not much to look at." She left a pregnant pause, long enough for Dean to realize what she meant. "Dark Pines Estates?" she said. "The trailer park?"

"Never heard of it."

Her face lighted with an awed smile. "You're going to see him, aren't you?"

"I don't... I don't know who you're—"

"Oh, come on, Dean. You know you could never lie to me." An eyebrow rose. "You sure could run, but you never could lie."

Dean relented, nodding.

"You know he wants to kill you, don't you? You're not—? Dean, you're not going to hurt him again, are you?"

"For your information, Catherine, I'm going there to apologize."

She laughed and shook her head. "You must have a death wish." She opened the passenger door. "Well, come on. Get in."

"I thought you were visiting Grandma."

"If you're going to let Patrick Cleary bash your head in, you'll probably want a witness."

Dean laughed. "Real nice." He looked up ahead. Trailer Park Road wasn't even in sight yet, let alone the estates themselves. "All right," he said, and slipped in beside her.

"YOU KNOW I thought that was you at the store, two or three weeks back," she said as she drove. Her eyes never left the road, hands never roaming from ten and two. She wore a buttoned-up white blouse and a black skirt, flesh-toned pantyhose and flat black shoes, and still draped herself in the same perfume, a flowery, orange scent that filled the car yet wasn't at all overpowering. "Then my cousin mentioned a strange man at the door. Described you to a tee."

"Your cousin?"

"You met him. In his robe and those silly little fuzzy slippers of his?"

Dean clued in. "Oh! Your cousin!" Suddenly self-conscious, he dialed down his enthusiasm. "Seems like a nice guy."

Finally, she favored him with a glance. The scrunchie was in—red today. The gray in her hair was more prominent in the sun, as were the fine lines around her lips and eyes. Dean thought they made her somehow prettier than she'd been. She didn't try to erase them, hiding herself with makeup and hair dye, presenting herself as a woman who had lived—maybe not an easy life, or a particularly exciting one, but a life. Catherine had the look of someone who knew her best days were ahead; looking at her made Dean feel the same. "You thought he was my boyfriend," she said, before returning her gaze to the windshield.

"Husband, actually," he said.

She raised her left hand off the wheel a moment. No ring—why hadn't he noticed when he'd seen her at the grocery store? She threw him another glance, a smile in the eyes but not on the lips.

"You really don't have to come with me," he said.

"It's no trouble. Besides, someone needs to protect you. Unless you're hoping to find a cinderblock on Patrick's lawn."

The joke caught him off guard. He didn't know how to react.

"I'm sorry," she said. "That wasn't funny, was it?"

"No, it... Yeah, it wasn't funny. But it's okay."

"And I guess we really don't have time to fill each other in on our lives. There's Trailer Park Road."

"You know I always found that weird. The road's called 'Trailer Park' but the trailer park's called 'Estates.'"

"Probably couldn't get the city to change it."

"Yeah." Silence. "Can I turn on the radio?"

"Nervous?"

"About Patrick?" He shook his head too eagerly. "No. I've been practicing. I've played out every scenario a dozen times."

Her nostrils flared. "But you are nervous."

He nodded. "You make me nervous."

She laughed. "Oh god, Dean! Still?"

"Always," he said. He remembered the invitation he'd gotten in the mail, wondered if she would go to the reunion. "Hey, you're not—"

Catherine glanced at him, curious. "What?"

"Nothing. Never mind."

She shook her head and flicked the turn signal. Tick-tock-tick-tock. They turned onto Trailer Park Road.

"Well. This is it," she said forebodingly.

"This is it," he agreed. His right hand gripped the storage compartment in the door as they approached the attendant station. Catherine zipped down her window. A plump woman in her 50s sat behind the glass, wearing a sweater with I (HEART) MY GRANDKIDS printed on it, and regarded them with a smile from under her bucket hat. "Welcome to Dark Pines Estates, how can I help you?"

"We're looking for the Cleary Estate," Catherine said.

Dean snorted laughter. The woman eyed him with scorn before consulting her book. "Number 37. Go two blocks up, and take a left. Mr. Cleary's house is at the end."

"Thank you very much, ma'am," Catherine said, and drove ahead. The lady looked after them, then busied herself with something at the desk. It looked to Dean like she'd picked up the phone. Maybe someone had called in, but maybe—

You're being paranoid, Dean-o.

—she was calling out.

"Last house on the left," Catherine said. "How apropos."

"I don't know what that means."

She snickered.

And there it was: the epitome of bottom-rung. The other homes were pleasant little single- and double-wides, most of them, anyhow, with flower pots and shrubbery and barbeques and neat little rectangles of lawn. Some were flecking paint, but many were vibrantly colored. As far as mobile homes went, they really were estates.

Patrick's, on the other hand, was a caravan resting on cinderblocks. Every bit of metal exposed to the elements was rusty, the license plate rendered unreadable, and nearly all of the paint had flaked off the sides. Four ruts lay in front of the door where his truck had once been parked. The motorcycle hidden under a tarp hadn't been moved in a long while; dirt and pine needles were crusted into the treads. Crushed beer cans lay just about everywhere, cigarette butts everywhere else. A tree stump chopped off and skinned at a height of three or four feet had a length of frayed yellow rope tied around it. A kettle BBQ, the kind that eats charcoal in its orange Pac-Man mouth, stood at the foot of the steps. The place smelled like burnt meat, lighter fluid and urine.

"Wow," Catherine said. "This is end of the road, all right."

"Yeah," Dean said. He wasn't surprised. The Cleary family hadn't had much to begin with; it wasn't as though Patrick had started from the top, and Dean had taken the rest away with an almost casual swipe of a concrete block. He wasn't pleased with what he'd done. He felt no sense of Schadenfreude.

She unbuckled her seatbelt. "Well? You sure you still want to do this?"

Dean stared at the blinds in the darkened windows, some slats broken, others bent, a few missing entirely. In one window, likely the bedroom, Patrick had draped an AC/DC Highway to Hell flag sideways. "I have to," he said, and opened the door. It took him another moment to muster the courage to haul himself out. Catherine got out on her side first, and he followed.

A dog barked inside. A single finger lifted the blinds with an audible scrape against the window pane. Only darkness lay beyond.

As they reached the steps, the screen door swung out violently and banged against the wall. The man stood in the doorway in graying long johns and dirty socks, no shirt. His ribs were visible, the belly distended by beer, giving him the impression of life-threatening malnutrition, but men like him were built to last. A few tattoos adorned the pale skin above his farmer's tan: an anchor on his right upper arm, blue and mostly faded, a blood-red heart with some word in a scroll—MOM?—on the left, the phrase BAD 2 THE BONE in black calligraphic letters etched over his left nipple, and THOROGOOD over the right.

The door swung back. He caught it without taking his eyes from his visitors.

"Ohh, well well well," Patrick Cleary said with caustic good cheer. "Looky looky looky, the gang's all here, huh?" The scar was even worse up close. It hadn't split cleanly, as Dean had thought when he was a kid. The wound was jagged, carved upward in a rugged grimace, giving the left side of his face a vaguely amphibious look, crocodilian. Where the scar met his lips, a bubbly white crust had formed. Fresh spittle pooled there, and he sucked it away as his gaze shifted between Catherine and Dean: a man following a tennis match. "Guess you couldn't wait for the reunion? Had to drive all the way out to Dark Pines Shit-states in your prissy little hatchback and see me post-fuckin'-haste, that right?"

Catherine had stopped a few feet behind Dean. She came to his side now.

"You bring the cooze for backup?" Patrick wondered with an amused little grin. He twiddled his fingers at Catherine. "Hi, cooze. Been a long time."

"Fuck you, Patty."

"Heh, yeah. Fuck me. She got some mouth on her. I bet you like that, huh, Pean?" His eyes remained on Catherine, twinkling with mischief. "That pretty, smart little mouth."

"Leave her alone," Dean said.

Patrick's eyes returned to his quarry. "It speaks," he said. "I was pretty sure for a while there you only barked. Woof-woof, Peaner. Woof fuckin'—" He seemed to remember something, and peered back inside the house. "Where is that shithead fuckin' dog, anyways?" He called out: "You best not be on my bed, Dean! I will whup your sorry ass, you mangy mutt!"

Catherine grasped Dean's arm. He turned to look at her, saw her teeth clenched, the jaw squared, her lips curled in a snarl.

Patrick turned back to them. "That's right, I called the fuckin' dog Dean. How ya like that, shithead?"

"That's pretty funny, Patrick," Dean admitted.

"It is, ain't it? You know what I like most about having a dog?" His eyes twinkled. "I come home after a long, shitty day at the pits, and he wags his tail, lookin' up at me with those dopey bloodhound eyes, and I don't pet him—no sir. You wanna know what I do?"

"I don't think so."

Patrick ignored him. "I give him a swift kick in his sorry ass, that's what. And he'll whimper and scurry off to the bedroom, and when I come to bed, he licks my fuckin' hand. Because that's what a good dog does." He beamed a smile at them, proud of his viciousness. "It takes its lickin', and begs for more."

The two men studied each other, gunslingers at high noon, though it was only just past nine, and neither man was armed. At least, Dean hoped Patrick wasn't carrying.

"I came to apologize," Dean said, "but I see now that was a mistake. You never changed—no, that's not right. You got worse. You're a sadistic, violent piece of shit, and I'm glad for what I did to you."

"Bad to the motherfuckin' bone," Patrick conceded, dragging the back of a thumb along his scar. "I ain't changin' for nobody."

"Let's go," Dean said, holding out a hand to Catherine. She gave him a surprised look, then took it. They turned back to the car.

"Uh-uh, oh hell no," Patrick said from behind them. "You don't turn your back on me, you little fuck."

Dean looked back in time to see Patrick jerk a revolver out from the back of his long underwear as he took to the steps. His sock feet squelched in a mud puddle at the foot of the stairs. The Smith & Wesson Model 19, the short-barreled version of Dirty Harry's .357 Magnum, jet-black instead of chrome, and riddled with scuff-marks. He aimed it somewhere between Dean and Catherine; the ambiguity of his aim made it all the more lethal. He could just as easily shoot Catherine as his intended victim. Or both of them.

"Get the fuck in the house," Patrick said.

"He's not gonna shoot us," Catherine said, urging Dean along by his hand. "There's people everywhere."

"You think I give a fuck about that, cooze? What do I got to lose, huh?" He clenched his jaw, cocking his head to the side. The scar showed pink and jagged in the morning sun. "Get in the fuckin' house." His visitors didn't move; he pulled the hammer back with his thumb—a needless move, since the hammer snapped back on its own when the trigger was pulled. The intent was not to expedite the bullet's journey, however, but to frighten, and in that, it was successful. "Now, goddammit!"

They moved reluctantly to his side. He waved them past with the barrel of the gun, and they rose the stairs into Patrick's trailer.

The dog greeted them at the door, a sad-faced bloodhound, seated on its haunches and growling softly at them. Dean bent and held out a hand to him, palm-up, in a gesture of peace.

"Don't you fuckin' touch my dog," Patrick snapped, stepping inside. The dim interior smelled like beer and dog food and dry farts. He peered out into the bright of day, then closed and bolted the door behind them. Dean the dog rose to sniff at his feet and Patrick booted him lightly away. It hobbled off to the kitchenette and began licking from its scummy, fly-specked water dish.

"Sit on the sofa." Patrick pointed toward a brown tartan thing, lumpen and dangerous with springs. A fuzzy, tiger print blanket was curled up on one end as if he'd slept there. They sat. A cloud of dust rose; crumbs and coins and a double-A battery were visible in the unnaturally wide chasm between cushions. The dog laid down in the kitchen with his head on his paws, and growled.

"Shut up, Dean!"

An old coffee table that could just as well have come from the dump as the Sally Ann stood between them and the tube TV, which flickered and buzzed and shifted horizontally, a religious program on mute, the rabbit ears on top so bent they appeared mutilated.

"Think you can insult me in my own fuckin' home and get away with it, huh?"

"Patty, this is ridic—"

He struck out and slapped Catherine backhanded across the cheek, shutting her up immediately. Dean reached out to grab Patrick's arm, and the man trained the pistol on him, still eyeing Catherine with malicious glee.

"Don't you fuckin' 'Patty' me, cooze." His mouth worked as he considered his next move, the scar wriggling unpleasantly. "All right, stand up," he said with a sigh of finality. They looked at each other, and stood. "Not you." He sneered at Catherine. "Just the faggit." She gave Dean a panicked look. Dean nodded, grimly, and she sat back down. "I'll deal with you later. I'm gonna fuckin' enjoy the shit outta this, Dean."

"I know you are, Patrick."

"I was talking to the fuckin' dog!"

Dean's teeth clacked together, startled by the sudden ferocity.

"Get the fuck in the corner, by the shitter. I'm gonna give you a swirlie before I send you night-night, sweet prince. One. Last. Swirlie." His eyes were wild, bugged-out. "For old time's sake. Ain't that fuckin' funny, Peaner? Ain't that a goddamn laff riot?"

"This is insane," Catherine said.

"You know, if she was my bitch, I bet I could make her shut up." He threw a wink at her. "Maybe I'll make her sing instead, when all's said 'n done."

"Let her go," Dean said. "This is between you and me." And because he knew it would fan the fire, he added: "I'm the one who did that to your face."

Patrick cracked him on the forehead with the gun barrel. Fireworks shot across his vision, but the pain was less than he'd expected. "Ain't nothin' wrong with my face, faggit. You didn't hurt me. Like fuck you did. You were a snivelin' little pussy back then and you're a snivelin' little pussy now." He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger, and held it near his groin. Dean glanced before realizing he'd fallen into Patrick's childish trap, and Patrick punched Dean in the shoulder. The blow didn't hurt—too much muscle built up there, not like when they were kids—but Dean stumbled back from it, knowing it was what Patrick required.

"Still peekin' at dicks, huh, faggit?" He punched him twice more. "Two more for fuckin' flinching." The scar making his pleased smile lopsided. Patrick sucked away spittle, the way Catherine used to when she'd had her braces. With her, it had been endearing; in Patrick, it was yet another feature of the monster he'd always been.

"Turn around and git in there," he said, indicating the small bathroom, fragrant with the man's piss.

Dean did as he was told.

The growl from the living room startled him, but he didn't dare turn. The shower was to his immediate left, the sink above the toilet. With very little space to move, he just had to hope there was enough. He had a plan, though it was contingent on Patrick getting in close for the swirlie. Dean was going to allow it: one last swirlie, for old time's sake, just like Patrick had said. And with his head in the toilet, when he was sure Patrick was smiling his crocodile smile from ear to ear (literally, on one side), he would reach behind himself and get Patrick in a headlock, catching him off guard. No one fought back post-flush—but most people hadn't been detained in Bagram. A swirlie was child's play compared to some of the atrocities he'd seen there, and had succumbed to himself. He'd smash Patrick's head into the toilet tank, shake the toilet water out of his own hair, and snatch up the gun. It was all so simple... if only he could be sure it would work.

But there was no alternative. He couldn't risk Catherine being in the line of fire, and he was certain once Patrick finished with the swirlie, he would not hesitate to blast his, Dean's, brains into the toilet bowl. It was the only way.

The growl continued. Patrick stood breathing down Dean's neck, and shouted, "Shut! The fuck! Up! Dean, you dumb fuckin' mutt!" right in his ear. His breath was sour, yeasty, even at nine in the morning.

The growl became a snarl, suddenly very close.

"What the fuck—?" Patrick said. There came a clack of claws on the linoleum, and then Patrick was screaming. He fell against Dean, pushing him up against the wall. He was shaking spastically, and the dog was ferocious. Good ol' Dean-o, Dean thought, finally fighting back. In the smudgy mirror, he saw what was happening. But the image was warped, and—

It was no bloodhound latched onto Patrick's arm, drawing blood, shaking him in its jaws.

It was a White Shepherd, its fur streaked with red.

Patrick locked the door, Dean thought. I saw him lock it. Where the fuck did the dog come from?

Dean heard the gun clatter onto the tiles. He tried to reach down and feel for it on the floor, but the dog had Patrick pressing him up against the wall. Dean's nose ground into the mirror, he snatched another look at the dog. It looked just like Catherine's. For a moment, it locked eyes with him, the whites clearly visible, the eyes unnaturally green. The jaws, clamped down on Patrick's crimson-streaked arm—pink bone beginning to peak out in places now as the dog tore and tore and tore back the flesh and muscle—seemed almost to be fixed in a smile.

The jaws let go suddenly, and Patrick fell to his knees, weeping, grasping at his arm by the elbow. Dean whipped round to face the door as the dog reared back into the living room.

Somebody better call the ASPCA, he thought with a wild, internal cackle. Fuck it, call Sarah McLachlan!

The dog launched itself at Patrick's throat. There was a bloody squelch and the brittle crackle of Patrick's trachea breaking, separating beneath the Shepherd's powerful jaws as a great jet of blood spurted along the dog's flank, drenching Patrick's chest and shoulders, obscuring his silly tattoos. Still it shook, like a terrier shaking a rat, and Patrick's head lolled back and forth on his bloodied neck. He choked, his tongue moving like some undersea worm rising from its hole, more blood gurgling up from his throat and splashed down his face. He sounded like a man drowning, which, of course, he was: drowning in his own blood.

His eyes went blank, and still the dog worried at his neck, gnawing at it like a favorite bone. A moment later, there was a sound like meat peeling apart and Patrick's tendons snapped like elastics. Dean slumped down onto the toilet and vomited his breakfast shake into the sink.

He heard the growling stop and the paws clack away. Certain he was the next item on the menu, Dean remained motionless, wouldn't turn. During his time at Bagram, he'd seen what dogs like this could do, had witnessed it up close and personal just now. The dog had established its dominance. He didn't dare make eye contact.

For a long moment, there was silence. In the kitchen, the sink turned on with a squeak, and water splashed into the metal basin. Dean wiped the puke from his lips and chin. He tore off the last scrap of toilet paper on the roll to swipe a few spots of Patrick's blood from his cheek and ear and forehead. Somehow the TP had managed to remain untouched by all the gore, but everything else was painted with it: the toilet tank, the mirror, the sink fixtures, the interior of the shower, the bar of Ivory soap in the dish. Patrick himself was slumped on his side at Dean's feet, half in the shower, half out, a sticky red puddle gurgling into the drain. His head rested at an impossible angle, the back of it nearly touching his shoulder blades, the throat opened in a yawning, toothless second mouth.

Dean stepped over him into the living room, tracking blood onto the filthy carpet. He found Catherine buttoning up her blouse and facing the kitchenette, where Dean the bloodhound continued to growl. Her hair was loose and damp, cascading over her shoulders.

"Good dog," she said to it, and turned to look at Dean the man. Her lips were deep red, as if she'd been drinking wine to toast Patrick's death. But it wasn't wine on her lips: it was Patrick's blood. Dean understood everything now. It had always been there, under his nose the whole time—he just hadn't had enough information to sniff it out. Why no one had ever seen the Priests' dog, only heard it. Why Catherine's father had never allowed her to play with the other kids, to socialize after school, and why he'd always kept her under such close scrutiny, after her mother had died giving birth to her. Why they'd never allowed visitors.

The dog was Catherine; Catherine was the dog.

Had she always been—he laughed at the thought—a weredog? Or had she been bitten? Was she living under a curse?

Too much, he thought. Too fucking much. I'm in love with a dog. Jesus. Jesus Christ...

"H-how long...?" He found he couldn't finish the sentence, and only swallowed. Her nostrils flared. She'd flared them before in the car, he remembered. But you are nervous, she'd said.

"Don't be afraid," she said now. "I'm not going to hurt you."

Dean nodded, but he was afraid; he'd always been nervous around Catherine, and now he knew the reason. Perhaps on some level he'd always known. She sat to pull on her pantyhose, curling her toes to shimmy both feet in at once, pulling them to her knees and then wriggling into them as she explained herself: "He was going to kill you, Dean, and then he would have tried to kill me, probably rape me if he'd gotten the chance before the police showed up." She shrugged, stood up and flattened her skirt. "I had no choice."

"You're—"

"An animal?"

Dean nodded again, stupidly.

"We're all animals, Dean," she said. She smiled roguishly, approaching him. "Only some of us are... more animal than others." She pressed herself against him, brushed her cold, wet nose against his cheek, his lips.

Dean slid his hand into her silken hair and kissed her.

THEY DROVE IN silence for a time, neither of them knowing quite what to say. It was over now—all of it. The past was a closed book. There was only the future, and the future was strange new territory.

Uncharted waters.

"Why did you run away?" Catherine asked as they drove past the Dark Pines town sign, heading down into the valley. "After the Ferris wheel."

Dean sighed heavily. "Because I was a coward. I always run. It's what I do."

"You weren't, though. I saw how brave you were, standing up against Patrick and his friends." She turned to him, eyes dazzling in the low afternoon sun. "I smelled you. You weren't afraid." She shrugged. "You stopped being afraid the second you saw what you'd done to Joel."

That wasn't how Dean remembered it, but his memory had failed him before. And dogs could smell fear—or so people said. Wouldn't Catherine know better?

"I've done bad things," Dean said.

"We do what we have to, to survive."

"I didn't, though. I shot a man in the kneecap for no reason."

"I just tore a man's head off with my teeth," Catherine said, cheerless. "Let he who is without sin cast the first cinderblock."

Dean turned to her, open-mouthed. Then he snorted a laugh. Catherine joined him.

"Just because Patrick wouldn't forgive you," she said, once they'd stopped laughing, "it doesn't mean you don't deserve forgiveness. I forgive you. Your family forgives you. Now you just need to forgive yourself."

"Thanks," he said. Silence fell again, with only the sound of the macadam rumbling under the tires as they drove further into town. She was smiling to herself. This is it, Dean-o. Now or never. It's only two weeks away. "Hey," he said, "did you get that invitation for the reunion?"

"Last week." She studied the road. "You gonna go?"

"I wasn't going to," he said, and she nodded as if she hadn't planned to go, either. "But I'm thinking I might. And I was wondering..." The words caught in his throat.

Catherine laughed. "God, Dean, you still can't ask?"

"Will you go with me?" he said hurriedly. "Be my date?"

She looked at him. "You sure you don't mind having a dog for a date?"

Dean laughed. Her face clouded over, growing serious. He put a hand on her leg. "I want nothing more," he told her, and it was true.

When Catherine smiled at him, there was a hopeful quality to it that reminded Dean of the time she'd kissed him on the Ferris wheel. It hadn't been the first time she'd kissed him—their first kiss had been in her backyard, the big White Shepherd licking his lips and the tears off his face. Her smile on the Ferris wheel held anticipation, excitement, and most of all, confidence. Because with that kiss, she thought she'd finally found someone who might understand her. This smile was the same.

Dean returned it, giving back as much as he got. They drove on to her house. This time, she let him inside.

FAT OF THE LAND

I -An Invitation

"DAMMIT, WHERE THE hell is it, June?"

June didn't know the "it" he was talking about, let alone where he'd left it. What she did know was that David had been stomping around the hotel room while she got herself ready to go, huffing every once in a while in the hope of getting her attention.

Now he came and stood at the bathroom door, hands planted on his hips, a little Superman curl falling over the sulky scowl of a petulant child. She was putting in the earrings he'd gotten her for their anniversary the previous year. She hadn't been in love with them, but she was in love with David—or imagined she was, when he wasn't acting like he was now—and it made him happy when she wore them. And she did look good with them in: rectangular panels of jade and something iridescent like fool's gold, which made the green in her otherwise-brown eyes pop.

June flashed him a smile in the mirror. "What are you looking for, hon?"

"It was right there on the table when we left for breakfast, and now it's gone," he said, not quite answering the question.

June's girlfriends had once asked if she and David wanted kids. "I've already got one kid to worry about, thanks," she'd told them. The girls had all laughed at that, but it had been indulgent laughter; they all wanted children, and they all wanted to get married (being married had always seemed less important to them than the Big Day itself). Of the four of them, June was the only one currently in a relationship—unless you counted Ally's "sleeping arrangement" with her current "man friend," which of course, no one did.

After two years with David, one of those years spent living under the same roof in their tasteful yet cramped Noe Valley condo, the two of them had been happy enough not to get married.

Not that he'd ever ask you, June thought, and scowled at herself in the mirror. Thoughts like this belonged to Althea Dreese, her mother. Shut up, Mother, June shot back, putting an end to it.

Max and Darren, whose wedding they'd driven down from San Francisco to Monte Verde to attend, had been quick to remind June and David that they'd only been dating two years, and would have leapt at the chance to marry earlier. They'd even considered flying to Washington or Iowa to get hitched, before the Supreme Court had struck down the so-called Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional.

"Imagine," Max Morales had said, "the Heartland of America allowing same-sex marriage before the gayest state in the country!"

June was aware Massachusetts had probably been the forerunner in that respect, but she hadn't corrected him. Max didn't deal well with criticism (Did any man? she sometimes wondered), and June was rarely comfortable doling it out, at least toward anyone but herself.

David awaited her response. She tried to remember what had been on the table when they'd left for breakfast. They'd spent their first night at the moderately expensive Seaside Inn & Gardens in Monte Verde, and after setting a fire in the hearth and making a weary attempt at sexual congress, both of them had virtually passed out from exhaustion.

There was the Nikon, of course, along with a half dozen rolls of film (in addition to two books' worth of published photos, June currently had one project on the go: this area of the California coast would be perfect for the movie Just Swell, a Bridges of Madison County for baby-boom surfers, for which she was scouting locations). Then there was her purse, their respective sunglasses, the car keys, the personalized wedding invitation from Americo Morales, a baggie of wintergreen Canada mints, another of trail mix—

"The invitation," June said aloud.

"The invitation," David agreed. "Did you put it somewhere?"

"I didn't touch it," she said truthfully. "Why would I?"

He threw his hands up in exasperation. "Well, I don't know..." He was at the end of his rope. The letter was their invitation, and on it was the address, not to the wedding of Americo's son, Maximo, but to an ultra-exclusive party at one of Monte Verde's many multi-million dollar oceanfront mansions—Americo Morales's mansion. Regularly featured on Forbes' list of the richest people in America, Morales was Chairman and CEO of Trimaricorp, one of the largest design firms on the West coast. They'd come for the wedding, and scouting locations would cover June's portion of the costs. It just so happened that Darren's boss owned a house here, and held an ultra-exclusive party in said mansion on Independence Day weekend every year.

David had read the letter aloud in amazement when he'd gotten it, his first ever invite to Morales's famous 4th Party: "You have been chosen to join in an orgiastic celebration of Mankind's greatness, on the birthday of the most prosperous Goddamn nation the world has ever seen."

"Is that sarcasm?" she'd wondered aloud at the time.

Morales was a fascinating eccentric, his philanthropic contributions earmarked for research in alternative fuels, green engineering and space exploration, a peculiar combination that seemed to June to suggest interplanetary conquest. When she'd mentioned this, David had looked at her queerly. "You think too much," he'd said.

She'd met the man when David had given her a tour of the office, a year or so back. Morales, a lean, muscular man in his mid-50s with the kind of hair they talk about in ads for men's hair-coloring, had been running on the treadmill in his office, wearing a shimmering skin-tight outfit that looked like the workout clothes of a comic-book hero. His office was the same size and height as the atrium downstairs, though this vast, virtually empty room was on the penthouse floor. On one matte-black wall a print of Francisco Goya's ghastly Saturn Devouring His Son hung, in which the titan, a giant, jaundiced troll, gnawed at a bloodied human torso. Perpendicular to the painting was a "living wall": water trickled down from somewhere, through lush, dark vegetation dotted with strange and beautifully exotic flowers. Directly across from this urban jungle the city skyline spread out across the Bay: the TransAmerica Pyramid and the Triple Nickel; the piers of Embarcadero, Treasure Island and the Bay Bridge; and Berkeley beyond.

Morales had slowed the treadmill, briefly toweled himself, and tossed it aside into a black granite bin below racks of fresh white linen. He'd approached with an outstretched hand and a charming smile. "You must be June," he'd said, face glistening with sweat, his eyes as bright as the sky above them. "It's a pleasure to finally meet you."

She'd muttered something about the pleasure being hers, but frankly, she'd been overwhelmed. June, who'd grown up with a silver spoon in her mouth (a tarnished antique, to be sure, the Dreese family fortune having traveled with them on the Mayflower, but silver, nonetheless), had never seen anything like this before. And Morales himself, aside from his morning haircut, manicured nails and bonded teeth, had been unexpectedly unpretentious, with none of the stuffy, old-money attitude Althea Dreese's side of the family seemed to have had ingrained in them.

"It'll be fine," David had assured her, as he read the invite for the second time. "We'll have a few drinks—not too many," he'd added, no doubt remembering the New Year's party when she'd gone overboard and ended up spending most of the night laid out in Darren's bathtub. "We'll schmooze a bit—not too much. You'll see. They're good people, June." And while she'd finished up the dishes in the sink, David, having conveniently forgotten the intended purpose of the damp dish towel slung over his shoulder, had ambled off to the living room to marvel over the invitation once more.

June, meanwhile, had been worried. The idea of living among them again—the rich, so-called "important people"—it made her generally queasy.

Good people, she'd thought dismissively. Easy enough for a kid who grew up in a middle-class neighborhood to say. Live with the Other Half awhile, Davey my boy, then tell me what you think of them.

Now they were in Monte Verde, one of the worst offenders in a state with the highest income gap, and Americo Morales's 4th Party loomed at the end of the weekend, the antithesis of what June felt would be an otherwise wonderful weekend on the Big Sur coast. Already they'd seen dolphins frolicking in the wake of a group of tanned, broad-shouldered surfer boys, as waves beat upon the shore and the sun stirred a colorful cocktail at the knife edge of the ocean. They'd already strolled through sequoias and redwoods stretching beyond sight. They'd seen baby deer grazing among dense wildflowers along a jagged rock face, a hundred feet above a green cove, and dozens, hundreds of elephant seals roasting on small rock islands in the afternoon sun, cooling themselves in the dark, algae-streaked water below. Her Nikon had snapped a hundred pictures, but it could not capture—no matter how hard she tried—the precise feel of these sights. Even as a professional photographer she had her limitations (which, she supposed, was why her books hadn't sold all that many copies).

David was looking at her with frustrated tears rimming his eyes. He's just like your father, Althea Dreese would have said. Go on, give the baby his bottle. She ignored her late mother's scorn, and held out her arms with the anticipated pout. Her man sidled up to her, dragging his feet on the carpeting like a child, and she hugged him. "It's okay," she cooed. "I'm sure it just got mistaken for trash when the maid came through. It shouldn't be too hard to find the house."

"But the invitation..."

"They'll have your name on a list," she assured him.

He looked up at her with moist gray eyes. "They will?"

"You haven't been to many rich-people parties, have you?"

He sniffled. She let him free, and he stepped back and swiped at his nose with the back of his hand. June hated when he did that. Use a tissue, for the love of Pete, her mother nagged inside her head; trying to avoid parroting those nitpicking disapprovals was a constant battle. She allowed him it this once, since he was so clearly distraught. Then David wiped the hand on his pants, and she sighed inwardly, noting the shiny streak he'd made on the right front pocket, and wondering how this nasty little habit had passed unnoticed by his own mother.

"This will be my first," he admitted.

She smiled. "Much as I'm loathe to admit it, I'm a seasoned pro. And I look damn good in a cocktail dress."

David reached out and brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. "You look damn good in anything." He raised a suggestive eyebrow. "And nothing. I'm sorry if I'm being a baby."

"I know how you can make it up to me," she said, and moved toward the bed. David's almost-waterworks display hadn't particularly been a turn-on, but with the two mimosas she'd had at breakfast, it hadn't entirely turned her off. He came willingly enough. So did June. She left in the earrings.

"I DON'T MEAN to be a pest," David said for the second time.

Then why, my dear, are you being one? June wondered. She'd asked him to drop it, assuring him he'd probably misplaced it. But when David Addison set his mind on something, he would see it through. Even their quick romp hadn't shaken the idea of tattling on the maid from his mind, as she'd hoped it would.

They stood at the front desk, David leaning over it casually, resting on his elbows, and June off to the side, looking through the rack of colorful brochures for restaurants and touristy destinations, only half-listening to the conversation. David had an after-sex glow, and was feeling confident.

When they'd first met, Althea Dreese had never much cared for David, son of a small-town car salesman and a teacher—though her opinion of him had brightened considerably when she discovered he'd been taken under the wing of Americo Morales. Morales was, in her mother's words, "a Spaniard," and "new money," both insults in her world, but he was also very prominent in the architectural community. Althea's predatory hooks had latched onto David then, seeing him as an unlikely heir, though certainly not the worst choice for a daughter who'd abandoned her mother as readily as she'd abandoned the family fortune. Althea Dreese had expected grandchildren. When she'd passed the year before, it had been her dying wish: a grandson, to carry on the name. June's father, Herbert Winter, had taken the Dreese family name at his wife's insistence, since his own meant nothing, and it hadn't mattered to him either way.

