STRANGERS [065-5.0]

BY DEAN KOONTZ

Synopsis:

A group of seemingly diverse people are experiencing fugue states and
debilitating nightmares.  Have they all shared a common experience? And,
does that experience portend the end of humanity as we know it?

Praise for Dean Koontz's

STRANGERS

"Koontz] is a great storyteller, and STRANGERS features a plot so
original you'll be reading, with chills, well into morning."

-New York Daily News

"The plot twists ingeniously ...  an engaging, often chilling, book.  I
found the novel tough to put down, except when making sure that the
doors and windows were securely locked."

-New York Times Book Review

"Koontz is a master at constructing vivid, eerily realistic worlds that
hold readers spellbound.  A memorable thriller."

-Booklist

"Dean Koontz is a master storyteller, building suspense page by page,
episode by episode.  He has absolutely amazing knowledge of his subject
matter, whether it be religion, military weapons, medicine, or an
understanding of human nature.  STRANGERS is absolutely enthralling."

-Witchita Falls Times

"An almost unbearably suspenseful page-turner.  His ability to maintain
the mystery through several plot twists is impressive, as is his array
of believable and sympathetic characters.  STRANGERS may be the suspense
novel of the year."

-Library Journal

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that
this book is stolen property.  it was reported as "unsold and destroyed"
to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received
any

payment for this "stripped book."

To Bob Tanner

whose enthusiasm at a crucial stage

was more important than he can know.

Definition for "fugue"

taken from Taber's EnCyclopedia Medical Dictionary, Clayton L.  Thomas,
M.D., M.P.H., (Ed.), 12th Edition, p.  F-44.  Published in 1973 by F.A.
Davis Company, Philadelphia.

This Berkley book contains the complete text of the original hardcover
edition.  It has been completely reset in a typeface designed for ea,,;y
reading and was printed from new film.

STRANGERS

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with

G.  P.  Putnam's Sons

Printing HISTORY

G.  P.  Putnam's Sons edition published / April 1986

Berkley edition / December 1986

All rights reserved.

Copyright 0 1986 by Nkui, Inc.

Cover photo credit (D Jeny Bauer.

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or
any other means, without permission.

For information address: G.  P.  Putnam's Sons, 200 Madison Avenue, New
York, New York 10016.

The Putnam Berkley World Wide Web site address is

littp:Hw.berkley.com

ISBN: 0-425-11992-0

Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison
Avenue, New York, New York 10016.

BERKLEY and the "B" design are trademarks belonging to Berkley
Publishing Corporation.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

30 29 28 27 26 25

A faithful friend is a strong defense.

A faithful friend is the medicine of life.

-APOCRYPHA


A terrible darkness has fallen upon us, but we must not surrender to it.
We shall lift lamps of courage and find our way through to the morning.

-ANONYMOUS MEMBER OF THE

FRENCH RESISTANCE (1943)


November 7-December 2

1.

Laguna Beach, California

Dominick Corvaisis went to sleep under a light wool blanket and a crisp
white sheet, sprawled alone in his bed, but he woke elsewhere-in the
darkness at the back of the large foyer closet, behind concealing coats
and jackets.  He was curled in the fetal position.  His hands were
squeezed into tight fists.  The muscles in his neck and arms ached from
the tension of a bad though unremembered dream.

He could not recall leaving the comfort of his mattress during the
night, but he was not surprised to find that he had traveled in the dark
hours.  It had happened on two other occasions, and recently.

Somnambulism, a potentially dangerous practice commonly referred to as
sleepwalking, has fascinated people throughout history.  It fascinated
Dom, too, from the moment he became a baffled victim of it.  He had
found references to sleepwalkers in writings that dated as far back as
1000 B.C.

The ancient Persians believed that the wandering body of a sleepwalker
was seeking his spirit, which had detached itself and drifted away
during the night.  Europeans of the grim medieval period favored demonic
possession or lycanthropy as an explanation.

Dom Corvaisis did not worry about his affliction, though he was
discomfited and somewhat embarrassed by it.  As a novelist, he was
intrigued by these new nocturnal ramblings, for he viewed all new
experiences as material for his fiction.

Nevertheless, though he might eventually profit from creative use of his
own somambulism, it was an affliction.  He crawled out of the closet,
wincing as the pain in his neck spread up across his scalp and down into
his shoulders.  He had difficulty getting to his feet because his legs
were cramped.

As always, he felt sheepish.  He now knew that somnambulism was a
condition to which adults were vulnerable, but he still considered it a
childish problem.  Like bed-wetting.

Wearing blue pajama bottoms, bare-chested, slipperless, he shuffled
across the living room, down the short hall, into the master bedroom,
and into the bath.  In the mirror, he looked dissipated, a libertine
surfacing from a week of shameless indulgence in a wide variety of sins.

In fact, he was a man of remarkably few vices.  He did not smoke,
overeat, or take drugs.  He drank little.  He liked women, but he was
not promiscuous; he believed in commitment in a relationship.  Indeed,
he had not slept with anyone inwhat was it now?-almost four months.

He only looked this bad-dissipated, wrung-out-when he woke and
discovered that he had taken one of his unscheduled nocturnal trips to a
makeshift bed.  Each time he had been exhausted.  Though asleep, he got
no rest on the nights he walked.

He sat down on the edge of the bathtub, bent his leg up to look at the
bottom of his left foot, then checked the bottom of his right foot.
Neither was cut, scratched, or particularly dirty, so he had not left
the house while sleepwalking.  He had awakened in closets twice before,
once last week and once twelve days prior to that, and he had not had
dirty feet on those occasions, either.  As before, he felt as if he had
traveled miles while unconscious, but if he actually had gone that far,
he had done it by making countless circuits of his own small house.

A long, hot shower soaked away a lot of his muscle discomfort.  He was
lean and fit, thirty-five years old, with recuperative powers
commensurate with his age.  By the time he finished breakfast, he felt
almost human.

After lingering with a cup of coffee on the patio, studying the pleasant
geography of Laguna Beach, which shelved down the hills toward the sea,
he went to his study, sure that his work was the cause of his
sleepwalking.  Not the work itself so much as the amazing success of his
first novel, Twilight in Babylon, which he had finished last February.

His agent put Twilight up for auction, and to Dom's astonishment a deal
was made with Random House, which paid a remarkably large advance for a
first novel.  Within a month, movie rights were sold (providing the
down-payment on his house), and the Literary Guild took Twilight as a
main selection.  He had spent seven laborious months of sixty-,
seventy-, and eighty-hour weeks in the writing of that story, not to
mention a decade getting himself ready to write it, but he still felt
like an overnight success, up from genteel poverty in one great leap.

The once-poor Dominick Corvaisis occasionally caught a glimpse of the
now-rich Dominick Corvaisis in a mirror or a sun-silvered window, saw
himself unguarded, and wondered if he really deserved what had come his
way.  Sometimes he worried that he was heading for a great fall.  With
such triumph and acclaim came considerable tension.

When Twilight was published next February, would it be well received and
justify Random House's investment, or would it fail and humiliate him?
Could he do it again-or was Twilight a fluke?

Every hour of his waking day, these and other questions circled his mind
with vulturine persistence, and he supposed the same damn questions
still swooped through his mind while he slept.  That was why he walked
in his sleep: he was trying to escape those relentless concerns, seeking
a secret place to rest, where his worries could not find him.

Now, at his desk, he switched on the IBM Displaywriter and called up
chapter eighteen on the first disk of his new book, as yet untitled.  He
had stopped yesterday in the middle of the sixth page of the chapter,
but when he summoned the document, intending to begin where he had left
off, he saw a full page where there had been half.  Unfamiliar green
lines of text glowed on the word processor's video display.

For a moment he blinked stupidly at the neat letters of light, then
shook his head in pointless denial of what lay before him.

The back of his neck was suddenly cool and damp.

The existence of those unremembered lines on page six was not what gave
him the creeps; it was what the lines said. Furthermore, there should
not have been a page seven in the chapter, for he had not yet created
one, but it was there.  He also found an eighth page.

As he scrolled through the material on the disk, his hands became
clammy.  The startling addition to his work-in-progress was only, a
two-word sentence, repeated hundreds of times:

I'm scared.  I'm scared.  I'm scared.  I'm scared.

Double-spacing, quadruple indentation, four sentences to a line,
thirteen lines on page six, twenty-seven lines on page seven, another
twenty-seven on page eight-that made 268 repetitions of the sentence.
The machine had not created them by itself, for it was merely an
obedient slave that did precisely what it was told.  And it made no
sense to speculate that someone had broken into the house during the
night to tamper with his electronically stored manuscript.  There were
no signs of a break-in, and he could not think of anyone who would play
such a prank.  Clearly, he had come to the word processor while
sleepwalking and had obsessively typed in this sentence 268 times,
though he had absolutely no recollection of having done it.

I'm scared.

Scared of what-sleepwalking?  It was a disorienting experience, at least
on the morning end, but it was not an ordeal that would cause such
terror as this.

He was frightened by the quickness of his literary ascent and by the
possibility of an equally swift descent into oblivion. Yet he could not
completely dismiss the nagging thought that this had nothing to do with
his career, that the threat hanging over him was something else
altogether, something strange, something his conscious mind did not yet
see but which his subconscious perceived and which it had tried to
convey to him by means of this message left while he was sleeping.

No.  Nonsense.  That was only the novelist's overactive imagination at
work.  Work.  That was the best medicine for him.

Besides, from his research into the subject, he knew that most adult
sleepwalkers made short careers of it.  Few experienced more than half a
dozen episodes, usually contained within a time span of six months or
less.  Chances were good that his sleep would never again be complicated
by midnight ramblings and that he would never again wake huddled and
tense in the back of a closet.

He deleted the unwanted words from the disk and went to work on chapter
eighteen.

When he next looked at the clock, he was surprised to see that it was
past one and that he had labored through the lunch hour.

Even for southern California, the day was warm for early November, so he
ate lunch on the patio.  The palm trees rustled in a mild breeze, and
the air was scented with autumn flowers.  With style and grace, Laguna
sloped down to the shores of the Pacific.  The ocean was spangled with
sunlight.

Finishing his last sip of Coke, Dom suddenly tilted his head back,
looked straight up into the brilliantly blue sky, and laughed.  "You
see-no falling safe.  No plummeting piano. No sword of Damocles."

It was November 7.

2.

Boston, Massachusetts

Dr.  Ginger Marie Weiss never expected trouble in Bernstein's
Delicatessen, but that was where it started, with the incident of the
black gloves.

Usually, Ginger could deal with any problems that came her way.  She
relished every challenge life presented, thrived on trouble.  She would
have been bored if her path had been always easy, unobstructed. However,
it had never occurred to her that she might eventually be confronted
with trouble she could not handle.

As well as challenges, life provides lessons, and some are more welcome
than others.  Some lessons are easy, some difficult.

Some are devastating.

Ginger was intelligent, pretty, ambitious, hard-working, and an
excellent cook, but her primary advantage in life was that no one took
her seriously on first encounter.  She was slender, a wisp, a graceful
sprite who seemed as insubstantial as she was lovely.  Most people
underestimated her for weeks or months, only gradually realizing that
she was a formidable competitor, colleague-or adversary.

The story of Ginger's mugging was legend at Columbia Presbyterian, in
New York, where she had served her internship four years prior to the
trouble at Bernstein's Deli catessen.  Like all interns, she had often
worked sixteen-hour shifts and longer, day after day, and had left the
hospital with barely enough energy to drag herself home.  One hot, humid
Saturday night in July, after completing an especially grueling tour of
duty, she headed for home shortly after ten o'clockand was accosted by a
hulking Neanderthal with hands as big as shovel blades, huge arms, no
neck, and a sloping forehead.

"You scream," he said, launching himself at her with jackin-the-box
suddenness, "and I'll bust your goddamned teeth out." He seized her arm
and twisted it behind her back.  "You understand me, bitch?"

No other pedestrians were close, and the nearest cars were two blocks
away, stopped at a traffic light.  No help in sight.

He shoved her into a narrow night-mantled serviceway between two
buildings, into a trash-strewn passage with only one dim light.  She
slammed into a garbage bin, hurting her knee and shoulder, stumbled but
did not fall.  Many-armed shadows embraced her.

With ineffectual whimpers and breathless protests, she made her
assailant feel confident, because at first she thought he had a gun.

Humor a gunman, she thought.  Don't resist.  Resisters get shot.

"Move!" he said between clenched teeth, and he shoved her again.

When he pushed her into a recessed doorway three-quarters of the way
along the passage, not far from the single faint bulb at the end, he
started talking filthy, telling her what he was going to do with her
after he took her money, and even in the poor light she could see he
held no weapon.  Suddenly she had hope.  His vocabulary of obscenities
was blood-curdling, but his sexual threats were so stupidly repetitive
that they were almost funny.  She realized he was just a big dumb loser
who relied on his size to get what he wanted.  Men of his type seldom
carried guns.  His muscles gave him a false sense of invulnerability, so
he probably had no fighting skill, either.

While he was emptying the purse that she willingly relinquished, Ginger
summoned all her courage and kicked him squarely in the crotch.  He
doubled over from the blow.  She moved fast, seized one of his hands,
and bent the index finger

backward, savagely, until the pain must have been as excruciating as the
throbbing in his bruised privates.

Radical, violent, backward extension of the index finger could quickly
incapacitate any man, regardless of his size and strength.  By this
action she was straining the digital nerve on the front of his hand
while simultaneously pinching the highly sensitive median and radial
nerves on the back.  The intense pain also traveled into the acromial
nerves in his shoulder, into his neck.

He grabbed her hair with his free hand and pulled.  That counterattack
hurt, made her cry out, blurred her vision, but she gritted her teeth,
endured the agony, and bent his captive finger even farther.  Her
relentless pressure quickly banished all thought of resistance from his
mind.  Involuntary tears burst from his eyes, and he dropped to his
knees, squealing and cursing and helpless.

"Let go of me!  Let go of me, you bitch!"

Blinking sweat out of her eyes, tasting the same salty effluence at the
corners of her mouth, Ginger gripped his index finger with both hands.
She shuffled cautiously backward and led him out of the passage in an
awkward three-point crawl, as if dragging a dangerous dog on a tightened
choke-chain.

Scuttling, scraping, hitching, and humping himself along on one hand and
two knees, he glared up at her with eyes muddied by a murderous urge.
His mean, lumpish face became less visible as they moved away from the
light, but she could see that it was so contorted by pain and fury and
humiliation that it did not seem human: a goblin face.  And in a shrill
goblin voice he squealed a chilling array of dire imprecations.

By the time they had clumsily negotiated fifteen yards of the
serviceway, he was overwhelmed by the agony in his hand and by the
sickening waves of pain rushing outward through his body from his
injured testicles.  He gagged, choked, and vomited on himself.

She still did not dare let go of him.  Now, given the opportunity, he
would not merely beat her senseless: he would kill her.  Disgusted and
terrified, she urged him along even faster than before.

Reaching the sidewalk with the befouled and chastened mugger in tow, she
saw no pedestrians who could call the police for her, so she forced her
humbled assailant into the middle of the street, where passing traffic
came to a standstill at this unexpected spectacle.

When the cops finally arrived, Ginger's relief was exceeded by that of
the thug who had attacked her.

In part, people underestimated Ginger because she was small: five-two, a
hundred and two pounds, not physically imposing, certainly not
intimidating.  Likewise, she was shapely but not a blond bombshell.  She
was blond, however, and the particular silvery shade of her hair was
what caught a man's eye, whether he was seeing her for the first time or
the hundredth. Even in bright sunshine her hair recalled moonlight. That
ethereally pale and radiant hair, her delicate features, blue eyes that
were the very definition of gentleness, an Audrey Hepburn neck, slender
shoulders, thin wrists, long-fingered hands, and her tiny waist-all
contributed to a misleading impression of fragility.  Furthermore, she
was quiet and watchful by nature, two qualities that might be mistaken
for timidity.  Her voice was so soft and musical that anyone could
easily fail to apprehend the self-assurance and underlying authority in
those dulcet tones.

Ginger had inherited her silver-blond mane, cerealian eyes, beauty, and
ambition from her mother, Anna, a five-foot-ten Swede.

"You're my golden girl," Anna said when Ginger graduated from sixth
grade at the age of nine, two years ahead of schedule, after being
promoted twice in advance of her peers.

Ginger had been the best student in her class and had received a
gilt-edged scroll in honor of her academic excellence.  Also, as one of
three student performers who had provided entertainment before the
graduation ceremony, she had played two pieces on the piano-Mozart,
followed by a ragtime tune-and had brought the surprised audience to its
feet.

"Golden girl," Anna said, hugging her all the way home in the car.

Jacob drove, blinking back tears of pride.  Jacob was an emotional man,
easily moved.  Somewhat embarrassed by the frequency with which his eyes
moistened, he usually tried to conceal the depth of his feelings by
blaming his tears or reddened eyes on a never-specified allergy.  "Must
be unusual

pollens in the air today," he said twice on the way home from
graduation.  "Irritating pollens."

Anna said, "It's all come together in you, bubbeleh.  My best features
and your father's best, and you're going places, by God, you just wait
and see if you aren't.  High school, then college, then maybe law school
or medical school, anything you want to do.  Anything."

The only people who never underestimated Ginger were her parents.

They reached home, turned into the driveway.  Jacob stopped short of the
garage and said, in surprise, "What are we doing?

Our only child graduates from sixth grade, our child who thinks she can
do absolutely anything-will probably marry the King of Siam and ride a
giraffe to the moon, our child wears her first cap and gown and we
aren't celebrating?  Should we drive into Manhattan, have maybe
champagne at the Plaza?

Dinner at the Waldorf?  No.  Something better.  Only the best for our
giraffe-riding astronaut.  We'll go to the soda fountain at Walgreen's!"

"Yeah!" Ginger said.

At Walgreen's, they, must have been as odd a family as the soda jerk had
ever seen: the Jewish father, not much bigger than a jockey, with a
Germanic name but a Sephardic complexion; the Swedish mother, blond and
gloriously feminine, five inches taller than her husband; and the child,
a wraith, an elf, petite though her mother was not, fair though her
father was dark, with a beauty altogether different from her mother's-a
more subtle beauty with a fey quality.  Even as a child, Ginger knew
that strangers, seeing her with her parents, must think she was adopted.

From her father, Ginger had inherited her slight stature, soft voice,
intellect, and gentleness.

She loved them both so completely and intensely that, as a child, her
vocabulary had been insufficient to convey her feelings.  Even as an
adult, she could not find the words to express what they had meant to
her.  They were both gone now, to early graves.

When Anna died in a traffic accident, shortly after Ginger's twelfth
birthday, the common wisdom among Jacob's relatives was that both Ginger
and her father would be adrift without the Swede, whom the Weiss clan
had long ago ceased to regard as an interloping gentile and for whom
they had developed both respect and love.  Everyone knew how close the
three had been, but, more important, everyone knew that Anna had been
the engine powering the family's success.  It was Anna who had taken the
least ambitious of the Weiss brothers-Jacob the dreamer, Jacob the meek,
Jacob with his nose always in a detective novel or a science fiction
storyand made something of him.  He had been an employee in a jewelry
store when she married him, but by the time she died he owned two shops
of his own.

After the funeral, the family gathered at Aunt Rachel's big house in
Brooklyn Heights.  As soon as she could slip away, Ginger sought solace
in the dark solitude of the pantry.  Sitting on a stool, with the aroma
of many spices heavy in the air of that narrow place, praying to God to
bring her mother back, she heard Aunt Francine talking to Rachel in the
kitchen. Fran was bemoaning the grim future awaiting Jacob and his
little girl in a world without Anna:

"He won't be able to keep the business going, you know he won't, not
even once the grief has passed and he goes back to work.  The poor
lufunensch.  Anna was his common sense and his motivation and his best
adviser, and without her in five years he'll be lost."

They were underestimating Ginger.

To be fair, Ginger was only twelve, and even though she was already in
tenth grade, she was still a child in most people's eyes.  No one could
have foreseen that she would fill Anna's shoes so quickly.  She shared
her mother's love of cooking, so in the weeks following the funeral she
pored through cookbooks, and, with the amazing diligence and
perseverance that were her trademarks, she acquired what culinary skills
she had not already learned.  The first time relatives came for dinner
after Anna's death, they exclaimed over the food.  Homemade potato rolls
and cheese kolacky.  Vegetable soup with plump cheese and beef kreplach
floating in it.  Schrafe fish as an appetizer.  Braised veal paprika,
tzimmes with prunes and potatoes, creamy macaroni patties fried in hot
fat and served in tomato sauce.  A choice of baked peach pudding or
apple schalet for dessert.  Francine and Rachel thought Jacob was hiding
a marvelous new housekeeper in the kitchen.  They were disbelieving when
he pointed to his daughter.  Ginger did not think she had done anything
remarkable.  A cook was needed, so she became a cook.

She had to take care of her father now, and she applied herself to that
responsibility with vigor and enthusiasm.  She cleaned house swiftly,
efficiently, and with a thoroughness that defied her Aunt Francine's sub
rosa inspections for dust and grime.  Although she was only twelve, she
learned to plan a budget, and before she was thirteen she was in charge
of all the household accounts.

At fourteen, three years younger than her classmates, Ginger was the
valedictorian of her high-school class.  When it became known that she
had been accepted by several universities but had chosen Barnard,
everyone began to wonder whether, at the tender age of fourteen, she had
finally taken too big a bite and would choke trying to swallow it.

Barnard was more difficult than high school.  She no longer learned
faster than the other kids, but she learned as well as the best of them,
and her grade average was frequently 4.0, never less than 3.8-and that
was the semester in her junior year when Jacob was sick with his first
bout of pancreatitis, when she spent every evening at the hospital.

Jacob lived to see her get her first degree, was sallow and weak when
she received her medical degree, even hung on tenaciously until she had
served six months of her internship. But after three bouts of recurring
pancreatitis, he developed pancreatic cancer, and he died before Ginger
had finally made up her mind to go for a surgical residency at Boston
Memorial instead of pursuing a career in research.

Because she had been given more years with Jacob than she had been given
with her mother, her feelings for him were understandably more profound,
and the loss of him was even more devastating than the loss of Anna had
been.  Yet she dealt with that time of trouble as she dealt with every
challenge that came her way, and she finished her internship with
excellent reports and superb recommendations.

She delayed her residency by going to California, to Stanford for a
unique and arduous two-year program of additional study in
cardiovascular pathology.  Thereafter, following a one-month vacation
(by far the longest rest she had ever taken), she moved East again, to
Boston, acquired a mentor in Dr.  George Hannaby (chief of surgery at
Memorial and renowned for his pioneering achievements in various
cardiovascular surgical procedures), and served the first three-quarters
of her two-year residency without a hitch.

Then, on a Tuesday morning in November, she went into Bernstein's Deli
to buy a few items, and terrible things began happening.  The incident
of the black gloves.  That was the start of it.

Tuesday was her day off, and unless one of her patients had a
life-threatening crisis, she was neither needed nor expected at the
hospital.  During her first two months at Memorial, with her usual
enthusiasm and tireless drive, she had gone to work on most of her days
off, for there was nothing else that she would rather do.  But George
Hannaby put an end to that habit as soon as he learned of it.  George
said that the practice of medicine was high-pressure work, and that
every physician needed time off, even Ginger Weiss.

"If you drive yourself too hard, too fast, too relentlessly," he said,
"it's not only you that suffers, but the patient as well."

So every Tuesday she slept an extra hour, showered, and had two cups of
coffee while she read the morning paper at the kitchen table by the
window that looked out on Mount Vernon Street.  At ten o'clock she
dressed, walked several blocks to Bernstein's on Charles Street, and
bought pastrami, corned beef, homemade rolls or sweet pumpernickel,
potato salad, blintzes, maybe some lox, maybe some smoked sturgeon,
sometimes cottage cheese vareniki to be reheated at home.  Then she
walked home with her bag of goodies and ate shamelessly all day while
she read Agatha Christie, Dick Francis, John D.  MacDonald, Elmore
Leonard, sometimes a Heinlein.  While she had not yet begun to like
relaxation half as much as she liked work, she gradually began to enjoy
her time off, and Tuesday ceased to be the dreaded day it had been when
she first began her reluctant observance of the six-day week.

That bad Tuesday in November started out fine-cold with a gray winter
sky, brisk and invigorating rather than frigidand her routine brought
her to Bernstein's (crowded, as usual) at ten-twenty-one.  Ginger
drifted from one end of the long counter to the other, peering into
cabinets full of baked goods, looking through the cold glass of the
refrigerated display cases, choosing from the array of delicacies with
gluttonous pleasure.  The room was a stewpot of wonderful smells and
happy sounds: hot dough, cinnamon; laughter; garlic, cloves; rapid
conversations in which the English was spiced with everything from
Yiddish to Boston accents to current rock-and-roll slang; roasted
hazelnuts, sauerkraut; pickles, coffee; the clink-clank of silverware.
When Ginger had everything she wanted, she paid for it, pulled on her
blue knit gloves, and hefted the bag, going past the small tables at
which a dozen people were having a late breakfast, then headed for the
door.

She held the grocery bag in her left arm, and with her free hand she
tried to put her wallet back in the purse that was slung over her right
shoulder.  She was looking down at the purse as she reached the door,
and a man in a gray tweed topcoat and a black Russian hat entered the
deli at that moment, his attention as distracted as hers; they collided.
As cold air swept in from outside, she stumbled backward a step. He
grabbed at her bag of groceries to keep it from falling, then steadied
her with one hand on her arm.

"Sorry," he said.  "That was stupid of me."

"My fault," she said.

"Daydreaming," he said.

"I wasn't looking where I was going," she said.

"You all right?"

"Fine.  Really."

He held the bag of groceries toward her.

She thanked him, took the bag-and noticed his black gloves.  They were
obviously expensive, of high-grade genuine leather, so neatly and
tightly stitched that the seams were hardly visible, but there was
nothing about those gloves that could explain her instant and powerful
reaction to them, nothing unusual, nothing strange, nothing threatening.
Yet she did feel threatened.  Not by the man.  He was ordinary, pale,
doughy-faced, with kind eyes behind thick tortoiseshell glasses.
Inexplicably, unreasonably, the gloves themselves were what abruptly
terrified her.  Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart hammered.

The most bizarre thing was the way every object and all the people in
the deli began to fade as if they were not real but merely figments of a
dream that was dissolving as the dreamer woke.  The customers having
breakfast at the small tables, the shelves laden with canned and
packaged food, the display cases, the wall clock with the Manischewitz
logo, the pickle barrel, the tables and chairs all seemed to shimmer

and slip away into a niveous haze, as if a fog was rising from some
realm beneath the floor.  Only the portentous gloves did not fade, and,
in fact, as she stared at them they grew more detailed, strangely more
vivid, more real, and increasingly threatening.

"Miss?" the doughy-faced man said, and his voice seemed to come from a
great distance, from the far end of a long tunnel.

Although the shapes and colors of the delicatessen bleached toward white
on all sides of Ginger, the sounds did not dwindle as well but, instead.
, grew louder, louder, until her ears filled with a roar of meaningless
jabber and with the jarring clatter of silverware, until the clinking of
dishes and the soft chatter of the electronic cash register were
thunderous, unbearable.

She could not take her eyes off the gloves.

"Is something wrong?" the man asked, holding up one leather-clad hand,
half-reaching toward her in an inquisitive gesture.

Black, tight, shiny .  .  .  with a barely visible grain to the leather,
neat little stitches along the fingers .  .  .  taut across the knuckles
.  .  .

Dizzy, disoriented, with a tremendous weight of indefinable fear
pressing down on her, she suddenly knew that she must run or die.  Run
or die.  She did not know why.  She did not understand the danger.  But
she knew she must run or perish where she stood.

Her heartbeat, already fast, became frantic.  The breath that was
snagged in her throat now flew free with a feeble cry, and she lunged
forward as if in pursuit of the pathetic sound that had escaped her.
Amazed by her response to the gloves but unable to be objective about
it, confused by her own behavior even as she acted, clutching the
grocery bag to her breast, she shouldered past the man who had collided
with her.  She was only vaguely aware that she almost knocked him off
his feet.  She must have wrenched open the door, though she could not
remember having done so, and then she was outside, in the crisp November
air.  The traffic on Charles Street-car horns, rumbling engines, the
hiss-sighcrunch of tires-was to her right, and the deli windows flashed
past on her left as she ran.

Thereafter she was oblivious of everything, for the world around her
faded completely away, and she was plunging through a featureless
grayness, legs pumping hard, coattails flapping, as if fleeing across an
amorphous dreamscape, struck dumb by fear.  There must have been many
other people on the sidewalk, people whom she dodged or shoved aside,
but she was not cognizant of them.  She was aware only of the need to
escape.  She ran deer-swift though no one pursued her, with her lips
peeled back in a grimace of pure terror though she could not identify
the danger from which she fled.

Running.  Running like crazy. Temporarily blind, deaf.

Lost.

Minutes later, when the mists cleared, she found herself on Mount Vernon
Street, part of the way up the hill, leaning against a wrought-iron
railing beside the front steps of a stately red-brick town house.  She
was gripping two of the iron balusters, with her hands curled so tightly
around them that her knuckles ached, her forehead on the heavy metal
balustrade as if she were a melancholy prisoner slumped against the door
of her cell.  She was sweating and gasping for breath.  Her mouth was
dry, sour.  Her throat burned, and her chest ached. She was bewildered,
unable to recall how she had arrived at this place, as if washed onto an
alien shore by moon-timed tides and waves of amnesia.

Something had frightened her.

She could not remember what it had been.

Gradually the fear subsided, and her breathing!  rei!ained an almost
regular rhythm; her heartbeat slowed slightly.

She raised her head and blinked her eyes, looking around warily and in
bafflement as her tear-bluffed vision slowly cleared.  She turned her
face up until she saw the bare black branches of a linden and a low,
ominous gray November sky beyond the skeletal tree.  Antique iron gas
lamps glowed softly, activated by solenoids that had mistaken the wintry
morning for the onset of dusk.  At the top of the hill stood the
Massachusetts State House, and at the bottom the traffic was heavy where
Mount Vernon intersected Charles Street.

Bernstein's Delicatessen.  Yes, of course.  It was Tuesday, and she had
been at Bernstein's when .  .  .  when something happened.

What?  What had happened at Bernstein's?

And where was the deli bag?

She let go of the iron railing, raised her hands, and blotted her eyes
on her blue knit gloves.

Gloves.  Not hers, not these gloves.  The myopic man in the Russian hat.
His black leather gloves.  That was what had frightened her.

But why had she been gripped by hysteria, overwhelmed by dread at the
sight of them?  What was so frightening about black gloves?

Across the street, an elderly couple watched her intently, and she
wondered what she had done to draw their attention. Though she strained
to remember, she could not summon the faintest recollection of her
journey up the hill.  The past three minutes-perhaps longer?-were
utterly blank.  She must have run up Mount Vernon Street in a panic.
Evidently, judging by the expressions on the faces of those observing
her, she had made quite a spectacle of herself.

Embarrassed, she turned away from them and started hesitantly down Mount
Vernon Street, back the way she had come.  At the bottom, just around
the corner, she found her bag of groceries lying on its side on the
pavement.  She stood over it for long seconds, staring at the crumpled
brown bundle, trying to recall the moment when she had dropped it. But
where that moment should have been, her memory contained only grayness,
nothingness.

What's wrong with me?

A few items had spilled from the fallen parcel, but none was torn open,
so she put them back in the paper sack.

Unsettled by her baffling loss of control, weak in the knees, she headed
home, her breath pluming in the frosty air.  After a few steps she
halted.  Hesitated.  Finally she turned back toward Bernstein's.

She stopped just outside the deli and had to wait only a minute or two
before the man in the Russian hat and the tortoiseshell glasses came out
with a grocery bag of his own.

"Oh." He blinked in surprise.  "Uh .  .  .  listen, did I say I'm sorry?
The way you stormed out of there, I thought maybe I'd only meant to say
it, you know -"

She stared at his leather-sheathed right hand where it gripped the brown
paper bag.  He gestured with his other hand as he spoke, and she
followed it as it described a brief, small pattern in the chilly air.
The gloves did not frighten her now.  She could not imagine why the
sight of them had thrown her into a panic.

"It's all right.  I was here waiting to apologize.  I was startled and
...  and it's been an unusual morning," she said, quickly turning away
from him.  Over her shoulder, she called out, "Have a nice day."

Although her apartment was not far away, the walk home seemed like an
epic journey over vast expanses of gray pavement.

What's wrong with me?

She felt colder than the November day could explain.

She lived on Beacon Hill, on the second floor of a four story house that
had once been the home of a nineteenthcentury banker.  She'd chosen the
place because she liked the carefully preserved period detail: elaborate
ceiling moldings, medallions above the doorways, mahogany doors, bay
windows with French panes, two fireplaces (living room, bedroom)
withornately carved and highly polished marble mantels. The rooms had a
feeling of permanence, continuity, stability.

Ginger prized constancy and stability more than anything, perhaps as a
reaction to having lost her mother when she was only twelve.

Still shivering even though the apartment was warm, she put away the
groceries in the breadbox and refrigerator, then went into the bathroom
to look closely at herself in the mirror. She was very pale.  She did
not like the hunted, haunted look in her eyes.

To her reflection, she said, "What happened out there, shnook?  You were
a real meshuggene, let me tell you.  Totally farfufket.  But why?  Huh?
You're the big-shot doctor, so tell me.  Why?"

Listening to her voice as it echoed off the high ceiling of the
bathroom, she knew she was in serious trouble.  Jacob, her father, had
been a Jew by virtue of his genes and heritage, and proud of it, but he
had not been a Jew by virtue of his religious practices.  He seldom went
to synagogue and observed holidays in the same secular spirit with which
many fallen-away Christians celebrated Easter and Christmas.  And Ginger
was one step farther removed from the faith than Jacob had been, for she
called herself an agnostic.  Furthermore, while Jacob's Jewishness was
integral, evident in everything he did and said, that was not true of
Ginger.  If asked to define herself, she would have said, "Woman,
physician, workaholic, political dropout," and other things before
finally remembering to add, "Jew." The only time Yiddish peppered her
speech was when she was in trouble, when she was deeply worried or
scared, as if on a subconscious level she felt those words possessed
talismanic value, charms against misfortune and catastrophe.

"Running through the streets, dropping your groceries, forgetting where
you are, afraid when there's no reason to be afraid, acting like a
regular farmishteh, " she said disdainfully to her reflection.  "People
see you behaving like that, they'll think for sure you're a shikker, and
people don't go to doctors whore drunkards.  Nu?"

The talismanic power of the old words worked a little magic, not much
but enough to bring color to her cheeks and soften the stark look in her
eyes.  She stopped shivering, but she still felt chilled.

She washed her face, brushed her silver-blond hair, and changed into
pajamas and a robe, which was her usual ensemble for a typically
self-indulgent Tuesday.  She went into the small spare bedroom that she
used as a home office, took the well-thumbed Taber's Cyclopedic Medical
Dictionary from the bookshelf, and opened it to the F listings.

Fugue.

She knew what the word meant, though she did not know why she had come
in here to consult the dictionary when it could tell her nothing new.
Maybe the dictionary was another talisman.  If she looked at the word in
cold print, it would cease to have any power over her.  Sure.  Voodoo
for the overeducated.  Nevertheless, she read the entry:

fugue (fyug) [L.  fuga, flight].  Serious personality dissociation.
Leaving home or surroundings on impulse.  Upon recovering from the fugue
state there usually is loss of memory for actions occurring while in the
state.

She closed the dictionary and returned it to the shelf.

She had other reference volumes that could provide more detailed
information about fugues, their causes and significance, but she decided
not to pursue the matter.  She simply could not believe her transient
attack had been a symptom of a serious medical problem.

Maybe she was under too much stress, working too hard, and maybe the
overload had led to that one, isolated, transient fugue.  A two- or
three-minute blank.  A little warning. So she would continue taking off
every Tuesday and would try to knock off work an hour earlier each day,
and she would have no more problems.

She had worked very hard to be the doctor that her mother had hoped she
would be, to make something special of herself and thereby honor her
sweet father and the long-dead but well-remembered and desperately
missed Swede.  She had made many sacrifices to come this far.  She had
worked more weekends than not, had forgone vacations and most other
pleasures.  Now, in only six months, she would finish her residency and
establish a practice of her own, and nothing would be allowed to
interfere with her plans.  Nothing was going to rob her of her dream.

Nothing.

It was November 12.

3.

Elko County, Nevada

Ernie Block was afraid of the dark.  Indoor darkness was bad, but the
darkness of the outdoors, the vast blackness of night here in northern
Nevada, was what most terrified Ernie.  During the day he favored rooms
with several lamps and lots of windows, but at night he preferred rooms
with few windows or even no windows at all because sometimes it seemed
to him that the night was pressing against the glass, as if it were a
living creature that wanted to get in at him and gobble him up.  He
obtained no relief from drawing the drapes, for he still knew the night
was out there, waiting for its chance.   He was deeply ashamed of
himself.  He did not know why he had recently become afraid of the dark.
He just was.

Millions of people shared his phobia, of course, but nearly all of them
were children.  Ernie was fifty-two.

On Friday afternoon, the day after Thanksgiving, he worked alone in the
motel office because Faye had flown to Wisconsin to visit Lucy, Frank,
and the grandkids.  She would not be back until Tuesday.  Come December,
they intended to close up for a week and both go to Milwaukee for
Christmas with the kids; but this time Faye had gone by herself.

Ernie missed her terribly.  He missed her because she was his wife of
thirty-one years and his best friend.  He missed her because he loved
her more now than he had on their wedding day.  And because ...  without
Faye, the nights alone seemed longer, deeper, darker than ever.

By two-thirty Friday afternoon he had cleaned all the rooms and changed
the linens, and the Tranquility Motel was ready for its next wave of
journeyers.  It was the only lodging within twelve miles, perched on a
knoll north of the superhighway, a neat little way station on a vast
expanse of sagebrush-strewn plains that sloped up into grassy meadows.
Elko lay over thirty miles to the east, Battle Mountain forty miles to
the west.  The town of Carlin and the tiny village of Beowawe were
closer, though from the Tranquility Motel Ernie had not a glimpse of
either settlement.  In fact, from the parking lot, no other building was
visible in any direction, and there was probably no motel in the world
more aptly named than this one.

Ernie was now in the office, working with a can of wood stain, touching
up a few scratches on the oak counter where guests signed in and checked
out.  The counter was not really in bad shape.  He was just keeping busy
until customers started pulling in from Interstate 80 in the late
afternoon.  If he did not keep his mind occupied, he would start
thinking about how early dusk arrived in November, and he would begin to
worry about nightfall, and then by the time darkness actually came, he
would be as jumpy as a cat with a can tied to its tail.

The motel office was a shrine to light.  From the moment he had opened
at six-thirty this morning, every lamp had been burning.  A squat
fluorescent lamp with a flexible neck stood on the oak desk in the work
area behind the check-in counter, casting a pale rectangle on the green
felt blotter.  A brass floor lamp glowed in the corner by the file
cabinets.  On the public side of the counter was a carousel of
postcards, a wall rack holding about forty paperbacks, another rack full
of free travel brochures, a single slot machine by the door, and a beige
sofa flanked by end tables and ginger-jar lamps equipped with three-way
bulbs-75, 100, and 150 watts-which were turned up all the way.  There
was a frosted-glass ceiling fixture, too,

with two bulbs, and of course most of the front wall of the office
featured a large window.  The motel faced south-southwest, so at this
time of day the declining sun's honey-colored beams angled through the
enormous pane, giving an amber tint to the white wall behind the sofa,
fracturing into hundreds of bright erratic lines in the crackled glaze
of the ginger-jar lamps, and leaving blazing reflections in the brass
medallions that ornamented the tables.

When Faye was here, Ernie left some of the lamps off because she was
sure to remark on the waste of electricity and extinguish a few of them.
Leaving a lamp unlit made him uneasy, but he endured the sight of dead
bulbs in order to keep his secret.  As far as he knew, Faye was not
aware of the phobia that had been creeping up on him during the past
four months, and he did not want her to know because he was ashamed of
this sudden strangeness in himself and because he did not want to worry
her.  He did not know the cause of his irrational fear, but he knew he
would conquer it, sooner or later, so there was no sense in humiliating
himself and causing Faye unnecessary anxiety over a temporary condition.

He refused to believe that it was serious.  He had been ill only rarely
in his fifty-two years.  He had only been laid up in the hospital once,
after taking a bullet in the butt and another one in the back during his
second tour of duty in Vietnam.  There had never been mental illness in
his family, and Ernest Eugene Block was absolutely
sure-as-hell-andwithout-a-doubt not going to be the first one of his
clan to go crawling and whimpering to a psychiatrist's couch.  You could
bet your ass on that and never have to worry what you would sit on.  He
would tough this out, weird as it was, unsettling as it was.

It had begun in September, a vague uneasiness that built in him as
nightfall approached and that remained until dawn. At first he was not
troubled every night, but it got steadily worse, and by the middle of
October, dusk always brought with it an inexplicable spiritual distress.
By early November the distress became fear, and during the past two
weeks his anxiety grew until now his days were measured-and almost
totally defined-by this perplexing fear of the darkness to come.  For
the past ten days, he'd avoided going out after nightfall, and thus far
Faye had not noticed, though she could not remain oblivious much longer.

Ernie Block was so big that it was ridiculous for him to be afraid of
anything.  He was six feet tall and so solidly and squarely built that
his surname was equally suitable as a oneword description of him.  His
wiry gray hair was brush-cut, revealing slabs of skullbone, and his
facial features were clean and appealing, though so squared-off that he
looked as if he had been carved out of granite.  His thick neck, massive
shoulders, and barrel chest gave him a top-heavy appearance.  When he
had been a high-school football star, the other players called him
"Bull," and during his twenty-eight-year career in the Marines, from
which he had been retired for six years, most people called him "sir,"
even some who were of equal rank.  They would be astonished to learn
that, lately, Ernie Block's palms got sweaty every day when sunset drew
near.

Now, intent upon keeping his thoughts far from sunset, he dawdled over
the repairs to the counter and finally finished at three-forty-five. The
quality of the daylight had changed. It was no longer honey-colored but
amber-orange, and the sun was drawing down toward the west.

At four o'clock he got his first check-in, a couple his own age, Mr. and
Mrs.  Gilney, who were heading home to Salt Lake City after spending a
week in Reno, visiting their son. He chatted with them and was
disappointed when they took their key and left.

The sunlight was completely orange now, burnt orange, no yellow in it at
all.  The high, scattered clouds had been transformed from white sailing
ships to gold and scarlet galleons gliding eastward above the Great
Basin in which almost the entire state of Nevada lay.

Ten minutes later a cadaverous man, visiting the area on special
assignment for the Bureau of Land Management, took a room for two days.

Alone again, Ernie tried not to look at his watch.

He tried not to look at the windows, either, for beyond the glass the
day was bleeding away.

I'm not going to panic, he told himself.  I've been to war, seen the
worst a man can see, and by God I'm still here, still as big and ugly as
ever, so I won't come unglued just because night is coming.

By four-fifty the sunlight was no longer orange but bloody red.

His heart was speeding up, and he began to feel as if his rib cage had
become a vise that was squeezing his vital organs between its jaws.

He went to the desk, sat down in the chair, closed his eyes, and did
some deep-breathing exercises to calm himself.

He turned on the radio.  Sometimes music helped.  Kenny Rogers was
singing about loneliness.

The sun touched the horizon and slowly sank out of sight. The crimson
afternoon faded to electric blue, then to a luminous purple that
reminded Ernie of day's end in Singapore, where he had been stationed
for two years as an embassy guard when he had been a young recruit.

It came.  The twilight.

Then worse.  Night.

The outside lights, including the blue and green neon sign that could be
seen clearly from the freeway, had blinked on automatically as dusk
crept in, but that had not made Ernie feel any better.  Dawn was an
eternity away.  Night ruled.

With the dying of the light, the outside temperature fell below
freezing.  To cut the chill in the office, the oil furnace kicked in
more frequently.  In spite of the chill, Ernie Block was sweating.

At six o'clock, Sandy Sarver dashed over from the Tranquility Grille,
which stood west of the motel.  It was a small sandwich shop with a
limited menu, serving only lunch and dinner to the guests and to hungry
truckers who swung in from the highway for a bite.  (Breakfast for
guests was complimentary sweet rolls and coffee delivered to their
rooms, if they asked for it the night before.)  Sandy, thirty-two, and
her husband, Ned, ran the restaurant for Ernie and Faye; Sandy waited
tables, and Ned cooked.  They lived in a trailer up near Beowawe and
drove in every day in their battered Ford pickup.

Ernie winced when Sandy entered, for when she opened the door he had the
irrational feeling that the darkness outside would spring, pantherlike,
into the office.

"Brought supper," Sandy said, shivering in the gust of cold air that
entered with her.  She set a small, lidless, cardboard box on the
counter.  It held a cheeseburger, French fries, a plastic container of
cole slaw, and a can of Coors.  "Figured you'd need a Coors to sluice
all this cholesterol out of your system."

"Thanks, Sandy."

Sandy Sarver was not much to look at, plain and washed out, even drab,
though she had more potential than she realized.  Her legs were too thin
but not unattractive.  She was underweight, but if she put on fifteen or
even twenty pounds, she would have a reasonably good shape.  She was
flat-chested, though an appealing suppleness compensated for her lack of
amplitude, and she had a charming feminine delicateness most apparent in
her small bones, slender arms, and swanlike neck. Also, she possessed an
infrequently seen but arresting gracefulness that was usually disguised
by her habit of shuffling when she walked and slumping round-shouldered
when she sat.  Her brown hair was lusterless and limp, probably because
she washed it with soap instead of shampoo.  She never wore makeup, not
even lipstick.  Her nails were bitten and time- glected.  However, she
was good-hearted, with a generous spirit, which was why Ernie and Faye
wished she could look better and get more out of life.

Sometimes Ernie worried about her, the same way he used to worry about
Lucy, his own daughter, before Lucy found and married Frank and became
so obviously, perfectly happy. He sensed that something bad had happened
to Sandy Sarver a long time ago, that she had taken a very hard blow
which had not broken her but had taught her to keep a low profile, to
keep her head tucked down, to harbor only meager expectations in order
to protect herself from disappointment, pain, and human cruelty.

Relishing the aroma of the food, popping the tab on the Coors, Ernie
said, "Ned makes the best darned cheeseburgers I've ever eaten."

Sandy smiled shyly.  "It's a blessing having a man who cooks."

Her voice was soft, meek.  "Especially in my case 'cause I'm no good at
it."

:'Oh, I'll bet you're a fine cook, too," Ernie said.

'No, no, not me, not even a little bit.  Never was, never will be."

He looked at her bare, goose-pimpled arms, exposed by her short-sleeved
uniform.  "You shouldn't come out on a night like this without a
sweater.  You'll catch your death."

"Not me," she said.  "I .  .  .  I got used to the cold a long time
ago."

That seemed an odd thing to say, and the tone of voice in which she said
it was even odder.  But before Ernie could think of a way to draw her
out and discover her meaning, she headed toward the door.

"See you later, Ernie."

"Uh ...  much business?"

"Some.  And the truckers'll be pulling in for supper soon."

She paused with the door open.  "You sure keep it bright in here."

A bite of cheeseburger stuck in his throat when she opened the door. She
was exposing him to the dangers of the darkness.

Cold air swept in.

"You could get a tan in here," she said.

" I .  .  .  I like it bright.  People come into a motel office that's
dimly lit ...  well, the impression is it's dirty."

"Oh!  I would've never thought of that.  Guess that's why you're the
boss.  I was in charge, I'd never think of little things like that.  I'm
no good at details.  Gotta scoot."

He held his breath while the door was open, sighed with relief when she
pulled it shut behind her.  He watched her scurry past the windows and
out of sight.  He could not remember ever hearing Sandy admit to a
virtue.  Likewise, she never hesitated to point out her faults and
shortcomings, both real and imagined.  The kid was sweet, but she was
sometimes dreary company.  Tonight, of course, even dreary company was
welcome.  He was sorry to see her go.

At the counter, eating while standing up, Ernie concentrated intently on
his food, not once lifting his eyes from it until he was done, using it
to take his mind off the irrational fear that made his scalp prickle and
kept the cold sweat trickling down from his armpits.

By six-fifty, eight of the motel's twenty rooms were occupied.  Because
it was the second night of a four-day holiday weekend, with more than
the usual number of travelers, he would rent out at least another eight
units if he stayed open until nine o'clock.

He could not do it.  He was a Marine-retired, but still a Marine-to whom
the words "duty" and "courage" were sacred, and he had never failed to
do his duty, not even in Vietnam, not even with bullets flying and bombs
bursting and people dying on all sides, but he was incapable of the
simple task of manning the motel desk until nine o'clock.  There were no
drapes at the big office windows, no blind over the glass door, no way
to escape the sight of darkness.  Each time the door opened, he was sick
with dread because no barrier lay between him and the night.

He looked at hisbig strong hands.  They were trembling. His sour stomach
churned.  He was so jumpy he could not keep still.  He paced the small
work area.  He fiddled with this and that.

Finally, at a quarter past seven, surrendering to his irrational
anxiety, he used a switch under the counter to turn on the NO VACANCY
sign outside, and he locked the front door. He clicked off the lamps,
one at a time, edging away from the shadows that rushed in where light
had ruled, and he quickly retreated to the rear of the room.  Steps led
up to the owner's apartment on the second floor.  He intended to climb
them at an ordinary pace, telling himself that it was silly and stupid
to be afraid, telling himself that nothing was coming after him from the
dark corners of the office behind, nothing- such a ridiculous
thought-nothing, absolutely nothing. But reassurances of that sort did
him no good whatsoever, for it was not something in the dark that scared
him; he was, instead, terrified by the darkness itself, by the mere
absence of light.  He started moving faster, grabbing at the handrail.
To his chagrin, he quickly panicked and bounded up the steps two at a
time.  At the top, heart pounding, Ernie stumbled into the living room,
fumbled for the wall switch, snapped off the last of the lights below,
slammed the door so hard that the whole wall seemed to shake, locked it,
and leaned with his broad back against it.

He could not stop gasping.  He could not stop shaking, either.  He could
smell his own rank sweat.

Several lights had been burning in the apartment during the day, but a
few were unlit.  He hurried from room to room, clicking on every lamp
and ceiling fixture.  The drapes and shades were all drawn tight from
his previous nocturnal ordeal, so he had not a single glimpse of the
blackness beyond the windows.

When he had regained control of himself, he phoned the Tranquility
Grille and told Sandy that he was not feeling well, that he had shut
down early.  He asked them to keep the day's receipts until tomorrow
morning rather than bother him tonight when they closed the restaurant.

Sickened by his pungent perspiration odor-not so much by the smell
itself as by the total loss of control that the smell represented-Ernie
showered.  After he had toweled himself dry, he put on fresh underwear,
belted himself into a thick warm robe, and stepped into slippers.

Heretofore, in spite of his bewilderingly unfocused apprehension, he had
been able to sleep in a dark room, though not without anxiety, and not
without the aid of a couple of beers.  Then, two nights ago, with Faye
in Wisconsin, when he was alone, he was able to nod off only with the
constant companionship of the nightstand lamp.  He knew he would need
that luminous comfort tonight, as well.

And when Faye returned on Tuesday?  Would he be able to go back to
sleeping without a light?

What if Faye turned off the lights ...  and he started screaming like a
badly frightened child?

The thought of that impending humiliation made him grind his teeth with
anger and drove him to the nearest window.

He put one beefy hand on the tightly drawn drapes.  Hesitated.  His
heart did an imitation of muffled machine-gun fire.

He had always been strong for Faye, a rock on which she could depend.
That was what a man was supposed to be: a rock.  He must not let Faye
down.  He had to overcome this bizarre affliction before she returned
from Wisconsin.

His mouth went dry and a chill returned when he thought about what lay
beyond the now-concealed glass, but he knew the only way to beat this
thing was to confront it.  That was the lesson life had taught him: be
bold, confront the enemy, engage in battle.  That philosophy of action
had always worked for him.  It would work again.  This window looked out
from the back of the motel, across the vast meadows and hills of the
uninhabited uplands, and the only light out there was what fell from the
stars.  He must pull the drapes aside, come face to face with that
tenebrous landscape, stand fast, endure it.  Confrontation would be a
purgative, flushing the poison from his system.

Ernie pulled open the drapes.  He peered out at the night and told
himself that this perfect blackness was not so bad deep and pure, vast
and cold, but not malevolent, and in no way a personal threat.

However, as he watched, unmoving and unmovable, portions of the darkness
seemed to ...  well, to shift, to coalesce, forming into not quite
visible but nonetheless solid shapes, lumps of pulsing and denser
blackness within the greater blackness, lurking phantoms that at any
moment might launch themselves toward the fragile window.

He clenched his jaws, put his forehead against the ice-cold glass.

The Nevada barrens, a huge emptiness to begin with, now seemed to expand
even farther.  He could not see the nightcloaked mountains, but he
sensed that they were magically receding, that the plains between him
and the mountains were growing larger, extending outward hundreds of
miles, thousands, expanding swiftly toward infinity, until suddenly he
was at the center of a void so immense that it defied description.  On
all sides of him, there was emptiness and lightlessness beyond man's
ability to measure, beyond the limits of his own feeble imagination, a
terrible emptiness, to the left and right, front and back, above and
below, and suddenly he could not breathe.

This was considerably worse than anything he had known before.  A
deeper-reaching fear.  Profound.  Shocking in its power.  And it was in
total control of him.

Abruptly he was aware of all the weight of that enormous darkness, and
it seemed to be sliding inexorably in upon him, sliding and sliding,
incalculably high walls of heavy darkness, collapsing, pressing down,
squeezing the breath out of himHe screamed and threw himself back from
the window.

He fell to his knees as the drapes dropped into place with a soft
rustle.  The window was hidden again.  The darkness was concealed.  All
around him was light, blessed light.  He hung his head, shuddered, and
took great gulps of air.

He crawled to the bed and hoisted himself onto the mattress, where he
lay for a long time, listening to his heartbeat, which was like
footfalls, sprinting then running then just walking fast inside him.
Instead of solving his problem, bold confrontation had made it worse.

"What's happening here?" he said aloud, staring at the ceiling.  "What's
wrong with me?  Dear God, what's wrong with me?"

It was November 22.

4.

Laguna Beach, California

Saturday, in desperate reaction to yet another troubling episode of
somnambulism, Dom Corvaisis thoroughly, methodically exhausted himself.
By nightfall, he intended to be so wrung out that he'd sleep as still as
a stone locked immemortally in the bosom of the earth.  At seven o'clock
in the morning, with the night's cool mist lingering in the canyons and
bearding the trees, he performed half an hour of vigorous calisthenics
on the patio overlooking the ocean, then put on his running shoes and
did seven arduous miles on Laguna's sloped streets.  He spent the next
five hours doing heavy gardening.  Then, because it was a warm day, he
put on his swimsuit, put towels in his Firebird, and went to the beach.
He sunbathed a little and swam a lot.  After dinner at Picasso's, he
walked for another hour along shop-lined streets sparsely populated by
off-season tourists.  At last he drove home.

Undressing in his bedroom, Dom felt as if he were in the land of
Lilliput, where a thousand tiny people were pulling him down with
grappling lines.  He rarely drank, but now he tossed back a shot of Rdmy
Martin.  In bed, he fell asleep even as he clicked off the lamp.

The incidents of somnambulism were growing more frequent, and the
problem was now the central issue of his life.  It was interfering with
his work.  The new book, which had been going well-it contained the best
writing he had ever done was stalled.  In the past two weeks, he had
awakened in a closet on nine occasions, four times in the last four
nights. The affliction had ceased to be amusing and intriguing.  He was
afraid to go to sleep because, asleep, he was not in control of himself.

Yesterday, Friday, he had finally gone to his physician, Dr. Paul
Cobletz, in Newport Beach.  Haltingly, he told Cobletz all about his
sleepwalking, but he found himself unwilling and unable to express the
true depth and seriousness of his concern.  Dom had always been a very
private person, made so by a childhood spent in a dozen foster homes and
under the care of surrogate parents, some of whom were indifferent or
even hostile, all of whom were dismayingly temporary presences in his
life.  He was reluctant to share his most important and personal
thoughts except through the mouths of imaginary characters in his
fiction.

As a result, Cobletz was not unduly worried.  After a full physical
examination, he pronounced Dom exceptionally fit. He attributed the
somnambulism to stress, to the upcoming publication of the novel.

"You don't think we should do any tests?" Dom asked.

Cobletz said, "You're a writer, so of course your imagination is running
away with you.  Brain tumor, you're thinking.  Am I right?"