June had taken particular pleasure in telling her mother that if she married David she'd be taking David's name, and if they had children, she'd name their first son Herbert. Althea Dreese's last breath had been a gasp of horror.

"Oh, it's no trouble at all, Mr. Addison," the clerk said. "We'll have a word with her. In the meantime, how can we make it up to you?"

"We're dying to find a restaurant," June jumped in, and the clerk, an older woman with ash-blonde hair twisted into a horse tail, turned from David to her. Dark, plum-red lipstick made her lips look as if she'd just been gorging on sweet wine in the back room. The lips peeled back in a smile, revealing teeth stained the same color.

"Something special," June went on, avoiding another look at those teeth. "Off the beaten path, but not too out of the way."

"We're foodies," David said with a self-conscious little nod.

The woman's lips peeled back in another smile—redder still, those teeth—and she dropped down into a crouch behind the desk. She came up a moment later holding a business card, which she proffered to June.

June took it and looked it over. It was plain white—Bone white, she thought—with raised gray lettering. There appeared to be a watermark, a shapeless sort of thing, but in the sunlight streaming in from the cottage windows, June couldn't make out its pattern, however much she tried.

AMBROSIA
an Epicurean's Delight!

45 Clarot Blvd.

"Do they have a menu?" David asked. June had felt his hot, minty breath over her shoulder as she studied the card. Rather than tickle at her ear and the sensitive spot on the nape of her neck, which would normally send shivers down her spine, for some reason her stomach twisted into a knot.

"Oh, no," the clerk said, with a penciled-in eyebrow raised, "the menu changes daily. Never the same thing twice. And dinner is served precisely at 7. It's part of their charm." She seemed to notice their dubiousness, and flashed a mollifying smile. "Tourists seem to like it. Why, just last week we had a couple, about your age, who came back simply raving about it."

David was still on the fence. Though he appreciated new things, his acid reflux wasn't a benefit to being adventurous when it came to foods; thankfully for June, he was adventuresome where it counted. "What does it serve?"

"Essentially it's a Spanish tapas," the clerk said. "But it's a hodgepodge of different ethnicities and influences." June assumed the woman meant cultures rather than ethnicities, yet said nothing. "I've never been there myself. I much prefer a home-cooked meal, though the hubby sometimes gets a hankering for burgers and fries at the greasy spoon off Route 1." She gave June a look that said, You know how men are. June nodded enthusiastically: Amen, sister. "Shall I call ahead and make a reservation?" The clerk was already picking up the phone.

David turned to June, raising a quizzical eyebrow. She shrugged in return. If he thought his stomach would be okay with it, she had no objections of her own. "What the heck?" she said. "Let's give it a shot."

"Wonderful!" the clerk said, a little too enthused. "I'm sure they'll just be overjoyed to have you for dinner."

II—Food of the Gods

THE YOUNG MAID rolled her housekeeping trolley out of a small cottage room between the parking lot and the pool as June and David approached the rental car. Hispanic, like the rest of the maids, the pool cleaner, and the man who trimmed the hedges. June noticed, with slight disgust, David lowering his gaze to avoid eye contact as they passed. June herself smiled and waved cheerily.

The people's champion, Althea Dreese mocked from June's subconscious.

Shut up, Mother.

Safely inside the car, David asked, "Did it seem like they were going to fire her to you?" He was ashamed, watching the pleasingly plump young woman in her blue uniform with its frilly bib rolling the cart toward the next row of rooms.

"I think they'll probably just ask her about it," June said, starting the car. It was a cheap little sedan with a surprising amount of what David's dad would call get-up-and-go. "Am I crazy, or did that woman make it sound like this restaurant was gonna put us on the menu?"

David squinted at the maid, then turned to June with a blank expression. A moment later, he broke into laughter. "You're definitely crazy," he said, and laughed again with a shake of his head.

"Are you sure your stomach will be okay?"

"I'll fire a preemptive strike at it with some Pepto." David crossed the seatbelt over his shoulder and locked himself in.

"Where are we headed again?"

"Mission San Adeos," she said. "Or Adios. A-day-os?" They'd been driving a while when David asked her. "If it's boring, we don't have to stay long. I just want to snap a few shots. Then we'll try that restaurant."

"Works for me." He fell silent for a minute or two. June was considering flicking on the radio when he spoke again. "Weird name. Ambrosia, I mean—not the Mission. Isn't ambrosia what the gods ate on Mount Olympus?"

"It's what they call bee pollen, too, I think. Or is that royal jelly?"

"Honey?"

"Not technically."

"No, I mean honey you. That's it up there, isn't it?" He pointed off to the right, where a series of buildings with clay-shingled arches and gables lay below rolling hills of farmland. In the distance, sheep grazed. The setting was so pastoral, its beauty so ethereal in the heat haze of the day it could have been a painting by Thomas Cole.

"Wow," she said, the sort of understatement her mother might have voiced, though she would never have used what she'd no doubt have called such a vulgar word. "It's gorgeous," she added, if only to differentiate herself from her smothering maternal influence. And it was gorgeous, so much so that she had to force herself to pay attention to the road. They drove along in silence for a time, while David snapped a few photos on his cell phone—to what point? June wondered, but let it go—and her mind again returned to the slightly peculiar conversation with the front-desk clerk.

"'An epicurean's fantasy,'" she said mockingly. "If this isn't the best tapas I've ever eaten, I'm going to be disappointed."

"Delight," David said, enlarging the image and twisting his phone to view the no-doubt-blurry photos he'd taken.

"Hmm?"

"It was 'an Epicurean's Delight.'" He turned to watch the scenery drift by. "What is tapas, anyway?"

June looked at him and laughed. Sometimes he was so inexperienced it boggled her mind. She had to remember he was from a different walk of life, and a different part of the country, but she found herself struggling to explain: "It's pretty much just a lot of different dishes and appetizers."

"Like a smorgasbord," he said, pleased with himself.

She felt her lips turn up in an involuntary grin, and patted his head. Beyond him the ocean passed by, endless gray, through the passenger window. He smiled back, silhouetted against the overcast sky, and his tantrum earlier today slipped from her memory, like family money through her fingers.

"COME LOOK AT this," David said.

June was admiring an altar heaped over with religious relics, preserved behind finger-smudged glass: fans of gold representing rays of sunshine, ornate gold crosses, rosaries of black and white pearls, beseeching Madonnas, bleeding Christs, and an elaborate gold chest filled with silver-gray curls of hair belonging to some Saint or another. Inscribed below the mantel were the words Jakobi Uzh Ep a'Hethqa Est. June knew a bit of French and Spanish, and remembered almost nothing of high-school Latin, but it didn't look like any of those languages—maybe Arabic? She snapped a few photographs. She'd taken some nice ones outside: domes carved in crumbling stone, sand skittering on a hot gust of wind through a ruined archway, gaudy statuary and crucifixes and cacti...

Following the sound of David's voice, she left the low-ceilinged antechamber, with its desiccated rafters and macabre relics (the bundle of hair particularly unnerved her, for some reason she couldn't quite grasp), and stepped into a large room. Maps had been painted on the walls, with slogans painted in red; beneath them, glass cases held ancient tools, weapons, whips and chains, alongside artifacts of the Natives who'd owned this land before the white settlers had stolen it from them. Beyond the next doorway lay the church's inner sanctum. Warm light radiated outward from within.

David stood before one of the large maps, a simple drawing, its only colors green, beige and red. At its center was a pretty accurate sketch of the Mission, small and unimposing. Wide-open country, green and empty, surrounded it on all sides. Painted over this were the words THE INDIANS, as red as blood. It was obvious the missionaries had felt alone in this neck of the woods, but for savages and certain death.

Also painted in red, directly across from the map, was the catchy slogan: DECLINE SECULARIZATION RUINATION. This room summed up exactly how she felt about the church's early efforts in her native land, with its dusty antiques and even dustier xenophobia, while beyond the doors to either side lay the shining artifacts of religious opulence. They had arrived under the pretense of spreading God's word, and had conquered instead, buoyed by dreams of Manifest Destiny and a new Eden. The outcome of their immoral victory was put on exhibit without shame.

"Pretty messed up, huh?" David said.

"Just a little bit," she agreed. She snapped a few pictures—again, not quite capturing the feel of it, the menace—then headed into the chapel.

The clouds had parted when they'd stepped out of the car in the Mission's lot, casting down long fingers of sunshine, as if God Himself were reaching out to bless its perfectly lovely sandstone arches, clay rooftops and bell towers. None of that sunlight penetrated the chapel. Chandeliers, and the altar itself, lighted it, their glow bounding off the vaulted ceiling, the gold gilding, and glass-framed paintings of beatified saints. The surprisingly vast room smelled of burning candles, incense and mustiness.

David casually splashed a bit of holy water from the font on his forehead and headed off toward the altar. June grinned at this, then weaved her way up and down the aisles, absently taking photos.

"Hon?" He stood dwarfed beneath the altar.

"What is it?"

"Come look at this."

She sauntered over to his side. He was looking at an old photo under glass, marked with the legend, Father Merced, 1867. The holy man looked wholly unimpressed to be having his photograph taken—the expression reminded her of those old photos of Native Americans, who believed the camera would steal their souls. His brow was creased, his face pitted with dark shadows.

"Creepy dude, huh?" He pointed at the newspaper clipping beneath, which showed the same stern-faced, silver-curled, robed missionary, standing in front of the Mission with his hands tucked into the opposite arm's sleeve. The caption read: Father Merced believes his life's work preserving Monte Verde's Roman Catholic basilica is a Missionem a Deos (Latin: 'Mission from God').

David bent to read another article beside it: 30-Day Standoff Still a Mystery. After a moment of silence, he said, "Listen to this," and read the rest aloud. "'Father Antonioni Merced's infamous standoff with the Yuman tribe in August of 1852, in the middle of what was known as the Yuma War, still baffles local historians. Merced and the few townspeople taking sanctuary at the basilica while a handful of Yuman warriors surrounded it had somehow survived without any source of sustenance aside from font and well water, which they had rationed. After close to thirty days, the United States Army stepped in, easily fighting off the remaining Yuman warriors. When asked to comment on their miraculous survival, a decidedly healthy-looking Merced simply said, 'When we were starved, God brought us food, and we ate.'

"'Local legend has it US Army infantrymen found several small bones littered among the Mission's stove soot believed to be human, although all townspeople imprisoned there were accounted for.'"

He stood and peered around. "Colorful history, this place. You think that's the same stove we saw in the living quarters?"

"Creepy and a cannibal," June said, wrinkling her nose at the Priest's photo.

"You just said a mouthful," David joked. The two of them laughed.

Out in the parking lot, a few day laborers were trimming trees and blowing leaves. June hated leaf blowers: so loud and obnoxious, such a waste of gas, spreading the leaves around, when it would be more efficient to suck them up into a bag, or rake them into piles. She felt like they had to be bad for the environment, as well; there were already twenty or more California districts with a ban on them. A ban on lawns would cut down on a lot of problems, too, she considered: less wasteful water usage, less gas required for lawnmowers. But man's fascination with having greener grass than his neighbor would outlive both of them. The tides will have risen, drowning cities and farmland, and the people of the future would be tending little green blocks of grass high on towers in the mountains, or in their underwater domes.

THUNK!

The tree branch crashed down on a white sports car parked two down from their sedan (a silver Hummer H3 took up the two slots between its smaller cousins), scratching the paint along the passenger door, cracking the windshield, and scattering leaves in all directions. David and June were passing the car when it fell, and stepped out of the way, startled.

"Hijo de puta!" the poor guy said, looking both angry and terrified. June couldn't blame him. If there was anything she could have done to help, she would have done it. But there was nothing.

Maybe they've got a union, she thought. Not likely, but maybe.

The other man, in his blue checkered shirt and dusty khakis, shut off the leaf blower and ran to his coworker's side. He tossed the tool aside and the two of them removed the tangle of branches from the car. There was no doubting the terror on the face of the man with the heavy steel hedge clippers, his Stalinesque mustache curled upward in a frightened snarl, his eyes wide, trying to look in all directions at once. The car's owner was nowhere in sight, but he would come out soon, and then—

"Somebody's getting fired," David said, rather glib, and got into the car.

"Maybe it's not that expensive to repair," June said hopefully.

David looked at her with a patronizing grin. "On a Maserati? That car's worth more than those two guys put together could make in ten years." He slapped his palms down on his thighs. "You hungry?"

Not anymore, she thought, an anxious tightening in her guts making her feel slightly queasy. But I suppose I could eat.

AMBROSIA LAY AT the foot of wooded mountains, a small restaurant with all the characteristics of a cottage in the English countryside. Smoke billowed on a westward wind from the stone chimney, and with its straw-thatched roof, June felt like the place could easily catch fire at any minute. With no other civilization in sight for miles, it would burn to the ground before any emergency vehicles arrived at the scene.

Mossy, hewn-stone gateposts that could have been missing pieces of Stonehenge bookended the long, cobblestone drive. A sign hung from the left stone, the name AMBROSIA carved roughly into black, split wood and painted Venetian red. Beyond Ambrosia's leaded glass windows, silhouettes shifted and rustled in the soft warm glow like restless spirits.

"I feel like we should have come for elevensies," David said as he lifted the wrought iron knocker and clanked it against the struck plate. June looked at him blankly. "Because this place looks like it's made for hobbits." He gave her a look of commiseration. "You all right?"

"Just hungry," she said, forcing a smile.

He put a comforting hand between her shoulder blades. "Well, let's rustle up some grub, huh?"

The double doors opened suddenly and a lithe man stood before them in the entryway with an expression of bafflement. He wore a velvety black vest over his white silk shirt, with his dark hair oiled flat to his scalp and a thin, slightly curled mustache.

While the French waiter eyed them suspiciously, June thought she heard the theme from Hitchcock's Vertigo play lightly over some hidden sound system—but in a moment, she realized it was the final aria of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Another benefit of a classical education, she thought. She recalled that Wagner's music had been used by the Nazis in the concentration camps for "reeducation." The thought troubled her, the music felt tainted.

An odd thought to come unbidden, Juniper.

Thank you, Mother.

"May I help you?" The contempt in the maître d's voice was undeniable. He was French, though; contempt was inherent in the accent.

"Uh, yes," David said, "the staff at the Seaside Inn sent us."

The scowl cleared, replaced by a thin smile. The man wasn't quite ready to embrace them into the fold, but an invitation had been extended, and he was apparently required to accept them on a trial basis. "Ah, oui, monsieur." He stepped aside and ushered them to the left with the arm he'd draped with a napkin. "Follow me, please."

June began to salivate the moment she stepped in: hot grease, savory sauces, spiced meats and roasted vegetables—the mingled smells overwhelmingly pleasant, bringing back faint memories of dinners prepared by Griselda, the Dreese family's personal chef. The restaurant was dimly lit by oil lamps and Dutch chandeliers; the tables—there were only seven, six of which were occupied by couples enjoying appetizers and apéritifs in quiet contemplation—draped with the whitest white tablecloths, placed in a horseshoe shape around the chef's station. A heavyset, dark-haired man in chef's whites moved his arms wildly, like a man conducting a symphony, as he prepared their meals before them. Flames shot up from his hands, a sorcerer's trick, and as he flicked his wrist, a bouquet of meats and vegetables shot up from the pan. The food seemed to hang suspended in the dim light before him, until it fell, and he caught it in his pan.

The diners applauded lightly.

Just in time for the show, June thought.

Aside from the tables, the décor was bizarrely eclectic: a grayed old ship's wheel; a pitchfork that could have been the very same tool Wood had painted in American Gothic; several brass plates, making her think of Dickens; yellowed scraps of parchment encased in glass alongside pinned butterflies and dusty moths; pencil sketches of homely men in top hats and top coats, and pretty women in hoop skirts and bonnets; another of the restaurant's façade, technically impressive but completely devoid of any character the house possessed; a cuckoo clock, an old spice rack, and a flocked gold mirror, its warped glass reflecting a dark, alternate version of Ambrosia in which the chef now returned to the main kitchen.

David followed the Frenchman to the empty table in the middle, as she followed David, disregarding her distorted, somewhat monstrous mirror image.

The maître d' pulled out both chairs, waiting until they were seated to speak. "Tonight's meal will begin with a squab ravioli—"

June tuned out after the first dish. As a child, dragged to stuffy country clubs and dimly lit restaurants smelling of pipe tobacco and oiled mahogany, while the waiter had droned on she'd imagined herself sitting in one of those shopping mall-bright restaurants where kids from public schools went, the places where play was as important as the food—more important, with playground equipment and video games, Whack-a-Mole, and animatronic animals singing songs on stage, or clowns roaming the premises, twisting balloons into exotic shapes. There were no fireplaces large enough to seat and cook an entire family; no portraits of ugly old rich men, each lit by his own brass directional lamp; no disgusting vegetables to shovel into her mouth—or hide in her napkin—just so she'd be allowed dessert. There, the ballroom was filled with rainbow-colored rubber, and had only seen an adult when one of the children lost her gum among the balls, or peed himself.

Now that vegetables were an essential part of the dining experience, the need to play had been displaced by the urge to seek out new foods, new wines, new flavors and smells and sights to tantalize the senses. So far, Ambrosia hadn't disappointed—and she'd only just been handed a menu, a slip of paper smaller than an 8-by-10 photograph and as bone-white as Ambrosia's business cards. She held it up and studied it in the candlelight. There were little more than twelve dishes; she wanted to eat every one of them. David couldn't have anything from the ocean, so the lobster bisque and insalata di calamari (technically an Italian squid salad, not Spanish, but the desk clerk had mentioned that Ambrosia served many "ethnicities") were both out. If she kissed him later with the ocean on her lips, his face would blow up like a puffer fish.

What she could really use right now was a drink. The incident in the parking lot, not to mention the possible fate of their chambermaid, had weighed heavily on her mind on the drive over, but since she'd be driving back, she would have to take it easy. A glass or two couldn't hurt, though, and would definitely do the trick. David had taken care of that: he'd ordered a bottle of red wine while she'd been ruminating. They could have saved forty dollars if they'd brought one with them, even allowing for the corkage fee, but she was glad he'd ordered it.

"Thank you," David said to the waiter, and June echoed the sentiment. The waiter left, approaching the couple at the next table, and David took her hand and brushed his lips against it. June gave him a smile, then surveyed the other "epicureans" dining with them tonight. The men, silver-haired and balding, wore open-throated shirts and blazers, with multiple rings on their rawhide-tanned fingers. The women, all of them young, wore cocktail dresses, cork heel sandals and shiny jewelry. They were healthy and white-toothed. One man wore a white straw hat cocked at a jaunty angle, as if, like the Carly Simon song, he were dining aboard a yacht.

She peered over the votive candle and wine goblets at her own man. He was scrutinizing the menu with a frown, deciding what he could risk, attempting to decipher the indecipherable fusion of several foreign languages. Would he age like these men? she wondered. At 31 his hair was just starting to recede. Would he ever go fully bald like his father? Crow's feet were just starting to claw tracks down the corners of his eyes, just as they were at hers. It gave him a distinguished look; she wished there were a female equivalent of "distinguished" that didn't sound like the hands of time were shoving her headlong toward Death's door.

Twenty minutes and a full glass of wine later, the chef emerged from the kitchen, rubbing his hands together in a circular motion, and smiling wide. The other diners applauded his arrival. David and June quickly joined in as the man gave a brief, uncomfortable bow. He began to cook then, and as he cooked, he spoke, like a man hosting a television show, in a slight, mysterious accent.

"These days, everyone wants to know where their dinner came from. What did it eat? Was it coddled? Did it have a good life?" He laughed contemptuously. "Ladies and gentlemen, we don't even ask this for our friends and neighbors!"

Laughter and applause arose around them. June looked across at David and saw that he was smiling in baffled amusement.

"I believe someday soon these questions will be moot," the chef said, pouring oil and ladling garlic into a sauté pan. He sprinkled, he doused, he sauced. "Meat will be grown in laboratories, like vegetables in a greenhouse, independent of the animals to whom they belong. The pigs and cows and little chickies will be free to roam the countryside. And with no use for them, they will die off. They exist at the terminus of evolution, only permitted to survive because of our need for them as food. You mark my words. By the end of this century, meat will be manmade and its sentient cousins will be well on their way to extinction!"

There were murmurs of dissent. A man at the far table to their left, sun-browned skin stretched taut over his bones like a canvas, scowled and hissed.

"I know," the chef said with a playful smirk. "A despicable thought. But it comes closer to reality each day. As a species, we must rise above the herd, so to speak. Pigs are smarter than some primates, they say. Cows are as diverse as dogs and cats and people. We must not fall into the trap of letting these animal activists—these terrorists—we must not let them teach us we are no better than the animals we eat!"

Applause. A ball of orange flame plumed up from the chef's pan. David shot June a look that said, Do you believe this guy? Do you believe them? June patted his hand and sipped her wine. Believe him or not, what the man was cooking smelled divine, and as far as she was concerned, this tortured genius could spout whatever bullshit came into his fat head.

He garnished, he sautéed, he tasted. The chef's nimble fingers molded dough and slid dishes into the oven. He added pinches of sugar and paprika and basil. And all the while, he intoned his manifesto, not addressing his crowd but rather an unseen visitor. Certainly, he'd never once looked his guests in the eye.

She thought: This is a photograph. The textures, the colors, the play of light in the other diners' faces. His facial expressions, like a man possessed—and if he was possessed, it was by a love of food—his gregarious hand gestures and movement, movement, movement. This would make a great shoot. Call it "Kitchens in America." And this place, Ambrosia, this would be the centerpiece. This could go in a gallery.

"Do you hear that?" The chef listened for a moment, his ear cocked toward the ceiling and the music as he stirred the contents of a pan, spun the lid of a pot, sucked a daub of sauce from his thumb. "Lovely piece, isn't it? I sincerely believe everything about the experience of eating should be sensual, but particularly the cooking. Eating is a ritual, wouldn't you agree? If eating is ceremony, cooking is the preparation for the ritual. Part of my ritual includes listening to the Great Works—such as Tristan und Isolde, the lovely opera you hear now, by Richard Wagner." (He pronounced it the German way: Reeckhard.) "When feeling contemporary, I enjoy Glenn Gould." He grinned, almost peculiarly sly. "Or Sammy Davis, Jr."

There were light chuckles at this. Repeat customers, no doubt. June didn't quite get it, and neither did David, from his dubious, slightly salivating look.

Mere moments later the food was plated and waiters emerged from the kitchen to spread it out before them. The humble chef slipped out during the confusion, back into the shadows of the kitchen.

Maybe I'll come back the day after tomorrow, June thought. Ask if he'll let me snap some photos.

With that decided, she began to eat: sliced cured meats and sausage and tartare, rustic cheeses and bright yellow tortillas heaped with potato and caramelized onion, small plates of duck confit and rabbit croquettes, Scotch eggs, meatballs cooked in white truffle oil, a soup made from chaud-froid. But the piece de resistance was the bone marrow: salty, greasy, rich and buttery. They scooped it straight from a severed hunk of bone onto crusty herbed bread and stuffed it into their salivating maws.

All thoughts were forgotten: she simply savored.

They spoke very little while they ate, only pausing to swallow a mouthful of wine and marvel with grunts and moans at how delicious everything tasted. The other epicureans leaned over their tables and spoke in hushed tones to their server and to each other. The head waiter, the Frenchman, plucked dishes from a stonework pass-through, only going into the kitchen occasionally. June had inquired, and discovered the chef was Austrian. It seemed the only thing Spanish in this Spanish restaurant was the use of the word "tapas."

And the food was a delight; June was definitely eating her words tonight. She didn't think she'd ever had anything quite like it in her life, and David had probably never imagined such rich flavors existed in the world.

"It really is the food of the gods," he remarked, still chewing. He picked up a greasy bit of sausage. "I don't know what this is, but if it's a leetle piggy," he said, affecting the chef's accent, "it's the best damn pig I've ever tasted."

"We should ask," June said. "It can't be beef. Maybe it's bison?"

"Could be that super-meat he was going on about. Grown in labs." David clearly hadn't grasped the point of the chef's sermon, but June didn't bother correcting him, too stuffed to argue. "Hang on, I'll ask." David spotted the head waiter and flagged him down. "Excuse me." His voice, louder than anything aside from the pop and crackle of the stone fireplace in the far corner and the opera oozing from hidden speakers, roused the other patrons from the soporific effect of their meals.

The waiter approached. "Oui, monsieur?"

"We were wondering—" The man with the hat turned to glare at them. "—what type of meat is in this?"

"The saucise is veal, I believe, with, eh, wild boar." He appeared unsure, his dark plucked eyebrows knitting together in a slight scowl. "If you like, I will ask Jörg for you."

June snickered, thinking he'd said Yorick, and covered her mouth with a hand. David raised an eyebrow, then turned back to the waiter. "That won't be necessary. Thank you." The waiter scuttled away, off to the next table, where Mr. You're So Vain raised and jiggled their empty water pitcher impatiently. "Alas, poor Jörg," David said in a hushed tone to June, indicating the slab of cooked bone, picked clean on the plate.

June laughed a little too loudly, garnering more dirty looks from their snooty fellow gourmands. "I knew him, Horatio," she said. "Bit of a kook, but one hell of a cook."

David chuckled. He sopped up some bone marrow grease on the last herbed roll, and stopped just shy of putting it in his mouth. "You want this?" He held it to her, eyeing it eagerly for himself.

"I should save room for dessert. But thanks, sugartits."

He laughed again. "You're on a role tonight, Ms. Dreese." And he plopped the savory bread in his mouth. "So is this marrow," he mumbled with his mouth full. "A delicious roll."

"I THINK I'M gonna be sick," David groaned, and then, before he could close his mouth he spewed vomit out over his lap and pattered on the car seat.

Once the sun had fallen behind the horizon, night drew its cold fist over the coast as they drove back to town, the ocean glittering in the moonlight.

"Shit, honey, that's gonna stain," June said.

"I'm sorry." He wiped his face with a fast-food moist towelette from the glove compartment, then used it to slop up the mess. "I didn't know I was gonna barf until it just kinda... came out."

"Neil Patrick Harris came out," she said. "That ejected."

She glanced at the mess, ropey with mucus, spotted with chunks of undigested meats, reds and browns and bright pinks. Seeing their dinner regurgitated, the smell of red wine thick and syrupy in the air, made her reassess her enjoyment of it. Had it really been as good as she'd imagined? Had she really placed it side-by-side with—even above—some of her favorites? With clam chowder in a sourdough bowl at Boudin Bakery? With traditional Chinese dishes served up in clay pots at the Utopia Café? With smørrebrød from Bar Tartine? The thought of having gorged herself at Ambrosia made her want to vomit in sympathy, the thought of photographing it suddenly felt loathsome, a sacrilege. She zipped down the window, sucking in great gasps of fresh air warmed by a sudden gust from the Santa Anas. "Forget it, David. We'll clean it up at the hotel. Just... just roll down your window, okay, honey?"

David gave her a miserable look and zipped his window down. He tossed out the handful of puke he'd picked up in the towelette. A yellowish string of it, thick and bubbly with spittle, stuck to the half-opened window like a snail trail.

"Gross," he remarked.

"You won't get any argument from me, bub."

He smiled at her, and looked sheepishly at the mess between his legs and on the floor mat. "It didn't taste as good coming up."

"I don't imagine," she said. "I guess that preemptive strike didn't do the trick."

"I forgot to take it," he said, and let out a belch. "I'll double-up on the antacids when we get back to the room."

June caught a whiff of David's burp and made a sour face. It smelled of sickeningly sweet burnt sugar and a vinegary tang like spoiled pork. "Probably a good idea."

David fell into a grim silence as the dark scenery passed by his window. In the rearview mirror, the mountains stood against the twilight like jagged, blackened teeth preparing to eat the sky, and June felt her heartbeat jangle—a loosened piano string, a long, drawn-out beat that seemed almost to quiver inside her chest. Rather than slow with it, her breathing hurried to fill in the gap as a sudden, horrific thought arose:

Poison. They've poisoned us.

The invitation to a secluded restaurant nestled in the mountains, so utterly charming and exclusionary, with absolutely perfect food—it was a trick the locals played on pesky tourists, the oldest trope imaginable. A few drops of saline in the food or drink to cause stomach cramps and violent bathroom expulsions. Or worse. Now, David was puking his guts out, and her heart palpitated like some woman of noble birth's in a Victorian-era novel. The desk clerk's bizarre choice of words—"overjoyed to have you for dinner" and "a couple, about your age, who came back simply raving"—seemed to be incantations to June's suddenly hyperaware mind. What exactly had they been raving about? June wondered.

Her constitution had always been stronger than David's; she wasn't likely to feel the gastrointestinal effects until they were back at the inn. She would awaken in the dead of night, embers glowing in the fireplace, and clutch at the knife blade carving out her insides like a jack-o'-lantern, eyes bugging out as a scream caught in her throat. Meanwhile, David would be perfectly still on his side of the bed, bloody spittle crusted where his lips had parted, a chunky pool of vomit drying on his pillow.

Don't be daft, Juniper. A lady doesn't think such things.

Shut up, Mother. Shut up, you nasty, stupid witch!

Focusing her rage and fear and frustration toward her mother—whom she had not forgiven, even in death—June's heartbeat evened out without her even noticing. She drew in a slow, deep breath, let it out just as slowly, concentrating on nothing but the darkened highway through the dusty, fly-specked windshield. She flicked on the wipers. The large bug directly in front of her smeared and streaked its guts across the glass. Each swipe of the blade erased more of it, until finally it was gone.

Back at the inn, David rushed to the washroom, holding his belly, his face ashen, somehow gaunt. He'd managed to keep from vomiting in the car again, but he'd begun to sweat and murmur to himself, struggling to hold it in. Somewhere along Route 1, it had seemed as though his eyes rolled back in his head, the lids fluttering, and he'd muttered something that sounded like "Eedger hardow, Misser Morales," reminding her of the few times he'd talked in his sleep. Despite of the heat blowing in from the desert, it had chilled her to the bone. Concerned, she suggested driving him to a hospital—where she'd find one, she had no idea. "I'll be a'right," he'd groaned. Then he'd ratcheted the chair back to a steep recline and gone to sleep.

The room was cold. June put a log in the fireplace and set it ablaze. She stood by the bathroom door a moment, listening for the sound of his retching. He spat, a hollow sound of his face hovering below the lip of the bowl. "You okay?"

"I'll be fine," he shouted, but he retched again—ooooohWLEH!—and the retch became a fit of coughing, followed by another hollow spit into the bowl. She could almost see the translucent thread stringing from his lips into the water below, and she cringed at the image.

June laid back against the heap of pillows. No sound came from the bathroom for a long while, and the warmth from the fireplace lulled her to sleep with the overhead lights still on. Popping knots dragged her back to consciousness twice. She felt David slip into bed some time later; he had already flicked off the light and had tucked her under the covers by then. She nearly nestled up against him when the smell of his sick-sweat prickled her nostrils. He leaned over to kiss her forehead, breath smelling of strong mouthwash, and she tried to ask if he was feeling any better, but before the words could come out, she was asleep again.

She dreamed of a hideous creature living in a cave in the mountains behind Ambrosia. She and David were hiking, searching for something—she didn't know what, though it seemed of great importance in her dream. David was walking a little ways ahead of her when he suddenly dropped into the earth. June hurried to the place where he'd last stood and leaned over the pit. "I'm all right," he shouted up at her, lying on the ground an impossible distance below, somehow still spotlighted by the sun. "Just twisted my ankle, I think."

The behemoth lumbered out of the darkness behind David then, a bedraggled and bug-eyed troll reminding her of Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son—and June found she couldn't speak to warn him. Her breath passed her lips as empty as a hot wind blowing through the ruined archways of an ancient city. David waved cheerily as the colossal Thing's shadow fell over him, still smiling when it brought him to its lips. He let it swallow him in two quick bites.

Not much more than an appetizer, really.

III—The Altar

DAVID SPENT A good half an hour in the shower, and during that time, June found the invitation to Americo Morales's 4th of July party wedged half under a table leg beside his suitcase.

She'd been looking for Ambrosia's business card, her plan to give them a call during the lull between the wedding reception and the ceremony (she thought of the chef's strange monologue, his talk of ceremony and ritual), and ask if she could come by the following day to shoot during prep, or the dinner rush.

She laid the card flat on the glass table and picked up the room phone. As she dialed the number, she noticed a shadow in the slat of rainbow-colored sunlight on the floor; the sun shining through Ambrosia's business card, magnifying the watermark. And it appeared to be words.

June hung up the phone and got down on her hands and knees, bringing her face close to the carpet. Every little speck of dirt and hair and crumb was visible from here—did they ever vacuum?

That was when she saw it, wedged under the table leg. "The envelope!" she said, and snagged it. She reached up to put it on the table, not watching what she was doing, trying to read the words in the watermark's shadow. The letters were blurry, but because she'd already had the phrase fresh in mind—if it was a phrase at all—she read it easily:

Jakobi Uzh Ep a'Hethqa Est

"Just like in the Mission," she said to herself. "But why?"