"Well ...  yes."

"Any headaches?  Dizziness?  Blurred vision?"

"No."

"I've examined your eyes.  There's no change in your retinas, no
indication of intracrania) pressure.  Any inexplicable vomiting?"

"No.  Nothing like that."

"Giddy spells?  Giggling or periods of euphoria without apparent reason?
Anything of that nature?"

"No."

"Then I see no reason for tests at this stage."

"Do you think I need ...  psychotherapy?"

"Good heavens, no!  I'm sure this will pass soon."

Finished dressing, Dom watched Cobletz close the file.  He said, "I
thought perhaps sleeping pills-"

"No, no," Cobletz said.  "Not yet.  I don't believe in drugs as a
treatment of first resort.  Here's what you do, Dom.  Get away from the
writing for a few weeks.  Don't do anything cerebral.  Get plenty of
physical exercise.  Go to bed tired every night, so tired that you can't
even bother to think about the book you've been working on.  A few days
of that, and you'll be cured.  I'm convinced of it."

Saturday, Dom began the treatment Dr.  Cobletz prescribed, devoting
himself to physical activity, though with more singlemindedness and
flagdllant persistence than the doctor had suggested.  Consequently, he
plummeted into a deep sleep the moment he put his head upon the pillow,
and in the morning he did not wake in a closet.

He did not wake in bed, either.  This time, he was in the garage.

He regained consciousness in a breathless state of terror, gasping, his
heart hammering so hard it seemed capable of shattering his ribs with
its furious blows.  His mouth was dry, his hands curled into fists.  He
was cramped and sore, partly from Saturday's excess of exercise, but
partly from the unnatural and uncomfortable position in which he had
been sleeping.  During the night he evidently had taken two folded
canvas dropcloths from a shelf above the workbench, and had squirreled
into a narrow service space behind the furnace. That was where he lay
now, concealed beneath the tarps.

"Concealed" was the right word.  He had not dragged the tarpaulins over
himself merely for warmth.  He had taken refuge behind the furnace and
beneath the canvas because he had been hiding from something.

From what?

Even now, as Dominick pushed the tarps aside and struggled to sit up, as
sleep receded and as his bleary eyes adjusted to the shadow-filled
garage, the intense anxiety that had accompanied him up from sleep still
clung tenaciously.  His pulse pounded.

Fear of what?

Dreaming.  In his nightmare he must have been running and hiding from
some monster.  Yes.  Of course.  His peril in the nightmare caused him
to sleepwalk, and when, in the dream, he sought a place to hide, he also
hid in reality, creeping behind the furnace.

His white Firebird loomed ghostlike in the light from the wall vents and
the single window above the workbench. Shuffling across the garage, he
felt as if he were a revenant himself.

In the house, he went directly to his office.  Morning light filled the
room, making him squint.  He sat at the desk in his filthy pajama
bottoms, switched on the word processor, and studied the documents on
the diskette that he had left in the machine.  The diskette was as he
had left it on Thursday; it contained no new material.

Dom had hoped that, in his sleep, he might have left a message that
would help him understand the source of his anxiety.  That knowledge was
obviously held by his subconscious but thus far denied to his conscious
mind.  When sleepwalking, his subconscious was in control, and possibly
it would try to explain things to his conscious mind by way of the
Displaywriter.  But as yet, it had not.

He switched off the machine.  He sat for a long time, staring out the
window, toward the ocean.  Wondering ...

Later, in the bedroom, as he was on his way to the master bath, he found
something strange.  Nails were scattered across the carpet, and he had
to be careful where he walked.  He stooped, picked up several of them.
They were all alike: 1.5inch steel finishing nails.  At the far side of
the room, he saw two objects that drew him there.  Beneath the window,
from which the drapes had been drawn aside, a box of nails lay on the
floor by the baseboard; it was only half full because part of its
contents had spilled from it.  Beside the box was a hammer.

He lifted the hammer, hefted it, frowned.

What had he been doing in those lonely hours of the night?

He raised his eyes to the windowsill and saw three loose nails that he
had laid there.  They gleamed in the sunlight.

Judging from the evidence, he'd been preparing to nail the windows shut.
Jesus.  Something had so frightened him that he had intended to nail the
windows shut and make a fortress of his house, but before he could set
himself to the task, he had been suddenly overwhelmed by fear and had
fled to the garage, where he had hidden behind the furnace.

He dropped the hammer, stood, looked out the window. Beyond lay only
bloom-laden rose bushes, a small strip of lawn, and an ivy-covered slope
that led up to another house. A lovely landscape.  Peaceful.  He could
not believe that it had been any different last night, that something
more threatening had been crouching out there in the darkness.

And yet ...

For a while Dom Corvaisis watched the day grow brighter,

watched the bees visit the roses, then began to pick up the nails.

It was November 24.

5.

Boston, Massachusetts

After the incident of the black gloves, two weeks passed without another
attack.

For a few days following the embarrassing scene at Bernstein's
Delicatessen, Ginger Weiss remained on edge, expecting another seizure.
She was unusually self-aware, acutely conscious of her physiological and
psychological conditions, searching for subtle symptoms of serious
disorder, alert for the slightest sign of another impending fugue, but
she noticed nothing worrisome.  She had no headaches, no attacks of
nausea, no joint or muscle pain.  Gradually, her confidence rose to its
usual high level.  She became convinced that her wild flight had been
entirely stress-related, a never-to-be-repeated aberration.

Her days at Memorial were busier than ever.  George Hannaby, chief of
surgery-a tall burly bear of a man who talked slow, walked slow, and
looked deceptively lazy-maintained a heavy schedule, and though Ginger
was not the only resident working under him, she was the only one who
currently worked exclusively with him.  She assisted in many-perhaps in
a majority-of his procedures: aortal grafts, amputations, popliteal
bypasses, embolectomies, portocaval shunts, thoracotomies, arteriograms,
the installation of temporary and permanent pacemakers, and more.

George observed her every move, was quick to note the slightest flaw in
her skill and techniques.  Although he looked like a friendly bear, he
was a tough taskmaster and had no patience for laziness, inaptitude, or
carelessness.  He could be scathing in his critiques, and he made all
the young doctors sweat.  His scorn was not merely withering; it was
dehydrating, scaring, a nuclear heat.

Some residents considered George tyrannical, but Ginger enjoyed
assisting him precisely because his standards were so high.  She knew
that his criticisms, though sometimes blister ingly delivered, were
motivated solely by his concern for the patient, and she never took them
personally.  When she finally earned Hannaby's unqualified blessing .  .
.  well, that would be almost as good as God's own seal of approval.

On the last Monday in November, thirteen days after her strange seizure,
Ginger assisted in a triple-bypass heart operation on Johnny O'Day, a
fifty-three-year-old Boston police officer who had been forced into
early retirement by cardiovascular disease.  Johnny was stocky,
rubber-faced, touslehaired, with merry blue eyes, unassuming, quick to
laugh in spite of his troubles.  Ginger was especially drawn to him
because, although he looked nothing whatsoever like the late Jacob
Weiss, he nevertheless reminded her of her father.

She was afraid Johnny O'Day was going to die-and that it was going to
be, in part, her fault.

She had no reason to believe that he was more vulnerable than other
cardiac patients.  In fact, Johnny was in comparatively little danger.
He was ten years younger than the average recipient of bypass surgery,
with greater resources for recuperation.  His cardiac ailment was not
complicated by any other debilitating condition, such as phlebitis or
excessively high blood pressure.  His prospects were encouraging.

But Ginger could not twist free of the dread in which she found herself
increasingly tangled.  On Monday afternoon, as the hour of surgery drew
near, she grew tense, and her stomach turned sour.  For the first time
since she had sat a lonely vigil beside her father's hospital bed and
had helplessly watched him die, Ginger was filled with doubt.

Perhaps her apprehension grew from the unjustified but inescapable
notion that if she somehow failed this patient she would in a sense be
failing Jacob yet again.  Or perhaps her fear was utterly unwarranted
and would seem foolish and laughable in hindsight.  Perhaps.

Nevertheless, entering the operating theater at George's side, she
wondered if her hands would shake.  A surgeon's hands must never shake.

The operating room was all white and aqua tile, filled with gleaming
chrome-plated and stainless-steel equipment.  Nurses and an
anesthesiologist were preparing the patient.

Johnny O'Day lay on the cruciform operating table, arms extended, palms
up and wrists exposed for the intravenous spikes.

Agatha Tandy, a private surgical technician who was employed by George
rather than by the hospital, stretched thin latex gloves over her boss's
freshly scrubbed hands, then over Ginger's hands as well.

The patient had been anesthetized.  He was orange with iodine from the
neck to the wrist, swathed in neatly tucked and folded layers of green
cloth from the hips down.  His eyes were taped shut to keep them from
drying out.  His breathing was slow but regular.

A portable tape deck with stereo speakers was on a stool in one corner.
George preferred to cut to the accompaniment of Bach, and that calming
music now filled the room.

It may have calmed the others, but today it did not calm Ginger.  A
secret scurrying something spun a web of ice in her stomach.

Hannaby positioned himself at the table.  Agatha stood at his right side
with an elaborately ordered tray of instruments. The circulating nurse
waited to fetch whatever might be required from the cabinets along one
wall.  An assisting nurse with large gray eyes noticed an errant flap of
green sheeting and quickly tucked it into place around the patient's
body. The anesthesiologist and his nurse were at the head of the table,
monitoring the IV and the EKG.  Ginger moved into position.  The team
was ready.

Ginger looked at her hands.  They were not shaking.

Inside, though, she was all aquiver.

In spite of her sense of impending disaster, the surgery went smoothly.
George Hannaby operated with quickness, sureness, dexterity, and skill
that were even more impressive than usual.  Twice, he stepped aside and
requested that Ginger complete a part of the procedure.

Ginger surprised herself by functioning with her customary sureness and
speed, her fear and tension revealed only by a tendency to perspire more
than usual.  However, the nurse was always there to blot her brow.

Afterward, at the scrub sink, George said, "Like clockwork."

Soaping her hands under the hot water, she said, "You always seem so
relaxed, as if .  .  .  as if you weren't a surgeon at all .  .  .  as
if you were just a tailor altering a suit of clothes."

"I may seem that way," he said, "but I'm always tense.

That's why I play Bach." He finished washing up.  "You were very tense
today."

"Yes," she admitted.

"Exceptionally tense.  It happens." Big as he was, he sometimes seemed
to have the eyes of a sweet, gentle child.  "The important thing is that
it didn't affect your skill.  You were as smooth as ever.  First ' rate.
That's the key.  You've got to use tension to your advantage."

"I guess I'm learning."

He grinned.  "As usual, you're being too hard on yourself. I'm proud of
you, kid.  For a while there, I thought maybe you'd have to give up
medicine and earn your living as a meat cutter in a supermarket, but now
I know you'll make it."

She grinned back at him, but the grin was counterfeit.  She had been
more than tense.  She had been seized by a cold, black fear that might
easily have overwhelmed her, and that was much different from a healthy
tension.  That fear was something she had never felt before, something
that she knew George Hannaby had never felt in his life, not in an
operating room.  If it continued, if the fear became a constant
companion during surgery and would not be dispelled ...  what then?

At ten-thirty that evening, when she was reading in bed, the phone rang.
It was George Hannaby.  If the call had come earlier, she'd have
panicked and assumed that Johnny O'Day had taken a serious turn for the
worse, but now she had regained her perspective.  "So sorry.  Missy
Weiss not home. I no speak the English.  Call back next April, please."

"If that's supposed to be a Spanish accent," George said, "it's
atrocious.  If it's supposed to be Oriental, it's merely terrible.  Be
thankful you chose medicine as a career instead of acting."

"You, on the other hand, would've done well as a drama critic."

"I do have the refined and sensitive perspective, the cool judgment and
unerring insight of a first-rate critic, don't I?

Now shut up and listen: I've got good news.  I think you're ready,
smart-ass."

"Ready?  For what?"

"The big time.  An aortal graft," he said.

"You mean .  .  .  I wouldn't just assist you?  Do it entirely myself?"

"Chief surgeon for the entire procedure."

"Aortal graft?"

"Sure.  You didn't specialize in cardiovascular surgery just to perform
appendectomies for the rest of your life."

She was sitting straight up in bed now.  Her heart was beating faster,
and she was flushed with excitement.  "When?"

"Next week.  There's a patient checking in this Thursday or Friday.
Name's Fletcher.  We'll go over her file together on Wednesday.  If
things proceed according to schedule, I would think we'd be ready to
cut'on Monday morning.  Of course, you'll be responsible for scheduling
all the final tests and making the decision to go ahead."

"Oh, God."

"You'll do fine."

:'You'll be with me."

'I'll assist you .  .  .  if you feel you need me for anything."

"And you'll take over if I start to screw up." "Don't be silly.  You
won't screw up- "

She thought about it a moment, then said, "No.  I won't screw up."

"That's my Ginger.  You can do whatever you set your mind to."

"Even ride a giraffe to the moon."

"What?"

"Private joke."

"Listen, I know you came close to panic this afternoon, but don't worry.
All residents experience that.  Most have to deal with it early, when
they begin to assist in the surgery. They call it The Clutch.  But
you've been cool and collected from the start, and I'd finally decided
you'd never clutch up like the rest of them.  Today, at last you did.
The Clutch just came later for you than for most.  And though I imagine
you're still worried about it, I think you should be glad it happened.
The Clutch is a seasoning experience.  The important thing is that you
dealt with it superbly."

"Thanks, George.  Even better than a drama critic, you'd have made a
good baseball coach."

Minutes later, when they concluded their conversation and hung up, she
fell back against the pillows again and hugged herself and felt so fine
that she actually giggled.  After a while she went to the closet and dug
around in there until she located the Weiss family photograph album. She
brought it back to bed and sat for a time, paging through the pictures
of Jacob and Anna, for although she could not share her triumphs with
them any more, she needed to feel that they were close.

Later still, in the dark bedroom, as she lay balanced on the thin edge
of wakefulness, she finally understood why she had been frightened this
afternoon.  She had not been seized by The Clutch.  Although she had not
been able to admit it until now, she had been afraid that, in the midst
of surgery, she would black out, plummet into a state of fugue, as she
had done that Tuesday, two weeks ago.  If an attack came while she held
a scalpel, while she was doing delicate cutting, or while stitching in a
vascular graft ...

That thought brought her eyes wide open.  The creeping form of sleep
retreated like a thief caught in the middle of a burglary.  For a long
time she lay there, stiff, staring at the dark and newly ominous shapes
of the bedroom furniture and at the window, where incompletely drawn
draperies revealed a band of glass silvered by a fall of moonlight and
by the rising beams of streetlamps below.

Could she accept the responsibility of chief surgeon on an aortal graft?
Her seizure had surely been a one-time occurrence.  It would never
happen again.  Surely not.  But did she dare test that theory?

Sleep crept back again and claimed her, though not for hours.

Tuesday, after a successful trip to Bernstein's Delicatessen, much food,
and several lazy hours in an easy chair with a good book, her
self-confidence was knit up again, and she began to look forward to the
challenge ahead, with only an ordinary degree and kind of apprehension.

On Wednesday, Johnny O'Day continued to recover from his triple bypass
and was in high spirits.  This was what made the years of study and hard
work worthwhile: preserving life, relieving suffering, bringing hope and
happiness to those who had known despair.

She assisted in a pacemaker implantation that went without a hitch, and
she performed an aortagram, a dye test on a patient's circulation.  She
also sat in with George while he examined seven people who had been
referred to him by other physicians.

When all the new patients had been seen, George and Ginger huddled for
half an hour over the file of the candidate for the aortal graft-a
fifty-eight-year-old woman, Viola Fletcher.  After studying the file,
Ginger decided she wanted Mrs.  Fletcher admitted to Memorial on
Thursday for testing and preparation.  If there were no
counterindications, surgery could take place first thing Monday morning.
George agreed, and all the necessary arrangements were made.

 Thus Wednesday progressed, always busy, never dull.  By six-thirty she
had put in a twelve-hour day, but she was not tired.  In fact, although
she had nothing to keep her at the hospital, she was reluctant to leave.
George Hannaby was home already.  But Ginger hung around, chatting with
patients, double-checking charts, until at last she went to George's
office, where she intended to look again at Viola Fletcher's file.

The professional offices were in the back wing of the building, separate
from the hospital itself.  At that hour the corridors were virtually
deserted.  Ginger's rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the highly polished
tile floors.  The air smelled of pine-scented disinfectant.

George Hannaby's waiting room, examining rooms, and private office were
dark and quiet, and Ginger did not switch on all the lights as she moved
through the outer rooms into the inner sanctum.  There, she snapped on
only the desk lamp as she passed it on her way to the file-room door,
which was locked.  George had given her keys to everything, and in a
minute she had withdrawn Viola Fletcher's records from the cabinet and
returned with them to George's desk.

She sat down in the big leather chair, opened the folder in the pool of
light from the desk lamp-and only then noticed an object that riveted
her attention and caused her breath to catch in her throat.  It lay on
the green blotter, along the curvature of light: a hand-held
ophthalmoscope, an instrument used to examine the interior of the eye.
There was nothing unusual-certainly nothing ominous-about the
ophthalmoscope.  Every doctor used such an instrument during a routine
physical examination.  Yet the sight of this one not only inhibited her
breathing but filled her with a sudden sense of terrible danger.

She had broken out in a cold sweat.

Her heart was hammering so hard, so loud, that the sound of it seemed to
come not from within but without, as if a parade drum was thumping in
the street beyond the window.

She could not take her eyes off the ophthalmoscope.  As with the black
gloves in Bernstein's Delicatessen more than two weeks ago, all other
objects in George's office began to fade, until the shining instrument
was the only thing that she could see in any detail.  She was aware of
every tiny scratch and minute nick on its handle.  Every humble feature
of its design seemed abruptly and enormously important, as if this Were
not a doctor's ordinary tool but the linchpin of the universe, an arcane
instrument with the potential for catastrophic destruction.

Disoriented, suddenly made claustrophobic by a heavy, insistent,
pressing mantle of irrational fear that had descended over her like a
great sodden cloak, she pushed the chair away from the desk and stood
up.  Gasping, whimpering, she felt suffocated yet chilled to the bone at
the same time.

The shank of the ophthalmoscope glistened as if made of ice.

The lens shone like an iridescent and chillingly alien eye. Her resolve
to stand fast now swiftly melted, even as her heart seemed to freeze
under the cold breath of terror. Run or die, a voice said Within her.
Run or die. A cry escaped her, and it sounded like the tortured appeal
of a lost and frightened child.

She turned from the desk, stumbled around it, almost fell over a chair.
She crossed the room, burst into the outer office, fled into the
deserted corridor, keening shrilly, seeking safety, finding none.  She
wanted help, a friendly face, but she was the only person on the floor,
and the danger was closing in. The unknown threat that was somehow
embodied in the harmless ophthalmoscope was drawing nearer, so she ran
as fast as she could, her footsteps booming along the hallway.

Run or die.

The mist descended.

Minutes later, when the mist cleared, when she was again aware of her
surroundings, she found herself in the emergency stairwell at the end of
the office wing, on a concrete landing between floors.  She could not
remember leaving the office corridor and taking to the stairs.  She was
sitting on the landing.  squeezed into the corner, her back pressed to
the cinderblock wall, staring out at the railing along the far side of
the steps.  A single bare bulb burned behind a wire basket overhead.  To
her left and right, flights of stairs led up and down into shadow before
coming to other lighted landings. The air was musty and cool.  If not
for her ragged breathing, silence would have ruled.

It was a lonely place, especially when your life was coming apart at the
seams and you needed the reassurance of bright lights and people.  The
gray walls, stark light, looming shadows, the metal railing .  The place
seemed like a reflection of her own despair.

Her wild flight and whatever other bizarre behavior she exhibited in her
inexplicable fugue had evidently not been seen, or she would not now be
alone.  At least that was a blessing.  At least no one knew.

She knew, however, and that was bad enough.

She shivered, not entirely from fear, for the mindless terror that had
gripped her was gone.  She shivered because she was cold, and she was
cold because her clothes clung to her, damp, soaked with sweat.

She raised one hand, wiped her face.

She rose, looked up the stairwell, then down.  She did not know whether
she was above or below the floor on which George Hannaby had his office.
After a moment she decided to go up.

Her footsteps echoed eerily.

For some reason, she thought of tombs.

"Meshuggene, " she said shakily.

It was November 27.

6.

Chicago, Illinois

The first Sunday morning in December was cold, under a low gray sky that
promised snow.  By afternoon the first scattered flakes would begin to
fall, and by early evening the city's grimy face and soiled skirts would
be temporarily concealed

beneath the white pancake makeup and pristine cloak of snow. This night,
from the Gold Coast to the slum tenements, everywhere in the city, the
number-one topic of conversation would be the storm.  Everywhere, that
is, but in the Roman Catholic homes throughout the parish of St.
Bernadette's, where they would still be talking about the shocking thing
Father Brendan Cronin had done during the early Mass that morning.

Father Cronin rose at five-thirty a.m., said prayers, showered, shaved,
dressed in cassock and biretta, picked up his breviary, and left the
parish house without bothering to put on a coat.  He stood for a moment
on the rear porch, breathing deeply of the crisp December air.

He was thirty years old, but with his direct green eyes and unruly
auburn hair and freckled face, he looked younger than he was.  He was
fifty or sixty pounds overweight, though not particularly thick in the
middle.  On him, fat distributed evenly, filling him out equally in
face, arms, torso, and legs.  From childhood through college, until his
second year at the seminary, his nickname had been "Pudge."

Regardless of his emotional state, Father Cronin nearly always looked
happy.  His face had a natural cherubic aspect, and the round lines of
it were not designed for the clear and easy expression of anger,
melancholy, or grief.  This morning he looked mildly pleased with
himself and with the world, though he was deeply troubled.

He followed a flagstone path across the yard, past denuded flower beds
where the bare earth lay in frozen clumps.  He unlocked the door of the
sacristy and let himself in.  Myrrh and spikenard blended with the scent
of the lemon-oil furniture polish with which the old church's oak
paneling, pews, and other wooden objects were anointed.

Without switching on the lights, with only the flickering ruby glow of
the sacristy lamp to guide him, Father Cronin knelt at the prie-dieu and
bowed his head.  In silence, he petitioned the Divine Father to make him
a worthy priest. In the past, this private devotion, before the arrival
of the sexton and the altar boy, had sent his spirits soaring and had
filled him with exultation at the prospect of celebrating Mass. But now,
as on most other mornings during the last four months, joy eluded him.
He felt only a leaden bleakness, an emptiness that made his heart ache
dully and that induced a cold, sick trembling in his belly.

Clenching his jaws, gritting his teeth, as if he could will himself into
a state of spiritual ecstasy, he repeated his petition, elaborated upon
his initial prayers, but still he felt unmoved, hollow.

After washing his hands and murmuring, "Da Domine, Father Cronin laid
his biretta on the prie-dieu and went to the vesting bench to attire
himself for the sacred celebration ahead.  He was a sensitive man with
an artist's soul, and in the great beauty of the ceremony he perceived a
pleasing pattern of divine order, a subtle echo of God's grace. Usually,
when placing the linen amice over his shoulders, when arranging the
white alb so that it fell evenly to his ankles, a shiver of awe passed
through him, awe that he, Brendan Cronin, should have achieved this
sacred office.

Usually.  But not today.  And not for weeks of days before this.

Father Cronin put on his amice, passed the strings around his back, then
tied them against his breast.  He pulled on the alb with no more emotion
than a welder getting dressed for work in a factory.

Four months ago, in early August, Father Brendan Cronin had begun to
lose his faith.  A small but relentless fire of doubt burned within him,
unquenchable, gradually consuming all of his long-held beliefs.

For any priest, the loss of faith is a devastating process. But it was
worse for Brendan Cronin than it would have been for most others.  He
had never even briefly entertained the thought of being anything but a
priest.  His parents were devout, and they fostered in him a devotion to
the Church. However, he had not become a priest to please them.  Simply,
as trite as it might sound to others in this age of agnosticism, he had
been called to the priesthood at a very young age. Now, though faith was
gone, his holy office continued to be the essential part of his
self-image; yet he knew he could not go on saying Mass and praying and
comforting the afflicted when it was nothing but a charade to him.

Brendan Cronin placed the stole around his neck.  As he pulled on the
chasuble, the courtyard door to the sacristy was flung open, and a young
boy burst into the room, switching on the electric lights that the
priest had preferred to do without.

"Morning, Father!"

"Good morning, Kerry.  How're you this fine morning?"

Except that his hair was much redder than Father Cronin's, Kerry McDevit
might have been the priest's blood relative. He was slightly plump,
freckled, with green eyes full of mischief.  "I'm fine, Father.  But
it's sure cold out there this morning.  Cold as a witch's-"

"Oh, yes?  Cold as a ' witch's what?"

"Refrigerator," the boy said, embarrassed.  "Cold as a witch's
refrigerator, Father.  And that's cold."

If his mood had not been so bleak, Brendan would have been amused by the
boy's narrow avoidance of an innocent obscenity, but in his current
state of mind he could not summon even a shadow of a smile. Undoubtedly,
his silence was interpreted as stern disapproval, for Kerry averted his
eyes and went quickly to the closet, where he stowed his coat, scarf,
and gloves, and took his cassock and surplice from a hanger.

Even as Brendan lifted the maniple, kissed the cross in its center, and
placed it on his left forearm, he felt nothing. There was just that
cold, throbbing, hollow ache where belief and joy had once existed.  As
his hands were occupied with that task, his mind drifted back to a
melancholy recollection of the exuberance with which he had once
approached every priestly duty.

Until last August, he never doubted the wisdom of his commitment to the
Church.  He had been such a bright and hard-working student of both
mundane subjects and religion that he had been chosen to complete his
Catholic education at the North American College in Rome.  He loved the
Holy City-the architecture, the history, and the friendly people. Upon
ordination and acceptance into the Society of Jesus, he had spent two
years at the Vatican, as an assistant to Monsignor Giuseppe Orbella,
chief speechwriter and doctrinal adviser to His Holiness, the Pope. That
honor could have been followed by a prized assignment to the staff of
the Cardinal of the Chicago Archdiocese, but Father Cronin had
requested, instead, a curacy at a small or medium-sized parish, like any
young priest.  Thus, after a visit to Bishop Santefiore in San Francisco
(an old friend of Monsignor Orbella's), and after a vacation during
which he drove from San Francisco to Chicago, he had come to St.
Bernadette's, where he'd taken great pleasure in even the most ordinary
day-today chores of a curate's life.  And with never a regret or doubt.

Now, as he watched his altar boy slip into a surplice, Father Cronin
longed for the simple faith that had for so long comforted and sustained
him.  Was it gone only temporarily, or had he lost it forever?

When Kerry was dressed, he led the way through the inner sacristy door,
into the sanctuary of the church.  Several steps beyond the door, he
evidently sensed that Father Cronin was not coming after him, for he
glanced back, a puzzled look upon his face.

Brendan Cronin hesitated.  Through the door he had a sideview of the
towering crucifix on the back wall and the altar platform straight
ahead.  This holiest part of the church was dismayingly strange, as if
he were seeing it objectively for the first time.  And he could not
imagine why he had ever thought of it as sacred territory.  It was just
a place.  A place like any other.  If he walked out there now, if he
went through the familiar rituals and litanies, he would be a hypocrite.
He would be defrauding everyone in the congregation.

The puzzlement on Kerry McDevit's face had turned to worry.  The boy
glanced out toward the pews that Brendan Cronin could not see, then
looked again at his priest.

How can I say Mass when I no longer believe?  Brendan wondered.

But there was nothing else to be done.

Holding the chalice in his left hand, with his right hand over the burse
and veil, he kept the sacred vessel close to his breast and followed
Kerry, at last, into the sanctuary, where the face of Christ upon the
cross seemed, for a moment, to gaze at him accusingly.

As usual, less than a hundred people were in attendance for the early
service.  Their faces were unusually pale and radiant, as if God had not
allowed real worshipers to attend this morning but had sent a deputation
of judgmental angels to witness the sacrilege of a doubting priest who
dared to offer Mass in spite of his fallen condition.

As the Mass progressed, Father Cronin's despair deepened. From the
moment he spoke the Introibo ad altars Dei, each step of the ceremony
compounded the priest's misery.  By the time Kerry McDevit transferred
the missal from the Epistle to the Gospel side of the altar, Father
Cronin's despondency was so heavy that he felt crushed beneath it.  His
spiritual and emotional exhaustion were so profound that he could barely
lift his arms, could hardly find strength to focus on the Gospel

and mutter the lines from the sacred text.  The faces of the worshipers
blurred into featureless blobs.  By the time he reached the Canon of the
Mass, Father Cronin could barely whisper.  He knew that Kerry was gaping
at him openly now, and he was sure that the congregation was aware that
something was wrong.  He was sweating and shaking.  The awful grayness
in him grew darker now, swiftly turning to black, and he felt as if he
were spiraling down into a frighteningly dark void.

Then, as he held the Host in his hands and elevated it, speaking the
five words that signified the mystery of transubstantiation, he was
suddenly angry with himself for being unable to believe, angry with the
Church for failing to provide him with better armor against doubt, angry
that his entire life seemed misdirected, wasted, expended in pursuit of
idiotic myths.  His anger churned, heated up, reached the boiling point,
was transformed into a steam of fury, a blistering vapor of rage.

To his astonishment, a wretched cry burst from him, and he pitched the
chalice across the sanctuary.  With a loud clank, it struck the
sanctuary wall, spraying wine, rebounded, bounced off a statue of the
Blessed Virgin, and clattered to a stop against the foot of the podium
at which he had not long ago read from the Gospels.

Kerry McDevit stumbled back in shock, and in the nave a hundred people
gasped as one, but that response had no effect on Brendan Cronin.  In a
rage that was his only protection against suicidal despair, he flung one
arm wide and swept a paten of communion wafers to the floor.  With
another wild cry, half anger and half grief, he thrust his hand under
his chasuble, tore off the stole that lay around his neck and threw it
down, turned from the altar, and raced into the sacristy. There, the
anger departed as suddenly as it had come, and he stopped and stood
there, swaying in confusion.

It was December 1.

7.

Laguna Beach, California

That first Sunday in December, Dom Corvaisis had lunch with Parker Faine
on the terrace at Las Brisas, in the shade of an umbrella-table
overlooking the sun-dappled sea.  The good weather was holding well this
year.  While the breeze brought them the cries of gulls, the tang of the
sea, and the sweet scent of star jasmine that was growing nearby,
Dominick told Parker every embarrassing and distressing detail of his
escalating battle with somnambulism.

Parker Faine was his best friend, perhaps the only person in the world
with whom he could open up like this, though on the surface they seemed
to have little in common.  Dom was a slender, lean-muscled man, but
Parker Faine was squat, burly, beefy.  Beardless, Dom went to the barber
for a haircut every three weeks; but Parker's hair was shaggy, and his
beard was shaggy, and his eyebrows bristled.  He looked like a cross
between a professional wrestler and a beatnik from the 1950s. Dom drank
little and was easily intoxicated, while Parker's thirst was legendary
and his capacity prodigious.  Although Dom was solitary by nature and
slow to make friends, Parker had the gift of seeming like an old
acquaintance just an hour after you first met him.  At fifty, Parker
Faine was fifteen years older than Dom.  He had been rich and famous for
almost a quarter of a century, and he was comfortable with both his
wealth and fame, utterly unable to understand Dom's uneasiness over the
money and notoriety that was beginning to come his way because of
Twilight in Babylon.  Dom had come to lunch at Las Brisas in Bally
loafers, dark brown slacks, and a lighter brown-checkered shirt with a
buttondown collar, but Parker had arrived in blue tennis shoes, heavily
crinkled white cotton pants, and a white-and-blue flowered shirt worn
over his belt, which made it seem as if they had dressed for entirely
different engagements, had met outside the restaurant sheerly by chance,
and had decided to have lunch together on a whim.

In spite of all the ways they differed from each other, they had become
fast friends, because in several important ways they were alike.  Both
were artists, not by choice or inclination but by compulsion.  Dom
painted with words; Parker painted with paint; and they approached their
different arts with identical high standards, commitment, craftsmanship.
Furthermore, though Parker made friends more easily than Dom did, each
placed enormous value on friendship and nurtured it.

They had met six years ago, when Parker had moved to Oregon for eighteen
months, in search of new subject matter for a series of landscapes done
in his unique style, which successfully married suprarealism with a
surreal imagination. While there, he had signed to give one lecture a
month at the University of Portland, where Dom held a position in the
Department of English.

Now, while Parker hunched over the table, munching on nachos that were
dripping with cheese ared guacamole and sour cream, Dom sipped slowly at
a bottle of Negra Modelo and recounted his unconscious nocturnal
adventures.  He spoke softly, though discretion was probably
unnecessary; the other diners on the terrace were noisily involved in
their own conversations.  He did not touch the nachos.  This morning,
for the fourth time, he had awakened behind the furnace in the garage,
in a state of undiluted terror, and his continued inability to get
control of himself had left him dispirited and without an appetite.  By
the time he finished his tale, he had drunk only half the beer, for even
that rich, dark Mexican brew tasted flat and stale today.

Parker, on the other hand, had poured down three doubleshot margaritas
and already ordered a fourth.  However, the painter's attention was not
dulled by the alcohol he consumed.  "Jesus, buddy, why didn't you tell
me about this sooner, weeks ago?"

"I felt sort of .  .  .  foolish.

"Nonsense.  Bullshit," the painter insisted, gesturing expansively with
one huge hand, but keeping his voice low.

The Mexican waiter, a diminutive Wayne Newton lookalike, arrived with
Parker's margarita and inquired if they wished to order lunch.

"No, no.  Sunday lunch is an excuse to have too many margaritas, and I'm
a long way from having too many.  What a sad waste to order lunch after
only four margaritas!  That'd leave most of the afternoon unfilled, and
we'd find ourselves on the street with nothing to occupy us, and then
without doubt we'd get into trouble, attract the attention of the
police. God knows what might happen.  No, no.  To avoid jail and protect
our reputations, we must not order lunch sooner than three o'clock.  In
fact, bring me another margarita.  And another order of these
magnificent nachos, please.  More salsahotter if you've got it.  A dish
of chopped onions, too, please. And another beer for my dismayingly
restrained friend."

"No," Dom said.  "I'm only half-finished with this one."

"That's what I meant by 'dismayingly restrained,' you hopeless Puritan.
You've sucked at that one so long it must be warm."

Ordinarily, Dominick would have leaned back and enjoyed Parker Faine's
energetic performance.  The painter's ebullience, his unfailing
enthusiasm for life, was invigorating and amusing.  Today, however, Dom
was so troubled that he was not amused.

As the waiter turned away, a small cloud passed over the sun, and Parker
leaned in farther under the suddenly deeper shadow beneath the umbrella,
returning his attention to Dominick, as if he had read his companion's
mind.  "All right, let's brainstorm.  Let's find some sort of
explanation and figure out what to do.  You don't think the problem's
just related to stress ...  the upcoming publication of your book?"

"I did.  But not any more.  I mean, if the problem was just a mild one,
I might be able to accept that career worries lay behind it.  But,
Jesus, my concerns about Twilight just aren't great enough to generate
behavior this unusual, this obsessive .  .  .  this crazy.  I go walking
almost every night now, and it's not just the walking that's weird.  The
depth of my trance is incredible.  Few sleepwalkers are as utterly
comatose as I am, and few of them engage in such elaborate tasks as I
do. I mean, I was attempting to nail the windows shut!  And you don't
attempt to nail your windows shut just to keep out your worries about
your career."

"You may be more deeply worried about Twilight than you realize."

"No.  It doesn't make sense.  In fact, when the new book continued to go
well, my anxiety about Twilight started fading.  You can't sit there and
honestly tell me you think all this middle-of-the-night lunacy springs
just from a few career worries."

"No, I can't," Parker agreed.

"I crawl into the backs of those closets to hide.  And when I wake up
behind the furnace, when I'm still half-asleep, I have the feeling that
something's stalking me, searching for me, something that'll kill me if
it finds my hidey-hole.  A couple of mornings I woke up trying to scream
but unable to get it out.  Yesterday, I woke up shouting, 'Stay away,
stay away, stay away!" And this morning, the knife .  .  ."

"Knife?" Parker said.  "You didn't tell me about a knife."

"Woke up behind the furnace, hiding again.  Had a butcher's knife.  I'd
removed it from the rack in the kitchen while I was sleeping."

"For protection?  From what?"

"From whatever .  .  .  from whoever's stalking me."

"And who is stalking you?"

Dom shrugged.  "Nobody that I'm aware of."

"I don't like this.  You could've cut yourself, maybe badly."

"That's not what scares me the most."

"So what scares you the most?"

Dom looked around at the other people on the terrace. Though some had
followed Parker Faine's bit of theater with the waiter, no one was now
paying the least attention to him or Dominick.

"What scares you the most?" Parker repeated.

"That I might .  .  .  might cut someone else."

Incredulous, Faine said, "You mean take a butcher's knife and ...  go on
a murdering rampage in your sleep?  No chance."

He gulped his margarita.  "Good heavens, what a melodramatic notion!
Thankfully, your fiction is not quite so sloppily imagined.  Relax, my
friend.  You're not the homicidal type."

"I didn't think I was the sleepwalking type, either."

"Oh, bullshit.  There's an explanation for this.  You're not mad. Madmen
never doubt their sanity."

"I think I'm going to have to see a psychiatrist, a counselor of some
kind.  And have a few medical tests."

"The medical tests, yes.  But put a hold on the psychiatrist. That's a
waste of time.  You're no more neurotic than psychotic."

The waiter returned with more nachos, salsa, a dish of chopped onions, a
beer, and a fifth margarita.

Parker surrendered his empty glass, took the full one.  He scooped up
some of the corn chips with generous globs of guacamole and sour cream,
spooned some onions on top, and ate with an appreciation only one step
removed from manic glee.

"I wonder if this problem of yours is somehow related to the changes you
underwent two summers ago."

Puzzled, Dom said, "What changes?"

"You know what I'm talking about.  When I first met you in Portland six
years ago, you were a pale, retiring, unadventurous slug."

"Slug?"

"It's true, and you know it.  You were bright, talented, but a slug
nonetheless.  You know why you were a slug?  I'll tell you why.  You had
all those brains and all that talent, but you were afraid to use them.
You were afraid of competition, failure, success, life.  You just wanted
to plod along, unnoticed.  You dressed drably, spoke almost inaudibly,
dreaded calling attention to yourself.  You took refuge in the academic
world because there was less competition there.  God, man, you were a
timid rabbit burrowing in the earth and curling up in its den."

"Oh, yeah?  If I was all that disgusting, why on earth did you ever go
out of your way to strike up a friendship with me?"

"Because, you thick-headed booby, I saw through your masquerade.  I saw
beyond the timidity, saw through the practiced dullness and the mask of
insipidness.  I sensed something special in you, saw glimpses and
glimmers of it.  That's what I do, you know.  I see what other people
can't.  That's what any good artist does.  He sees what most cannot."

"And you called me insipid?"

"It's true-about what an artist does and about you being a rabbit.
Remember how long you knew me before you found enough confidence to
admit being a writer?  Three months!"

"Well, in those days, I wasn't really a writer."

"You had drawers full of stories!  More than a hundred short stories,
not one of which had ever been submitted to any publication anywhere!
Not just because you were afraid of rejection.  You were afraid of
acceptance, too.  Afraid of success.  How many months did I have to
hammer at you till you finally sent a couple to market?"

"I don't remember."

"I do.  Six months!  I wheedled and cajoled and demanded and pushed and
nagged until you broke down and started submitting stories.  I'm a
persuasive character, but prying you out of your rabbit hole was almost
beyond even my formidable talent for persuasion."

With an almost obscene enthusiasm, Parker scooped up dripping masses of
nachos and stuffed himself.  After slurping his margarita, he said,
"Even when your short stories started selling, you wanted to stop.  I
had to push you constantly. And after I left Oregon and came back here,
when I left you on your own again, you only continued to submit stories
for a few months.  Then you crawled back into your rabbit hole."

Dom did not argue because everything the painter said was true.  After
leaving Oregon and returning to his home in Laguna, Parker continued to
encourage Dom through letters and phone calls, but long-distance
encouragement was insufficient to motivate him.  He'd convinced himself
that, after all, he was not a writer worthy of publication, in spite of
more than a score of sales he'd racked up in less than a year.  He
stopped sending his stories to magazines and quickly fabricated another
shell to replace the one Parker had helped him break out of.  Though he
was still compelled to produce stories, he reverted to his previous
habit of consigning them to his deepest desk drawer, with no thought of
marketing them. Parker had continued to urge him to write a novel, but
Dom had been certain that his talent was too humble and that he was too
lacking in self-discipline to tackle such a large and complex project.
He tucked his head down once more, spoke softly, walked softly, and
tried to live a life that was largely beneath notice.

"But the summer before last, all of that changed," Parker said.
"Suddenly you throw away your teaching career.  You take the plunge and
become a full-time writer.  Almost overnight, you change from an
accountant type to a risk-taker, a Bohemian.  Why?  You've never been
clear about that.  Why?"

Dominick frowned, considered the question for a moment, and was
surprised that he had not thought about it much before this.  "I don't
know why.  I really don't know."

At the University of Portland, he had been up for tenure, had felt that
he would not be given it, and had grown panicky at the prospect of being
cast loose from his sheltered moorings.  Obsessed with keeping a low
profile, he had faded too completely from the notice of the campus
movers-and-shakers, and when the time arrived for the tenure board to
consider him, they had begun to question whether he had embraced the
University with sufficient enthusiasm to warrant a grant of lifetime
employment.  Dom was enough of a realist to see that, if the board
refused tenure, he would find it difficult to obtain a position at
another university, for the hiring committee would want to know why he
had been turned down at Portland.  In an uncharacteristic burst of
self-promotion, hoping to slip out from under the university's ax before
it fell, he applied for positions at institutions in several Western
states, emphasizing his published stories because that was the only
thing worth emphasizing.

Mountainview College in Utah, with a student body of only four thousand,
had been so impressed by the list of magazines in which he had published
that they flew him from Portland for an interview.  Dom made a
considerable effort to be more outgoing than he had ever been before. He
was offered a contract to teach English and creative writing with
guaranteed tenure.  He had accepted, if not with enormous delight then
at least with enormous relief.

Now, on the terrace of Las Brisas, as the California sun slid out from
behind a band of white jeweled clouds, he took a sip of his beer,
sighed, and said, "I left Portland late in June that year.  I had a
U-Haul trailer hooked to the car, just a small one, filled mostly with
books and clothes.  I was in a good mood.  Didn't feel as if I'd failed
at Portland.  Not at all.  I just felt .  .  .  well, that I was getting
a fresh start.  I was really looking forward to life at Mountainview. In
fact, I don't remember ever being happier than the day I hit the road."

Parker Faine nodded knowingly.  "Of course you were happy!

You had tenure in a hick school, where not much would be expected of
you, where your introversion would be excused as an artist's
temperament."

"A perfect rabbit hole, huh?"

"Exactly.  So why didn't you wind up teaching in Mountainview?"

"I told you before .  .  .  at the last minute, when I got there the
second week in July, I just couldn't bear the idea of going on with the
kind of life I'd had before.  I was tired of being a mouse, a rabbit."

"Just like that, you were repelled by the low-key life.  Why?"

"It wasn't very fulfilling."

"But why were you tired of it all of a sudden?"

"I don't know."

"You must have some idea.  Haven't you thought about it a lot?"

"Surprisingly, I haven't," Dom said.  He stared out to sea for a long
moment, watching a dozen sailboats and a large yacht as they moved
majestically along the coast.  "I just now realized how amazingly little
I've thought about it.  Strange I'm usually too self-analytical for my
own good, but in this case I've never probed very deeply."

"Ah ha!" Parker exclaimed.  "I knew I was on the right trail!  The
changes you went through then are somehow related to the problems you're
having now.  So go on.  So you told the people at Mountainview that you
didn't want their job any more?"

"They weren't happy."

"And you took a tiny apartment in town."

"One room, plus kitchen and bath.  Not much of a place. Nice view of the
mountains, though."

"Decided to live on your savings while you wrote a novel?"

"There wasn't a lot in the bank, but I'd always been frugal."

"Impulsive behavior.  Risky.  And not a damn bit like you," Parker said.
"So why did you do it?  What changed you?"

"I guess it was building for a long time.  By the time I got to
Mountainview, my dissatisfaction was so great that I had to change."

Parker leaned back in his chair.  "No good, my friend. There must be
more to it than that.  Listen, by your own admission, you were as happy
as a pig in shit when you left Portland with your U-Haul.  You had a job
with a livable salary, guaranteed tenure, in a place where no one was
ever going to demand too much of you.  All you had to do was settle down
in Mountainview and disappear.  But by the time you got there, you
couldn't wait to throw it all over, move into a garret, and risk
eventual starvation, all for your art. What the hell happened to you
during that long drive to Utah?

Something must've given you a real jolt, something big enough to knock
you out of your complacency."

"Nope.  It was an uneventful trip."

"Not inside your head, it wasn't."

Dominick shrugged.  "As far as I remember, I just relaxed, enjoyed the
drive, took my time, looked at the scenery.  .  .  ."

"Amigo!" Parker roared, startling their waiter, who was passing by. "Uno
margarita!  And another cerveza for my friend."

"No, no," Dom said.  "- I"

"You haven't finished that beer," Parker said.  "I know, I know.  But
you are going to finish it and drink another, and gradually you're going
to loosen up, and we're going to get to the bottom of this sleepwalking.
I'm sure it's related to the changes you underwent the summer before
last.  You know why I'm so sure?  I'll tell you why I'm so sure.  Nobody
under goes two personality crises in two years for utterly unrelated
reasons.  The two have to be tied together somehow."

Dom grimaced.  "I wouldn't exactly call this a personality crisis."

"Oh, wouldn't you?" Leaning forward, lowering his shaggy head, putting
all the force of his powerful personality behind the question, Parker
said, "Wouldn't you really call it a crisis, my friend?"

Dom sighed.  "Well .  .  .  yeah.  I guess maybe I would.  A crisis."

They left Las Brisas late that afternoon, without arriving at any
answers.  That night, when he went to bed, he was filled with dread,
wondering where he would find himself in the morning.

And in the morning, he virtually exploded out of sleep with a shrill
scream and found himself in total, claustrophobic darkness.  Something
had hold of him, something cold and clammy and strange and alive.  He
struck out blindly, flailed and clawed, twisted and kicked, freed
himself, scrambled away in panic, through the cloying blackness, on his
hands and knees, until he collided with a wall.  The lightless room
reverberated with thunderous pounding and shouting, an unnerving
cacophony, the source of which he could not identify. He scrambled along
the baseboard until he came to a junction of walls, where he put his
back into the corner and faced out upon the lightless chamber, certain
that the clammy creature would leap on him from the gloom.

What was in the room with him?

The noise grew louder: shouting, hammering, a crash followed by a
clatter-rattle of wood, more shouting, and another crash.

Still groggy from sleep, his senses distorted by hysteria and excess
adrenaline, Dom was convinced that the thing from which he had been
hiding had at last come for him.  He had tried to fool it by sleeping in
closets and behind the furnace. But tonight it would not be deceived: it
meant to have him; he could hide no longer; the end had come.

From the darkness, someone or something shouted his name-"Dom!"-and he
realized that someone had been calling to him for the last minute or
two, maybe longer.

"Dominick, answer me!"

Another'shuddering crash.  The brittle crack of splintering wood.

Huddling in the corner, Dom finally woke completely.  The clammy
creature had not been real.  A figment of a dream. He recognized the
voice calling to him as that of Parker Faine. Even as the residual
hysteria of his nightmare subsided, another crash, the loudest of all,
generated a chain-reaction of destruction, a
crackling-sliding-scraping-toppling-crashingbooming-clattering-rattling
that culminated with the opening of a door and the intrusion of light
into the darkness.

Dom squinted against the glare and saw Parker silhouetted like some
hulking troll in the bedroom door, the hall light behind him.  The door
had been locked, and Parker had forced it, had thrown himself against it
until the lock disintegrated.

"Dominick, buddy, are you okay?"

The door had been barricaded as well, which had made entrance even more
difficult.  Dom saw that, in his sleep, he had evidently moved the
dresser in front of the door, had stacked the two nightstands atop the
dresser, and had put the bedroom armchair in front of it.  Those
overturned pieces of furniture now lay on the floor in a jumbled heap.

Parker stepped into the room.  "Buddy?  Are you all right?

You were screaming.  I could hear you clear out in the driveway."

"A dream."

"Must've been a lulu."

"I can't remember what it was," Dom said, remaining on the floor, in the
corner, too exhausted and weak-kneed to get up.  "You're a sight for
sore eyes, Parker.  But ...  what on earth are you doing here?"

Parker blinked.  "Don't you know?  You phoned me.  Not more than ten
minutes ago.  You were shouting for help.  You said they were here and
were going to get you.  Then you hung up."

Dom felt humiliation settle over him as if it were a painful burn.

"Ah, so you did make the call in your sleep," the painter said. "Thought
as much.  You sounded ...  not yourself.  Maybe I should've called the
police, but I suspected this sleepwalking thing.  Knew you wouldn't want
it brought into the open in front of strangers, a bunch of cops."

"I'm out of control, Parker.  Something's .  .  .  snapping inside me."

"That's enough of that crap.  I won't listen to any more of it."

Dom felt like a helpless child.  He was afraid he was going to cry.  He
bit his tongue, squeezed back the tears, cleared his throat, and said,
"What time is it?"

"A few minutes after four.  Middle of the night." Parker looked toward
the window and frowned.

Following the other man's gaze, Dom saw that the draperies were drawn
tight shut and that the highboy had been moved in front of the window,
barring entrance by that route.  He had been busy in his sleep.

"Oh, Christ," Parker said, moving to the bed, where he stopped, a vivid
expression of shock on his broad face.  "This is no good, my friend.
This is no good at all."

Holding on to the wall, Dom rose shakily to his feet to see what Parker
was talking about, but when he saw it, he wished he had remained on the
floor.  An arsenal was laid out on the bed: the .22 automatic that he
usually kept in his nightstand; a butcher's knife; two other meat
knives; a cleaver; a hammer; the ax he used for splitting firewood and
which, the last he remembered, had been in the garage.

Parker said, "What were you expecting-a Soviet invasion?  What frightens
you so?"

"I don't know.  Something in my nightmares."

"So what do you dream about?"

"I don't know."

"You can't remember any of it?"

"No." He shivered again, violently.

Parker came to him, put a hand on his shoulder.  "You better take a
shower, get dressed.  I'll start rustling up some breakfast.  Okay? Then
I .  .  .  I think we'd better pay a visit to that doctor of yours as
soon as his office opens.  I think he's got to take a second look at
you."

Dominick nodded.

It was December 2.

December 2-December 16

Boston, Massachusetts

Viola Fletcher, a fifty-eight-year-old elementary-school teacher, mother
of two daughters, wife of a devoted husband, a wry and witty woman with
an infectious laugh, was silent now and still, lying on the operating
table, unconscious, her life in Dr.  Ginger Weiss's hands.

Ginger's entire life had been a funnel, focusing on this moment: for the
first time, she was assuming the senior surgeon's role in a major and
complicated procedure .  Years of arduous education, an immeasurable
weight of hopes and dreams, lay behind her ascension to this moment. She
had a prideful yet humbling sense of just how great a distance her
journey had covered.

And she was half sick with dread.

Mrs.  Fletcher had been anesthetized and draped in cool green sheets.
None of the patient's body was visible except that portion of her torso
on which surgery would be performed, a neat square of flesh painted with
iodine and framed by lime-colored cloth.  Even her face was out of sight
beneath tented sheeting, as an added precaution against airborne
contamination of the wound that would shortly be made in her abdomen.
The effect was to depersonalize the patient, and perhaps that was in
part the intent of the draping, as well, thereby sparing the surgeon the
need to look upon the human face of agony and death if, God forbid,-his
skill and education should fail him.

On Ginger's right, Agatha Tandy, the surgical technician, stood ready
with spreaders, rakes, hemostats, scalpels, and other instruments.  On
her left, a scrub nurse was prepared to assist.  Another scrub nurse,
the circulating nurse, the anesthesiologist, and his nurse also waited
for the procedure to begin.

George Hannaby stood on the other side of the table, looking less like a
doctor than like the former star fullback on a pro football team.  His
wife, Rita, had once talked him into playing Paul Bunyan in a comedy
sketch for a hospital charity show, and he had appeared at home in
woodsman's boots, jeans, and a red plaid shirt.  He brought with him an
aura of strength, calmness, and competency that was most reassuring.

Ginger held out her right hand.

Agatha put a scalpel in it.

A keen, thin, bright curve of light outlined the razor-sharp edge of the
instrument.

Hand poised over the score lines on the patient's torso, Ginger
hesitated and took a deep breath.

George's stereo tape deck stood on a small table in the corner, and
familiar strains of Bach issued from the speakers.

She was remembering the ophthalmoscope, the shiny black gloves.  .  .  .

However, as frightening as those incidents had been, they had not
utterly destroyed her self-confidence.  She had felt fine ever since the
most recent attack: strong, alert, energetic. If she had noticed the
slightest weariness or fuzzy-mindedness, she would have canceled this
procedure.  On the other hand, she had not acquired her education, had
not worked seven days a week all these years, only to throw away her
future because of two aberrant moments of stress-related hysteria.
Everything was going to be fine, just fine.

The wall clock said seven-forty-two.  Time to get on with it.

She made the-first cut.  With hemostats and clamps and a faultless skill
that always surprised her, she moved deeper, constructing a shaft
through skin, fat, and muscle, into the center of the patient's belly.
Soon the incision was large enough to accommodate both her hands and
those of her assisting physician, George Hannaby, if his help should be
required. The scrub nurses moved close to the table, one on each side,
grasped the sculpted handles of the retractors, and pulled back gently
on them, drawing apart the walls of the wound.

Agatha Tandy picked up a fluffy, absorbent cloth and quickly blotted
Ginger's forehead, careful to avoid the jeweler's lenses that protruded
from her operating glasses.

Above his mask, George's eyes squinted in a smile.  He was not sweating.
He seldom did.

Ginger swiftly tied off bleeders and removed clamps, and Agatha ordered
new supplies from the circulating nurse.

In the brief blank spaces between Bach's concertos and in the silence at
the end of the tape before it was turned over, the loudest sounds in the
tile-walled room were the sibilant exhalations and groaning inhalations
of the artificial lung machine that breathed for Viola Fletcher.  The
patient could not breathe for herself because she was paralyzed by a
curarederived muscle relaxant.  Though entirely mechanical, those sounds
possessed a haunting quality that made it impossible for Ginger to
overcome her apprehension.

On other days, when George cut, there was more talk.  He traded quips
with the nurses and the assisting resident, using light banter to reduce
the tension without also reducing concentration on the vital task at
hand.  Ginger was simply not up to that sort of dazzling performance,
which seemed akin to playing basketball, chewing gum, and solving
difficult mathematical problems at the same time.

Having completed the excursion into the belly, she ran the colon with
both hands and determined that it was healthy. With damp gauze pads
provided by Agatha, Ginger cradled the intestines, placed the hoe-like
blades of the retractors against them, and turned them over to the scrub
nurses, who held them out of the way, thus exposing the aorta, the main
trunkline of the body's arterial system.

From the chest, the aorta entered the belly through the diaphragm,
running parallel to the spine.  Immediately above the groin, it split
into two iliac arteries leading to the femoral arteries in the legs.

"There it is," Ginger said.  "An aneurysm.  Just like in the X rays." As
if to confirm it, she glanced at the patient's X ray that was fixed on
the light screen,'on the wall at the foot of the operating table.  "A
dissecting aneurysm, just above the aortic saddle."

Agatha blotted Ginger's forehead.

The aneurysm, a weakness in the wall of the aorta, had permitted the
artery to bulge outward on both sides, forming a dumbbell-shaped
extrusion full of blood, which beat like a second heart.  This condition
caused difficulty in swallowing, extreme shortness of breath, severe
coughing, and chest pains; and if the bulging vessel burst, death
followed swiftly.

As Ginger stared at the pulsing aneurysm, an almost religious sense of
mystery overcame her, a profound awe, as if she had stepped out of the
real world into a mystic sphere, where the very meaning of life was soon
to be revealed to her.  Her feeling of power, of transcendence, rose
from the realization that she could do battle with death-and win. Death
was lurking there in the body of her patient right now, in the form of
the throbbing aneurysm, a dark bud waiting to flower, but she had the
skill and training to banish it.

From a sterile package, Agatha Tandy had taken a section of artificial
aorta-a thick, ribbed tube that split into two smaller tubes, the iliac
arteries.  It was woven entirely of Dacrol.  Ginger positioned it over
the wound, trimmed it to fit with a pair of small sharp scissors, and
returned it to the technician.  Agatha put the white graft in a shallow
stainlesssteel tray that already contained some of the patient's blood,
and swished it back and forth to wet it thoroughly.

The graft would be allowed to soak until it had clotted a bit.  Once it
was installed in the patient, Ginger would run some blood through it,
clamp it, allow that blood to clot a bit more, then flush it out before
actually sewing it in place. The thin layer of clotted blood would help
prevent seepage, and in time the steady flow of blood would form a
neointima, a leak-proof new lining virtually indistinguishable from that
in a real artery.  The amazing thing was that the Dacron vessel was not
merely an adequate substitute for the damaged section of aorta but was,
in fact, actually superior to what nature had provided; five hundred
years from now, when nothing remained of Viola Fletcher but dust and
time-worn bones, the Dacron graft would still be intact, still flexible
and strong.

Agatha blotted Ginger's forehead.

"How do you feel?" George asked.

"Fine," Ginger said.

"Tense?"

"Not really," she lied.

He said, "It's a genuine pleasure watching you work, Doctor."

"I'll second that," said one of the scrub nurses.

"Me, too," the other said.

"Thanks," Ginger said, surprised and pleased.

George said, "You have a certain grace in surgery, a lightness of touch,
a splendid sensitivity of hand and eye that is, I'm sorry to say, not at
all common in the profession."

Ginger knew that he never gave voice to an insincere compliment, but
coming from such a stern taskmaster, this bordered on excessive
flattery.  By God, George Hannaby was proud of her!  That realization
flooded her with warm emotion.  If she had been anywhere but in an
operating room, tears would have come to her eyes, but here she kept a
tighter rein on her feelings.  However, the intensity of her reaction to
his words made her aware of how completely he had filled the role of
father-figure in her life; she took nearly as much satisfaction from his
praise as she would have taken if it had come from Jacob Weiss himself.

Ginger proceeded with the operation in better spirits.  The disturbing
possibility of a seizure slowly receded from her thoughts, and greater
confidence allowed her to work with even more grace than before. Nothing
could go wrong now.

She set about methodically controlling the flow of blood through the
aorta, carefully exposing and temporarily clamping all branching
vessels, using thin elastic loops of extremely pliable plastic tubing to
valve off the smaller vessels, placing mosquito clamps and bulldog
clamps on the larger arteries, including the iliacs and the aorta
itself.  In little less than an hour, she had stopped all blood flow
through the aorta to the patient's legs, and the throbbing aneurysm had
ceased its mocking imitation of the heart.

With a small scalpel, she punctured the aneurysm, releasing a pool of
blood; the aorta deflated.  She sliced it open along its anterior wall.
At that moment, the patient was without an aorta, more helpless and more
dependent upon the surgeon than at any other time.  There was no going
back now.  From this point on, the operation must be conducted not only
with the greatest care but with the most prudent speed.

A hush had fallen on the surgical team.  What little conversation there
had been now ceased.  The Bach tape had reached the end again, and no
one moved to turn it over. Time was measured by the wheezing and sucking
of the artificial lung machine and by the beeping of the EKG.

Ginger removed the Dacron graft from the steel tray, where it had been
soaking up blood and clotting precisely as desired.

She sewed the top of it into the aortal trunk, using an extremely fine
thread.  Then, with the top of the graft sewn in place and the
unattached bottom clamped off, Ginger filled it with blood to let it
clot again.

Throughout these steps of the operation, it had not been necessary for
Ginger to have the sweat blotted from her forehead.  She hoped that
George noticed her new dryness-she was sure he did.

Without needing to be told that it was once again time for music, the
circulating nurse reset the Bach tape.

Hours of work lay ahead of Ginger, but she pressed on without the least
weariness.  She moved down the draped body, folding back the green
sheets,,revealing both of the patient's thighs.  With the help of the
circulating nurse, Agatha had replenished the instrument tray and was
ready now with everything that Ginger needed to make two more incisions,
one in each of the patient's legs, below the inguineal creases, where
the legs attached to the body trunk.  Clamping and tying off vessels,
Ginger eventually exposed and separated the remoral arteries.  As with
the aorta before, she used thin elastic tubing and a variety of clamps
to valve off the blood flow through these vascular fields, then opened
both arteries where the bifurcated legs of the graft would attach to
them.  A couple of times she caught herself humming along happily with
the music, and the ease with which she worked made it seem almost as if
she had been a surgeon in an earlier life, now reincarnated into the
elite brotherhood of the caduceus, predestined for this labor.

But she should have remembered her father and his aphorisms, the bits of
wisdom that he had collected and with which he had gently lectured or
patiently admonished her on those rare occasions when she had been less
than well behaved Or when she had failed to do her very best in school.
Time waits for no man; God helps those who help themselves; a penny
saved is a penny earned; resentment hurts only those who harbor it,-
judge not that ye be not judged....  He had a thousand of them, but
there was none he liked better and none he repeated more often than this
one: Pride goeth before a great fall.

She should have remembered those six words.  The operation was going so
well, and she was so happy with her work,

so proud of her performance in this first major solo flight, that she
forgot about the inevitable great fall.

Returning to the opened abdomen, she unclamped the bottom of the Dacron
graft, flushed it out, then tunneled the twin legs of it beneath the
untouched flesh of the groin, beneath the inguineal creases, and into
the incisions she had made in the femoral arteries.  She stitched in
both terminuses of the bifurcated graft, unclamped the restricted
vascular network, and watched with delight as the pulse returned to the
patched aorta.  For twenty minutes, she searched for leaks and knitted
them up with fine, strong thread.  For another five minutes, she watched
closely, in silence, as the graft throbbed like any normal, healthy
arterial vessel, without any sign of chronic seepage.

At last she said, "Time to close up."

"Beautifully done," George said.

Ginger was glad she was wearing a surgical mask, for beneath it her face
was stretched by a smile so broad that she must have looked like the
proverbial grinning idiot.

She closed the incisions in the patient's legs.  She took the intestines
from the nurses, who were clearly exhausted and eager to relinquish the
retractors.  She replaced the guts in the body and gently ran them once
again, searching for irregularities but finding none.  The rest was
easy: laying fat and muscle back in place, closing up, layer by layer,
until the original incision was drawn shut with heavy black cord.

The anesthesiologist's nurse undraped Viola Fletcher's head.

The anesthesiologist untaped her eyes, turned off the anesthesia.

The circulating nurse cut Bach off in mid-passage.

Ginger looked at Mrs.  Fletcher's face, pale now but not unusually
drawn.  The mask of the respirator was still on her face, but she was
getting only an oxygen mixture.

The nurses backed away and skinned off their rubber gloves.

Viola Fletcher's eyelids fluttered, and she groaned.

"Mrs.  Fletcher?" the anesthesiologist said loudly.

The patient did not respond.

"Viola?" Ginger said.  "Can you hear me, Viola?"

The woman's eyes did not open, but though she was more asleep than
awake, her lips moved, and in a fuzzy voice she said, "Yes, Doctor."

Ginger accepted congratulations from the team and left the room with
George.  As they stripped off their gloves, pulled off their masks, and
removed their caps, she felt as if she were filled with helium, in
danger of breaking loose of the bonds of gravity.  But with each step
toward the scrub sinks in the surgical hall, she became less buoyant.  A
tremendous exhaustion settled over her.  Her neck and shoulders ached.
Her back was sore.  Her legs were stiff, and her feet were tired.

"My God," she said, "I'm pooped!"

"You should be," George said.  "You started at seventhirty, and it's
past the lunch hour.  An aortal graft is damned debilitating."

"You feel this way when you've done one?"

"Of course."

"But it hit me so suddenly.  In there, I felt great.  I felt I could go
on for hours yet."

"In there," George said with evident affection and amusement, "you were
godlike, dueling with death and winning, and no god ever grows weary.
Godwork is too much fun to ever get weary of it."

At the sinks, they turned on the water, took off the surgical gowns
they'd worn over their hospital greens, and broke open packets of soap.

As Ginger began to wash her hands, she leaned wearily against the sink
and bent forward a bit, so she was looking straight down at the drain,
at the water swirling around the stainless-steel basin, at the bubbles
of soap whirling with the water, all of it funneling into the drain,
around and around and down into the drain, around and down, down and
down.  .  .  .  This time, the irrational fear struck and overwhelmed
her with even less warning than at Bernstein's Deli or in George's
office last Wednesday.  In an instant her at-' tention had become
entirely focused upon the drain.  which appeared to throb and grow wider
as if it were suddenly possessed of malignant life.

She dropped the soap and, with a bleat of terror, jumped back from the
sink, collided with Agatha Tandy, cried out again.  She vaguely heard
George calling her name.  But he was fading away in the manner of an
image on a motion picture screen, retreating into a mist, as if he were
part of a scene that was dissolving to a full-lens shot of steam or
clouds or fog, and he no longer seemed real.  Agatha Tandy and the
hallway and the doors to the surgery were fading, too.  Everything was
fading but the sink, which appeared to grow larger and more solid,
super-real.  A sense of mortal danger settled over her.  But it was just
an ordinary scrub sink, for God's sake, and she had to hold on to that
truth, clutch at the cliff of reality and resist the forces pulling her
over the edge.  Just a sink.  Just an ordinary drain.  Just She ran.
From every side, the mist closed around her, and she lost all conscious
awareness of her actions.

The first thing she became aware of was the snow.  Large white flakes
sifted past her face, gently turning, lazily eddying toward the ground
in the manner of fluffy airborne dandelion seeds, for there was no wind
to drive them.  She raised her head, looked up beyond the towering walls
of the old highrise buildings that shouldered in around her, and saw a
rectangular patch of low gray sky, from which the snow descended.  As
she stared into the winter heavens, momentarily confused as to her
whereabouts and condition, her hair and eyebrows grew white.  Flakes
melted on her face, but she slowly realized that her cheeks were already
wet with tears and that she was still weeping quietly.

Gradually, the cold impinged upon her.  In spite of the absence of wind,
the air was sharp-toothed; it bit her cheeks, nipped her chin, and her
hands were numb from the cold venom of countless bites.  The chill
penetrated her hospital greens, and she was shivering uncontrollably.

Next she became aware of the freezing concrete beneath her and the
ice-cold brick wall against her back.  She was squeezed into a corner,
facing out, knees drawn up to her chin, arms locked around her legs-a
posture of defense and terror.  Her body heat was being leeched away
through every contact point with pavement and masonry, but she did not
have the strength or will to get to her feet and go inside.

She remembered fixating upon the drain of the scrub sink. With
unmitigated despair, she recalled the mindless panic, her collision with
Agatha Tandy, the startled look on George Hannaby's face as he had
reacted to her screams.  Although the rest was a blank, she supposed she
had then taken flight from imaginary dangers, like some madwoman, to the
shock of her colleagues-and to the certain destruction of her career.

She pressed harder against the brick wall, wishing that it would suck
away her body heat even faster.

She was sitting at the end of a wide alley, a blind serviceway that led
into the core of the hospital complex.  To her left, double metal doors
led into the furnace room, and beyond those was the exit from the
emergency stairs.

Inevitably, she was reminded of her encounter with a mugger during her
internship at Columbia Presbyterian in New York.  That night, he had
dragged her into an alleyway much like this.  However, in the New York
alleyway, she had been in command, victorious-while here she was a
loser, descendant rather than ascendant, weak and lost.  She perceived a
bleak irony and a frightening symmetry in having been brought to the
lowest point of her life in such a place as this.

Premed, medical school, the long hours and hardships of her intern year,
all the work and sacrifices, all the hopes and dreams had been for
nothing.  At the last minute, with a surgical career almost within her
grasp, she had failed George, Anna, Jacob, and herself.  She could no
longer deny the truth or ignore the obvious: Something was wrong with
her, something so desperately wrong that it would surely preclude the
resumption of a life in medicine.  Psychosis?  A brain tumor?

Perhaps an aneurysm in the brain?

The door to the emergency stairs was flung open with a rattle and a
screech of unoiled hinges, and George Hannaby came out into the snow,
breathing hard.  He took several quick steps into the alley, heedless of
the risk posed by the quarterinch skin of slippery new snow.  The sight
of her was sufficiently shocking to bring him to a lurching halt.  A
ghastly expression lined his face, and Ginger supposed he was regretting
the extra time and attention and special guidance that he had given her.
He had thought she was especially bright and good and worthy, but now
she had proved him wrong.  He had been so kind to her and so supportive
that her betrayal of his trust, although beyond her control, filled her
with self-loathing and brought more hot tears to her eyes.

"Ginger?" he said shakily.  "Ginger, what's wrong?"

She was able to respond only with a wretched, involuntary sob.

Seen through her tears, he shimmered, blurred.  She wished he'd go away
and leave her to stew in humiliation.  Didn't he know how much worse it
was to have him staring at her while she was in this condition?

The snow was falling harder.  Other people appeared in the doorway
through which he had come, but she could not identify them.

"Ginger, please talk to me," George said as he drew near. "What's wrong?
Tell me what's wrong.  Tell me what I can do."

She bit her lip, tried to repress her tears, but instead she began to
sob harder than ever.  In a thin, blubbery voice that sickened her with
proof of her own weakness, she said, "SSomething's wrong with me."

George stooped down in front of her.  "What?  What's wrong?"

"don't know."

She had always been able to handle any trouble that came her way,
unassisted.  She was Ginger Weiss.  She was different. She was a golden
girl.  She didn't know how to ask for help of this kind, of this degree.

Still stooping in front of her, George said, "Whatever it is, we can
work it out.  I know you're fiercely proud of your selfreliance.  You
listening, kid?  I've always stepped carefully when I'm with you because
I know you resent being helped along too much.  You want to do it all
yourself.  But this time you simply can't handle it alone, and you don't
have to.  I'm here, and by God you're going to lean on me whether you
like it or not.  You hear?"

"I ...  I've ruined everything.  I've (I-disappointed you."

He found a small smile.  "Not you, dear girl.  Not ever.  Rita and I
have had all sons, but if we could've had a daughter, we would've hoped
for one like you.  Exactly like you.  You're a special woman, Dr. Weiss,
a dear and special woman.  Disappoint me?  Impossible.  I would consider
it an honor and a pleasure if you would lean on me now, just as if you
were my daughter, and let me help you through this as if I were the
father you've lost."

He held out a hand to her.

She grasped it and held on tightly.

It was Monday, December 2.

Many weeks would pass before she learned that other people in other
places-all strangers to her-were living through eerie variations of her
own nightmare.

2.

Trenton, New Jersey

A few minutes before midnight, Jack Twist opened the door and left the
warehouse, stepping into the wind and sleet, and some guy was just
getting out of a gray Ford van at the foot of the nearest loading ramp.
The van's arrival had been masked by the rumble of a passing freight
train.  The night was deep around the warehouse, except for four meager
patches of murky yellow light from poorly maintained, grime-dimmed
security lamps.  Unfortunately, one of those lights was directly over
the door through which Jack had exited, and its sickly glow reached
precisely far enough to include the passenger's door of the van, out of
which the unexpected visitor had appeared.

The guy had a face made for police mug books: heavy jaw, a mouth that
was hardly more than a slash, a nose that had been broken a couple of
times, and hard little pig eyes.  He was one of those obedient but
pitiless sadists that the mob employed as enforcers, a man who, in other
times, might have been a rape and pillage specialist in the armies of
Genghis Khan, a grinning Nazi thug, a torture master in one of Stalin's
death camps, or a Morlock from the future as imagined by H.  G.  Wells
in The Time Machine.  To Jack, the guy looked like serious trouble.

They startled each other, and Jack did not immediately raise his .38 and
put a bullet in the bastard, which is what he should have done.

"Who the hell are you?" the Morlock asked.  Then he saw the canvas bag
that Jack was dragging with his left hand and the lowered pistol in
Jack's right hand.  His eyebrows shot up, and he shouted, "Max!,,

Max was probably the driver of the van, but Jack did not wait around for
formal introductions.  He did a quick reverse into the warehouse,
slammed the door shut, and stepped to the side of it in case someone out
there started using it for target practice.

The only light inside the warehouse came from the brightly lit office
far at the back of the building and from an overhead bank of widely
spaced, low-wattage bulbs set in tin shades, which were allowed to burn
all night.  But there was sufficient illumination for Jack to see the
faces of his two companionsMort Gersh and Tommy Sung-who had been
following him. They did not look as happy as they had been only a couple
of minutes ago.

They had been happy because they had successfully hit a major way
station on the route of the mafia cash train, a collection point for
narcotics money from half the state of New Jersey.  Suitcases and flight
bags and cardboard boxes and Styrofoam coolers full of cash arrived at
the warehouse from a score of couriers, most of it on Sunday and Monday.
Tuesdays, mob accountants in Pierre Cardin suits arrived to calculate
the week's profits from the pharmaceutical division. Every Wednesday,
suitcases full of tightly banded sacks of greenbacks went out to Miami,
Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, and other centers of high finance, where
investment advisers with Harvard or Columbia MBAS, on retainer to the
mafia-or fratellanza, as the underworld referred to itselfwisely put it
to work.  Jack, Mort, and Tommy had simply stepped in between the
accountants and the investment advisers, and had taken four heavy bags
full of cash for themselves.  "Just think of us as one more layer of
middlemen," Jack had told the three glowering thugs who were, even now,
tied up in the warehouse office, and Mort and Tommy had laughed.

Mort was not laughing now.  He was fifty years old, potbellied,
slump-shouldered, baking.  He wore a dark suit, pork-pie hat, and gray
overcoat.  He always wore a dark suit and pork-pie hat, though not
always the overcoat.  Jack had never seen him in anything else. Tonight,
Jack and Tommy were wearing jeans and quilted vinyl jackets, but there
was Mort looking like one of the guys in the background of an old Edward
G. Robinson movie.  The snapbrim of his hat had lost its sharp edge and
gone slightly soft, rather like Mort himself, and the suit was rumpled.
His voice was weary and dour.  He said, "Who's out there?" as Jack
slammed the door and stepped hastily away from it.

"At least two guys in a Ford van Jack said.

"Mob?"

"I only saw one of them," Jack said, "but he looked like one of Dr.
Frankenstein's experiments that didn't work out."

"At least all the doors are locked."

"They'll have keys."

The three of them moved quickly away from the exit, back into the deep
shadows in an aisle between piles of wooden crates and cardboard cartons
that were stacked on pallets. The merchandise formed twenty-foot-high
walls.  The warehouse was immense, with a wide array of goods stored
under its vaulted ceiling: hundreds of TV sets, microwave ovens,
blenders, and toasters by the thousands, tractor parts, plumbing
supplies, Cuisinarts, and more.  It was a clean, well-run establishment,
but as with any giant industrial building at night, the place was eerie
when all the workers were gone. Strange, whispery echoes floated along
the maze of aisles. Outside, the sleet fell harder than before, rustling
and ticking and tapping and hissing on the slate roof, as if a multitude
of unknown creatures moved through the rafters and inside the walls.

"I told you it was a mistake to hit the mob," Tommy Sung said.  He was a
Chinese-American, about thirty, which made him seven years younger than
Jack.  "Jewelry stores, armored cars, even banks, okay, but not the mob,
for God's sake.  It's stupid to hit the mob.  Might as well walk into a
bar full of Marines and spit on the flag."

"You're here," Jack said.

"Yeah, well," Tommy said, "I don't always show good judgment."

In a voice of doom and despair, Mort said, "A van shows up at this hour,
it means one thing.  They're delivering one kind of shit or another,
probably coke or horse.  Which means there won't be just the driver and
the ape you saw.  There'll be two other guys in the back of the van with
the merchandise, carrying converted Uzis or worse."

Tommy said, "Why aren't they already shooting their way in?"

"As far as they know," Jack said, "there's ten of us, and we have
bazookas.  They'll move cautiously."

"A truck used on dope runs is sure to have radio communications," Mort
said.  "They'll have already called for backup."

Tommy said, "You telling me the mafia has a fleet of radio vans like the
goddamned phone company or something?"

"These days, they're as organized as any business," Mort said.

They listened for sounds of purposeful human movement in farther reaches
of the building, but all they heard was sleet hitting the roof.

The .38 in Jack's hand suddenly felt like a toy.  Mort was carrying a
Smith & Wesson M39 9mm pistol, and Tommy had a Smith & Wesson Model 19
Combat Magnum that he had tucked inside his insulated jacket after the
men in the office had been securely tied up, when it had seemed that the
dangerous part of the job had been completed.  They were well armed, but
they were not ready to face down Uzis.  Jack remembered old
documentaries of hopelessly outclassed Hungarians trying to turn back
invading Russian tanks with rocks and sticks.  In times of trouble, Jack
Twist had a tendency to melodramatize his plight and, regardless of the
situation, to cast himself in the role of the noble underdog battling
the forces of evil.  He was aware of this tendency, and he thought it
was one of his most endearing qualities.  At the moment, however, their
position was so tenuous that there was no way to melodramatize it.

Mort's thoughts had led him to precisely the same consideration, for he
said, "There's no use trying to get out by any of the back doors.
They'll have split up by now-two in front, two in back."

The front and rear exits-both the regular doors and rollup cargo bay
doors-were the only ways out.  There were no openings, not even windows
or vents, on the sides of the enormous building, no basement and
therefore no basement exit, no way to get onto the roof.  In preparation
for the robbery, the three of them had studied detailed plans of the
building, and now they knew they were trapped.

Tommy said, "What are we going to do?"

The question was addressed to Jack Twist , not to Mort, because Jack
organized any robbery he took part in.  If unanticipated events required
improvisation, Jack was expected to come up with the brilliant ideas.

" Hey," Tommy said, taking a stab at brilliance himself,

why don't we go out the same way we got in!"

They had entered the building with a variation on the Trojan Horse ploy,
which was the only way to bypass the elaborate security systems that
were in operation at night.  The warehouse was a front for the illegal
drug trade, but it was also a real, functioning, profitable warehouse
that accepted regular shipments from legitimate businesses in need of
temporary storage for excess inventory.  Therefore, with the personal
computer and modern in his apartment, Jack had tapped into the computers
of both the warehouse and one of its reputable clients, and had created
the file of electronic paperwork that would legitimize the delivery of a
huge crate, which had arrived this morning and had been stored per
instructions.  He, Mort, and Tommy had been inside the crate, which had
been designed and constructed with five concealed exits, so they could
get out of it quietly even if it was blocked by other crates on four
sides.  A few minutes after eleven o'clock tonight, they had slipped out
and had surprised the tough guys in the office, who had been quite
confident that their multiple alarm systems and locked doors had
transformed the warehouse into an inviolable fortress.

"We could get back in the crate," Tommy said, "and when they finally
come in and don't find us, they'll go crazy trying to figure how we got
away.  By tomorrow night the heat'll be off.  Then we can slip out and
make our getaway."

"No good," Mort said sourly.  "They'll figure it out.  They'll search
this place until they find us."

"No good, Tommy," Jack agreed.  "Now, here's what I want you to
do.........  He quickly improvised an escape plan, and they assented to
it.

Tommy hurried to the master panel of light switches in the office, to
kill every light in the warehouse.

Jack and Mort dragged the four heavy bags of money toward the south end
of the long building, and the dry sound of canvas scraping along the
concrete floor echoed and reechoed through the chilly air.  At that far
end of the building, instead of more stacks of merchandise, there were
several trucks that had been parked in the interior staging area, where,
first thing in the morning, they would be loaded.  Jack and Mort were
less than halfway through the maze, still half a city block from the
semis, when the dim lights winked out and the warehouse was plunged into
unrelieved darkness. They paused long enough for Jack to switch on his
Eveready before continuing through the gloom.

Bearing his own flashlight, Tommy rejoined them and took one of the bags
from Jack, one from Mort.

The clicking impact and susurrant slide of sleet upon the roof began to
subside slightly as the storm entered a lull, and Jack thought he heard
the screech of brakes outside.  Could reinforcements have arrived so
soon?

The warehouse's interior loading zone contained four eighteen-wheelers:
a Peterbilt, a White, and two Mack trucks. Each of them faced out toward
a loading-bay door.

Jack went to the nearest Mack, dropped his sack of money, stepped up on
the running board, opened the door, and shone his flashlight inside,
along the dashboard.  The keys dangled from the ignition.  He had
expected as much.  Confident of their multilayered security system, the
warehouse employees did not believe there was any danger that one of
these vehicles might be stolen during the night.

Jack and Mort went to the other three trucks, found keys in all of them,
and started the engines.

In the cab of the first Mack, there was a sleeping berth behind the
seat, where one member of a long-distance driving team could catch a nap
while his partner took the wheel. Tommy Sung stowed the four bags of
money in that recess.

Jack returned to the Mack just as Tommy finished with the sacks.  He
settled in behind the wheel and switched off his flashlight.  Mort got
in on the passenger's side.  Jack started the engine but did not switch
on the headlights.

All four trucks were idling noisily now.

Carrying his flashlight, Tommy ran to the farthest of the four big
roll-down doors of the interior loading zone and touched the control
that started it moving laboriously upward on its track.  Jack watched
him tensely from the high seat of the big rig.  Tommy hurried back along
that outer wall, his progress marked by the bobbling beam of his flash,
slapping his right hand against the door controls as he came to each of
them.  Then, snapping off his flashlight, he bolted toward the Mack as
the four doors slowly lumbered open with much grating and clattering.

Outside, the Morlocks would know the doors were going up, would hear the
trucks' engines.  But they'd be looking into a dark building, and until
they could throw some light in here, they couldn't know which rig was
the intended escape vehicle.  They might spray all of the trucks with
submachinegun fire, but Jack was counting on gaining a few precious
seconds before they opted for that violent course of action.

Tommy clambered up into the cab of the Mack, pulling the door shut
behind him, sandwiching Mort between himself and Jack.

"Damn rollers move too slow," Mort said as the bay doors clattered
toward the ceiling, gradually revealing the sleetlashed night beyond.

"Drive through the sucker," Tommy urged.

Fastening his seatbelt, Jack said, "Can't risk getting hung up."

The door was one-third open.

Gripping the wheel with both hands again, Jack saw movement in the
murky, wintry world beyond, where the few dim exterior security lights
did little to push back the darkness. Two men hurried across the wet and
icy blacktop, from the left, slipping and skidding, both of them armed,
one of them with what appeared to be an Uzi.  They were trying to stay
low to make poor targets of themselves and trying to stay on their feet
at the same time, squinting into the black warehouse under the rising
bay doors, and as yet they had not thought of meeting the crisis with an
indiscriminate spray of bullets.

The first door, the one in front of Jack, was halfway up.

Abruptly, angling in from the left, the same direction from which the
two hoods had come, the gray Ford van appeared, its tires churning up
silvery plumes of slush.  It fishtailed to a stop between the second and
third ramps, blocking those exits.  Its front wheels were up on the
lower edge of the third ramp, so its headlights speared into the fourth
bay, revealing that the cab of that truck was untenanted.

In front of Jack, the door was two-thirds up.

"Keep your heads down," he said.

Mort and Tommy squeezed down as low as they could, and Jack hunched over
the wheel.  The heavy rolling panel was not all the way up, but he
thought he could slip under itwith a little luck.  In quick succession
he released the brakes, popped the clutch, and hit the accelerator.

The instant he put the truck in gear, those outside knew that the break
was being made from the first bay, and the night was shaken with the
rattle of gunfire.  Jack heard slugs slam into the truck as he reached
the exit, drove through, and headed down the concrete ramp, but none
penetrated the cab or shattered the windshield.

Below, another van, this one a Dodge, swept in at the foot of the
incline, trying to block his path.  Reinforcements had, indeed, arrived.

Instead of braking, Jack tramped down harder on the accelerator and
grinned at the horrified expressions of the men in the Dodge as the
massive grille of the Mack slammed into them.  The rig rammed the van
backward so hard that the smaller vehicle tipped over on its side and
slid fifteen or twenty feet across the macadam.

The impact jolted Jack, but his safety belt held him in check.  Mort and
Tommy were thrown forward, against the lower part of the dash and into
the cramped space below. They protested with cries of pain.

To execute that maneuver, Jack had been forced to descend the ramp
faster than he should have done, and now as he tried to wheel the truck
to the left, toward the lane leading away from the warehouse, the rig
lurched, swayed, threatened to either tear itself out of his control or
tip over as the Dodge had done.  Cursing, he held on to it, brought it
around with an effort that made his arms feel as if they were pulling
out of his shoulders, and then he was headed straight into the lane.

Ahead of him, three men stood around a midnight-blue Buick, and at least
two of them were armed.  They opened fire as he bore down on them.  One
man aimed too low, and bullets snapped off the top of the Mack's grille,
sparking brightly where they struck.  The other guy aimed too high; Jack
heard slugs ricocheting off the brow of the cab, above the windshield.
One of the two overhead-mounted air-horns was hit and torn loose; it
fell down along the side of the cab, thumped against Tommy's window,
hanging from its wires.

Jack was almost on top of the Buick, and the gunmen realized he meant to
hit it, so they stopped shooting and scattered.  Handling the huge rig
as if it were a tank, he broadsided the car, shoving it out of the way.
He kept going, past the end of the warehouse, toward another warehouse,
past that one, still accelerating.

Mort and Tommy pushed themselves back onto the seat, groaning.  Both
were battered.  Mort had a bloody nose, and Tommy was bleeding from a
small cut over his right eye, but neither of them was seriously hurt.

"Why does every job go sour?" Mort asked morosely, his voice more nasal
than usual because of his injured nose.

"It hasn't gone sour," Jack said, switching on the windshield wipers to
clear away the glimmering beads of sleet. "It's just turned out to be a
little more exciting than we expected."

"I hate excitement," Mort said, putting a handkerchief to his nose.

Jack glanced in the side mirror, back toward the fratellanza's
warehouse, and he saw the Ford van turning around to follow him.  He had
put the Dodge and the Buick out of commission, and he only had the Ford
to worry about.  He had no hope of outrunning it.  the roads were
treacherously icy, and he had too little experience behind the wheel of
a rig like this to risk pushing it to its limits in bad weather.

He was also worried about an unnerving chorus of small noises that had
sprung up from the engine compartment following the ramming of the van
and the Buick.  Something rattled tinnily.  Something else hissed.  If
the Mack broke down and left them stranded, they would very likely be
killed in the ensuing shoot-out with the Morlocks.

They were in a vast industrial area of warehouses, packing plants, and
factories, and the nearest major city street was more than a mile ahead
of them.  Though some of the factories had night shifts and were
currently operating, the industrial park's main service road, along
which they were speeding, was deserted.

Glancing at the mirror, Jack saw the Ford on their tail and gaining
fast.  He abruptly wheeled the rig to the right, into a branch road past
a factory where a sign proclaimed HARKWRIGHT CUSTOM FOAM PACKAGING.

"Where the hell are you going?" Tommy asked.

"We can't outrun them," Jack said.

"We can't face them down, either," Mort said through his bloody
handkerchief.  "Not handguns against Uzis."

"Trust me," Jack said.

Harkwright Custom Foam Packaging did not operate a late shift.  The
building itself was dark, but the road around it and the big truck lot
behind were lit by sodium-vapor lamps that colored the night yellow.

At the rear of the building, Jack turned left, into the truck lot,
through drilling sleet that looked like molten gold under the big lamps.
Two score of trailers, without cabs attached, stood in orderly ranks,
like beheaded prehistoric beasts, all painted mustard by the fall of
sodium light.  He swung the rig in a wide circle, brought it in close to
the back wall of the factory, doused the headlights, and drove parallel
to the building, heading back toward the road that entered the lot and
along which he had just come.  He braked to a stop at the corner, close
up against the factory wall, at a right angle to the branch road.

"Brace yourselves," he said.

Mort and Tommy already knew what was coming.  Their feet were pressed
flat up against the dashboard and their backs were jammed against the
back of the seat, as protection against the impact.

No sooner had Jack braked at the corner of the buildingthe Mack poised
like a crouching cat anticipating a mousethan a glow appeared on the
passing road.  The light approached from the right, from the front of
the factory: the most out-reaching headlamp beams of the unseen but
oncoming Ford van.  The glow grew brighter, brighter still, and Jack
tensed, trying to wait until the last best moment before pulling into
the lane.  Now the glow became two distinct parallel beams, lancing past
the snout of the Mack, and the beams grew very bright.  Finally Jack
tramped hard on the accelerator, and the Mack lurched forward, but it
was a big truck, not quick off the dime.  The Ford, going faster than
Jack had expected, shot past the corner, directly across the Mack's bow,
and Jack surged forward in time to catch only the rear of it.  But that
was enough to send the small van into a spin. It whipped around 360
degrees, then again, on the icy surface of the parking lot, before
crashing nose-first into one of the mustard-colored cargo trailers.

Jack was sure that none of the men in the Ford was in any condition to
come out of the wreck shooting, but he did not dawdle.  He swung the
Mack around and headed back past the side of Harkwright Custom Foam
Packaging.  When he reached the main service road, he turned right, away
from the distant fratellanza warehouse, toward the entrance to the
industrial park and the network of city streets beyond.

They were not followed.

He drove three miles by a direct route to an abandoned Texaco service
station that they had scouted days ago.  He pulled past the useless
pumps and parked alongside the dilapidated little building.

The moment Jack halted the rig, Tommy Sung threw open the door on his
side, jumped out, and walked away into the darkness.  He was heading for
a lower-middle-class residential neighborhood three blocks away, where,
on Monday, they had parked a dirty, rusted, battered Volkswagen Rabbit.
The car was newer under the hood than it was outside-and fast. It would
get them back to Manhattan, where they would dump it.

They had also stashed an untraceable Pontiac in the industrial park on
Monday, within a two-minute walk of the mob warehouse.  They intended to
hump the bags of money to the Pontiac, then drive the Pontiac here for
the switch to the Rabbit.  But alternate transportation had become
essential, and the Pontiac had been left to rot where they stashed it.

Jack and Mort heaved the sacks of money out of the Mack and stood them
against the side wall of the shuttered service station, where the
slanting sleet began to crust on the canvas. Mort climbed back in the
cab and wiped down all the surfaces they might have touched.

Jack stood by the bags, looking at the street beyond the end of the rig,
where an occasional car crept past on the glistening pavement.  None of
the motorists would be interested in a truck parked at a long-abandoned
service station. But if a police car cruised by on patrol .  .  .

At last Tommy pulled in from the side street and parked between the rows
of pumps.  Mort grabbed two sacks, hustled them toward the car, slipped,
fell, got right up, made for the Rabbit again.  Dragging the other pair
of bags, Jack followed with greater care.  By the time Jack reached the
Rabbit, Mort was already in the back seat.  Jack threw the last bags in
with Mort, slammed the door, and got in front with Tommy.

He said, "For God's sake, drive slow and careful."

"You can count on it," Tommy said.

The tires spun on the sleet-skinned blacktop as they pulled out from
between the pumps, and when they left the lot and moved into the street,
they slid sideways before the tread gripped.

"Why does every job turn sour?" Mort asked mournfully.

"It hasn't turned sour," Jack said.

The Rabbit hit a pothole and began to slide toward a parked car, but
Tommy turned the wheel into the slide and got control.  They continued
at an even slower pace, found the expressway, and climbed a ramp under a
sign that said NEW YORK CITY.

At the upper end of the ramp, as the tires slithered one last time
before gripping and carrying them onto the expressway, Mort said, "Why'd
it have to sleet?"

"They've got a lot of salt and cinders on these lanes," Tommy said.
"It's going to be all right now, all the way into the city."

"We'll see," Mort said glumly.  "What a bad night.  Jesus."

"Bad?" Jack said.  "Bad?  Mort, they would never in a thousand years let
you in the Optimist's Club.  For God's sake, we're all of us
millionaires.  You're sitting on a fortune back there!"

Under his pork-pie hat, which still dripped melting sleet, Mort blinked
in surprise.  "Well, uh, I guess that does take some of the sting out of
it."

Tommy Sung laughed.

Jack laughed, and Mort, too, and Jack said, "The biggest score any of us
ever made.  And no taxes payable on it, either."

Suddenly, everything seemed uproariously funny.  They settled in a
hundred yards behind a highway maintenance truck with flashing yellow
beacons, cruising at a safe and leisurely speed, while they gleefully
recalled the highlights of their escape from the warehouse.

Later, when the tension was somewhat relieved, when their giddy laughter
had subsided to pleased smiles, Tommy said, "Jack, I gotta tell you that
was a first-rate piece of work.  The way you used the computer to create
paperwork for the crate .  .  .  and that little electronic gizmo you
used to open the safe so we didn't need to blow it .  .  .  well, you
are one hell of an organizer."

"Better than that," Mort said, "in a crisis you're just about the best
knockover artist I've ever seen.  You think fast.  I tell you, Jack, if
you ever decided to put your talents to work in the straight world, for
a good cause, there's no telling what you could do."

"Good cause?" Jack said.  "Isn't getting rich a good cause?"

"You know what I mean," Mort said.

"I'm no hero," Jack said.  "I don't want any part of the straight world.
They're all hypocrites out there.  They talk about honesty, truth,
justice, social conscience .  .  .  but most of them are just looking
out for number one.  They won't admit it, and that's why I can't stand
them.  I admit it.  I'm looking out for number one, and to hell with
them." He heard the tone of his own voice changing from amusement to
sullen resentment, but he could not help that.  He scowled through the
wet windshield, past the thumping wipers.  "Good cause, huh?  If you
spend your life fighting for good causes, the so called good people will
sure as hell break your heart in the end.  Fuck 'em."

"Didn't mean to touch a nerve," Mort said, clearly surprised.

Jack said nothing.  He was lost in bitter memories.  Two or three miles
later, he said quietly, "I'm no damn hero."

In days to come, when he recalled those words, he would have occasion to
wonder how he could have been so wrong about himself.

It was one-twelve a m., Wednesday, December 4.

3.

Chicago, Illinois

By eight-twenty, Thursday morning, December 5, Father Stefan Wycazik had
celebrated the early Mass, had eaten breakfast, and had retreated to his
rectory office for a final cup of coffee.  Turning away from his desk,
he faced the big French window that presented a view of the bare,
snow-crusted trees in the courtyard, and he tried not to think about any
parish problems.  This was his time, and he valued it highly.

But his thoughts drifted inexorably to Father Brendan Cronin.  The rogue
curate.  The chalice-hurler.  Brendan Cronin, the talk of the parish.
The Berserk Priest of St.  Bernadette's. Brendan Cronin of all people.
It just did not make sense.  No sense at all.

Father Stefan Wycazik had been a priest for thirty-two years, the rector
of the Church of St.  Bernadette for nearly eighteen years, and
throughout his life of service, he had never been tortured by doubt. The
very concept baffled him.

Following ordination, he was assigned as a curate to St. Thomas's, a
small parish in the Illinois farm country, where seventy-year-old Father
Dan Tuleen was shepherd.  Father Tuleen was the sweetest-tempered,
kindest, most sentimental, and most lovable man Stefan Wycazik had ever
known. Dan had also been troubled by arthritis and failing vision, too
old for the job of running a parish.  Any other priest would have been
removed, gently forced into retirement.  But Dan Tuleen had been
permitted to remain at his post because he had been at St.  Thomas's for
forty years and was an integral part of the life of his flock.  The
Cardinal, a great admirer of Father Tuleen, had looked around for a
curate who could handle a good deal more responsibility than would
usually be expected of a rookie, and he had finally settled on Stefan
Wycazik.  After only a day at St.  Thomas's, Stefan had realized what
was expected of him and had not been intimidated.  He'd shouldered
virtually all the work of the parish. Few young priests would have been
equal to such a task. Father Wycazik never doubted he could handle it.

Three years later, when Father Tuleen died quietly in his sleep, a new
priest was assigned to St.  Thomas's, and the Cardinal sent Father
Wycazik to another parish in suburban Chicago, where the rector, Father
Orgill, was having troubles with alcohol.  Father Orgill had not been a
totally disgraced whiskey priest.  He had been a man with the power to
salvage himself, and he had been well worth salvaging.  Father Wycazik's
job had been to give Francis Orgill a shoulder to lean on and to guide
him, subtly but firmly, toward an exit from his dilemma.  Unhampered by
doubt, he had provided what Francis Orgill had needed.

During the next three years, Stefan served at two more problem-plagued
churches, and those who moved in the hierarchy of the archdiocese began
to refer to him as "His Eminence's troubleshooter."

His most exotic assignment was to Our Lady of Mercy Orphanage and School
in Saigon, Vietnam, where he was second in charge under Father Bill
Nader for six nightmarish years.  Our Lady of Mercy was funded by the
Chicago Archdiocese and was one of the Cardinal's pet projects.  Bill
Nader had carried the scars of two bullet wounds, one in his left
shoulder and one in his right calf, and had lost two Vietnamese priests
and one previous American to Vietcong terrorists.

From the moment of Stefan's arrival, during his entire tour of duty in
the war zone, he never doubted that he would survive or that his work in
that hell-on-earth was worthwhile. When Saigon fell, Bill Nader, Stefan
Wycazik, and thirteen nuns escaped the country with 126 children.
Hundreds of thousands died in the subsequent bloodbath, but even in the
face of mass slaughter, Stefan Wycazik never doubted that 126 lives were
a very significant number, never allowed despair to grip him.

Back in the States, as a reward for his willingness to be the Cardinal's
troubleshooter for a decade and a half, Stefan was offered a promotion
to monsignor, which he modestly declined.  Instead, he humbly
requested-and was rewarded with-his own parish.  At long last.

That was St.  Bernadette's.  It had not been a prosperous parish when it
was put into Stefan Wycazik's able hands.  St. Bernadette's was $125,000
in debt.  The church was in desperate need of major repairs, including a
new slate roof.  The rectory was worse than decrepit; it threatened to
come tumbling down in the next high wind. There was no parish school.
Attendance at Sunday Masses had been on a steady decline for almost ten
years.  St.  Bette's, as some of the altar boys referred to it, was
precisely the kind of challenge that excited Father Wycazik.

He never doubted that he could rescue St.  Bette's.  In four years he
raised the attendance at Mass by forty percent, retired the debt, and
repaired the church.  In five years he rebuilt the parish house.  In
seven years he doubled attendance and broke ground for a school.  In
recognition of Father Wycazik's unflagging service to Mother Church, the
Cardinal, in his last week of life, had conferred the coveted honor of
P. R. permanent rector-on Stefan, guaranteeing him life tenure at the
parish that he had single-handedly brought back from the edge of both
spiritual and financial ruin.

The granite solidity of Father Wycazik's faith made it difficult for him
to understand why, at the early Mass on the Sunday just past, Father
Brendan Cronin's belief had dissolved so completely as to cause him to
fling the sacred chalice across the chancel in despair and rage.  In
front of almost a hundred worshipers.  Dear God.  At least it had not
happened at one of the three later Masses, which were better attended.

Initially, when Brendan Cronin had come to St.  Bette's more than a year
and a half ago, Father Wycazik had not wanted to like him.

For one thing, Cronin had been schooled at the North American College in
Rome, reputedly the most splendid educational institution within the
jurisdiction of the Church. But though it was an honor to be invited to
attend that establishment, and though its graduates were considered the
cream of the priesthood, they were often effete dainties, loath to get
their hands dirty, with much too high an opinion of themselves.  They
felt that teaching catechism to children was beneath them, a waste of
their complex minds.  And visiting shut-ins was a task they found
unspeakably distasteful after the glories that had been Rome.

In addition to the stigma of being trained in Rome, Father Cronin was
fat.  Well, not fat, really, but certainly plump, with a round soft face
and liquid-green eyes that seemed, at first encounter, to betoken a lazy
and perhaps easily corrupted soul.  Father Wycazik, on the other hand,
was a big-boned Pole whose family had not contained a single fat man.
The Wycaziks were descended from Polish miners who had emigrated to the
United States at the turn of the century, taking physically demanding
jobs in steel mills, quarries, and the construction trades.  They had
produced big families that could be supported only through long hours of
honest labor, so there wasn't time to get fat.  Stefan had grown up with
an instinctual sense that a real man was solid but lean, with a thick
neck, big shoulders, and joints gnarled from hard work.

To Father Wycazik's surprise, Brendan Cronin had proved to be a hard
worker.  He had acquired no pretensions and no elitist opinions while in
Rome.  He was bright, good-natured, amusing, and he thrived on visiting
shut-ins, teaching the children, and soliciting funds.  He was the best
curate Father Wycazik had been given in eighteen years.

That was why Brendan's outburst on Sunday-and the loss of faith that had
inspired it-was so distressing to Stefan Wycazik.  Of course, on another
level, he looked forward to the challenge of bringing Brendan Cronin
back into the fold. He had begun his career in the Church as a strong
right arm for priests in trouble, and now he was being called upon to
fill that role once more, which reminded him of his youth and engendered
in him a buoyant feeling of vital purpose.

Now, as he took another sip of coffee, a knock came at the office door.
He turned his gaze to the mantel clock.  It was of ormolu and inlaid
mahogany with a fine Swiss movement, a gift from a parishioner.  That
timepiece was the only elegant object in a room boasting strictly
utilitarian-and mismatched-furniture and a threadbare imitation-Persian
carpet.  According to the clock, the time was eight-thirty, precisely,
and Stefan turned to the door, saying, "Come in, Brendan."

As he came through the door, Father Brendan Conin looked no less
distressed than he had on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, when
they had met in this office to discuss his crisis of faith and to search
for ways to reestablish his belief.  He was so pale that his freckles
burned like sparks on his skin, and by contrast his auburn hair looked
more red than usual.  The bounce had left his step.

"Sit down, Brendan.  Coffee?"

"Thank you, no." Brendan bypassed the tattered Chesterfield and the
Morris chair, slumping in the sag-bottomed wingback instead.

Did you eat a good breakfast?  Stefan wanted to ask.  Or did you just
nibble at some toast and swill it down with coffee?

But he did not want to seem to be mothering his curate, who was thirty
years old.  So he said, "You've done the reading I suggested?"

"Yes."

Stefan had relieved Brendan of all parish duties and had given him books
and essays that argued for the existence of God and against the folly of
atheism from an intellectual point of view.

"And you've reflected on what you've read," Father Wycazik said.  "So
have you found anything so far that .  .  .  helps you?"

Brendan sighed.  Shook his head.

"You continue to pray for guidance?"

"Yes.  I receive none."

"You continue to search for the roots of this doubt?"

"There don't seem to be any."

Stefan was increasingly frustrated by Father Cronin's taciturnity, which
was utterly unlike the young priest.  Usually, Brendan was open,
voluble.  But since Sunday he had turned inward, and he had begun to
speak slowly, softly, and never at length, as if words were money and he
a miser who begrudged the paying out of every penny.

"There must be roots to your doubt," Father Wycazik insisted.  "There
must be something from which doubt's growna seed, a beginning."

"It's just there," Brendan muttered, barely audible.  "Doubt. It's just
there as if it's always been there."

"But it wasn't: you did believe.  So when did doubt begin?

Last August, you said.  But what sparked it?  There must've been a
specific incident or incidents that led you to reevaluate your
philosophy."

Brendan gave a softly exhaled "no."

Father Wycazik wanted to shout at him, shake him, shock him out of his
numbing gloom.  But he patiently said, "Countless good priests have
suffered crises of faith.  Even some saints wrestled angels.  But they
all had two things in common: Their loss of faith was a gradual process
that continued many years before reaching a crisis; and they could all
point to specific incidents and observations from which doubt arose. The
unjust death of a child, for instance.  Or a saintly mother stricken
with cancer.  Murder.  Rape.  Why does God allow evil in the world?  Why
war?  The sources of doubt are innumerable if familiar, and though
Church doctrine answers them, cold doctrine is sometimes little comfort.
Brendan, doubt always springs from specific contradictions between the
concept of God's mercy and the reality of human sorrow and suffering."

"Not in my case," Brendan said.

Gently but insistently, Father Wycazik continued.  "And the only way to
assuage that doubt is to focus on those contradictions that trouble you
and discuss them with a spiritual guide."

"In my case, my faith just ...  collapsed under me ...  suddenly ...
like a floor that seemed perfectly solid but was rotten all along."

"You don't brood about unjust death, sickness, murder, war?  Like a
rotten floor, then?  Just collapsed overnight?"

"That's right."

"Bullshit!" Stefan said, launching himself up from his chair.

The expletive and the sudden movement startled Father Cronin.  His head
snapped up, and his eyes widened with surprise.

"Bullshit," Father Wycazik repeated, matching the word with a scowl as
he turned his back on his curate.  In part he intended to shock the
younger priest and force him out of his half-trance of self-pity, but in
part he was also irritated by Cronin's uncommunicative funk and stubborn
despair. Speaking to the curate but facing the window, where patterns of
frost decorated the panes and where wind buffeted the glass, he said,
"You didn't fall from committed priest in August to atheist in December.
Could not.  Not when you claim you've had no shattering experiences that
might be responsible.  There must be reasons for your change of heart,
Father, even if you're hiding them from yourself, and until you're
willing to admit them, face them, you'll remain in this wretched state."

A plumbless silence filled the room.

Then: the muffled ticking of the ormolu and mahogany clock.

At last, Brendan Cronin said, "Father, please don't be angry with me.  I
have such respect...  and I value our relationship so highly that your
anger.....  on top of everything else .  .  .  is too much for me right
now."

Pleased by even a thread-thin crack in Brendan's shell, delighted that
his little stratagem had produced results, Father Wycazik turned from
the window, moved quickly to the wingback chair, and put a hand on his
curate's shoulder.  "I'm not angry with you, Brendan.  Worried.
Concerned.  Frustrated that you won't let me help you.  But not angry."

The young priest looked up.  "Father, believe me, I want nothing more
than your help in finding a way out of this.  But in truth, my doubt
doesn't spring from any of the things you mentioned.  I really don't
know where it comes from.  It remains .  .  .  well, mysterious."

Stefan nodded, squeezed Brendan's shoulder, returned to his chair behind
the desk, sat down, and closed his eyes for a moment, thinking.

"All right, Brendan, your inability to identify the cause of your
collapsed faith indicates it's not an intellectual problem, so no amount
of inspirational reading will help.  If it's a psychological problem,
the roots lie in your subconscious, awaiting revelation."

When he opened his eyes, Stefan saw that his curate was intrigued by the
suggestion that his own inner mind was simply malfunctioning.  Which
meant God hadn't failed Brendan, after all: Brendan had failed God.
Personal responsibility was far easier to deal with than the thought
that God was unreal or had turned His back.

Stefan said, "As you may know, the Illinois Provincial of the Society of
Jesus is Lee Kellog.  But you may not know that he oversees two
psychiatrists, both Jesuits themselves, who deal with the mental and
emotional problems of priests within our order.  I could arrange for you
to begin analysis with one of those psychiatrists."

"Would you?" Brendan asked, leaning forward in his chair.

"Yes.  Eventually.  But not right away.  If you begin analysis, the
Provincial will refer your name to the province's Prefect of Discipline,
who will begin to pick through your actions of the past year to see if
you've violated any of your vows."

"But I never-"

"I know you never," Stefan said reassuringly.  "But the Prefect of
Discipline's job is to be suspicious.  The worst thing is .  .  .  even
if your analysis leads to a cure, the Prefect will scrutinize you for
years to come, to guard against a lapse into unpriestly conduct.  Which
would limit your prospects.  And until your current problem, Father, you
struck me as a priest who'd go far-monsignor, perhaps higher."

"Oh, no.  Certainly not.  Not me," Brendan said self-deprecatingly.

"Yes, you.  And if you beat this problem, you could still go far.  But
once you're on the Prefect's danger list, you'll always be suspect.  At
best you'll wind up no better than me, a simple parish priest."

A smile flickered at the corners of Brendan's mouth.  "It would be an
honor-and a life well spent-to be, as you say, no better than you."

"But you can go farther and be of great service to the Church.  And I'm
determined you'll have that chance.  So I want you to give me until
Christmas to help you find a way out of this hole.  No more pep talks.
No debates about the nature of good and evil.  Instead, I'll apply some
of my own theories about psychological disorders.  You'll get amateur
treatment from me, but give it a chance.  Just until Christmas. Then, if
your distress is still as great, if we're no nearer an answer, I'll put
you in the hands of a Jesuit psychiatrist. Deal?"

Brendan nodded.  "Deal."

"Terrific!" Father Wycazik said, sitting up straight, rubbing his hands
together briskly, as if about to chop wood or perform some other
invigorating exercise.  "That gives us more than three weeks.  For the
first week, you'll put away your ecclesiastical suits, dress in ordinary
clothes, and report to Dr.  James McMurtry at St.  Joseph's Hospital for
Children. He'll see that you're assigned to the hospital staff."

"As chaplain?"

"As an orderly-emptying bedpans, dhanging bedclothes, whatever is
required.  Only Dr.  McMurtry will know you're a priest."

Brendan blinked.  "But what's the point of this?"

"You'll figure it out before the week is up," Stefan said happily.  "And
when you understand why I sent you to the hospital, you'll have one
important key to help you unlock your psyche, a key that'll open doors
and give you a look inside yourself, and maybe then you'll see the cause
of your loss of faith-and overcome it."

Brendan looked doubtful.

Father Wycazik said, "You promised me three weeks."

"All right." Brendan unconsciously fingered his Roman collar and seemed
disturbed by the thought of removing it, which was a good sign.

"You'll move out of the rectory until Christmas.  I'll give you funds to
pay for meals and an inexpensive hotel room. You'll work and live in the
real world, beyond the shelter of the ecclesiastic life.  Now, change
clothes, pack your suitcases, and report back to me.  Meanwhile, I'll
call Dr.  McMurtry and make the necessary arrangements."

Brendan sighed, got up, went to the door.  "There's one thing maybe
supports the notion that my problem's psychological, not intellectual.
I've been having these dreams ...

actually the same dream every time."

"A recurring dream.  That's very Freudian."

"I've had it several times a month since August.  But this week it's
become a regular occurrence-three out of the last four nights.  It's a
bad one, too-a short dream that I have over and over again in one night.
Short, but .  .  .  intense.  It's about these black gloves."

"Black gloves?"

Brendan grimaced.  "I'm in a strange place.  Don't know where.  I'm
lying in bed, I think.  I seem to be ...  restrained. My arms are held
down.  And my legs.  I want to move, run, get out of there, but I can't.
The light is dim.  Can't see much. Then these hands .  .  ." He
shuddered.

"Hands wearing black gloves?" Father Wycazik prompted.

"Yes.  Shiny black gloves.  Vinyl or rubber.  Tightly fitted and shiny,
not like ordinary gloves." Brendan let go of the doorknob, took two
steps toward the middle of the room, and stood with his hands raised
before his face, as if the sight of them would help him recollect the
details of the menacing hands in his dream.  "I can't see whose hands
they are.  Something wrong with my vision.  I can see the hands ...  the
gloves ...  but only up to the wrists.  Beyond that, it's all ...
blurry."

By the offhanded way that Brendan had mentioned the dream, almost as an
afterthought, he obviously wanted to believe that it was of no
consequence.  However, his face was paler than before, and there was a
vague but unmistakable flutter of fear in his voice.

A burst of winter wind rattled a loose window pane, and Stefan said,
"The man with black gloves-does he say anything to you?"

"He never speaks." Another shudder.  Brendan lowered his hands, thrust
them in his pockets.  "He touches me.  The gloves are cold, slick." The
curate looked as if he could feel those gloves even now.

Acutely interested, Father Wycazik leaned forward in his chair and said,
"Where do these gloves touch you?"

The young priest's eyes glazed.  "They touch .  .  .  my face. Forehead.
Cheeks, neck .  .  .  chest.  Cold.  They touch me almost everywhere."

"They don't hurt you?"

"No."

"But you're afraid of these gloves, of the man wearing them?"

"Terrified.  But I don't know why."

"One can't help but see how Freudian a dream it is."

"I suppose," the curate said.

"Dreams are a way for the subconscious mind to send messages to the
conscious, and in this case it's easy to see Freudian symbolic meanings
in these black gloves.  The hands of the devil, reaching out to pull you
down from grace.  Or the hands of your own doubt.  Or they could be
symbols of temptations, of sins seeking your indulgence."

Brendan seemed grimly amused by the possibilities.  "Especially sins of
the flesh.  After all, the gloves do touch me all over." The curate
returned to the door and put his hand on the knob, but paused again.
"Listen, I'll tell you something odd.  This dream ...  I'm half-sure
it's not symbolic." Brendan let his gaze slide away from Stefan's, down
to the worn rug.  "I think those gloved hands represent nothing more
than gloved hands.  I think ...  somewhere, someplace, at some time or
other, they were real."

"You mean you were once in a situation like the one in your dream?"