June logged on to David's computer to look it up. No Wi-Fi. She tugged on a sweater and left the room while the shower still ran, and David sang "When I'm Sixty-Four." Which she found strange, since he wasn't a big Beatles fan.

The lady with the red teeth stood behind the desk again this morning: this time, the teeth were pink, as if from a fresh meal of raw meat. "Hiya, darlin'! How was Ambrosia? Was it just to die for?"

Again with the innuendos. "It was great, thanks for the recommendation."

"Oh, it's no trouble. No trouble at all."

Suddenly, the woman's saccharine friendliness made June want to wipe the smile from her face. "Actually," she said, "my partner got sick."

The woman's features squeezed together unpleasantly. "You're part—? Oh, dear, I'm so sorry to hear that. Would you like me to give them a call?"

"That won't be necessary. I wonder if I could get the Wi-Fi password."

"Certainly." The clerk took a business card, flipped it, and scrawled on the reverse. She slid it across the desk to June, who snatched it with a cursory acknowledgment and began to walk away. Then she remembered the envelope, and the maid.

"Did you speak to the maid the other day?"

The woman blinked, clueless. "The—? Oh, Josefina. We spoke to her, yes."

"You didn't—"

"Terminated, oh, yes ma'am. With prejudice. You won't be seeing her around here anymore, I assure you."

June waited until the woman finished ranting—she was giving June a headache—then said, "We found the envelope. You fired her for nothing."

"Oh, dear." She looked sincerely displeased. "And she was such a good little worker, too."

"You might want to think of this the next time you fire someone," June said, and stormed off without letting the woman reply. She felt vindicated, and hoped the gardeners at the Mission had received similar treatment from a kind stranger.

Oh, yes, you're their White Knight, darling, Althea Dreese mocked from the grave.

Back in the room, she typed in the password and searched Jakobi Uzh Ep a'Hethqa Est in an online translator. It detected Zulu, though it was only able to translate the first word, as James. Clearly it wasn't that.

She searched the phrase, and found one hit, which appeared to be an entire page filled with gibberish, in which the words from the watermark were interspersed throughout a single paragraph that ran from the top of the page to the bottom, with no line breaks and very few actual words. It reminded her of the time she'd tried, and failed, to conquer Finnegan's Wake for her English Lit. class. June held the private opinion Joyce might have suffered from syphilitic dementia.

She tapped the pen on the table. David had switched to Alanis Morrisette's "Ironic," singing a decent falsetto as water splashed heavily on the shower floor.

Jakobi Uzh Ep a'Hethqa Est

Delight, David had said. It was 'an Epicurean's Delight.'

Ambrosia, she thought. Food of the gods.

Adeos. From God.

Could it be a code of some sort? A—what do you call it—a cipher?

David came out of the shower, startling her. She closed the laptop and stood, pretending to be busy elsewhere. "What's wrong, hon?" he asked, his hair a wet tangle on his head, an impossibly plush towel around his waist.

June didn't know what to say. In her hesitation, she spotted the envelope at the edge of the table and picked it up for David to see.

"Oh, shit, June. Shit." Wet footprints trailed from the bathroom to where he stopped, dripping on the carpet. "Where was it?"

"Under the table."

"Under the table," he said, as if it had been the only place he hadn't checked. "Well, I'll have to go down and apologize."

"They've already fired her."

"Fuck," he said, genuinely bummed. "I knew I shouldn't have said anything."

I told you not to say anything, she thought. She glanced at her watch. "And since you spent so much time in there, I don't have time to get showered."

"Sorry, hon. Had to wash the sick off. Speaking of which, I'm all clean now..." He unwrapped the towel, exposing his neatly trimmed genitals, and tossed it on the back of a chair. "Care to get freaky, madam?"

"Put your clothes on, dork," she said, and threw the towel back at him.

DARREN SHINGLE STOOD alone at the altar for a good twenty minutes, looking elegant as usual in a classic black Gucci suit, wearing a newly whitened smile until finally he could smile no more. The gatherers had begun to talk among themselves, whispering concerns that Max had left him at the altar, and it was difficult for June not to suspect it herself.

Of course, Max could have been late for many reasons. The idea that he'd left Darren at the altar (the man for whom Maximo Morales had professed his undying love on at least a dozen occasions where June herself had been present, with whom he shared a home in the Western Addition and not simply his bed, who had virtually planned their entire life together from marriage until they would die together as old men) was about the least likely scenario June could imagine.

Darren passed words with the minister, a woman with the round and smiling face of a Buddha, who nodded, and said something conciliatory. He approached his parents, sitting front row left, speaking with them in hushed tones. Their mannerisms were diplomatic, cautiously optimistic. But Darren began to lose his temper, and waved his hands frantically.

David belched, attracting June's attention, the couple sitting next to them peering over. The worst of his illness had passed, but a few symptoms still lingered. June had suspected food poisoning—and worse, last night—but she hadn't felt the slightest bit ill herself.

Americo Morales took out his cell phone and dialed, stepping away from Darren and his wife to speak with whomever he'd called. When he hung up and shrugged at his wife, it was the final nail in the coffin of this blessed union. Darren plucked a champagne glass from the tower and sauntered off through the dewy grass toward the gardens, downing it as he walked. The country club—not quite as stuffy as the ones June had been dragged to as a child—had everything required of a wedding, including a view of the ocean beyond an archway smothered in impossibly green, blue-tinted gardenias. The only thing it didn't offer was a discreet exit. Darren's wilted form shrank into the distance, his polished Stefano Bemer shoes cutting two dark trails in the damp grass until finally he disappeared behind a squared hedge.

"Such a shame," the woman next to David said.

Americo Morales took a glass from the tower and clinked his car keys against it a few times. The guests hushed their speculations and faced the front, awaiting word.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he announced, "I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news on such a beautiful day, but... it would appear that my son won't be attending. He's not answering his phone." There were murmurs of discontent, though June suspected most of them were contrived. "I'm not going to speculate as to his reasons. He's a grown man, even if he doesn't always act like it. It would have been nice of him to explain himself in person, of course, for Darren's sake, if not for the rest of us."

He placed the filled champagne flute back on the table. "You're welcome to stay. Eat, drink and make merry." Mrs. Morales winced. "Sorry," he said. "Poor choice of words."

While Americo wandered off toward the reception hall, guests began to gather their belongings. Once the first person—one of the groomsmen—snagged a glass of champagne, the tower descended faster than the fall of Babel. David snagged two before they disappeared and brought one back to June, who stood with two of Darren's groomsmaids and a groomsman, his brother, Charlie.

"I just can't see Max doing this," the girl in her early twenties said grimly, though the smile in her eyes betrayed a twinge of Schadenfreude as she adjusted the hem of her dress self-consciously. The dress looked great, even if she fit into it as well as a sausage fit its casing. Darren had picked them out; had it been up to Max, he would have put them all in pink crinoline, merely so they wouldn't upstage him.

Charlie Shingle shook his head grimly. "Little shit," he muttered. His wife, the other groomsmaid, swatted him on the lapel, not at all playfully. He turned to her with gentle reproach. "Don't tell me you didn't see this coming, Gretchen."

"Oh, please, tell me: why should I have seen this coming, Charles?"

David swooped in with the champagne just in time. June sipped at hers, if only to avoid eye contact with the happy couple. Their six-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, scurried around the archway, screeching and laughing, perfect little examples of why June didn't want children. Gretchen Shingle looked haggard, beginning to show at six months pregnant. Charlie Shingle was shitfaced.

"Well, I mean, if it's good enough for us, it's good enough for them, right?"

"Them?" David inquired.

Charlie glanced around himself. "Look, I'm not a homophobe. He's my brother, for Christ sakes. I just mean, they can get married now, so they should have all the problems that come with it, right?" His wife gave him a reproachful look that was far from gentle, her white Lee Press-On nails resting like talons on her round belly. "It only makes sense they should leave each other at the altar now, too, am I right?"

"I guess so," David said, and slugged down his champagne. Ever the diplomat, June thought with a smile. "Hey, uh, you two been to any restaurants yet? There's this nice little out-of-the-way joint—"

"Where he got food poisoning," June chimed in.

David flashed her a glare. "You don't know that. It could have been anything. Besides, you didn't get sick, and we ate the same things."

She shrugged. "It was great, though."

"Oh yeah?" Charlie said, not really interested. He would have been happy eating prepackaged sandwiches from a gas station. "What's it called?"

"Ambrosia," they both said at once. David squeezed her hip, amused by the jinx.

"Sounds a little..." Charlie said, and shrugged. "You know."

Gretchen shook her head, exasperated. The other groomsmaid chuckled to herself, took a large gulp of champagne, and peered around for single men.

"Expensive?" David suggested.

"Exactly." Charlie extended a finger beyond his beer bottle to point at David. "This guy gets it."

"It wasn't too expensive. Probably not the best place for kids. Spanish tapas."

Charlie pulled a face. "Can't eat Spanish. Gives me gas somethin' awful."

"Everything gives you gas," his loving wife said.

Charlie laughed. "Everything she cooks, anyway."

June made eye contact with David, who made a subtle motion with his head to skip away from the younger Shingles. "I should see how Darren's doing," June said, spotting his signal. "It was good to catch up with you."

"Oh yeah, real good," Charlie said. "Catcha later, Dave."

"David," he corrected.

"Yup."

Gretchen shook June's hand. "Really nice to see you again, June. You should come out to the house when the baby comes, hey?"

"Wouldn't miss it," June said with a warm smile. And she wouldn't, if she happened to be scouting locations in the Reno area sometime in the next year. The chance of that happening was unlikely, but it wasn't a direct lie. She waved at the sausage girl. "Nice to meet you, Dakota."

"Yeah, mm-hmm," the girl said, flashing June a glance before returning to the hunt.

David took her hand and they wandered off. "Well, that was awkward," he said under his breath.

"Oh? I didn't notice."

He laughed, then bent to kiss her cheek. "Did you see the smile on that blonde girl? You couldn't wipe it off with a chisel."

"No kidding," June said with a laugh.

"Hey, you don't really mean to try and comfort Darren, do you? I think I saw Max's sister head off that way. Weren't they friends before Max and Darren?"

"Good memory." She shook her head. "I've got a feeling he'll be pretty inconsolable, anyway. We'll talk later, I'm sure. I've got those photos for him to look at, anyway. I think outside the Mission would be perfect for the love scene in Just Swell."

The two lead actors were fossils, and the thought made David shudder theatrically. She laughed again, but the laugh died when she realized they had stopped under the flowered archway. He looked up at it. She followed his gaze, and an awkward smile passed between them, like strangers under the mistletoe. "Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce," David said, breaking the silence. "At least Max and Darren beat the odds."

June laughed, a little anxious. For a moment, she'd thought David might spontaneously drop down on one knee and pop the question. And would it be that terrible to get married? Just because her parents' marriage had been a train wreck didn't mean hers would be. David's parents had been together for 36 years, longer than she and David had been alive.

Would it be that terrible?

A horrible cackle shook her from her thoughts. June and David turned to its source: Gretchen Shingle's braying laughter at her husband, who was wiping the beer he'd spilled down the front of his rented suit with a mortified look as the children circled, circled.

It could always be worse, she thought.

JUNE PARKED OUTSIDE Ambrosia's stone gateposts and stepped out. Somewhere distant, a chainsaw roared—somebody felling trees or cleaning up a mess in the road, she couldn't quite tell by where the sound arose from. She snapped a few photos with the Nikon: of the mossy stones, silhouetted against knife blades of sunlight through the clouds, the blood-red AMBROSIA on the signpost. She switched to a wide-angle lens, and snapped a few shots of the restaurant and the hills beyond. Smoke rising from its little thatched roof, Ambrosia looked more surreal in the daytime than it had last night. The clouds had broken, giving the scene a golden, godlike tint, one she could easily punch up in Photoshop.

The air had turned brisk, but with the sun shining and the view so spectacular, she decided to shirk the car and walk down, to get some better angles of the cottage. Aside from the chainsaw, and the gravel crunching underfoot, the afternoon was silent. Not a bug, not a bird. June sauntered down the hill, snapping shots, when something struck her, and suddenly she stopped in her tracks, her heartbeat quickening.

Barely ten feet from where she'd stopped, a deer was grazing. June raised her camera, ever so slowly, as the animal flittered its tail, and continued nibbling at the dry grass. They'd seen deer the other day at the cove, but not this close, and not alone. It seemed as though everything had come together to create this special moment between June and the deer, and she wanted—needed—to capture the feeling with a photograph.

Click! She snapped a shot off from her chest and wound the film forward. The deer rose from its business in the dirt to regard her, hobbling slightly on its left front leg, which appeared to be an old break, gnarled like an old tree branch, but long-since healed. June brought the camera up to her eye—

The deer stumbled off, bobbing up and down on its crippled leg as it hurled itself toward the darkened woods.

"Shit," she muttered, the magic dispelled. The chainsaw grew louder as she approached Ambrosia. Someone cutting wood out back to keep the fire burning, no doubt. Must go through a lot of it, she thought, burning day and night like that.

She stood in front of the door and used the knocker. As she waited, she saw an old stone well she hadn't noticed last night, its cover mossy, the gray wood bucket swaying in a light breeze from its frayed rope.

Click! Click!

Nobody came to the door.

June jiggled the handle. It turned in her hand, startling her, and the door swung inward.

The vague scent of last night's meal hit her nostrils, making her salivate—until she detected an unpleasant sour smell beneath it, reminding her of David puking in the car. She gagged and covered her nose. The chainsaw doubled in volume once the door fell shut behind her, as if the back door were open, focusing the sound through the kitchen.

"Hello?"

The saw revved and roared. June stepped further into the room. Her reflection in the warped mirror was pale and stretched; she looked like a gaunt giant as she moved past toward the tables, toward the kitchen, and all the while, the roar of the chainsaw grew louder, as though someone was using it inside.

Ice sculpting, she thought. Don't ice sculptors use saws sometimes? Probably carving a swan for someone's wedding.

Leftover food in pots and pans at the chef's station between the tables coagulated, going to rot. A fly lighted on a thin slice of rolled white meat and buzzed off toward the kitchen. She snapped a photo.

Health code violations all over the place. This is turning out to be more of an exposé than a photo essay.

The chainsaw growling, June stepped through the darkened vestibule and into the kitchen.

Her heart stopped.

The head waiter, the Frenchman, stood with his shirt off, his pale skin glistening with sweat and spattered blood. He held the chainsaw in both hands, poised to make another cut. And what he was carving... June staggered back in unimaginable horror.

The Frenchman raised his eyes from his work and caught sight of her. For a long moment, he stood as frozen as June. She kept staring, unable to look away from the plump, naked woman strung above the table, her flesh hanging in ragged strips, yellow clumps of fat oozing from chainsaw cuts in her belly and hips and breasts. Josefina. Even with her damp black hair stringing down in her face, and the gag tied in her mouth, June knew it was the maid from the Seaside Inn & Gardens. This was her punishment, for the crime of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Eyes closed, breathing slow and ragged, Josefina still appeared to be alive after all the cuts and the spilled blood, had only passed out from the pain.

The chainsaw rumbled. A fly buzzed on Josefina's nose and another in her hair.

Unconsciously, as if in a dream, June snapped a photo.

The effect was immediate: the waiter's eyes came alight, his thin mustache curled upward in a snarl, and he stepped around the galvanized steel tub filled with Josefina's fats and juices.

June turned and ran, screaming through the darkened hall. Behind her, impossibly close, the chainsaw roared back to life, and as she stumbled out into the dining hall the front door burst open, Jörg tromping in with his hands full of bulky grocery bags.

"Armand," he called out, "whose car is that parked out front?" The large chef's head rose, and he took in the sight of June sweating and breathing heavily in the kitchen doorway. "What are you doing here?"

The chainsaw shrieked against something—stone or drywall—rattling the objects on the walls, and a grin spread across Jörg's unshaven face. "Looks like we have a guest for dinner, Armand!" he said, delighted.

Running past the tables, the Nikon beat and bounced forgotten against her breasts, she saw there was nowhere to go. Nowhere.

Wrong. A third doorway lay beyond the fireplace, across the large room from Jörg, who dropped his groceries and stepped away from the front door to meet her. If she could make it to the door before he did—

Her darting eyes fell on the pitchfork. She stopped to grab it, trying to tear it from the wall. But it wouldn't budge. She saw the grin widen on Jörg's fat face, the snarl spreading on the Frenchman's, and June placed a foot against the wall, pulling with all of her strength.

The rusted clamps holding it in place snapped, and June stumbled back, the pitchfork held in a death grip. Once she regained her balance, she spun on her heels, swinging the weapon toward Armand, who halted his approach, letting the chainsaw rumble. She swung it in Jörg's direction. Rather than stop, he stepped closer to her with his hands raised.

"Look at her!" the chef said. "The tenacity!"

The waiter only snarled.

"Put the fucking chainsaw down, asshole!"

"You heard her," Jörg said. "Put it away. It is unnecessary. Isn't it, dear lady?"

June panted heavily as Jörg crept closer. "Don't you fucking move another step!"

He stopped, the smile disappearing from his face, and his bristly wattle fell slack. "Dear lady, you have absolutely no idea what you are doing," he said soothingly. "Please, put down the trident. You look as though you've just seen Frankenstein's monster!"

Armand snickered, and in her peripherals, June saw he was moving forward again. She jabbed the tines at him. He stepped back, the pointed ends missing him by mere inches, clanking instead against the stilled saw blade.

Jörg scowled. "This has gone on quite long enough." He nodded at Armand, jowls quivering. "You may kill her. But leave the head untouched."

Armand flashed the chef a sneer, then took another step toward June. She swung out once more, grunting with effort—

—and bolted for the door by the fireplace.

Behind her, Jörg laughed. "Oh that's lovely, isn't it? Perhaps she'll—"

But June had jerked open the door and slipped into the darkness beyond, cutting off his words as she pulled the heavy door shut behind her. The sound of her breathing filled her ears, the hurried beat of her heart. She kept moving forward, swinging the pitchfork in front of her like a blind man's cane. Behind her, the chainsaw screamed against something metallic, and sparks brightened the long, stone hallway in which she'd found herself. In the brief illumination, June glimpsed a wooden door at the far end, with no obstacles in between. She ran for it, and when she reached it, she slammed against it headlong.

Locked.

Armand scraped the whirring blade against the walls, more sparks lighting the hall as June threw herself against the door again. On her third try, the lock gave with a groaning snap, and she hurtled forward into a small, candlelit chamber.

Pushing the door shut, she scoured the room for something to block the way and found nothing but an altar decorated with cream-colored candles melted down to the nubs. They lighted a glass jar containing a lock of silver-gray hair tied in a yellow ribbon, a desiccated finger bone, and something brown and gnarled which she recognized as a human tongue. Stood against the face of the altar was a photo of a glowering, robed Father Merced, and beside this lay an amorphous sculpture, a million-eyed, bulbous creature in place of a crucifix, or a Buddha—and as she puzzled at these bizarre religious artifacts, she realized she had stumbled into a shrine, but could just as easily have stepped into the foyer of Hell.

The chainsaw bellowed, echoing down the hall and in her skull. She moved alongside the shrine and shoved it forward. Grunting with the effort, she pushed back against the wall and the altar tipped. June watching it hover precariously in mid-air with her heart in her throat. Then it toppled over with an impossibly loud crash, smashing up against the door.

The candles snuffed out—ssshhhhhh! Darkness again, black as pitch. The chainsaw rumbled outside the room. The door rattled. The altar had barred the way.

"Go 'round the back," Jörg said, his voice echoing. "Mrs. Addison? That is your name, isn't it?"

"Fuck you!"

"Dear dear," the man clucked. "Would you prefer I call you June?"

June said nothing, only felt along the floor for the pitchfork, crawling on her hands and knees in the small room, six feet at its widest. Her fingers touched stone and mortar, sifted through every grain of sand and smoothed over every hardened drop of wax. Still, the pitchfork was missing. Desperation squeezed her insides, making her panic.

He knows my name. How could he know my name?

But he didn't, did he? He'd called her Mrs. Addison, and that was worse, because it meant he'd likely called the front desk at the Seaside Inn & Gardens, since she and David had checked in under Addison. The two men could easily have sent somebody to the room to kidnap David—

God, no...

"What is wrong with you people?" she cried.

"Wrong?" Jörg wondered. "There is nothing wrong with me, Mrs. Addison—"

"That's not my fucking name!"

He paused for only a moment. "—something is wrong with society."

"You're a fucking monster. Cannibals! You made me—" She gagged at the thought of it, the delicious cured and salted meats, the confit, the tartar... No wonder David had gotten sick. How much of that meat was what it appeared to be? Any of it? How much of it was human?

At long last, she threw up, vomit splashing on her hands and the thighs of her capris. While she retched, she heard Jörg chuckle. She wanted to burst through the door and plunge the pitchfork right through his ribcage. She wanted to twist it and throw herself against it and tear his goddamned innards out, to shove them back down his throat so he choked on them. Buoyed by the spirit of revenge, she wiped the puke from her chin with the arm of her sweater, and felt again for the weapon.

"Cannibalism is such a detestable term," the chef was saying. "The Chinese eat everything from the trees to the oceans, and yet we do not fault them for it. We do not call them names such as cannibal."

"They aren't eating people, you maniac!"

Her roaming fingers grasped a stone in the wall. It seemed to have dimension, not just a bumpy flat surface. It had depth. She slid her hand up to the rocks above it, found the same depth there. And suddenly she felt a cool breath of air, dank and musty and somewhat salty.

Around the back, he'd told Armand.

It was an opening.

She traced the contours. The passage rose maybe three feet from the floor, two or more feet across—the altar had hidden it, but now it was exposed. An exit. Freedom.

"June? What are you doing in there?"

"Jakobi Uzh Ep a'Hethqa Est!" she said, trying to divert his attention, hoping she'd pronounced it right. "That's your credo, isn't it?"

She sensed him smiling beyond the darkness, and, having distracted him, crawled into the opening. The passage seemed to slant downward at a shallow angle.

"Your pronunciation's a tad off, June," Jörg said, his voice beginning to recede. "Would you like to know what it means?" Without waiting for her to answer, he told her: "It's written in an auxiliary language the priest Antonioni Merced created to speak with the Yuman Indians—a little joke, really. It means 'We are what we eat, we eat what we are.'" The chef chuckled to himself. "You know, I sincerely believe you and your husband would make excellent Associates to the Order. And why not? You've already gorged yourselves on the forbidden fruit. There is nothing left to..."

His words were finally lost to the darkness. The further she crawled inside the cavern, the louder her own hurried breath and thrumming heartbeat became, but soon these were drowned out by heavy, constant drips from the cold ceiling and walls, and a rush of wind from somewhere deeper inside the passage.

Then: a great thump echoed from the altar chamber. She pictured Jörg throwing himself against the door, and hurried her descent, beginning to smell brackish water, suggesting sea caves or underground pools. Her throat felt incredibly dry, so parched she considered slurping the cold liquid pooled beneath her hands and knees... and somehow, despite everything she'd seen and eaten in the past day, June realized she was hungry.

An eerie greenish glow shimmered ahead of her, not far from where she crawled. She hurried onward, ignoring the pain in her knees, until finally the passage opened above her head, and cool air washed brushed her cheeks.

She stood with difficulty in a large chamber, her joints throbbing. Neon green phosphorescence illuminated the cave walls, and the glistening columns of rock like the rotted teeth of an enormous beast. A few feet from where she'd emerged from the stone passage was the source of the salty smell: a brackish pool of water, abnormally round, as if it had been bored by someone... or something. However it had come to be here, it was at least twenty feet wide, its depth impossible to determine in the gloom.

A growl arose from deep inside the belly of the beast. It grew and then quieted again, the snarl of a gigantic, yellow-skinned troll: Saturn, the titan, uprooted from June's nightmare and transplanted into reality. She shivered, wrapping her arms over her chest to stay warm. The temperature had lowered by several degrees the further she'd gone into the hole; now, it was practically freezing.

The noise steadied, fell again to a low grumble.

Soon, she realized the growl didn't belong to a monster; the real monster held the growling thing in his hands. As June peered down into the black water, looking for an opening below, Armand emerged from a passage across the pool with the roaring chainsaw in his hands, and a helmet strapped on his head, its light shining into the cavern. The beam hovered over June, momentarily blinding her. She threw her arms up to shade her eyes.

"Now I've got you, you bitch!" Armand shouted, his face greenish and alien-like from the phosphor, his green teeth visible in a snarl as he revved the saw. Its teeth whirred in the light from his helmet, sharp and hungry, and she knew she had nowhere left to run. If she crawled back into the hole, he'd catch her for certain—and if not him, then Jörg. He'd carve her into rough slices while she screamed and sweated and bled, and finally, mercifully, passed out from the sheer agony of it, the same as he'd done to the poor maid.

The beam of Armand's flashlight twinkled against the black water, causing tiny glints of light like stars set against the vast black emptiness of space.

June sucked in a deep breath, held it, and jumped. She had a moment to consider the possible consequences of such an impulsive act, and then she struck the frigid water, and something slithered about her head, her arms stinging with nettles. Pain slashed across the side of her head, a lightning bolt shooting down through her body to her feet, and then darkness.

IV—An Epicurean's Delight

VOICES ROUSED HER. June blinked at the harsh light, and looked around herself. Movement was difficult. Her head throbbed steadily, felt sticky and itched like hell.

David sat beside her, wearing a look of terror and concern, thick ropes wound around his arms and torso, securing him to a Queen Anne chair. Two huge silver platters lay on the giant, carved slab dining table before them, blanketed with stalks of dark green romaine, beet-red radicchio, and sprigs of holly. Fat orange-pink prawns nestled on melting ice cubes over the greens, and placed among the crustaceans in front of June was a man's severed head. His milky green eyes stared directly at her, accusingly, a juicy violet plum placed in his mouth. His flesh had been roasted to a glistening, crispy golden brown, the scalp and face entirely devoid of hair (June considered, gruesomely, that it had cooked off), yet still she recognized him as the Mission gardener, whose innocent, unfortunate mistake had cost him his life. On the tray in front of David stood Josefina's head, her dark brown eyes widened in horror. The maid had been kept raw, her flesh turned blue-gray, a fresh apricot nestled between her lips. David stared at her with a mixture of guilt, revulsion and horror.

"David," June groaned. Speaking hurt her head. Her throat was dry, her lungs sore. What happened to me in that pool? she wondered. Did I hit something... or did something hit me? "Where are we?"

"I don't know. I was asleep, and then..." He squeezed his eyes closed. "...it felt like I was being smothered. Then I was here, tied to this fucking—" He struggled a moment, then gave up and blinked at her. "Are you hurt? You're bleeding."

"I'm okay," she lied, and struggled with her own ropes. Not an inch of give. "We have to get out of here."

"Tell me about it."

His sarcasm annoyed her. It was his fault they were in this mess, wasn't it? If he hadn't made a point of tattling on Josefina—

But she couldn't avoid blame. It was her curiosity that had brought them to this table. Her impertinence, for daring to mess with the Association... whoever the hell they might be.

"You're awake," came a male voice from behind them. June twisted to look, but the back of her chair was too high. She saw nothing but her own hair, matted with blood, staining the rococo fabric.

"Where are we?" David said immediately. "Why are you doing this to us?"

"Tut-tut, Mr. Addison," the voice said. "All in good time."

A rumbling approached from outside the dining hall. Beyond flocked wallpaper and portraits of cheerless old white men—each under their own brass lamp, as portraits of the Old Guard always seemed to be—something moved toward the darkened doorway.

Not the chainsaw. Please.

"Ah, our special guest has arrived," the man said at their ears. June swung her head, fireworks shooting through her vision—and saw nothing of the man holding them captive but an arm draped in white silk.

June's heart sank as Armand wheeled in a dolly, their situation so much bleaker than she'd dared to imagine. Strapped to the dolly was Maximo Morales, naked and unconscious, quite possibly dead, and hairless but for the shiny black curls on his head. Armand had washed the blood from himself, and dressed neatly in a black tuxedo and bow tie. He stood the dolly up vertically, leaving Maximo prone and unconscious, with only a strap to conceal his nudity, and joined the man in the white suit, moving out of June's field of vision.

"Max!" David shouted. He twisted his head to look at their captor. "Let him go, you bastards! What did he ever do to you?"

A soft chuckle met his plea. "He was born," the man in the white suit seethed. "He crossed through our border and into our home. Like a goddamn cockroach."

"He was born here," June said, not that it mattered one way or the other. Reasoning with these monsters was futile, but someone had to speak for Max. "His family's from Spain."

"His father's Americo Morales," David added, hoping it meant something to these maniacs.

"Dagos," Armand spat. "I don't know what's worse."

The man in the white suit ignored them, kept plodding forward. "Build a bigger wall, they'll find other ways around it. Under it. Through it. The only reason we tolerate them is because they're so fucking good at what they do, and they do it with aplomb!"

Armand picked up a metal bucket from the floor and tossed its contents at Max's face, painting him in crimson. David sank back against his chair, turning from the sight. Whose blood is it? June wondered. His or hers? That didn't matter, either. It was the blood of every immigrant, legal and illegal, who had dared to cross these people.

Max roused, shook the blood from his hair and blinked it from his eyes. He sucked in a massive breath, his broad, skinny ribcage expanding, and let it out in a scream.

"Max!" June called. "Max, it's us! June and David!"

He blinked. The blood had dripped into his eyes, making the whites pink. "Where—the fuck—am I?" He looked beyond them, at their captors, the Associates. "You fucking pricks, what are you doing to us?"

"We're going to get out of this, Max," David said, though it was clear from his tone he didn't believe it himself.

"Like fuck you are," Armand said, and Max began to weep.

"This one," the man in the white suit said, "mincing around like a schoolgirl. Do you believe he was hoping to get married in my town? To another man? You see? This is what they bring to us—the Europeans." He said the word with purest contempt, as if his own ancestors were a somehow nobler breed. "Shitty pop music and queerdom. And the Mexicans. Christ, what's to do with the Mexicans when they outlive their usefulness? I ask you this, Mr. and Mrs. Addison."

When they didn't respond, he slammed his fist on the table between them, rattling the cutlery, stubby fingers with clean, square nails. The white cuff held a gold cufflink in the shape of some kind of sigil. His face remained out of sight. "Why not make a nice meal out of them, hmm?" He indicated the heads before them with a sweep of his hand, palm up. "Eating is a ritual, after all."

Off to the right, Armand began sharpening a large kitchen knife—shhhick shhhick shhhick—wearing a look of fixed concentration as he stepped between them, still sharpening, and plucked a carving fork from the table. He jabbed it at an angle into the gardener's cheek. The blade carved flesh, a smell arising from the steaming meat: something like roast pork, but slightly tangy and acidic. The meat was white, and clear juices dripped down to the gardener's chin.

June felt a pang of hunger and turned away in disgust. She hadn't eaten since breakfast, and the strenuous afternoon had depleted her energy. Despite the type of meat now prickling her nostrils, she found it difficult not to salivate—and the thought that she'd partaken of Jörg's "forbidden fruit" the night before and still felt fine, while David had vomited up every last bit, made her wonder what kind of monster she was herself, to not only have enjoyed it but kept it down.

"Mmm! Num-num!" The man in the white suit smacked his lips. "Looks scrumptious, doesn't it? Well, bon appétit, as the French say—right, Armand?" he added with a chuckle, and suddenly his chest exploded outward in a spray of blood, spattering against June and David's cheeks, while from the doorway came a seemingly simultaneous explosion. The man gasped and slumped over the table, one hand scattering the shrimp on Josefina's platter, and tipping her head at an unsettling angle. His hat, white straw, had settled brim-up beside the gardener.

Armand brandished the knife and the sharpener, stepping into a defensive stance. Two more reports flashed from the darkness in the hall, and he shook like a ragdoll before falling back on the chair at the head of the table. The chair tipped, and Armand crashing down beside it on the floor. The man in the white suit, a small man with thinning silver hair and a tanned, lined neck, whimpered. His scrawny buttocks began to slide downward, the suit jacket pulling up, exposing a nest of fine silver hairs on his back. His weight tugged the tablecloth before he fell sideways, clunking his head on the arm of June's chair. He crumpled to the floor with an agonized exhale.

"Son!" the intruder's gruff voice said, stepping into the light from the chandelier, handsome and muscular and slightly frazzled. Americo Morales wore a loose blue chambray shirt, white slacks and hiking boots. In his right hand, he held a silver, long-barreled gun. In that moment, he couldn't have looked more heroic.

"Oh, thank God!" David gasped.

Americo approached his son, tucking the pistol into the back of his pants. Max Morales had passed out again, his chin resting on his clavicle, a little runner of blood-tinged drool hanging from his open mouth. "Is he okay? Is he hurt?"