Still looking at the rug, the curate said, "I don't know. Perhaps in my
childhood.  See, this might not have anything to do with my crisis of
faith.  The two things might beprobably are-unconnected."

Stefan shook his head.  "Two unusual and serious afflictions-a loss of
faith and a recurring nightmare-troubling you at the same time, and you
want me to think they've no relation?  Too coincidental.  There must be
some connection. But tell me, at what point in your childhood would
you've been menaced by this unseen, gloved figure?"

"Well, I had a couple of serious illnesses as a boy.  Maybe during a
fever I was examined by a doctor who was a little rough or
scary-looking.  And maybe the experience was so traumatic that I
repressed it, and now it's coming back to me in a dream."

"When doctors wear gloves for an examination, they use throwaway white
latex.  Not black.  And not heavy rubber or vinyl gloves."

The curate took a deep breath, blew it out.  "Yeah, you're right.  But I
just can't shake the feeling that the dream's not symbolic.  It's crazy,
I suppose.  But I'm sure those black gloves are real, as real as that
Morris chair, as real as those books on the shelf."

On the mantel, the clock struck the hour.

The soughing of the wind in the caves became a howl.

"Creepy," Stefan said, referring not to the wind or the hollow striking
of the clock.  He crossed the room and clapped the curate on the
shoulder.  "But I assure you, you're wrong. The dream is symbolic, and
it is related to your crisis of faith.

The black hands of doubt'.  it's your subconscious warning you that
you're in for a real battle.  But it's a battle in which you're not
alone.  You've got me beside you."

"Thank you, Father."

"And God.  He's beside you as well."

Father Cronin nodded, but there was no conviction in his face or in the
defeated hunching of his shoulders.

"Now go pack your suitcases," Father Wycazik said.

"I'm leaving you short-handed when I go."

"I've got Father Gerrano and the sisters at the school.  Now, off with
you." When his curate had gone, Stefan returned to his desk.

Black gloves.  It was only a dream, not particularly frightening in its
essence, yet Father Cronin's voice had been so haunted when he spoke of
it that Stefan was still affected by the image of shiny black
rubber-clad fingers reaching out of a blur and prodding, poking....

Black gloves.

Father Wycazik had a hunch that this was going to be one of the most
difficult salvage jobs upon which he had ever embarked.

Outside, snow fell.

It was Thursday, December 5.

4.

Boston, Massachusetts

On Friday, four days after the catastrophic fugue that followed the
aortal graft on Viola Fletcher, Ginger Weiss was still a patient at
Memorial Hospital, where she had been admitted after George Hannaby led
her out of the snowy alleyway in which she had regained consciousness.

For three days, they had put her through exhaustive tests. An EEG study,
cranial X rays, sonograms, pneumoventriculography, a lumbar puncture, an
angiogram, and more, repeating the several procedures (though
fortunately not the lumbar puncture) for cross-checked results.  With
the sophisticated tools and processes of modern medicine, they searched
her brain tissue for neoplasms, cystic masses, abscesses, clots,
aneurysms, and benign gummatous lumps.  For a while they concentrated on
the possibility of malignancies of the perineural nerves.  They checked
for chronic intracranial pressure. They analyzed the fluid from the
spinal tap in search of abnormal protein, cerebral bleeding, a low sugar
count that would indicate bacterial infection, or signs of a fungus
infection.  Because they were physicians who always gave their best to a
patient, but especially because Ginger was one of their own colleagues,
her doctors were diligent, determined, thoughtful, thorough, and firmly
committed to pinpointing the cause of her problem.

At two o'clock Friday afternoon, George Hannaby came to her room with
the results of the final battery of tests and with the reports of
consultants who had given one last round of opinions.  The fact that he
had come himself, rather than let the oncologist or the brain specialist
(who were in charge of her case) bring the news, most likely meant that
it was bad, and for once Ginger was sorry to see him.

She was sitting in bed, dressed in blue pajamas that Rita Hannaby,
George's wife, had been kind enough to fetch (along with a suitcase.
full of other necessities) from the Beacon Hill apartment.  She was
reading a paperback mystery, pretending to be confident that her
seizures were the result of some easily corrected malady, but she was
scared.

But what George had to tell her was so bad that she could no longer hold
fast to her composure.  In a way, it was worse than anything for which
she had prepared herself.

They had found nothing.

No disease.  No injury.  No congenital defect.  Nothing.

As George solemnly outlined the final results and made it clear that her
wild flights, performed in a fugue, were without a discernible
pathological cause, she finally lost control of her emotions for the
first time since she had broken into tears in the alleyway.  She wept,
not noisily, not copiously, but quietly and with enormous anguish.

A physical ailment might have been correctable.  And once cured, it
would not have prevented her from returning to a career as a surgeon.

But the test results and the opinions of the specialists all conveyed
the same unbearable message: Her problem was entirely in her mind, a
psychological illness beyond the reach of surgery, antibiotics, or
controlling drugs.  When a patient suffered repeated incidents of fugue
for which no physiological cause could be found, the only hope of ending
the seizures was psychotherapy, though the finest psychiatrists could
not boast of a high cure rate with patients thus afflicted.  Indeed, a
fugue was often an indication of incipient schizophrenia. Her chances of
managing her condition and living a normal life were small; her chances
of institutionalization were dismayingly high.

Within reach of her lifelong dream, within months of beginning her own
surgical practice, her life had been shattered as thoroughly as a
crystal goblet struck by a bullet.  Even if her condition was not that
extreme, even if psychotherapy gave her a chance to control her strange
outbursts, she'd never be able to obtain a license to practice medicine.

George plucked several Kleenex from the box on the nightstand and gave
them to her.  He poured a glass of water.  He got a Valium and made her
take it, though at first she resisted. He held her hand, which seemed
like that of a very small girl when clasped in his large mitt.  He spoke
softly, reassuringly.

Gradually he calmed her.

When she could speak, she said, "But George, damn it, I wasn't raised in
a psychologically destructive atmosphere.  Our home was happy, at peace.
And I certainly got more than my share of love and affection.  I wasn't
physically, mentally, or emotionally abused." She angrily snatched the
box of tissues from the nightstand, tore Kleenex from it.  "Why me?

How could I, coming from my background, develop a psychosis?  How?  With
my fantastic mother, my special papa, my damned-if-it-wasn't-happy
childhood, how could I wind up seriously mentally disturbed?  It isn't
fair.  It isn't right.  it isn't even believable."

He sat on the edge of her bed, and he was so tall that he still loomed
over her.  "First of all, Doctor, the consulting specialists tell me
there's a whole school of thought that says many mental illnesses are
the result of subtle chemical changes in the body, in the brain tissue,
changes we're not yet advanced enough to detect or understand.  So this
doesn't have to mean that you're screwed up by your childhood.  I don't
think you've got to reevaluate your whole life because of this. Second,
I'm not-I repeat.  not-at all convinced that your condition is anything
as serious as debilitating psychosis."

"Oh, George, please don't coddle-"

"Coddle a patient?  Me?" he said, as if no one had ever suggested
anything half as astonishing to him.  "I'm not just trying to lift your
spirits.  I mean what I say.  Sure, we didn't find a physical cause for
this, but that doesn't mean there isn't a physical problem involved. You
might have a condition that's not yet sufficiently advanced to be
detectable.  In a couple of weeks, or a month, or as soon as there's any
worsening of the problem, any indication of deterioration, we'll run
more tests; we'll take another look, and I'd bet everything I own that
we'll eventually put our finger on the problem."

She allowed herself to hope.  Discarding a wadded mass of tissues, she
fumbled for the Kleenex box.  "You really think it could be like that? A
brain tumor or an abscess so small it doesn't show up yet?"

"Sure.  I find that a hell of a lot easier to believe than that you're
psychologically disturbed.  You'?  You're one of the steadiest people
I've ever known.  And I can't accept that you could be psychotic or even
psychoneurotic and not exhibit unusual behavior between these fugues.  I
mean, serious mental illness isn't expressed in neatly contained little
bursts.  It relops over into the patient's entire life."

She had not thought about that before.  As she considered his point, she
felt a little better, though not wildly hopeful and certainly not happy.
On the one hand, it seemed weird to be hoping for a brain tumor, but a
tumor could be excised, perhaps without gross damage to cerebral
tissues.  Madness, however, responded to no scalpel.

"The next few weeks or months are probably going to be the most
difficult of your life," he said.  "The waiting."

"I suppose I'm restricted from hospital work for the duration."

"Yes.  But depending on how you come along, I don't see why you can't
help me out at the office."

"And what if I .-.  .  threw one of these fits?"

"I'd be there to keep you from hurting yourself until it passed."

"But what would your patients think?  Wouldn't exactly help your
practice any, would it?  To have an assistant who suddenly turns into a
meshuggene and runs shrieking through the office?"

He smiled.  "Let me worry about what my patients think. Anyway, that's
for the future.  Right now, at least for a week or two, you've got to
take it easy.  No work at all.  Relax.

Rest.  These last few days have been emotionally and physically
exhausting."

"I've been in bed.  Exhausting?  Don't knock a teapot."

He blinked, confused.  "Don't what?"

"Oh," she said, surprised to have heard those four words pop out of her,
lit's something my father used to say.  It's a Yiddish expression.  Hok
nit kain tehynik: don't knock a teapot.  It means, don't talk nonsense.
But don't ask me why it means that.  It's just something I used to hear
all the time when I was a kid."

"Well, I'm not knocking a teapot," he said.  "You may have been in bed
all week, but it's been an exhausting experience nonetheless, and you
need to take it easy for a while. I want you to move in with Rita and me
for the next few weeks."

"What?  Oh, I couldn't impose on you-"

"It's no imposition.  We have a live-in maid, so you won't even have to
make your bed in the morning.  From the guestroom window, you'll have a
nice view of the bay.  Living around water is calming.  In fact, it's
quite literally what the doctor ordered."

"No.  Really.  Thank you, but I couldn't."

He frowned.  "You don't understand.  I'm not just your boss but your
doctor, and I'm telling you this is what you're going to do."

"I'll be perfectly fine at the apartment-"

"No," he said firmly.  "Think about it.  Suppose one of these seizures
struck while you were making dinner.  Suppose you knocked over a pot on
the stove.  It could start a fire, and you might not even be aware of it
until you came out of the fugue, by which time the whole apartment could
be ablaze and you could be trapped ' That's only one way you might hurt
yourself.  I can think of a hundred.  So I have to insist that .  .  .
for a while you must not live alone.  If you don't want to stay with me
and Rita, do you have relatives who'd take you in for a while?"

"Not in Boston.  In New York, I've got aunts, uncles .

But Ginger could not stay with any of her relatives.  They would be
happy to have her, of course-especially Aunt Francine or Aunt Rachel.
However, she did not want them to see her in her current condition, and
the thought of pitching a fit in front of them was intolerable.  She
could almost see Francine and Rachel huddling over a kitchen table,
speaking in low voices, clucking their tongues: "Where did Jacob and
Anna go wrong?  Did they push her too hard?  Anna always pushed her too
hard.  And after Anna died, Jacob relied on the girl too much.  She had
to take over the house at twelve It was too much for her.  Too much
pressure too young."

Ginger would receive considerable compassion, understanding, and love
from them, but at the risk of sullying the memory of her parents, a
memory she was determined to honor, always.

To George, who still sat upon the edge of the bed and awaited her
response with an obvious concern that touched her deeply, she said,
"I'll take the guest room with the view of the bay."

"Splendid!"

"Though I think it's a horrible imposition.  And I warn you, if I really
like it there, you might never get rid of me.  You'll know you're in
trouble if you come home some day, and I've hired people to repaint the
walls and hang new drapes."

He grinned.  "At the first mention of painters or draperies, we'll throw
your butt out in the street." He kissed her lightly on the cheek, got up
from the edge of the bed, and walked to the door.  "I'm going to start
the release procedures now, so you should be out of here in two hours.
I'll call Rita and have her come pick you up.  I'm sure you can beat
this thing, Ginger, but you've got to keep thinking positive."

When he left the room and his footsteps faded down the hall, she stopped
struggling to maintain her smile, and it collapsed instantly.  She
leaned back against her pillows and stared morosely at the age-yellowed
acoustic tile on the ceiling.

After a while she got out of bed and went into the adjoining bathroom,
where she approached the sink with trepidation. After a brief
hesitation, she turned on the water and watched it whirling around and
around and into the drain.  On Monday, at the surgical scrub sink, after
successfully performing the aortal graft on Viola Fletcher, Ginger had
been panicked by the sight of water swirling into a drain, but she could
not imagine why.  Damn it, why?  She desperately wanted to understand.

Papa, she thought, I wish you were alive, here to listen, to help.

Life's nasty surprises had been the subject of one of Papa's little
sayings that Ginger had once found amusing.  When anyone fretted about
the future, Jacob would shake his head and wink and say, "Why worry
about tomorrow?  Who knows what'll hit you today?"

How true.  And how utterly unamusing flow.

She felt like an invalid.  She felt lost.

It was Friday, December 6.

5.

Laguna Beach, California

When Dom went to the doctor's office on Monday morning, December 2, in
the company of Parker Faine, Dr.  Cobletz did not recommend immediate
diagnostic procedures, for he had only recently given Dom a thorough
examination and had seen no signs of physical disorder.  He assured them
there were other treatments to be tried before jumping to the conclusion
that it was a brain disorder that sent the writer scurrying upon errands
of fortification and self-defense inhis sleep.

After Dom's previous visit, on November 23, the physician had, he said,
become curious about somnambulism and had done some reading on the
subject.  With most adults the affliction was short-lived; however, in a
few cases, there was a danger of it becoming habitual, and in its most
serious forms it resembled the inflexible routines and pattern-obsessed
behavior of worst-case neurotics.  Once habitual, somnambulism was much
harder to cure, and it could become the dominant factor in the patient's
life, generating a fear of night and sleep, producing profound feelings
of helplessness culminating in more serious emotional disorders.

Dom felt he was already in that danger zone.  He thought of the
barricade he had built across his bedroom door.  The arsenal on the bed.

Cobletz, intrigued and concerned but not worried, had assured
Dominick-and Parker-that in most instances of persistent somnambulism,
the pattern of nocturnal rambling could be broken by the administration
of a sedative before bed. Once a few untroubled nights had passed, the
patient was usually cured.  In chronic cases, the nightly sedative was
augmented with a diazepam compound during the day when the patient was
plagued by anxiety.  Because the tasks that Dominick performed in his
sleep were unnaturally strenuous for a somnambulist, Dr.  Cobletz had
prescribed both Valium during the day and a 15 ing. tablet of Dalmane,
just before slipping under the covers each night.

On the drive back to Laguna Beach from Dr.  Cobletz's offices in
Newport, with the sea on the right and hills on the left, Parker Faine
argued that, until the sleepwalking stopped, it was not wise for Dom to
continue living alone.  Hunched over the steering wheel of his Volvo,
the bearded and shaggyhaired artist drove fast, aggressively but not
recklessly.  He seldom glanced away from the Pacific Coast Highway, yet
he gave the impression, through the sheer force of his personality, that
his eyes and attention were fixed constantly and entirely upon Dom.

"There's plenty of room at my place.  I can keep an eye on you.  I won't
hover, mind you.  I won't be a mother hen.  But at least I'll be there.
And we would have plenty of opportunity to talk about this, really get
into it, just you and me, and try to figure how this sleepwalking is
related to the changes you went through the summer before last, when you
threw away that job at Mountainview College.  I'm definitely the guy to
help you.  I swear, if I hadn't become a goddamned painter, I'd have
become a goddamned psychiatrist.  I have a knack for getting people to
talk about themselves.  How about it?

Come stay with me for a while and let me play therapist."

Dom had refused.  He wanted to stay at his own house, alone, for to do
otherwise seemed to be a retreat into the same rabbit hole in which he
had hidden from life for so many years.  The change he had undergone
during his trip to Mountainview, Utah, the summer before last, had been
dramatic, inexplicable, but for the better.  At thirty-three, he had
finally seized the reins of life, had mounted it with a flourish, and
had ridden into new territory.  He liked the man he had become, and he
feared nothing more than slipping back into his dreary former existence.

Perhaps his somnambulism was mysteriously related to the previous
changes of attitude that he had undergone, as Parker insisted, but Dom
had his doubts that the relationship was either mysterious or complex.
More likely, the connection between the two personality crises was
simple: The sleepwalking was an excuse to retreat from the challenges,
excitement, and stress of his new life.  Which could not be allowed.

Therefore, Dom would stay in his own house, alone, take the Valium and
Dalmane as Dr.  Cobletz had prescribed them,

and tough this thing out.

That was what he had decided in the Volvo, on Monday morning, and by
Saturday, the seventh of December, it seemed that he had made the
correct decision.  Some days he needed a Valium and some days he did
not.  Every evening he took a Dalmane tablet with milk or hot chocolate.
Somnambulism disturbed his nights less frequently.  Before beginning
drug therapy, he walked in his sleep every night, but in the past five
nights he journeyed just twice, leaving his bed only in the predawn
hours of Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Furthermore, his activities in his sleep were far less bizarre and less
disturbing than they had been.  He no longer gathered up weapons, built
barricades, or tried to nail the windows shut.  On both occasions, he
merely left his Beauty rest for a makeshift bed in the back of the
closet, where he woke stiff and sore and frightened by some unknown and
nameless threat that had pursued him in dreams he could not recall.

Thank God, the worst seemed past.

By Thursday he had begun to write again.  He worked on the new novel,
picking up where he left off weeks ago.

On Friday, Tabitha Wycombe, his editor in New York, called with good
news.  Two prepublication reviews of Twilight in Babylon had just come
in, and both were excellent. She read them to him, then revealed even
better news: Bookseller excitement, aroused by industry publicity and by
the distribution of several hundred advance reading copies, continued to
grow, and the first printing, which had already been raised once, was
now being raised again.  They talked for almost half an hour, and when
Dom hung up, he felt that his life was back on the rails.

But Saturday night brought a new development, which might have been
either a turn for the better or the worse.  Every night that he had gone
walking in his sleep, he had been unable to recall even the smallest
detail of the nightmares that drove him from his bed.  Then, Saturday,
he was plagued by an uncannily vivid, terrifying dream that sent him
fleeing through the house in somnambulistic panic, but this time he
remembered part of it when he woke, not most of it, but at least the
end.

In the last minute or two of the dream, he was standing in a
half-glimpsed bathroom, everything blurred.  An unseen man shoved him
against a sink, and Dom bent over it, his face thrust down into the
porcelain bowl.  Someone had an arm around him and was holding him on
his feet, for he was too weak to stand on his own.  He felt rag-limp,
and his knees were quivering, and his stomach was twisting and rolling.
A second unseen person had two hands on his head, forcing his head into
the sink.  He could not speak.  He could not draw breath.  He knew he
was dying.  He had to get away from these people, out of this room, but
he did not have the physical resources to take flight.  Though his
vision remained bleary, he could see the smooth porcelain and the
chrome-plated rim of the drain in detail, for his face was only inches
from the bottom of the sink.  It was an old-fashioned drain without a
mechanically operated stopper.  The rubber plug had been removed and set
aside, somewhere out of sight.  The water was running, spewing out of a
faucet, past his face, splattering against the bottom of the basin,
whirling around and around, down into the drain, around and down.  The
two people pouring him into the sink were shouting, though he could not
understand them.  Around and down ...  around....  Staring hypnotically
into the miniature whirlpool, he grew terrified of the gaping drain,
which was like a sucking orifice intent upon drawing him into its
reeking depths.  Suddenly he was aware they wanted to stuff him down
into the drain, dispose of him.  Might be a garbage disposal in there,
something that would chop him to pieces and flush him away He woke,
screaming.  He was in his bathroom.  He had walked in his sleep.  He was
at the sink, bent over, screaming into the drain.  He leapt back from
that gaping hole, stumbled, nearly fell over the edge of the bathtub. He
grabbed a towel rack to steady himself.

Gasping for breath, shaking, he finally got up enough nerve to return to
the sink and look into it.  Glossy white porcelain. A brass drain rim
and a dome-shaped brass stopper.  Nothing else, nothing worse.

The room in his nightmare had not been this room. Dominick washed his
face and returned to the bedroom. According to the clock on the
nightstand, it was only twotwenty-five A. M.

Though it made no sense at all and seemed to have no symbolic or real
connection with his life, the nightmare was profoundly disturbing.
However, he had not nailed windows shut or gathered up weapons in his
sleep, so it seemed that this was only a minor setback.

In fact, it might be a sign of improvement.  If he remembered his
dreams, not just pieces but all of them from beginning to end, he might
discover the source of the anxiety that had made a night rambler of him.
Then he would be better able to deal with it.

Nevertheless, he did not want to go back to bed and risk returning to
that strange place in his dream.  The bottle of Dalmane was in the top
drawer of the nightstand.  He was not supposed to take more than one
tablet each evening, but surely one indulgence couldn't hurt.

He went out to the bar cabinet in the living room, poured some Chivas
Regal.  With a shaky hand, he popped the pill in his mouth, drank the
Chivas, and returned to bed.

He was improving.  Soon, the sleepwalking would stop.  A week from now,
he'd be back to normal.  In a month, this would seem like a curious
aberration, and he'd wonder how he'd allowed it to get the better of
him.

Precariously prone upon the trembling wire of consciousness above the
gulf of sleep, he began to lose his balance.  It was a pleasant feeling,
a soft slipping away.  But as he floated down into sleep, he heard
himself murmuring in the darkness of the bedroom, and what he heard
himself saying was so strange it startled him and piqued his interest
even as the Dalmane and whiskey inexorably had their way with him.

"The moon," he whispered thickly.  "The moon, the moon."

He wondered what he could possibly mean by that, and he tried to push
sleep away at least long enough to ponder his own words.  The moon? "The
moon," he whispered again, and then he was gone.

It was three-eleven A. M., Sunday, December 8.

6.

New York, New York

Five days after stealing more than three million dollars from the
fratellanza, Jack Twist went to see a dead woman who still breathed.

At one o'clock Sunday afternoon, in a respectable neighborhood on the
East Side, he parked his Camaro in the underground garage beneath the
private sanitarium and took the elevator up to the lobby.  He signed in
with the receptionist and was given a visitor's pass.

One would not think the place was a hospital.  The public area was
tastefully decorated in Art Deco style suited to the building's period.
There were two small Ertd originals, sofas, one armchair, tables with
neatly arranged magazines, and all the furniture had a 1920s' look.

It was too damn luxurious.  The Ends were unnecessary. A hundred other
economies were obvious.  But the management felt that image was
important in order to continue to attract upper-crust clientele and keep
the annual profit around the hundred percent mark.  The patients were of
all typesmiddle-aged catatonic schizophrenics, autistic children, the
long-term comatose both young and old-but they all had two things in
common: Their conditions were all chronic rather than acute, and they
were from well-to-do families who could afford the best care.

Thinking about the situation, Jack invariably became angry that no place
in the city provided fine custodial care for the catastrophically
brain-injured or mentally ill at a reasonable price.  In spite of huge
expenditures of tax money, New York's institutions, like public
institutions everywhere, were a grim joke that the average citizen had
to accept for a lack of alternatives.

If he had not been a skilled and highly successful thief, he would not
have been able to pay the sanitarium's exorbitant monthly charges.
Fortunately, he had a talent for larceny.

Carrying his visitor's pass, he went to another elevator and rode up to
the fourth of six floors.  The hallways in the upper levels were more
reminiscent of a hospital than the lobby had been.  Fluorescent lights.
White walls.  The clean, crisp, minty smell of disinfectant.

At the far end of the fourth-floor hall, in the last room on the right,
lived the dead woman who still breathed.  Jack hesitated with his hand
on the push-plate of the heavy swinging door, swallowed hard, took a
deep breath, and finally went inside.

The room was not as sumptuous as the lobby, and it was not Art Deco,
either, but it was very nice, resembling a medium-priced room at the
Plaza: a high ceiling and white molding; a fireplace with a white
mantel; a deep hunter-green carpet; pale green drapes; a green
leaf-patterned sofa and a pair of chairs.  The theory was that a patient
would be happier in a room like this than in a clinical room.  Although
many patients were oblivious of their surroundings, the cozier
atmosphere at least made visiting friends and relatives feel less bleak.

The hospital bed was the only concession to utilitarian design, a
dramatic contrast to everything else.  But even that was dressed up with
green-patterned designer sheets.

Only the patient spoiled the lovely mood of the chamber.

Jack lowered the safety railing on the bed, leaned over, and kissed his
wife's cheek.  She did not stir.  He took one of her hands and held it
in both of his.  Her hand did not grip him in return, did not flex,
remained slack, limp, senseless, but at least it was warm.

"Jenny?  It's me, Jenny.  How are you feeling today?

Hmmmmm?  You look good.  You look lovely.  You always look lovely."

In fact, for someone who had spent eight years in a coma, for someone
who had not taken a single step and had not felt sunshine or fresh air
upon her face in all that time, she looked quite good indeed.  Perhaps
only Jack could say that she was still lovely-and mean it.  She was not
the beauty she had once been, but she certainly did not look as if she
had spent almost a decade in solemn flirtation with death.

Her hair was not glossy any more, though still thick and the same rich
chestnut shade as when he had first seen her at her job, behind the
men's cologne counter in Bloomingdale's, fourteen years ago.  The
attendants washed her hair twice a week here and brushed it every day.

He could have moved his hand under her hair, along the left side of her
skull, to the unnatural depression, the sickening concavity.  He could
have touched it without disturbing her, for nothing disturbed her any
more, but he did not. Because touching it would have disturbed him.

Her brow was uncreased, her face unlined even at the corners of her
eyes, which were closed.  She was gaunt though not shockingly so.
Motionless upon those green designer sheets, she seemed ageless, as if
she were an enchanted princess

awaiting the kiss that would wake her from a century of slumber.

The only signs of life were the vague, rhythmic rise and fall of her
breast as she breathed, and the soft movement of her throat as she
occasionally swallowed saliva.  The swallowing was an automatic,
involuntary action and not a sign of awareness on any level whatsoever.

The brain damage was extensive and irreparable.  The movements she made
here and now were virtually the only movements she would ever make
until, at last, she gave a dying shudder.  There was no hope.  He knew
there was no hope, and he accepted the permanence of her condition.

She would have looked much worse if she had not received such
conscientious care.  A team of physical therapists came to her room
every day and put her through passive exercise routines.  Her muscle
tone was not the best, but at least she had muscle tone.

Jack held her hand and stared down at her for a long time. For seven
years, he had been coming to see her two nights a week and for five or
six hours every Sunday afternoon, sometimes on other afternoons as well.
But in spite of the frequency of his visits and in spite of her
unchanging condition, he never tired of looking at her.

He pulled up a chair and sat next to the bed, still holding her hand,
staring at her face, and for more than an hour he talked to her.  He
told her about a movie that he had seen since his previous visit, about
two books he had read.  He spoke of the weather, described the force and
bite of the winter wind.  He painted colorful word pictures of the
prettiest Christmas displays he had seen in shop windows.

She did not reward him with even a sigh or a twitch.  She lay as always,
unmoving and unmoved.

Nevertheless, he talked to her, for he worried that a fragment of
awareness might survive, a gleam of comprehension down in the black well
of the coma.  Maybe she could hear and understand, in which case the
worst thing for her was being trapped in an unresponsive body, desperate
even for one-way communication, but receiving none because they thought
she could not hear.  The doctors assured him that these worries were
groundless; she heard nothing, saw nothing, knew nothing, they said,
except what images and fantasies might sputter across short-circuiting
synapses of her shattered brain.  But if they were wrong-if there was
only one chance in a million that they were wrong-he could not leave her
in that perfect and terrible isolation.  So he talked to her as the
winter day beyond the window changed from one shade of gray to another.

At five-fifteen, he went into the adjoining bathroom and washed his
face.  He dried off and blinked at his reflection in the mirror.  As on
countless other occasions, he wondered what Jenny had ever seen in him.

Not one feature or aspect of his face could be called handsome.  His
forehead was too broad, ears too big.  Although he had 20-20 vision, his
left eye had a leftward cast, and most people could not talk to him
without nervously shifting their attention from one eye to the other,
wondering which was looking at them when, in fact, both were.  When he
smiled he looked clownish, and when he frowned he looked sufficiently
threatening to send Jack the Ripper scurrying for home and hearth.

But Jenny had seen something in him.  She had wanted, needed, and loved
him.  In spite of her own good looks, she had not cared about
appearances.  That was one of the reasons he had loved her so much.  One
of the reasons he missed her so much.  One of a thousand reasons.

He looked away from the mirror.  If it was possible to be lonelier than
he was now, he hoped to God that he never slipped down that far.

He returned to the other room, said goodbye to his unheeding wife,
kissed her, smelled her hair once more, and got out of there at
five-thirty.

In the street, behind the wheel of his Camaro, Jack looked at passing
pedestrians and other motorists with loathing.  His fellow men.  The
good, kind, gentle, righteous people of the straight world would regard
him with disdain and possibly even disgust if they knew he was a
professional thief, though it was what they had done to him and to Jenny
that had driven him to crime.

He knew anger and bitterness solved nothing, changed nothing, and hurt
no one but himself.  Bitterness was corrosive.  He did not want to be
bitter, but there were times when he could not help it.

Later, after dinner alone at a Chinese restaurant, he returned to his
apartment.  He had a spacious one-bedroom coop in a first-class building
on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park.  Officially, it was owned by
a Liechtenstein-based corporation, which had purchased it with a check
written on a Swiss bank account, and each month the utilities and the
association fees were paid by the Bank of America out of a trust
account.  Jack Twist lived there under the name "Philippe Delon.  " To
the doormen and other building employees, to the few neighbors with whom
he spoke, he was known as the odd and slightly disreputable relative of
a wealthy French family who had sent him to America ostensibly to scout
investments but actually just to get him out of their hair.  He spoke
French fluently and could speak English with a convincing French accent
for hours without slipping up and revealing his deception.  Of course,
there was no French family, and both the corporation in Liechtenstein
and the Swiss bank account were his, and the only wealth he had to
invest was that which he had stolen from others.  He was not an ordinary
thief.

In his apartment, he went directly to the walk-in closet in the bedroom
and removed the false partition at the rear of it.  He pulled two bags
from the secret, three-foot-deep storage space and took them into the
dark living room, not bothering to turn on lights.  He piled the bags
beside his favorite armchair, which stood by a large window.

He got a bottle of Becks from the refrigerator, opened it, and returned
to the living room.  He sat in the darkness for a while, by the window,
looking down on the park, where lights reflected off the snow-covered
ground and made strange shadows in the bare-limbed trees.

He was stalling, and he knew it.  Finally he switched on the reading
lamp beside the chair.  He pulled the smallest of the two bags in front
of him, opened it, and began to scoop out the contents.

Jewels.  Diamond pendants, diamond necklaces, glittering diamond
chokers.  A diamond and emerald bracelet.  Three diamond and sapphire
bracelets.  Rings, broaches, barrettes, stickpins, jeweled hat pins.

These were the proceeds of a heist that he had pulled off
single-handedly six weeks ago.  It should have been a twoman job, but
with extensive and imaginative planning, he had found a way to handle it
himself, and it had gone smoothly.

The only problem was that he had gotten no kick whatsoever from that
heist.  When a job had been successfully concluded, Jack was usually in
a grand mood for days after. From his point of view, these were not
simply crimes but also acts of retribution against the straight world,
payment for what it had done to him and to Jenny.  Until the age of
twenty-nine, he had given much to society, to his country, but as a
reward he had wound up in a Central American hellhole, in a dictator's
prison, where he had been left to rot.  And Jenny .  .  .  He could not
bear to think about the condition in which he had found her when, at
last, he had escaped and come home.  Now, he no longer gave to society
but took from it, and with intense pleasure.  His greatest satisfaction
was breaking the rules, taking what he wanted, getting away with
it-until the jewelry heist six weeks ago.  At the end of that operation,
he had felt no triumph, no sense of retribution. That lack of excitement
scared him.  It was, after all, what he lived for.

Sitting in the armchair by the window, he piled the jewelry in his lap,
held selected pieces up to the light, and tried once more to gain a
feeling of accomplishment and revenge.

He should have disposed of the jewelry in the days immediately following
the burglary.  But he was reluctant to part with it until he had
squeezed at least a small measure of satisfaction from it.

Troubled by his continued lack of feeling, he put the jewels back into
the sack from which he had taken them.

The other sack contained his share of the proceeds from the robbery at
the fratellanza warehouse five days ago.  They had been able to open
only one of the two safes, but that had contained over $3,100,000-more
than a million apiece, in untraceable twenties, fifties, and hundreds.

By now he should have begun to convert the cash into cashier's checks
and other negotiable instruments for deposit, by mail, in his Swiss
accounts.  However, he held on to it because, as with the jewelry, the
possession of it had not yet given him a sense of triumph.

He removed thick stacks of tightly banded currency from the bag and held
them, turned them over in his hands.  He brought them to his face and
smelled them.  That singular scent of money was usually exciting in
itself-but not this time.  But he did not feel triumphant, clever,
lawless, or in any way superior to the obedient mice who scurried
through society's maze exactly as they were taught.  He just felt empty.

If this change in him had occurred with the warehouse job, he would have
attributed it to having stolen from other thieves, rather than from the
straight world.  But his reaction subsequent to the jewelry heist had
been the same, and that victim had been a legitimate business.  It was
his ennui following the jewelry store action that caused him to move on
to another job sooner than he should have.  Usually he pulled off one
job every three or four months, but only five weeks had elapsed between
his most recent operations.

All right, so maybe the usual thrill eluded him on both these recent
jobs because the money was no longer important to him.  He had set aside
enough to support himself in style for as long as he lived and to take
care of Jenny even if she endured a normal lifespan in her coma, which
was unlikely. Perhaps, all along, the most important thing about his
work had not been the rebellion and defiance of it, as he had thought;
perhaps, instead, he had done it all just for the money, and the rest of
it had been merely cheap rationalization and self-delusion.

But he could not believe that.  He knew what he had felt, and he knew
how much he missed those feelings now.

Something was happening to him, an inner shifting, a seachange.  He felt
empty, adrift, without purpose.  He dared not lose his love of larceny.
It was the only reason he had for living.

He put the money back into the bag.  He turned out the light and sat in
the darkness, sipping Beck's and staring down at Central Park.

In addition to his recent inability to find joy in his work, he had been
plagued by a recurring nightmare more intense than any dream he had ever
known.  It had begun six weeks ago, before the jewelry store job, and
he'd had it eight or ten times since.  In the dream, he was fleeing from
a man in a motorcycle helmet with a darkly tinted visor.  At least he
thought it was a motorcycle helmet, although he could not see many
details of it or anything else of the man who wore it.  The faceless
stranger pursued him on foot through unknown rooms and along amorphous
corridors and, most vividly, along a deserted highway that cut through
an empty moon-washed landscape.  On every occasion, Jack's panic built
like steam pressure in a boiler, until it exploded and blew him awake.

The obvious interpretation was that the dream was a warning, that the
man in the helmet was a cop, that Jack was going to get caught.  But
that was not the way the nightmare felt. In the dream, he never had the
impression that the guy in the helmet was a cop.  Something else.

He hoped to God he would not have the dream tonight. The day had been
bad enough without that midnight terror.

He got another beer, returned to the chair by the window, and sat down
in the darkness once more.

It was December 8, and Jack Twist-former officer in the elite United
States Army Rangers, former POW in an undeclared war, a man who had
helped save the lives of over a thousand Indians in Central America, a
man who functioned under a burden of grief that might have broken some
people, a daring thief whose reservoir of courage had always been
bottomless-wondered if he had run out of the simple courage to go on
living.  If he could not regain the sense of purpose he had found in
larceny, he needed to find a new purpose. Desperately.

7.

Elko County, Nevada

Ernie Block broke all the speed limits on the drive back from Elko to
the Tranquility Motel.

The last time he had driven so fast and recklessly had been on a gloomy
Monday morning during his hitch with Marine Intelligence in Vietnam.  He
had been behind the wheel of a Jeep, passing through what should have
been friendly territory, and had unexpectedly come under enemy fire. The
incoming shells had spewed up geysers of dirt and chunks of macadam only
feet away from his front and rear bumpers. By the time he had broken out
of the fire zone, he had escaped more than twenty near-misses, had been
hit by three small but painfully jagged pieces of mortar, had been
rendered temporarily deaf from the thunderous explosions, and had found
himself struggling to control a Jeep that was running on its wheel rims
with four flat tires.  Having survived, he figured he had known fear as
profound as it could ever be.

But coming back from Elko, his fear was building toward a new peak.
Nightfall was approaching.  He had driven to the Elko freight office in
the Dodge van to take delivery of a shipment of lighting fixtures for
the motel.  He had set out shortly after noon, leaving Faye in charge of
the front desk, giving himself plenty of time to make the round-trip
before twilight.  But he had a flat tire and lost time changing it.
Then, once he reached Elko, he wasted almost an hour having the tire
repaired because he had not wanted to start home without a spare.  With
one thing or another, he had left Elko almost two hours later than
expected, and the sun had westered to the far edge of the Great Basin.

He kept the accelerator most of the way to the floor, whipping around
other traffic on the superhighway.  He did not think he would be able to
finish the drive home if he had to do it in full darkness.  In the
morning they would find him behind the wheel of the van, still parked
along the roadside, stark raving mad from having spent long hours in
horrified contemplation of the perfectly black landscape.

In the two and a half weeks since Thanksgiving, he had continued to
conceal his irrational fear of darkness from Faye. After she returned
from her visit to Wisconsin, Ernie found it more difficult to sleep
without a lamp burning, having indulged himself with a night light while
she was gone.  Every morning he used Murine to clear his bloodshot eyes.
Fortunately, she had not suggested going into Elko at night for a movie,
so Ernie had not been required to make excuses.  A few times, after
sunset, he'd had to go from the office to the Tranquility Grille next
door, and even though the walk was well-lighted by the motel's outdoor
lamps and signs, he had been nearly overwhelmed by a sense of fragility,
vulnerability. But he had kept his secret.

All his life, in the Marine Corps and out of it, to the best of his
ability, Ernie Block had done what was required of him, all that could
be expected.  And now, by God, he was not going to fail his own wife.

Behind the wheel of the Dodge van, racing westward toward the
Tranquility Motel under a smeary orange-purple sky, Ernie Block wondered
if his problem was premature senility, Alzheimer's disease.  Even though
he was only fifty-two, it almost had to be something like Alzheimer's.
Although it frightened him, at least he could understand it.

Understand it, yes, but he could not accept it.  Faye depended on him.
He could not become a mental invalid, a burden on her.  The men in the
Block family never let their womenfolk down.  Never.  Unthinkable.

The highway rounded a small hillock, and a mile ahead, north of the
Interstate, lay the motel, the only building in that vast panorama.  Its
blue and green neon sign was already switched on, shining fiercely
bright against the twilight sky. He'd never seen a more welcome sight.

Complete darkness was still ten minutes away, and he decided it was
foolish to risk being stopped by a cop when he was this close to
sanctuary.  He eased up on the accelerator, and the speedometer needle
swiftly dropped: ninety ...  eighty-five .  .  .  seventy-five .  .  .
sixty .  .  .

He was three-quarters of a mile from home when a curious thing happened:
He glanced southward, away from the road, and his breath caught.  He did
not know what startled him. Something about the landscape.  Something
about the way the light and shadow played across those down-sloping
fields. He was suddenly gripped by the odd idea that a particular piece
of ground-a half-mile ahead, on the opposite side of the highway-was of
supreme importance in understanding the bizarre changes that had been
taking place in him during the past few months.

.  .  .  fifty .  .  .  forty-five ...  forty .  .  .

He could see nothing to make that piece of land different from the tens
of thousands of acres around it.  Besides, he had seen it countless
times before and had been unimpressed by it.  Nevertheless, in the slope
of the terrain, in the gently folded contours of the earth, in the
bisecting wound of an arroyo, in the configuration of sagebrush and
grass, and in the scattered gnarled outcroppings of rock, something
seemed to cry out for investigation.

He felt as if the land itself were saying, "Here, here, here is part of
the answer to your problem, part of the explanation for your fear of the
night.  Here.  Here But that was ridiculous.

To his surprise, he found himself pulling to the shoulder of the
highway, stopping a quarter-mile from home, not far from the exit ramp
to the county road that led past the motel. He squinted south across the
highway, at the place that had mysteriously captured his attention.

He was gripped by the most amazing sense of impending epiphany, an
overwhelming feeling that something of monumental importance was about
to happen to him.  The skin prickled along the back of his neck.

He got out of the van, leaving it idling behind him.  In a state of
tremulous expectation that he could not understand, he headed toward the
far side of the interstate, where he could have a better look at the
plot of ground that fascinated him.  He traversed two lanes of blacktop,
clambered into the twenty-foot-wide gulley that divided the halves of
the interstate, and scrambled up the far slope.  He waited for three
huge trucks to roar past, then crossed the eastbound lanes in the windy
wake of those rigs.  His heart was pounding with an inexplicable
excitement, and for the moment he had forgotten the advent of night.

He stopped on the far berm, at the crest of the highway's elevated bed,
looking south and slightly west.  He wore a bulky suede jacket with
sheepskin lining, but his brush-cut gray hair provided little protection
from the chilly wind, which scrubbed its cold knuckles across his skull.

He began to lose the feeling that something of immense importance was
about to happen.  Instead, he was seized by the even creepier notion
that something had already happened to him on that patch of
shadow-banded ground out there, something that accounted for his recent
fear of the dark.  Something he had assiduously banned from his memory.

But that made no sense.  If important events had transpired here, they
simply would not have slipped his mind.  He was not forgetful.  And he
was not the kind of person who repressed unpleasant memories.

Still, the back of his neck continued to tingle.  Out there, not far
into those trackless Nevada plains, something had happened to him that
he had forgotten but that now pricked him from his subconscious, where
it was deeply embedded, much the way a needle, accidentally left in a
quilt, might jab and startle a sleeper out of a dream.

With his legs spread wide and his feet planted firmly in the berm, with
his blocky head hunched down on his blocky shoulders, Ernie seemed to be
challenging the landscape to speak more clearly to him.  He strained to
resurrect the dead memory of this place-if, indeed, there was one-but
the harder he tried to grasp the elusive revelation, the faster it
receded from him.  Then it was gone altogether.

The thought vu deserted him as completely as the sense of impending
epiphany had evaporated before it.  The tingle left his scalp and neck.
His frantically pounding heart settled slowly into a more normal pace.

Bewildered and somewhat dizzy, he studied the fast-fading scene before
him-the angled land, the spines and teeth of rock, the brush and grass,
the weathered convexities and concavities of the ancient earth-and now
he could not imagiNe why it had seemed special to him.  It was just a
portion of the high plains virtually indistinguishable from a thousand
other spots from here to Elko or from here to Battle Mountain.

Disoriented by the suddenness of his plunge from the brink of
transcendent awareness, he looked back toward the van, which waited on
the north side of the interstate.  He felt conspicuous and foolish when
he thought of the way he had dashed from there to here in the grip of a
strange excitement. He hoped Faye had not seen him.  If by chance she
had been looking out a window in this direction, she could not have
missed his performance, for the motel was only a quarter of a mile away,
and the flashing emergency blinkers on the truck made it by far the most
noticeable thing in the swiftly descending darkness.

Darkness.

Abruptly, the nearness of nightfall hit Ernie Block hard. For a while,
the mysterious magnetism that had drawn him to this place had been
stronger than his fear of the dark.  But that changed in an instant when
he realized that the eastern half of the sky was purple-black and that
only minutes of vague light remained in the western realm.

With a cry of panic, he bolted across the eastbound lanes, in front of a
motor home, oblivious of the danger.  A horn blared at him.  He did not
care, did not pause, just ran pellmell because he could feel the
darkness clutching at him and pressing down on him.  He reached the
shallow gully that served as a lane divider, fell as he started down
into it, rolled back onto his feet, terrified of the blackness that was
welling up out of each depression in the land and from under every rock.
He flung himself up the other side of the gully, fled into the westbound
lanes. Fortunately there was no oncoming traffic, for he did not look to
see if the way was clear.  At the van, he fumbled with the door handle,
acutely conscious of the perfect blackness under the truck.  It was
grappling at his feet.  It wanted to pull him under the Dodge and devour
him. He yanked the door open.  Tore his feet loose of the hands of
darkness. Clambered into the cab.  Slammed the door. Locked it.

He felt better but far from safe, and if he had not been so close to
home he would have frozen stiff.  But he only had a quarter of a mile to
go, and when he switched on his headlights, the gloom fell back, which
encouraged him.  He was shaking so violently that he did not trust
himself to pull back into traffic, so he drove along the shoulder of the
interstate until he came to the exit ramp.  There were sodium lamps
along the ramp and at the base of it, and he was tempted to stop there
at the bottom, in the yellow glare, but he gritted his teeth and turned
onto the county road, out of the light. After driving only two hundred
yards, Ernie reached the entrance to the Tranquility Motel.  He swung
through the parking area, slid the van into a slot in front of the
office, switched off the headlights, and cut the engine.

Beyond the big windows of the office, he could see Faye at the front
desk.  He hurried inside, closing the door behind himself with too much
force.  He smiled at Faye when she glanced up, and he hoped the smile
looked more convincing than it felt.

"I was beginning to worry, dear," she said, returning his smile.

"Had a flat tire," Ernie said, unzipping his jacket.

He felt somewhat relieved.  Nightfall was easier to accept when he was
not alone; Faye gave him strength, but he was still uneasy.

She said, "I missed you."

"I was only gone the afternoon."

"I guess I'm hooked, then.  Seemed longer.  Guess I've got to have my
Ernie fix every couple of hours or go through withdrawal symptoms."

He leaned across the counter, and she leaned from her side, and they
kissed.  There was nothing half-hearted about their kiss. She put one
hand to his head to hold him close. Most long-married couples, even if
they remained in love, were perfunctory in their displays of affection,
but that was not the case with Ernie and Faye Block.  After thirty-one
years of marriage, she could still make him feel young.

She said, "Where are the new lighting fixtures?  They did come in,
didn't they?  The freight office didn't make a mistake?"

That question jolted him back to an acute awareness of the night
outside.  He glanced at the windows, then quickly away. "Uh, no.  I'm
tired.  I don't really feel up to hauling them in here tonight."

"Just four crates-"

"Really, I'd rather do it in the morning," he said, striving to keep a
tremor out of his voice.  "The stuff will be all right in the truck.
Nobody'll touch it.  Hey, you put up the Christmas decorations!"

"You mean you just noticed?"

A huge wreath of pine cones and nuts hung on the wall above the sofa.  A
life-sized cardboard figure of Santa Claus stood in the corner beside
the rack of postcards, and a small ceramic sleigh with ceramic reindeer
was displayed at one end of the long counter.  Red and gold
Christmas-tree balls hung from the ceiling light fixture on lengths of
transparent fishing line.

"You had to get up on a ladder for some of this," he said.

"Just the stepladder."

"But what if you'd fallen?  You should've left this for me to do."

Faye shook her head.  "Honey, I swear to God I'm not the fragile type.
Now, hush up.  You ex-Marines carry macho too far sometimes."

"Is that so?"

The outer door opened, and a trucker came in, asking about a room.

Ernie held his breath until the door closed.

The trucker was a lanky man in a cowboy hat, denim jacket, cowboy shirt,
and jeans.  Faye complimented him on the hat, which had an elaborately
sculpted leather band brightened with chips of turquoise.  In that easy
way of hers, she made the stranger feel like an old friend as she
shepherded him through the check-in process.

Leaving her to it, trying to forget his curious experience on the
interstate, trying not to dwell on the night that had come, Ernie moved
behind the counter, hung his coat on the brass rack in the corner by the
file cabinets, and went to the oak desk, where mail was stacked on the
blotter.  Bills, of course.  Advertistments.  A charity solicitation.
The first Christmas cards of the year.  His military pension check.

 Finally, there was a white envelope without a return address, which
contained only a Polaroid color photograph that had been taken in front
of the motel, beside the door to Room 9.  It was of three people-man,
woman, child.  The man was in his late twenties, darkly tanned and
good-looking.  The woman was a couple of years younger, a pretty
brunette.  The little girl, five or six, was very cute.  All three were
smiling at the camera.  Judging from their clothes-shorts and
Tshirts-and the quality of sunlight in the picture, Ernie assumed that
the snapshot had been taken in the middle of summer.

Puzzled, he turned the photo over, looking for a scribbled note of
explanation.  The back was blank.  He checked the envelope again, but it
was empty: no letter, no card, not even a business card to identify the
sender.  The postmark was Elko, December 7, last Saturday.

He looked again at the people in the picture, and although he did not
remember them, he felt his skin prickle, just as it had done when he had
been drawn to that place along the highway.  His pulse accelerated.  He
quickly put the picture aside and looked away from it.

Faye was still chatting with the cowboy-trucker as she took a room key
off the pegboard and passed it across the counter.

Ernie kept his eyes on her.  She was a calming influence. She had been a
lovely farmgirl when he'd met her, and had grown into a lovelier woman.
Her blond hair might have begun to turn white, but it was hard to tell.
Her blue eyes were clear and quick.  Hers was an open, friendly Iowa
face, slightly saucy but always wholesome, even beatific.

By the time the cowboy-trucker left, Ernie had stopped shaking.  He took
the Polaroid snapshot to Faye.  "What do you make of this?"

"That's our Room Nine," she said.  "They must've stayed with us." She
frowned at the young couple and little girl in the photograph.  "Can't
say I remember them, though.

Strangers to me."

"So why would they send us a photo without a note?"

"Well, obviously, they thought we would remember them.

"But the only reason they'd think that was if maybe they stayed for a
few days and we got to know them.  And I don't know them at all.  I
think I'd remember the tyke," Ernie said. He liked children, and they
usually liked him.  "She's cute enough to be in movies."

"I'd think you'd remember the mother.  She's gorgeous."

"Postmarked Elko," Ernie said.  "Why would anybody who lives in Elko
come out here to stay?"

"Maybe they don't live in Elko.  Maybe they were here last summer and
always meant to send us a photo, and maybe they recently passed through
and meant to stop and leave this off but didn't have time.  So they
mailed it from Elko."

"Without a note."

"It is odd," Faye agreed.

He took the picture from her.  "Besides, this is a Polaroid. Developed a
minute after it was taken.  If they wanted us to have it, why didn't
they leave it with us when they stayed here?"

The door opened, and a curly-haired guy with a bushy mustache came into
the office, shivering.  "Got any rooms left?" he asked.

While Faye dealt with the guest, Ernie took the Polaroid back to the oak
desk.  He meant to gather up the mail and go upstairs, but he stood by
the desk, studying the faces of the people in the snapshot.

It was Tuesday evening, December 10.

8.

Chicago, Illinois

When Brendan Cronin went to work as an orderly at St. Joseph's Hospital
for Children, only Dr.  Jim McMurtry knew that he was really a priest.
Father Wycazik had obtained a guarantee of secrecy from the physician,
as well as the solemn assurance that Brendan would be assigned as much
workand as much unpleasant work-as any orderly. Therefore, during his
first day on the job, he emptied bedpans, changed urine-soaked bed
linens, assisted a therapist with passive exercises for bed-ridden
patients, spoon-fed an eight-year-old boy who was partially paralyzed,
pushed wheelchairs, encouraged despondent patients, cleaned up the vomit
of two young cancer victims nauseous from chemotherapy.  No one pampered
him, and no one called him "Father." The nurses, doctors, orderlies,
candy-stripers, and patients called him Brendan, and he felt
uncomfortable, like an impostor engaged in a masquerade.

That first day, overcome with pity and grief for St.  Joseph's children,
he twice slipped away to the staff men's room and locked himself in a
stall, where he sat and wept.  The twisted legs and swollen joints of
those who suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, that mangler of the
innocent young, was a sight almost too terrible to be borne.  The wasted
flesh of the muscular dystrophy victims, the suppurating wounds of the
burn victims, the battered bodies of those whose parents had abused
them: He wept for all of them.

He could not imagine why Father Wycazik thought this duty would help him
regain his lost faith.  If anything, the existence of so many
pain-racked children only reinforced his doubt.  If the merciful God of
Catholicism really existed, if there was a Jesus, why would He allow the
innocent to endure such atrocities?  Of course, Brendan knew all the
standard theological arguments on that point.  Mankind had brought all
forms of evil upon itself by choice, the Church said, by turning away
from the grace of God.  But theological arguments were inadequate when
he came face to face with these smallest victims of fate.

By the second day, the staff was still calling him Brendan, but the
children were calling him Pudge, a long-unused nickname which he
divulged to them in the course of telling a funny story.  They liked his
stories, jokes, rhymes, and silly puns, and he found he could nearly
always get a laugh or at least a smile out of them.  That day, he went
to the men's room and wept only once.

By the third day, both the children and staff called him Pudge.  If he
had another metier besides the priesthood, he had found it at St.
Joseph's.  In addition to performing the usual tasks expected of an
orderly, he entertained the patients with comic patter, teased them,
drew them out.  Wherever he went, he was greeted with cries of "Pudge!"
that were a better reward than money.  And he did not cry until he was
back in the hotel room that he had taken for the duration of Father
Wycazik's unconventional therapy.

By Wednesday afternoon, the seventh day, he knew why Father Wycazik sent
him to St.  Joseph's.  Understanding came while he was brushing the hair
of a ten-year-old girl who'd been crippled by a rare bone disease.

Her name was Emmeline, and she was rightfully proud of her hair.  It was
thick, glossy, raven-black, and its healthy luster seemed to be a
defiant response to the sickness that had wasted her body.  She liked to
brush her hair a hundred strokes every day, but often her knuckles and
wrist-joints were so inflamed that she could-not hold the brush.

On Wednesday, Brendan put her in a wheelchair and took her to the X ray
department, where they were monitoring a new drug's effects on her bone
marrow, and when he brought her back to her room an hour later, he
brushed her hair for her.  Emmeline sat in the wheelchair, looking out a
window, while Brendan pulled the soft bristles through her silken
tresses, and she became enchanted with the winterscape beyond the glass.

With a gnarled hand more suited to the body of an eightyyear-old woman,
she pointed down to the roof of another, lower wing of the hospital.
"See that patch of snow, Pudge?"

Rising heat within the building had caused most of the snow to loosen
and slide off the pitched roof.  But a large patch remained, outlined by
dark slate shingles.  "It looks like a ship," Emmy said.  "The shape.
You see?  A beautiful old ship with three white sails, gliding across a
slate-colored sea."

For a while Brendan could not see what she saw.  But she continued to
describe the imaginary vessel ' and the fourth time that he looked up
from her hair, he suddenly was able to see that the patch of snow did,
indeed, bear a remarkable and delightful resemblance to a sailing ship.

To Brendan, the long icicles that hung in front of Emmy's window were
transparent bars, the hospital a prison from which she might never be
released.  But to Emmy, those frozen stalactites were wondrous Christmas
decorations that, she said, put her in the holiday mood.

"God likes winter as much as He likes spring," Emmy said. "The gift of
the seasons is one of His ways of keeping us from getting bored with the
world.  That's what Sister Katherine told us, and right away I could see
it must be true.  When the sun hits those icicles just right, they cast
rainbows across my bed. Ever-so-pretty rainbows, Pudge.  The ice and
snow are like .  .  .  like jewels .  .  .  and ermine cloaks that God
uses to dress up the world in winter to make us ooh and ah.  That's why
He never makes two snowflakes alike: it's a way of reminding us that the
world He made for us is a wonderful, wonderful world."

As if on cue, snowflakes spiraled down from the gray December sky.

In spite of her nearly useless legs and twisted hands, in spite of the
pain she had endured, Emmy believed in God's goodness, and in the
inspiring rightness of the world that He had created.

Strong faith was, in fact, a trait of nearly all the children in St.
Joseph's Hospital.  They remained convinced that a caring Father watched
over them from His kingdom in the sky, and they were encouraged.

In his mind he could hear Father Wycazik saying: If these innocents can
suffer so much and not lose their faith, what sorry excuse do you have,
Brendan?  Perhaps, in their very innocence and naivetd, they know
something that you have forgotten while chasing your sophisticated
education in Rome. Perhaps there is something to be learned from this,
Brendan. Do you think so?  Just maybe?  Something to be learned?

But the lesson was not powerful enough to restore Brendan's faith.  He
continued to be deeply moved, not by the possibility that a caring and
compassionate God might actually exist, but by the children's amazing
courage in the face of such adversity.

He gave Emmy's hair a hundred strokes, then ten more, which pleased her,
and then he lifted her from the wheelchair and put her into bed.  As he
pulled the covers over her pathetic bent-stick legs, he felt a surge of
that same rage that had filled him during Mass at St.  Bette's two
Sundays ago, and if a sacred chalice had been close at hand, he would
not have hesitated to hurl it at the wall once more.

Emmy gasped, and Brendan had the odd notion that she had read his
blasphemous thoughts.  But she said, "Oh, Pudge, did you hurt yourself?"

He blinked at her.  "What do you mean?"

"Did you burn yourself?  Your hands.  When'd you hurt your hands?"

Bewildered by her question, he looked down at the backs of his hands,
turned them over, and was surprised by the marks on his palms.  In the
center of each palm was a red ring of inflamed and swollen flesh.  Each
ring was two inches in diameter and sharply defined along all its edges.
The circular band of irritated tissue which formed the ring was no more
than half an inch wide, inscribing a perfect circle; the skin around and
within the circle was quite normal.  It almost looked as if the marks
had been painted on his hands, but when he touched one of the rings with
a fingertip, he could feel the bump it made in his palm.

"That's strange," he said.

Dr.  Stan Heeton was the resident physician on duty in St. Joseph's
emergency room.  Standing at the examining table on which Brendan sat,
peering with interest at the odd rings on Brendan's hands, he said, "Do
they hurt?"

"No.  Not at all."

"Itching?  A burning sensation?"

"No.  Neither."

"Do they at least tingle?  No?  You've never had these before?"

"Never.

"Do you have any allergies that you're aware of?  No?

Hmmmm.  At first glance, it looks like a mild burn, but you'd have
remembered leaning against something hot enough to cause this.  There'd
be pain.  So we can rule that out.  Same for acid contact.  Did you say
you'd taken a little girl to radiology?"

"Yes, but I didn't stay in the room while the X rays were taken."

"Doesn't really look like a radiation burn.  Maybe dermatomycosis, a
fungal infection, perhaps in the ringworm family, though the symptoms
aren't sufficiently indicative of ringworm.  No scaling, no itching. And
the ring is much too clearly defined, not like the inflammation patterns
you get with a Microsporum or Trichophyton infection."

"So what does all this boil down to?"

Heeton hesitated, then said, "I don't think it's anything serious.  The
best guess is a rash related to an unidentified allergy.  If the problem
persists, you'll have to take the standard patch tests and find the
source of your problem." He let go of Brendan's hands, went to a chair
at a corner desk, and began to fill out a prescription form.

Puzzled, Brendan stared at his hands a moment longer, then folded them
in his lap.

At the corner desk, still writing, Heeton said, "I'll start with the
simplest treatment, a cortisone lotion.  If the rash doesn't disappear
in a couple of days, come see me again."

He returned to the examining table, holding out the prescription form.

Brendan took the paper from him.  "Listen, is there any chance I might
pass on an infection to the kids or anything like that?"

"Oh, no.  If I thought there was the slightest chance, I'd have told
you," Heeton said.  "Now, let me have one last look."

Brendan turned his hands palms-up for examination.

"What the devil?" Dr.  Heeton said, surprised.

The rings were gone.

That night, in his room at the Holiday Inn, Brendan again endured the
by-now familiar nightmare about which he had spoken with Father Wycazik.
It had disturbed his sleep twice before in the past week.

He dreamed he was lying in a strange place, with his arms and legs
restrained by straps or braces.  From out of a haze, a pair of hands
reached for him.  Hands encased in shiny black gloves.

He woke in knots of sweat-soaked sheets, sat up in bed, and leaned back
against the headboard, letting the dream evaporate as sweat dried on his
forehead.  In the dark he brought his hands to his face to blot it-and
went rigid when his palms touched his cheeks.  He switched on the lamp.
The swollen, inflamed rings had returned to his palms.  But as he
watched, they faded.

It was Thursday, December 12.

9.

Laguna Beach, California

Dom Corvaisis thought he had slept Wednesday night straight through in
peace.  He woke in bed, in precisely the same position in which he had
gone to sleep, as if he had not moved an inch during the night.

But when he went to work at his Displaywriter, he was dismayed to find
proof of his somnambulistic wandering on the current work diskette.  As
on a few other occasions, he apparently had gone to the Displaywriter in
his night trance and had repeatedly typed two words.  Previously, he had
typed, "I'm scared," but this time there were two different words:

The moon.  The moon.  The moon.  The moon.

The moon.  The moon.  The moon.  The moon.

There were hundreds of repetitions of those sev&n letters, and he was at
once reminded that he had heard himself murmuring the same words in a
state of drowsy disorientation, just as he had fallen asleep last
Sunday.  Dominick stared at the screen for a long time, chilled, but he
had no idea what special meaning "the moon" held for him, if any.

The Valium and Dalmane therapy was working well.  Until now, there had
been no new episodes of sleepwalking and no dreams since last weekend,
when he'd had that nasty nightmare about being forced face-down into a
sink.  He had seen Dr.  Cobletz again, and the physician had been
pleased by his swift progress.

Coblei-z had said, "I'm going to extend your prescriptions, but be sure
not to take the Valium more than once-or at most, twice-a day."

"I never do," Dom had lied.

"And only one Dalmane a night.  I don't want you becoming
drug-dependent.  I'm sure we'll beat this thing by the first of the
year."

Dom believed Cobletz was correct, which was why he did not want to worry
the doctor by confessing that there were days when he only made it
through with the aid of Valium and nights when he took two or even three
Dalmane tablets, washing some of them down with beer or Scotch.  But in
a couple of weeks he could stop taking them without fear that the
somnambulism would get a new grip on him.  The treatment was working.
That was the important thing.  The treatment was, thank God, working.

Until now.

The moon.

Frustrated and angry, he deleted the words from the diskette, a hundred
lines of them, four repetitions to the line.

He stared at the screen a long time, growing increasingly nervous.

Finally he took a Valium.

That morning Dom got no work done, and at eleven-thirty he and Parker
Faine picked up Denny Ulmes and Nyugen Kao Tran, the two boys assigned
to them by the Orange County chapter of Big Brothers of America.  They
had planned a lazy afternoon at the beach, dinner at Hamburger Hamlet,
and a movie, and Dominick had been looking forward to the outing.

He had become involved in the Big Brothers program years earlier in
Portland, Oregon.  It had been his only community involvement, the only
thing that had been able to bring him out of his rabbit hole.

He had spent his own childhood in a series of foster homes, lonely and
increasingly withdrawn.  Some day, when he finally got married, he hoped
to adopt kids.  In the meantime, when he spent time with these kids, he
was not only helping them but was also comforting the lonely child
within himself.

Nyugen Kao Tran preferred to be called "Duke," in imitation of John
Wayne, whose movies he loved.  Duke was thirteen, the youngest son of
boat people who had fled the horrors of "peacetime" Vietnam.  He was
bright, quick-witted, as startlingly agile as he was thin.  His
father-after surviving a brutal war, a concentration camp, and two weeks
in a flimsy boat on the open sea-had been killed three years ago in a
holdup while working at his second job as a nightshift clerk at a
Seven-Eleven store in sunny southern California.

Denny Ulmes, the twelve-year-old who was Parker's little brother, lost
his father to cancer.  He was more reticent than Duke, but the two got
along famously, so Dom and Parker frequently combined their outings.

Parker became a Big Brother at Dom's insistence, with curmudgeonly
reluctance.  "Me?  Me?  I'm not father material-or surrogate father
material," Parker had said.  "Never was and never will be.  I drink too
much, womanize too much. It'd be downright criminal for any kid to ttirn
to me for advice.

I'm a procrastinator, a dreamer, and a self-centered egomaniac.  And I
like me that way!  What in God's name would I have to offer a kid?  I
don't even like dogs.  Kids like dogs, but I hate 'em.  Damn dirty
flea-bitten things.  Me, a Big Brother?  Friend, you have lost your
marbles for sure."

But Thursday afternoon at the beach, when the water proved too cold for
swimming, Parker organized a volleyball game and surfside races.  He got
Dom and the boys involved in a complicated game of his own devising,
involving two frisbees, a beach ball, and an empty soda can.  Under his
direction they also built a sandcastle complete with a menacing dragon.

Later, during an early dinner at Hamburger Hamlet in Costa Mesa, while
the kids were in the bathroom, Parker said, "Dom, good buddy, this Big
Brother thing was sure one of the best ideas I've ever had."

"Your idea?" Dominick said, shaking his head.  "I had to drag you into
it kicking and screaming."

"Nonsense," Parker said.  "I've always had a way with kids. Every artist
is a bit of a kid at heart.  We have to stay young to create.  I find
kids invigorate me, keep my mind fresh."

"Next, you'll be getting a dog," Dom said.

Parker laughed.  He finished his beer, leaned forward.  "You okay?  At
times today, you seemed ...  distracted.  A little out of it."

."Lot on my mind," Dom said.  "But I'm fine.  The sleepwalking's pretty
much stopped.  And the dreams.  Cobletz knows what he's doing."

"Is the new book going well?  Don't shit me, now."

:'It's going well," Dom lied.

'At times you have that look," Parker said, watching him intently. "That
.  .  .  doped up.  Following the prescribed dos age, I assume?"

The painter's perspicacity disconcerted Dom.  "I'd have to be an idiot
to snack on Valium as if it was candy.  Of course, I follow the
prescribed dosage."

Parker stared hard at him, then apparently decided not to push it.

The movie was good, but during the first thirty minutes Dom grew nervous
without reason.  When he felt the nervousness building toward an anxiety
attack, he slipped out to the men's room.  He'd brought another Valium
for just such an emergency.

The important thing was that he was winning.  He was getting well.  The
somnambulism was losing its grip on him.  It really was.

Beneath a strong pine-scented disinfectant, there was an acrid stench
from the urinals.  Dom felt slightly nauseous.  He swallowed the Valium
without water.

That night, in spite of the pills, he had the dream again, and he
remembered more of it than just the part where people were forcing his
head into a sink.

In the nightmare, he was in a bed in an unknown room, where there seemed
to be an oily saffron mist in the air.  Or perhaps the amber fog was
only in his eyes, for he could not see anything clearly.  furniture
loomed beyond the bed, and at least two people were present.  But those
shapes rippled and writhed as if this were purely a realm of smoke and
fluid, where nothing had a fixed appearance.

He almost felt as if he were underwater, very deep underneath the
surface of some mysterious cold sea.  The atmosphere in the dream-place
had more weight than mere air.  He could barely draw breath.  Each
inhalation and exhalation was agony.  He sensed that he was dying.

The two blurred figures came close.  They seemed concerned about his
condition.  They spoke urgently to each other. Although he knew they
were speaking English, he could not understand them.  A cold hand
touched him.  He heard the clink of glass.  Somewhere a door shut.

With the flash-cut suddenness of a scene transition in a film, the dream
shifted to a bathroom or kitchen.  Someone was forcing his face down
into the sink.  Breathing became even more difficult.  The air was like
mud: with each inhalation it clogged his nostrils.  He choked and gasped
and tried to blow out the mud-thick air, and the two people with him
were shouting at him, and as before he could not understand what they
were saying, and they pressed his face down into the sink Dom woke and
was still in bed.  Last weekend he had been flung free of the dream only
to discover that he had walked in his sleep and had been acting out the
nightmare at his own bathroom sink.  This time, he was relieved to find
himself beneath the sheets.

I am getting better, he thought.

Trembling, he sat up and switched on the light.

No barricades.  No signs of somnambulistic panic.

He looked at the digital clock: two-oh-nine A. M.  A halfempty can of
warm beer stood on the nightstand.  He washed down another Dalmane
tablet.

I am getting better.

It was Friday the thirteenth.

10.

Elko County, Nevada

Friday night, three days after his weird experience on the I80, Ernie
Block couldn't sleep at all.  As darkness embraced him, his nerves wound
tighter, tighter, until he thought he would start screaming and be
unable to stop.

Slipping out of bed as soundlessly as he could, pausing to make sure
that Faye's slow and even breathing had not changed, he went into the
bathroom, closed the door, turned on the light.  Wonderful light.  He
reveled in the light.  He put down the lid of the commode and sat for
fifteen minutes in his underwear, just letting the brightness scar him,
as mindlessly happy as a lizard on a sun-washed rock.

Finally he knew he must return to the bedroom.  If Faye woke, and if
he'remained in here too long, she would begin to think something was
wrong.  He was determined to do nothing that would make her suspicious.

Although he had not used the toilet, he flushed it for cover, and went
to the sink to wash his hands.  He had just finished rinsing off the
soap and had plucked the towel off the rack when his eyes were drawn to
the only window in the room. It was above the bathtub, a rectangle about
three feet wide and two feet high, which opened outward on an overhead
piano hinge.  Although the glass was frosted and provided no view of the
night beyond, a shiver passed through Ernie as he stared at the opaque
pane.  More disturbing than the shiver was the sudden rush of peculiar,
urgent thoughts that came with it:

The window's big enough to get through, I could get away, escape, and
the roof of the utility room is under the window, so there's not a long
drop, and I could be off, into the arroyo behind the motel, up into the
hills, make my way east, get to a ranch somewhere and get help.  .  .  .

Blinking furiously as that swift train of thoughts flashed through his
mind and faded away, Ernie discovered that he had stepped from the sink
to the bathtub.  He did not remember moving.

He was bewildered by the urge to escape.  From whom?

From what?  Why?  This was his own home.  He had nothing to fear within
these walls.

Yet he could not take his glaze from the milky window.  A dreaminess had
come over him.  He was aware of it but unable to cast it off.

Got to get out, get away, there won't be another chance, not another
chance like this, now, go now, go, go.  .  .  .

Unwittingly, he had stepped into the tub and was directly in front of
the window, which was set in the wall at face-level. The porcelain
coating of the tub was cold against his bare feet.

Slide back the latch, push up the window, stand on the rim of the tub,
pull yourself up onto the sill, out and away, a threeor four-minute
headstart before you're missed, not much but enough.  .  .  .

Panic rose in him without reason.  There was a fluttering in his guts, a
tightness in his chest.

Without knowing why he was doing it, yet unable to stop himself, he slid
the bolt from the latch on the bottom of the window.  He pushed out. The
window swung up.

He was not alone.

Something was at the other side of the window, out there on the roof,
something with a dark, featureless, shiny face. Even as Ernie recoiled
in surprise, he realized it was a man in a white helmet with a tinted
visor that came all the way down over his face, so darkly tinted that it
was virtually black.

A black-gloved hand reached through the window, as if to grab him, and
Ernie cried out and took a step backward and fell over the edge of the
tub.  Toppling out of the tub, he grabbed wildly at the shower curtain,
tore it loose from several of its rings, but could not arrest his fall.
He hit the bathroom floor with a crash.  Pain flashed through his right
hip.

"Ernie!" Faye cried, and a moment later she pushed open the door.
"Ernie, my God, what's wrong, what happened?"

"Stay back." He got up painfully.  "Someone's out there."

Cold night air poured through the open window, rustling the
half-wrecked, bunched-up shower curtain.

Faye shivered, for she slept in only a pajama shirt and panties.

Ernie shivered, too, though partly for different reasons. The moment the
pain had throbbed through his hip, the dreaminess had left him.  In the
sudden rush of clear-mindedness, he wondered if the helmeted figure had
been imaginary, a hallucination.

"On the roof?" Faye said.  "At the window?  Who?"

"I don't know," Ernie said, rubbing his sore hip as he stepped back into
the tub and peered out the window again. He saw no one this time.

"What'd he look like?" Faye asked.

"I couldn't tell.  He was in motorcycle gear.  Helmet, gloves," Ernie
said, realizing how outlandish it sounded.

He levered himself up on the windowsill far enough to lean out and look
across the full length and breadth of the utility room's roof.  Shadows
were deep in places, but nowhere deep enough to hide a man.  The
intruder was gone-if indeed he had ever existed.

Abruptly Ernie became aware of the vast darkness behind the motel.  It
stretched across the hills, off to the distant mountains, an immense
blackness relieved only by the stars.  Instantly, a crippling weakness
and vulnerability overwhelmed him.  Gasping, he dropped off the sill,
back into the tub, and started to turn away from the window.

"Close it up," Faye said.

Squeezing his eyes shut to guard against another glimpse of the night,
he turned once more to the in-rushing cold air, fumbled blindly for the
window, and pulled it shut so hard that he almost broke the pane.  With
unsteady hands he struggled to secure the latch bolt.

When he stepped out of the tub, he saw concern in Faye's eyes, which he
expected.  He saw surprise, which he also expected.  But he saw a
penetrating awareness for which he was unprepared.  For a long moment
they looked at each other, neither of them speaking.

Then she said, "Are you ready to tell me about it?"

"Like I said .  .  .  I thought I saw a guy on the roof."

"That's not what I'm talking about, Ernie.  I mean, are you ready to
tell me what's wrong, what's been eating at you?"

Her eyes did not waver from his.  "For a couple of months now.  Maybe
longer."

He was stunned.  He thought he had concealed it so well. She said,
"Honey, you've been worried.  Worried like I've never seen you before.
And scared."

"No.  Not scared exactly."

"Yes.  Scared," Faye said, but there was no scorn in her, just an
Iowan's forthrightness and a desire to help.  "I've only ever seen you
scared once before, Ernie-back when Lucy was five and came down with
that muscle fever, and they thought it might be muscular dystrophy."

"God, yes, I was scared shitless then."

"But not since."

"Oh, I was scared in Nam sometimes," he said, his admission echoing
hollowly off the bathroom walls.

"But I never saw it." She hugged herself.  "It's rare that I see you
like this, Ernie, so when you're scared I'm scared. Can't help it.  I'm
even more scared because I don't know what's wrong.  You understand?
Being in the dark like I am .  .  .  that's worse than any secret you're
withholding from me."

Tears came to her eyes, and Ernie said, "Oh, hey, don't cry.  It's going
to be all right, Faye.  Really it is."

"Tell me!" she said.

"Okay."

"Now.  Everything."

He had woefully underestimated her, and he felt thickheaded.  She was a
Corps wife, after all, and a good one.  She had followed him from
Quantico to Singapore to Pendleton in California, even to Alaska, almost
everywhere but Nam and, later, Beirut.  She had made a home for them
wherever the Corps allowed dependents to follow, had weathered the bad
times with admirable aplomb, had never complained, and had never failed
him.  She was tough.  He could not imagine how he had forgotten that.

"Everything," he agreed, relieved to be able to share the burden.

Faye made coffee, and they sat in their robes and slippers at the
kitchen table while he told her everything.  She could see that he was
embarrassed.  He was slow to reveal details, but she sipped her coffee,
remained patient, and gave him a chance to tell it in his own way.

Ernie was about the best husband a woman could want, but now and then
his Block-family stubbornness reared its head, and Faye wanted to shake
some sense into him.  Everyone in his family suffered from it,
especially the men.  Blocks did things this way, never that way, and you
better never question why.  Block men liked their undershirts ironed but
never their underpants.  Block women always wore a bra, even at home in
the worst summer heat.  Blocks, both men and women, always ate lunch at
precisely twelve-thirty, always had dinner at six-thirty sharp, and God
forbid if the food was put on the table two minutes late: The subsequent
complaining would burst eardrums.  Blocks drove only General Motors
vehicles.  Not because GM products were notably better than others, but
because Blocks had always driven only General Motors vehicles.

Thank God, Ernie was not a tenth as bad as his father or brothers.  He
had been wise enough to get out of Pittsburgh, where the Block clan had
lived for generations in the same neighborhood.  Out in the real world,
away from the Kingdom of the Blocks, Ernie had loosened up.  In the
Marine Corps he could not expect every meal at precisely the time that
Block tradition demanded.  And soon after their marriage, Faye had made
it clear that she would make a first-rate home for him but would not be
bound by senseless traditions.  Ernie adapted, though not always easily,
and now he was a black sheep among his people, guilty of such sins as
driving a variety of vehicles not made by General Motors.

Actually, the only area where the Block family stubbornness still had a
hold on Ernie was in some man-woman matters.  He believed that a husband
had to protect his wife from a variety of unpleasantnesses that she was
just too fragile to handle.  He believed that a husband should never
allow his wife to see him in a moment of weakness.  Although their
marriage had never been conducted according to those rules, Ernie did
not always seem to realize they had abandoned the Block traditions more
than a quarter of a century ago.

For months, she had been aware something was seriously wrong.  But Ernie
continued to stonewall it, straining to prove he was a happy retired
Marine blissfully launched on a second career in motels.  She had
watched an unknown fire consuming him from within, and her subtle and
patient attempts to get him to open up hadgone right over his head.

During the past few weeks, ever since returning from Wisconsin after
Thanksgiving, she had been increasingly aware of his reluctance-even
inability-to go out at night.  He could not seem to make himself
comfortable in a room where even one lamp was left unlit.

Now, as they sat in the kitchen with cups of steaming coffee, the blinds
tightly closed and all the lights on, Faye listened intently to Ernie,
interrupting only when he seemed to need a word of encouragement to keep
him going, and nothing he told her was more than she could cope with.
Indeed, her spirits rose, for she was increasingly certain that she knew
what was wrong with him and how he might be helped.

He finished, his voice low and thin.  "So .  .  .  is that the reward
for all the years of hard work and careful financial planning? Premature
senility?  Now, when we can really start enjoying what we've earned, am
I going to wind up with my brains all scrambled, drooling, pissing my
pants, useless to myself and a burden on you?  Twenty years before my
time?

Christ, Faye, I've always realized that life isn't fair, but I never
thought the deck was stacked against me this bad."

"It won't be like that." She reached across the table and took his hand.
"Sure, Alzheimer's can strike people even younger than you, but this
isn't Alzheimer's.  From what I've read, from the way it was with my
father, I don't think the onset of senility-premature or otherwise-is
ever like this. What it sounds like is a simple phobia.  Phobia.  Some
people have an irrational fear of flying or heights.  For some reason,
you've developed a fear of the dark.  It can be overcome."

"But phobias just don't develop overnight, do they?"

Their right hands were still clasped.  She squeezed his as she said, "Do
you remember Helen Dorfman?  Almost twenty-four years ago.  Our landlady
when you were first assigned to Camp Pendleton."

"Oh, yeah!  The building on Vine Street, lived in number one, first
floor front.  We lived in number six." He seemed to take heart from his
ability to recall those details.  "She had a cat .  .  .  Sable.
Remember how the damn cat took a liking to us, left little gifts on our
doorstep?"

"Dead mice."

"Yeah.  Right there beside the morning paper and the milk,"

He laughed, blinked, and said, "Hey, I see what you mean by bringing up
Helen Dorfinan!  She was afraid to go out of her apartment.  Couldn't
even walk out on her own lawn."

"The poor woman had agoraphobia," Faye said.  "An irrational fear of
open spaces.  She was a prisoner in her own home.  Outside, she was
overwhelmed with fear.  Doctors call it a 'panic attack,' I think."

"Panic attack," Ernie said softly.  "Yeah, that's it, all right."

"And Helen didn't develop her agoraphobia till she was thirty-five,
after her husband died.  Phobias can spring up suddenly, later in life."

"Well, whatever the hell a phobia is, wherever it comes from ...  I
guess it's a lot better than senility.  But good God, I don't want to
spend the rest of my life being afraid of the dark."

"You won't have to," Faye said.  "Twenty-four years ago, nobody
understood phobias.  There hadn't been much study done.  No effective
treatments.  But it's not like that now.  I'm sure it's not."

He was silent a moment.  "I'm not crazy, Faye."

"I know that, you big jerk."

He mulled over the word "phobia, and he plainly wanted to believe her
answer.  In his blue eyes, she saw a rebirth of hope.

He said, "But the weird experience I had on the interstate on
Tuesday....  And the hallucination-I'm sure it must've been a
hallucination-of the motorcyclist on the roof....  How does stuff like
that fit this explanation?  How could that be a part of my phobia?"

"I don't know.  But an expert in the field could explain it all and tie
it together.  I'm sure it's not as unusual as it seems, Ernie."

He pondered for a moment, then nodded.  "Okay.  But how do we begin?
Where do we go for help?  How do I beat this damn thing?"

"I already have it figured out," she said.  "No doctor in Elko is going
to know how to treat a case like this.  We need a specialist, someone
who deals with phobic patients every day.  Probably isn't anyone like
that in Reno, either.  We'll have to go to a bigger city.  Now, I
suspect Milwaukee's big enough to have a doctor with experience in these
things, and we could stay with Lucy and Frank-"

"And at the same time get to see a lot of Frank, Jr., and Dorie," Ernie
said, smiling at the thought of his grandchildren.

"Right.  We'll go there for Christmas a week sooner than planned, this
Sunday instead of next.  Which is tomorrow, in fact.  It's already
Saturday.  When we get to Milwaukee, we'll look up a doctor.  If, by New
Year's, it looks like we'll have to stay there awhile, then I'll fly
back here, find a full-time couple to manage the place, and rejoin you.
We were planning to hire somebody this spring, anyway."

"If we close the motel a week early, Sandy and Ned will lose out on some
money over at the Grille."

"Ned will still get the truckers off the interstate.  And if he doesn't
do as well as usual, we'll make it up to him."

Ernie shook his head and smiled.  "You've got it all worked out.  You're
something, Faye.  You sure are.  You're an absolute wonder."

"Well, I will admit I can be dazzling sometimes."

"I thank God every day that I found you," he said. "I don't have any
regrets either, Ernie, and I know I never will."

"You know, I feel a thousand percent better than when we first sat down
here.  Why'd it take me so damn long to ask you for help?"

"Why?  Because you're a Block," she said.

He grinned and finished the old joke: "Which is only one step removed
from a blockhead."

They laughed.  He grabbed her hand again and kissed it. "That's the
first real laugh I've had in weeks.  We're a terrific team, Faye.  We
can face anything together, can't we?"

"Anything," she agreed.

It was Saturday, December 14, near dawn, and Faye Block was sure they
would come out on top of their current problem, just as they had always
come out on top before when they worked together, side by side.

She, like Ernie, had already forgotten the unidentified Polaroid
photograph that they had received in a plain envelope last Tuesday.

Boston, Massachusetts

On an intricately crocheted doily, on the highly polished maple dresser,
lay black gloves and a stainless-steel ophthalmo  scope.

Ginger Weiss stood at a window to the left of the dresser, looking out
at the bay, where the gray water seemed to be a mirror image of the
ashen mid-December sky.  Farther shores were hidden by a lingering
morning mist that shimmered with a pearly luminosity.  At the end of the
Hannaby property, at the bottom of a rocky slope, a private dock thrust
out into the choppy bay.  The dock was covered with snow, as was the
long expanse of lawn leading back to the house.

It was a big house, built in the 1850s, with new rooms added in 1892, in
1905, and again in 1950.  The brick driveway curved beneath an enormous
front portico, and broad thick steps led up to massive doors.  Pillars,
pilasters, carved granite lintels above doors and windows, a multitude
of gables and circular dormers, bay-facing second-story balconies at the
back, and a large widow's walk on the roof contributed to an impression
of majesty.

Even for a surgeon as successful as George, the house might have been
too expensive, but he had not needed to buy it. He had inherited the
place from his father, and his father had inherited it from George's
grandfather, and his father had bought it in 1884.  The house even had a
name-Baywatch-like ancestral homes in British novels, and more than
anything else, that inspired awe in Ginger.  Houses in Brooklyn, where
she came from, did not have their own names.

At Memorial, Ginger never felt uncomfortable around George.  There, he
was a figure of authority and respect, but he seemed to have his roots
in common stock like everyone else.  At Baywatch, however, Ginger was
aware of the patrician heritage, and that made George different from
her.  He never invoked a claim to privilege.  That would not be like
him.  But the ghost of the New England patriciate haunted the rooms and
corridors of Baywatch, often making her feel out of place.

The corner guest suite-bedroom, reading alcove, and bathin which Ginger
had been settled for the past ten days, was simpler than many chambers
in Baywatch, and there she was almost as comfortable as in her own
apartment.  Most of the pegged-oak floor was covered by a figured Serapi
carpet in shades of blue and peach.  The walls were peach, the ceiling
white.  The maple furniture, which consisted of various kinds of chests
used as nightstands and tables and dressers, had all come off
19th-century sailing ships owned by George's greatgrandfather.  There
were two upholstered armchairs covered in peach-colored silk from
Brunschwig & Fils.  On the nightstands, the bases of the lamps were
actually Baccarat candlesticks, a reminder that the apparent simplicity
of the room was built upon an elegant foundation.

Ginger went to the dresser and stared down at the black gloves that lay
upon the doily.  As she had done countless times during the past ten
days, she put the gloves on, flexed her hands, waiting for a rush of
fear.  But they were only ordinary gloves that she had bought the day
she had been discharged from the hospital, and they did not have the
power to bring her to the trembling edge of a fugue.  She took them off.

A knock sounded at the door, and Rita Hannaby said, "Ginger, dear, are
you ready?"

"Coming," she said, snatching her purse from the bed and taking one last
quick glance at herself in the dresser mirror.

She was wearing a lime-green knit suit with a creamy white blouse that
had a simple lime-green bow at the throat.  Her ensemble included a pair
of green pumps that matched the suit, an eelskin purse that matched the
pumps, a gold and malachite bracelet.  The outfit perfectly complemented
her complexion and golden hair.  She thought she looked chic. Well,
perhaps not chic, but at least stylish.

However, when she stepped into the hall ' and got a look at Rita
Hannaby, Ginger felt at a disadvantage, a mere pretender to class.

Rita was as slim as Ginger, but at five-eight she was six inches taller,
and everything about her was queenly.  Her chestnut-brown hair swept
back from her face in a perfectly feathered cut.  If her facial bones
had been more exquisitely chiseled, she would have looked severe.
However, beauty and warmth were assured by her luminous gray eyes,
translucent skin, and generous mouth.  Rita was wearing a gray St.
John's suit, pearls, pearl earrings, and a broad-brimmed black hat.

To Ginger, the amazing thing was that Rita's fashionable appearance did
not seem planned.  One had no sense that she had spent hours getting
ready.  Instead, she seemed to have been born with impeccable grooming
and a fashionably tailored wardrobe; elegance was her natural condition.

"You look sma,.hing!" Rita said.

"Next to you, I feel like a frump in blue jeans and a sweatshirt."

"Nonsense.  Even if I were twenty years younger, I'd be no match for
you, dear.  Wait and see who the waiters pamper

the most at lunch."

Ginger had no false modesty.  She knew she was attractive. But her
beauty was more that of a pixie, while Rita had the blueblood looks of
one who could sit upon a throne and convince the world she belonged.

Rita did nothing to cause Ginger's newfound inferiority complex.  The
woman treated her not like a daughter but like a sister and an equal.
Ginger's feelings of inadequacy were, she knew, a direct result of her
pathetic condition.  Until two weeks ago, she had not been dependent on
anyone in ages. Now she was dependent again, not entirely able to look
after herself, and her self-respect slipped a bit further every day.
Rita Hannaby's good humor, carefully planned outings, woman-to-woman
shmoozing, and unflagging encouragement were not enough to distract
Ginger from the cruel fact that fate once more had cast her, at thirty,
in the frustrating role of a child.

Together, they descended to the marble-floored foyer, where they got
their coats from the closet, then went out the door and down the steps
under the portico to the black Mercedes 500 SEL in the driveway.
Herbert, who was sort of a cross between a butler and a Man Friday, had
brought the car around five minutes ago and had left the engine running,
so the interior was a toasty-warm haven from the frigid winter day.

Rita drove with her usual confidence, away from the old estates, out of
quiet streets lined with bare-limbed elms and maples, through
ever-busier thoroughfares, heading to Dr. Immanuel Gudhausen's office on
bustling State Street.  Ginger had an eleven-thirty appointment with
Gudhausen, whom she had seen twice last week.  She was scheduled to
visit him every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday until they got to the
bottom of her attacks of fugue.  In her bleaker moments, Ginger was sure
she'd still be lying on Gudhausen's couch thirty years from now.

Rita intended to do a bit of shopping while Ginger was with the doctor.
Then they would go to lunch at some exquisite restaurant in which, no
doubt, the decor would seem to have been planned to flatter Rita Hannaby
and in which Ginger would feel like a schoolgirl foolishly trying to
pass for a grownup.

"Have you given some thought to what I suggested last Friday?" Rita
asked as she drove.  "The Women's Auxiliary at the hospital?"

"I don't really think I'm up to it.  I'd feel so awkward."

"It's important work," Rita said, expertly slipping the Mercedes out
from behind a Globe newspaper truck, into a gap in traffic.

"I know.  I've seen how much money you've raised for the hospital, the
new equipment you've bought .  .  .  but I think I've got to stay away
from Memorial right now.  It'd be too frustrating to be around the
place, too constant a reminder that I can't do the work I've been
trained for."

"I understand, dear.  Don't give it another thought.  But there's still
the Symphony Committee, the Women's League for the Aged, and the
Children's Advocacy Committee.  We could use your help at any of those."

Rita was an indefatigable charity worker, ably chairing committees or
serving on them, not only organizing beneficent societies but getting
her hands dirty in the operation of them.  "What about it?" she pressed.
"I'm sure you'd find working with children especially rewarding."

"Rita, what if I had one of my attacks while I was with the children? It
would frighten them, and I-"

"Oh, pish posh," Rita said.  "Every time I've gotten you out of the
house these last two weeks, you've used that same excuse to try to
resist leaving your room.  'Oh, Rita,' you say, 'I'll have one of my
awful fits and embarrass you." But you haven't, and you won't.  Even if
you did, it wouldn't embarrass me.  I don't embarrass easily, dear."

"I never thought for a moment you were a shrinking violet.

But you haven't seen me in this fugue state.  You don't know what I'm
like or-"

"Oh, for goodness' sake, you make it sound as if you're a regular Dr.
Jekyll and Mr.  Hyde-or Ms.  Hyde-which I'm sure you're not.  You
haven't beaten anyone to death with a cane yet, have you, Ms.  Hyde?"

Ginger laughed and shook her head.  "You're something else, Rita."

"Excellent.  You'll bring so much to the organization."

Although Rita probably did not think of Ginger as another charity case,
she had approached this recuperation and rehabilitation as a new cause.
She rolled up her sleeves and committed herself to seeing Ginger through
the current crisis, and nothing on earth was going to stop her.  Ginger
was touched by Rita's concern-and depressed by the need for it.

They stopped at a traffic light, third car from the intersection, with
cars, trucks, buses, taxis, and delivery vans crowding them on all
sides.  In the Mercedes, the cacophony of the city was muffled but not
silenced altogether, and when Ginger looked out the window at her side
to search for the source of a particularly annoying engine roar, she saw
a large motorcycle.  The rider turned his head toward her at that
moment, but she could not see his face.  He was wearing a helmet with a
tinted visor that came all the way down to his chin.

For the first time in ten days, the amnesic mist descended over Ginger.
It happened much faster this time than it had with the black gloves,
ophthalmoscope, or sink drain.  She looked into the blank and shiny
visor, and her heart stuttered, and her breath was pinched off, and she
was instantly swept away by a massive wave of terror, gone.

First, Ginger became aware of horns.  Car horns, bus horns, the
air-horns of trucks.  Some like the high squeals of animals, some low
and ominous.  Wailing, whooping, barking, shrieking, honking, bleating.

She opened her eyes.  Her vision swam into focus.  She was still in the
car.  The intersection was still in front of them, though evidently a
couple of minutes had passed and the traffic ahead had moved.  With the
engine running but the gearshift in park, the Mercedes was ten feet
closer to the crosswalk and angled slightly into the next lane, which
was what was causing the horn blowing as other vehicles tried to get
around.

Ginger heard herself whimpering.

Rita Hannaby was leaning across the console that separated the driver's
and passenger's seats, very close, gripping both of Ginger's hands,
holding them down and holding them very tightly.  "Ginger?  Are you
there?  Are you all right?  Ginger?"

Blood.  After the jarring blasts of the horns, after Rita's voice,
Ginger became aware of the blood.  Red spots marked her lime-green
skirt.  A dark smear stained the sleeve of her suit jacket.  Her hands
were gloved in blood, as were Rita's hands.

"Oh, my God," Ginger said.

"Ginger, are you with me?  Are you back?  Ginger?" One of Rita's
manicured nails was torn off, with only a splintered stub sticking up
jaggedly from the cuticle, and both her hands appeared to have been
gouged.  Scratches on the woman's fingers, on the backs of her hands,
and on her palms were bleeding freely, and as far as Ginger could tell,
all of the blood was Rita's, none of it her own.  The cuffs of the gray
St.  John's suit were wet with blood.  "Ginger, talk to me."

Horns continued to blare.

Ginger looked up and saw that Rita's perfectly coiffured hair was now in
disarray.  A two-inch-long scratch furrowed her left cheek, and blood
tinted with makeup was trickling along her jaw to her chin.

"You're back," Rita said with obvious relief, letting go of Ginger's
hands.

"What've I done?"

"Only scratches," Rita said.  "It's all right.  You had an attack,
panicked, tried to leave the car.  I couldn't let you go. You might've
been hit in traffic."

A passing driver, maneuvering around the Mercedes, angrily shouted
something unintelligible at them.

"I've hurt you," Ginger said.  Sickness throbbed through her at the
thought of the violence she had done.

Other drivers sounded their horns with increasing impatience, but Rita
ignored them.  She took Ginger's hands again, not to restrain her this
time but to offer comfort and reassurance.  "It's all right, dear.  It's
passed now, and a little iodine will patch me up just fine."

The motorcyclist.  The dark visor.

Ginger looked out the side window; the cyclist was gone.

He had, after all, been no threat to her, just a stranger passing in the
street.

Black gloves, an ophthalmoscope, a sink drain, and now the dark visor of
a motorcyclist's helmet.  Why had those particular things set her off?
What did they have in common, if anything?

As tears spilled down her face, Ginger said, "I'm so sorry."

"No need to be.  Now, I better get us out of the way," Rita said.  She
pulled handsful of Kleenex from the box on the console and used them to
grip the wheel and gearshift, to avoid spreading bloodstains.

Her own hands wet with Rita's blood, Ginger sagged back against her seat
and closed her eyes and tried to stop the tears but could not.

Four psychotic episodes in five weeks.

She could no longer glide placidly through the gray winter days,
defenseless, docile in the face of this vicious turn of fate, merely
waiting for another attack or for a shrink to explain what was wrong.

It was Monday, December 16, and Ginger was suddenly determined to do
something before she suffered a fifth fugue. She could not imagine what
she possibly could do, but she was sure she'd think of something if she
put her mind to it and stopped feeling sorry for herself.  She had
reached bottom now.  Her humiliation, fear, and despair could not bring
her to any greater depths.  There was nowhere to go but up.  She would
claw her way back to the surface, damned if she wouldn't, up toward the
light, of it of the dark into which she had fallen.

Christmas Eve-Christmas Day

1.

Laguna Beach, California

At eight A. M., Tuesday, December 24, when Dom Corvaisis got out of bed,
he went through his morning ablutions in a haze resulting from the
lingering effects of yesterday's indulgence in Valium and Dalmane.

For the eleventh night in a row, he had been troubled by neither
somnambulism nor the bad dream that involved the sink.  The drug therapy
was working, and he was willing to tolerate a period of pharmaceutically
induced detachment to put an end to his unnerving midnight journeys.

He did not believe he was in danger of becoming physically addicted
to-or even psychologically dependent on-Valium or Dalmane.  He had been
exceeding the prescribed dosage, but he was still not worried.  He had
allmost run out of pills, and in order to get another prescription from
Dr.  Cobletz, he had fabricated a story about a break-in at his house,
claiming that the drugs had been taken along with his stereo and TV set.
Dom had lied to his doctor in order to obtain drugs, and sometimes he
saw his action in exactly that harsh and unfavorable light; but most of
the time, in the soft haze that accompanied continuous tranquilization,
he was able to dress the shabby truth in self-delusion.

He dared not think about what would happen to him if the episodes of
somnambulism returned in January, after the drugs were discontinued.

At ten o'clock, unable to concentrate enough to work, He put on a light
corduroy jacket and left the house.  The lateDecember morning was cool.
Except for a few unseasonably warm days now and then, the beaches would
not be busy again until April.

As Dom descended the hills in his Firebird, heading for the center of
town, he noticed that Laguna looked dull under a somber gray sky.  He
wondered how much of the leaden gloom was real and how much resulted
from the dulling effects of the drugs, but he quickly abandoned that
disturbing line of thought.  In acknowledgment of his somewhat fuzzy
perceptions and impaired responsiveness, he drove with exaggerated care.

Dom received most mail at the post office.  Because he subscribed to so
many publications, he rented a large drawer rather than just a box, and
that day before Christmas, the drawer was more than half full.  He
didn't look at the return addresses but carried everything back to the
car with the intention of reading his mail at breakfast.

The Cottage, a popular restaurant for decades, was on the east side of
Pacific Coast Highway, on the slope above the road.  At that hour, the
breakfast rush had passed, and the lunch crowd had not yet arrived.  Dom
was given a table by the window with the best view.  He ordered two
eggs, bacon, cottage fries, toast, and grapefruit juice.

As he ate, he went through the mail.  In addition to magazines and
bills, there was a letter from Lennart Sane, the wonderful Swedish agent
who handled translation rights in Scandinavia and Holland, and a padded
envelope from Random House.  As soon as he saw the publisher's address
on the label, he knew what he had.  Finally, his mind began to clear,
the fuzziness partially dispelled by excitement.  He put down the toast
he had been eating and tore open the large envelope, and an advance copy
of his first novel slid out.  No man can know what a woman feels when
taking her newborn child in her arms for the first time, but a novelist
who holds the first copy of his first book must experience a joy similar
to that of the mother who looks upon the face of her baby for the first
time and feels its warmth through the swaddling clothes.

Dom kept the book beside his plate and could barely look away from it.
He had finished his meal and had ordered coffee by the time he was able
to tear his attention from Twilight and examine what mail remained.
Among other things, there was a plain white envelope with no return
address, which contained a single page of white paper on which had been
typewritten two sentences that rocked him:

The sleepwalker would be well-advised to search the past for the source
of his problem.  That is where the secret is buried.

He read the passage again, astonished.  The sheet of paper rattled as a
tremor passed through him.  The back of his neck went cold.

2.

Boston, Massachusetts

When Ginger got out of the cab, she was in front of a sixstory, brick,
Victorian Gothic building.  A blustery wind slapped her, and the
bare-limbed trees along Newbury Street rasped, clattered, and clicked:
the sound of rattling bones.  Huddling against the bitter wind, she
scurried past a low iron fence and entered 127 Newbury, the former Hotel
Agassiz, one of the city's finest historic landmarks, now converted into
condominiums.  She had come to see Pablo Jackson, about whom she knew
only what she had read in yesterday's Boston Globe.

She had left Baywatch after George departed for the hospital and after
Rita went off to do some last-minute Christmas shopping, for she had
been afraid they would try to stop her. In fact, the maid, Lavinia, had
pleaded with her not to go out alone.  Ginger had left a note,
explaining her whereabouts, and she hoped they would not be too upset.

When Pablo Jackson opened his door, Ginger was surprised.  That he was a
black man, that he was in his eighties those things were not surprising,
for she had learned as much about him from the article in the Globe.
However, she was not prepared for such a vital and vigorous
octogenarian.  He was about five-eight, slight, but age had not bowed
his legs, bent his back, or rounded his shoulders.  He stood militarily
erect, in white shirt and sharply creased black trousers, and there was
a sprightliness and youthfulness in his smile and in the way he waved
her into the apartment.  His thick kinky hair had not receded, but it
had gone so white that it seemed to glow with a spectral light, giving
him a curiously mystical aura.  He escorted Ginger into the living room,
moving with the stride of a man forty or fifty years his junior.

The living room was a surprise, too, not what she expected either of a
sedate old monument like the Hotel Agassiz or of Pablo Jackson, an
elderly bachelor.  The walls were creamcolored, and the contemporary
sofas and chairs were upholstered in a matching fabric.  An Edward
Fields carpet of the same creamy shade provided relief from the dominant
scheme by means of a deeply sculpted wave pattern.  Color was provided
by pastel accent pillows-yellow, peach, green, and blue-on the sofas,
and from two large oil paintings, one a Picasso.  The result was an
airy, bright, warm, and modern decor.

Ginger settled into one of two armchairs that faced each other across a
small table near a long, bay window.  She declined coffee and said, "Mr.
Jackson, I'm afraid I'm here under false pretenses."

"What an interesting beginning", he said, smiling, crossing his legs,
resting his long-fingered black hands on the arms of his chair.

"No, really, I'm not a reporter."

"Not from People?" He studied her speculatively.  "Well, that's all
right.  I knew you weren't a reporter when I let you in.  These days,
reporters have an oily smoothness about them, and they're an arrogant
lot.  Soon as I saw you standing at the door, I said to myself, 'Pablo,
this bitty girl is no reporter. She's a real person." "

:'I need some help that only you can provide."

'A damsel in distress?" he said, amused.  He seemed not at all angry or
uneasy, which she had expected he would be.

She said, "I was afraid you wouldn't see me if I told you my real
reasons for wanting to meet you.  You see, I'm a doctor, a surgical
resident at Memorial, and when I read the article about you in the
Globe, I thought you might be able to help."

"I'd be delighted to see you even if you were selling magazines.  An
eighty-one-year-old man can't afford to turn anyone away .  .  .  unless
he prefers to spend his days talking to the walls."

Ginger appreciated his efforts to put her at ease, though she suspected
that his social life was more interesting than her own.

He said, "Besides, not even a burnt-out old fossil like me would turn
away such a lovely girl as you.  But now tell me what this help is that
only I can give you."

Ginger leaned forward in her chair.  "First, I've got to know if the
article in the newspaper was accurate."

He shrugged.  "As accurate as newspaper articles ever are. My mother and
father were expatriate Americans living in France, just as the newspaper
said.  She was a popular chantellse, a cafe singer in Paris, before and
after World War I.

My father was a musician, as the Globe said.  And it's true that my
parents knew Picasso and recognized his genius early on.  I was named
after him.  They bought two score of Picasso's pieces when his work was
cheap, and he gave them several paintings as gifts.  They had bon got.
They didn't own a hundred works, as the paper said, but fifty.  Still,
that collection was an embarrassment of riches.  Sold gradually over the
years, it cushioned their retirement and gave me something to fall back
on as well."

"You were an accomplished stage magician?"

"For over fifty years," he said, raising both hands in a graceful and
elegant expression of amazement at his own longevity.  That gesture was
marked by the rhythm and fluidity of prestidigitation, and Ginger
half-expected him to pluck living white doves from thin air.  "And I was
famous, too. Sans pareil, even if I say so myself.  Not famous over here
so much, you understand, but all over Europe and in England."

"And your act involved hypnotizing a few members of the audience?"

He nodded.  "That was the centerpiece.  It always wowed them."

"And now you're helping the police by hypnotizing witnesses to crimes,
so they can recall details they've forgotten."

"Well, it's not a full-time job," he said, waving one slender hand as if
to dismiss any such thoughts she might have had. The gesture seemed
likely to end with the magical appearance of a bouquet of flowers or
deck of cards.  "In fact, they've only come to me four times in the past
two years.  I'm usually their last resort."

"But what you've done has worked for them?"

"Oh, yes.  Just as the newspaper said.  For instance, a by stander might
see a murder take place and get a glimpse of the car in which the killer
escaped, but not be able to recall the license number.  Now, if he
glanced at the license even for a split second, that number is buried in
his subconscious mind, 'cause we never really forget anything we see.
Never. So if a hypnotist puts the witness in a trance, regresses him in
time-that is, takes him back in his memories to the shooting-and tells
him to look at the car, then the license number can be obtained."

"Always?"

"Not always.  But we win more than we lose."

"Why turn to you?  Aren't the police department's psychiatrists capable
of using hypnosis?"

"Certainly.  But they're psychiatrists not hypnotists.  Hypnosis is not
what they specialized in.  I've made it a lifelong study, developed my
own techniques that often succeed where standard methods fail."

"So when it comes to hypnotism, you're a maven."

"An expert?  Yes, that's true.  Even a maven's maven.  But why does any
of this interest you, Doctor?"

Ginger had been sitting with her purse in her lap and her hands at rest
upon it.  But as she told Pablo Jackson about her attacks, she clutched
the purse tighter, tighter, until her knuckles were white.

Jackson's relaxed demeanor changed to shocked interest and concern. "You
poor child.  You poor, poor little thing. De mal en pis-en pis!  From
bad to worse-to worse!  How horrible.  You wait there.  Don't you move."
He popped up from the chair and hurried from the room.

When he returned, he was carrying two glasses of brandy. She tried to
refuse hers.  "No thank you, Mr.  Jackson.  I don't drink much, and
certainly not at this hour of the morning."

"Call me Pablo.  How much sleep did you get last night?

Not much?  You were up most of the night, woke up hours ago, so for you
this isn't morning, it's the middle of the afternoon.  And there's no
reason a person can't have a drink in the afternoon, is there?"

He settled into his chair again, and for a moment they were silent as
they sipped their brandies.

Then she said, "Pablo, I want you to hypnotize me, regress me back to
the morning of November twelfth, to Bernstein's Delicatessen.  I want
you to hold me at that point in time and question me relentlessly until
I can explain why the sight of those black gloves terrified me."

"Impossible!" He shook his head.  "No, no."

"I can pay whatever-"

"Money is not the issue.  I don't need money." He frowned. "I'm a
magician, not a physician."

"I'm already seeing a psychiatrist, and I've broached the subject with
him, but he won't do it."

"He must have his reasons."

"He says it's too soon for hypnotic regression therapy.  He admits the
technique might help me discover the cause of my attacks, but he says
that might be a mistake because I might not yet be ready to face up to
the truth.  He says premature confrontation with the source of my
anxieties might contribute to .  .  .  a breakdown."

"You see?  He knows best.  I would be meddling."

"He does not know best," Ginger insisted, angered by the vivid
recollection of her recent conversation with the psychiatrist, in which
he had been infuriatingly condescending. "Maybe he knows what's best for
most patients, but he doesn't know what's best for me.  I can't go on
like this.  By the time Gudhausen's willing to resort to hypnosis, maybe
in a year, I'll no longer be sane enough to benefit.  I've got to get a
grip on this problem, take control, do something."

"But surely you see that I can't be responsible-"

"Wait," she interrupted, putting her brandy aside.  "I anticipated your
reluctance." She opened her purse, withdrew a folded sheet of typing
paper, and held it out to him.  "Here. Please take this."

He took the paper.  Though Pablo was half a century older than she, his
hands were far steadier than hers.  "What is it?"

"A signed release making it clear that I came here in desperation,
exonerating you in advance for anything that goes wrong."

He did not bother to read it.  "You don't understand, dear lady.  I'm
not concerned about being sued.  Considering my age and the snail's pace
of the courts, I wouldn't live to see a judgment placed against me.  But
the mind is a delicate mechanism, and if something went wrong, if I led
you into a breakdown, I would surely roast in Hell."

"If you don't help me, if I've got to spend long months in therapy,
uncertain of the future, I'll have a breakdown any way." Desperate,
Ginger raised her voice, venting her frustration and anger.  "If you
send me away, leave me to the well-meaning mercy of friends, abandon me
to Gudhausen, I'm finished.  I swear, that'll be the end of me.  I can't
go on like this!  If you refuse to help me, you'll still be responsible
for my breakdown because you could've prevented it."

"I'm sorry," he said.

"Please."

"can't."

"You cold, black bastard," Ginger said, startled by the epithet even as
she spoke it.  The hurt expression on his benign and gnomish face stung
and shamed her.  Now it was her turn to say, "I'm sorry.  So sorry." She
brought her hands to her face, bent forward in her chair, and wept.

He came to her, stooped down in front of her.  "Dr.  Weiss, please don't
cry.  Don't despair.  It'll be all right."

"No.  It never will," she said.  "Not ever like it was."

He gently pried her hands away from her face.  He put one of his hands
under her chin, lifted her head until she was looking at him.  He
smiled, winked, and held a hand before her eyes to show her that it was
empty.  Then, to her surprise, he plucked a quarter from her right ear.

"Hush now," Pablo Jackson said, patting her shoulder. "You've made your
point.  And I certainly don't have an time

de boue, a soul of mud, an ungenerous spirit.  A woman's tears can move
the world.  Against my better judgment, I'll do what I can."

Instead of putting an end to her crying, his offer of help renewed her
weeping, though these were tears of gratitude.

".  .  .  and now you are in a deep sleep, deep, very deep, utterly
relaxed, and you will answer all my questions.  Is that understood?"

'Yes."

:,You cannot refuse to answer.  Cannot refuse.  Cannot."

Pablo had drawn the drapes over the three-bay window and had turned out
all the lights except the lamp beside Ginger Weiss's chair.  The amber
beams fell over her, giving her hair the appearance of real gold
filaments and emphasizing the unnatural paleness of her skin.

He stood before her, looking down at her face.  She had a fragile
beauty, an exquisite femininity, yet in her face there was also a great
strength almost masculine in quality.  Le juste milieu: perfect balance,
the golden mean, was nowhere better defined than in her countenance,
where character and beauty were given equal weight.

Her eyes were closed, and they moved very little beneath her lids, an
indication that she was in a deep trance.

Pablo returned to his chair, which stood in shadow, beyond the amber
light from the single lamp.  He sat, crossed his legs. "Ginger, why were
you frightened by the black gloves?"

"I don't know," she said softly.

"You cannot lie to me.  Do you understand?  You can withhold nothing
from me.  Why were you afraid of the black gloves?"

"I don't know."

"Why were you afraid of the ophthalmoscope?"

"I don't know."

"Why were you afraid of the sink drain?"

"I don't know."

"Did you know the man on the motorcycle on State Street?"

"No."

"Then why were you frightened of him?"

"I don't know."

Pablo sighed.  "Very well.  Ginger, we'll now do something amazing,
something that might seem impossible but which I assure you is possible.
In fact, it's easy.  We're going to make time run backward, Ginger.
Nothing to it.  We're going to send you slowly but surely back in time.
You are going to get younger.  It's already happening.  You can't resist
it ...  time like a river ...  flowing backward ...  ever back ...  and
now it's no longer December twenty-fourth.  It's December twentythird,
Monday, and still the clock runs backward .  .  .  a little faster...
now it is the twenty-second ...  now the twentieth...  the eighteenth. .
.  ." He continued in that manner until he had regressed Ginger to the
twelfth of November. "You are in Bernstein's Delicatessen, waiting for
your order to be filled.  Can you smell the hot baked goods, the
spices?"

She nodded, and he said, "Tell me what you smell."

She drew a deep breath, and a pleased look overtook her face.  Her voice
became more animated: "Pastrami, garlic

...  honey cookies ...  cloves and;cinnamon .  .  ." She remained in her
chair, with her eyes closed, but she lifted her head and turned left and
right, as if surveying the deli.  "Chocolate. Just smell that cocoa
pound cake!"

"It's wonderful," Pablo said.  "Now, you pay for your order, turn from
the counter .  .  .  head toward the door, preoccupied with your purse."

"I can't get my wallet in," she said, scowling.

"You have the bag of groceries in one arm."

"Got to clean out this purse."

"Bang!  You bump into the man in the Russian hat."

Ginger gasped and twitched in surprise.

"He grabs your grocery bag to keep it from falling," Pablo said.

"Oh!" she said.

"He tells you he's sorry."

"My fault," Ginger said.  Pablo knew she was not talking to him but to
the doughy-faced man in the Russian hat, who was now as real to her as
he had been that Tuesday in the deli.  Apologetically, she said, "I
wasn't looking where I was going.

"He holds out your groceries, which you take from him."

The aged magician watched her closely.  "And you notice .  .  .  his
gloves."

Her transformation was instantaneous and electrifying.  She sat straight
up; her eyes popped open.  "The gloves!  Oh, God, the gloves!"

"Tell me about the gloves, Ginger."

"Black," she said in a small, quavering voice.  "Shiny."

"What else?"

"No!" she cried, starting to get up from the chair.

"Sit down, please," Pablo said.

She froze, half out of her seat.

"Ginger, I am ordering you to sit down and relax."

She sat rigidly, her small hands fisted.  Her radiant blue eyes were
open wide, focused not on Pablo but on the gloves in her memory.  She
looked as if she would bolt again at the slightest provocation.

"You will relax now, Ginger.  You will be calm ...

calm .  .  .  very calm.  Do you understand?"

"Yes.  All right," she said.  Her breath came less rapidly than it had
done, and her shoulders slumped a bit, but she was still tense.

Ordinarily, when he put someone into a trance, he maintained total and
instantaneous control of the subject.  He was surprised and made uneasy
by this woman's continued distress in spite of his admonitions to relax,
but he could not calm her further.  Finally he said, "Tell me about the
gloves, Ginger."

"Oh, my God." Her face twisted in fear.

" Relax and tell me about the gloves.  Why are you afraid of them?"

She shook.  "D-Don't let them t-t-touch me."

"Why are you afraid of them?" he persisted.

She hugged herself and shrank back into her chair.