"He's fine," June said. "Just pretty shaken up."

"They were going to kill him," David said. "They thought he was Mexican," he added, and laughed somewhat deliriously. Americo gave David an odd look, then began to unstrap his son from the dolly. The boyish man fell into his father's arm. Americo hugged him to his chest, and began to weep.

The man in the white suit groaned.

"Sir?" David said. "Sir!"

Americo blinked away tears, and peered back at them.

"This one's still alive."

Americo narrowed his eyes, and laid his son on the floor. Max curled immediately into the fetal position and put a thumb in his mouth, fully regressed in his terror. His father stood, jerking the gun from his slacks, and he stepped over to David's side and shot the man twice, point-blank. The shots were satisfyingly loud.

"Fucking old-money prick," Americo grunted, and spat on the dead man at his feet. He laid the gun (wood-handled, with PYTHON 357 etched into the barrel) on the table between them, took in the sight of Josefina and the gardener, and swallowed something distasteful. "Jesus," he said. "To think I'd hired these people to cater my party."

He began to untie June. The ropes slackened, and she struggled with them. "Hold on, sweetheart. It's June, right? You're going to be okay, June. Looks like you put up one hell of a fight."

June nodded, smiling gratefully. A tear dropped; she felt it prickle a trail down the blood coagulating on her cheek.

The ropes fell. June wriggled out and stood, freed—delighted. She swayed on her feet, woozy from the blow to her head whatever had caused it (she remembered, vaguely, a large and unseen thing writhing in the dark, some squirming, natatorial creature with stinging nettles), and she grasped the table.

Americo was untying David. "Anything you need me to do, just ask," David said. "Anything."

Meanwhile, June stood over the man in the white suit, which was now almost entirely red. She hauled back and kicked him as hard as she could. His body shifted, but he uttered no sound. The toe of her dock shoe came back bloody.

"—how did you find us, though?" David was obsessing about details, as was his custom. "It just seems... I don't know. Kind of well-timed."

"Son, have you ever heard the expression 'Don't look a gift horse in the mouth'?" Americo asked this with a stern look, and David stopped talking. In a moment he was freed, and rubbing at his wrists. His boss went down to one knee beside Armand's lifeless body. He threw a look back over his shoulder. "I want you kids to get as far away from here as possible," he said, and unbuckled Armand's belt.

"Shouldn't we call the police?" David asked.

"He is the police," Americo said, indicating the man in white. "That's Sheriff Cooper I just put three hollow-points through."

"That's not good."

"No, it is not. Leave town. Don't pack up. If you get a phone call from any unknown numbers in the next couple of days, I suggest you don't answer it."

"What about you? What will you do?" June asked, as the man slid the waiter's pants down to the knees. The Frenchman wore silk briefs over his deeply-tanned legs, the exposed buttocks pale.

"Well, first I'm going to dress my son, and take him back to his mother and fiancé." He jerked the pants over Armand's bare feet, and brought them to Max. Pausing there for a moment, he eyed the two of them sharply. "And then I'm going to move Heaven and Earth to turn this whole goddamn town into a parking lot."

June took David's hand, and they ran. Lifeless, musty unfurnished rooms seemed to go on forever: the great halls, the dusty libraries, the swollen antechambers. It was a mausoleum; nobody lived here but the dead. They lost themselves twice, had to turn and circle back, only to head through another dark doorway, another bare, enormous room. Finally, they came to a solid door set in a gothic arch, much wider and sturdier than the others. June let go of David's hand to throw the bolt back, and tore it open.

A bitter wind whipped up at them from the yawning cliff at their feet, the smell of salt water strong. Its rocky face crumbled into the ocean far below as they stood gripping the smooth stone arch. The mansion had been built by the ocean; erosion had brought the cliff to its walls.

"Honey?" David said, his voice small, frightened. June turned to him, saw that he was looking down—not just looking but staring. She followed his gaze, and saw frenzied movement in the shadows along the rocky shore. Crabs, she thought; there must be hundreds of them. But her eyes adjusted, seeing it now for what it was: a behemoth cloaked in darkness, a slithering, crawling leviathan dragging itself up from the churning tide. She saw eyes, a glimpse of its hide, and legs, and claws, but all of these quickly vanished, swirling away into its dark shroud.

June scrabbled back out of the doorway, terrified into action. David stood where he was, fixated on the grotesque thing rising from the depths. She tore his fingers from the door, and he rocked on his feet, a stunned look in his eyes. She shook him, and the blank look cleared. He seemed to realize what was happening, and stepped back from the abyss.

"What... what is that thing?"

June said nothing, only slammed the door on it.

Hurrying back the way they'd come, he stopped suddenly and stared straight ahead, appearing confused. June tugged him forward by the hand, and they ran past the dining hall again, where the dead remained dead, and Americo and Max had departed.

Out on the front lawn, its grounds gone to ruin, the toothless cadaver of a mansion receded into the dark. A sudden wave of dizziness struck her as they passed through its moldering gardens, and she stopped only for a moment, catching her breath, letting the oxygen flow to her swimming head. Then they took to the hill, damp grass licking at her bare calves, and when they finally broke through the woods, June and David found themselves in a clearing behind Ambrosia.

No smoke arose from the chimney. Its fire had finally guttered out.

Once in the car, David drove as if the Devil were at their back wheels, but it seemed as though the thing draped in shadow hadn't followed. Driving gave him something to focus on, and June's head hurt too much to look at anything but the mirrors, searching for frantic movement in the dark.

"How are we going to get past this?" he asked her, with another nervous glance at the rearview as they turned onto the highway. "Knowing what we know... everything we've seen... Can we just forget it ever happened? Is that even possible?"

"We have to try," she said. June felt him gazing at her, not looking at the road, so she tore her eyes from the mirror to look back at him. His eyes were pleading, requiring something more from her, which she didn't have to give. She forced a smile, put a hand on his thigh, and squeezed.

Strengthened by her perceived courage, David pressed his foot on the accelerator, and the road sign disappeared behind them: YOU ARE LEAVING MONTE VERDE.

Thank God, she thought. Thank Americo.

What was he doing there? she found herself wondering.

The truth didn't matter. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, Americo had said, and she didn't intend to. It didn't matter how incredibly timely his intervention had been. What mattered was they were free.

Maybe he had Max micro-chipped? she thought. He seems like the kind of guy who'd protect an investment—especially his child.

But her mother had a different opinion: What if he'd come for dinner, Juniper? That's something to consider, don't you think?

She racked her brain for something to take her mind off the useless speculation. There was a secondary camera in the glove compartment. June took it out: a small, virtually useless thing, a backup camera for touristy-type photos. Now that her good camera was gone, she supposed it would have to do. She brought it to her eye, and turned to look back at the retreating town through the viewfinder.

In her mind's eye, she saw beachfront houses topple into the black froth of the ocean. She envisioned the Mission set ablaze in the dead of night, burning against the moonless desert. She saw gardeners, maids, chauffeurs, construction workers and janitors stalk through the streets, using the tools of their trades against their exploiters. She saw the mesas crumble and the forests burn, as if now that outsiders knew its secrets, the town of Monte Verde were being obliterated from the earth, like a Biblical city by the hand of God—or Americo Morales.

Good riddance, she thought, and snapped another photo.

SCAVENGERS

1

TWO DAYS BEFORE the first of those murders you may have heard about on the news, I saw Jim Taymor stapling a poster to the utility pole between his yard and mine. I'd been mowing my lawn, and I stopped the mower to ask him what was up. I recall thinking it was for a special event at the restaurant, but the look on his face told me I was wrong. Jim had been my neighbor and my friend long enough for me to know the not-so-subtle working of his jaw meant he was jazzed up about something. A glimpse at the poster he'd half tacked up told me what it was before he spoke.

LOST DOG

had been printed in large computer letters up top. Below this was a picture of their rat terrier, Rosco. I happen to know his show name was Rosco P. Coltrane, after the idiot deputy in The Dukes of Hazzard, which I believe Jim or his wife, Leanne, had thought was funny. Like the character, the dog was perpetually terrified, and the photo, with its downward-pointing wide angle, had captured this look just fine. Below that were a few details: black and white coloration, that he'd been wearing a red collar around his neck, that he was "very friendly" (a fact I cannot attest to, having known Rosco intimately for the six years they'd had him), and that he had a "slightly crooked" tail.

I don't suppose I have to tell you I'd never been fond of the Taymors' dog. He was loud, rambunctious, and somewhat feral—if there was ever a dog so different from its owners, Rosco was it. But upon witnessing the look of woe on Jim's face that morning, the sympathy I offered was honest. I said I hoped he'd find it (a lie), and that I'd keep my eye out for Rosco myself and be sure to contact Jim or Leanne the second I heard or saw anything. To be frank, I had my doubts the little mutt would ever be seen or heard from again.

What I'd been thinking of were the cougars reputed to be in the area. Family pets had gone missing more often than usual that spring and summer—outdoor cats in particular, but gates were sometimes left open, and runaway dogs had not escaped the fate of their feline brothers and sisters. It was not unheard of to see mangled raccoons splayed out far from the closest road, nor carcasses of squirrels that were little more than fur and bone scattered on someone's lawn. I'm certain the thought of those damn cougars hadn't escaped Jim and Leanne Taymor, either. Hell, Jim's LOST DOG announcement remained half-tacked between a new one for a missing orange tabby, and a weathered one for a black Lab named Chico, its PLEASE CALL tabs flapping hopelessly in a light spring breeze.

If only it had been the work of cougars, life in our little village of Knee High would have gone on as it always had—not quite simply (I am not so delusional—at least not yet—as to believe life anywhere can be altogether simple), but less hurried, perhaps. And certainly we would not be on the map, as we are now, resting uneasily in the collective forebrain of the country at large, already weary from the previous tragedy du jour.

Would things have happened differently if Rosco the trained rat terrier had shown up shivering and hungry at their doorstep that night, or any subsequent night leading up to the dreadful culmination of their crimes? I can't say for certain. It is difficult for me to believe Jim would have done what he had over the death of a dog, no matter how he felt about Rosco. What I can say is that Jim and Leanne Taymor were two of the finest people I have ever met, yet their crimes, of which they are most certainly guilty, remain among the most heinous things I have ever heard. I believe they call that a dichotomy. It's a word I've considered quite a bit since Jim and Leanne dropped in on my wife and me, little over half a year ago now, and revealed to us their terrible secret.

If you watch the news (and who can avoid it these days, what with round-the-clock footage of all the late-breaking celebrity scandals and puff pieces your brain can handle), you might think you know all there is to know about what the news took to calling "The Taymor Murders." Even if you'd hung on every word of that damned media circus throughout the fall and winter of 2011/12, questions remain. Their motivations seemed to defy logic, their impenitence was harder to swallow. If they had pled insanity, we might have understood; if they'd appeared insane, even, rather than how we'd seen them as they were hauled off toward prison and sitting in court, both wearing identical expressions of happy-pill serenity, it might have made some sense. If they hadn't looked like the typical small-town White America couple with the minivan and the 2.5 children, we might have been able to scratch the itch in our subconscious, the one which reminds us we all walk a tightrope between sanity and madness, a rope that is both slippery and barbed. The odds are not stacked in our favor.

Before the murders, Jim and Leanne had been what folks would call "people people," and if you leafed through either of their high school yearbooks (they hadn't met until university, having grown up on either side of the state), you'd see they always had been, though they didn't care for the term and surely would never have applied it to themselves. Jim and Leanne weren't the type to toot their own horns, blessed with a knack for remaining humble even while receiving well-deserved praise. Friends and neighbors had been quick to assure the frenzy of newshounds that the Taymors were "friendly, caring people," "a happy and loving couple," and "two of the finest people you could ever meet."

I've always thought one of the sadder aspects of the whole mess—aside from all those dead folks, which is unquestionably tragic—was that every single good thing those people had to say about the Taymors was the God's honest truth. They say it's the quiet ones, the nice ones, who commit some of the worst crimes. I don't know how true that is; what, for instance, would Hitler's neighbors have said about him? Likely nothing pleasant. But it was certainly true in their case.

How could such a happy, generous couple commit the horrible acts of violence they showed on the news, you ask? How could two peace-loving, human-rights-touting Democrats—who'd voted for Gore, I should add, before anyone had cared a lick for that tiresome old fool—murder six innocent men and women, a young boy and a dog... in cold blood, and with all the ease and indifference of a child trampling an ant hill?

Well, I happen to be privy to that information, much as I often wish I weren't. I was their neighbor throughout the whole mess, and I remain their friend. I am the only one who did not abandon them after they were sentenced to seven consecutive life-sentences each, with zero chance of parole. Whether that makes me a fool or not I'll leave up to you. Even my Virginia, who sat with me during their entire confession, gripping my hand under the table as the more appalling details were revealed, had been shrewd enough to jump ship when it seemed there was no redemption in sight.

From what they told me, during and after the incident, and from what I've pieced together myself through detective work and bald assumption, I'd like to tell you that story, if you'll hear it. You can make up your mind as to what's true and what isn't. I'm not even sure I have myself, to tell the truth.

And like I said, I was there.

2

THOUGH THEIR DOG was missing and presumed (by me, at least) to be dead, the so-called Taymor Murders began with the trash. It happened quite regular that Jim or Leanne would open up shop mid-morning to discover raccoons had gotten into the Dumpsters in the alley out back of La Costina again. "La Costina" in Knee High, Nebraska—can you imagine it? The name of that place was about the only whiff of pretension I'd ever gotten from them, otherwise we likely wouldn't have been as close as we'd become over the years.

It's all boarded up now. Nobody wants to eat at a place where people were murdered, and so far no one's been foolhardy enough to rent it out in the wake of it, even though they could for a song. Tragedies leave their imprints—not just on the bereaved, but on the community at large. I'm sure the good folks in Sandy Hook could tell you that. Or Sanford, Florida. Or Centennial, Colorado. Or any number of small towns across this great nation of ours. That particular piece of property is a black stain on the incorporated village of Knee High, and will be, I suspect, long after I'm gone.

When Jim came to me with his idea—it was Leanne's idea, in truth—to quit a perfectly good career as a geologist and open an Italian restaurant in a town with a population of roughly 2500 (this during the summer months, when migrant workers fill up the empty rentals and campgrounds), with virtually no tourism and the economy heading into the crapper, I told him flat-out he was crazy. As his best friend and his accountant, I felt I had the right.

That restaurant was meant to be their retirement fund; now their golden years will be on Uncle Sam's dime. Nobody ever expected it to do well. In actual fact most people thought it would go bust in less than a year's time. But word of its old-world charm and inventive take on traditional dishes carried to the city, and while other businesses fell into dissolution around it, La Costina drew in crowds every night.

Most of this had to do with Leanne's cooking. She'd started taking classes in the Big O as a lark after the fall of the Towers, to "take her mind off the tragedy," as she'd put it, though I suspect the tragedy she meant was one of a more personal nature, one which had been on her mind for some time by then. Pretty soon she was in charge of the cooking for all sorts of events around town. Knee High Collegiate's bake sale in the spring of 2002 paid for an entire class to go to Ecuador (God knows what they'd wanted to do down there, aside from muling cocaine back across the border), along with all brand-new equipment for a football team that had never done well in the rankings and probably never would. I doubt any of those kids had any delusions about being scouted by the Huskers, but hell if they didn't look sharp in those new uniforms.

Even so, nobody thought the restaurant stood a chance. People thought the both of them had gone crazy, an idea that came to haunt some of these folks just lately. Not only did the Taymors and La Costina prove our assumptions wrong, they did us one better and brought several small businesses back from the brink of extinction, with the help of some much-needed tourist bucks. No one could begrudge them their inexplicable success when said success restored hope to a town struggling to stay afloat like so many others, while the government fat cats gave handouts to corporations that had overspent their means.

Five years later they were still doing a fine business. The only trouble was with the raccoons, and for the self-employed, that was very little trouble indeed. At first. When it became big trouble, Jim came to me on the evening of May 1st while I sat on the veranda with a sweating bottle of O'Douls (which tasted like cold piss to me, but my blossoming love of the alcoholic kind in that first year of the Great Recession had almost cost me the love of my wife of thirty years), watching a storm gather on the outskirts of town. He nodded and sat beside me. Like the day before, when I'd seen him tacking up the LOST DOG sign, I could tell there was something on his mind; his eyes had a storm of their own brewing in them, an odd look for Jim Taymor. The only other time I'd seen him with a look like that, prior to that night in May, was when Leanne had had her miscarriage in '98.

It was not just the dog, missing three days by then, weighing on his mind.

Our own kids had grown and left the nest, Jim and Leanne being twenty-some years our juniors. But Virginia and I had kept pace with them in '98—Gin sometimes joked the Lewinsky scandal had been planting dirty thoughts in her head—and with our bedroom windows practically side-by-side, some nights it seemed like a competition. Jim and Leanne won. They had had a name chosen (Olivia) before Leanne had even started to show, which any fool could tell you is bad luck. As a professional accountant for forty-two years, and a retired one for six, I believe less in luck than in numbers. For instance, the chance of a woman in her mid-to-late-thirties losing a child is much higher than the odds of winning the $2 Powerball. Life is a Ponzi scheme, I tell you; you only get back what you put in, and more than likely you'll lose your shirt.

Jim sat in the Adirondack chair next to mine, where Gin would have been sitting with a cup of iced tea if she hadn't been visiting our eldest in North Dakota. When he planted his hands on the armrests, I realized with dismay I could see the bone of every knuckle, emblazoned white against his tanned skin. This was not good news I was about to be treated to, and I took another swig in preparation for it, hoping for the sweet sting of alcohol and getting nothing but bitter. I was expecting word of another miscarriage, or of financial crisis: the town's predictions of failure finally coming 'round the bend. Hell, even learning that Leanne had up and left him in the night would have been less bewildering than what he did say.

Less disconcerting.

"Have you ever heard of Frugaltarians?" he said after a time. There was a noisome whiff of trash on him, but that was nothing new; he often got his hands dirty at the restaurant, and some of the stink wouldn't wash off until his morning shower. I loathe to imagine what his side of the bed must have smelled like.

Right then he was eying the tract houses across the way. Not many had lights on, despite the growing dark. This was as much to do with the economy as with the fact that there was not much for the modern American family to do in Knee High on a rainy weekend evening. Children don't spend long nights playing board games with their folks like they did when Jessa and Tim were growing up, except for maybe the Mormons. These days they drove into the city to sit in darkened theaters and the Dave & Busters, their zombified faces tinted blue by the screens of their intelligent telephones.

I knew of them, the Frugaltarians. I'd heard of them from the news, where I suspect most people who don't have the internet hear of things like that. Dumpster divers, or so it was said. It had seemed like a reaction to the recession to me, but the Frugaltarians themselves said it was about social responsibility and an opposition to corporate greed, and I suppose that's a reaction to economic decline of a sort. These weren't homeless people, I should stress. The Frugaltarians were hard-working Americans, rooting through the trash for edibles by choice, taking food from the mouths of vagrants. At least, that was what I had gleaned from the story.

"If we don't eat it," one woman in a smart business suit and tortoise-shell glasses told the reporter, "it'll go to waste."

"I guess the thrill of boycotting the Walmart must have lost its luster," Gin had said, shaking her head the way she always does when something goes beyond her comprehension.

I told Jim that I had.

He nodded. It was the sort of nod you might expect of a man who'd just been told he had cancer of the rectum. Then he said: "They're not what they seem." His eyes remained unwavering on the black windows of the empty subdivision, finger bones chalk-white on the armrest.

I guessed he was going to elaborate, but he never did. What he did shook me more than anything he'd done since he had risen the creaky stairs to my porch: he stood up and walked right back down to the sidewalk, without even a fond farewell. Right then I had an inkling Jim was in deeper trouble than I'd imagined, and I should have mentioned it to Gin when she returned from Jessa's dormitory that Wednesday.

Like Jim Taymor departing my porch, his head hung low while God bowled a perfect game in the distance, I said nothing. If I had told Virginia, she would undoubtedly have gone to Leanne. A woman should be spared her man's darkest moments, that's what I've always believed. This moment was surely the darkest side of Jim I'd seen since they'd moved into the house beside us in September of '96.

The darkest by far.

3

I DIDN'T TELL Gin, and that's on me.

If I'd told her, could I have stopped events from progressing the way they had? I often wonder that now, particularly on those nights with a storm threatening in the east. More than likely the two of us would have been drawn into it ourselves, and that would have been good for no one. The same government who bailed out Merrill Lynch and Citibank, in spite of the massive bonuses provided to upper management, would have been handing out meals and accommodations, meager as they might be, to four lifers instead of two. And although I've always thought Virginia looked damned fine in orange, it would do me no good being halfway across the state in the men's institution and her in the women's. Distance is one problem those little blue pills cannot solve, with the exception of a few meager inches.

The next time I saw Jim, he was out mowing his front lawn, wearing that silly, sweaty blue bandana he always tied around his head while doing chores, although he was not so much mowing the lawn as running the push mower in a zigzag pattern around the center of it, counter to his usual methodical rows. Only a few days had passed between then and that night on the porch, but Jim's hair was unkempt and I could see cheekbones where he'd had a bit of pudginess since his high school days. I didn't find out until many months later what had happened to cause such a drastic change in the interim. I'll spare you the wait.

That night on my porch was the first time he'd seen them, really seen them for what they were. It was a Sunday, and as was typical for a Sunday, they'd closed up shop early. It was Leanne's night off. Only Jim was there, along with a few of the young wait-staff, Arnie Jacobs the sous-chef, and the Latino fella who ran the big ugly Hobart dishwasher. I don't remember his name, having only spoken to him a couple of times in his broken English—it might be Javier. Something with a J that's pronounced like a Y; I suppose with only that to go by it could be anything, really. Anyway, Javier or whatever his name was had to leave early—wife had had an accident at the leather mill, so the story went, cutting up her hand pretty badly in one of those deadly machines—and so Jim was left with the last of the dishes and cleanup duty.

He didn't mind the job, said it was where he'd started in the food industry a long way back: bussing tables and running the dishwasher to pay his way through school. It was a Zen thing, he said, something he could do on autopilot, switching off his thoughts for a time. I guess I knew what he meant. In those days before the troubles had come, peace and tranquility hadn't been strangers to me, having been retired a handful of years already. I did a fair bit of work during tax season, to pay for the things Gin and I hadn't saved for, the trips out to see the kids, hospital bills, repairs on the house, etc. But mostly I just puttered about, not doing or thinking much of anything. Peace of mind is something you don't often notice until you've lost it, and it's a luxury no amount of spring tax work has afforded me since our little town of Knee High became a household name.

Jim stepped out into the darkened alley, lugging a stuffed garbage bag in each hand. The mouth of that alley was just wide enough for the garbage truck to pass through with a man hanging off the side, but it opened wider from there, allowing room for two, maybe three cars, two large trash bins and one for recycling. There were three doors. One led to La Costina; the other two were for the army-navy store (in the middle) and a video store. This last was empty (and still is), its windows barred and its doors chained—much like La Costina's and the army-navy's are today.

The single yellow light above the surplus store provided meager illumination for the entire lot. It was triggered by motion, and didn't work the way it was meant: it'd go off with a sudden gust of wind, yet wouldn't when you were standing right below it, waving your hands like a spastic air-traffic controller. This layout is fresh in my mind because I've been there recently, after the police no longer considered it a crime scene and the tape had been cleared away.

Call it morbid curiosity. I needed to see for myself where my friends had lost their innocence. That may sound foolish to you—the mawkish behavior of a washed-up old fart, perhaps. I wanted to see if it held the same dark power over me as they had seemed to hold over the psyche of my fellow Kneeites (a peculiar, vaguely Biblical demonym voted into being some ten years back, which few self-respecting Knee High residents, outside of town council, ever use when referring to themselves). After La Costina's back lot, I hobbled out to the place where the Schultz house once stood, leaning heavily on the brass-tipped cane Gin had bought for me when my knee (of all things) had gone bad a while back.

The oddest thing about these spots was how normal they felt. Nothing at all appeared to be sinister about them. Seven people had been murdered, and the earth itself seemed to know no difference. The ground was dry in places, wet in others; spongy with rotting leaves, hard with packed dirt and stones. In the parking lot, a patch of dandelions now grew where the pavement had cracked, the green paint had flaked from metal doors, the mortar between bricks crumbled here and there. The garbage bins were a little rusted but otherwise serviceable. These were typical post-recession American settings—something you'd see in just about any town from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine.

I'm not sure what I had expected to find, precisely. I suppose I thought I might feel an imprint of those murders—the aftershock, so to speak. Like those women on the boob tube who, upon entering even the most cookie-cutter of suburban homes, become tearful, grasping whatever medallion worn around her neck and declaring, "I sense a tremendous amount of suffering here." I felt none of this. Horrific things had happened; the world went on, despite them.

What I did feel was an end to that profound sense of loss with which I'd been burdened since the night of their confession. Leanne had picked up the telephone in the kitchen and dialed 911, and Jim had watched her with a strange hybrid of resignation and regret on his face, as she asked the police to come and arrest them. Sitting there, I felt as though the neighbors I knew and, yes, had grown to love, had been murdered before my very eyes. Trudging over the Schultz property, running my fingers over nearly every square inch of the alley behind La Costina, it felt as if I were standing at the graveside of Jim and Leanne Taymor.

I felt—for the moment—at peace.

Nearly a year before, I had stood in the alley, touching things indiscriminately, as if to be certain of their corporeality, and Jim had stepped through the back door with trash in hand, his shadow drawn long over the scale of dried slime on the concrete you often saw out the back of a busy restaurant: the shriveled bits of lettuce and potato shavings, the fish scales and egg shells, the soap suds. The first bag had landed true; the second one had thudded off the edge of the bin. The sound which accompanied it—a "low sort of mewling growl," was the way he described it—had arisen from somewhere in the darkness of the back lot. It was, he said, the sound of an animal either in pain or in heat, and made the hackles on his neck stand at attention for "The Star-Spangled Banner."

The garbage bag had split open, oozing filth onto the pavement. If he left it overnight, raccoons would get to it, or skunks, and spread it all over the damn place. They'd have an even bigger problem to deal with when the maggots and flies set in. Leanne was a fine woman, but she didn't tolerate half-assedness; the spic-and-span, "a place for everything and everything in its place" condition of their home was a testament to that. The animal—whatever it was—suddenly the furthest thing from his mind, Jim approached the shredded bag, preparing to scoop the raw food up with his hands, since there was no shovel handy, and slop it into the bin. Leave it for the guy with the truck to deal with; Lord knows they paid him enough.

As he got down on his haunches and scooped up a handful of filth, there came a scratching behind the bin. Startled, Jim peered around it.

There, clawing at the rusted corner of the bin, was a fat orange tabby. It yowled at him, its eyes shining in the half-light from the kitchen.

"Here, puss puss puss," Jim cooed, and made kissing sounds he would have been embarrassed about in public. He was certain this was the lost cat from the posters. It did not scurry away, merely yowled again, a plaintive sound, nothing at all pleasant about it. It reminded Jim of the time he'd accidentally closed the sliding door at his grandmother's house on the tail of her vicious Siamese. Not the sound it had made immediately, that had been a cry much like a wailing baby, but after the initial pain had subsided. It had lain beside Grandma, glaring resentfully at eight-year-old Jim, yowling every so often, just like the cat behind the bin did now.

Jim waddled toward her on his haunches, making his kissy sounds.

The tabby shied away, the little blue bell on its collar jingling against the tag, and suddenly he saw the reason for its wails. Someone had left the cat tethered to the bike rack on the far wall by a length of chain. They'd been feeding it by the look of her, but a few dishes of 9 Lives didn't excuse the mistreatment.

The cat squalled again. Jim looked at his watch face, slimed with the juicy innards of some vegetable. The minute hand was closing on midnight. His eyes scoured the lot, gazing into every dark nook and cranny, waiting for a shape to present itself, for someone to emerge from the shadows. He'd only seen the man who ran Knee High Surplus once or twice: a pleasant enough older fella, military haircut, dressed not in the camo he would have expected, but in a shiny red tracksuit with an emblem on the left breast.

He didn't look the type to chain household pets to walls as a form of torture, but Jim knew the old notion that No man is an island was pure claptrap. Every man, woman and child on God's green earth is an island unto him or herself, with oceans of inscrutability between them. We tell ourselves we know someone, even those who are closest to us: our neighbors, or those who share our beds. But how much do we really know? I ask you that in all sincerity. How much do we know? In truth, Jim Taymor knew his neighbor at La Costina's no more than I, apparently, knew my own. He could have been a ritual animal abuser just as easily as a saint.

Fear clutched suddenly and coldly at Jim's midsection. He was thinking of Rosco P. Coltrane. The poor little mutt was on his own out there, defenseless against the animal savagery of the world outside his backyard. Had Rosco spent a night at the end of this same chain?

A sucking, clucking sort of sound startled him. He recognized it as human, even before he turned to see its maker—and what he did see made him reconsider.

The woman, naked as Eve before the serpent, was climbing down the brick side of the building. This in itself did not make his heart perform an awkward triple-somersault beneath his scuzzy apron. What troubled him was that she was climbing down face-first, hand over hand, foot over foot. Her flesh, under the motion-sensing light, was gray-black and cracked like the basin of a dried lakebed.

There was a wet double-slap of bare feet as the woman landed, just outside the slanted rectangle of fluorescent light from La Costina's kitchen. She perched there like a toad, knees perpendicular with her shoulders, hands planted on the ground before her, and in the vague light it seemed as if her eyes were glowing like those of an animal. But her shape was distinctly human. Of that, Jim was dead certain.

He was certain of another thing, too: he knew this person. He'd seen her jogging by the house just about every morning. She lived in our neighborhood. It was Cordelia Moone, who made a living wage fashioning clay pots and trinkets out of her home. He recognized her, even with her graying blonde hair hanging in dirty strands in her face, instead of tied up in its usual neat little ponytail. I'm not inclined to doubt him; Jim has always had a preternatural recognition of faces, which is perhaps one of the reasons La Costina had fared so well. Even out-of-towners he'd remember by name, if he saw them more than once. If he says it was Cordelia Moone he saw under all that muck, as opposed to some wild-eyed transient merely passing through town, I would be apt to take him at his word.

It made the mystery of what happened the following week a fair bit less mysterious, in retrospect.

Jim said he heard Cordelia Moone make a low mewling growl, a sound he'd never heard uttered so authentically from a human mouth. It sounded, in truth, like the cat chained to the bike rack. While Jim scuttled out of sight behind the Dumpster, Cordelia Moone stood on her haunches and yowled. The cat repeated the sound, and it turned in a tight circle toward her, its little blue bell jingling. And as the Moone woman crept into the kitchen's light, her eyes began to glow like a wolf's in a pair of headlamps.

Eyeshine in animals is caused by what they call the "bright tapestry," a layer of tissue directly behind the retina. (The red-eye effect you see in photos is blood illuminated by the flash, an entirely different phenomenon.) The closest a human eye can approximate that animal shine is something called "white shine," caused by cataracts or cataract surgery, cancer, etc.

I looked this up the morning Jim told me everything, while he and Leanne were getting processed at Knee High's Sheriff's station—trying to convince myself, I suppose, that there didn't have to be a supernatural explanation for the glow in the Moone woman's eyes. That the story they told Gin and me wasn't quite as batshit-crazy as it sounded. That they weren't as crazy as I believed them to be. But it was also to re-inter the corpse of childhood superstition their tale had dug up in me, whose shadow had crept up on me during their confession, drawing its claws around my throat. If what they'd said was even half true, my little bubble of a worldview was set to burst.

Only Cordelia's doctor would know for sure, I thought.

And the coroner. He would know too.

Jim told us Cordelia Moone had approached the tabby cautiously, crawling on all fours with her mud-caked tits swaying beneath her, flecks of earth shedding off her like dried skin or insects from a neglected animal. Even from where he was, crouched behind the Dumpster ten feet away, he could smell her: a rancid, musky sort of odor that seemed to radiate from her in hot, fetid waves. He had pinched his nose shut, feeling the prickle in his nostrils that signaled an oncoming sneeze, and watched.

The cat had mewled, like a kitten calling to its mother.

The woman had stroked its fur. Her lips peeled back in a gentle smile, dirt crackling in the wrinkles on her face.

Then she had gripped the cat by all four legs, and while it yelped and jerked in her hands, plunged her face into its soft, furry belly.

There was a crunchy squelch, Jim said, as her teeth tore into its flesh. Jim felt revulsion curdle the contents of his stomach. Her face came up with a Velcro rip, glistening innards and orange fur hanging from her lips, dripping fluids. The cat hung loose in her hands, its glassy marble eyes seeming to stare at Jim with the same accusing look Grandma Taymor's Siamese had given him.

Cordelia swallowed, wiped her mouth in the dirty crook of her elbow, and bowed her head for another bite.