"Listen to me, Ginger.  That moment in time is frozen.  The clock is
moving neither forward nor back.  The gloves cannot touch you.  I will
never let them touch you.  Time is suspended. I have the power to
suspend time, and I have stopped it.  You are safe.  Do you hear me?"

" Yes," she said, but as she cringed against the back of her armchair,
there was doubt and barely suppressed terror in her voice.

"You are perfectly safe." Pablo was distressed to see this sweet girl so
oppressed by fear.  "Time has been stopped, so you can study those black
gloves without being afraid they'll get hold of you.  You will study
them and tell me why they frighten you."

She was silent, shaking.

"You must answer me, Ginger.  Why are you afraid of the gloves?" She
only whimpered, so he thought a moment, then said, "Is it really this
pair of gloves that frighten you?"

"N-No.  Not exactly."

"The gloves on this man in the deli .  .  .  they remind you of a pair
of other gloves, perhaps from some incident long ago?  Is that it?"

:'Oh, yes.  Yes."

'When did this other incident take place?  Ginger, what other gloves do
these remind you of?"

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do." Pablo rose from his chair, moved to the draped windows,
and observed her from those shadows.  "All right .  .  .  the hands of
the clock are moving again.  Time is moving backward again ...  back . .
.  back .  .  .  all the way back to the time when you were first
frightened by a pair of black gloves.  You are drifting back .  .  .
back .  .  .  and now

you are there.  You are at the very time, at the very place, at the
precise moment and spot where you were first frightened by black
gloves."

Ginger ' s eyes were fixed on a horror in a different time, not in this
room or in Bernstein's Delicatessen, but in some other place.

Pablo watched her anxiously.  "Where are you, Ginger?"

When she remained silent, he said, "You must tell me where you are."

"The face," she said in a haunted voice that made Pablo shiver.  "The
face.  The blank face."

"Explain yourself, Ginger.  What face?  Tell me what you see."

"The black gloves .  .  .  the dark glass face."

"Do you mean.....  like the motorcyclist?"

"The gloves.....  the visor." A spasm of fear throbbed through her.

"Be calm, relax.  You're safe.  Safe.  Now, wherever you are, do you see
a man wearing a helmet and a visor?  And black gloves?"

She began a monotonous chant of stark terror: "Uh, uh, uh, uh .  .  ."

"Ginger, you must be calm.  Be calm, relaxed, and at ease. Nothing can
harm you.  You're safe." Afraid that he was losing control of her and
would have to bring her out of the trance soon, Pablo moved quickly to
her chair, knelt at her side, put one hand on her arm, and stroked
gently as he spoke to her.  "Where are you, Ginger?  How far back in
time have you gone, Ginger?  Where are you?  When are you?"

"'Oh, uh, uhhhhhhhh.  " A pathetic cry escaped her, an echo out of time,
the tortured response to a long-suppressed terror and despair.

He became very stern, switching from a soft to a hard voice. "I am in
command of you.  You are deeply asleep and completely in my control,
Ginger.  I demand that you answer me, Ginger."

A shudder, worse than any previous spasm, passed through her.

"I demand that you answer.  Where are you, Ginger?"

"Nowhere."

"Where are you?"

"No place." Abruptly, she stopped shaking.  She sagged in the chair. The
fear melted out of her face, and her features went soft, slack.  In a
thin and emotionless voice, she said, "Dead."

"What do you mean?  You're not dead."

"Dead," she insisted.

"Ginger, you must tell me where you are and how far back in time you've
gone, and you must tell me about the black gloves, that first pair of
black gloves, the ones you were reminded of when you saw the gloves on
that man in the delicatessen.  You absolutely must tell me."

"Dead."

Suddenly, because he was kneeling beside her chair and was close to her,
Pablo realized her breathing was extremely shallow.  He took her hand
and was startled by how cold it was.  He pressed two fingers to her
wrist, feeling for her pulse. Weak.  Very weak.  Frantic, he put his
fingertips to her throat and located a slow and weak heartbeat.

To avoid answering his questions, she seemed to be withdrawing into a
sleep far deeper than her hypnotic trance, perhaps into a coma, into an
oblivion where she could not hear his demanding voice.  He had never
encountered a reaction like this before, had never even read of such a
thing. Was it possible for Ginger to will herself dead merely to escape
his questions?  Memory blocks erected around traumatic experiences were
not uncommon; his reading in psychology journals sometimes turned up
accounts of these psychological barricades to recollection, but they
were barriers that could be dismantled without killing the subject.
Surely no experience could be so horrendous that a person would rather
die than remember it.  Yet even as Pablo pressed his fingers to her
throat, the throbbing of her pulse grew fainter and more irregular.

"Ginger, listen," he said urgently.  "You don't have to answer me.  No
more questions.  You can come back.  I won't insist on answers."

She seemed suspended on a terrible brink, teetering.

"Ginger, listen to me!  No more questions.  I'm finished asking
questions.  I swear it." After a long and frightening hesitation, he
detected a slight improvement in her pulse rate. "I'm no longer
interested in the black gloves or anything else, Ginger.  I just want to
bring you back to the present and out of your trance.  Do you hear me?
Please hear me.  Please.  I've finished questioning you."

Her pulse stuttered shockingly, but then it throbbed more steadily.
Respiration improved, too.  As he talked to her in that reassuring
manner, she quickly got better.  Color returned to her lovely face.

In less than a minute, he returned her to December 24 and woke her.

She blinked.  "It didn't work, huh?  You couldn't put me under."

"You were under," he said shakily.  "Too far under."

She said, "Pablo, you're trembling.  Why're you trembling?

What's wrong?  What happened?"

This time, she went to the kitchen and poured the brandy.

Later, at the door of Pablo's apartment, as Ginger was leaving to meet
the taxi that Pablo had summoned for her, she said, "I still can't think
what it could be.  Nothing so terrible has ever happened to me,
certainly nothing so bad I'd rather die than reveal it."

"There's something very traumatic in your past," Pablo said.  "An
incident involving a man wearing black gloves, a man with what you said
was a 'dark glass face." Perhaps a motorcyclist like the one that
panicked you on State Street. It's an incident you've buried very deep
...  and which you seem determined to keep buried at any cost.  I really
think you should tell Dr.  Gudhausen what happened here today and let
him proceed from there."

"Gudhausen is too traditional, too slow.  I want your help."

"I won't risk putting you in a trance and questioning you again."

"Unless your research turns up a similar case."

"Not much chance of that.  I've done a lot of reading in psychology and
hypnosis for fifty years, and I've never heard of anything like it."

"But you're going to research it, aren't you?  You promised."

"I'll see what I can find," he said.

"And if you discover that someone developed a workable technique for
getting through a memory block like this, you'll use it on me."

Ginger was mystified, but she was also considerably less distraught than
she had been when she first arrived at Pablo Jackson's apartment.  At
least they had gotten somewhere,

even if they did not yet know where.  They had found the problem, some
mysterious traumatic experience in the past, and though they had not
learned a single detail of it, they knew it was back there, a dark shape
waiting to be explored. In time they would find a way to throw a light
on it, and when it was revealed, she would know the cause of her fugues.

"Tell Dr.  Gudhausen," Pablo said again.

"I'm pinning all my hopes on you."

"You're damn stubborn," the old magician said, shaking his head.

"No.  Just persistent."

'Willful."

"Just determined."

"Acharnge!"

"When I get back to Baywatch I'll look up that word, and if it's an
insult, you'll be sorry when I come back on Thursday," she teased.

"Not Thursday," he said.  "The research is going to take time.  I'm not
going to hypnotize you again unless I can find a record of a similar
case and can follow someone else's procedures, knowing they succeeded."

"Okay, but if you don't call by Friday or Saturday, I'll probably come
back and bust my way in.  Remember, you're my best hope."

"I am your best hope ...  only for want of anything better."

"You underrate yourself, Pablo Jackson." She kissed him on the cheek.
"I'll be waiting for your call."

"Au revoir.

"Shalom."

Outside, as she got into the cab, she remembered one of her father's
favorite aphorisms, and, like a lead weight, it counteracted her new
buoyancy: It's always brightest just before the dark.

3.

Chicago, Illinois

Winton Tolk-the tall, jovial, black patrolman riding shotgun-got out of
the police cruiser to buy three hamburgers and Cokes at a corner
sandwich shop, leaving his partner, Paul Armes, behind the wheel, and
Father Brendan Cronin in the back seat.  Brendan glanced at the shop,
but he could not see inside, for the big front windows were painted with
festive holiday images: Santa, reindeer, wreaths, angels.  A light snow
had jus(begun to fall, and the weather forecast called for eight inches
by midnight, which meant tomorrow would be a white Christmas.

As Winton got out of the car, Brendan leaned forward and said to Paul
Armes, "Yeah, well, nobody's knocking Going My Way, but what about It's
a Wonderful Life?  Now there was a terrific picture!"

, 'Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed," Paul said.

"What a cast." They had been talking about great Christmas films, and
now Brendan was sure he had hit upon the best of the best.  "Lionel
Barrymore played the skinflint.  Gloria Grahame was in that, too."

"Thomas Mitchell," Paul Armes said as, outside, Winton reached the door
of the sandwich shop.  "Ward Bond.  God, what a cast!" Winton had gone
into the sandwich shop.  "But you're forgetting another great one.
Miracle on 34th Street."

"That was terrific, sure, but I still think Capra's better-"

It seemed that the gunshots and the startling cascade of shattering
glass came at the same instant, with not a fraction of a second between.
Even with the car doors shut, the heater fan making noise, and the
police-band radio crackling and chirruping, the shots were loud enough
to halt Brendan in midsentence.  As the explosions blew away the
Christmas peace of the Uptown street, the sandwich shop's painted window
tableau dissolved, erupted in a glittering spray.  New shots overlaid
the echo of old reports, and the blasts were accompanied by a brittle
and atonal music of glass smashing on the roof, hood, and trunk of the
cruiser.

"Oh, shit!" Paul Armes tore the dash-mounted riot gun free of its
clasps, throwing open his door even as the glass was still raining.
"Stay down," he shouted back at Brendan, and then he was out, crouching,
moving around the car, and using it as a shield

Stunned, Brendan looked through the window at his side, back toward the
sandwich-shop entrance.  Abruptly, that door was flung wide open, and
two young men appeared, one black, one white.  The black man wore a knit
cap and a long navy peacoat-and carried a semiautomatic sawed-off shot
gun.  The white man, in a plaid hunting jacket, was armed with a
revolver.  They came out fast, half-crouched, and the black man swung
the shotgun toward the patrol car.  Brendan was looking directly into
the muzzle.  There was a flash, and he was sure he had been shot, but
the rear passenger-side window in front of his face remained intact.
Instead, the front window exploded inward, fragments of glass and lead
pellets showering across the seat, rattling off the dashboard.  The
near-miss shocked Brendan out of his daze, and he rolled off his seat,
to the floor, his heart hammering almost as loud as the gunfire.

Winton Tolk had had the bad luck to walk unsuspecting into the middle of
an armed robbery.  He was probably dead.

As Brendan pressed himself to the floor of the squad car, he heard Paul
Armes shouting outside: "Drop it!"

Two shots cracked.  Not a shotgun.  Revolver fire.  But who pulled the
trigger?  Paul Armes or the guy in the plaid hunting jacket?

Another shot.  Someone screamed.

But who had been hit?  Armes or one of the robbers?

Brendan wanted to look, but he did not dare show himself.

Thanks to an arrangement Father Wycazik had made with the local precinct
captain, Brendan had been riding as an observer with Winton and Paul for
five days.  In an ordinary suit, tie, and topcoat, he was supposed to be
a lay consultant employed by the Church to study the need for Catholic
charity outreach programs, a cover story which everyone seemed to
accept.  Winton's and Paul's beat was uptown, an area bordered by Foster
Avenue on the North, Lake Shore Drive high-rises on the east, Irving
Park Road on the south, and North Ashland Avenue on the west.  It was
Chicago's poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhood, home to blacks and
Indians, but mostly to Appalachians and Hispanics.  After five days with
Winton and Paul, Brendan developed a strong liking for both men and a
deep sympathy for all the honest souls who lived and worked in those
decaying buildings and filthy streets-and who were prey to the packs of
human jackals among them.  He had learned to expect anything riding with
these guys, but the sandwich-shop shootout was the worst incident yet.

Another shotgun blast slammed into the car, rocking it.

Brendan curled fetally on the floor and tried to pray, but no words
came.  God was still lost to him, and he cowered in terrible solitude.

Outside, Paul Armes shouted, "Give it up!"

The gunman said, "Fuck you!"

When he'd reported to Father Wycazik after a week at St. Joseph's,
Brendan had been sent to another hospital, where he'd been given work on
the terminal ward, a dreadful place with no children at all.  There, as
at St.  Joseph's, Brendan quickly discovered the lesson that Stefan
Wycazik expected him to learn.  To most who were at the end of life,
death was not to be feared but welcomed, a blessing for which they
thanked God rather than cursed Him.  And in dying, many who had never
been believers became believers at last, and those who had fallen away
from faith came back.  There was frequently something noble and deeply
moving in the suffering that accompanied a person's exit from this
world, as if each shared, for a while, the mystical burden of the cross.

Yet, that lesson learned, Brendan remained unable to believe.  Now, the
fierce beating of his heart hammered the words of the prayer to dust
before he could speak them, and his mouth was as dry as powder.

Outside, there was shouting, but he could not make sense of the words
any more, maybe because the people shouting were incoherent and maybe
because he was partially deaf from the gunfire.

He did not yet fully understand the lesson that Father Wycazik had hoped
he would learn from this Uptown portion of his unconventional therapy.
And now as he listened to the chaos outside, he knew that the lesson,
regardless of its nature, would be insufficient to convince him that God
was as real as bullets.  Death was a bloody, stinking, foul reality, and
in the face of it, the promise of a reward in the afterlife was not the
least persuasive.

The shotgun discharged again, followed by the roar of the riot gun, then
by shouting and the slap-slap-slap of running feet.  It sounded like a
war out there.  Another blast from the riot gun.  More shattering glass.
Another scream, more horrible than the one that had rent the air before
it.  Yet another shot.  Silence.  Silence perfect and profound.

The driver's door was jerked open.

Brendan cried out in surprise and terror.

"Stay down!" Paul Armes said from the front seat, keeping a low profile
himself.  "Two dead, but there might be other shitheads inside."

"Where's Wintono" Brendan asked.

Paul did not answer.  Instead, he grabbed the radio microphone up front
and called Central.  "Officer down.  Officer down!" Armes gave his
position, the address of the sandwich shop, and requested backup.

Lying on his side on the floor of the squad car, Brendan closed his eyes
and saw, with heartbreaking clarity, the pictures that Winton Tolk
carried in his wallet and that he proudly displayed when queried about
his family-pictures of his wife, Raynella, and his three children.

"Those rotten fucking bastards," Paul Armes said, his voice shaking.

Brendan heard soft clicking and scraping sounds that puzzled him until
he realized Armes was reloading.  He said, "Winton's been shot?"

"Bet on it," Armes said.

"He might need help."

"It's on the way."

"But he may need help now," Brendan said.

"Can't go in there.  Might be another one.  Two more.  Who knows?  We
gotta wait for backup."

"Winton might need a tourniquet .  .  .  other first aid.  He might be
dead by the time help gets here."

"Don't you think I know that?" Paul Armes said bitterly, furiously.  He
finished reloading and slid out of the car to take up a position from
which he could watch the shop.

The more Brendan thought about Winton Tolk sprawled on the floor in
there, the angrier he became.  If he had still believed in God, he might
have quenched his anger in prayer. But now it fed on itself and grew
into a hot rage.  His heart pounded even harder than when the shotgun
blasts were crashing into the car inches from him.  The injustice of
Winton's fate-the unfairness, the wrongness-was like an acid eating at
Brendan.

He got out of the car and started across the sidewalk, through the
falling snow, toward the entrance to the sandwich shop.

"Stop!  For God's sake, don't!"

Brendan kept going, driven by his rage and by the thought that Winton
Tolk might need immediate first aid to survive.

A dead man in a plaid hunting jacket was lying on his back on the
sidewalk.  A round from Armes's revolver had taken him in the chest, a
second round in the throat.  There was a stink of loosed bowels.  In the
snow beside the corpse lay a handgun, perhaps the very one with which
Winton Tolk had been shot.

"Cronin!" Paul Armes yelled.  "Get your ass back here, you idiot!"

Moving past the broken windows, Brendan could see into the shop, which
was surprisingly dark.  The lights had been shot out or a switch thrown,
and the gray daylight penetrated only a couple of feet inside.  He could
not see anyone, but that did not mean it was safe to enter.

"Cronin!" Paul Armes shouted.

Brendan went to the entrance, where he found the black man in the
peacoat.  This one had been hit by a shotgun blast that also demolished
the glass door; he was crumpled in a thousand bright fragments.

Stepping over the body, Brendan entered the sandwich shop.  He did not
have his Roman collar, which might have been something of a shield if he
had been wearing it.  On the other hand, degenerates like these would
probably kill a priest as reflexively and as happily as they blew away
police officers. In his suit and tie and topcoat, he was as ordinary and
vulnerable as any man, but he did not care.  He was that furious.
Furious that God did not exist or, existing, did not care.

At the back of the small shop was a service counter.  Behind the counter
was a grill, other equipment.  On this side were five very small tables
and ten chairs, most of which had been toppled.  On the floor were a
couple of napkin dispensers, ketchup and mustard bottles, scattered one-
and five-dollar bills, a lot of blood, and Winton Tolk.

Not bothering to study the overturned tables to see if a gunman was
sheltering behind them, Brendan went to the officer, knelt beside him.
Winton had been hit twice in the chest.  Not with the shotgun.  Probably
the other thug's revolver.  The wounds were sickening, far too traumatic
to respond dramatically to a mere tourniquet or first-aid procedures.
His breast was mantled with blood, and blood trickled from his mouth.
The pool of blood in which he lay was so deep that he appeared to be
floating on it.  He was still, eyes closed, either unconscious or dead.

"Winton?" Brendan said.

The cop did not respond.  His eyelids did not even flutter.

Filled with a rage akin to that which had caused him to heave the holy
chalice against the wall during Mass, Brendan Cronin gently put both
hands on Winton Tolk's neck, one on each side, feeling for the throbbing
carotid arteries.  He detected no life, and in his mind he saw the
photographs of Raynella and the Tolk children again, and now he was
seething with resentment at the indifference of the universe.  "He can't
die," Brendan said angrily.  "He can't." Suddenly he thought he felt a
thready pulse, so faint it was virtually nonexistent.  He moved his
hands, seeking confirmation that Tolk lived.  He found it: a less feeble
beat than that first phantom drumming, though no less irregular.

"Is he dead?"

Brendan looked up and saw a man coming around the side of the service
counter, a Hispanic in a white apron, the owner or an employee.  A
woman, also in a white apron, had risen from behind the counter.

Outside, distant sirens were growing nearer.

Under Brendan's hands, the throbbing in Winton Tolk's neck seemed to be
getting stronger and more regular, which was surely not the case. Winton
had lost too much blood to stage even a limited spontaneous recovery.
Until the paramedics arrived with life-support machines, his vital signs
would deteriorate unavoidably, and even expert medical care might not
stabilize his condition.

The sirens were no more than two blocks away.

Puffs of snow blew in through the shattered windows.

The sandwich-shop employees edged closer.

Numb with shock, in a haze of anger at fate's capricious brutality,
Brendan trailed his hands from Winton's neck to the wounds in his chest.
When he saw the blood oozing up between his fingers, his rage gave way
to overwhelming helplessness and uselessness, and he began to cry.

Winton Tolk choked.  Coughed.  Opened his eyes.  Breath rattled thinly
and wetly in his throat, and a soft groan escaped him.

Amazed, Brendan felt for a pulse in the man's throat again. It was weak
but definitely not as weak as before, and hardly irregular at all.

Raising his voice over the shrieking sirens, which were now so near that
the air trembled, Brendan said, "Winton?  Winton, do you hear me?"

The cop did not seem to recognize Brendan-or even to know where he was.
He coughed again and choked more

violently than before.

Brendan quickly lifted Tolk's head a few inches and turned it to one
side, to let the blood and mucus drain more freely from his mouth.
Immedifitely the wounded man's respiration improved, though it remained
noisy, each inhalation hardwon.  He was still in critical condition, in
desperate need of medical attention, but he was alive.

Alive.

Incredible.  All this blood, and he was still alive, hanging on.

Outside, three sirens died one after the other.  Brendan shouted for
Paul Armes.  Excited by the hope that Winton could be saved, but also
panicked by the possibility that medical attention would arrive seconds
too late, he glanced at the sandwich-shop employees and shouted, "Go!
Get them in here.  Let them know it's safe.  Paramedics, damn it!"

the man in the apron hesitated, then moved toward the door.

Winton Tolk expelled bloody mucus and finally drew an unobstructed
breath.  Brendan carefully lowered Winton's head to the floor again. The
cop continued to breathe shallowly, with difficulty, but steadily.

Outside there were shouts and doors slamming and running feet coming
toward the sandwich shop Brendan's hands were wet with Winton Tolk's
blood.  Unthinking, he blotted them on his coat-and it was then that he
realized the rings had reappeared on his hands for the first time in
nearly two weeks.  One on each palm.  Twin bands of raised and inflamed
tissue.

Cops and paramedics burst through the front door, stepping over the dead
man in the navy peacoat, and Brendan quickly moved out of their way.  He
backed up until he bumped against the service counter, where he leaned
in sudden exhaustion, staring at his hands.

For a few days following the first appearance of the rings, he had used
the cortisone prescribed by Dr.  Heeton at St. Joseph's, but when the
rings had not reappeared, he had soon stopped applying the lotion.  He
had almost forgotten about the marks.  They had been a
curiosity-baffling, but of little concern. Now, as he looked at the
strange marks, he heard the voices of those around him, fuzzy and
strange: "Jesus, the blood!"

"Can't be alive .  .  .  twice in the chest."

"Get the fuck out of my way!"

"Plasma!"

"Type his blood.  No!  Wait .  .  .  do it in the ambulance."

Brendan finally looked at the crowd around Winton Tolk. He watched the
paramedics as they worked to keep the wounded man alive, get him on a
stretcher, and move him out of the sandwich shop.

He saw a cursing policeman dragging the dead man out of the doorway to
make it easier for the paramedics to exit with Tolk.

He saw Paul Armes moving along beside the stretcher.

He saw that the blood in which Tolk had been lying was not merely a pool
but a lake.

He looked at his hands again.  The rings were gone.

4.

Las Vegas, Nevada

The Texan in the yellow Day-Glo polyester pants would not have tried to
get Jorja Monatella into bed if he had known she was in the mood to
castrate someone.

Although it was the afternoon of December 24, Jorja was not yet in the
Christmas spirit.  Usually even-tempered and easygoing, she was in an
exceedingly sour state of mind as she strode back and forth through the
casino, from the bar to the blackjack tables and back to the bar again,
delivering drinks to the gamblers.

For one thing, she hated her job.  Being a cocktail waitress was bad
enough in a regular bar or lounge, but in a hotel casino bigger than a
football field, it was a killer.  At the end of a shift, her feet ached,
and often her ankles were swollen. The hours were irregular, too.  How
were you supposed to provide a stable home for a seven-year-old daughter
when you did not have a job with normal hours?

She also hated the costume: a little red nothing, cut high in the crotch
and hips, very low at the bustline, smaller than a bathing suit.  An
elastic corset was built in to minimize the waistline and emphasize the
breasts.  If you were already smallwaisted, with generous breasts-as
Jorja was-the getup made you look almost freakishly erotic.

And she hated the way the pit bosses and casino floormen were always
hitting on her.  Maybe they figured any girl who would strut her stuff
in an outfit like that was an easy lay.

She was sure that her name had something to do with their attitude as
well: Jorja.  It was cute.  Too cute.  Her mother must have been drunk
when she got creative with the spelling of Georgia.  It was all right
when people heard it, because they had no way of knowing she spelled it
cute, but she had to wear a name tag on her costume-joRJA-and at least a
dozen people a day commented on it.  It was a frivolous name, misspelled
like that, so it gave them the idea she was a frivolous person.  She had
considered going to court to have the proper spelling made legal, but
that would hurt her mother. However, if guys at work kept hitting on
her, she might even have it changed to Mother Teresa, which ought to
cool off some of the horny bastards.

And fending off the bosses was not the worst of it.  Every week, some
high-roller-a bigshot from Detroit or L A.  or Dallas, dropping a bundle
at the tables-would take a shine to Jorja and ask the pit boss to fix
him up with her.  A few cocktail waitresses were available-not many, but
a few.  But when the pit bosses approached Jorja, her answer was always
the same: "To hell with him.  I'm a waitress, not a hooker."

Her routine, cold refusal did not stop them from pressuring her to
relent, which they had done an hour ago.  A wartfaced, bug-eyed oilman
from Houston-in phosphorescent yellow pants, a blue shirt, and a red
string tie-one of the hotel's favored clients, had gotten the hots for
her and had made inquiries.  His breath stank of the burritos he had
eaten forlunch.

Now the bosses were angry with her for refusing a highly valued
customer, for being "too stuffy." Rainy Tarnell, the blackjack pit boss
on the day shift, had the gall to put it just like that-"Honey, don't be
so stuffy!"-as if falling on her back and spreading her legs for a
stranger from Houston was merely the equivalent of a fashion gaucherie
like wearing white shoes either before Memorial Day or after Labor Day.

Though she hated being a casino cocktail waitress, she could not afford
to quit.  No other job would pay her as well.  She was a divorced mother
raising a daughter without benefit of child-support payments, and in
order to protect her credit rating, she was still paying off bills that
Alan had run up in her name before walking out on her, so she was
acutely aware of the value of a dollar.  Her wages were low, -but the
tips were exceedingly good, especially on those occasions when one of
her customers started winning big at cards or dice.

On this day before Christmas, the casino was two-thirds empty, and tips
were bad.  Vegas was always slow Thanksgiving and Christmas, and the
crowds did not return until December 26.  The whizzing-rattling-ringing
of slot machines was muted.  Many of the blackjack dealers stood idle
and bored in front of empty tables.

No wonder I'm in a sour mood, Jorja thought.  Sore feet, back pain, a
horny creep who figures I ought to be as available as the drinks I
serve, an argument with Rainy Tarnell, and no tips to show for it.

When her shift ended at four o'clock, she hurried to the changing room
downstairs, punched the time clock, slipped out of her costume and into
street clothes, and was out the door into the employee parking lot with
a speed that would have drawn praise from an Olympic runner.

The unpredictable desert weather did nothing to instill the Christmas
spirit in her.  A Las Vegas winter day could be cold, with bone-numbing
wind, or it could be warm enough for shorts and halters.  This year, the
holiday was warm.

Her dusty, battered Chevette started on only the third try, which should
have improved her mood.  But listening to the starter grind and the
engine cough, she was reminded of the shiny new Buick that Alan had
taken with him fifteen months ago, when he had abandoned her and Marcie.

Alan Rykoff.  More than her job, more than any of the other things that
irritated her, Alan was the cause of Jorja's foul mood.  She had shed
his name when the marriage had been dissolved, reverting to her maiden
name, Monatella, but she could not as easily shed the memories of the
pain he had inflicted on her and Marcie.

As she drove out of the parking lot into the street behind the hotel,
Jorja tried to banish Alan from her thoughts, but he remained at center
stage.  The bastard.  With his current bedmate, an airhead blond bearing
the unlikely name "Pepper," he had flown off to Acapulco for a week, not
even bothering to leave a Christmas gift for Marcie.  What did you tell
a seven-year-old girl when she asked why her daddy didn't buy her
anything for Christmas-or even come to see her?

Although Alan left Jorja saddled with bills, she had willingly forgone
alimony because, by then, she loathed him so much that she had not
wanted to be dependent on him.  However, she had gone after child
support and had been shocked when he countered by insisting Marcie was
not his child and, therefore, not his responsibility.  Damn him.  Jorja
had married him when she was nineteen and he was twenty-four, and she'd
never been unfaithful.  Alan knew she hadn't cheated, but protecting his
jazzy lifestyle-he needed every dollar for clothes, fast cars, and
women-was more important to him than his wife's reputation or his
daughter's happiness.  To spare little Marcie humiliation and pain,
Jorja had released Alan from responsibility before he could voice his
sleazy accusations in the courtroom.

So she was finished withhim.  She could put him out of her mind.

But as she drove past the mall at the intersection of Maryland Parkway
and Desert Inn Road, Jorja thought about how young she had been when she
tied herself to Alan, too young for marriage and too naive to see
through his facade.  When she was nineteen, she thought he was
sophisticated, charming.  For more than a year, their union had seemed
blissful, but gradually she began to see him for what he was: shallow,
vain, lazy, a shockingly promiscuous womanizer.

The summer before last, when their relationship had been rocky, she had
tried to salvage the marriage by coercing Alan into a carefully planned
three-week vacation.  She believed that part of their problem was that
they spent too little time together.  He was a baccarat dealer in one
hotel, and she was employed in another, and they frequently worked
different shifts, slept on different schedules.  Just the two of them
and Marcie-embarking upon an adventurous three-week car trip seemed a
good way to repair their damaged relationship.

Unfortunately but predictably, her scheme had not worked. After the
vacation, upon their return to Vegas, Alan had been more promiscuous
than before.  He seemed determined-driven-to take a poke at anything in
skirts.  In fact, it was almost as if the car trip had somehow pushed
him over the edge, for the number and intensity of his one-night stands
developed a manic quality, a frightening desperation.  Three months
later, in October of that year, he walked out on her and Marcie.

The only good thing about the car trip had been the brief encounter with
that young woman doctor who had been driving cross-country from Stanford
to Boston on, she'd said, her first vacation ever.  Jorja still
remembered the woman's name: Ginger Weiss.  Although they had met only
once, and then for little more than an hour, Ginger Weiss had quite
unwittingly changed Jorja's life.  The doctor had been so very youngso
slender, pretty, feminine-it had been difficult to accept that she was
really a doctor, yet she'd been uncommonly selfassured and competent.
Deeply impressed by Ginger Weiss during that encounter, Jorja was later
motivated by the doctor's example.  She'd always thought of herself as a
born cocktail waitress, incapable of anything more challenging, but when
Alan walked out, she had remembered Dr.  Weiss and decided to make more
of herself than she had previously thought possible.

During the past eleven months, Jorja had taken business management
courses at UNLV, squeezing them into an already hectic schedule.  When
she finished paying the bills that Alan had left her, she would build a
nest egg so she could eventually open her own business, a dress shop.
She had worked out a very detailed plan, revising and honing it until it
was realistic, and she knew she would stick with it.

It was a shame that she would never have a chance to thank Ginger Weiss.
Of course, it was not any favor that Dr.  Weiss had performed that so
deeply affected Jorja; it was not so much what the doctor had done as
what she was.  Anyway, at twenty-seven Jorja's prospects were more
exciting than they had been previously.

Now, she turned off Desert Inn Road onto Pawnee Drive, a street of
comfortable homes behind the Boulevard Mall. She stopped in front of
Kara Persaghian's house and got out of the car.  The front door opened
before she reached it, and Marcie rushed out, into her arms, shouting
happily.  "Mommy!

Mommy!" And Jorja was at last able to forget about her job, the Texan,
the argument with the pit boss, and the dilapidated condition of the
Chevette.  She squatted down and hugged her daughter.  When all else
failed to cheer her, she could count on Marcie for a lift.

"Mommy," the girl said, "did you have a great day?"

"Yes, honey, I did.  You smell like peanut butter."

"Cookies!  Aunt Kara made peanut butter cookies!  I had a great day,
too.  Mommy, do you know why elephants came ...  ummm, why they came all
the way from Africa to live in this country?" Marcie giggled.  " 'Cause
we got orchestras here, and elephants just love to dance!" She giggled
again.  "Isn't that silly."

Even allowing for maternal prejudice, Jorja knew that Marcie was an
adorable child.  The girl had her mother's hair, so dark brown that it
was virtually black, and her mother's dusky complexion.  Her eyes were a
striking contrast to the rest of her, not brown like Jorja's but blue
like her father's.  She had an immensely appealing gamine quality.

Marcie's huge eyes opened wide.  "Hey, know what day it is?"

"I sure do.  Almost Christmas Eve."

"Will be soon as it's dark.  Aunt Kara's giving us cookies to take home.
You know, Santa's already left the North Pole, and he's started going
down chimleys already, but in other parts of the world, of course, where
it's dark, not chimleys here.  Aunt Kara says I been so bad all year
I'll only get a necklace made out of coal, but she's just teasing. Isn't
she just teasing, Mommy?"

"Just teasing," Jorja confirmed.

"Oh, no, I'm not!" Kara Persaghian said.  She came through the doorway,
onto the front walk, a grandmotherly woman in a housedress and apron. "A
coal necklace .  .  .  and maybe a set of matching coal earrings."

Marcie giggled again.

Kara was not Marcie's aunt, merely her after-school babysitter.  Marcie
called her "Aunt Kara" from the second week she knew her, and the sitter
was obviously delighted by that affectionately bestowed honorary title.
Kara was carrying Marcie's jacket, a big coloring-book picture of Santa
that they had been working on for a few days, and a plate of cookies.
Jorja gave the picture and jacket to Marcie, accepted the cookies with
expressions of gratitude and with some chatter about diets, and then
Kara said, "Jorja, could I speak with you a moment-just the two of us?"

"Sure." Jorja sent Marcie to the car with the cookies and turned
inquisitively to Kara.  "It's about .  .  .  Marcie.  What's she done?"

"Oh, nothing bad.  She's an angel, that one.  Couldn't misbehave if she
tried.  But today ...  well, she was talking about how the thing she
wants most for Christmas is that Little Ms. Doctor play kit-"

"It's the first time she's ever really nagged me about a toy," Jorja
said.  "I don't know why she's obsessed with it."

"She talks about it every day.  You are getting it for her?"

Jorja glanced at the Chevette, confirming that Marcie was out of
earshot, then smiled.  "Yes, Santa definitely has it in his bag."

"Good.  She'd be heartbroken if you didn't.  But the oddest thing
happened today, and it made me wonder if she'd ever been seriously ill."

 'Serious illness?  No.  She's an exceptionally healthy kid."

'Never been in the hospital?"

"No.  Why?"

Kara frowned.  "Well, today she started talking about the Little Ms.
Doctor kit, and she told me she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up
because then she could treat herself when she got sick.  She said she
never wanted a doctor to touch her again because she was once hurt real
bad by doctors. I asked her what she meant, and she got quiet for a
while, and I thought she wasn't going to answer me.  Then finally, in
this very somber voice, she said some doctors had once strapped her down
in a hospital bed so she couldn't get out, and then they stuck her full
of needles and flashed lights in her face and did all sorts of horrible
things to her.  She said they hurt her real bad, so she was going to
become her own doctor and treat herself from now on."

" Really?  Well, it's not true," Jorja said.  "I don't know why she'd
make up such a story.  That is odd."

"Oh, that's not the odd part.  When she told me all this, I was
concerned.  I was surprised you'd never told me.  I mean, if she'd been
seriously ill, I ought to've been told in case there was a possibility
of a recurrence.  So I questioned her about it-just casually, the way
you coax things out of a childand suddenly the poor little thing just
burst into tears.  We were in the kitchen, making cookies, and she
started to cry .  .  .  and shake.  Just shaking like a leaf.  I tried
to calm her, but that only made her cry harder.  Then she pulled away
from me and ran.  I found her in the living room, in the corner behind
the big green Lay-Z-Boy, huddled down as if she were hiding from
someone."

"Good heavens," Jorja said.

Kara said, "Took me at least five minutes to get her to stop crying and
another ten to coax her out of her hidey-hole behind that chair.  She
made me promise, if those doctors ever came for her again, that I'd let
her hide behind the chair and not tell them where she was.  I mean,
Jorja, she was in a real state."

On the way home, Jorja said, "That was some story you told Kara."

"What story?" Marcie asked, looking straight ahead, barely able to see
over the dashboard.

"That story about the doctors."

"Oh."

"Being strapped in bed.  Why'd you make up a thing like that?"

"It's true," Marcie said.

"But it isn't."

"Yes, it is." The girl's voice was little more than a whisper.

"The only hospital you were ever in was the one where you were born, and
I'm sure you don't remember that." Jorja sighed.  "A few months ago we
had a little talk about fibbing. Remember what happened to Danny Duck
when he fibbed?"

"The Truth Fairy wouldn't let him go to the woodchuck's party."

"That's right."

"Fibbing's bad," Marcie said softly.  "Nobody likes fibbers-'specially
not woodchucks and squirrels."

Disarmed, Jorja had to bite back a laugh and struggle to keep a stern
tone in her voice.  "Nobody likes fibbers."

They stopped at a red traffic light, but Marcie still looked straight
ahead, refusing to meet Jorja's eyes.  The girl said, "It's 'specially
bad to fib to your mommy or your daddy."

"Or to anyone who cares about you.  And making up stories to scare
Kara-that's the same as fibbing."

"Wasn't tryin' to scare her," Marcie said.

"Trying to get sympathy, then.  You were never in a hospital."

"Was."

"Oh, yeah?" Marcie nodded vigorously, and Jorja said, "When?"

"Don't 'member when."

"You don't remember, huh?"

"Almost."

"Almost isn't good enough.  Where was this hospital?"

"I'm not sure.  Sometimes ...  I 'member it better than other times.
Sometimes I can hardly 'member it at all, and sometimes I 'member it
real good, and then I ...  I get scared."

"Right now you don't remember too well, huh?"

"Nope.  But today I 'membered real good ...  and scared myself."

The traffic light changed, and Jorja drove in silence, wondering how
best to handle the situation.  She had no notion what to make of it.  It
was foolish ever to believe that you understood your child.  Marcie had
always been able to surprise Jorja with actions, statements, big ideas,
musings, and questions that seemed not to have come from within herself
but which it seemed she had carefully selected from some secret book of
startling behavior that was known to all kids but not to adults, some
cosmic volume perhaps titled Keeping Mom and Dad Off-Balance.

As if she had just dipped into that book again, Marcie said, "Why were
all Santa Claus's kids deformed?"

"What?"

"Well, see, Santa and Mrs.  Claus had a whole bunch of kids, but all of
them was elves."

"The elves aren't their children.  They work for Santa."

"Really?  How much does he pay 'em?"

"He doesn't pay them anything, honey."

"How do they buy food, then?"

"They don't have to buy anything.  Santa gives them all they need." This
was certainly the last Christmas that Marcie would believe in Santa;
nearly all of her classmates were already doubters.  Recently, she had
been asking these probing questions.  Jorja would be sorry to see the
fantasy disproved, the magic lost.  "The elves are part of his family,
honey, and they work with him simply for the love of it."

"You mean the elves are adopted?  So Santa doesn't have real kids of his
own?  That's sad."

"No, 'cause he's got all the elves to love."

God, I love this kid, Jorja thought.  Thank you, God.  Thank you for
this kid, even if I did have to get tied up with Alan Rykoff to get her.
Dark clouds and silver linings.

She turned into the two-lane driveway that encircled Las Huevos
Apartments and parked the Chevette in the fourth carport.  Las Huevos.
The Eggs.  After five years in the place, she still couldn't understand
why anyone would name an apartment complex The Eggs.

The instant the car stopped, Marcie was out of it with the poster from
the coloring book and the plate of cookies, dashing up the walkway to
their entrance.  The girl had deftly changed the subject just long
enough to finish the ride and escape from the confines of the car.

Jorja wondered if she should press the issue farther.  It was Christmas
Eve, and she had no desire to spoil the holiday. Marcie was a good kid,
better than most, and this business about being hurt by doctors was an
extremely rare instance of fabrication.  Jorja had made the point that
fibbing was not acceptable, and Marcie had understood (even if she had
persisted a bit with her medical fantasy), and her sudden change of
subject had probably been an admission of wrongdoing. So it was an
aberration.  Nothing would be gained by harping on it, especially not at
the risk of ruining Christmas.

Jorja was confident she would hear no more about it.

5.

Laguna Beach , California

During the afternoon, Dominick Corvaisis must have read the unsigned
typewritten note a hundred times:

The sleepwalker would be well-advised to search the past for the source
of his problem.  That is where the secret is buried.

In addition to the letter's lack of signature and return address, the
postmark on the plain white envelope was doublestruck and badly smeared,
so he could not determine whether it had been mailed in Laguna Beach or
from another city.

After he paid for his breakfast and left The Cottage, he sat in his car,
the copy of Twilight in Babylon forgotten on the seat beside him, and
read the note half a dozen times.  It made him so nervous that he
withdrew a pair of Valiums from his jacket pocket and almost took one
without water.  But as he put the tablet to his lips, he hesitated.  To
explore all the ramifications of the note, he would need a clear mind.
For the first time in weeks, he denied himself chemical escape from his
anxieties; he returned the Valium to his pocket.

He drove to South Coast Plaza, a huge shopping mall in Costa Mesa, to
buy some last-minute Christmas gifts.  In each store he visited, while
he waited for the clerks to gift-wrap his purchases, he took the curious
message from his pocket and read it again and again.

For a while Dom had wondered if the note had come from Parker, if
perhaps the artist had sent it to jolt him and intrigue him and propel
him out of his drug-induced haze.  Parker might be capable of such
highly theatrical, amateur psychotherapy.  But finally Dom dismissed
that idea.  Machiavellian maneuvers were simply not aspects of the
painter's personality.  He was, in fact, almost excessively forthright.

Parker was not the author of the note, but he was certain to have some
original speculations about who might be behind it.  Together, they
might be able to decide just how the arrival of this letter changed
things and how they ought to proceed.

Later, back in Laguna, when Dom was within a block of Parker's house, he
was suddenly shaken by a previously unconsidered, profoundly troubling
possibility.  This new idea was so disconcerting that he pulled the
Firebird to the curb and stopped.  He got the note from his pocket, read
it again, fingered the paper.  He felt cold inside.  He looked into the
reflection of his own eyes in the rearview mirror, and he did not like
what he saw.

Could he have written the note himself?

He could have composed it on the Displaywriter while asleep. But it was
outlandish to suppose he'd dressed, gone to the mailbox, deposited the
note, returned home, and changed into pajamas again without waking up.
Impossible.  Wasn't it?  If he had done such a thing, his mental
imbalance was worse than he had thought.

His hands were clammy.  He blotted them on his trousers.

Only three people in the world were aware of his sleepwalking: himself,
Parker Faine, and Dr.  Cobletz.  He had already eliminated Parker.  Dr.
Cobletz had certainly not sent the note.  So if Dom himself had not sent
it-who had?

When he pulled away from the curb at last, he did not continue to
Parker's house but headed home instead.

Ten minutes later, in his study, he took the by-now rumpled note from
his pocket.  He typed those two sentences, which appeared on the
Displaywriter's dark screen in glowing green letters.  Then he switched
on the printer and instructed the computer to produce a hard copy of the
document.  He watched as it hammered out those twenty-three words.

The Displaywriter came with two printwheels in two typefaces.  He had
bought two more to provide options for different tasks.  Now, Dom used
the three additional printwheels to produce a total of four copies of
the note, and with a pencil he labeled each according to the style of
type used for it: PRESTIGE ELITE, ARTISAN 10, COURIER 10, LETTER GOTHIC.

He smoothed out the original rumpled note and placed each of the copies
beside it for comparison.  He hoped to eliminate all four type styles
that he possessed, disproving the theory that he had sent the note to
himself.  But the Courier 10 appeared to be a perfect match.

That did not conclusively prove he'd written the note.  In offices and
homes all over the country, there must be millions of printwheels and
printer elements in the Courier face.

He compared the paper of the original note to that of the copy he had
made.  They were both twenty-pound, 8 1/2 x 11", standard products sold
under a dozen labels in thousands of stores in all fifty states. Neither
sheet was of sufficient quality to contain fibers.  Dom held them up to
the light and saw that neither page featured a mill seal or brand-name
watermark, which might have proven that the original note had not been
typed on paper from his own stock.

He thought: Parker, Dr.  Cobletz, and me.  Who else could know?

And what was the note trying to tell him, exactly?  What secret was
buried in his past?  What suppressed trauma or forgotten event lay at
the root of his somnambulism?

Sitting at his desk, staring at the night beyond the big window,
straining blindly toward understanding, he grew tense.

Again, he felt a need for Valium, almost a craving, but he resisted.

The note engaged his curiosity, logic, and reason.  He was able to focus
his intellect on the search for a solution and concentrate with an
intensity of which he had not been capable recently, and thus he found
the will power to forsake the solace of tranquilization.

He was beginning to feel good about himself for the first time in weeks.
In spite of the helplessness in which he had been wallowing, he now
realized that, after all, he still had the power to shape and direct the
course of his own life.  All he had needed was something like the note,
something tangible on which he could focus.

He paced around the house, carrying the note, thinking. Eventually he
came to a front window from which he could see his curbside mailbox-a
brick column with a metal receptacle mortared into it-standing in the
bluish fall of light from a mercury-vapor streetlamp.

Because he kept the post office drawer in town, the only mail he got at
home was that addressed to "Occupant" and occasional cards or letters
from friends who had both his mailing and street address but who
sometimes forgot that all correspondence was to go to the former.
Standing at the window, staring at the curbside receptacle, Dom realized
that he had not picked up today's delivery.

He went outside, down the front walk to the street, and used a key to
unlock the receptacle.  Except for the breeze that rustled the trees,
the night was quiet.  The wind carried the scent of the sea, and the air
was chilly.  The overhead mercury-vapor lamp was sufficiently bright for
Dom to identify the mail as he withdrew it from the box: six advertising
flyers and catalogs, two Christmas cards .  .  .  and a plain white
business-size envelope with no return address.

Excited, fearful, he hurried back into the house, to his study, tearing
open the white envelope and extracting a single sheet of paper as he
went.  At his desk, he unfolded the letter.

The moon.

No other words could have shocked him as badly as those.

He felt as if he had fallen into the White Rabbit's hole and was
tumbling down into a fantastic realm where logic and reason no longer
applied.

The moon.  This was impossible.  No one knew he had awakened from bad
dreams with those words on his lips, repeating them in panic: "The moon,
moon.  .  .  ." And no one knew that, while sleepwalking, he had typed
those words on the Displaywriter.  He'd told neither Parker nor Cobletz,
because those incidents had transpired after he'd begun drug therapy and
after the drugs seemed to be working, and he had not wanted to appear to
be slipping backward.  Besides, although those two words filled him with
dread, he did not understand their significance.  He did not know why
they had the power to raise gooseflesh, and he instinctively felt that
it was unwise to mention this development to anyone until he had gotten
a better handle on it.  He had been afraid Cobletz would conclude that
the drugs were not helping him and would discontinue them in favor of
psychotherapy-and Dom had needed the drugs.

The moon.

No one knew, damn it.  No one but .  Dom himself.

In the streetlamp's dim glow, he had not checked for a postmark.  Now,
he saw that its point of origin was not a mystery, as was the case with
the letter that had come this morning.  It was clearly stamped NEW YORK,
N Y., and dated December 18.  Wednesday of last week.

He almost laughed out loud.  He was not insane, after all. He was not
sending these cryptic messages to himself-could not possibly be sending
them-because he had been in Laguna last week.  Three thousand miles
separated him from the mailbox in which this-and undoubtedly the
other-strange message had first been deposited.

But who had sent him the notes-and why?  Who in New York could know that
he was sleepwalking ...  or that he had repeatedly typed "the moon" on
his word processor?  A thousand questions crowded Dom Corvaisis' mind,
and he had no answers to any of them.  Worse, at the moment, he could
see no way even to seek answers.  The situation was so bizarre that
there was no logical direction for his inquiries to take.

For two months, he had thought that his sleepwalking was the strangest
and most frightening thing that had ever happened-or ever would
happen-to him.  But whatever lay

behind the somnambulism must be even stranger and more frightening than
the nightwalking itself.

He recalled the first message he had left for himself on the word
processor: I'm afraid.  What had he been hiding from in closets?  When
he had started to nail the windows shut while sound asleep, what had he
hoped to keep out of his house?

Dom saw now that his sleepwalking had not been caused by stress.  He was
not suffering anxiety attacks because he feared the success or failure
of his first novel.  It was nothing as mundane as that.

Something else.  Something very strange and terrible.

What did he know in his sleep that he did not know when awake?

6.

New Haven County, Connecticut

The sky had cleared before nightfall, but the moon had not yet risen.
The stars shed little light upon the cold earth.

With his back against a boulder, Jack Twist sat in the snow atop a
knoll, at the edge of pines, waiting for the Guardmaster armored truck
to appear.  Only three weeks after personally netting more than a
million dollars from the mafia warehouse job, he was already setting up
another heist.  He was wearing boots, gloves, and a white ski suit, with
the hood over his head and tied securely under his chin.  Three hundred
yards behind him and to the southwest, beyond the small woods, the
darkness was relieved by the light of a housing development; however,
Jack waited in utter blackness, his breath steaming.

In front of him, two miles of night-clad fields lay northeast, barren
but for a few widely spaced trees and some winterstripped brush.  In the
distance beyond the emptiness, there were electronics plants, then
shopping centers, then residential neighborhoods, none of which was
visible from Jack's position, though their existence was indicated by
the glow of electric lights on the horizon.

At the far edge of the fields, headlights appeared over a low rise.
Raising a pair of night binoculars, Jack focused on

the approaching vehicle, which was following the two-lane county road
that bisected the fields.  In spite of the leftward cast of his left
eye, Jack had superb vision, and with the help of the night binoculars,
he ascertained that the vehicle was not the Guardmaster truck, therefore
of no consequence to him.  He lowered the glasses.

In his solitude upon the snowy knoll, he thought back to another time
and a warmer place, to a humid night in a Central American jungle, when
he had studied a nocturnal landscape with binoculars just like these.
Then, he had been searching anxiously for hostile troops that had been
stalking and encircling him and his buddies.  .  .  .

His platoon-twenty highly trained Rangers under the leadership of
Lieutenant Rafe Eikhorn, with Jack as second in command-had crossed the
border illegally and gone fifteen miles inside the enemy state without
being detected.  Their presence could have been construed as an act of
war; therefore, they wore camouflage suits stripped of rank and service
markings, and they carried no identification.

Their target was a nasty little "re-education" camp, cynically named the
Institute of Brotherhood, where a thousand Miskito Indians were
imprisoned by the People's Army.  Two weeks earlier, courageous Catholic
priests had led another fifteen hundred Indians through the jungles and
out of the country before they could be imprisoned, too.  Those
clergymen had brought word that the Indians at the Institute would be
murdered and buried in mass graves if not rescued within the month.

The Miskitos were a fiercely proud breed with a rich culture that they
refused to forsake for the anti-ethnic, collectivist philosophy of the
country's latest leaders.  The Indians' continued loyalty to their own
traditions would ensure their extermination, for the ruling council did
not hesitate to call up the firing squads to solidify its power.

Nevertheless, twenty Rangers in mufti would not have been committed to
such a dangerous raid merely to save Miskitos. Both left- and right-wing
dictatorial regimes routinely slaughtered their citizenry in every
corner of the world, and the United States did not-could not-prevent
those state-sanctioned murders.  But in addition to the Indians at the
Institute,

there were eleven others whose rescue, along with the Indians, made the
risky operation worthwhile.

Those eleven were former revolutionaries who had fought the just war
against the now-deposed right-wing dictator, but who had refused to
remain silent when their revolution had been betrayed by totalitarians
of the left.  Undoubtedly, those eleven possessed valuable information.
The opportunity to debrief them was more important than saving the lives
of a thousand Indians-at least as far as Washington was concerned.

Undetected, Jack's platoon reached the Institute of Brotherhood in a
farming district at the edge of the jungle.  It was a concentration camp
in all but name, a place of barbed-wire fences and guard towers.  Two
buildings stood outside the fenced perimeter of the camp: a two-story
concrete-block structure from which the government administered the
district, and a dilapidated wooden barracks housing sixty troops.

Shortly after midnight, the platoon of Rangers stealthily took up
positions and launched a rocket attack on the barracks and the concrete
building.  The initial artillery barrages were followed by hand-to-hand
combat.  Half an hour after the last shot was fired, the Indians and
other prisoners-as jubilant a group as Jack had ever seen-were formed
into a column and moved out toward the border, fifteen miles away.

Two Rangers had been killed.  Three were wounded.

As first in command of the platoon, Rafe Eikhorn led the exodus and
oversaw security along the column's flanks, while Jack stayed behind
with three men to be sure the last of the prisoners got out of the camp
in orderly fashion.  It was also his responsibility to gather up files
relating to the interrogation, torture, and murder of Indians and
district peasants.  By the time he and his four men left the Institute
of Brotherhood, they were two miles behind the last of the Miskitos.

Though Jack and his men made good time, they never caught up with their
platoon and were still miles from the Honduran border when, at dawn,
hostile army helicopters, like giant black wasps, came in low over the
trees and began off-loading enemy troops wherever a clearing could be
found. The other Rangers and all the Indians reached freedom, but Jack
and his three men were captured and transported to a facility similar to
the Institute of Brotherhood.  However, the place was so much worse than
the concentration camp that

it had no official existence.  The ruling council did not admit that
such a hellhole existed in the new workers' paradiseor that monstrous
inquisitions were conducted within its walls. In true Orwellian
tradition, because the four-story complex of cells and torture chambers
had no name, it did not exist.

Within those nameless walls, in cells without numbers, Jack Twist and
the three other Rangers were subjected to psychological and physical
torture, relentless humiliation and degradation, controlled starvation,
and constant threats of death.  One of the four died.  One went mad.
Only Jack and his closest friend, Oscar Weston, held on to both life and
sanity during the eleven and a half months of their incarceration.  .  .
.

Now, eight years later, leaning against a boulder atop a knoll in
Connecticut, waiting for the Guardmaster truck, Jack heard sounds and
detected odors which were not of this wind-swept winter night.  The hard
footfalls of jackboots on concrete corridors.  The stench from the
overflowing slops bucket, which was the cell's only toilet.  The
pathetic cry of some poor bastard being taken from his cell to another
session with interrogators.

Jack took deep breaths of the clean, cold Connecticut air. He was seldom
troubled by bad memories of that time and nameless place.  He was more
often haunted by what had happened to him after his escape-and by what
had happened to his Jenny in his absence.  It was not his suffering in
Central America that turned him against society; rather, subsequent
events were what had soured him.

He saw other headlights out on the black fields and raised his night
binoculars.  It was the Guardmaster armored transport.

He looked at his watch.  Nine-thirty-eight.  It was right on schedule,
as it had been every night for a week.  Even with the holiday tomorrow,
the truck kept to its route.  Guardmaster Security was nothing if not
reliable.

On the ground beside Jack was an attache case.  He lifted the lid.  The
blue numerals of a digital scanner were locked on the Guardmaster's open
radio link to the company dispatcher.  Even with his state-of-the-art
equipment, he had needed three nights to discover the truck's frequency.
He turned the volume dial on his own receiver.  Static crackled, hissed.
Then he was rewarded by a routine exchange between the driver and the
distant dispatcher.

"Three-oh-one," the dispatcher said. "Reindeer," the driver said.

"Rudolph," the dispatcher said. "Rooftop," the driver said.

The hiss and crackle of static settled in once more.

The dispatcher had opened the exchange with the truck's number, and the
rest of it had been the day's code which served as confirmation that 301
was on schedule and in no trouble of any kind.

Jack switched off his receiver.  The lighted dials went dark.

The armored transport passed less than two hundred feet from his
position on the knoll, and he turned to watch its dwindling taillights.

He was confident of Guardmaster's schedule now, and he would not be
returning to these fields until the night of the stickup, which was
tentatively scheduled for Saturday, January 11.  Meanwhile, there was a
great deal more planning to be done.

Ordinarily, planning a job was nearly as exciting and satisfying as the
actual commission of the crime.  But as he left the knoll and headed
toward the houses to the southwest, where he had parked his car on a
quiet street, he felt no elation, no thrill.  He was losing the ability
to take delight in even the contemplation of a crime.

He was changing.  And he did not know why.

As he drew near the first houses to the southwest of the knoll, he
became aware that the night had grown brighter. He looked up.  The moon
swelled fat on the horizon, so huge it seemed to be crashing to earth,
an illusion of enormousness created by the odd perspective of the early
stages of the satellite's ascension.  He stopped abruptly and stood with
his head tilted back, staring up at the luminous lunar surface.  A chill
seized him, an inner iciness unrelated to the winter cold.

"The moon," he said softly.

Hearing himself speak those words aloud, Jack shuddered violently.
Inexplicable fear welled in him.  He was gripped by an irrational urge
to run and hide from the moon, as if its luminescence were corrosive and
would, like an acid, dissolve him as he stood bathed in it.