I don't believe Jim would have lied about that, particularly after having admitted to seven murders—eight, if you included the accidental death of the dog. Cordelia Moone was the first, but not that night. Jim stood up slowly, letting the egg yolk and peeled carrot drip through his fingers onto the cement at his feet. I imagine the cold, chunky egg must have felt sickening in his hands right then, like vomit or innards.

Cordelia's nostrils flared suddenly. She lowered her meal, seemed to sniff the air for a moment, and then her shining eyes fell upon her observer. She mirrored his action, rising up on her—I almost wrote "hind legs" there, as if she weren't a woman at all. But of course she was a woman, or at least had been. If she wasn't, the actions Jim and Leanne took from that point on would have been justified. Maybe even lauded.

Her dinner discarded, the Moone woman's blood-streaked arms hung loose at her sides, her shoulders hunched "like an ape," as Jim described her posture to us at our kitchen table. She was swaying back and forth, into the light and out of it, and as she did the flicker in her eyes waxed and waned like... well, like the moon. And when she made that low growl again, he saw her blood-pinked teeth had been whetted down to fangs.

It seemed to Jim she was sizing him up, measuring whether the tasty treat she'd found was worth snapping his neck, or if the risk of killing him was worth the meal Jim himself would make. And while she mulled this over, Jim stood immobile, so terrified by this woman he'd seen puttering in the vegetable garden out front of her bungalow, where most folks had a lawn (or rusted car parts and the like), or sweeping her walkway, or up on a ladder cleaning out her gutters, her face now virtually unrecognizable beneath its coat of grime and her filthy hair. So terrified was he, he admitted freely enough, for a moment he was certain he had wet himself. But it was only the slop from the trash bag, oozing a cold wet trail down his leg.

His attention momentarily diverted by the stain on his pants, Cordelia Moone vaulted over the fence, disappearing into the night.

Why she returned the following night, I couldn't say. Perhaps it's like that song about the cat said, and she just couldn't stay away. All I know for certain is the next night, which was a Monday, Jim came prepared.

Cordelia Moone's sister, who lived in a neighboring town, reported her missing two days later. The hunt was on. MISSING posters were tacked up all over town (by whom I do not know; I never saw anyone putting them up, they had simply appeared one morning, as if the job had been done in the skulk of night) alongside those for Rosco, the Taymors's dog, the orange tabby (that Cordelia had half devoured), and the dozens of other pets who'd vanished from backyards that year. Rumors spread, as they tend to in small towns, like a California wildfire.

And though her body had not been found, the local rag suggested that perhaps our resident cougar had acquired a taste for human meat.

I thought nothing much of the disappearance, aside from your typical neighborly concern. Well, not entirely. Because I knew Cordelia Moone was a Frugaltarian. Or at least, suspected I knew. Jim's words that night on my porch, while I choked down my bitter brew—They're not what they seem—had been planted in my brain, and they grew a poison plant in my heart like the rhubarb Jim had killed her with. And what could I do, even if I had been certain? Go to the police with a hunch? With Jim's reputation around town, they would have laughed me out of the station.

Of course, by then she was only "missing." When Cordelia failed to surface after several months, the case, like her corpse, grew cold.

4

JIM LAY AWAKE in bed that night he'd come to my porch smelling of trash, while Leanne's breath came slow and steady beside him, much as I would lay awake beside my Virginia when the absurd idea occurred that Jim Taymor might have had something to do with the Moone woman's disappearance. And it was a silly notion. If you had known Jim Taymor—the old Jim Taymor, not the shell of a man I'd since gone to visit each Friday at the State Penitentiary—if you knew him like I did, you would have laughed the thought away without a moment's hesitation. But it was because I knew him so well that the thought wouldn't shake so easily. Because that night on my porch, I had seen a different man—or rather, a glimpse of the man he had only just started to become. A man who'd been lurking under the surface, waiting to come out from hiding.

He lay awake that night, stewing in the certainty he could never tell the woman he loved anything about what he'd seen behind the restaurant, despite the promise they'd made after the miscarriage to share everything. Most men know a promise like that is conditional; no woman wants to know every dirty little secret about her husband, just like no man wanted to know how many men his darling wife had taken behind the bleachers before he had met her. Just the same, I think Jim was the rare type of man who wanted to know, not out of jealousy but because he was genuinely interested, and the promise they'd made was something he had aimed to follow to the letter. Until that very night, I believe he had honestly thought he could keep it.

While Leanne slept, Jim replayed the scene on the darkened stucco of the bedroom ceiling: Cordelia's glowing eyes, the grime on her face and in her straggly hair, the way she'd mollified the cat by mimicking its own sounds, before tearing out its raw guts with her teeth. Her nudity, bizarre and somewhat grotesque at the time, aroused something primal within him as his wife snored softly beside him. Cordelia was old enough to be his mother (she may even have taught him how to bake clay pots in a kiln when he was a boy, when they had taken classes to her studio), but he found his mind now returning to the dark, mud-slicked place where her muscled legs came together, and felt himself stiffening under the sheet. This was the sort of dark detail a man's wife should be spared, as I've said. I only relate it to you because it illustrates Jim's chaotic state of mind—and certainly body—as he contemplated what he'd do, if anything, the next time he saw Cordelia Moone.

She's killed him, too, you know, he thought, and the erection immediately began to subside. It hadn't just been Cordelia. Whoever had left the cat chained to the bike rack behind the restaurant, like a treat left for a larger, far more dangerous pet, was equally, if not more, responsible. You've given Rosco his last Snausage. He's pissing on the carpets in doggy heaven now, the little rascal.

He thought of Rosco—shivering and yelping in the dark, chewing obsessively at his paws as he sometimes did, his cries met with nothing but anger from apartment dwellers trying to sleep—and was reminded of the Golden Retriever he'd had as a child, a dog named Rufus. Jim swallowed a hard lump and held back his tears. They weren't Jim the adult's tears, anyhow; they belonged to the boy he'd been. The rat terrier had been Leanne's idea, and Rosco had loved her most, perhaps sensing Jim hadn't liked him much. Rosco was too wimpy, too yappy, too disobedient—Jim and I had the same complaints, it seemed. Mostly, he had reminded Jim of Rufus, despite their obvious differences, and looking at Rosco had called up happy childhood memories poisoned by Rufus's miserable demise.

He would not cry for Rosco, whom he liked but could not love.

Somebody, somewhere, cried for their fat orange tabby. A young girl, maybe, who'd smiled each time she'd heard the jingle of its little blue bell as it scampered through the tall grass in their yard, who'd watched it toy with a ball of yarn for hours at a time, squealing with delight as it did. (I was thinking of my youngest, Jessa, as I wrote that. Her Maine Coon, whom she'd named Mr. Muggins for reasons neither Gin nor I could gather, had played a mean string ball.) Somebody somewhere wept for their black Lab named Chico, their ferret, or their pair of long-haired Peruvian guinea pigs.

And if Cordelia Moone had eaten these defenseless animals, was it much of a leap to think she might eat a child? If you scraped away the morality, if you slathered it over with animal feces (judging by the smell), and transformed yourself into the savage she-beast he'd seen in the back lot, if you crossed the rather rational line between keeping household pets and eating them alive, would enough humanity remain to think in terms of morality and mortality?

Of course, nobody would believe him if he told them. If he'd said Cordelia Moone rubs shit on herself at night and hunts pets for dinner. If he'd said, The Frugaltarians cannot be trusted. He'd tried it out on me, and I'd looked at him—rightly—as if he'd gone mad. Leanne herself wouldn't believe him, even if he'd wanted to keep up his end of the promise they'd made in the fall of '98. Oh, she might want to believe him, if only so she didn't have to think her husband was insane. But sooner or later she'd suggest, as passive-aggressively as she could manage (and Leanne Taymor was anything but passive), that he visit that quack shrink at the Medical Center who walked to work each day with a metal lunchbox and still clung to the few scraps of hair he had left on his scalp, suffering from the delusional belief that nobody had noticed he was bald.

If he hadn't seen Cordelia with his own eyes, he wouldn't have believed it himself.

What's to stop her from eating a child?

What is she, anyway? Is she even human at all anymore?

These were the thoughts that plagued him, while Leanne rode out her NyQuil coma beside him.

If he'd been planning murder from the get-go, he could easily have visited her at her home and strangled her or stabbed her, then messed up the place a bit to look like a hot burglary. They say this type of robbery has been on the rise since the recession hit. With businesses taking more extreme preventative measures, private residences have become easier targets, despite the higher likelihood of casualties. Nobody would have blinked an eye over it, I suspect, and perhaps Jim and Leanne and all of those others they put to death would have been spared the fates they got.

But Jim didn't go to her home, nor did he follow behind her in his car on her morning run. What he did was drive to the empty lot on Mulligan Avenue, where there had once been a profitable Chrysler dealership. It's all gravel and weeds, the remains of the showroom foundation crumbled and sprouting dandelions, strewn with cigarette butts and broken beer bottles. Among the weeds each year grows a particularly ample crop of rhubarb. Jim clipped them at the stem, using a pair of Leanne's gardening gloves to stuff them in a trash bag so as not to touch the leaves directly.

He was counting on the idea that, whatever she may be at night, Cordelia still believed in the Frugaltarian movement. Short of house pets chained mysteriously to bike racks, perhaps she'd resort to scavenging.

As a restaurateur, he knew all about the sorts of foods you could and couldn't eat. He must have known the amount of rhubarb a woman of her weight would have to consume to reach a lethal dose of oxalic acid was approximately seven to eight pounds. No one, even a morbidly obese vegan, could possibly eat that amount of leafy greens. He would have known, as I now do, that cooking the leaves with soda bicarbonate dramatically increased the plant's toxicity. These are facts you can easily divine on the internet, as I've come to learn, ever since Gin persuaded me to chip away at our retirement fund for its low-low monthly fee so she could keep in touch with out-of-town friends and relatives, in particular Jessa and Tim.

Jim knew the leaves were poisonous, but for fear that it wouldn't be enough, he added a healthy dose of rat poison. I believe they call that "overkill."

He closed shop early, much to the discontent of his wealthier customers, and cleared the staff. Leanne still felt ill, and Jim had pulled double duty for Javier, whose own wife was still in the hospital (Lord knows how they afforded the medical bills on their meager salaries; perhaps my neighbors had footed the bill there, too). Sweating in front of the stove in the darkened kitchen, he prepared a few special dishes for his nighttime visitor. The extra ingredient was not love but poison. He cooled them in the walk-in, scraped them into the trash. A small part of him mourned the loss of so much good food as he hauled the bag to the Dumpsters.

No animals chained out back tonight. Good for him. Not so good for the creature calling itself Cordelia Moone.

Jim sat at the mouth of the alley behind the wheel of his Suburban, waiting. One of those maddening talk shows on public radio played low in the background, but he wasn't paying attention. If he had been, he might have heard that the man responsible for the attacks on September 11 had been killed. A bit of good news like that might have changed his mind, but Jim wouldn't hear about it until the next morning, and by then the deed was already done.

In actual fact, I don't believe he expected anyone to show. A part of him, he told me, had come to think he'd imagined the whole experience. It has always been difficult for me to believe that. The details he'd given were so vivid, names and faces withal, that if he had imagined it all he surely would have seen the signs much earlier. A man doesn't acquire schizophrenia overnight, not without benefit of drug or alcohol dependency, a tumor or lesions in the brain. Court-appointed neurologists and psychologists had him checked for these and found nothing. In any case, the trap was set. If things ended up with a family of dead raccoons in the bins, they'd go out with the trash on Wednesday. No harm, no foul.

He was about to give up when he heard rattling somewhere near the far end of the alley, a hubcap's clatter and scrape as it rolled to the ground. Then the lid of the furthest Dumpster swung open so violently it slammed against the back. Jim leaped up in the driver's seat, jerking his collarbone against the seatbelt. In his agitated state, he must have buckled himself in, though he didn't remember having done so.

Cordelia Moone crawled onto the lip of the Dumpster and perched there. She remained motionless for some time, perhaps sensing for predators. Finally, she began plucking out a single piece of trash at a time. She brought each item close to her face to sniff at it, and tossed what was spoiled over her shoulder. What hadn't begun to rot she nibbled at with both hands held to her mouth like a rodent, and Jim watched with cold captivation for her to reach the bait bag. He didn't think she would suspect poison, especially when you factored in the treat that had been left without it the night before. She would see its contents, virtually devoid of the plastics and scraps which constituted real garbage, as the motherlode.

As Jim sat there, with news of bin Laden's assassination going unheard in the background, he could think of only two things. One was that she would see him. Nocturnal animals can see in the dark, and it appeared to Jim that whatever Cordelia was during the day, she was surely a creature of the night now. Something had changed her. He held a vague idea that the Frugaltarian movement (these things were always "movements"; one couldn't simply do anything these days without belonging to one group or another, so eager we human animals are to be placed into our little labeled boxes) was some kind of cult. But the notion they could have somehow altered her into the subhuman creature he saw before him... It wasn't just difficult to believe, it was outright preposterous.

The other thought was that if she did happen to see him, he'd have to be quick about it: start the Suburban, drop it into Forward and step on the accelerator, before Cordelia Moone had a chance to react. If she was still on the Dumpster, so be it. He'd ram the bin and Cordelia so hard into the back wall of the building that even if it didn't kill her, she'd be too broken to get up. And if she came at him, if she was running full steam by the time he got the car going, he'd plow her down like roadkill. Then he'd simply back out into the street, leave the door open and the keys in the ignition, and walk home.

He'd tell the police the car had been stolen—with any luck, it would be—and they'd assume it had been a joyride gone bad. Cars were stolen all the time, particularly in the current economic climate. Besides, what motive would Jim Taymor have to kill her, aside from her rooting through his trash? If she really was no longer human, as Jim truly believed, the unidentified carjackers would be hailed as accidental heroes.

Fortunately, Cordelia did not see him, and Jim never had to lie about it. That was one thing he never did: lie. Everything he said to the police, to Leanne, and to Gin and me was the truth, at least as far as he saw it. The polygraph they'd administered proved it. I suppose that's a pretty decent reason why they aren't admissible evidence in court.

What Cordelia did do was find the goodie bag Jim had left for her. Her eyes lighted, quite literally, as she tore it open to poke through its contents: spinach lasagna, sautéed spinach with garlic butter, spinach and salmon mousse. She must have thought she'd died and gone to Frugaltarian heaven. Except what looked like spinach to her was actually leaf rhubarb, and in addition to the nutrients you'd expect to find in your leafy greens, your vitamins A and C, your potassium and dietary fiber, these were loaded with oxalates, cooked in soda bicarbonate, and sauced with the rat poison kept under the sinks as a just-in-case, which he'd never had occasion to use until just then.

She sniffed at the handful she'd scooped out, like a kid with a handful of pumpkin guts. In the moonlight, Jim was close enough to see her nostrils flare.

A creeping certainty grew in him then: she'd smell the poison. Or taste it. She nibbled a bit, and waited, like a rat would. Waiting for the onset of stomach cramps that would tell her to avoid the brown acid.

A minute passed on the dashboard clock.

Two.

Cordelia sniffed the cloudless night air. In the distance came terrible squawks and screeches: raccoons fighting over a tasty morsel in some poor bugger's yard. Her head twitched to the left, the gold eyeshine vanishing momentarily, leaving only black. It seemed to Jim that black had spread from eyelid to eyelid, as if she were no longer human at all. It took all of his strength not to run her down right then and there.

Then he thought of Leanne, sitting on the living room sofa surrounded by crumpled tissues, something mindless on the boob tube, and the thought of her discovering what he'd been doing out here, when he should have been serving steak in mushroom béchamel sauce and lobster ravioli to a house full of salivating customers, gave him the strength to hold out. He chuckled softly to himself as a dark thought occurred to him: I'm still serving food... at least technically. It made him feel like a homicidal chef in some dime-store detective novel, and he stopped cold, looking at the dashboard clock. Four whole minutes had passed. Finally, Cordelia returned her attentions, and her snout, to her supper.

People may tell you warfarin poisoning is a painless, more humane death, but I tell you this: Cordelia's death was far from painless. She'd eaten roughly an entire helping of rhubarb lasagna laced with rat poison, when her fingers clutched suddenly at her belly. The expression on her face, which Jim neither relished nor entirely abhorred, was that of pure agony. She toppled from her perch to the cold concrete, crying out like a wounded animal. Had she loosed a human cry from her conspicuously human lips instead of that monstrous howl, she might have caused alarm. Someone might have called the cops, and the paramedics might have arrived just in time to save her life. As it happened, the sounds of her death were lost in the din of the raccoon skirmish maybe a block away. No one had ever considered that a woman lay dying in the back alley of Jim and Leanne Taymor's Italian family eatery. Good for Jim. Not quite so good for the thing calling itself Cordelia Moone.

Jim sat in the comfortable cab of his Suburban and watched her die. Rufus, the dog Jim had when he was a boy, had gotten sick, suffering multiple seizures near the end that had terrified eleven-year-old Jimmy's father as much as they had Jimmy. In the waiting room, while the vet put down old Rufus, Jimmy had wept the whole time. Adult Jim remembered this while Cordelia Moone twisted and moaned at the foot of the bins. Rain pattered in through the sunroof, falling on Jim's cheeks and tracking warmth down to his chin. But it wasn't rain—the sky was clear, full of stars, and the sunroof was closed, anyhow. These were tears streaming down his face, just like the little boy who'd lost his dog.

He looked up from wiping his face, in time to see shadows skulking into the back lot, perched on the fence and on the rooftop. Terror rattled through his bones; curiosity held him there, the same sort of reckless curiosity that would cause a man to stick his head into a darkened hole to see what lay beyond. He peered up through the tinted portion of the windshield, then the sunroof, counting heads: six of them in all, mere silhouettes against the moonlit sky. Cordelia's caterwauling had summoned them. They whimpered and howled and lay down on their stomachs, their chins resting on their hands like a pack of wolves grieving its Alpha. Jim couldn't see their faces throughout this performance, just the eyes, and the same glow fading from Cordelia's life-lamps burned brightly in theirs.

Jim waited for them to leave, but as time ticked away, he grew ever more nervous. There was, after all, a dead woman in the alley, or some manner of thing with the look of a woman, which would amount to the same thing when the police showed up. He needed to be gone when they did. He had a successful restaurant to worry about. A reputation. A wife—

The moment he thought of Leanne, his cell phone began to ring. As I recall, it was some classical piece or another and high-pitched as all get-out, the sort of thing they use to deter teenagers from loitering at some shopping centers. Naturally, it was Leanne. Speak of the Devil and he (or she, in this case) doth ring. This was especially true when you had your phone surgically attached at the hip (or ear) like most everyone seemed to these days.

It was after midnight, and she'd be worried. Jim scanned the fence, the rooftops, certain they'd heard. Night animals had heightened senses, he knew; whether that extended to hearing for these creatures, only human in appearance... Well, he was about to find out firsthand.

One head turned toward the sound, atop a smallish body that might have belonged to a child. Another, large and distinctly male, crouched at the edge of the roof of the surplus store directly across from where Jim was a sitting duck, and turned toward the Suburban.

He scrambled to get the phone out of its holster. In that moment—a moment that seemed to draw out longer than the time it had taken for Cordelia to die—the smallest of the pack leaped down from the fence, landing on all fours, its knees drawn up higher than its shoulders. It was no human posture, and even from the relatively low height of the ten-foot fence any normal human child would have been injured in the drop. Like Cordelia, the boy was naked, encrusted with dried muck and animal scat. Judging by his little winky (that's Virginia's word, not mine, and it pains me some to see that I've written it, but for this to be an authentic account, I feel I should censor myself as little as possible), a hairless knot below his abdomen, he had yet to reach puberty. Maybe eleven or twelve at the most, just about the age when Jimmy Taymor had wept for his dead dog.

On the third ring, Jim fumbled the worthless thing out and thumbed it off. It was already too late. The others had heard, shining their mutant eyes in his direction. The big male climbed a pipe down the side of the building, nimble as a monkey and big as a gorilla. A female bounded from rooftop to awning to the ground below, with the speed and grace of a house cat, though she was heavy-breasted and thick in the waist and bottom.

The boy-thing crawled foot over hand toward Jim, like some jittering specter from one of those Japanese horror movies Jessa liked to watch on her visits. Jim saw its face as it crept into the light from the kitchen, and he realized—with genuine despair—it was the son of an old friend from junior school. Do his parents know he's been drawn into this? Jim wondered. Are they there with him, lurking somewhere in the dark beyond the rooftops?

He turned the key in the ignition, forgetting it was already half-turned, even with the radio "personalities" buzzing like know-it-all bees in the background. The engine whinnied. The largest of the creatures closed the distance, prowling toward him; there was no doubting the murder in his—I should say its, if I'm to fairly represent Jim's state of mind—eyes. He eased back on the key, and the engine roared to life. The gas gauge flittered and the tachometer shot straight up to 1000 RPM.

The brights came on in that same moment, blasting cold white halogen over the entire scene. The effect was like flicking on the kitchen lights at a cockroach party. Before he could see any of their faces, they threw their arms up over their eyes—he had a sudden foreboding feeling the others would be disfigured somehow, twisted into shapes too horrible for the human mind to comprehend—and drew back a step at a time, their shadows thrown long and black against the far wall.

Emboldened, Jim laid on the horn: one long blast. Two. On the third, the pack began to scatter, crawling back the way they'd come. The big one threw one last baleful look over its shoulder. It was a bear of a man, muscular as well as fat in the gut, and prematurely bald (most of the hair had migrated to the torso, including the back, and poked through the cracks in the layer of filth, like grass sprouting from dry ground). It was the type of guy with an overabundance of testosterone, probably working some hands-on, outdoors job, like road work or forestry, maybe farming, with a healthy thirst for the wobbly pop. Jim didn't recognize him, but it didn't mean he was a stranger. In a town of a little over 2000 souls, it wasn't possible to know everyone, despite what television might have you believe.

Then the creature scaled the wall, getting fingers and footholds in the small chinks between bricks.

Alone now, Jim allowed himself a chance to breathe. He gave his phone a contemptuous look (or so I imagine; were I in his position, it would have ended up in the trash alongside Cordelia's leftovers). Simple concern had almost cost Leanne a husband: death by cell phone. Had she been widowed that night instead of being greeted by Jim's cold, distracted look at the door, she would never have known the horrors her husband was soon to show her. She would never have known how it felt to have human blood on her hands. Child blood.

But she would have known heartache. In this case, I believe, such grief would have been a kindness.

Not that I believe my friend should have been set upon by those things, torn apart limb from limb, or whatever they might have done to him for murdering one of their own. I do not wish that at all, except the Jim I knew is long gone. If he'd died on that warm, clear night in May, instead of the other six innocent folks he put to death (and the dog, lest we forget him), would the world have been better off?

I have to think it would.

Jim had lived, though, and because he'd lived, Leanne got to hear the whole unspeakable story, straight from the horse's mouth. How Cordelia had had a kind of foam clotted on her lips and chin, pink with her own blood. How putrid she'd smelled when he'd folded her body into the gazebo tent they kept for charity events, like pungent, musky animal feces. Like rot. How he'd carried her inside and through the kitchen, where La Costina's staff had worked and laughed and danced along with silly songs on the radio, and how her head had thumped against every stair on their way to the basement cold-storage. How she'd looked when the tent had slipped away, frost growing on her pitch-black eyes, as mist from the deep freeze rose around her, like it had off Stevens Lake in the early morning sun, back when they were still in school.

Jim spared Leanne no detail, no matter how gruesome. ("It was the only way," he later told us, as the two of them sat at our kitchen table, holding hands through it all. Leanne gave his hand, which was trembling, a little squeeze. "It was the only way I could live with myself after what I'd done.")

He told her everything that very night, and when he had finished, he closed her hand over something cold and flat.

It was a key, the key to the basement freezer, only to Jim, it was more than that. She held his life in her hand, small and metallic though it was. "Keep it," he told her, still holding her hand in both of his. He gave her an unsmiling look. "Or hand it over to the police. You do whatever feels right, sweetheart."

What felt right to Leanne was to sleep on it.

5

I CANNOT IMAGINE how Leanne must have felt, lying awake beside her husband of over twenty years, a man she thought she'd known, while Jim slept like the dead.

I lay awake myself that night, wondering what had gotten into my friend and neighbor, yes, but also worrying about our youngest, Jessa. I finally fell asleep in the wee hours, and woke some time later from a nightmare I cannot fully recall, in which I'd become lost in grass the height of a man as it was cut down by the blades of some God-sized lawnmower. I woke with a gasp, my hand held out before me as if to stop God's thunderous John Deere from mowing me down. Gin, my sweet Virginia, took me by the wrist and kissed the back of my hand. I took hers in both of mine and kissed back, still cold from my dream.

At the Taymor house, Jim woke to find Leanne's side of the bed empty. Her half of the comforter lay flat, meaning she'd made her side of the bed when she got up. In those few moments between sleep and fully awake, he thought for sure she had left him. The worst of it was that he couldn't fault her for it. She'd stuck with him through tragedy and triumph, but nowhere in their vows had murder been among them. She would have been well within her rights to pack a bag and slip out during the night, with or without leaving a Dear John (as well as the John Deere sitting in their garage).

Hell, she would have been smart to.

So it was with mingled regret and relief that he found her in the kitchen, looking like the illness she'd had was gone, scrubbing the stove in a frenzy. The room was already gleaming—it was always gleaming–-yet still she spritzed cleaner and scoured away like a madwoman. I suppose in that moment she might have been a bit mad, and with good reason. To discover the man whose bed she shared was capable of such a horrendous undertaking... I think we'd all go a little crazy burdened with such knowledge.

Jim stepped around Rosco's bowls, as he did every morning before he realized they were missing from their mat on the floor—the mat itself was gone, too. A good sign for his case, or so he thought. It meant Leanne had believed at least a portion of his story.

I do not know how Jim talked her down from her manic state, I only know neither of them had much interest in the coffee she'd scalded. Knowing Leanne as I do, I don't believe she would have acted as if nothing had happened, nor would she have given him the silent treatment. She would have been moody, almost surely, and who could blame her? She might even have given him the cold shoulder for a while. But at the restaurant, it would be business as usual. She would put on her game face, and no one outside of the two of them would be the wiser.

Spinach, however, would be off the menu for quite some time.

I'm not sure Jim could have said anything to sway her in his direction, frankly. Had the large man not come into La Costina that night, she might be paying her husband conjugal visits now, instead of wearing a matching orange jumper. She might even have kept his secret, sparing him his fate, but the weight of it would have driven a wedge between them that the miscarriage hadn't. Spinach might not have been on the menu, but divorce surely would have been.

The large man stood just inside the doors, looking through the pass-through at the busy kitchen and gnawing on his fingernails, as if they might provide him the sustenance he'd been denied in La Costina's back lot. Jenny Meyer, the hostess on duty, scurried away from her station to approach Jim, who was offering a young couple on their honeymoon a complimentary dessert.

He took Jenny aside. "What's the trouble?"

Jenny looked off in trepidation, and Jim followed her gaze. If he hadn't recognized the face straight away (and of course, he did—I've already mentioned his recollection of faces), the man's build would have been a dead giveaway.

"He's giving me the charlies," Jenny said with a cold shiver. (For the record, "charlies" was the word Jim told us Jenny had used. I am not overlaying my own unhip old-timer version of teenaged slang over her words, though I suppose Jim could have done so himself.) Jim agreed, not taking his eyes off the man. He was used to making quick decisions on the job, yet none of them had been life-and-death until now. "I'll take care of him," he said, laying a hand briefly on Jenny's shoulder. "Why don't you go have your break?"

Jenny eyed the large man suspiciously before wandering back to the kitchen, beyond which the break room, and her cell phone (with probably more than a dozen text messages; Jenny was a pretty girl, and popular), awaited.

Jim spared a look into the kitchen, where Leanne was plating food with the same frenzied expression she'd worn in their home kitchen that morning. She glanced up from her work, caught the frightened look in Jim's eyes, and knew, the way a spouse instinctually understands the geography of his or her marriage, her husband's fear had been caused by the large man at the door, chewing the ends of his fingers. There was nothing very menacing about the man, aside from his monstrous size. He was a behemoth: six-eight if he was an inch, possibly taller, broad in the shoulders and heavy in the gut.

Jim gave her a troubled nod, but she didn't need it to know this was the one he'd told her about: the man-thing who'd scrabbled down and then scaled back up the brick wall, as sprightly as a child climbing the playground monkey bars.

Jim pasted on a smile and headed for the front of the house.

The large man had to duck under the hanging lamp at the host station as the two men approached each other. They met in front of the bar. Jim stuck out a hand. The large man left it suspended, and Jim lowered it to his side unshook. He had a prominent brow, the sort of forehead that folds down over the eyes like a hood, giving the appearance of brooding—or idiocy—when the face is slack. The eyes themselves, though... intelligence shone in them, as brightly as they had shined in the dark.

"Can I offer you a drink?" Jim said, aware he was stalling. Business such as this was best handled in the back office, behind a closed door, but Jim's desire for a stiff drink came on sudden and strong, a sentiment I understand fully but don't currently endorse.

"I don't drink," the large man said. His acrid sweat filled Jim's nostrils: a musky, nostril-stinging sort of smell, barely concealed by a liberal application of Brut aftershave. His voice was as deep as Jim had expected. Not Jolly Green Giant deep, but the sort of baritone that commanded attention, if not respect.

"No," Jim said, visibly shaken, "I don't suppose you do." He threw a glance back at Leanne, wondering just how much this man knew about them. Did he know they were married? Where they lived? "Step into my office," he said, thinking, Said the spider to the fly. Only he was the fly now, wasn't he? Never in his life had he wanted to be elsewhere—anywhere—so badly.

The large man, who did not introduce himself then and never would, followed Jim through the kitchen. I happen to know his name was Richard Holland, with the benefit of Jim and Leanne's confession, not to mention the endless news coverage. He answered to the nickname "Dutch." I'm sure you can guess why.

A man his size does not pass through a crowd without being gawked at and, though this was their busiest time, tonight was no exception. Every single eye in the back of the house looked up as he lumbered through, ducking his head to miss the pots hanging on the rack. Even Arnie Jacobs, sweat dripping out from under the bandana on his bald, coffee-colored scalp, turned to gape, and Arnie stands at least six-four himself.

"Let's keep focused, guys!" Leanne said, clapping her hands to get their attention.

Work resumed. Jim opened the office door. Dutch had to duck again to step inside. Leanne shot her husband another look—one that said, Shout if you need me in there—and Jim closed the door between them.

Sitting behind his desk, Jim said, "Have a seat." He gestured toward the chair he used for interviews and one-on-ones with the staff, the same one I sometimes sat in when the two of us were going over the annuals. The chair was clearly too small for Dutch. He didn't even regard it.

"I'll stand."

"Of course you will," Jim said, the large man towering over him. "Well, I suppose I should just come out and say it—"

"Cordelia and I weren't close," Dutch said. "Simple fact is, I hated the bitch."

Jim made to say something, but Dutch held out a hand large enough to crush his head like an egg, palm first, to silence him.

"But she was one of us," he continued. And whatever the "us" was, be they Frugaltarians or members of some peculiar, cat-eating religious sect, whatever Jim had thought he'd seen in the alley the night before, this was certainly a man standing before him now. No nictitating eyes, no scales or unusual birthmarks. Not a monster—a man. A decidedly large man, make no mistake. But nothing more.

"She was family, and that's gotta stand for something."

"Uh-huh." Jim didn't know how to respond.

"So here's what I think we should do." He'd begun to chew his fingernails again, already inflamed from biting. Jim couldn't get a good enough look at those teeth to see if they were as sharp as Cordelia's had been: the teeth of a carnivore. "You forget what you saw," he suggested, "and we got no truck with you. You go on with your life, we go on with ours."

"You killed my dog," Jim said, surprising himself with the outburst. "All those lost pets, you killed them and ate them."

"That's one of the things the bitch and I disagreed about." Dutch took his paw out of his mouth long enough to make a swishing gesture with it, then planted it right back between his eager jaws. "Certain principles and tenets of the organization, you might say, including but not limited to the consumption of living meat."

"You're against it, I suppose," Jim said, feeling rather sickened by the man's flippant use of the word, meat. As if anything with flesh was by definition edible, and anything a man could eat should not be excluded from the menu without consensus.

"We're against it."

"We?"

Dutch ignored the question, began looking at the framed photo of Jim and Leanne on the desk, from their Missouri University days. Jim had no gut and sideburns and Leanne's hair was still a shock of platinum-blonde curls with dark roots, hanging loose over her stonewashed jean jacket with the sleeves rolled up. They had made quite a pair: Jim the shy geology student, eager to bust out of his shell, and Leanne the English Lit. major, hoping to shut down the party and settle into life as an adult.

Jim flipped the photograph face down. "You can't expect me to believe you won't turn me in. I poisoned a woman. A woman is dead because of me, and you people are gonna let me walk away scot-free?"

Jim had never been the type to disregard the dental hygiene of the horse he'd been presented with. I know this from my many years preparing his taxes. All the little tricks where I could save him some cash, he'd say, This can't be legal, knowing full well the kind of man I am, and of course that it was not only legal but required.

"Not exactly," Dutch said, with a sly tilt of his big round head and a nibble on the red-raw index finger of his right hand. "There's still the matter of Cordelia's remains."

This was the twist of the blade Jim had been waiting for, though he'd never imagined he would be bargaining over her corpse like a couple of fellas haggling over the price of cukes at a roadside stand. "I see," he said.

"If it was up to me," the large man said, "you could grind her up and feed her to those wasters out front. Unfortunately, it's not up to me."

He spit a bit of nail out. Jim saw where it landed, on the L-key of his computer, and made a note to wipe it up the moment the man left his office.

"The others feel we should give her a proper send-off. It's tradition. Me? I say, fuck tradition. Cordelia Moone didn't give a squirt of piss for tradition, pigging out on all those kitties and pups. Worse than that, she was stupid, too stupid to smell a trap when it's already clamped down on her leg. If it'd been up to her, we'd all have eaten that shit out of your Dumpster, and you'd have had one hell of a mess to explain to the cops."

Jim considered the idea for a moment. Already his mind was working, you see. If he handed over the Moone woman's remains, what was to stop Dutch and "the others" from turning him in to the police? One body or seven bodies—murder was murder in the eyes of the law. And whether he'd serve one life sentence or multiple consecutives, they'd amount to the same: the rest of his life spent behind bars, without his wife. Probably he'd be filling the role of wife himself in the Big House.

"What would happen if I didn't hand her over?" Jim said. "Hypothetically. Say her body was no longer intact? What would you do to me?"

The large man squeezed his hands into fists, the knuckles cracking, and relaxed them. His dull expression never changed. "It's not me you'd have to worry about," he said finally.

"The others?"

Dutch nodded ominously. "They would split you apart at the joints."

Jim didn't for a second think the man was exaggerating, but he decided to push a little harder. "Well then I guess I'm in a bit of a bind. But you seem like a reasonable man." He spat out the word—not reasonable but man. "Maybe we can come to some kind of understanding?"

The idea seemed to pique the large man's interest. A finger hovered for a moment in the empty air near his lips. "How much of an understanding are we talking about?"

"Ten?"

A thoughtful nibble on his left pinky finger, palm-out "Make it fifteen," the man said.

"Fifteen thousand is a lot of money."

"So is ten. Fifteen grand, Mr. Taymor, and I personally guarantee you, nobody comes to your house in the middle of the night and takes a pair of hedge clippers to you." He tipped his head toward the photograph lying face down on the desk. "Or your pretty wife."

"Hedge clippers!" Jim repeated to us as he later related all of this. It seemed to him much too specific not to be a grim reality. I have to say I agree.

"Fifteen it is," Jim said, and swallowed hard. "Only, that amount of money, I'm going to have to shift a few things around, talk to my accountant..."

"Friday afternoon. Out back of here. Cash."

Jim nodded and stuck out his hand again. This time, the large man took it. A deal was made. His giant fingers, chewed to rat shit, crushed Jim's average-sized hand with only the slightest of pressure. Hands that big could do a man's job with a pair of hedge clippers, Jim thought, and shook away the pain the moment his hand was set free. He opened the door with the other hand. The large man ducked to go.

"We never settled on a time," Jim said.

"Before dark," Richard Holland told him without hesitation, hovering in the doorway.

"How about six?"

The large man nodded. "Six is good."

6

JIM NEVER CAME to me to ask about money. If he had, I would have told him it was readily available, and we didn't need an Acid-test to know it.

The money was a stall. Leanne knew that, too. What Leanne also knew was that if they did pay the man, they'd be paying for the rest of their lives. A few thousand here, a few thousand there, until their entire nest egg vanished into the wind. Every single dime that came out of La Costina not already earmarked for the restaurant itself would go into Richard "Dutch" Holland's double-XL pockets. They wouldn't be giving him any fifteen-thousand on Friday at six P.M. or ever, because they'd never see the end of it.

With that settled, Jim and Leanne put their heads together to figure out what they would do. They knew they could clean out their accounts quite easily between then and Friday (it was late Tuesday they discussed this, after Richard Holland had left, with their customers cleared out and the staff gone away home). They could walk away with all the cash they could liquidate, a tidy sum, and live out the rest of their days in Belize, or somewhere else extradition laws to the United States were lax.

They could do that... but by then their little Italian eatery had become no longer just their retirement fund, but their lifeline. It had occurred to both of them at some point or another that La Costina was the baby they'd never been able to have, and to give it up would be like little Olivia dying all over again. My Virginia had long suspected they'd begun to drift apart after the miscarriage; that restaurant of theirs had breathed fresh life into their marriage, where since the autumn of '98 there'd been only death.

Jim and Leanne stood in the door of the basement walk-in, weighing their options. Cordelia Moone's flesh was gray-blue, with little white snowflakes of frost in her hair and scaled over her eyes, which seemed to have returned to their original brown. Her breasts remained flat, even after they'd stood her up in the corner, though not from gravity; Jim had left her on the floor overnight, and they'd frozen that way. (It was a morbid reminder of the erection he'd gotten the night before, a detail he did spare Leanne, only telling me via the visitor's phone at Nebraska State Pen.)

Earlier, before the staff had arrived, Jim had turned the basement lights off and shined a flashlight in the Moone woman's face for Leanne to see. At first it hadn't worked. There'd been too much frost in her eyes. But when Jim scratched enough of it off—a sickening task if there ever was one (he told me later he tried to think of her like a side of beef, an image that would have just made it harder for me to look at beef)—sure enough, two golden flickers of light appeared.

It wasn't enough to convince Leanne just then, but when the large man had lowered his head to duck under the pot rack, she'd seen it in his eyes too. That animal shine. And the condition of his fingers had sealed the deal. He'd chewed them raw, like Rosco had sometimes chewed obsessively at his own paws.

"Jim... what are they?"

"Pandas are carnivores," Jim said. "Did you know that?"

"No." She wasn't sure where this was going, but she was willing to follow along. For now, she told herself. She'd come this far without turning him in. Already she'd be considered an accomplice, so she might as well hear what he had to say and hope it didn't sound as crazy as she feared he'd become.

"Well, they are. They have all the characteristics of a carnivore. Carnivore genes, carnivorous digestive tract, ursine teeth. That's bear."

"I know what ursine means," Leanne said, annoyed by his unintentional patronization.

"Right. They even belong to the order Carnivora. But for some reason, they only eat bamboo. Maybe twenty percent of the 30 to 40 pounds they eat gives them nutrition. Carnivorous animals get sixty percent or more. The rest of that bamboo is waste."

"So why do they eat it?"

"They eat it by choice, not necessity. They're the vegans of the animal kingdom." Leanne let the obvious mistake slide, because it seemed he was on a tear. It was easy enough to forget humans were part of the animal kingdom, despite our higher level of consciousness. We put a robot on Mars, for Pete's sake—when was the last time you saw a chimp do that? "Whether that's because they've evolved to be too, let's say hefty, to hunt," Jim went on, "or they're conscientious objectors, nobody knows. All we know for sure is that they were hunters, once."

"You mean these, these things," she said, nodding toward Cordelia's frozen corpse, uncertain just what to call it, "they eat our leftovers so they don't have to hunt?"

Jim shrugged. "I'm not sure why they do it. But I know these—people? Whatever the heck they are—I know they have the teeth and the strength to eat us, if they wanted."

Leanne took a step toward Cordelia Moone's stiffened corpse. The freezer was empty, aside from the few boxes on some of the shelves, freezer-burnt breadsticks and various foodstuffs whose Best Befores were long behind them, things they'd meant to get rid of so they could shut off the freezer for good. She was glad they hadn't now. What would they have done with Cordelia, otherwise?

Leanne reached out, meaning to touch her.

"What are you doing?"

Jim's voice startled her. She'd forgotten he was there. Without answering, she peeled back Cordelia's upper lip. When she let it go, it relaxed slowly, then stiffened in an Elvis-like sneer.

She stepped back in absolute terror, her breath expelled in a frosty cloud. The front teeth—the glamor teeth, her dentist called them—were perfectly normal.

But Cordelia's molars were as sharp as razors.

7

IT WAS LEANNE who suggested their next move. In the two-and-a-half days between late Tuesday night and their Friday evening deadline, the Taymors gave as much time as they could spare to finding out who the large man was, where he lived, how he spent his days, and with whom, if anyone, he had relationships.

As it happened, Richard Holland ran a carpentry shop on the south end of town. Leanne had almost contracted him to do work on La Costina's interior, back when it was still a dream on the horizon, but Dutch's company had rescinded their bid at the last minute without explanation. She had only spoken to him over the phone, or she surely would have recognized him. Though her recall of faces wasn't quite as finely tuned as her husband's, there was no mistaking a man of his size and stature.

So while Jim took care of business at the restaurant, Leanne followed Richard Holland from the carpentry shop to his home, a smart little split-level on the east side, close to the old mill. She drove the sedan, so as not to arouse suspicion. If he'd looked out his window and seen the Suburban, he would have gone out to investigate. She couldn't chance that.

As the sun sank in the west, Dutch's home darkened along with the sky. He didn't turn on any inside lights, even after the streetlamps came on overhead, and Leanne began to think he'd slipped out unnoticed through the backdoor, or worse, that he'd seen her parked out front, recognized her from the restaurant, and was presently slinking around back to pounce on her, to use those unusually sharp molars to strip the flesh and gristle right off her shivering bones.

Leanne thought of those pandas, who had the equipment and refused to use it. Though Dutch had told Jim they were against the consumption of what he'd called "living meat," did she believe they would not they lash out, if cornered? There was no doubt in her mind. Even a rat is smart enough to attack when afforded no other option.

Still she waited, as Jim had waited, in a different car in a different part of town, both of them choked by the very same fear.

It was perhaps an hour later—the same radio voices droning on and on about President Obama's military might—when the front door opened and a great shadow emerged. He didn't need to duck; he'd retrofitted the otherwise small house to be giant-proof.

Instead of heading for his car as she'd hoped he would, Dutch turned and crossed the street, taking up on the sidewalk and lumbering like an ogre right past her car. She ducked, cold terror flooding her insides, turning them to acid, certain he had seen her, would see her. She waited for the knock of his meaty fist on the window.

Or the shattering of glass.

But the monster that was Richard Holland passed by without incident, leaving Leanne, when she'd finally caught her breath, with three options as she saw it. Following by car would attract too much attention, not to mention the trouble she might run into if Dutch slipped down an alley or into a back lot, as seemed to be his custom. She'd be less likely to be spotted if she followed by foot, but she'd worn heels (Stupid girl! she cursed herself), so she'd have to do it barefoot.

The third option, which she gave short shrift, was to give up: to head back to the restaurant and tell Jim she was through; to gather up the money and await their back alley meeting with bated breath (though not baited, as Cordelia's had been), hoping that first $15,000 would also be the last.

The thought of those glimmering eyes, those pointed teeth... all the better to eat you with, my dear... These images arose in her mind, as clear as the dried-out strawberry air freshener swaying from the rearview, as her own harrowed reflection staring back at her from the mirror, as the dulled gold wedding band and the permanent indent it had made on her finger.

Lying awake the night of the murder (Leanne began thinking of it more as an extermination; it gave the death a more humane slant in her mind, much like using the warfarin had for Jim), the idea of turning her husband in had grown awfully tempting. With the key to the old basement walk-in on the bedside table, within her view, and Jim snoring contentedly beside her, the thought of him locked away safely behind bars—this man she'd lain beside for 26 good years, who had turned out to be a cold-blooded killer, or so she'd considered it at the time—began to feel like the only sane decision, the right decision.

The moment she realized this, she'd gotten up, made her side of the bed, and started cleaning. It wouldn't do to have a filthy house when the police showed up, let alone those newspeople with their immaculate hairdos, and their hot lights and cameras that could pick out every spot of grime and dust-bunny in brilliant high-definition.

(These were thoughts a wife should spare her husband, yet later on, Leanne Taymor spoke them. In front of me, and in front of Gin. In front of God too, I suppose.)

She hadn't made up her mind entirely about sparing Jim until she was sitting outside the Holland Woodwork & Joinery. She'd been watching the large man through the big front windows as he glad-handed clients and pored over blueprints with employees, all the while smiling that toothy, hooded-eye smile. At just past noon, she tucked into the Hammental sandwich she'd made that morning, consisting of maple-glazed ham, Emmental cheese, lettuce, tomato, Dijon mustard and a few sprigs of dill. Over time, it had become a favorite, but now it occurred to her she hadn't made one in quite some time. Not until that morning.

She remembered the first time she'd made this sandwich—two of them, actually: one for herself, and one for Jim. Back then she had been Leanne Wexler, and Jim had been a boy she'd seen around campus every so often, with his few friends or by himself on his way to class. She'd smiled at him in the hall once, and he'd turned away shyly, blood rising in his neck all the way to his fluffy, tawny sideburns. After that day she'd decided the next time she saw him, she would strike up a conversation herself.

She couldn't remember exactly what they'd talked about. Their talk had been brief, she remembered that much. He'd been sitting on one of the stone benches in The Quad, in front of Jesse Hall and the four columns left over from the old Academic Hall that had burned to the ground in the early '80s. He was eating a Big Mac and flipping through a thick geology text, something with the incomprehensible name Quantitative Seismology: Theory and Methods Volume II.

Leanne had sat down beside him. He'd pretended not to notice her until she'd leaned in between his eyes and the dense text and said, "As an English major, I have to say, I find your taste in literature deplorable." He grinned, still not daring to meet her eyes. "Although any guy interested in making the earth move is okay by me."

His cheeks had flushed with color at this. The rest of the conversation had been rushed, following the nervous pace of a young man who hadn't spoken to many girls. He asked her out, more as a reflex than at his own behest. The details were nailed down, a few delicate innuendos made, and Jim was up on his feet with his giant book and ugly yellow Styrofoam sandwich package, ostensibly heading off toward his next class.

They picnicked at Stevens Lake on Saturday, walking the trails and feeding the ducks. She'd filled a thermos with sparkling wine and they'd drunk it out of paper Dixie cups: Jim sipping, Leanne taking healthy gulps, enjoying the feel of the bubbles filling her mouth and prickling down to her belly. Despite the blanket Leanne had brought to sit on, Jim held a napkin under his sandwich—which he'd named "Hammental"—while he ate. At the time, she thought it was just about the most absurdly adorable thing she'd ever seen. He complimented her sandwich-making skills, and when she joked "All that's missing is the special sauce and a sesame seed bun," he'd laughed so hard champagne spurted from his nose.

After lunch, heading back to Jim's car (he drove a Plymouth Acclaim back then, its wheel wells growing so much rust the once-white rocker panels had turned a deep brown), he had stepped back suddenly, startled. At his feet, a baby bird lay shivering and wet in the grass. From the branches of a redbud, its sweet, wild-smelling purple canopy shading them from the sun, came the frantic squawks and chirps of its family.

"Poor little guy," Leanne said, and continued on, certain the mother would fly down to pluck it from the ground to deposit it safely back in the nest.

"We can't just leave it."

Leanne turned back, saw Jim looking down at the poor thing, and felt her heart swell with affection. Before she could say anything—about fleas, about the Avian flu she'd heard them describe on the news just lately, about the poor thing's mother—Jim scooped it up from the grass and tucked it into the pocket of his surfer hoodie.

Mama Bird immediately went wild, swooping down from her high branch with a violent chirrup and dive-bombing Jim's head like a kamikaze pilot. Jim paid it no mind except to duck out of its way as he pulled himself up into the low branches of the redbud tree. Petals fell around Leanne in a violet snowstorm. She stood below him, laughing fretfully, praying for his safety. With perfect mental clarity, she saw the image of Jim laid out on a hospital gurney, the baby bird a squashed mess of blood and tiny broken bones in his pocket.

Over the edge of the nest, the hatchlings stretched their little orange beaks to Jim, as if he were their mother returning with a worm. He placed their sister back among them, and beamed a big pleased smile down at Leanne, a job well done.

"Now get your butt down here," she said. She'd been about to call him "hero" when Mama Bird swooped in and struck the base of his skull with her beak. The sound was like a baseball dinged into the crowd. He fell.

A moment later, Jim was lying on his back at the base of the tree, legs in the air, laughing at the ridiculousness of it all.

Get a good look, Leanne, she'd told herself, before rushing over to help him to his feet. That's the man you're going to marry.

She laughed now, remembering it. She must have had the memory at the back of her mind while making her lunch that morning. And since she'd been thinking only of what Jim had done the night before, and the key he'd given her, putting his life in her hands, she thought she must have made her decision without even being consciously aware of it. The sandwich was her answer. Jim's Hammental.

And speaking of food, not once did she see big Dutch Holland eat something, not even sitting alone in his office. She supposed he could have been on a diet, considering his size. But as the afternoon went on, and Leanne grew hungry yet again, she was seized by the certainty Dutch was saving his appetite for the delicacies of the evening. The moment this idea occurred to her, she knew she could no longer share the world with things like Richard Holland, inhuman creatures wearing human skin like children wore costumes on Hallowe'en. She understood then that Jim had done right by poisoning Cordelia Moone.

By exterminating her.

Knowing what they knew, there could be no turning back. Not for Leanne, and not for Jim.

Not ever.

8

I FEEL I should backtrack a tad here. Remember me? Why would you? I am the nameless narrator whose voice you have likely been imagining all wrong: a folksy yet slightly prissy tone, due to my profession, my age bracket, my background. I have never offered my name, just my wife's—though I suppose the sharper among you could deduce, given what you already know about the Taymor Murders, who I am: Retired accountant, mid-to-late 50s, fiscal Republican (during the Bush Jr. administration, this was often difficult to admit), husband of Virginia, father of Jessa and Timothy, next-door neighbor to Jim and Leanne Taymor. The sharper among you might also have deduced I could easily have "changed the names to protect the innocent," as the true crime shows claim. It might be of interest to the ghoulish types who need to know every morbid, minuscule detail surrounding a murder case that I enjoy puzzle books and have a mole on my right ass-cheek that looks somewhat like the state of Florida. The journalists have left these last two details out, but I'm sure, had they known, it would be household news. Neighbor of convicted Frugaltarian Killers has a mole on his buttock! More at eleven. That sort of thing.

I've said I was there during the time of the murders, but the truth is, I both was and wasn't. Gin and I had troubles of our own to deal with: Jessa, our youngest, was in and out of the hospital, for symptoms which seemed at the time to be related to multiple sclerosis. It wasn't, thank God, but it was quite a scare, and Jessa had almost lost her entire first year of college over it (we had her in our early-40s, if you're wondering about the age-discrepancy, an accident but a blessing). She managed to make up some credits here and there, but I was less troubled by her missing classes, or even by those bewildering symptoms: chronic headaches, oversensitivity to light, confusion, and spastic muscle movements which felt to her as if she no longer owned her own body—all of which seemed to dissipate in a little over two to three weeks. What worried me most was the thought of my little angel passing away before me. This was the thought which caused most of those sleepless nights the week of the murders, as I'm sure you can imagine.

By June, when she came back home for the summer, the scare had mostly passed. When Gin and I picked her up from the bus depot, she wore a black t-shirt, cut off above her navel, MEAT IS MURDER printed in blood-streaked letters over her chest. She fairly reeked of marijuana. Gin, who had never smoked it in her life (had perhaps never even seen it being smoked), had commented on Jessa's "nice perfume," and I caught a glimmer of a smirk in our daughter's eyes in the rearview.

If it is difficult for any man to truly know what lurks inside the mind of a teenaged girl, it is even more true when the girl is the man's daughter—and that goes double if said father is edging toward sixty, I suspect. I did my best to cut her slack, in light of her recent health scare, but I found it hard not to lose my patience in those few months between semesters. She was moody that summer, all too often snarky with her mother. She wouldn't eat much of what we put in front of her, preferring instead to get food with her high school friends. I kept my suspicions, that one or more of her professors had been filling her head full of liberal propaganda, to myself. A child's mind is easy prey, even a child of college age. Give them a free beer cooler, promise them no payments, tell them what they want to hear, and they'll be yours to mold.

Jessa was far from the perfect little girl I remembered, but she was alive. I was grateful for that much, at least.

And like they say after those oh-so important news breaks, which Jim and Leanne have starred in many a time: We now return to our regularly scheduled program...

9

PARKED OUT FRONT of Richard Holland's house, Leanne slipped out of her heels and left them on the driver's seat. She stepped out, eyeballing the man's large shadow as it turned the corner onto Flint Street, where it disappeared behind a hedge.

Those first few steps were the worst. Barefoot, it felt like she stepped on every single stone and twig and upturned bottle cap between her sedan and the corner, struggling not to cry out as they bit into her heels, the calloused pads, cursing herself silently every step of the way.

From Flint Street, the large man turned onto Genoa. Where the two streets come together, the Elementary School stands behind a chain-link fence. Both Jessa and Tim went to that school, ten years apart. That night Leanne paid no mind to the SLOW CHILDREN sign, which had always caused her distress; what she wouldn't have given to have been blessed with any child, even a slow one. Her thoughts were on the chase; the pain in each step reminded her of the potential cost if she lost sight of Richard Holland. And by the time she had hobbled and limped past the schoolyard, she'd gotten used to the pain anyway. The soles of her feet would be bloody and raw when she finally got back to the car, worse even than the skin surrounding Dutch's fingernails. But the gains—the gains of this venture could prove to be very fruitful indeed.

From Genoa Avenue to Devlin, past her friend Paulette Chamblee's four-star B&B overlooking a woody ravine. From Devlin to Sammon. On Sammon, which dead-ended at the edge of those same woods (Lord help me if he goes in there), the large man strode heavily down the center of the potholed road to the foot of the Schultz house, where he stood on its sagging porch for a long moment, until the crooked front door swung inward onto darkness, and he ducked inside.

Anyone born or at least raised in Knee High should be quite familiar with the Schultz house and its sinister aura. To call it an eyesore would be too kind. It was a blight, and had been, for much longer than the Taymors were my neighbors. With wallboards as gray as ash, the crumbled slate-shingle roof sagging in the middle, its porch nothing but a broken heap of old lumber, its staircase sunken, its cobblestone walk and front yard (to call it a yard was flattery) a wilderness of jimson and hogweed and wild ficus, the Schultz house had been known by children to be haunted, long before Tim and Jessa had attended Knee High Elementary.

Old Lady Schultz had been rumored by kids to be a witch. If you'd ever seen her out there on her porch, you might have been hard-pressed to contest it. In her youth, she'd been a librarian—Lord knows why; it was obvious she loathed children. Perhaps she'd found sadistic pleasure in shushing them, in squeezing every last nickel of their allowances out of them for their overdue books throughout the years.

I knew Old Lady Schultz, though when I was in school she'd been called Dotty, and Dotty Schultz had been just as mean in her twenties as she'd been in her decrepitude. When she finally kicked the bucket in the early aughts, you can bet there were cries of Ding-dong, the witch is dead from many a mouth.

It was thought that when she died her house would be demolished by the bank, but when news of her death arose, lo and behold, the rats crawled out from the woodwork! The rats in this case were long-lost relatives—"long-lost" meaning those relations who could not tolerate her when she was alive, and were only too happy to snatch her property (including about fifty acres of the woods behind and to the left of it) from her cold, dead hands.

Her great-nephew, as chance would have it, was a land developer. I have no clue if he'd held this job before laying claim to his great-aunt's property, but just three weeks after Dotty Schultz keeled over, a sign went up out front, in the same surreptitious manner as those MISSING posters had:

LAND RESERVED FOR

FUTURE DEVELOPMENT

I suppose Great-Nephew Schultz suspected Knee High might be soon to expand, what with the new addition to the highway, perhaps incorporating with nearby towns across the Platte and finally, to the great city of Omaha. Commuters and retirees would need condos and townhouses, and what better place to put them than a quaint little valley town with low property taxes and little to no pretensions?

These days they call that sort of market speculation "hope value." Whatever young Mr. Schultz's hopes had been, the house (and sign) remained until the recession hit, and by then any hope of future value had sunk, along with the rest of the housing market. That the same sign stood for Leanne to hide behind some ten years later—albeit with the thoughtful addition of BARACK SUCKS COCK Sharpied across it on a diagonal by some semi-literate artiste—was a testament to the failures of economic recovery, debt ceiling be damned. One of Jim's LOST DOG posters was stapled haphazardly to the utility pole nearby, dampened by the other night's rain. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, Leanne made her numbed, barefoot approach and peered inside a darkened window.

They were cross-legged on the floor, amid stacks of yellowed—a slightly darker shade of gray in the gloaming—newspapers, all six of them just as naked as Jim had told her, though they lacked the crust of filth he'd mentioned. The night sky was just bright enough through the dead trees outside the Schultz house for her to make out their faces, and the horror of recognition widened her eyes.

There was Pete Wallin, who drove the resurfacer at the public ice-skating rink in the winter and, come spring, a big lawn tractor (though not as big as his Zamboni) at the fairgrounds on the other side of the woods. He was as skinny as a rake with his long, Ichabod Crane face, and every single rib visible in his hairless—save for a few stragglers around the nipples—chest. His spine stood out like alligator spikes.

She remembered the heavyset woman from the checkout counter at the Food 4 Less in Lincoln, mouthing numbers as she counted the food stamps of a customer ahead of Leanne. Tara or Tina, she thought, trying to conjure up a mental image of the woman's nametag, before realizing it would be worse if she knew her name. Bad enough she knew their faces, let alone their names.

The kid Jim had recognized belonged to George and Helena Lannegan. She thought his name was Kyle, and knew he was enrolled in the same school up the road that Tim and Jessa had attended. Neither parent was among the adults seated around him. He was a stray, it seemed, like the others—but how? If they truly were no longer human, as it appeared from everything she'd seen herself and all that Jim had told her, how could Kyle Lannegan be one of them if his parents weren't? She supposed it could have been a recessive gene or a mutation, like dwarf parents siring a child of normal height. Or—and the thought of this caused her to shudder uncontrollably—he could have been changed.

Richard Holland's head twitched suddenly on its tree trunk neck, his nostrils flaring in her direction. She ducked, certain he'd caught her scent. Like a dog, she thought. Like my Rosco. Fear and anger pumped volcanic adrenaline into her veins, her breath quickening. Surely they'd hear her, she thought, if they hadn't smelled her already. She waited for Dutch's thick fingers to snatch her up by her hair, or the scruff of her neck, and for a moment it felt as though they'd actually slipped along her spine. But it was only a moth.

Typically, the very sight of them gave her the charlies, as Jenny Meyer might have said. ("It's the dust," she explained to Gin and me during that long night spent around our kitchen table. "Why do they have to be so dusty?"). But crouched outside the decrepit Schultz house she merely watched the moth flutter awkwardly away, counting out Mississippis as she slowed her breath, waiting for the hand to fall on her neck.

At thirty-Mississippi, she steeled herself to chance a peek over the window ledge.

They remained sitting in their ragged circle, all heads turned toward the heavyset woman, who plunged her hands into what looked at first to be a hole in the floor. The woman's gut folded over her crotch, yet pubic hair was still evident in the folds at her hips. Her hands came up streaked with black, and the smell—earthy and musky and sour, the smell of death and rotting cheese—was strong enough to make Leanne's eyes sting. She swallowed an involuntary gag, but the hot innards stench had already imprinted itself on her olfactory bulbs. It was a smell she would likely compare to every other stench, from that day forward: Sure, it stinks, but it's not as bad as the time...

This filth was black as tar, and Tina/Tara smeared it onto the naked torsos and necks of the others. They scraped it from their skin with their palms, not to fling it away in disgust but to rub it on their faces and in their hair, the way someone might attempt to conserve the suds of a single dried-out sliver of soap in the shower.

The delight Leanne saw in their glimmering eyes spoke of sacrament. Whatever they were, human or animal or something in between, Cordelia's Frugaltarianism had merely been a cover for this undreamed of private-interest group or secret society, who met not in the library basement or the Legion Hall, but at an abandoned house on the edge of the woods in the dead of night, providing neither coffee nor donuts, but a liberal application of animal shit on their naked bodies.

Once they'd entirely covered themselves, they raised their arms to the rotted ceiling and bent at the hips, slapping their open palms into the excrement with a wet sound and raising their blackened palms again to the sky. They did this perhaps a dozen times, uttering soft, animal grunts with each elevation.

Finally, each of them shook out their limbs like some post-meditation ritual, and lay down to dry out on the bare boards. Their chests rose and fell rapidly, the panting of desert wolves. Leanne stayed at the window, and while she watched them sleep she began to formulate the first inklings of a plan.

If the body-paint and bowing were parts of a ritual, surely the sleeping was a part of it, too.

A lot of things could happen while a person slept—that much had already been proven by the men and women (and child) sleeping fitfully in the Schultz house, who had gone skulking unnoticed through the streets and alleys of Knee High for God knew how long, while the rest of us slept.

Well, Leanne was awake now. She thought she might never sleep again until this business was done, but she was wide awake.

Her blood froze. The boy, who'd been asleep only moments ago, had gotten up while she was thinking and had begun sniffing at the air, staring directly at the window where she was crouched. She was frozen in place, caught by that innocent, terrible stare, the eyes shimmering out from his shit-streaked face like stars in the void of space.

He sniffed.

Did he smell her?

The short woman beside the Lannegan boy stirred in her sleep.

How could he not see her?

Sniff-sniff-sniff. Sniff-sniff-snifffff.

Kyle Lannegan squinted out at the dim night, the light in his eyes closing to slits. Then he turned away from the window and sank back to the floor, curling up beside the short woman and planting a grimy thumb in his mouth.

10

LEANNE REMAINED MOTIONLESS at the window a while longer, wondering why the boy hadn't seen her when he'd been looking her right in the eyes, or if he had seen her, why he hadn't awakened the others.

They were still sleeping when she walked back to Davis Street, where the car was parked. Once there she gave the agony in her feet a rest, lying across both front seats with her poor tootsies hanging out the driver door, cooling them in the night breeze. She would bathe them in ice water once she got home, but for now they had work to do on the pedals. It had been just over an hour since Richard Holland had left his house. Ten more minutes of strain couldn't possibly hurt them worse than they'd already been.

When Jim got home from the restaurant, she was asleep, sitting up on their plush recliner, her feet soaking in a basin of lukewarm water, pink with her blood.

He woke her gently. Still, she was startled. She wrapped her arms around his neck as if she were clinging to a life-preserver, and he carried her to bed. He dressed her feet in gauze and bandages and ointment. She tried once, in a sleep-muttering sort of way, to tell him her plan, but he shushed her. When he slipped into bed himself a few minutes later, she was breathing soft and slow and steady.

Jim flicked off the light.

11

"JEWISH LIGHTNING," HE said, skeptical.

They sat in the kitchen, sipping their morning coffees—fair trade coffee, I suspect. Leanne normally liked hers black, but she took a little cream and sugar today, the color just too similar to the grime she'd seen at the Schultz house. Even dumping out the wet grinds she'd gagged a little, thinking back.

"Jim," she said with a disapproving squint.

He let out an exasperated sigh. "We're talking about roasting people alive here, Leanne, and you're concerned about an ethnic slur?"

"Those things aren't people," she quickly reminded him. "Just tell me what you think."

What Jim thought was that it wouldn't work. The outcome was too uncertain, and the possibility it could blow up in their faces—both literally and figuratively—was far too high.

"First of all," he said, "we don't know if it's a daily event, this..." He shook his head, not knowing just what to call the thing she'd witnessed. "And even if it is, how can we be sure we'll get all of them in one shot?"

Leanne let her shoulders sag. He was right, and she knew it. Her idea had been to throw a Molotov cocktail through one of the windows (though what she'd called it was "one of those bottles filled with gas and a wick thingy on the end"—Jim had provided her with its name), hoping there was enough methane in the feces to act as an accelerant and engulf the whole group of them in flames.

Even if it were a surefire plan, the idea of burning people alive felt not just morally but physically repugnant, a whole lot worse than letting an old, oft-used ethnic slur slip (a forgivable sin, perhaps, given the circumstances, though the B'nai B'rith might disagree). Jim didn't voice the opinion. Having poisoned a woman just two nights prior, he was hardly in a position to judge.

Leanne was right about one thing, though: they had to take out the whole group at once, and before the "Dutch" wolf came knocking at their door. If not arson, though, then what? Chances were pretty slim the lot of them would return to La Costina's Dumpsters, which meant another good dose of rat poison was out of the question. Besides, there was hardly enough free space in the old downstairs freezer for Cordelia and Dutch, let alone the rest of their clan. And the likelihood that on a few days' notice, either he or Leanne could get their hands on a legitimate assault weapon—a bazooka, Jim thought with childlike excitement—was slim to none.

"What if we slipped in earlier in the day and splashed around some gasoline? Or should I be concerned about wasting gas in this economic climate?" Jim asked with a sly wink.