The compulsion to flee passed in a minute.  He could not understand why
the moon had so suddenly terrified him.  It was only the ancient and
familiar moon of love songs and romantic poetry.  Strange.

He headed toward the car again.  The looming lunar face still made him
uneasy, and several times he glanced up at it, perplexed.

However, by the time he got in the car, drove into New Haven, and picked
up Interstate 95, that curious incident had faded from his mind.  He was
once more preoccupied with thoughts of Jenny, his comatose wife, whose
condition haunted him more than usual at Christmastime.

Later, in his apartment, as he stood by a big window, staring out at the
great city, a bottle of Becks in one hand, he was sure that from 261st
Street to Park Row, from Bensonhurst to Little Neck, there could be no
one in the Metropolis whose Christmas Eve was lonelier than his.

7.

Christmas Day

Elko County, Nevada.

Sandy Sarver woke soon after dawn came to the high plains. The early sun
glimmered vaguely at the bedroom windows of the house trailer.  The
world was so still that it seemed time must have stopped.

She could turn over and go back to sleep if she so desired, for she had
eight more days of vacation ahead of her.  Ernie and Faye Block had
closed the Tranquility Motel and had gone to visit their grandchildren
in Milwaukee.  The adjacent Tranquility Grille, which Sandy operated
with her husband, Ned, was also closed over the holidays.

 But Sandy knew she could not get back to sleep, for she was wide
awake-and horny.  She stretched like a cat beneath the blankets.  She
wanted to wake Ned, smother him with kisses, and pull him atop her.

Ned was merely a shadowy form in the dark bedroom, breathing deeply,
sound asleep.  Although she wanted him badly, she did not wake him.
There would be plenty of time for lovemaking later in the day.

She slipped quietly out of bed, into the bathroom, and showered.  She
made the end of it a cold shower.

For years she had been uninterested in sex, frigid.  Not long ago, the
sight of her own nude body had embarrassed her and filled her with
shame.  Although she did not know the reason for the new feelings that
had risen in her lately, she definitely had changed.  It had started the
summer before last, when sex had suddenly seemed .  .  .  well,
appealing.  That sounded silly now.  Of course sex was appealing.  But
prior to that summer, lovemaking had always been a chore to be endured.
Her late erotic blossoming was a delightful surprise and an inexplicable
mystery.

Nude, she returned to the shadowy bedroom.  She took a sweater and a
pair of jeans from the closet, and dressed.

In the small kitchen, she started to pour orange juice but stopped when
stricken by the urge to go for a drive.  She left a note for Ned, put on
a sheepskin-lined jacket, and went outside to the Ford pickup.

Sex and driving were the two new passions in her life, and the latter
was almost as important to her as the former.  That was another funny
thing: until the summer before last, she hated going anywhere in the
pickup except to work and back, and she seldom drove.  She'd not only
disliked highway travel but had dreaded it the way some people were
afraid of airplanes.  But now, other than sex, there was nothing she
liked better than to get behind the wheel of the truck and take off
journeying on a whim, without a destination, speeding.

She had always understood why sex repelled her-that had been no mystery.
She could blame her father, Horton Purney, for her frigidity.  Though
she had never known her mother, who had died giving birth, Sandy had
known her father far too well.  They had lived in a ramshackle house on
the outskirts of Barstow, on the edge of the lonely California desert,
just the two of them, and Sandy's earliest memories were of sexual
abuse.  Horton Purney had been a moody, brooding, mean, and dangerous
man.  Until Sandy escaped from home at fourteen, her father had used her
as if she had been an erotic toy.

Only recently had she realized that her strong dislike for highway
travel was also related to something else that her father had done to
her.  Horton Purney had run a motorcycle repair shop out of a sagging,
sun-scorched, unpainted barn on the same property as his house, but he
had never made much money from it.  Therefore, twice a year, he put
Sandy in the car and made the two-and-a-half-hour drive across the
desert to Las Vegas, where he knew an enterprising pimp, Samson Cherrik.
Cherrik had a list of perverts with a special interest in children, and
he was always happy to see Sandy. After a few weeks in Vegas, Sandy's
father packed, put Sandy in the car, and drove back to Barstow, his
pockets bulging with cash.  For Sandy, the long drive to Vegas was a
nightmare journey, for she knew what awaited her at their destination.
The trip back to Barstow was worse, for it was not an escape from Vegas
but a return to the grim life in that ramshackle house and the dark,
urgent, insatiable lust of Horton Purney. In either direction, the road
had led to hell, and she had learned to loathe the rumble of the car's
engine, the hum of tires on the pavement, and the unspooling highway
ahead.

Therefore, the pleasure she now took from driving and sex seemed
miraculous.  She could not understand where she'd found the strength and
will to overcome her horrible past. Since the summer before last, she
simply .  .  .  changed, was still changing.  And, oh, it was glorious
to feel the chains of self-loathing and the bonds of fear breaking
apart, to feel self-respect for the first time in her life, to feel
free.

, Now, she got into the Ford pickup and started the engine. Their house
trailer was set on an unlandscaped half-acre lot at the southern edge of
the tiny-almost nonexistent-town of Beowawe, along Route 21, a two-lane
blacktop.  As Sandy drove away from the trailer, there seemed to be
nothing but empty plains, rolling hills, scattered buttes, rocky
outcroppings, grass, brush, and waterless arroyos for a thousand miles
in every direction.  The intensely blue morning sky was immense, and as
she got the Ford up to speed, Sandy felt as if she might take flight.

If she headed north on 21, she would pass through Beowawe and soon come
to Interstate 80, which led east toward Elko or west toward Battle
Mountain.  Instead, she went south, into a beautifully barren landscape.
With skill and ease, she guided the four-wheel-drive pickup over the
badly weathered county road at seventy miles an hour.

In fifteen minutes, Route 21 petered out into a gravel roadbed that led
south through another eighty-three miles of uninhabited and desolate
territory.  She did not follow it, choosing instead to turn east on a
one-lane dirt track flanked by wild grass and scrub.

Some snow lay on the ground this Christmas morning, though not much.  In
the distance, the mountains were white, but down here, the annual
precipitation was less than fifteen inches a year, little of it in the
form of snow.  Here was an inch-deep skin of snow, there a small hillock
against which a shallow drift had formed, and here a sparkling bush on
which winddriven snow had hardened into a lacy garment of ice, but by
far the largest portion of the land was bare and dry and brown.

Sandy drove fast on the dirt, too, and behind her a cloud of dust plumed
up.  In time she left the track, headed overland-north, then west,
coming at last to a familiar place, though she had not set out with this
destination in mind.  For reasons she did not understand, her
subconscious often guided her to this spot during her solitary drives,
seldom in a direct line but by wandering routes, so her arrival was
usually a surprise to her.  She stopped, set the brake.  With the engine
idling, she stared for a while through the dusty windshield.

She came here because it made her feel better, though she did not know
why.  The slopes, the spines and teeth of rock, the grass and brush,
formed a pleasing picture, though the scene was no prettier and no
different from thousands of other places nearby.  Yet here she felt a
sublime peacefulness that could not be attained anywhere else.

She switched off the engine and got out of the pickup, and for a while
she strolled back and forth, hands jammed into the pockets of her
sheepskin-lined jacket, oblivious of the stingingly cold air.  Her drive
through the wildiands had brought her back toward civilization, and
Interstate 80 lay only a couple of hundred yards to the north.  The
occasional roar of a passing truck-echoed like a distant dragon's growl,
but the holiday traffic was light.  Beyond the highway, on the uplands
to the northwest, lay the Tranquility Motel and Grille, but Sandy
glanced just once in that direction.  She was more interested in the
immediate terrain, which exerted a mysterious and powerful attraction
for her, and which seemed to radiate peace the way a rock, in evening,
radiated the heat of the sun that it had absorbed during the day.

She wasn't trying to analyze her affinity for this patch of ground.
Evidently, there was some subtle harmony in the contours of the land, an
interplay of line, form, and shadow that defied definition. Any attempt
to decode its attraction would be as foolish as trying to analyze the
beauty of a sunset or the appeal of a favorite flower.

That Christmas morning, Sandy did not yet know that Ernie Block had been
drawn, as if possessed, to the same patch of ground on December 10, when
he had been on his way home from the freight office in Elko.  She did
not know that it aroused in Ernie an electrifying sense of pending
epiphany and more than a little fear-emotions quite unlike those that it
stirred in her.  Weeks would pass before she learned that her special
retreat had a strong attraction for others besides herself-both friends
and strangers.

Chicago, Illinois.

For Father Stefan Wycazik-that stocky Polish dynamo, rector of St.
Bernadette's, rescuer of troubled priests-it was the busiest Christmas
morning he had ever known.  And as the day wore on, it swiftly became
the most meaningful Christmas of his life.

He celebrated the second Mass at St.  Bernadette's, spent an hour
greeting parishioners who stopped by the rectory with fruit baskets and
boxes of homemade cookies and other gifts, then drove to University
Hospital to pay a visit to Winton Tolk, the policeman who had been shot
in an uptown sandwich shop yesterday afternoon.  Following emergency
surgery, Tolk had been in the intensive care unit yesterday afternoon
and all through the night.  Christmas morning he had been moved to a
semiprivate room adjacent to the ICU, for although he was no longer in
critical condition, he still needed to be monitored constantly.

When Father Wycazik arrived, Raynella Tolk, Winton's wife, was at her
husband's bedside.  She was quite attractive, with chocolate-brown skin
and stylish close-cropped hair.  "Mrs. Tolk?  I'm Stefan Wycazik."

"But-"

He smiled.  "Relax.  I'm not here to give anyone the last rites."

"Good," Winton said, , cause i'm sure not planning on dying."

of looming over me ...  calling my name ...  but I was still in a haze,
you see."

"It's a miracle Win survived," Raynella said in a tremulous voice.

"Now, now, honey," Winton said softly.  "I did make it, and that's all
that counts." When he was sure his wife would be all right, he looked at
Stefan and said, "Everyone's amazed that I could lose so much blood and
pull through.  From what I hear, I must've lost buckets."

"Did Brendan apply a tourniquet?"

Tolk frowned.  "Don't know.  Like I said, I was in a haze, a daze."

Father Wycazik hesitated, wondering how to find out what he needed to
know without revealing the extraordinary possibility that motivated this
visit.  "I know you're not very clear about what happened but .  .  .
did you notice anything peculiar about ...  Brendan's hands?"

:'Peculiar?  What do you mean?"

"He touched you, didn't he?"

"Sure.  I guess he felt for a pulse ...  then checked around to see
where the bleeding was coming from."

"Well, did you feel anything ...  anything unusual when he touched you
...  anything odd?" Stefan asked carefully, frustrated by the need to be
vague.

"I don't seem to be following your line of thought, Father."

Stefan Wycazik shook his head.  "Never mind.  The important thing is
that you're well." He glanced at his watch and, feigning surprise, said,
"Good heavens, I'm late for an appointment." Before they could respond,
he snatched his hat from the chair, wished them godspeed, and hurried
out, no doubt leaving them astonished by his behavior.

When people saw Father Wycazik walking toward them, they were usually
reminded of drill sergeants or football coaches.  His solid body and the
self-confident, aggressive way he used it were not what one expected of
a priest.  And when he was in a hurry, he was not so much like a drill
sergeant or a football coach as he was like a tank.

From Tolk's room, Father Wycazik blitzed down the hall, shoved through a
pair of heavy swinging doors, then through another pair, into the
intensive care unit, where the wounded policeman had been until just an
hour ago.  He asked to speak to the physician on duty, Dr.  Royce
Albright.  With the hope that God would forgive a few little white lies
told in a good cause, Stefan identified himself as the Tolk family's
priest and implied that Mrs.  Tolk had sent him to get the full story of
her husband's condition, about which she was not yet entirely clear.

Dr.  Albright looked like Jerry Lewis and had a deep rumbling voice like
Henry Kissinger, which was disconcerting, but he was willing to answer
whatever questions Father Wycazik wished to pose.  He was not Winton
Tolk's personal physician, but he was interested in the case.  "You can
assure Mrs.  Tolk that there's almost no danger of a setback.  He's
coming along marvelously.  Shot twice in the chest, pointblank, with a
.38.  Until yesterday, no one here would've believed that anyone could
take two shots in the chest from a large-caliber handgun and be out of
intensive care in twentyfour hours!  Mr.  Tolk is incredibly lucky."

"The bullets missed the heart, then .  .  .  and all vital organs?"

"Not only that," Albright said, "but neither round did major damage to
any veins or arteries.  A .38-caliber slug has lots of punch, Father.
Ordinarily, it chews up the victim.  In Tolk's case, one major artery
and vein were nicked, but neither was severed.  Very fortunate, indeed."

"Then I suppose the bullet was stopped by bone at some point."

"Deflected, yes, but not stopped.  Both slugs were found in soft tissue.
And that's another amazing thing-no shattered bones, not even a small
fracture.  A very lucky man."

Father Wycazik nodded.  "When the two slugs were removed from his body,
was there any indication they were underweight for .38-caliber
ammunition?  I mean, maybe the cartridges were faulty, with too little
lead in the bullets.  That would explain why, even though it was a .38
revolver, the shots did less damage than a pair of .22s."

Albright frowned.  "Don't know.  Could be.  You'd have to ask the police
.  .  .  or Dr.  Sonneford, the surgeon who took the slugs out of Tolk."

"I understand Officer Tolk lost a great deal of blood."

Grimacing, Albright said, "Must be a mistake about that on his chart.  I
haven't had a chance to talk to Dr.  Sonneford today, it being
Christmas, but according to the chart, Tolk received over four liters of
whole blood in the operating room. Of course, that can't be correct."

"Why not?"

"Father, if Tolk actually lost four liters of blood before they got him
to the hospital, there wouldn't be enough in him to maintain even
minimal circulation.  He'd have been dead. Stone cold dead."

Las Vegas, Nevada.

Mary and Pete Monatella, Jorja's parents, arrived at her apartment at
six on Christmas morning, bleary-eyed and grumpy from too little sleep,
but determined to take up their rightful posts by the brightly trimmed
tree before Marcie awoke.  Mary, as tall as Jorja, had once been almost
as shapely as her daughter too; now she was heavy, girdled.  Pete was
shorter than his wife, barrel-chested, a bantam rooster who seemed to
strut when he walked but was one of the most selfeffacing men Jorja had
ever known.  They came burdened with presents for their only grandchild.

They had a present for Jorja-plus the usual gifts they brought every
time they visited: well-meant but annoying criticism, unwanted advice,
guilt.  Mary was hardly through the door before she announced that Jorja
should clean the ventilation hood above the range, and she rummaged
under the sink until she found a spray bottle of Windex and a rag, with
which she performed the chore herself.  She also observed that the tree
looked underdecorated-"It needs more lights, Jorja!"-and when she saw
how Marcie's presents were wrapped, she professed despair.  "My God,
Jorja, the wrapping papers aren't bright enough.  The ribbons aren't big
enough.  Little girls like bright papers with Santa Claus on them and
lots of ribbons."

For his part, her father was content to focus all of his discontent upon
the huge tray of cookies on the kitchen counter. "These are all
store-bought, Jorja.  Didn't you make any homemade cookies this year?"

"Well, Dad, I've been working a little overtime lately, and then
there're the classes I'm taking at UNLV, and-"

"I know it's hard being a single mother, baby," he said, "but we're
talking fundamentals here.  Homemade cookies are one of the best parts
of Christmas.  It's an absolute fundamental."

"Fundamental," Jorja's mother agreed.

The Christmas spirit had been late in coming to Jorja this year, and
even now she had a tenuous grip on it.  Subject to her parents'
well-intentioned but infuriating nonstop commentary on her shortcomings,
she might have lost the holiday mood altogether if Marcie had not put in
a timely appearance at six-thirty, just after Jorja had slipped a
fourteen-pound turkey into the oven for the big meal later in the day.
The girl shuffled into the living room in her pajamas, as cute as any
idealized child in a Norman Rockwell painting.

"Did Santa bring my Little Ms.  Doctor kit?"

Pete said, "He brought you more than that, pumpkin.  Look here!  Just
look at all Santa brought."

Marcie turned and saw the tree-which "Santa" had put up during the
night-and the mountain of gifts.  She gasped.

"Wow!"

The child's excitement was transmitted to Jorja's parents, and for the
time being they forgot about such things as dusty ventilation hoods and
store-bought cookies.  For a while the apartment was filled with joyous,
busy sounds.

But by the time Marcie had opened half her gifts, the celebratory mood
began to change, and in crept a little of the darkness that would
reappear in a far more frightening form later in the day.  In a whiny
voice that was out of character, the girl grumped that Santa had not
remembered the Little Ms.  Doctor kit.  She discarded a much-wanted doll
without even taking it out of its box, moving to the next package in the
hope that it contained Little Ms.  Doctor, clawing at the wrappings.
Something in the child's demeanor, a queerness in her eyes, disquieted
Jorja.  Soon Mary and Pete noticed it as well.  They began urging Marcie
to take more time with each present, to get more pleasure out of each
before rushing on to the next, but their entreaties were not successful.

Jorja had not put the doctor play-kit under the tree; it was hidden in a
closet as a final surprise.  But with only three boxes left, Marcie was
pale and trembling in anticipation of Little Ms.  Doctor.

In God's name, what was so important about it?  Many of the toys already
unwrapped were more expensive and more interesting than the
play-doctor's bag.  Why was her attention so intently and unnaturally
focused on that single item?  Why was she so obsessed with it?

When the last of the gifts beneath the tree and the last of those from
Mary and Pete were opened, Marcie let out a sob of purest misery. "Santa
didn't bring it!  He forgot!  He forgot!"

Considering all the wondrous presents strewn across the room, the girl's
despondency was shocking.  Jorja was disconcerted and displeased by
Marcie's rudeness, and she saw that her own parents were startled,
dismayed, and impatient with this unexpected and unjustified tantrum.

Suddenly afraid that Christmas was collapsing into ruins around her,
Jorja ran to the bedroom closet, plucked the crucial gift from behind
the shoe boxes, and returned to the living room with it.

With frenzied desperation, Marcie snatched the box from her mother.

"What's gotten into the child?" Mary asked.

, 'Yeah," Pete said, "what's so important about this Little Doctor?"

Marcie tore frantically at the wrappings until she saw that the package
contained the item she most desired.  Immediately, she grew calm,
stopped trembling.  "Little Ms.  Doctor. Santa didn't forget!"

"Honey, maybe it's not from Santa," Jorja said.  She was relieved to see
the child she loved emerging from that strange and unpleasant mood. "Not
all your gifts came from Santa. Better look at the tag."

Marcie dutifully searched for the tag, read the few words on it, and
looked up with an uncertain smile.  "It's from .  .  .  Daddy."

Jorja felt her parents' staring at her, but she did not meet their eyes.
They knew that Alan had gone off to Acapulco with his latest bimbo, the
airhead blond named Pepper, and that he had not bothered to leave so
much as a card for Marcie, and they no doubt disapproved of Jorja
letting him off the hook like this.

Later, when Jorja was in the kitchen, squatting in front of the oven,
checking on the turkey, her mother stooped down beside her and said
softly, "Why'd you do it, Jorja?  Why'd you put that louse's name on the
gift she wanted most of all?"

Jorja slid the rack partway out of the oven, bringing the turkey into
the light.  With a ladle, she scooped the drippings from the pan and
basted the roasting bird.  Finally she said, "Marcie shouldn't have her
Christmas ruined just because her father's a jackass."

"You shouldn't protect her from the truth," Mary said quietly.

"The truth's too ugly for a seven-year-old."

"The sooner she knows what a louse her father is, the better.  You know
what your dad heard about this woman Alan's living with?"

"I sure hope this bird's going to be done by noon."

Mary would not drop the subject.  "She's on the call list of two
casinos, Jorja.  That's what Pete heard.  You know what I mean?  She's a
call girl.  Alan's living with a call girl.  What's wrong with him?"

Jorja closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

Mary said, "Well, if he wants nothing to do with Marcie, that's fine.
God knows what diseases he's picked up living with that woman."

Jorja pushed the turkey back into the oven, closed the door, and stood
up.  "Could we not talk about this any more?"

"I thought you'd want to know what the woman is."

"So now I know."

Their voices dropped lower, became more intense: "What if he comes
around some day and says, 'Pepper and I want Marcie to go to Acapulco
with us,' or Disneyland, or maybe just stay at their place for a while?"

Exasperated, Jorja said, "Mother, he doesn't want anything to do with
Marcie because she reminds him of his responsibilities."

"But what if-"

"Mother, damn it!"

Although Jorja had not raised her voice, there was such anger in those
three words that the effect on her mother was immediate.  A hurt look
crossed Mary's face.  Stung, she turned away from Jorja.  She went
quickly to the refrigerator, opened it, and looked over the contents of
the overloaded shelves. "Oh, you made gnocchi."

"Not store-bought," Jorja said shakily.  "Homemade." She meant to be
conciliatory, but she realized that her comment might be misconstrued as
a snide reference to her father's dismay over store-bought cookies.  She
bit her lip, and fought back scathing tears.

Still looking into the refrigerator, a tremor still in her voice, Mary
said, "You're going to have potatoes, too?  And what's this-oh, you've
already grated the cabbage for coleslaw.  I thought you'd need help, but
I guess you've thought of everything." She closed the refrigerator door
and looked for something she could do to occupy her and get them through
this awkward moment.  Tears were visible in her eyes.

Jorja virtually flung herself away from the counter and threw her arms
around her mother.  Mary returned the hug, and for a while they clung to
each other, finding speech both unnecessary and impossible.

Holding fast, Mary said, "I don't know why I'm like this. My mother was
the same with me.  I swore I'd never be like this with you."

"I love you just the way you are."

"Maybe it's because you're my only.  If I'd been able to have a couple
others, I wouldn't be so tough on you."

"It's partly my fault, Mom.  I've been so touchy lately."

"And why shouldn't you be?" her mother said, holding her tight.  "That
louse walks out on you, you're supporting yourself and Marcie, going to
school.  .  .  .  You got every right to be touchy.  We're so proud of
you, Jorja.  It takes such courage to do what you're doing."

In the living room, Marcie began shrieking.

What now?  Jorja wondered.

When she got to the living room archway, she saw her father trying to
persuade Marcie to play with a doll.  "Look here," Pete said, "dolly
cries when you tilt her this way, giggles when you tilt her that way!"

"I don't want to play with the dumb doll"' Marcie pouted. She was
holding the make-believe plastic-and-rubber hypodermic syringe from the
Little Ms.  Doctor kit, and that unsettling intensity and urgency had
taken possession of her again.  "I want to give you another shot."

"But honey," Pete said, "you've already given me twenty shots."

"I've got to practice," Marcie said.  "I'll never grow up to be my own
doctor if I don't start practicing now."

Pete looked at Jorja with exasperation.

Mary said, "What is it with this Little Ms.  Doctor thing'?"

"I wish I knew," Jorja said.

Marcie grimaced -as she pushed the plunger of the fake hypodermic.
Perspiration glistened on her brow.

"I wish I knew," Jorja repeated uneasily.

Boston, Massachusetts.

It was the worst Christmas of Ginger Weiss's life.

Although Jewish, her beloved father had always celebrated Christmas in a
secular spirit, because he liked the harmony and good will that the
holiday promoted, and after his death, Ginger had continued to regard
December 25 as a special day, a time of joy.  Until today, Christmas had
never depressed her.

George and Rita did all they could to make Ginger feel a part of their
celebration, but she was acutely aware that she was an outsider.  The
Hannabys' three sons had brought their families to Baywatch for several
days, and the huge house was filled with the silvery laughter of
children.  Everyone made an effort to include Ginger in all the Hannaby
traditions, from popcorn-stringing to neighborhood caroling.

Christmas morning, she was there to watch the children attack the
mountain of gifts, and following the example of the other adults, she
crawled around on the floor with the kids, helping them assemble and
play with their new toys. For a couple of hours, her despair abated, and
she was assimilated by the Hannaby family in spite of herself.

However, at lunch-rich with holiday delicacies yet essentially a light
meal, just a hint of the extravagant dinner feast to come that
evening-Ginger felt out of place again.  Much conversation involved
reminiscences of previous holidays of which she'd not been a part.

After lunch, she pleaded a headache and escaped to her room.  The
splendid view of the bay calmed her but couldn't arrest her spiral into
depression.  She desperately hoped Pablo Jackson would call tomorrow and
say that he had studied the problem of memory blocks and was ready to
hypnotize her again.

Ginger's visit to Pablo had distressed George and Rita less than she had
expected.  They were upset that she had gone out alone, risking an
amnesic seizure with no friend to help

her, and they made her promise she would allow either Rita or one of the
servants to drive her to and from Pablo's apartment in the future, but
they did not attempt to argue against the unconventional treatment she
had sought from the magician.

The bay view's capacity to calm Ginger was limited.  She turned from the
window, got up, and went to the bed, where she was surprised to find two
books on the nightstand.  One was a fantasy by Tim Powers, an author she
had read before, the other a copy of something called Twilight in
Babylon and she had no idea where they had come from.

There were half a dozen other books in the room, borrowed from the
library downstairs, for during the past few weeks she had had little to
do but read.  But this was the first time she'd seen Powers' book and
Twilight in Babylon.  The former, a tale of time-traveling trolls
fighting their own secret war against British goblins during the
American revolution, looked delightful, the type of exotic story that
her father had enjoyed.  A slip of paper laid loosely in the front
identified it as a review copy.  Rita had a friend who was a reviewer
for the Globe, and who sometimes passed along intriguing books before
they were available in the stores.  Evidently, these had come within the
last day or two, and Rita, aware of Ginger's tastes in fiction, had put
them in her room.

She set the Powers book aside for later delectation, and she took a
closer look at Twilight in Babylon.  She had never heard of the author,
Dominick Corvaisis, but the brief summary of the story was intriguing,
and when she had read the first page, she was hooked.  However, before
continuing, she moved from the bed to one of the comfortable chairs and,
only then, glanced at the author's photograph on the back of the jacket.

Her breath caught in her throat.  Fear filled her.

For a moment she thought the photograph was going to be the kicker that
knocked her into another fugue.  She tried to fling the book aside but
could not, tried to stand up but could not.  She drew deep breaths,
closed her eyes, and waited for her pulse rate to sink toward normal.

When she opened her eyes and looked at the author's photograph again, it
still disturbed her, though not as badly as it had at first.  She knew
that she had seen this man before, had met him somewhere, and not in the
best of circumstances,

though she could not remember where or when.  His brief biography on the
jacket flap informed her that he had lived in Portland, Oregon, and now
resided in Laguna Beach, California.  As she had never been in either of
those places, she could not imagine when their paths might have crossed.

Dominick Corvaisis, about thirty-five, was a striking man who reminded
Ginger of Anthony Perkins when that actor had been younger.  His looks
were compelling enough that she could not imagine having forgotten where
she had met him.

Her instant reaction to the photo was strange, and some might have
dismissed it as a meaningless fillip of an overwrought mind.  But during
the past two months she had learned to respect strange developments and
to look for meaning in them, no matter how meaningless they seemed.

She stared at Corvaisis' photograph, hoping to nudge her memory.
Finally, with an almost clairvoyant sense that Twilight in Babylon would
somehow change her life, she opened it and began to read.

Chicago, Illinois.

From University Hospital, Father Stefan Wycazik drove across town to the
laboratory operated by the Scientific Investigation Division of the
Chicago Police Department.  Though it was Christmas Day, municipal
workers were still cleaning last night's snowfall from the streets.

Only a couple of men were on duty at the police lab, which was located
in an aging government building, and the old rooms had the deserted
feeling of an elaborate Egyptian tomb buried far beneath desert sands.
Footsteps echoed resoundingly back and forth between the tile floors and
the high ceilings.

Ordinarily, the lab did not share its information with anyone from
outside the police and judicial systems.  But half the police officers
in Chicago were Catholics, which meant that Father Wycazik had more than
a few friends on the force. Stefan had importuned some of those friends
to make petitions in his name and to pave the way for him at the SID.

He was greeted by Dr.  Murphy Aimes, a paunchy man with a perfectly bald
head and walrus mustache.  They'd spoken on the telephone earlier,
before Stefan left the rectory

for University Hospital, and now Murphy Aimes was ready for him.  They
settled on two stools at a laboratory bench.  A tall opaque window
loomed in front of them, decorated with dark streaks of pigeon dung.  On
the marble top of the bench, Aimes had laid out a file folder and
several other items.

"I must say, Father, I'd never compromise case information like this if
there were any possibility of a trial arising from the shootout at that
sandwich shop.  But I suppose, as both perpetrators are dead, there's no
one to be put on trial."

"I appreciate that, Dr.  Aimes.  I really do.  And I'm grateful for the
time and energy you've expended on my behalf."

Curiosity ruled Murphy Aimes's face.  He said, "I don't really
understand the reason for your interest in the case."

"I'm not entirely sure of it myself," Stefan said cryptically.

He had not revealed his purpose to the higher authorities who had made
him welcome at the lab, and he did not intend to enlighten Aimes,
either.  For one thing, if he told them what was on his mind, they would
think he was dotty and would be less inclined to cooperate with him.

"Well," Aimes said, miffed at not being taken into Stefan's confidence,
"you asked about the bullets." He opened a manila envelope of the type
that ties shut with a string, and he emptied its contents into his palm:
two gray lumps of lead. "The surgeon removed these from Winton Tolk. You
said you were particularly interested in them."

"certainly am," Stefan said, taking them in his own hand when Aimes
offered them.  "You've weighed these, I suppose. I understand that's
standard procedure.  And they weigh what .38 slugs should?"

"If you mean, did they fragment on impact-they did not. They're so
misshapen they must've impacted bone, so it's surprising they didn't
fragment a little-or a lot-but in fact they're both intact."

"Actually," Father Wycazik said, staring at the slugs in his hand, "I
meant were they underweight for .38s?  Malformed ammunition, factory
mistakes?  Or were they the right size?"

"Oh, the right size.  No doubt of that."

"Big enough to do plenty of damage, terrible damage," Father Wycazik
said thoughtfully.  "The gun?"

From a larger envelope, Aimes produced the revolver with which Winton
Tolk was shot.  "A snubnose Smith and Wesson .38 Chief's Special."

"You've examined it, test-fired it?"

"Yes.  Standard procedure."

"No indication that anything's wrong with it?  Specifically, is the bore
poorly machined or is there some other anomaly that'd result in the
bullet leaving the muzzle at a much slower velocity than it should?"

"That's a peculiar question, Father.  The answer is no.  It's a fine
Chief's Special, up to the usual high standards of Smith and Wesson."

Putting the two expended bullets back into the small envelope from which
he had seen Aimes take them, Father Wycazik said, "What about the
cartridges these bullets came from?  Is there any chance they were
filled with too little powder, that they carried an inadequate charge?"

The SID man blinked.  "I gather one thing you're trying to find out is
why two .38s in the chest didn't do more damage."

Stefan Wycazik nodded but offered no elaboration.  "Were there any
unexpended cartridges in the revolver?"

"A couple.  Plus spare ammunition in one of the gunman's jacket
pockets-another dozen."

"Did you cut open any of the unexpended shells to see if maybe they
carried an inadequate charge?"

"No reason to," Murphy Aimes said.

"Would it be possible for you to check one of them now?"

"Possible.  But why?  Father, what in the world is this all about?"

Stefan sighed.  "I know this is an imposition, Dr.  Aimes, and it
behooves me to repay your kindness with an explanation.  But I can't.
Not yet.  Priests, like physicians and attorneys, must sometimes respect
confidences, keep secrets. But if I'm ever at liberty to reveal what
lies behind my curiosity, you'll be the first to know."

Aimes stared and Stefan met his eyes forthrightly.  Finally the SID man
opened another envelope.  This contained the unexpended cartridges from
the dead gunman's .38 Chiefs Special.  "Wait here."

In twenty minutes, Aimes returned with a white enamel lab tray in which
were two dissected .38 Special cartridges. Using a pencil as a pointer,
he commented on the disassembled elements.  "This is the case head in
which the primer assembly is seated.  The firing pin strikes here.  This
opening on the other side of the case head is the flashhole that leads
from the primer packet to the powder compartment.  There's no problem
with this, no manufacturing errors.  At the other end of the cartridge,
you've got a lead semiwadcutter bullet with a copper gascheck crimped
onto its base to retard bore leading.  The tiny cannelures around the
bullet are packed with grease to ease its passage through the barrel.
Nothing out of order here, either.  And in between the case head and the
bullet is the powder compartment-or it's sometimes calldd the combustion
chamber-out of which I've taken this small pile of gray, flaky material.
This is nitrocellulose, a highly combustible material; it's ignited by
the spark that comes through the flashhole from the primer; it explodes,
ejecting the bullet from the cartridge.  As you can see, there's enough
nitrocellulose to fill the powder chamber.  Just to be sure, I opened
another round." Aimes pointed the pencil at the second disassembled
cartridge.  "There was nothing wrong with this, either.  The gunman was
using well-made, reliable, Remington ammunition.  Officer Tolk was just
a lucky man, Father, a very lucky man."

New York, New York.

Jack Twist spent Christmas in the sanitarium room with Jenny, his wife
of thirteen years.  Being with her on holidays was especially grim.  But
being anywhere else, leaving her alone, would have been grimmer.

Although Jenny had spent almost two-thirds of their marriage in a coma,
the years of lost communion had not diminished Jack's love for her. More
than eight years had passed since she had smiled at him or spoken his
name or been able to return his kisses, but in his heart, at least, time
was stopped, and she was still the beautiful Jenny Mae Alexander, a
freshfaced young bride.

Incarcerated in that Central American prison, he had been sustained by
the knowledge that Jenny waited at home for him, missed him, worried
about him, and prayed each night for his safe return.  Throughout his
ordeal of torture and periodic starvation, he had clung to the hope that
he would one day feel Jenny's arms around him and hear her marvelous
laugh.  That hope had kept him alive and sane.

Of the four captured Rangers, only Jack and his buddy Oscar Weston
survived and came home, though their escape was a near thing.  They had
waited almost a year to be rescued, confident that their country would
not leave them to rot. Sometimes they debated whether they would be
freed by commandos or through diplomatic channels. After eleven months,
they still believed their countrymen would bail them out, but they no
longer dared to wait.  They had lost weight and were dangerously thin,
undernourished.  They had also suffered unknown tropical fevers without
treatment, which had further debilitated them.

Their only opportunity for escape was during one of their regular visits
to the People's Center for Justice.  Every four weeks, Jack and Oscar
had been taken from their cells and driven to the People's Center-a
clean, well-lighted, unwalled, unbarred institution in the heart of the
capital-a model prison meant to impress foreign journalists with the
current regime's humanitarianism.  There, they were given showers,
deloused, put in clean clothes, handcuffed to prevent gesturing, and
seated before videotape cameras to be politely questioned.  Usually,
they answered questions with obscenities or wisecracks.  Their answers
did not matter because the tape was edited, and answers they had never
made were dubbed in by linguists who could speak unaccented English.

Once the propaganda film had been made, they were interviewed over
closed-circuit television by foreign reporters gathered in another room.
The camera never provided closeups of them, and their answers were not
heard by those who asked the questions; instead, once again, unseen
intelligence men, stationed at another microphone outside the camera's
range, answered for them.

At the start of their eleventh month in captivity, Jack and Oscar began
making plans to escape the next time they were transported to that far
less secure, less heavily guarded propaganda facility.

The once-formidable strength of their young bodies had been leached
away, and their only weapons were shivs and needles made of rat bones,
which they had painstakingly shaped and sharpened by rubbing them
against the stone walls of the cells.  Wickedly sharp, those instruments
nevertheless made pathetic weapons; yet Jack and Oscar hoped to triumph
over gun-toting guards.

Surprisingly, they did triumph.  Once- inside the People's Center, they
were remanded into the custody of a single guard who escorted them to
the showers on the second floor.  The guard kept his gun holstered,
probably because the facility was a detention center inside the larger
detention center of the capital city itself.  The guard was certain Jack
and Oscar were demoralized, weak, and unarmed, so he was surprised when
they suddenly turned on him and, with shocking savagery, stabbed him
with the bone shivs they had concealed in their clothes.  Pierced twice
in the throat, his right eye skewered, he succumbed without producing a
scream that might have drawn other police or soldiers.

Before their break was discovered, Jack and Oscar confiscated the dead
guard's handgun and ammunition, then made bold use of the hallways,
risking notice, alarm, and capture. But it was, after all, a minimum
security "reeducation" center, and they were able to make their way to a
stairwell and down to a dimly lighted basement, where they progressed
swiftly and stealthily through a series of musty storage rooms. At the
end of the building, they found the loading docks and a way out.

Seven or eight large boxes had just been off-loaded from a delivery
truck, which was backed up to the nearest of the two big bays, and the
driver was engaged in an argument with another man; both of them were
shaking clipboards at each other.  Those two were the only men in sight,
and as they turned and headed toward a glass-enclosed office, Jack and
Oscar raced silently to the recently unloaded boxes and from there into
the back of the delivery truck, where they made a nest for themselves
behind the as-yet-undelivered packages. In a few minutes the driver
returned, cursing, slammed the truck's cargo-bay door, and drove away
into the city before the alarm sounded.

Ten minutes and many blocks from the People's Center, the truck stopped.
The driver unbolted the rear doors, took out a single package without
realizing Jack and Oscar were inches from him behind a wall of boxes,
and went into the building before which he'd parked.  Extricating
themselves from their burrow, Jack and Oscar fled.

Within a few blocks they found themselves in a district of muddy streets
and dilapidated shanties, where the povertystricken residents were no
fonder of the new tyrants than they had been of the old and were willing
to hide two Yankees on the lam. After nightfall, supplied with what
little food the slum-dwellers could spare, they departed.  for the
outskirts. When they came to open farmland, they broke into a barn and
stole a sharp sickle, several withered apples, a leather blacksmith's
apron and some burlap bags which could be used to fashion makeshift
shoes when their shabby prison-issue eventually fell apart-and a horse.
Before dawn, they had reached the edge of the true jungle, where they
abandoned the horse and set out on foot once more.

Weak, poorly provisioned, armed only with the sickleand the gun they had
taken off the guard-without a compass and therefore required to plot a
course by the sun and the stars, they headed north through the tropical
forests toward the border, eighty miles away.  Throughout that nightmare
journey, Jack had one vital aid to survival: Jenny.  He thought of her,
dreamed of her, longed for her, and seven days later, when he and Oscar
reached friendly territory, Jack knew that he had made it as much
because of Jenny as because of his Ranger training.

At that point he thought the worst was behind him.  He was wrong.

Now, sitting beside his wife's bed, with Christmas music on the tape
deck, Jack Twist was suddenly overcome with grief.  Christmas was a bad
time because he could not help but remember how dreams of her had
sustained him through his Christmas in prison-when in fact she had
already been in a coma and lost to him.

Happy holidays.

Chicago, Illinois.

As Father Stefan Wycazik moved through the halls and wards of St.
Joseph's Hospital for Children, his spirits soared. That was no small
thing, for he was already in a buoyant and elevated state.

The hospital was crowded with visitors, and Christmas music issued from
the public address system.  Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters,
grandparents, other relatives, and friends of the young patients were on
hand with gifts, goodies, and good wishes, and there was more laughter
in that usually grim place than one might ordinarily hear echoing
through its chambers in an entire month.  Even most of the seriously
afflicted patients were smiling broadly and talking animatedly, their
suffering forgotten for the time being.

Nowhere in the hospital was there more hope or laughter than among those
people gathered around the bed of tenyear-old Emmeline Halbourg.  When
Father Wycazik introduced himself, he was greeted warmly by Emmy
Halbourg's parents, two sisters, grandparents, one aunt, and one uncle,
who assumed he was one of the hospital's chaplains.

Because of what he'd learned from Brendan Cronin yesterday, Stefan
expected to find a happily mending little girl; but he was unprepared
for Emmy's condition.  She was positively glowing.  Only two weeks ago,
according to Brendan, she had been crippled and dying.  But now her dark
eyes were clear, and her former pallor was gone, replaced by a wholesome
flush.  Her knuckles and wrists were not swollen, and she seemed to be
completely free of pain.  She looked not like a sick child valiantly
fighting her way back to health; rather, she seemed already cured.

Most startling of all, Emmy was not lying in bed but standing with the
aid of crutches, moving among her delighted and admiring relatives.  Her
wheelchair was gone.

"Well," Stefan said, after a brief visit, "I must be going, Emmy.  I
only stopped by to wish you a merry Christmas from a friend of yours.
Brendan Cronin."

"Pudge!" she said happily.  "He's wonderful, isn't he?  It was awful
when he stopped working here.  We miss him a lot."

Emmy's mother said, "I never met this Pudge, but from the way the kids
talked about him, he must've been good

medicine for them."

"He only worked here one week," Emmy said.  "But he comes back-did you
know?  Every few days he comes back to visit.  I was hoping he'd come
today, so I could give him a big Christmas kiss."

"He wanted to stop by, but he's spending Christmas with his folks."

"Oh, that's good!  That's what Christmas is for-isn't it, Gather?  Being
together with your folks, having fun, and loving each other."

"Yes, Emmy," Stefan Wycazik said, thinking that no theologian or
philosopher could have put it better.  "That's what Christmas is for."

If Stefan had been alone with the girl, he would have asked her about
the afternoon of December 11.  That was the day Brendan had been
brushing her hair while she sat in her wheelchair before this very
window.  Stefan wanted to know about the rings on Brendan's hands, which
had appeared for the first time that day, and which Emmeline had noticed
before Brendan himself spotted them.  He wanted to ask Emmy if she had
felt anything unusual when Brendan had touched her.  But there were too
many adults around, and they would surely ask awkward questions.  Stefan
was not yet prepared to reveal the reasons for his curiosity.

Las Vegas, Nevada.

After getting off to a rocky start, Christmas at the Monatelia apartment
improved dramatically.  Mary and Pete stopped hammering Jorja with their
well-meant but unwanted advice and criticism.  They loosened up and
involved themselves in Marcie's play the way grandparents should, and
Jorja was reminded of just why she loved them so much.  The holiday
dinner was on the table at twelve-fifty, only twenty minutes late, and
it was delicious.  By the time Marcie sat down to eat, she had worked
off her all-consuming interest in Little Ms.  Doctor, and she did not
rush through her meal.  It was a leisurely dinner with much chit-chat
and laughter, the Christmas tree twinkling in the background.  Those
were golden hours until, during dessert, the trouble started with
surprising suddenness.  With frightening speed, it escalated to total
disaster.

Teasing Marcie, Pete said, "Where does a little bitty thing like you put
so much food?  You've eaten more than the rest of us combined!"

"Oh, Grandpa."

"It's true!  You've been really shoveling it in.  One more bite of that
pumpkin pie, and you're going to explode."

Marcie lifted another forkful, held it up for all to see, and with great
theatricality, she moved it toward her mouth.

"No, don't!" Pete said, putting his hands in front of his face as if to
protect himself from the blast.

Marcie popped the morsel into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed.  "See? I
didn't explode."

"You will with the next bite," Pete said.  "I was just one bite too
soon.  You'll explode .  .  .  or else we'll have to rush you to the
hospital."

Marcie frowned.  "No hospital."

"Oh, yes," Pete said.  "You'll be all swollen up, ready to bUTSt, and
we'll have to rush you to the hospital and have them deflate you."

"No hospital," Marcie repeated adamantly.

Jorja realized that her daughter's voice had changed, that the girl was
no longer participating in the game but was, instead, genuinely if
inexplicably frightened.  She was not scared of exploding, of course,
but evidently the mere thought of a hospital had caused her to go pale.

"No hospital," Marcie repeated, a haunted look in her eyes.

"Oh, yes," Pete said, not yet aware of the change in the child.

Jorja tried to deflect him: "Dad, I think we-"

But Pete said, "Of course, they won't take you in an ambulance 'cause
you'll be too big.  We'll have to rent a truck to haul you."

The girl shook her head violently.  "I won't go to a h-h-hospital in a
million years.  I won't ever let those doctors touch me .

"Honey," Jorja said, "Grandpa's only teasing.  He doesn't really-"

Unplacated, the girl said, "Those hospital people will hhurt me like
they hurt me before.  I won't let them hurt me again."

Mary looked at Jorja, baffled.  "When was she in the hospital?"

"She wasn't," Jorja said.  "I don't know why she-"

"I was, I was, I was!  They t-tied me down in bed, stuck me full of
rmeedles, and I was scared, and I won't ever let them touch me again."

Remembering the strange tantrum that Kara Persaghian had reported
yesterday, Jorja moved swiftly to forestall a similar scene.  She put
one hand on Marcie's shoulder and said, "Honey, you were never-"

"I was!" The girl's anger and fear burgeoned into rage and terror.  She
threw her fork, and Pete ducked to avoid being hit by it.

"Marcie!" Jorja cried.

The girl slipped off her chair and backed away from the table,
white-faced.  "I'm going to grow up and be my own doctor, so nobody
else'll stick rmeedles in me." Words gave way to a pitiful moaning.

Jorja went after Marcie, reaching for her.  "Honey, don't."

Marcie held her hands out in front of her, as if warding off an attack,
although it was not her mother that she feared. She was looking through
Jorja, perhaps seeing some imaginary threat, though her terror was real.
She was not merely pale but translucent, as if the very substance of her
was evaporating in the tremendous heat of her terror.

"Marcie, what is it?"

The girl stumbled backward into a corner, shuddering.

Jorja gripped her daughter's defensively raised hands. "Marcie, talk to
me." But even as Jorja spoke, a sudden stench of urine filled the air,
and she saw a dark stain spreading from the crotch down both legs of
Marcie's jeans.  "Marcie!"

The girl was trying to scream, but could not. "What's happening?" Mary
asked.  "What's wrong?"

"I don't know," Jorja said.  "God help me, I don't know."

With her eyes still focused on some figure or object that remained
visible only to her, Marcie began a wordless keening.

New York, New York.

The tape deck still played Christmas music, and Jenny Twist lay immobile
and insensate, but Jack no longer engaged in the frustrating one-way
communication with which he had filled the first few hours of his visit.
Now he sat in silence, and inevitably his thoughts drifted back through
the years to his homecoming from Central America.  .  .  .

Upon returning to the States, he had discovered that the rescue of the
prisoners at the Institute of Brotherhood had been misrepresented, in
some quarters, as a terrorist act, a mass kidnapping, a provocation
meant to spark a war.  He and every Ranger involved were painted as
criminals in uniform, and those taken prisoner were for some reason the
special focus of the opposition's anger.

In a political panic, Congress had banned all covert activities in
Central America, including a pending plan to rescue the four Rangers.
Their release was to be arranged strictly through diplomatic channels.

That was why they had waited in vain for rescue.  Their country had
abandoned them.  At first Jack had trouble believing it.  When at last
he believed, it was the second worst shock of his life.

Having won his freedom, home again, Jack was relentlessly pursued by
hostile journalists and subpoenaed to appear before a Congressional
committee to testify about his involvement in the raid.  He expected to
have a chance to set the record straight, but he quickly discovered that
they weren't interested in his viewpoint, and that the televised hearing
was merely an opportunity for politicians to do some grandstanding in
the infamous tradition of Joe McCarthy.

In a few months, most people had forgotten him, and when he regained the
pounds he had lost in prison, they ceased to recognize him as the
alleged war criminal they had seen on television.  But the pain and the
sense of betrayal continued to burn fiercely in him.

If being abandoned by his country was the second worst shock of his
life, the worst was what had happened to Jenny while he had been stuck
in that Central American prison.  A thug had accosted her in the hallway
of her own apartment building as she was coming home from work.  He put
a gun to her head, hustled her into her apartment, sodomized and raped
her, clubbed her brutally with his pistol, and left her for dead.

When Jack came home at last, he found Jenny in a state institution,
comatose.  The level of care she had been getting was abominable.

Norman Hazzurt, the rapist who attacked Jenny, had been tracked down
through fingerprints and witnesses, but a clever defense attorney had
managed to delay the trial.  Undertaking an investigation of his own,
Jack satisfied himself that Hazzurt, with a history of violent sex
offenses, was the guilty man.  He also became convinced that Hazzurt
would be acquitted on a technicality.

Throughout his ordeal with the press and politicians, Jack made plans
for the future.  There were two primary tasks ahead of him: First, he
would kill Norman Hazzurt in such a way as to avoid any suspicion
falling upon himself; second, he would get enough money to move Jenny to
a private sanitarium, though the only way to obtain so much cash in a
hurry was to steal it.  As an elite Ranger, he was trained in most
weapons, explosives, martial arts, and survival techniques.  His society
had failed him, but it had also provided him with the knowledge and the
means by which he could extract his revenge, and it had taught him how
to break whatever laws stood in his way without punishment.

Norman Hazzurt died in an "accidental" gas explosion two months after
Jack returned to the States.  And two weeks later, Jenny's transference
to a private sanitarium was financed by the proceeds from an ingenious
bank robbery executed with military precision.

The murder of Hazzurt did not satisfy Jack.  In fact, it depressed him.
Killing in a war was different from killing in civilian life.  He did
not have the detachment to kill except in self-defense.

Robbery, however, was enormously appealing.  After the successful bank
job, he'd been excited, exalted, exhilarated. Daring robbery had a
medicinal quality.  Crime gave him a reason to live.  Until recently.

Now, sitting at Jenny's bedside, Jack Twist wondered what would keep him
going, day after day, if not grand larceny. The only other thing he had
was Jenny.  However, he no longer needed to provide for her; he had
already piled up more than enough money for that.  So his only reason
for living was to come here several times a week, look upon her serene
face, hold her hand-and pray for a miracle.

It was ironic that a man like him-a hard-headed, selfreliant
individualist-should have no hope but mysticism.

As he brooded on that, he heard Jenny make a soft gurgling sound.  She
took two quick, deep breaths and produced a long, rattling sigh.  For
one crazy moment as he rose from his chair, Jack half-expected to find
her eyes open, filled with awareness for the first time in more than
eight years, the miracle having come to pass even as he had been
day-dreaming of it.  But her eyes were closed, and her face was slack.
He put a hand against her face, then moved it to her throat. He felt for
her pulse.  What had happened was not, in fact, miraculous but
anti-miraculous, mundane, and inevitable: Jenny Twist had died.

Chicago, Illinois.

Few physicians were on duty at St.  Joseph's that Christmas, but a
resident named Jarvil and an intern named Klinet were eager to talk to
Father Wycazik about Emmeline Halbourg's amazing recovery.

Klinet, an intense wiry-haired young man, escorted Stefan to a
consultation room to review Emmy's file and X rays. "Five weeks ago, she
was started on namiloxiprine-a new drug, just approved by the FDA."

Dr.  Jarvil, the resident, was soft-spoken, with heavy-lidded eyes, but
when he joined them in the consultation room, he too was visibly excited
by Emmeline Halbourg's dramatic turn for the better.

"Namiloxiprine has several effects in bone diseases like Emmy's," Jarvil
said.  "In many instances it puts a stop to the destruction of the
periosteunl, promotes the growth of healthy osteocytes, and somewhat
induces the accumulation of intercellular calcium.  And in a case like
Emmy's, where the bone marrow is the primary target of the disease,
namiloxiprine creates an unusual chemical environment in the marrow
cavity and in the haversian canals, an environment that's extremely
hostile to microorganisms but actually encourages the growth of marrow
cells, the production of blood cells, and hemoglobin formation."

"But it's not supposed to work this fast," Klinet said.

"And it's basically a stop-loss drug," Jarvil said.  "It can arrest the
progress of a disease, put a stop to bone deterioration.  But it doesn't
make regeneration possible.  Sure, it's supposed to promote some
reconstruction, but not the kind of rebuilding we're seeing in Emmy."

"Fast rebuilding," Klinet said, smacking his forehead with the heel of
his hand, as if to knock this amazing fact into his unwilling brain.

They showed Stefan a series of X rays taken over the past six weeks, in
which the changes in Emmy's bones and joints were obvious.

Klinet said, "She'd been on namiloxiprine for three weeks without
noticeable effect, and then suddenly, two weeks ago, her body not only
went into a state of remission but began rebuilding damaged tissues."

The timing of the girl's turnaround coincided perfectly with the first
appearance of the strange rings on Brendan Cronin's hands.  However,
Stefan Wycazik made no mention of that coincidence.

Jarvil produced more X rays and tests that showed a remarkable
improvement in the child's haversian canals, the elaborate network that
carried small blood vessels and lymphatics throughout the bone for the
purpose of maintenance and repair.  Many of these had been clogged with
a plaquelike substance that pinched off the vessels passing through
them. In the past two weeks, however, the plaque almost disappeared,
allowing the full circulation required for healing and regeneration.

"No one even knew that namiloxiprine could clean out the canals this
way," Jarvil said.  "No record of it.  Oh, yes, minor unclogging, but
only as a consequence of getting the disease itself under control.
Nothing like this.  Amazing."

"If regeneration continues at this rate," Klinet said, "Emmy could be a
normal, healthy girl in three months.  Really phenomenal."

Jarvil said, "She could be well again."

They grinned at Father Wycazik, and he did not have the heart to suggest
that neither their hard work nor the wonder drug was responsible for
Emmeline Halbourg's cure.  They were euphoric, so Stefan kept to himself
the possibility that Emmy's cure had been effected by some power far
more mysterious than modern medicine.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Christmas Day with Lucy, Frank, and the grandchildren was fun and
therapeutic for Ernie and Faye Block.  By the time they went out for a
walk (just the two of them) toward the end of the afternoon, they were
feeling better than they had in months.

The weather was perfect for walking: cold, crisp, but without wind.  The
most recent snowfall was four days old, so the sidewalks were clear.  As
twilight approached, the air shimmered with a purple radiance.

Bundled in heavy coats and scarves, Faye and Ernie strolled arm in arm,
talking animatedly about the day's events, enjoying the Christmas
displays that Lucy's and Frank's neighbors had erected on their front
lawns.  The years slipped away, and Faye felt as if she and Ernie were
still newlyweds, young and full of dreams.

From the moment they had arrived in Milwaukee on December 15, ten days
ago, Faye had reason to hope that everything was going to work out all
right.  Ernie had seemed bettera new bounciness in his step, more
genuine good humor in his smile.  Evidently, just basking in the love of
his daughter, son-in-law, and grandchildren was sufficient to burn away
some of the crippling fear that had become the central fact of his life.

The therapy sessions with Dr.  Fontelaine, six so far, had also been
remarkably beneficial.  Ernie was still afraid of the dark but far less
terrified than when they left Nevada.  Phobias, according to the doctor,
were easy to treat compared to many other psychiatric disorders.  In
recent years therapists had discovered that, in most cases, the symptoms
were the disease rather than merely shadows cast by unresolved conflicts
in the patient's subconscious.  It was no longer considered necessary-or
even possible or desirable-to seek the psychological causes of the
condition in order to treat it.  Long courses of therapy had been
abandoned in favor of teaching the patient desensitization techniques
that could eradicate the symptoms in months or even weeks.

Approximately a third of all phobics could not be helped by these
methods and, instead, required long-term treatment and even
panic-blocking drugs like alprazolam.  But Ernie had improved at a pace
that even Dr.  Fontelaine, an optimist by nature, found astonishing.

Faye had been reading extensively about phobias and had discovered she
could help Ernie by digging up amusing, curious facts that allowed him
to view his condition from a different-less fearsome-perspective.  He
was especially fond of hearing about bizarre phobias that made his
terror of the dark seem reasonable by comparison.  For example, knowing
there were pteronophobics out there, people who lived in constant and
unreasonable fear of feathers, made his abhorrence of nightfall seem not
only bearable but almost ordinary and logical, as well.  Ichthyophobes
were horrified by the prospect of encountering a fish, and pediophobes
ran screaming at the sight of a doll.  And Ernie's nyctophobia was
certainly preferable to coitophobia (the fear of sexual intercourse),
and not a fraction as debilitating as autophobia (the fear of oneself).

Now, walking through the twilight, Faye tried to keep Ernie's mind off
the descending darkness by telling him about the late author, John
Cheever, winner of the National Book Award, who'd been gephyrophobic.
Cheever had suffered from a crippling fear of crossing high bridges.

Ernie listened with fascination, but he was no less aware of the onset
of nightfall.  As the shadows lengthened across the snow, his hand
steadily tightened on her arm until it would have been painful if she
had not been wearing a thick sweater and heavy coat.

By the time they had gone seven blocks, they were too far from the house
to have any hope of returning to it before full darkness settled on the
land.  Two-thirds of the sky was black already, and the other third was
deep purple.  The shadows had spread like spilt ink.

The streetlamps had come on.  Faye halted Ernie in a cone of light,
giving him a brief reprieve.  His eyes had a wild look, and his steaming
exhalations rushed from him at a rate that indicated incipient panic.