She ignored the joke and gave it thought. "No, they'd smell gasoline. But the stench of that—" She didn't want to say it. I don't believe I've ever heard Leanne utter a cussword in the twenty-five years I've known her. I've heard sugar quite a bit, though, and not in the context of asking to borrow some.

"Shit," Jim said for her, and she gave him a nasty squint again.

"It smelled like natural gas, under all the other icky smells."

"If we were to make it look like J—" Not wanting to incur her full wrath, he reconsidered the phrase. "—like an insurance scam, it should seem accidental. If the Schultz kid was going to burn it down, he'd want it to look like an act of God. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt there's been propane in that house since Old Lady Schultz shuffled off to that dusty old library in the sky."

"Everyone thinks that place is a flophouse," Leanne said. "If we put a hotplate upstairs, they'll just think some hobo left it with the gas on."

She was onto something, he thought, but she was missing a key element. "They'd smell us, though. Even if they didn't notice the propane, they'd smell us. You said you thought they'd smelled you from outside. Cordelia smelled me from fifteen feet away. And I'm pretty sure animals can smell if a predator's been inside their den."

Leanne thought for a moment, rubbing absently at the bandages on the sole of a bare foot. "If they were camouflaging themselves with the—"

"Shit."

This time she dismissed him. He'd made a guess earlier that if Dutch and the others covered themselves in the eye-watering stench, they could move among whatever scavenger the excrement belonged to—he'd said skunk, though he supposed it could just as easily have been raccoon, wolf... or cougar. Aggressive mimicry, like what Cordelia had done with the cat, lulling it into a sense of security before tearing it to shreds. The dark color would also allow them to slip through the night, virtually unnoticed by human eyes.

She didn't want to consider it, but the idea was there for the picking. "What if we used their own tactic against them?"

"You mean...?"

She nodded.

"We don't even know if that's why they do it," he said. "It could be like you said, just a ritual."

"But if it isn't..."

"I'm not rubbing shit on myself, Leanne." Jim gave her a look of suspicion. "And you're not exactly volunteering, are you?"

"We've only got one shot at this, Jim," she said. "Don't you think we should do whatever it takes to get it done? And that means one of us has to go inside that house, and plant the propane tank. If they smell it, or us, then it's over. We'll pay the giant his toll and pray he doesn't get greedy for more."

Jim thought for a long moment, aware she was using the same not-so-subtle coaxing technique she'd employed when she had convinced him to quit his well-paying job and open an Italian restaurant in his rural hometown. She'd been right then, and she was right now.

Somewhere, a dog barked. And somewhere else, six people who weren't really people went about their lives in plain sight. Whether they were alien body snatchers or were-creatures or cultists didn't matter.

What mattered was what they weren't.

"Fine," he said. "I'll do it."

12

LEANNE CALLED THE wild animal sanctuary out on the county road Thursday morning, inquiring about the possible hazards of wild-animal manure. "For fertilizer," she explained, saying she'd hoped to use something local and sustainable, preferably not farm waste.

The woman on the phone advised against it. "Intestinal worms, rabies, you name it," she said. "Steer clear of raccoon latrines, especially, if you can help it. You'll be able to tell what kind of dung it is from the smell. Raccoon is probably the worst-smelling of all." There was a cheerful note to her voice when she added, "If it's unavoidable, we'd be glad to send someone out to disinfect your property. All proceeds go towards preservation and maintaining the sanctuary—"

Leanne hung up on the sales pitch. They wouldn't provide her with material goods, but they'd made up for it with information. Handling raccoon feces without protection was dangerous (and it was surely raccoon feces they wanted—what she'd smelled could only have been the foulest, worse even than the elephant exhibit at the Kansas City Zoo). The risk of infection too great. They'd need some sort of protective gear, and she knew exactly where to find it.

The crisscrossed bars in the video store window upset her almost as much as those SLOW CHILDREN signs did as she passed by. Of all the failing businesses their success had resuscitated, they could do nothing for Big Top Video. Robert "Red" Ritter had sold what he could in a fire sale (the Schultz house would never get the luxury, but it would burn, all right—you bet it would), and left town. Off to greener pastures, Leanne dared to hope, though I happen to know the authorities found Red dead in a small, virtually barren apartment in Lincoln barely a year after Big Top folded its tents. Died suddenly, the obits said, which I also happen to know is the polite term for suicide.

The bell above the door to the army-navy store dinged as she stepped in. Ask not for whom the bells tolls, Leanne thought, remembering the phrase from her English Lit. days, as recited by that professor who'd once asked her on a date. She had declined with some trepidation, hoping it wouldn't affect her grade, and happy when it hadn't.

"Be there in a minute," the proprietor called from the back. Funny how in all the years she'd had her business beside Knee High Surplus she'd never once seen its owner, just that beat-up maroon Volvo parked out front (of all possible automobile makers he'd gone with the Swedes, one of only a handful of neutral nations during WW-Eye-Eye), from sunrise to well beyond sunset with bullet-hole stickers on its rear window beside a Garfield suction toy, a wooden bead seat cover on the driver's side, and a back seat full of storage boxes.

Jim had suspected the man lived out of that car, and had considered having it towed several times. But Leanne had ixnayed the idea. "If he is living in that car," she'd said, "you'd be towing away a man's home. Haven't there been enough foreclosures around here, without the two of us adding to it?"

Inside were articulated mannequins wearing gas masks, camouflage and Kraut pickle-helmets. Military regalia hung from the walls, the shelves lined with folded uniforms, green, desert beige and orange. Though most of the items in the store had been used for violence at one point or another, the manner in which they were placed suggested collectible, not arsenal. The overall atmosphere was of dust and antiquity.

In the center of the room was a long table filled with swords and weaponry of the Orient, with grenades and mortars and oiled black Lugers, and long rifles with dulled bayonets. Leanne suspected—she hoped—the explosives were no longer usable, although if they were live, it would make the task at hand a whole lot easier.

A short man with cropped gray hair and deep circles under his eyes materialized from the gloom in the back. He wore none of the green and brown both Jim and Leanne had expected, but a pristine white tracksuit with black stripes, and dock shoes on his sockless feet, though there is no water nearby and Memorial Day was still a few weeks away.

"Howdy, neighbor," he said.

"How—?" she started to say.

He smiled affably. "Just because we've never met, doesn't mean I don't know who you are. Buddy Ames," he said, sticking a hand out over the glass counter filled with sharp, shiny knives. He wore a fresh scent like Ivory soap, a pleasant counterpoint to the shop's musty odor.

"Nice to meet you, Mr. Ames."

"Buddy's fine. We're neighbors, after all."

Leanne nodded and smiled, knocked for a loop. She felt a twinge of guilt for thinking this man had been sleeping in his car. He was clearly doing fine or, at least, had regular access to a shower and a washing machine.

"What can I do you for, Leanne? You don't strike me as the Soldier of Fortune type, nor a collector, for that matter. So I presume you're looking for a gift of sorts." He smiled then—a crooked smile that set her immediately at ease and got her mind working again.

"Actually, I'm looking for protective clothing. We've got a bit of a raccoon problem at the house, and Jim, my husband, he's dead-set on cleaning it himself. We'd really rather not call an exterminator. Those chemical cleaners..." She shrugged, and Buddy Ames smiled again.

"Yup, can't say I blame you there. I suppose if you'll be handling the waste yourself you'll need something with a little more protection than coveralls and a dust mask, am I right?"

"Preferably. The animal sanctuary—"

"The chipmunk zoo," he offered.

"That's the place. They said there's a high chance of contamination?"

"And you're hoping I've got a hazmat suit among my wares."

Leanne smiled and nodded again. Such a shrewd businessman should have been selling something of value, she thought. Gold, or cell phones.

"Well, Leanne, it would seem you're in luck. I've just gotten a new shipment, and wouldn't you know it? It contains not one but two used Level B Tyveks, a large and a small. His and hers, you might say."

"That is lucky."

"Indeed." He fixed her with his shrewd gaze. "But I've got a feeling you'll need a lot more than luck with what you and your husband have in mind."

"Excuse me?"

"Please," he said, holding up a small, manicured hand. "We're neighbors."

"Meaning what, exactly?"

"Meaning they're my Dumpsters, too. And I know all about our... " He made quotes in the air: "...visitors."

13

LEANNE STOOD WITH Buddy Ames as he smoked his thin brown cigarette, surveying the small lot behind their businesses where Cordelia Moone had dined on Ms. Kitty and had breathed her last the following night. They'd gone through the large back room where it seemed Buddy slept, ate and bathed in a small military-style quarters, replete with bunk, hotplate and a shower, doubling as a breakfast nook when the curtain was thrown back and the white plastic table was raised on its hinges.

"I first saw them two years ago," Buddy said, "about the time the lurker next door skipped town." Next door meant Big Top Video; the "lurker" was Red (now deceased) Ritter.

"Two years?" Leanne said. "And you never told anyone?"

He favored her with a look through the haze of smoke. "What would I have said? 'Hey there, neighbors. Property taxes sure are taking a bite this year. Oh, and did you happen to notice the human Rodentia in our Dumpsters?'"

This surprised a laugh out of her. "I suppose you're right. I wouldn't have believed it myself if I didn't see it with my own eyes."

"And I wouldn't have had the guts to do what your husband did, though I've thought about it quite a bit."

"You—? You're the one who..."

Buddy blew out a cloud of smoke and looked her over. "I suppose he told you about the cat."

Leanne managed a sickly nod. "Was that the first animal you left out there for them? For bait?"

"Not bait." He gave her another of his shrewd glances. "And to answer your query, I didn't leave your... what was his name?"

"Rosco," she said, nearly choking it out.

"I did not leave your Rosco out for those monsters, I assure you."

She let out a breath of relief.

"That's not to say he isn't dead. Your husband's posters were one of the reasons I caught Ms. Kitty and left her for them."

Leanne didn't follow.

"I'm sure you've noticed the inflated amount of missing pets this past year. Rumor has it there's a cougar loose in the area." He lowered his head, looking up at her through the canopy of his eyebrows. "I assure you, Mrs. Taymor, as I believe your husband may have gathered when Cordelia Moone gobbled up Garfield's little sister, these missing pets are not the victims of a mountain lion."

"She ate them all?"

"Not just her, but yes. That's my belief. I left Ms. Kitty there because I had to be sure. Right now, they're predominantly scavengers. Right now. But it won't be long believe me, before meat is on the menu again. Your husband saw what Cordelia Moone did to that cat. That wasn't the first animal I'd left for her, either. I had to know before I agitated the nest. I had to be sure. And, Mrs. Taymor, I am absolutely certain now."

"Leanne," she said, distractedly, almost dreamily. "Buddy... you've known about these things for two years, and what? Sat back and waited for them to do something awful like this?" She shook her head, swimming with questions. "I just can't imagine living with that knowledge for so long, and not doing anything about it."

"That's why you're on their bad side, and I'm not even on their radar. I saw the big one the other night—"

"Richard Holland," Leanne said.

He exhaled a plume of smoke in surprise. "As in Holland Woodwork?"

"That's him. I followed him to the Schultz place—the old house on Sammon Circle?"

He nodded. "I know it."

"They were all there. I even knew some of them."

He looked at her in amazement and admiration. "You must have gotten close enough to touch them," he said. "Or for them to touch you."

Leanne shivered, picturing Kyle Lannegan's cold, blank stare through the window.

"And now you think you can get rid of them," he said. She turned away from his eyes, which gleamed with excitement. It was too grisly, all of this, and Buddy Ames's enthusiasm for this business was all too ghoulish. "Seven at one blow."

"Six," she corrected.

"Of course," he said, "now that Ms. Moone is on ice."

She was dumbfounded, unable to respond.

"I watched the whole thing as it happened," he explained, pointing to the eaves, where a small but obvious camera pointed toward the bins. "Smile. You're on Candid Camera."

That shiver ran up her spine again. How could she have missed that? Buddy Ames knew so much, but how much longer would he keep their secret? Two years, Leanne, she reminded herself. You can see he's grateful. Good riddance to bad rubbish pickers.

"Trouble is," he said, "you wipe out this hive, and another one's going to creep in and take its place."

"Another one? What do you mean? There are more of these things?"

"'Fraid so. The ones you followed to their home away from home, you might call them the Knee High Chapter."

Leanne shook her head, unable to believe the situation was so entirely hopeless.

"Or maybe," he said, that hopeful twinkle in his eyes again, "maybe you'll scare the livin' bejesus out of them. Let them know Knee High is not a lurker-friendly town."

"That's twice you've said that: lurker."

"What they call them," Buddy said with a nod. "On the internet. Whole chatrooms are devoted to 'em, alongside the chupacabra and Bigfoot. They also call them coonies, though I don't use the term. Don't like the connotations."

It occurred to her that lurker was the perfect name for them: not that they crept, as such, though they did move on both hands and feet. But there was no doubting they lurked within the shadows, existing unobserved by society at large, their true nature concealed behind a human guise.

"Big Top Ritter was one of them, I'm almost certain of it. Do you remember, a little over two years ago, when that kid went missing? Danny... what was his name?"

"Danny Reynolds," Leanne said, remembering the Amber Alert all too clearly, the photo of the little blond-haired boy with glasses that had later shown up on the sides of milk cartons. "Nine years old. Last seen wearing a green parka and a red backpack." She considered what he was saying. "You don't think...?"

"There was a fight between Ritter and Ms. Moone, outside his shop one night shortly after the kid went missing. I heard her say something about 'that boy,' and the spooky way she'd said it, I knew right away Danny was the boy she meant. Big Top denied it, of course, but she kept at him. Then, just when it looked like it was just about to devolve into fisticuffs, they started screeching at each other."

"You're saying our former neighbor killed and ate that little boy?" she said. "And you saw Cordelia Moone confront him about it. How could I have missed all this?"

"You've got a successful business to run," Buddy said. "Meanwhile, I've got nothing but time. And free time, I'm sure you'll agree, is a building block of obsession."

14

I'M GOING TO cut to the chase here, because this story is running a bit longer than I'd intended; it would seem I'm obsessing a bit myself. What I said about most of this being true—well, much of the preceding conversation was how I imagine it must have gone, based on what Leanne later told me. I hope you'll excuse the fiction. While I doubt it's true what they say about everyone having a novel in them, it would seem I've got one lurking inside me dying to get out. Though, as you've likely noticed, Steinbeck I am not.

Too much free time, I suppose. If it were April, you'd be getting the abridged version, and so much the better for it.

Buddy Ames was not available to corroborate their story, nor his part in progressing it along, when the authorities went by his shop. The morning after the Schultz house burned down—along with half the woods behind it, and the fairground's gazebo—his Volvo was no longer parked out front of Knee High Surplus, the store and all of its stock having been left abandoned. He was not, as Red before him, found dead in a barren apartment in Lincoln, NE. So far as I know, he was never found.

And when you consider the story Jim and Leanne had to peddle, who could blame him for running?

15

ACCORDING TO BUDDY (via Jim and Leanne, a broken telephone of pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo), these things he called "lurkers" had once been hunters, just as Jim had suspected, but had given it up in favor of scavenging, around the turn of the last century. According to American frontier folklore (which you can easily find on the internet, as I have), it was decided—by some Lurker High Council, I presume, though the thought of it gives me shivers—that the consumption of human beings had become increasingly hazardous to their freedom, and with tuberculosis, cholera, influenza and typhus spreading like the legs of some diseased whore, it was hazardous to their health as well.

And so, sometime between 1890 and 1920, the lurkers had stopped eating meat.

Mostly.

There were still the odd transgressions, of course. Albert Fish, the Werewolf of Wysteria, had claimed he'd eaten close to 100 children. The ritualistic fashion in which he'd carved up his young victims was the work of a truly grotesque gourmand; he did not just enjoy his food, he loved it. "I never ate any roast turkey that tasted half as good as his fat little behind" was how he described the meal he'd made of one child. (I'd advise you not to look up the rest of his confessions. If you have any vestige of a soul, it would turn your stomach, as it did mine.)

Fish, aka the Brooklyn Vampire, aka the Gray Man, is not only one of America's first serial killers, he is considered by some to be the first known lurker, though he had never identified himself as such. I imagine they don't call themselves lurkers, anyhow. Likely, it's a pejorative term to them.

Before you ask, the Donner party was mentioned by at least two "experts" on the subject of lurker mythology. Likewise with Jeffery Dahmer, the so-called Master Butcher of Rotenburg, and the Miami Zombie (who'd attacked a man and eaten pieces of his face while under the influence of marijuana, and not "bath salts" as earlier reports had stated, and said man had still been quite alive). Some halfwit suggested Hannibal Lecter be added to the list, and was swiftly rebuked, proving the line between fiction and reality was at least somewhat intact among this gathering of internet delusionals.

Not all cannibals are lurkers, they say, but all lurkers are cannibals by nature. Big Top Video owner Robert Ritter proved that, if you believed Buddy Ames's suspicions. Given the opportunity, a lurker would eat your child, your mother, your grandparents—it was only by choice that they did not feed on us, as Jim had also suspected, and decisions, like leftovers, could be all too easily discarded. Just think of the last New Year's resolution you made, and you'll know what I mean. Not a day passes when I don't wish I could rescind the choice I made to trade in the hard stuff for the non-alcoholic beverage in my hand, as my rocker rocks and the sun sinks beyond the houses opposite. Particularly on those nights I think I've mentioned, with dark clouds gathering on the eastern horizon—east, toward where the Schultz house stood before Jim and Leanne Taymor razed it to the ground.

I suspect Leanne might feel the same about the decision she'd made to follow Jim from the frying pan into the fire, so to speak.

Many of the rumored victims of the Mexican chupacabra (roughly translated, it means "goat-sucker") are thought instead to be the work of the lurkers. When a few goats in a field lay disemboweled, most people—sane people—think wolf, or cougar. These people get out their torches and pitchforks and hunt down the monster.

The Algonquin Indian wendigo, if you're familiar with the legend, is thought to be the basis of lurker lore, or the first known example. These ghouls are eternally ravenous, no matter how much they eat. It is this bottomless hunger which drives them to eat humans. The Algonquins believe humans themselves become wendigos, should the flesh of their fellow man be consumed. In Canada, prior to his arrest in 1906, a shaman called Jack Fiddler put fourteen supposed wendigos to death. In some cases, it is said, the afflicted tribesmen turned themselves in to be euthanized.

Fourteen murders... and in his little community, Jack Fiddler was celebrated. Fiddler committed suicide before standing trial, for the record; just as Robert "Red" Ritter would, a little over ninety years later, for reasons unknown—unless you believed Buddy Ames. Fourteen. That's twice as many lurker exterminations as Jim and Leanne were soon to lay claim to, and in Knee High, as everywhere else, they would be reviled.

Rightly so, I have to say. Rightly so.

16

JIM COULD SMELL their shit right through his mask.

The stench was worse than the time he'd found his old dog Rufus wriggling on his back in the tall grass behind his old house. The Golden Retriever had positively reeked, worse than any animal had a right to. The dead coon Rufus had been rubbing his fur in, streaking himself with its scent, lay frozen among the gnarled roots of their giant oak, fangs bared and paws curled into claws. Its guts lay coiled beside it, red as raspberry jam. Ants climbed the sticky, glistening mountain for treasures to bring back to their Queen. There were more ants trudging in the brown, putrid ribbons of raccoon scat and gore in Rufus's fur.

Jim's father had given Rufus a good couple of swats with a rolled-up copy of the biweekly Knee High Whistler, and his mother had bathed the miserable mutt in V8. Despite the old wives' remedy, Rufus had carried on stinking for almost a week. Kids held their noses and made exaggerated retching sounds as he followed Jimmy to the school bus, no matter how hard he'd tried to send the dog back to the house.

Along with the two Tyvek suits and SCBA masks she bought, Buddy sold Leanne a flare gun at a good discount. I would have approved, even though I would not have approved of its intended use. Buddy also happened to have been storing up a good deal of thermite in the fallout shelter he'd created under his living quarters, enough thermite to take down a skyscraper, he'd told Leanne. The twinkle had returned to Buddy's eyes when he told her that, as if this might be firsthand knowledge.

The creek where Jim and Leanne stood, in the woods between the Schultz house and the fairgrounds, has no name. So far as I know, it never has, though during a particularly wet spring or fall it sometimes rises just about high enough to be considered a river. It is a distributary of the Missouri, I believe, perhaps the Platte. As a child I played near its banks with various groups of friends, most of whom have either moved away or passed on since. Those who are still with us, physically as well as in spirit, I see on occasion. A few of them live—if you want to call it living—at the seniors' home up on the hill, what Gin likes to call the Cripple Castle. We share a nod or a wave, but rarely do we speak. Back then, we'd had nothing but the exuberant curiosity of youth in common, though when you're a kid that seems like enough. Old age isn't quite the grand unifier childhood is, despite what the Castle's advertisements in the Whistler would like you to think.

"I wish I'd thought to bring Vaporub," Jim remarked as he zipped himself into the protective gear. Raccoons are a peculiar animal, obsessive about touch, and about washing their food before they dine. Conversely, they have no misgivings about shitting where they eat. Leanne stood back where the woods cleared for the creek, holding her nose as Jim shoveled scat into the red plastic bucket he used to wash the cars. He scooped up a shovelful of clear, cool water into the bucket next. Then he shook in a good amount of thermite from an emptied paint can. It rose in a gray-black cloud.

"Careful," Leanne said with a wince. She knew it wasn't necessary; Buddy Ames had assured her it was safe until it was ignited—and then stand back, Jack!—but she'd always felt it was best to err on the side of caution.

Jim ignored the warning, using a long branch to stir up the filth into a rich, black paste, indistinguishable from what Leanne had seen the lurkers smear onto their skin. As soon as she'd come within whiffing distance of the latrine, she'd been certain it was the same smell from the Schultz house, though it seemed to Jim she would have said just about anything to step clear of its powerful stench.

"Get the bags ready?" he said over his shoulder, picking up the bucket full of lethal sludge. Leanne shook them out, gagging when he approached. "That's not the first time I've had that effect on a woman," he joked, though it was a pretty lame attempt at levity. Her reaction was somewhere between a laugh and a groan.

He lowered the stinking bucket into the doubled-up trash bags, then took the bundle from Leanne. She ran off to the trees immediately. The bran muffin and coffee she'd had that morning—more cream and sugar today—came up and splashed against the mossy earth, a few rebound droplets spattering her sneakers.

Jim tied the bags and set them down. "You okay?" he said. "I'd hold your hair, but my grip is like a lobster's with these gloves."

Leanne wiped her lips with the back of her hand. "I'll be fine." She rose from the bushes and regarded him with a probing look. "Jim... can we do this? I mean really do this?"

"It was your idea," he reminded her.

"Well," she said, "it looked good on paper."

Jim smiled wanly. As their pet phrase, it would normally garner at least a chuckle. He felt like doing a lot of things right then—run was very high on that list—but laughing was not one of them.

"This is the best way," he said. "The only way. Six in one blow."

There were other ways, of course. Buddy had suggested poisoning the feces, a contact poison that would slowly kill them as it seeped into their skin. He'd suggested pumping carbon monoxide in through the unused water pipes while they slept, essentially putting them to sleep for good. He'd suggested using a couple of propane flamethrowers to roast them alive, but it seemed to Leanne this mode of death would require some sort of clever one-liner, and she'd been fresh out.

"There's always thermite," Buddy had suggested, with an eyebrow raised and his eyes twinkling again.

Leanne had urged him to go on.

"Thermite burns fast and hot. It melts right through metal. If you pour water on it while its burning, you'll get hundreds, thousands of tiny little explosions from the superheated water, like dousing a grease fire only much, much worse. It's undetectable by explosive-sniffing dogs, so our lurkers wouldn't be likely to smell it either. You guys sprinkle it along the floorboards, in the ducts, and it looks and smells just like dirt and rust. Mix it with their war paint, camouflage, whatever you want to call it, and they'll become walking—lurking—thermite grenades." With his trade-marked shrewd look, he said, "If you're serious about doing this, and I believe that you are, thermite is the only way to fly."

She'd taken his word for it. The three other paint cans filled with thermite lay in the back of their Suburban, parked on Hammersmith Road at the other end of the fairgrounds. Jim had reasoned that if they were going to accidentally blow themselves up out there looking for turds, one can was sufficient.

It had occurred to her that the thermite squirreled away in Buddy's fallout shelter could easily have blown the entire building sky-high, including La Costina, but the man had seemed unconcerned. Below ground, his supply of assault rifles and handguns, unlike their surplus counterparts on the ground floor, were very functional. Along with the shelves of canned goods, toilet paper and cigarillos lining the walls, Buddy Ames was well prepared for an apocalypse, whatever its cause might be.

17

JIM SLIPPED OUT of his Tyvek and headed back to the car for the rest of the thermite, while Leanne sat on mossy rocks by the edge of that nameless creek (a good distance from the latrine), eating leftovers. They'd left Arnie Jacobs in charge of lunch at the restaurant, and would leave him again with dinner. The man had been at it long enough; in many ways, he was a better chef than Leanne.

"You don't take risks," Arnie had told her once, "that's your problem. You're a fine cook—you should trust yourself to improvise more."

If he could see me now, Leanne thought with grim humor.

The wild mushroom risotto he'd made two days ago was still delicious cold from a plastic container. It occurred to her this whole mess had started because of leftovers; if only Jim had never seen Cordelia Moone chowing down on that cat. If only he'd left it alone. Leanne had been quite happy until then, being blissfully unaware of the presence of the lurkers and their contribution to the town's dwindling pet population—not to mention little Danny Reynolds.

Had they come too far to change their minds?

She had no doubts what they were doing was right, but was the motive genuine? Were they doing it because they believed these were creatures that should not be? Was it because of the slaughtered animals, because what Buddy Ames believed had happened to Danny Reynolds could happen to another child? Or was it simply to save their own hides?

Leanne dumped the last of Arnie's wonderful leftovers in the creek and rinsed the container. She'd lost her appetite. Second-guessing herself at every turn wasn't going to help, and neither was applying conventional morality to an unconventional situation. A distinction had to be made. These weren't people they were killing, after all—hadn't she said as much to Jim the day before?

They were lurkers.

A twig snapped behind her. She twisted round, scared out of her wits, certain he'd be standing there, Dutch Holland, with his massive paws and his glowering forehead.

But it was only Jim. She'd probably been as glad to see him before, though not by much.

"Phew! That's hot work," Jim said, setting down the cans (he'd carried two in one hand; anyone who's tried that knows the murder it can be on the fingers), and rubbing his sore hand. He'd sweated patches in the neck and armpits of his old MIZZOU t-shirt. He grew concerned as he approached Leanne.

"You okay?" he said. "You look like you've seen a ghost."

Leanne forced a smile. "I'm fine. Just thought you were someone else."

"Oh." His hand felt like a fat, heavy spider on her shoulder. "Honey, he's at work. You know that. We saw him there. The others, they have no idea what he's been up to."

"You can't know that."

"I do. If they knew, they'd be after more than money. That Dutch, whatever he isn't, he is a businessman."

"Okay," she said, sounding unconvinced.

"No one knows what we're planning except the two of us, hon."

And Buddy Ames, she thought but didn't say. He could have given us up the second I left his store. Two years is a long time to keep their secret—you thought that yourself, remember? Certainly long enough to make a pact with the Devil.

"Nobody's going to spring a trap on us," he assured her. Jim was just as worried as Leanne—hell, he was terrified. But sharing fear works like an echo chamber, one person's jitters playing off the other's until you're screaming at every sound and flit of shadow. "If that's what you're thinking," he hastily added.

"Okay," she said, and this time she made sure to sound persuaded.

18

THE HOUSE WAS cool and dark as they slipped in through the back door on an old kitchen filled with earthy, rusty, rotted smells.

Leanne's breath fogged the clear plastic screen of her mask as her eyes scoured the gloom. Cabinets opened, rotting from their hinges, wallpaper peeling, linoleum cracked and broken and bent up at the corners, rusted silverware scattered just about everywhere, broken plates and tea cups. It was surely her image of Hell, a nightmare version of her own home kitchen. Jim moved into the next room without much thought. After mourning the loss of so much good china, Leanne followed.

Here was more of the same, though it was phonebooks and framed photographs (and their accompanying shards of glass) littering the floors, along with newspapers, and small mountains of dirt and pine needles. It was difficult to tell if the wild patterns on the peeling wallpaper were mold stains or flocking.

The stench of raccoon feces was thick in here. At the far end of the room, Leanne saw the window she'd been looking through the night before. In the middle of the room the floor disappeared like a Wile E. Coyote illusion. Jim crossed to it. He set down the trash bag and paint can. Then he knelt beside it, a man-sized artist's well of rancid black paint, and dipped a gloved finger into the mess. It came up black.

"Still wet," he said as he rubbed the thumb and forefinger together.

"Great," Leanne said, too disgusted to show her enthusiasm.

"Why don't you start shaking that stuff around the room, and I'll get to work here."

"Any particular pattern?"

Jim gave a wearied look.

"Right," she said. She got to work, using the edge of the Suburban's key to pry open one of the cans while Jim untied the trash bag. Then she began shaking it out around the baseboards. She was three-quarters around the large room before the can was empty, and she returned for another. Jim, meanwhile, had dumped the bucket and smoothing out the smelly black sludge with the lid from a paint can.

"It's not a cake," Leanne said over her shoulder. "It doesn't have to be perfect."

"I think it was smoother before we started."

"It's shit, James," she said, startling Jim with her sudden bluntness. "They're not going to notice."

With a resigned nod, he dropped the bucket back into the bags. He tied them again as Leanne scattered the contents of the second can. "You've already emptied one? I can't even see it."

"That's the idea, isn't it?"

Jim didn't like her snarky tone, but he kept mum. "You know, I really think this might work," he said with a grunt as he opened the third can and began to distribute it around the room.

19

THEY SAT UNDER the opened tailgate, waiting for the sun to go down and darkness to fall over Knee High. I imagine they thought back on that sunset quite a bit later on, when the lights were dimmed for the night in their respective correctional facilities. I imagine in their minds that orange ball of flame might have warped and distorted into the other fire, the one they were soon to set at the old Schultz place—those images that would burn themselves onto their retinas like the shadows of Hiroshima.

They'd made sure to kick away their footprints in the dust and dirt and thermite as they left the house. Now all they had to do was wait on Dutch and the others to arrive, and hope, when the time came, they'd have the guts to go through with it.

Leanne thought they would, but she wasn't the one holding the flare gun.

"I've been thinking about Olivia," Jim said suddenly.

Leanne turned away from him. "Don't," she said.

He sat silently for a time. But Jim had more to say on the subject, and he could hold his peace no more. "I keep thinking if she had lived..."

"Jim."

"...we never would have opened the restaurant, and none of this would have happened."

"So this is my fault?" She wouldn't turn around; it meant she was probably crying. Leanne dealt with tears like a dog going off alone into the woods to die. Touch her now, and she was likely to bite back with hurtful words.

"I'm not saying..." He stopped, deciding on his approach. "It's nobody's fault, Leanne. I never blamed you for what happened. If that's what you think..."

Leanne turned on him then, eyes full of tears. "You never had to."

"Honey..."

She got up and grabbed her Tyvek suit from the behind him. He put a hand on her shoulder—that heavy spider again, poisonous now—and she jerked away from his touch, glaring at him with ice cold, red-rimmed eyes. She stepped into the suit a leg at a time, got the wrong leg first and tried to yank herself free. It bunched around her shoe and she crumpled against the bumper, allowing herself to weep openly for the first time in years.

Jim risked another hand on her shoulders. She fell into his embrace, jerking beneath his arms with each shuddering, long-postponed sob. He held her, stroking her sweat-dampened hair, rocking her like a baby, waiting for her to speak. She said nothing. Finally, she wiped away her tears, and he let her go.

"Thank you," she said, the corners of her mouth quivering.

"Thank you."

She blinked the last traces of tears away. "For what?"

"For staying with me, after everything," Jim said. "I know how difficult a decision it must have been for you."

She said nothing, only smiled.

"I couldn't live without you," he said. "You know that, don't you?"

"You could."

"No. I can't."

Leanne thought about this for a moment. Then she spoke: "I used to think that, too. I thought if you died before me, I'd leap into your grave and let them bury me with you."

"And now...?"

"I love you, Jim. I'll always love you, no matter what. That's something I've decided, too." She traced the rough hair on his cheek with her fingers. "But I don't need you like I used to."

Jim nodded, the lump in the back of his throat a cork holding back tears of his own. He knew it could never be the same between them, but he was grateful for the years they'd had. Whatever came next, those damnable monsters couldn't take that away from them. He would hold on to that just as long as he could.

20

BY COMPARISON TO death by fire, Cordelia's rat poisoning was the rough equivalent of sending her a gift basket from FTD Flowers. It is believed that unconsciousness strikes the victims before the pain becomes too much to bear. More than likely this is something people say to comfort the bereaved. It certainly doesn't explain the Tibetan fellow in New Delhi, who ran a country mile while burning from head to foot, though I suppose he could have been an exception to the rule.

It is not a pretty death, despite the beauty inherent in fire. I have watched, horrified and amazed, as great arcs of burning napalm from Navy riverboats torched entire villages; I know more than a man ought to of the metaphorical shadows of the dead etched onto those walls in Hiroshima. Jim and Leanne discovered their shadows quite suddenly on that beautiful, summery night in May.

The heavyset checkout lady arrived first. They had parked the Suburban a few blocks from the fairgrounds, and sat watching from an old hunting blind they'd happened upon in a tree near the unnamed creek. (Leanne was no climber, and had had to be hauled half the way up.) They had donned their Tyveks to be safe, and the woman, Tess or Tina or maybe Tammy, didn't even raise her head as she passed under the blind.

The woman appeared to be in a daze, swinging her arms like a Bigfoot as she trod through the woods until she eventually disappeared among the trees. They gave it until full dark, and when nobody else appeared beneath them, Leanne figured it was a safe bet the others had come from the front, as Richard Holland had two nights prior. The Taymors climbed down one after the other, and weaved through the moonlit woods, only losing their way once before the trees opened up on the Schultz house.

The grunting chants Leanne had heard were already in progress, offering sound cover to sneak around to the front of the house. She threw a passing glance through an unevenly boarded side window, saw them slapping their hands in the excrement and raising them to the sky in exultation, the air already redolent with its nasty smell. Leanne thought she detected a hint of thermite, but it was probably her imagination; if the lurkers hadn't caught it, there likely wasn't anything to smell.

It had worked.

Don't get ahead of yourself, she thought. There's still a chance it won't ignite.

Jim crouch-walked ahead of her, the flare gun held out at his side, his Tyvek a crinkly white beacon under the moon. She saw the glow of her own suit in her peripherals, but it was already too late to turn back. Jim was under the window now, and as she crouched down beside him, he loaded a flare into the red plastic barrel. They could always turn around and run, she supposed, but if Buddy Ames was right, if there really were lurkers just about everywhere, in every town, they could find themselves running for the rest of their lives.

This was no time for indecision.

The grunts from inside stopped, and the night fell silent but for the sound of frogs chirping and the whine of mosquitoes. The lurkers would be resting soon, gathering their strength for a long night of scavenging... or a hunt. Jim rose up on his haunches. She wanted to cry out to him—too soon!—but didn't dare raise her voice, certain they would tear both of them apart, limb from limb, with or without the use of hedge clippers.

She wasn't about to become the first human meal of these particular lurkers because of her husband's poor timing.

Jim raised the flare gun, the index finger of his safety gloves creaking as it tightened on the trigger. But his right eye twitched behind the mask—and the finger relaxed.

He turned to her, his face twisted in a voiceless scream.

She saw it then, too: Pete Wallin holding a gentle hand on the checkout clerk's swelled, naked belly. The others shined their eyes toward the proud Mama and Papa as those Three Wise Men might have looked at Mary rocking Jesus in his manger.

The heavyset woman was pregnant.

Leanne snatched the flare gun from Jim's hand; he'd all but dropped it in his astonishment. Rage had overcome her, unsure if she was mad at Jim for hesitating, or at the two lurkers for being able to conceive, even if their spawn would be born a monster.

Whatever the reason, she did not hesitate to squeeze the trigger. A flare burst from the barrel, a red so bright that trails remained on her retinas for several minutes afterward. She watched it arc above the heads of the creatures inside, saw them look up from the heavyset woman's belly and follow its descent in shock and awe. Saw it overshoot them by a dozen feet or more, and land somewhere in the kitchen, where it fizzled out on the cruddy linoleum.

Eyes as bright as lamps flashed toward the window.

"Flare," she snapped. Jim sat in a daze, stunned into idiocy. "Gimme the FLARES!"

Jim's face alighted with awareness then, and he began to rummage through his pockets.

The lurkers rose on all fours. Flares fell from the pocket of his vest and scattered on the beige carpet of pine needles. Leanne darted for them.

Jim was still fixated on the window, the lurkers skulking toward them, orange cinders burning in their filth-blackened faces. Leanne scrabbled with a flare in the barrel, like trying to thread a needle with a poisonous snake in her lap. It kept scraping the edges and sliding out. She heard them in there, their animal screeches, their wet hands and feet slapping against the floorboards, closing the distance.

She heard a dull click. By some sort of miracle, the flare had struck home. She snapped it shut and stood. Richard Holland was ahead of the others, a lumbering giant, his mouth upturned in a snarl, his white, fanged molars visible even from a distance.

She squeezed the trigger.

The flare hit the floor behind Dutch's charging feet, igniting the thermite so suddenly and violently it was difficult to believe what she was seeing. One second there was a dingy old room, and the next they were looking through the window at the inside of the sun.

PHOOM!

Waves of heat blew Leanne's mask off her head and whiffled her hair back from her brow. She closed her eyes, for fear they'd bake in the hollows of her skull. When the ringing in her ears stopped, the lurkers' agonized screams rushed in to take its place. She opened her eyes again to see sparks flying from dancing white-hot pillars of flame. They were living sparklers, writhing and tearing at their charring flesh, human-shaped candles melting into fatty puddles on the floor.

Dutch had been thrown like a giant ragdoll with the force of the explosion. He lay huddled against the far wall near the stairs, virtually the only part of the first floor not yet ablaze. He rose to his feet, no crawling now, skirting the flames like some invincible movie monster rising from the ashes of his own death, barely giving a glance to his dead and dying companions, things he'd once referred to as "family," at first only striding and then running toward the open window.

Jim fell back from it, immobile with terror, certain now that this was how it would end: with husband and wife gored by the hands of the lumbering giant for a paltry $15,000.

But Leanne hadn't given up. Moving on autopilot, she plucked another flare from the pile. Her hands shook badly, her brain felt like it was on fire, but she managed to get it loaded just as Dutch reached the window, planting his hands on either side. The heat had burned the hair right off his head and baked the flesh from his skull—a decidedly human skull. Just two cavernous slits remained of his nose, between eyes glowing not with eyeshine now but with the reflection of the flames. All of Dutch's flesh hung in charred strips, yet still she could smell the fresh, cool scent of his aftershave: Brut for the brute. Sharp teeth bloodied, rows of molars stretching all the way up between his eyes and the oozing holes of his ears, the lurker grinned right in her face. Then his jaw opened wider than any human jaw had been meant, wide enough to gnaw off her head, and Leanne breathed a silent prayer.

The floor collapsed beneath Dutch with a belch of fire. He dropped, hanging onto the window ledge with hands that were no more than skeletal claws, fragile things, true terror registering on what was left of his face for scarcely a moment.

Then he plunged into the inferno.

Leanne fell back in utter exhaustion. Jim crawled over to her, put his arms around her. She let him hold her. It was over (For now, her strained mind added, but she thrust the useless thought away). As the great conflagration overtook the upper floors and that awful house burned to the ground, Leanne and Jim hugged each other, hot tears baking on their cheeks.

21

VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTERS STRUGGLED all night to put out the fire. Once it spread to the woods, dry as bone from that long, hot first week of May, it was a losing battle. They had the knowhow, they just didn't have the tools. But rain came, mercifully, early that morning, a torrential downfall that filled the gutters and swelled the nameless creek from my childhood, flooding basements and smothering the blaze in under an hour.

People speculated that the Schultz kid had set the fire for the insurance money, just as Leanne had suspected they would; the bastard would have burned down all of Knee High if the wind had blown in the right direction, and the rain hadn't come when it had. Nothing was left of the house but coal, some of it still upright in blackened columns. Most of it lay in a heap in the cement pit that had been Dotty Schultz's basement, along with the charred remains of six people, burned so badly that dental records had to be used to identify those without families to miss them.

After the roof collapsed, sealing the Knee High Chapter's tomb for good, Leanne and Jim had tossed the Tyvek suits into the fire and left through the fairgrounds. Leanne placed an anonymous call to the fire department from the payphone at Daisy's Pantry. The convenience store had been closed. No one had seen them arrive or leave, and the store had no cameras.

In a tragic bit of irony, Jim and Leanne arrived at the restaurant Friday morning to find their rat terrier dead at the foot of the Dumpster. At first, neither of them could believe the wretched thing slumped on the cracked asphalt (where the orange cat had been less than a week ago) was their Rosco. He was scruffy, dirty, and possibly mange-ridden. He looked like the kind of creature you might see shuffling through the street in the background of those ads about children in some scorching, dirt-poor corner of the world. Choose the child you want to adopt. Call now, operators are standing by.

It wasn't until Leanne gasped and staggered back a step that Jim realized he was looking the same dog from the posters he'd tacked up all over town. Leanne fell to her knees beside Rosco, and wept.

One of the trash bags Jim had left for Cordelia had been dragged out of the bin. The dog lay among its contents, gathering flies. Probably a raccoon had done it, and had realized before it was too late that the food was bad. Surely Rosco hadn't; he had neither the smarts nor the stature to manage such maneuvers. Jim used a big spatula from the kitchen and oven gloves to peel the stiffened corpse off the concrete ("It sounded like peeling a Band-Aid off a hairy leg," Jim told me, with understandable distaste, from behind a glass partition at Nebraska State Penitentiary), while Leanne held open a trash bag, fresh tears running down her face.

Jim comforted his wife, but didn't join her in her tears, not as he had for his boyhood dog, Rufus, nor for Cordelia Moone. Not as he would when the County Sheriff's Department finally hauled off him and Leanne to their separate cells, either.

They tied the bag and tossed it in with the rest of the trash. I suppose we in the accounting trade would consider the death of Rosco the rat terrier a passive-activity loss. As I've said, I didn't much care for Rosco, but I would not will such a death on any creature, man or animal.

The following Monday, Jim mowed neat rows into his lawn with a smile. But the smile was forced. After what he'd seen, what he'd done, he might reach up to find his eyes leaking like bad plumbing every so often, but he didn't think he'd ever truly smile again.

Nobody suspected Jim and Leanne Taymor of the crime. Why would they? They'd been nothing but model citizens until the night Jim Taymor had stepped on the unstable precipice at the edge of sanity and tumbled headlong into the abyss. Days became weeks, months, as speculation grew and the investigations proved arson. The Schultz kid (who was in his mid-thirties, not much of a kid at all) was questioned and released. Residents petitioned for the State Fire Marshal's resignation. He stayed on another term, and is still in office at the time of this writing. All the while, Jim and Leanne lived with those death shadows on the walls of their minds, hiding in plain sight much as the lurkers had, living in fear of being discovered, and marveling when another day passed and the police hadn't come knocking at their door.

La Costina continued to thrive, but their hearts were no longer in it.

They came to us in early October, the trees in the woods surrounding the fire pit that had once been the Schultz house already bare, the black streaks on their trunks a physical representation of the marks the tragedy had painted on all our hearts. The guilt had gotten too much for them to bear. They spilled their guts, and Gin, after they'd told us everything they could remember, asked for them to confess.

They agreed almost at once, as if all they'd needed was our approval.

There was no trial. Had forensic psychologists been asked to testify, they might have pushed for psychiatric care. Folie à deux, the well-spoken interviewees said on those 24-hour news channels. The public would have none of it. They cried out for blood—for the life of the child, mostly, and for Rosco. It was 26 days before the sentence was handed down, during which time it was as if the entire town held its breath: seven consecutive counts each of life with no chance of parole. Overkill again: Neither Jim nor Leanne are immortal, so far as I know.

I cannot speak for the mortality of their Lurkers.

I went to see them quite a bit over the next six months. Their visitation days were staggered, and the drives gave me plenty of time to consider whether I believed any of it. And the thing of it is, the more they told me, the absolute sincerity of their words, the more I found myself wanting to believe them. The alternative is a far worse thing to contemplate: that Jim and Leanne Taymor, my two closest friends, had decided as a sort of a lark to murder seven innocent people, and if anyone found them out, they would simply pretend they had gone insane.

My rational mind refuses to believe their story, of course. But the primitive part of my brain has me checking the darkened corners of the house, quickening my step past the opened doorway to the basement, looking under the bed and behind the door before I settle down for the night. Primitive me jumps at the sound of raccoons fighting in some trash-strewn alley. Primitive me looks for that distinctive glow in the eyes of everyone I pass. He sees a flicker of lamplight in a man's glasses and shouts, Lurker! There! Right there! Can't you see?! Can't you see it's only a mask?!

Rational me, meanwhile, tightens his lips.

Leanne seemed to be doing well, the last I saw of her. She'd even signed up for the Second Chance Pups program, and had brought with her a Golden Retriever—who probably looked a lot like the dog Jim had loved as a boy—she was training to be a seeing-eye dog, of all things. I have to say, I find some pleasure in knowing she'll be okay, in spite of all that has happened. As long as I've known her, she's been a fighter. The dog sat pretty for a treat. Around his neck was the same blue bandana Jim had used to tie on his head for yardwork. Everything neat, and in its right place.

I'd like to say Jim Taymor held up in prison as well as his wife had, but I'd be lying. The last time I saw him, he was a hollow shell that had once contained a man. Sunken, jittering eyes, lips chapped and pursed, stubbly flesh hanging under his chin.

"Thanks for coming," he said.

"My pleasure," I told him, though it had never been much of a pleasure visiting either of them. It felt more like penance, like those non-alcoholic beers I drank less and less of these days. "You look good."

He shook his head, and said nothing for some time. Something on his mind, I suppose, but I didn't have all day. I'd been about to ask if he wanted to be left alone when he came out with it. "Can you do something for me? I know you've done enough just coming here to see me, but this is the last thing, I swear it." He looked at me imploringly. "I swear," he said again.

"Name it," I said, regretting the words before they'd entirely left my mouth. We'd discussed writing down their story, and I'd already begun the chore of it.

"I'm so sorry," he said, and snatched a glance over his shoulder. A burly guard about the size of Richard "Dutch" Holland stood expressionless behind him. Jim seemed unreasonably focused, fixed on the door he'd come through. I wondered, fleetingly, if he meant to escape. As it turned out, escape was precisely what he'd had in mind—though not as I'd imagined it.

"There are more of them, you know," he whispered. "Much more." He stole another frightened glance at the door. "There's a key, under the doormat of the gazebo behind the house," he told me. "Buddy put it there."

"Buddy Ames?" By then I'd come to the conclusion Buddy was either a ghost or a figment of his and Leanne's imaginations. "This key," I said, thinking of the key he'd given Leanne when the whole mess started, "what does it open?"

He told me. I asked him what he meant for me to do, and Jim just said, "You'll know when you see it." Then he apologized again, and let the guard take him away.

It was the last time I saw him. I still remember that haunted expression on his face as he was pulled roughly through the door into the darkened hallway beyond, and out of my life.

Haunted... yet somehow at peace.

22

I HAVEN'T GONE to visit Leanne in over a month. I can't bring myself to, not after opening Jim's lockbox in back of the Wells Fargo (procured under the pseudonym Ross Coltraine), and having read the document within.

Gin told me to leave it alone. The key was trouble, she said—trouble we couldn't afford. "We've already done all we can for those two," she said. "Can't you see how people act around us? How they hush when we enter a room?" Of course, I had. Particularly come April, when typically I'd do a decent business filing taxes. This year, my list of clients was less than half what it was before this whole mess happened.

I wish to God I had taken Gin's advice.

In the lockbox was a single sheet of foolscap. My fingers shook as I unfolded it. I'm not sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn't what I got.

On the foolscap was a list of names. A letter had arrived at the penitentiary with too many stamps and no return address, but the postmark said NEW MEXICO. Leanne might have recognized the handwriting as the same she'd seen scribbled in Buddy Ames's notes, but Leanne had received no similar letter. The letter revealed to Jim that a key had been placed under the gazebo, and the key belonged to a lockbox.

Inside would be a list of names.

Jim killed himself in the showers the night of my final visit, using the sharpened end of a toothbrush. It had taken him two good stabs to find the jugular. I have to admire the courage that second jab must have taken, to pull it out of the first wound and try, try again. But perhaps it was fear that did it. Those last words he said to me, There are more of them, you know... I think it's highly likely there are as many lurkers among the prison population as there are on the outside. If not more.

Prison officials claimed murder, of course. Said he must have had a run-in with one of several gangs. Why else would he have been found in the showers? I knew better. He'd done it in the showers for the same reason he stood over the kitchen stove every day eating his morning toast: Leanne had trained him well, and he hadn't wanted to make a mess.

We each have a decision to make, I believe, as to how much pain we can endure, how much loss and regret and unhappiness is too much for us to bear. We each must choose the horrors we can abide without collapsing under their weight.

Would Jim have done it, if Leanne's name was on that list? Could Leanne have, if his had been? If they'd had a child of their own, and that child's name were there among the others, people whose lives and faces were otherwise abstracts, could they have done what was required of them? Could they have lived saddled with such frightening knowledge, and done nothing, as I have?

I burned Jim's letter in the kitchen sink the moment I came home from the bank. I couldn't bear to look at it again. So far as I know, Jim had never seen the list with his own eyes. He had chosen me not because of what was on that list, but because I was the only one who would listen.

The last name on Buddy's list, you see, was hers.

Gin, my sweet Virginia. Lord help me, just last night, as I flicked off the bedside lamp, I saw the shine in her eyes.

I think I can bear it. Rational me knows it can't be true. I must think rationally. We've slept in the same bed, longer than we've been married. In that time, I've seen her get up for many a glass of water and cup of hot milk, for her headache powders, to relieve herself, and once, when she'd gotten quite drunk after Jessa was born, she got up to vomit with the door locked tight behind her.

Not once has she left the house in the skulk of night, so far as I know. Not once has she come back from those brief excursions from the warmth of our bed, wearing the noisome smell of animal excrement, or of trash. I must not succumb to fear, as Jim and Leanne had. My love for her is too strong to give in to that niggling voice in the dark. Love can conquer a great many things. But love, like fear, does not always respond to reason.

Rational me believes I would kill myself before I could harm a hair on her beautiful head.

Some nights though, with the sun sinking, and dark clouds gathering in the east, I find myself thinking what a lovely night it would be for a fire.

Prologue

Suffer the Children

WHEN OWEN SADDLER was thirteen years old and his sister Lori was five, the two of them went down to the cool, clear waters of China Cove to play, on a rare summer day when the whole family was together. Owen loved his sister, but he'd taken her along with him only begrudgingly. What he didn't like, more than anything, was being told what to do, and as it was his stepfather who'd stuck him with looking after Lori, he liked the task even less.

Already he felt a strong loathing toward the man pretending to be his father, a man Owen's mother had told him to call "Dad," but whom she herself called "Gerald," and never "Gerry." Owen couldn't remember his real father, but he was certain the man couldn't have been more different from Gerald. His real father had been a strong man, a determined man. He knew this because his mother had often said so, and Owen had a vague sense—not enough to be called a memory—of its truth. Gerald was neither of these, but he was tall, was often quick to anger, and he usually drank so much on these infrequent little trips that Owen's mother would have to drive them home. Yet for all the man's faults, he had given Owen a younger sister to pal around with (or ignore, depending on his mood), so Owen supposed he owed the man at least a little credit.

Lori plodded along in her candy-striped tank top and Adidas swim shorts, scooping up bottle caps, pop tabs, and candy wrappers with her shovel, crinkling her nose in disgust, and flicking them away in a scattering of sand. Owen followed along a short distance behind her. Farther down the beach, some older boys were throwing a football, chasing each other, and laughing once they'd piled on top of one another, fighting over the ball. Owen made sure not to be caught too close to Lori, for fear the boys might lump him in the same category as her and call him a baby.

"Let's go back this way, okay?" he said, taking her hand and directing her away from the boys.

"I wanna go swimming," Lori said, pouting. She knew all about his dislike of water, of lakes in particular—he didn't like to call it "fear," but truthfully that was what it was—and he supposed she knew he wouldn't take her much closer, let alone join her. The sun beat down on the beach in China Cove, where the islands of Georgian Bay and the endless blue of Lake Huron came together. Owen wore a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt to cover his scrawny chest (the smart one, Donatello, was his favourite), long board shorts, and his shoes and socks. He had grown too hot not to cool off his legs, but just the idea of stepping into the shallow surf troubled him. There was no reason for it, as far as he knew. Gerald had called it a "phobia." His mother had held her tongue when he'd said it, something Owen had thought unlike her.

"Mom said no swimming," he lied.

Lori's scowl was deepened by the shadow of her sun hat. "That's not true!"

"It is. Go ask her if you don't believe me."

Lori turned away from the water, toward the trees, where Gerald and their mother sat in the shade, her reading, him blowing the foam off a can of beer from the cooler. It was too far to shout, so Lori squinted up at her brother as if to assess his honesty. He struggled to keep a straight face. "Fine," she said finally, sulking until he let go of her hand.

Owen recalled snippets of a hushed conversation in the car on their way up to the lake, while Lori sang along to the music from her colorful "My First Sony" Walkman. Their mother hadn't wanted to come here, that much he'd been able to hear. But Gerald, who was usually neither strong nor determined, had put his foot down—literally, stepping on the accelerator—and had refused to reply to Margaret Saddler's passive-aggressive comments about Gerald's impending drunkenness until she'd finally given up her protests, saying "Fine," in the same sulky tone their daughter did now.

Lori trudged to within a few paces of the water and peered back, apparently waiting for Owen to follow. He did, but only after realizing, too late, what she'd had in mind. Once she'd figured out he was too far away to catch up to her, she turned and ran: the sort of deke-out the boys playing football might have applauded.

"Cripes," he muttered, and chased after her.

Lori's little legs carried her into the surf before Owen had made it halfway to the water's edge. She was already up to her waist when he stopped dead where the waves left shapes in the sand as they retreated, disintegrating bit by bit a small mound of wet earth that had once been a sandcastle. Suddenly Owen no longer felt the sun's baking heat; instead, a cold, shuddering fear gripped him from head to toe.

There were creatures in the water with sharp teeth and spiny fins. There were bloodsucking leeches and turtles with vicious alligator snouts. There were slippery, slimy things that squirmed in the muck at the bottom of the lake, hideous blind invertebrates that had never seen daylight.

A wind whipped his hair. He turned and watched as it swished through the trees, tilting pines and rustling the branches of enormous maples. A steel-gray cloud suddenly blocked the sun. Owen frowned uneasily, and turned back toward the water to see Lori's sun hat blowing from her head. She cried out, half-laughing, and chased it farther out into the lake.

Out where it should have been too deep to stand, a man Owen hadn't noticed before was standing up to his ankles in the lake. Dressed in a white buttoned shirt and loose-fitting black pants, from whose right pocket Owen caught a glimmer of gold, the man locked eyes with him, and Owen found himself unable to look away. The wind caught the man's dark hair, and a malicious grin spread below his moustache. The man stretched out a hand toward Owen.

"Lori!"

Owen hadn't meant to scream, had only meant to call her out of the water. But the boys farther down the beach looked over at the sound of his cracking voice and snickered. Owen wheeled around to see Gerald and his mother rising from the picnic blanket. Oh God, they're coming over, he thought, feeling the familiar warmth return, rising up his neck to his cheeks as embarrassment seized him.

"What's the big idea?" Lori grumbled, having retrieved her hat and waded back to where Owen now stood. She looked back out over the water, following his troubled gaze toward the man standing in the lake.

"That man," Owen said. The dark grin on the man's vaguely familiar face widened. "I think he's dangerous."

Lori shaded her eyes with a hand and squinted out at the lake. Owen was certain she was looking right at the man, but Lori turned back to her brother with a look of curiosity in her blue eyes. "What man?"

"Right there! You don't see him?" Owen jabbed a finger at the man, whose grin widened even further as he began to stride toward them, his brown leather shoes splashing on the surface of the lake, dampening the cuffs of his pants. "He's right there!"

"Who's right there?" Gerald said, approaching the children with a smirk. Owen turned to face him. Gerald stopped just in front of Owen, and planted the hand not holding a can of Old Vienna beer on his hip, in a posture of obstinateness with which Owen was all too familiar.

"Nobody," Owen said to him, still feeling the presence of the man behind them, wanting to turn and look, as he would have when retreating from a darkened basement. Watching for the monster. Sensing its approach. Finally, he couldn't stop himself from turning back to look. But there was no one. The surface of the water was clear, flat, empty. The man was gone.

Owen turned to Gerald, not comprehending. His mother approached then, and stood behind her husband wearing a disapproving scowl under her mass of brown curls. Owen felt tears begin to well up as a wild urge to defend himself overcame him, despite his reluctance to admit what he'd just seen. The man had been there. He'd seen him. A man walking on water. It wasn't possible... was it?

Seeing things, he thought.

Lori peered up at him sympathetically.

"There was a man," Owen said, his voice starting to quaver, his lower lip quivering: the telltale onset of weeping. "He was... he was standing on the water. He was right there!"

His mother and Gerald made a show of peering out at the bay where Owen pointed, but it was obvious they didn't believe him. Owen wouldn't have believed himself if he hadn't seen it with his own eyes.

"I don't see anyone," Gerald said.

"That's because he's gone now. He must have... he must have gone underwater."

"Owen, don't be silly," his mother said.

"I saw him, Mom."

"It was your imagination," she said, scowling off toward the water herself.

"You don't know what's in my head."

"Don't sass your mother," Gerald said.

"Shut up, Gerald!"

"Owen!" his mother scolded.

Gerald crushed the beer can, his face expressionless. Gerald with his pale legs and potbelly, with his lame jokes and stupid crumpled Panama hat. "All right," he said calmly. "This has gone on long enough." He let the crushed can fall from his fingers into the wet sand, then made toward Owen. Lori saw it coming and stepped out of their way.

"Gerald...?" Concern like broken glass in his mother's voice.

Owen backed away from Gerald's reach, glancing cautiously at the water behind him. "What are you doing? Get away from me!"

"No more phobias," Gerald said, snatching out at Owen, who quickly sidestepped out of his reach. The fear Owen had seen in his mother's eyes caused tears that had been standing in his own to brim and fall. "You're going in that lake!" Gerald growled. His long fingers nabbed Owen's right arm, squeezing so hard the flesh around them went stark white. Owen swung with his weak left fist, pounding feebly at Gerald's ribs while the much larger man dragged him toward the water.

"Let me go! Let me GO!"

Tears streamed down his face. Lori followed their progress with wide, fearful eyes. The older boys stopped playing to watch the spectacle.

Baby. Crybaby. Little loser. I deserve this.

Owen stopped fighting and let Gerald drag him in, shoes and all, up to his knees. He wept silently as the cold water filled his shoes.

"There's nothing to be afraid of," Gerald yelled, his face red, raised veins zigzagging his temples, the tendons in his neck stretched taut. "See?" He dragged Owen farther in, up to the cuffs of his shorts. Owen came along like one of Lori's stuffed animals, held by the arm, his muscles lax. Gerald shook him until his teeth clacked. But the cold had numbed Owen; he felt far away. "See?"

"GERALD!"

The scream snapped Owen from his stupor. Gerald's grip loosened, but not enough for Owen to pull away. Gerald's hat fell off his balding head and he snatched it up, squaring it back on his head with a sheepish look.

Margaret Saddler had ventured into the water up to her ankles. The wind fluttered her curls and the hem of her sundress. In the shadow provided by a cloud, she was beauty and fury. "You let my son go this instant!"

Gerald held firm. They stood several feet apart, the water lapping at Margaret's ankles and at Gerald's knees, staring each other down. Behind her, Lori's fear was palpable.

He let go.

Owen splashed down onto his hands and knees. He stood up quickly, shaking off like a wet dog, and scurried to shore, blowing right past his mother. She watched him go. All of her rage had apparently vanished; she appeared deflated, weary.

They caught up to Owen at the parking lot, where he'd been mindlessly chucking gravel at the surrounding trees, enjoying the hollow, wooden thock. Gerald lugged the cooler, unnaturally quiet, sulking, while Margaret carried the knapsack and held Lori's hand. As Gerald and their mother loaded everything into the car, Lori sauntered up to Owen, who attempted to ignore her until she tugged on his shirt.

Owen hefted the small stone in his hand. "What d'you want, squirt?"

Lori reached out and took his hand, her small fingers squeezing his. "I believe you," she whispered. Owen looked down at her, certain she was messing with him. But the sincerity of her smile had his tears threatening to return.

He ruffled her hair, breaking the spell. Lori grunted and shook her head free of his grasp. "You're a good kid, you know that?" he said.

"So are you," she said.

"Nah." She was always saying stuff like that, making him feel good when all he'd wanted was to feel rotten, to feel like the jerk kid he was.

"Course, you are," she assured him. "You're the best older brother I ever had."

Owen smiled at this, mystified, as his little sister—so much older than him in many ways—scampered off to the car and got in the back seat.

After some time, he followed her.

Chapter 1

In His Image

1

WHEN OWEN WAS forty, the people of St. John's Norway Cemetery put his sister Lori in the ground. Had she lived, she would have turned thirty-two in a month.

The non-denominational minister, who had been provided by the funeral home, read the standard verses: the one about the deceased being not dead but merely sleeping, followed by a bit of Psalm 23, John 3:16's "only begotten Son," and then another about ashes and dust—nothing particularly inspired or personal. Owen saw his mother's jaw clench as she ground her teeth. Distaste for religious platitudes was one thing they still had in common, aside from their love of Lori, who was dead and soon to be buried.

Even Lori's headstone was just like the others beside and behind it. Speckled granite with too much polish, more like a jewel than a grave marker. The artificial grass was too green, sterile. Owen had expected to see dirt, a small sign of the grim business being done, but aside from a few specks along the too-smooth edges of the hole, there was none. What had been taken out—and subsequently covered by more green plastic shag—had been expertly removed, leaving a perfectly rectangular chasm in which Lori, Owen's little sister, would lay until time wore her bones to the minister's dust and ash.

Owen was glad for the few mourners who cried, because he couldn't seem to manage tears himself. Even when he thought back to the last time he'd seen his sister alive, and the bad way they'd left things, he felt cold, detached. The others, the people who smiled for her life instead of weeping over her death, he wanted to grab by their shoulders, shaking away their smiles, the way he'd shake away bad art on an Etch A Sketch. He wanted to shout in their faces, She's dead! Stop smiling! Lori's dead, you maniacs, and she's never coming back!

He couldn't, though. Not because doing so would violate social norms he cared little about at the moment, but because he lacked the courage. Stewing in impotent rage, Owen shoved his hands deep into his pockets and watched the casket sink into the ground, sinking the way Lori had sunk in that lake up north—whose name he couldn't recall—before she'd finally begun to float again, not from the force of her own will, but from the gases of her decomposition.

Death is lighter than water, he thought.

"For today we grieve the loss of a good soul," said the minister. "But rest assured, life will go on, and happiness will surely find us once more."

Surely, Owen thought grimly. In his right pocket was a handful of dirt, smooth and without stones. Between his fingers, it felt something like ashes.

Like what you've read? Get the full novel here: Salvage

THANK YOU

Thank you for reading my debut horror collection, Gristle & Bone! When I started out writing this book I had no idea what it would become, and that many more would soon follow it. I only wanted to share these few stories I had trapped inside my head with a handful of possible readers. I could not have imagined it would be picked up for republication by a genuine publisher (only for the company to dissolve a year later), that it would receive many positive reviews, and one day be enjoyed by writers whose work I have enjoyed myself.

I truly hope you've enjoyed what you read, as well. If you have, please consider leaving a brief review on Amazon and/or Goodreads. I would also love to hear what you think via social media @ www.facebook.com/duncanralstonfiction and/or on Twitter @userbits. I enjoy talking books (especially horror), movies, TV shows—and would love to hear from you!

The people I need to acknowledge keep changing, but there are many constants: Sherri, for not getting annoyed when I watch you read my words. My parents, for reading even the stuff that's far too disgusting for them. Fellow writers Jeffery X. Martin, Thomas S. Flowers and Chad Clark (you can, and should, find all of their books on Amazon). The Don of Horror, Jim McLeod, and his Ginger Nuts of Horror team. Chris Hall from DLS Reviews for his excellent introduction to this edition. Extreme Horror Author Matt Shaw. Friends, family, readers, interviewers, and blog reviewers, without whose feedback and encouragement this book would not have endured so many damn reprints. Thank you all.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Duncan Ralston is the author of the horror collections GRISTLE & BONE and VIDEO NASTIES, the novellas WILDFIRE, WOOM, WHERE THE MONSTERS LIVE, SCAVENGERS and EBENEZER, and the novels SALVAGE and THE METHOD. His screenplays have won and placed in several major competitions.

For more from Duncan Ralston, including exclusive updates, blog posts, and contests, please join him at his official website duncanralston.com, or follow him on Amazon, BookBub, Facebook, and Twitter.

SHADOW WORK PUBLISHING

Also by Duncan Ralston

Salvage (novel)

Wildfire (novella)

Woom (novella)

Where the Monsters Live (novella)

The Method (novel)

Video Nasties (collection)

Ebenezer (novella)

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