"Remember to control your breathing," Faye said.

He nodded and began at once to take deeper, slower breaths.

When all the light in the sky had been extinguished, she said, "Ready to
go back?"

"Ready," he said hollowly.

They stepped out of the glow of the streetlamp, into darkness, heading
back toward the house, and Ernie hissed between clenched teeth.

What they were engaged upon, for the third time, was a dramatic
therapeutic technique called "flooding," in which the phobic was
encouraged to confront the thing he feared and to endure it long enough
to break its hold on him.  Flooding is based on the fact that panic
attacks are self-limiting. The human body cannot sustain a very high
level of panic indefinitely, cannot produce endless adrenaline, so the
mind must adapt to, and make peace-or at least a truce-with what it
fears.  Unmodified flooding can be a cruel, barbaric method of cracking
a phobia, for it puts the patient at risk of a breakdown.  Dr.
Fontelaine preferred a modified version of the technique involving three
stages of confrontation with the source of fear.

The first stage, in Ernie's case, was to put himself in darkness for
fifteen minutes, but with Faye at his side for support and with lighted
areas easily accessible.  Now, each time they arrived at the lighted
sidewalk beneath a streetlamp, they paused to let him gather his
courage, then went on into the next patch of darkness.

The second stage, which they would try in another week or two, after
more sessions with the doctor, would involve driving to a place where
there were no streetlamps, no easily reached lighted areas.  There, they
would walk together arm in arm across an unrelieved vista of darkness
until Ernie could tolerate no more, at which time Faye would switch on a
flashlight and give him a moment's respite.

In the third stage of treatment, Ernie would go for a stroll alone in a
completely dark area.  After a few outings like that, he would almost
certainly be cured.

But he was not cured yet, and by the time they covered six blocks of the
seven-block return journey to the house, Ernie was breathing like a
well-run racehorse, and he bolted for the safety of the light inside.
Not bad, though-six blocks. Better than before.  At this rate, he would
be cured in no time.

As Faye followed him into the house, where Lucy was already helping him
out of his coat, she tried to feel good about his progress to date.  If
this pace held, he would complete the third and final stage weeks-maybe
even a couple of months-ahead of schedule.  That was what worried Faye.
His rapid improvement was amazing; it seemed too rapid and too amazing
to be real.  She wanted to believe the nightmare would be put behind
them quickly, but the pace of his recuperation made her wonder if it was
lasting.  Striving always to think positive, Faye Block was nevertheless
plagued by the instinctive and unnerving feeling that something was
wrong. Very wrong.

Boston, Massachusetts.

Inevitably, given his exotic background as a godson of Picasso and a
once-famous European stage performer, Pablo Jackson was a star in Boston
social circles.  Furthermore, during World War II, he had been a liaison
between British Intelligence and the French Resistance forces, and his
recent work as a hypnotist with police agencies had only added to his
mystique.  He never lacked invitations.

On the evening of Christmas Day, Pablo attended a blacktie dinner party
for twenty-two at the home of Mr.  and Mrs. Ira Hergensheimer in
Brookline.  The house was a splendid brick Georgian Colonial, as elegant
and warmly welcoming as the Hergensheimers themselves, who had made
their money in real estate during the 1950s.  A bartender was on duty in
the library, and white-jacketed waiters circulated through the enormous
drawing room with champagne and canapes, and in the foyer a string
quartet played just loudly enough to provide pleasant background music.

Among that engaging company, the man of most interest to Pablo was
Alexander Christophson, former Ambassador to the Court of St.  James's,
one-term United States Senator from Massachusetts, later Director of the
Central Intelligence Agency, now retired almost a decade, whom Pablo had
known half a century.  Now seventy-six, Christophson was the second
eldest guest, but old age had been nearly as kind to him as to Pablo. He
was tall, distinguished, with remarkably few lines in his classic
Bostonian face.  His mind was as sharp as ever.  The true length of his
journey on the earth was betrayed only by a mild trace of Parkinson's
disease which, in spite of medication, left him with a tremor in his
right hand.

Half an hour before dinner, Pablo eased Alex away from the other guests
and led him to Ira Hergensheimer's oakpaneled study, adjacent to the
library, for a private conversation.  The old magician closed the door
behind them, and they carried their glasses of champagne to a pair of
leather wingback chairs by the window.  "Alex, I need your advice."

"Well, as you know," Alex said, "men our age find it especially
satisfying to give advice.  It compensates for no longer being able to
set a bad example ourselves.  But I can't imagine what advice I could
give on any problem that you wouldn't already have thought of yourself."

"Yesterday," Pablo said, "a young woman came to see me. She's an
exceedingly lovely, charming, and intelligent woman who's accustomed to
solving her own problems, but now she's bumped up against something very
strange.  She desperately needs help."

Alex raised his eyebrows.  "Beautiful young women still come to you for
help at eighty-one?  I am impressed, humbled, and envious, Pablo."

"This is not a coup defoudre, you filthy-minded old lizard. Passion
isn't involved." Without mentioning Ginger Weiss's name or occupation,
Pablo discussed her problem-the bizarre and inexplicable fugues-and
recounted the session of hypnotic regression that had ended with her
frightening withdrawal.  "She actually seemed about to retreat into a
deep self-induced coma, perhaps even into death, to avoid my questions.
Naturally, I refused to put her in a trance again and risk another
withdrawal of that severity.  But I promised to do some research to see
if any similar case was on record. I found myself poring through books
most of last evening and this morning, searching for references to
memory blocks with self-destruction built into them.  At last I found it
...  in one of your books.  Of course, you were writing about an imposed
psychological condition as a result of brainwashing, and this woman's
block is of her own creation; but the similarity is there."

Drawing on his experiences in the intelligence services during World War
II and the subsequent cold war, Alex Christophson had written several
books, including two that dealt with brainwashing.  In one, Alex had
described a technique he called the Azrael Block (naming it for one of
the angels of death) that seemed uncannily like the barrier that
surrounded Ginger Weiss's memory of some traumatic event in her past.

As distant string music came to them muffled by the closed study door,
Alex put down his champagne glass because his hands trembled too
violently.  He said, "I don't suppose you'd drop this matter and forget
all about it?  Because I'm telling you that's the wisest course."

"Well," Pablo said, a bit surprised by the ominous tone of his friend's
voice, "I've promised her I'll try to help."

"I've been retired eight years, and my instincts aren't what they once
were.  But I have a very bad feeling about this. Drop it, Pablo.  Don't
see her again.  Don't try to help her any more."

"But, Alex, I've promised her."

"I was afraid that'd be your position." Alex folded his tremulous hands.
"Okay.  The Azrael Block ...  It's not something that Western
intelligence services use often, but

the Soviets find it invaluable.  For example, let's imagine a topnotch
Russian agent named Ivan, an operative with thirty years' service in the
KGB.  In Ivan's memory there'll be an incredible amount of highly
sensitive information that, were it to fall into Western hands, would
devastate Russian espionage networks.  Ivan's superiors constantly worry
that, on some foreign assignment, he'll be identified and interrogated."

"As I understand it, with current drugs and hypnotic techniques, no one
can withhold information from a determined interrogator."

"Exactly.  No matter how tough he is, Ivan will spill all he knows
without being tortured.  For that reason, his superiors would prefer to
send younger agents who, if caught, would have less valuable information
to reveal.  But many situations require a seasoned man like Ivan, so the
possibility of all his knowledge falling into enemy hands is a nightmare
with which his superiors must live, whether they like it or not."

"The risk of doing business."

"Exactly.  However, let's imagine that, among all the sensitive
knowledge in his head, Ivan knows two or three things that're especially
sensitive, so explosive that their revelation could destroy his country.
These particular memories, less than one percent of his knowledge about
KGB operations, could be suppressed without affecting his performance in
the field.  We're talking here about the suppression of a very tiny
portion of his memories.  Then, if he fell into enemy hands, he'd still
give up a great deal of valuable stuff during interrogation-but at least
he would not be able to reveal those few most crucial memories."

"And this is where the Azrael Block comes in," Pablo said. "Ivan's own
people use drugs and hypnosis to seal off certain parts of his past
before sending him overseas on his next assignment."

Alex nodded.  "For example .  .  .  say that years ago Ivan was one of
the agents involved in the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II.
With a memory block in place, his awareness of that involvement could be
locked in his subconscious, beyond the reach of potential interrogators,
without affecting his work on new assignments.  But not just any block
will do.  If Ivan's interrogators discover a standard memory block,
they'll work diligently to unlock it, because they'll know that what
lies behind it is of enormous importance.  So the barrier must be one
that cannot be tampered with.  The Azrael Block is perfect. When the
subject is questioned about the forbidden topic, he's programmed to
retreat into a deep coma where he cannot hear the inquisitioner's
voice-and even into death.  In fact, it should more accurately be called
the Azrael Trigger.  because if the interrogator probes into the blocked
memories, he pulls that trigger, shooting Ivan into a coma, and if he
continues to pull the trigger he may eventually kill the subject."

Fascinated, Pablo said, "But isn't the survival instinct strong enough
to overcome the block?  When it comes to the point that Ivan must either
remember and reveal what he has forgotten or die .  .  .  well, surely
the repressed memory would surface."

"No." Even in the warm amber light of the floorlamp beside his chair,
Alex's face appeared to have gone gray.  "Not with the drugs and
hypnotic techniques we have these days. Mind control is a frighteningly
advanced science.  The survival instinct is the strongest we've got, but
even that can be overridden.  Ivan can be programmed to self-destruct."

Pablo found his champagne glass empty.  "My young ladyfriend seems to
have invented a sort of Azrael Block of her own to hide from herself
some extraordinarily distressing event

in her past."

"No," Alex said, "she didn't form the block herself."

"She must have.  She's in a bad state, Alex.  She just ...  slips away
when I try to question her.  So, as you know this field, I thought you
might have a few ideas about how I can deal with it."

"You still don't understand why I warned you to drop this whole thing,"
Alex said.  He pushed up from his chair, moved to the nearby window,
shoved his trembling hands in his pockets, and stared out at the
snow-covered lawn.  "A selfimposed, naturally generated Azrael Block?
Such a thing isn't possible.  The human mind will not, of its own
volition, put itself at risk of death merely to conceal something from
itself. An Azrael Block is always an externally applied control.  If
you've encountered such a barrier, then someone planted it in her mind."

"You're saying she's been brainwashed?  Ridiculous.  She's no spy."

"I'm sure she's not."

"She's no Russian.  So why would she've been brainwashed?  Ordinary
citizens don't become targets for that sort of thing."

Alex turned from the window and faced Pablo.  "This is just an educated
guess .  .  .  but perhaps she accidentally saw something she was not
supposed to see.  Something extremely important, secret.  Subsequently,
she was subjected to a sophisticated process of memory repression, to
make sure she never told anyone about it."

Pablo stared at him, astonished.  "But what could she possibly have seen
to've made such extreme measures necessary?"

Alex shrugged.

"And who could've tampered with her mind?"

Alex said, "The Russians, the CIA, the Israeli Mossad, Britain's MI6-any
organization with the knowledge of how such things are done." ..

"I don't think she's traveled outside the U S., which leaves the CIA."

"Not necessarily.  All the others operate in this country for their own
purposes.  Besides, intelligence organizations are not the only groups
whore familiar with mind-control techniques.  So are some crackpot
religious cults, fanatical political fringe groups .  .  .  others.
Knowledge spreads fast, and evil knowledge spreads faster.  If people
like that want her to forget something, you sure don't want to help her
remember. It wouldn't be healthy for either you or her, Pablo."

"I can't believe-"

"Believe," Alex said somberly.

"But these fugues, these sudden fears of black gloves and helmets .  . .
these would seem to indicate that her memory block is cracking.  Yet the
people you've mentioned wouldn't have done a half-baked job, would they?
If they'd implanted a block, it would be perfect."

Alex returned to his chair, sat, leaned forward, fixing Pablo with an
intense gaze, obviously striving to impress him with the gravity of the
situation.  "That's what worries me most, old friend.  Ordinarily, such
a firmly implanted mental barrier would never weaken on its own.  The
people capable of doing this to your lady-friend are absolutely expert
at it.  They wouldn't screw up.  So her recent problems, her
deteriorating psychological condition, can mean only one thing."

"Yes?"

"The forbidden memories, the secrets buried behind this Azrael Block,
are apparently so explosive, so frightening, so traumatic, that not even
an expertly engineered barrier can contain them.  Buried in this woman
is a shocking memory of immense power, and it's straining to break out
of its prison in her subconscious, into her conscious mind.  These
objects that trigger her blackouts-the gloves, the sink drain-are very
likely elements of those repressed memories.  When she fixates on one of
these things, she's close to a breakthrough, trembling on the edge of
remembrance.  Then her program kicks in, and she blacks out."

Pablo's heart quickened with excitement.  "Then, after all, it might be
possible to use hypnotic regression to probe at this Azrael Block, widen
the cracks already in it, without driving her into a coma.  One would
have to be extremely cautious, of course, but with-"

"You're not listening to me!" Alex said, bolting up again. He stood
between their chairs, looming over Pablo, pointing one trembling finger
at him.  "This is incredibly dangerous. You've stumbled into something
much too big for you to handle.  If you help her to remember, you're
going to make powerful enemies somewhere."

"She's a sweet girl, and her life is in ruins because of this."

"You can't help her.  You're too old, and you're just one man."

"Listen, maybe you don't understand enough of the situation.  I haven't
told you her name or profession, but I'll tell you now that-"

"I don't want to know who she is!" Alex said, his eyes widening.

"She's a physician," Pablo persisted.  "Or almost.  She's spent the past
fourteen years training herself for medical practice, and now she's
losing everything.  It's tragic."

"Think about this, damn it: she's almost certain to discover that
knowing the truth is even worse than not knowing.  If the repressed
memories are breaking through like this, then they must be so traumatic
that they could destroy her psychologically."

"Maybe," Pablo acknowledged.  "But shouldn't she be the one to decide
whether or not to keep digging for the truth?"

Alex was adamant.  "If the memory itself doesn't destroy her, then
she'll probably be killed by whoever implanted the block.  I'm surprised
they didn't kill her straightaway.  If it is an intelligence agency
behind this, ours or theirs, then you've got to remember that to them
civilians are entirely expendable.  She got a rare and amazing reprieve
when they used brainwashing instead of a bullet.  A bullet's quicker and
cheaper. They won't give her a second reprieve.  If they discover that
the Azrael Block has crumbled, if they learn that she's uncovered the
secret they've hidden from her, they'll blow her brains out."

"You can't be sure," Pablo said.  "Besides, she's a real gogetter, Alex,
an achiever, a mover and shaker.  So from her point of view, her current
situation is almost as bad as having her brains blown out."

Making no effort to conceal his frustration with the old magician, Alex
said, "You help her, and they'll blow your brains out as well.  Doesn't
that give you pause?"

"At eighty-one," Pablo said, "not much of interest happens.  You can't
afford to turn your back on that rare bit of excitement when it comes
along.  Vogue la galsreel must chance it."

"You're making a mistake."

"Maybe I am, my friend.  Maybe.  But .  .  .  then why do I feel so
good?"

Chicago, Illinois.

Dr.  Bennet Sonneford, who had operated on Winton Tolk yesterday
subsequent to the shooting at the sandwich shop, ushered Father Wycazik
into a spacious den, where the walls were covered with mounted fish:
marlin, an immense albacore, bass, trout.  More than thirty glass eyes
stared sightlessly down upon the two men.  A trophy case was filled with
silver and gold cups, bowls, medallions.  The doctor sat at a pine desk
in the shadow of a forever-swimming, open-mouthed marlin of startling
proportions, and Stefan sat beside the desk in a comfortable chair.

Although the hospital had provided only Dr.  Sonneford's office number,
Father Wycazik had been able to track down the surgeon's home address
with the aid of friends at the telephone company and police department.
He had arrived at Sonneford's doorstep at seven-thirty Christmas night,
effusively apologetic about interrupting holiday celebrations.

Now, Stefan said, "Brendan works with me at St.  Bernadette's, and I
think very highly of him, so I don't want to see him in trouble."

Sonneford, who looked a bit like a fish-pale, slightly protuberant eyes,
a naturally puckered mouth-said, "Trouble?" He opened a kit of small
tools, choosing a miniature screwdriver, and turned his attention to a
fly-casting reel that lay on the blotter.  "What trouble?"

"Interfering with officers in the performance of their duties."

"Ridiculous." Sonneford carefully removed tiny screws from the reel
housing.  "If he hadn't tended to Tolk, the man would be dead now.  We
gave him four and a half liters."

"Really?  That isn't a mistake on the patient's chart."

"No mistake." Sonneford removed the metal case from the automatic reel,
peered intently into its mechanical guts.  "An adult has seventy
milliliters of blood per kilogram of body weight.  Tolk is a big man-one
hundred kilos.  He'd normally contain seven liters.  So when I first
ordered blood in the ER, he'd lost over sixty percent of his own." He
put down the screwdriver and picked up an equally small wrench.  "And
they gave him another liter in the ambulance before I saw him."

"You mean he'd actually lost over seventy-five percent of his blood by
the time they got him out of that sandwich shop?

But .  .  .  can a man lose so much blood and survive?"

"No," Sonneford said quietly.

A pleasant shiver passed through Stefan.  "And both bullets lodged in
soft tissue but damaged no organs.  Deflected by ribs, other bones?"

Sonneford was still squinting at the reel but had stopped tinkering with
it.  "If those .38s had hit bone, the impact would've resulted in
chipping, splintering.  I found nothing like that.  On the other hand,
if they were not deflected by bone, they should've passed through him,
leaving massive exit wounds.  But I found them lodged in muscle tissue."

Stefan stared at the surgeon's bent head.  "Why do I have the feeling
there's something more you want to tell me, but that it's something
you're afraid to talk about?"

At last Sonneford glanced up.  "And why do I get the feeling that you've
not told the truth about your reasons for coming here, Father?"

"Touchd," Stefan said.

Sonneford sighed and put the tools away in the kit.  "All right.  The
entry wounds make it clear that one bullet hit Tolk in the chest,
impacted with the lower portion of the sternum, which should've snapped
off or fractured; splinters like shrapnel should've pierced organs,
vital blood vessels.  Apparently, none of that happened."

"Why do you say 'apparently'?  Either it happened, or it didn't."

"From the entry wound in the flesh, I know that bullet hit the sternum,
Father, and I found it lodged harmlessly in tissue on the other side of
the sternum; therefore .  .  .  somehow ...  it passed through that bone
without damaging it.  Impossible, of course.  Yet I found just an entry
wound over the sternum, the undamaged bone directly under the woundand
then the bullet lodged inside behind the sternum, with no indication how
it had gotten from one place to the other. Furthermore, the entry wound
of the second slug was over the base of the fourth rib, right side, but
that rib was undamaged as well.  The bullet should have shattered it.  ,

"Maybe you're wrong," Stefan said, playing devil's advocate.  "Maybe the
bullet entered just slightly off the rib, between ribs."

"No." Sonneford raised his head but did not look at Stefan. The
physician's uneasiness still seemed peculiar and was not explained by
what he had said thus far.  "I don't make diagnostic errors.  Besides,
inside the patient, those bullets were lodged where you'd expect them to
be if they had hit bone, had punched through, and had had the last of
their energy absorbed by the muscle.  But there were no damaged tissues
between the point of entry and the expended slugs.  Which is impossible.
Bullets can't pass through a man's chest and leave no trail at all!"

"Almost seems as if we have a minor miracle."

"More than minor.  Seems like a pretty damn major miracle to me."

"If only one artery and vein were injured, and if both were only nicked,
how did Tolk lose so much blood?  Were those nicks big enough to account
for it?"

"No.  He couldn't have hemorrhaged so massively from those traumas."

The surgeon said nothing more.  He seemed gripped in the talons of some
dark fear that Stefan could not understand. What had he to fear?  If he
believed that he had witnessed a miracle, should he not be joyous?

"Doctor, I know it's difficult for a man of science and medicine to
admit he's seen something that his education can't explain, something
that in fact is in opposition to everything he had believed to be true.
But I beg you to tell me everything you saw.  What are you holding back?
How did Winton Tolk lose so much blood if his injuries were so small?"

Sonneford slumped back in his chair.  "In surgery, after beginning
transfusions, I located the bullets on the X rays and made the necessary
incisions to remove them.  In the process, I found a tiny hole in the
superior mesenteric artery and another small tear in one of the superior
intercostal veins. I was certain there must be other severed vessels,
but I couldn't locate them immediately, so I clamped off both the
superior mesenteric and the intercostal for repair, figuring to search
further when those were attended to.  It only took ' a few minutes, an
easy task.  I sewed the artery first, of course, because the bleeding
was in spurts and was more serious. Then .  .  ."

"Then?" Father Wycazik urged gently.

"Then, when I had quickly finished stitching the artery, I turned to the
torn intercostal vein ...  and the tear was gone."

"Gone," Stefan said.  A quiver of awe passed through him, for this was
the thing he had expected-yet it was also a revelation of such
astounding importance that it seemed too much to have hoped for.

"Gone," Sonneford repeated, and at last he met Stefan's gaze.  In the
surgeon's watery gray eyes, a shadow moved like the half-perceived
passage of a leviathan through the depths of a murky sea, the shadow of
fear, and Stefan confirmed that for some inexplicable reason the miracle
occasioned dread in the doctor.  "The torn vein healed itself, Father. I
know the tear had been there.  Clamped it off myself.  My technician saw
it.  My nurse saw it.  But when I was ready to sew it up, the rent was
gone.  Healed.  I removed the clamps, and the blood flowed again through
the vein, and there was no leakage.  And later ...  when I excised the
bullets, the muscle tissue appeared to .  .  .  knit up before my eyes."

"Appeared to?"

"No, that's an evasion," Sonneford admitted.  "It did knit before my
eyes.  Incredible, but I saw it.  Can't prove it, Father, but I know
those two slugs did smash Tolk's sternum and shatter his rib.  They did
send bone fragments through him like shrapnel.  Major, mortal damage was
done, had to have been.  But by the time he was on the table in surgery,
his body had almost entirely healed itself.  The shattered bones had . .
.  reformed.  The superior mesenteric artery and the intercostal vein
were severed to begin with, which is why he lost blood so fast, but by
the time I opened him, both vessels had knitted up except for a small
tear in each.  Sounds crazy, but if I hadn't moved to repair the artery,
I'm sure it would've finished closing on its own .  .  .  just as the
vein did."

"What did your nurse and other assistants think of this?"

"Funny thing is .  .  .  we didn't talk much about it.  I can't account
for how little we discussed it.  Maybe we didn't talk about it because .
.  .  we're living in a rational age when the miraculous is
unacceptable."

"How sad if true," Stefan said.

With the shadow of dread still shimmering anemone-like in the depths of
his eyes, Sonneford said, "Father, if there is a God-and I'm not
admitting there is-why would He save this particular cop?"

"He's a good man," Father Wycazik said.

"So?  I've seen hundreds of good men die.  Why should this one be saved
and none of the others?"

Father Wycazik pulled a chair around from the side of the desk in order
to be able to sit near the surgeon.  "You've been frank with me, Doctor,
so I'll be upfront with you.  I sense a force behind these events that's
more than human. A Presence.  And that Presence isn't primarily
concerned with Winton Tolk but with Brendan, the man .  .  .  the priest
who first reached Officer Tolk in that sandwich shop."

Bennet Sonneford blinked in surprise.  "Oh.  But you wouldn't have
gotten such a notion unless .  .  ."

"Unless Brendan was linked to at least one other miraculous event,"
Stefan said.  Without using Emmy Halbourg's

name, he told Sonneford about the girl's mending limbs that had once
been crippled by disease.

Instead of taking hope from what Stefan told him, Bennet Sonneford
shriveled farther in the heat of his strange despair.

Frustrated by the physician's relentless gloominess, Father Wycazik
said, "Doctor, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems to me you've
got every reason to be joyous.  You were privileged to witness what-I
personally believe-was the hand of God at work." He held one hand out to
Sonneford and was not surprised when the doctor gripped it tightly.
"Bennet, why're you so despondent?"

Sonneford cleared his throat and said, "I was born and raised a
Lutheran, but for twenty-five years I've been an atheist.  And now .
.."

"Ah," Stefan said, "I see.

Happily, Stefan began angling for Bennet Sonneford's soul in the
fish-lined den.  He had no suspicion that, before the day was done, his
current euphoria would be dispelled and that he would experience a
bitter disappointment.

Reno, Nevada.

Zeb Lomack had never imagined that his life would end in bloody suicide
on Christmas, but by that night he had sunk so low that he longed to end
his existence.  He loaded his shotgun, put it on the filthy kitchen
table, and promised himself that he would use it if he was unable to get
rid of all the goddamned moon stuff before midnight.

His bizarre fascination with the moon had begun the summer before last,
though at first it had seemed innocent enough. Toward the end of August
that year, he had taken to going out on the back porch of his cozy
little house and watching the moon and stars while sipping Coors.  In
mid-September, he purchased a Tasco 10VR refracting telescope and bought
a couple of books on amateur astronomy.

Zebediah was surprised by his own sudden interest in stargazing.  For
most of his fifty years, Zeb Lomack, a professional gambler, had shown
little interest in anything but cards.  He worked Reno, Lake Tahoe,
Vegas, occasionally one of the smaller gambling towns like Elko or
Bullhead City, playing poker with the tourists and local would-be poker
champs.  He was not only good at card games: He loved cards more than he
loved women, booze, food.  Even the money was not important to Zeb; it
was just a handy by-product of playing cards.  The important thing was
staying in the game.

Until he got the telescope and went crazy.

For a couple of months he used the scope on a casual basis, and he
bought a few more books on astronomy, and it was just a hobby.  But by
last Christmas he began to focus his attention less on the stars than on
the moon, and thereafter something strange happened to him.  The new
hobby soon became as interesting as card games, and he found himself
canceling planned excursions to the casinos in order to study the lunar
surface.  By February, he was glued to the eyepiece of the Tasco every
night that the moon was visible.  By April he built a collection of
books about the moon that numbered more than one hundred, and he went
out to play cards only two or three nights a week.  By the end of June,
his book collection had grown to five hundred titles, and he had begun
to paper the bedroom walls and ceiling with pictures of the moon clipped
from old magazines and newspapers.  He no longer played cards, but began
living off his savings, and thereafter his interest in things lunar
ceased to bear any resemblance to a hobby and became a mad obsession.

By September, his book collection had grown to more than fifteen hundred
volumes stacked throughout his small house. During the day, he read
about the moon or, more often, sat for hours staring intently at
photographs of it, unable either to understand or to resist its allure,
until its craters and ridges and plains became as familiar to him as the
five rooms of his own house.  On those nights when the moon was visible,
he studied it through the telescope until he could no longer stay awake,
until his eyes were bloodshot and sore.

Before this obsession took control of him, Zeb Lomack had been a
ruggedly hewn and relatively fit man.  But as his preoccupation with
things lunar tightened its grip, he stopped exercising and began eating
junk food-cake, ice cream, TV dinners, bologna sandwiches-because he no
longer had time to prepare good meals.  Furthermore, the moon not only
fascinated him but also made him uneasy, filled him not only with wonder
but with dread, so he was always nervous; and he tranquilized himself
with food.  He became softer, flabbier,

though he was only minimally aware of the physical changes he was
undergoing.

By early October, he thought about the moon every hour of every day,
dreamed of it, and could go nowhere in his house without seeing hundreds
of images of the lunar face. He had not stopped repapering the walls
when he had finished his bedroom in June, but had carried that project
throughout. The full-color and black-and-white moon pictures came from
astronomy journals, magazines, books, and newspapers.  On one of his
infrequent ventures out of the house, he had seen a three-by-five-foot
poster of the moon, a color photograph taken by astronauts, and he had
bought fifty copies, enough to paper the ceiling and every wall in the
living room; he had even taped the poster over the windows, so every
square inch of the room was decorated with that repeating image, except
for doorways.  He moved the furniture out, transforming the empty
chamber into a planetarium where the show never changed.  Sometimes he'd
lie on his back on the floor and stare up and around at those fifty
moons, transported by an exhilarating sense of wonder and an
inexplicable terror, neither of which he could understand.

Christmas night, as Zeb was sprawled on the floor with half a hundred
bloated moons hanging over him, bearing down on him, he suddenly noticed
writing on one of them, a single word scrawled across the lunar image
with a felt-tip pen, where there had never been a word before.  The
picture had been defaced with a name: Dominick.  He recognized his own
handwriting, but he could not remember having scrawled that name across
the moon.  Then his eye was caught by another name written on another
poster: Ginger.  And then a third name on a third poster: Faye.  And a
fourth: Ernie.  Suddenly anxious, Zeb stumbled around the room, checking
the other posters, but he found no more names.

In addition to being unable to recall writing those words, he could not
think of anyone he knew named Dominick, Ginger, or Faye.  He knew a
couple of Ernies, though neither was a close friend, and the appearance
of that name on one of the moons was no less mysterious than the three
others. Staring at the names, he grew increasingly uneasy, for he had
the odd feeling that he did know them, that they had played a terribly
important role in his life, and that his very sanity and survival
depended on remembering who they were.

Some long-forgotten memory swelled in him like a steadily inflating
balloon, and intuitively he knew that when the balloon popped he would
recollect everything, not only the identities of these four people, but
also the origins of his fevered fascination with-and underlying fear
of-the moon. But as the memory balloon swelled within him, his fear grew
as well, and he began to sweat and then to shake uncontrollably.

He turned from the posters, suddenly terrified of remembering, and
lurched out to the kitchen, driven by that gnawing hunger that was
always occasioned by thoughts that made him nervous.  He wrenched open
the refrigerator door and was startled to discover that the shelves were
bare.  They held dirty bowls and empty plastic containers in which food
had been kept, two empty milk cartons, an egg carton with one broken and
dried egg.  He looked in the freezer, found only frost.

Zeb tried to remember when he had last been to the supermarket.  It
might have been days or weeks since his most recent shopping expedition.
He could not remember because, in his moon-filled world, time no longer
had any meaning. And how much time had passed since his last meal?  He
vaguely remembered having some canned pudding, but he was not clear
whether that had been earlier today or yesterday or even two days ago.

Zebediah Lomack was so shocked by this development that his mind cleared
for the first time in weeks, and when he looked around the kitchen, he
made a strangled sound of disgust and fear.  For the first time he
saw-really saw-the mess in which he'd been living, a situation
previously masked by his all-encompassing fascination with the moon.
Garbage covered the floor: discarded cans sticky with fruit juice, slimy
with traces of rancid gravy; empty cereal boxes and a score of drained
milk cartons; dozens of wadded-up and discarded potato-chip bags and
candy wrappers.  And roaches.  They squirmed, scuttled, and jigged
through the garbage, raced across the floor, climbed walls, crouched on
counters, and lurked in the sink.

"My God," Zeb said in a voice that was hardly more than a croak, "what's
happened to me?  What've I been doing?

What's wrong with me?"

He put one hand to his face and twitched with surprise

when he felt a beard.  He had always been clean-shaven, and he had
thought he shaved just this morning.  The wiry hair on his face sent him
in a panic to the bathroom, where he could look in the mirror.  He saw a
stranger: filthy, matted hair hanging in tangled clumps; pale, soft,
sickly-looking skin; a two-week beard crusted with food and dirt; wild
eyes.  He became aware of his body odor: His stink was so rank that he
gagged on his own aroma.  Apparently, he had not bathed in days, weeks.

He needed help.  He was sick.  Confused and sick.  He could not
understand what had happened to him, but he knew that he must go to the
telephone and call for help.

But he did not go immediately to the phone because he was afraid they'd
say he was hopelessly insane and would lock him away forever.  Like they
had locked away his father. When Zebediah was eight, his father pitched
a terrible fit, ranting and raving about lizard-things that were
crawling out of the walls, and the doctors took him to the hospital to
dry him out.  But that time, unlike before, the DTs had not gone away,
and Zeb's dad had been institutionalized for the rest of his life.  Ever
after, Zeb had been afraid his own mind might be flawed, too.  Staring
at his pale face in the mirror, he knew he could not call for help until
he made himself presentable and straightened up the house; otherwise,
they would lock him up and throw away the key.

He could not bear to look at his reflection long enough to shave, so he
decided to deal with the house first.  Keeping his head down to avoid
seeing the moons, which exerted a tidal force on him as real as the true
moon's effect on the seas, he scurried into the bedroom, opened the
closet, shoved the clothes aside, located his Remington .12-gauge and a
box of shells.  Head bowed, fighting the urge to look up, he made his
way to the kitchen, where he loaded the shotgun and put it on the
garbage-strewn table.  Speaking aloud, he made a bargain with himself:

"You get rid of the moon books, tear down the pictures so this place
don't look so crazy, clean the kitchen, shave, bathe.  Then maybe you'll
get your head clear enough to figure what the hell's wrong with you.
Then you can get help-just not while things are like this."

The shotgun was the unspoken part of the bargain.  He had been fortunate
to rise briefly out of the moon-dream in which he had been living,
shocked to his senses by the lack of food in the refrigerator, but if he
drifted back into that nightmare, he could not count on being jolted
awake again.  Therefore, if he could not resist the siren song of the
moons on the walls, he would quickly return to the kitchen, pick up the
shotgun, put it in his mouth, and pull the trigger.

Death was better than this.

And death was better than being locked up forever like his father.

Now, in the living room once more, keeping his eyes on the floor, he
began to gather up the books.  Some had once boasted jackets with photos
of the moon, but he had clipped those pictures.  He hefted an armload of
them and went outside to the snow-covered back yard, where there was a
barbecue pit lined with concrete blocks.  Shivering in the crisp winter
air, he dumped the books into the pit and headed back to the house for
more, not daring to look at the night sky for fear of the great luminous
body suspended in it.

As he worked, the urge to return to the study of the moon was as intense
and demanding as the hideous need that forced a heroin addict to return
again and again to the needle, but Zeb fought it.

Likewise, as he made trip after trip to the barbecue pit, he felt that
memory of some long-forgotten event continuing to swell within him:
Dominick, Ginger, Faye, Ernie ...  Instinctively, he knew that he would
understand the cause of his fascination with the moon if only he could
recall who those four people were.  He concentrated on the names, trying
to use them to block out the alluring summons of the moon, and it seemed
to work because soon he had disposed of two or three hundred volumes in
the barbecue pit and was ready to set them ablaze.

But when he struck a match and leaned down to light the pages of a book,
he discovered the pit was empty.  He stared in shock and horror.
Dropping the matches, he raced back to the house, threw open the kitchen
door, stumbled inside, and saw what he had been most afraid of seeing.
The books were piled there, damp with snow, smeared with wet ashes from
the pit.  He had indeed disposed of them, but then the lunacy had taken
him again; under its spell and without knowing what he was doing, he had
carried every volume back into the house.

He began to cry, but he was still determined he would not wind up in a
padded room.  He picked up a score of books and headed back toward the
barbecue pit, feeling as if he were in hell and condemned, for eternity,
to the performance of this frantic ritual.

When he figured he had filled the pit again, he suddenly realized he was
not carrying books to the place of burning but away from it.  Again, he
had drifted off into his moondream and, instead of destroying the
objects of his obsession, he was re-collecting them.

As he headed back toward the house, he noticed how the crust of snow
glimmered with a scintillant, reflected light. Against his will, his
head came up.  He looked into the deep and nearly cloudless sky.

He said, "The moon."

He knew then that he was a dead man.

Laguna Beach, California.

For Dominick Corvaisis, Christmas was usually not much different from
other days.  He had no wife or children to make it special.  Raised in
foster homes, he had no relatives with whom he could share a turkey and
mincemeat pie.  A couple of friends, including Parker Faine, always
invited him to join in their festivities, but he declined, for he knew
he would feel like the proverbial fifth wheel.  However, Christmas was
not sad or lonely.  He was never bored by his own company, and his home
overflowed with good books that could fill the day with delight.

But this Christmas Dom could not concentrate to read, for he was
preoccupied by the mysterious mail he had received the previous day and
by the need to resist the urge to pop a Valium.  Though he had been
afraid that he would dream and walk in his sleep, he had taken no Valium
yesterday and no Dalmane last night.  He was determined to avoid any
further reliance on chemicals, though he continued to crave them.

In fact, the craving became so bad that he emptied the pills into the
toilet and flushed them away, because he did not trust himself.  As the
day wore on, his anxiety rose to the level he had experienced before he
had begun drug therapy.

At seven o'clock Christmas night, Dom arrived at Parker's rambling
hillside contemporary and accepted a glass of homemade eggnog with a
cinnamon stick in it.  The burly painter's beard, usually bushy and
untamed, was neatly trimmed, and his mane of hair was newly cut and
combed in honor of the holiday.  Though he was more conservatively
groomed and more subdued in dress than was his habit, he was every bit
as ebullient as one expected him to be.  "What a Christmas!

Peace and love reigned in this house today, I tell you!  My cherished
brother made only forty or fifty nasty and envious remarks about my
success, which is not half as many as he lets loose with on a less
blessed occasion.  My sainted halfsister, Carla, only once called her
sister-in-law Doreen a bitch, and even that might be considered
justified in light of the fact that Doreen started it by calling Carla a
'brainless New Age crackpot full of psychobabble." Ah, truly a day of
fellowship and caring!  Not one punch thrown this year, if you can
believe it.  And Carla's husband, though he got plastered as usual, did
not throw up or fall down a flight of stairs, as in past years, though
he did insist on doing his Bette Midler imitation at least a dozen
times."

As they moved toward a grouping of chairs by the windowwall overlooking
the sea, Dom said, "I'm going on a trip, a long drive.  I'll fly to
Portland and rent a car up there.  Then I'll retrace the journey I took
the summer before last, from Portland down to Reno, across Nevada and
half of Utah on Interstate 80, then to Mountainview."

Dom sat down as he spoke, but Parker remained on his feet, very still.
The announcement pleasantly electrified him. "What's happened?  That's
no vacation.  That's not a route you'd take for pleasure.  Are you
sleepwalking again?  Must be.  And something's happened to convince you
this is related to the changes you underwent that summer."

"I haven't begun sleepwalking again, but I'm sure I will, probably
tonight, because I've thrown the damn drugs away. They weren't curing
me.  I lied.  I was getting hooked, Parker. I didn't care because it
seemed that being hooked was better than enduring the things I did while
sleepwalking.  But now all that's changed because of these." He held up
the two notes from his unknown correspondent.  "The problem's not just
within me, not just psychological.  There's something stranger at work
here." He gave the first note to Parker.  His fearful state of mind was
betrayed by the sheet of paper, which shook in his hand.

When the painter read it, he looked baffled.

Dom said, "It came in the mail yesterday at the post office. No return
address.  There was another note delivered to the house." He explained
about having typed the words "the moon" on his word processor hundreds
of times in his sleep and about waking from a dream with those same
words on his lips, then passed the second note to Parker.

"But if I'm the first one you've told about this moon thing, how could
anyone have known enough to send such a note?"

"Whoever he is," Dom said, "he knows about my sleepwalking, maybe
because I've gone to a doctor about it-"

"You're saying you're being watched?"

"Apparently, to a degree.  Periodically monitored if not constantly
watched.  But while the monitor knows about my sleepwalking, he probably
doesn't know about my typing those words on the Displaywriter, or that I
woke up repeating them in the night.  Not unless he was standing beside
my bed, which he wasn't.  However, he indisputably does know that I'll
react to "the moon," that those words'll frighten me.  So he must know
what lies behind this whole crazy mess."

At last Parker sat down on the edge of a chair.  "Find him, and you'll
know what's going on."

"New York is a big place," Dom said.  "I have no starting point there.
But when I got this first note-this business about the answer to my
sleepwalking lying in the past I realized you must be right about this
personality crisis being tied to the previous one.  The dramatic change
I went through on the trip from Portland to Mountainview is somehow
connected.  If I make that trip again, stop at the same motels, eat in
the same roadside restaurants, try to recreate it as exactly as I can .
.  .  something might turn up.  My memory might be jogged."

"But how could you have forgotten something so major?"

"Maybe I didn't forget it.  Maybe the memory was taken from me."

Leaving that possibility for later exploration, Parker said, "Whoever
the hell this guy is-what reasons would he have for sending these notes?
I mean, you've imagined a situation where it's you against Them, some
unknown Them, and so this guy is on their side, not yours."

"Maybe he doesn't agree with everything that's been done to me-whatever
it is that I've forgotten was done to me."

"Done to you?  What're we talking about here?"

Dom nervously turned his glass of eggnog around and around in his hands.
"I don't know., But this correspondent ...  he obviously wants me to
know my problem's not psychological, that there's something more behind
it.  I think maybe he wants to help me find the truth."

"So why doesn't he just call you up and tell you the truth?"

, "The only thing I can figure is that he doesn't dare risk telling me.
He must be part of some conspiracy, God knows what, but part of some
group that doesn't want the truth to come out.  If he approaches me
directly, the others will know, and he'll be in deep shit."

As if it helped him think, Parker ran one hand through his hair several
times, mussing it badly.  "You make this sound like some all-knowing
secret society is on your ass-like the Illuminatus Society,
Rosicrucians, CIA, and the Fraternal Order of Masons all rolled into
one!  You actually think you've been brainwashed?"

"If you want to call it that.  Whatever traumatic episode I've
forgotten, I didn't forget it without assistance.  Whatever I saw or
experienced was apparently so shocking, so traumatic, that it's still
festering in my subconscious, trying to reach me through sleepwalking
and through the messages I leave on the Displaywriter.  It was so damned
big that even brainwashing hasn't been able to wipe it out, so big that
one of the conspirators is risking his own neck to send me hints."

After reading them one more time, Parker returned the two notes to Dom,
chugged down his own eggnog.  "Shit.  I think you've got to be right,
which upsets me.  I don't want to believe it.  It sounds too much as if
you've let your novelistic imagination run wild, as if you're trying out
the plot of a new book on me, something a bit more colorful than you
should write.  But crazy as the whole thing sounds, I can't think of any
other answer."

Dom realized he was squeezing the eggnog glass so tightly that he was in
danger of shattering it.  He put it on a small table and blotted his
hands on his slacks.  "Me neither.  There's nothing else that explains
both the crazy damn sleepwalking, and my personality change between
Portland and Mountainview, and those two notes."

 His face lined with worry, Parker said, "What could it have been, Dom?
What did you stumble into when you were out there on the road?"

"I don't have the foggiest."

"Have you considered that it might be something so bad ...  so damn
dangerous that you'd be better off not knowing?"

Dom nodded.  "But if I don't learn the truth, I won't be able to stop
the sleepwalking for good.  In my sleep I'm running from the memory of
whatever happened to me out there on the road, the summer before last,
and to stop running I've got to find out what it was, face up to it.
'Cause if I don't stop the sleepwalking, it'll eventually drive me mad.
That might sound a bit melodramatic, too, but it's true.  If I don't
learn the truth, then the thing I fear in my dreams is going to start
haunting the waking hours as well, and I'm not going to have a moment's
peace, waking or sleeping, and eventually the only solution will be to
put a gun in my mouth and pull the trigger."

"Jesus."

:,I mean it."

'I know you do.  God help you, my friend, I know you do.

Reno, Nevada.

A cloud saved Zeb Lomack ' It drifted across the moon before the grip of
the lunar obsession had completely reclaimed him.  With the empyreal
lantern briefly dimmed, Zebediah abruptly became aware that he was
standing coatless in the freezing December night, gaping up at the sky,
mesmerized by moonbeams.  If the cloud had not broken the trance, he
might have stood there until the object of his grim fascination had
descended past the horizon.  Then, having sunk back into his lunacy, he
might have returned to one of the rooms papered with the ancient
god-face that the Greeks called Cynthia, that the Romans called Diana,
there to lie in a stupor until, days hence, he had starved to death.

Reprieved, he let out a wretched cry and ran to the house. He slipped
and fell in the snow, fell again on the porch steps, but immediately
scrambled up, desperately seeking the safety of the indoors, where the
face of the moon could not work its charms on him.  But of course there
was no safety inside, either.  Though he closed his eyes and began at
once to tear blindly at the moon pictures, ripping them from the kitchen
walls and casting them on the garbage-covered floor, he began to succumb
to his obsession yet again. Eyes tightly shut, he could not see the
cratered images, but he could feel them. He could feel the pale light of
a hundred moons upon his face, and he could feel the roundness of the
moons in his hands as he tore them off the wall, which was crazy because
they were only pictures that could not produce light or warmth and could
not convey by touch the roundness of the lunar globe, yet he
nevertheless felt those things strongly.  He opened his eyes and was
instantly captured by the familiar celestial body.

Just like my dad.  Asylum-bound.

Like a distant crackle of lightning, that thought flickered through Zeb
Lomack's rapidly dimming mind.  It jolted him and allowed him to recover
just long enough to turn away from the living room door and fling
himself toward the kitchen table, where the loaded shotgun waited.

Chicago, Illinois.

Father Stefan Wycazik, descendant of strong-willed Poles, rescuer of
troubled priests, was not accustomed to failure, and he did not handle
it well.  "But after everything I've told you, how can you still not
believe?" he demanded.

Brendan Cronin said, "Father Stefan, I'm sorry.  But I simply don't feel
any stronger about the existence of God than I did yesterday."

They were in a bedroom on the second floor of Brendan's parents'
gingersnap brick house in the Irish neighborhood called Bridgeport,
where the young priest was spending the holiday according to Father
Wycazik's orders, issued yesterday after the Uptown shootout.  Brendan,
dressed in gray slacks and a white shirt, was sitting on the edge of a
double bed that was covered by a worn, yellow chenille spread.  Stefan,
choosing to feel needled by his curate's stubbornness, moved constantly
around the room from dresser to highboy to window to bed to dresser
again, as if trying to avoid the prickling pain of his failure.

"Tonight," Father Wycazik said, "I met an\atheist who was half-converted
by Tolk's incredible recovery.  But you're unimpressed."

"I'm happy for Dr.  Sonneford," Brendan said mildly, "but his renewed
belief doesn't rekindle my own."

The curate's refusal to be properly impressed by recent miraculous
events was not the only thing that irritated Father Wycazik.  The young
priest's pacific demeanor was also bothersome.  If he could not find the
will to believe in God again, then it seemed he should at least be
disheartened and downcast by his continued lack of faith.  Instead,
Brendan appeared untroubled by his miserable spiritual condition, which
was quite different from his attitude when Father Wycazik had seen him
last.  He had changed dramatically; for reasons that were not at all
clear, a great peace seemed to have settled over Brendan.

Still determinedly pressing his argument, Stefan said, "It was you,
Brendan, who cured Emmy Halbourg and healed Winton Tolk.  It was you,
through the power of those stigmata on your hands.  Stigmata that God
visited upon you as a sign."

Brendan rooked at his palms, now unmarked.  "I believe ...  somehow I
did heal Emmy and Winton.  But it wasn't God acting through me."

"Who else but God could've granted you such curing power?"

"I don't know," Brendan said.  "Wish I did.  But it wasn't God.  I felt
no divine presence, Father."

"Good grief, how much more strongly do you expect Him to make His
presence felt?  Do you expect Him to thump you on the head with His
great Staff of Justice, tip His diadem to you, and introduce Himself?
You've got to meet Him halfway, Brendan."

The curate smiled and shrugged.  "Father, I know these amazing events
seem to have no explanation other than a religious one.  But I feel very
strongly that something other than God lies behind it."

"Like what?" Stefan challenged.

"I don't know.  Something tremendously important, something really
wonderful and magnificent ...  but not God.  Look, you've said that the
rings were stigmata.  But if that's what they were, why wouldn't they
have been in a form that had some Christian significance?  Why
rings-which seem to have no relation to the message of Christ?"

When Brendan began Stefan's unconventional course of psychological
therapy at St.  Joseph's Hospital for Children three weeks ago, the
young priest had been so troubled by his loss of faith that he'd been
growing rapidly thinner.  Now he had stopped losing weight.  He was
still thirty pounds lighter than usual, but he was no longer as wan and
haggard as he had been following his shocking outburst during Mass on
the first of December.  In spite of his spiritual fall, there was a glow
to his skin and a light in his eyes that was almost ... beatific.

"You feel splendid, don't you?" Stefan asked. "Yes, though I'm not sure
why."

"Your soul's no longer troubled."

"No."

"Even though you've still not found your way back to God."

"Even though," Brendan agreed.  "Maybe it has something to do with the
dream I had last night."

"The black gloves again?"

"No.  Haven't had that one in a while," Brendan said.  "Last night I
dreamed that I was walking in a place of pure golden light, beautiful
light, so bright I could see nothing around me, and yet it didn't hurt
my eyes." A peculiar note, perhaps Of reverence, (intered the curate's
voice.  "In the dream, I keep walking and walking, not knowing where I
am or where I'm going, but with the sense that I'm approaching a thing
or a place of monumental importance and unbearable beauty. Not just
approaching but .  .  .  being called to it.  Not an audible call but a
summons that just ...  reverberates in me. My heart is pounding, and I'm
a little afraid.  But it isn't a bad fear, Father, what I feel in that
bright place, not bad at all.  So I just keep walking through the light,
toward something magnificent that I can't see but that I know is there."

Drawn by Brendan's hushed voice as if by a magnet, Father Wycazik moved
to the bed and sat upon the corner of it. "But surely this is a
spiritual dream, the call of God coming to you in sleep.  He's calling
you back to your faith, back to the duties of your office."

Brendan shook his head.  "No.  There was no religious quality to the
dream, no sense of a divine presence.  It was a different kind of awe
that filled me, a joy unlike the joy I knew in Christ.  I woke up four
times during the night, and each time I woke, the rings were on my
hands.  And each time that I fell back to sleep, I dropped into the same
dream again.  Something very strange and important is happening, Father,
and I'm a part of it; but whatever it is, it's not anything that my
education, experiences, or previous beliefs have prepared me for."

Father Wycazik wondered if the call that had come to Brendan in the
dream had been from Satan instead of God.  Perhaps the devil, aware that
a priest's soul was in jeopardy, had dressed his hateful form in this
deceptively attractive golden light, the better to lead the curate from
the righteous path.

Still firmly determined to bring his curate back into the fold, but
temporarily out of winning strategies, Stefan Wycazik decided to call a
truce.  He said, "So .  .  .  what now?

You aren't ready to put on your Roman collar and resume your duties, as
I thought you'd be by now.  Do you want me to contact Lee Kellog, the
Illinois Provincial, and ask him to authorize psychiatric counseling?"

Brendan smiled.  "No.  That doesn't appeal to me any more. I don't
believe it'd do any good.  What I'd like to do-if it's all right with
you, Father-is move back into my room in the rectory and wait this out,
see what happens.  Of course, as I remain a fallen-away priest, I can't
hear confessions or say Mass.  But while I'm waiting to see what
happens, I could do some cooking, help you catch up on the filing."

Father Wycazik was relieved.  He had expected Brendan to express the
intention of returning to a secular life.  "You're welcome, of course.
There's much you can do.  I'll keep you busy; no need to worry about
that.  But tell me, Brendan .  .  .  you do think there's a possibility
that you'll find your way back?"

The curate nodded.  "I don't feel alienated from God any more.  Just
empty of Him.  As this situation develops, perhaps it'll lead me back to
the Church, as you're convinced it will. I just don't know."

Still frustrated and disappointed by Brendan's refusal to see the
miraculous presence of God in the healing of Emmy and Winton, Father
Wycazik was nonetheless glad that he would have the curate close and be
provided the opportunity to continue guiding him back to salvation.

Brendan went downstairs with Father Wycazik, and at the front door the
two men embraced in such a way that a stranger, without any knowledge of
their occupation, would have thought them father and son.

Accompanying Father Wycazik as far as the front stoop, where a blustery
wind gave a howl more suited to Halloween than to Christmas, Brendan
said, "I don't know why or how, Father Stefan, but I feel we're about to
embark upon an amazing adventure."

"The discovery-or rediscovery-of faith is always an amazing adventure,
Brendan," Father Wycazik said.  Then, having gotten in the last clean
jab, as a good fighter for souls should always do, he left.

Reno, Nevada.

Whimpering, gasping for breath, struggling valiantly against the
narcotizing effect of his lunar obsession, Zeb Lomack clambered through
the garbage and squirming roaches that carpeted the kitchen, grabbed the
shotgun that lay upon the table, jammed the barrel between his teeth and
suddenly realized that his arms were not long enough to reach the
trigger.  The urge to look up at the bewitching moons on the walls was
so overpowering that he felt as if someone had hold of him by the hair
and was pulling his head back to force his gaze up from the floor.  And
when he closed his eyes defensively, it seemed as if some invisible
adversary began to pry insistently at his.  eyelids.  In his horror of
being committed to a madhouse like his father, he found the strength to
resist the mesmeric moon-call.  Eyes still closed, he collapsed into a
chair, kicked off one shoe, stripped away the sock, braced the shotgun
with both hands, put the barrel in his mouth, raised his unshod foot,
and touched one bare toe to the cold trigger.  Imagined moonlight on his
skin and imagined lunar tides in his blood (no less forceful for being
imaginary) demanded his attention with such sudden power that he opened
his eyes, saw the many moons on the walls, and cried "no!"

into the barrel of the gun.  Even as the spellbinding mooncall pulled
him back toward a trance, even as he pressed his foot down upon the
trigger, the swelling memory balloon at last burst in his mind, and he
remembered everything that had been taken away from him: the summer
before last, Dom inick, Ginger, Faye, Ernie, the young priest, the
others, Interstate 80, the Tranquility Motel, oh, God, the motel, and
oh, God, the moon!

Perhaps Zebediah Lomack was unable to check the downward motion of his
bare foot or perhaps, instead, the suddenly revealed memory was so
terrible that it encouraged suicide. Whichever the case, the .12-gauge
went off with a roar, and the back of his head blew out, and for him
(though for no one else) the terror ended.

Boston, Massachusetts.

All Christmas afternoon, Ginger Weiss read Twilight in Babylon, and at
seven o'clock that evening, when it was time to go downstairs for drinks
and dinner with the Hannaby family, she resented the interruption and
did not want to put the book aside.  She was a willing captive of the
engrossing story, but she was more captivated by the photo of the
author. Dominick Corvaisis' commanding eyes and dark good looks
continued to arouse in her an uneasiness bordering on fear, and she
could not overcome the peculiar feeling that she knew him.

Dinner with her hosts, their children and grandchildren, might have been
pleasurable if Dominick Corvaisis had not exerted a mysteriously
powerful claim on her attention.  At ten o'clock, when she could at last
gracefully withdraw without offending anyone, she cast out and gathered
in a final series of Christmas wishes for happiness and health, then
returned to her room.

She began reading where she had left off, and with a minimum of
interruptions to scrutinize the author's photograph again, she finished
the book at three-forty-five A. M.  In the deep post-midnight silence
that had settled over Baywatch, Ginger sat with the book in her lap, the
jacket photo turned up, her eyes fixed on Dominick Corvaisis' hauntingly
familiar face.  Minute by minute, as she sat in her strange, silent,
onesided communion with the writer's image, Ginger became increasingly
convinced that she had met the man somewhere and that he was, in some
unimaginable fashion, part of her recent troubles.  Although her
steadily growing conviction was tempered by the realization that this
intuition might be part of the same mental disturbance that generated
her fugues, and might therefore be unreliable, her agitation and
excitement increased until, shaky and distraught, she was finally driven
to action.

Leaving her room with exaggerated stealth, she went downstairs, through
the dark and untenanted rooms of the great slumbering house, into the
kitchen.  She switched on the light and used the wall phone to call
information in Laguna Beach. It was one o'clock in the morning in
California, too rude an hour to wake Corvaisis.  But if she could get a
number for him, she would sleep better, knowing that she could get in
touch with him in the morning.  To her dismay, though not to her
surprise, his number was unlisted.

Switching off the kitchen light and creeping quietly back to her room,
Ginger made up her mind to write Corvaisis in the morning, care of his
publisher.  She would dispatch the message by express mail, with an
urgent plea to the publisher to forward the letter immediately.

Perhaps attempting to contact him was precipitate and irrational.
Perhaps she had never met him, and perhaps he had nothing to do with her
bizarre affliction.  Perhaps he'd think she was a crackpot.  But if this
million-to-one shot proved a good bet, the payoff might be her very
salvation, which was sufficient reward to risk making a fool of herself.

Laguna Beach, California.

As yet unaware that an advance review copy of his book had made a vital
link between himself and a deeply troubled woman in Boston, Dom remained
at Parker Faine's house until midnight, discussing the possible nature
of the conspiracy that he had theorized.  Neither he nor Parker had
enough information to put together a detailed or even slightly useful
picture of the conspirators, but the very process of sharing and
exploring the mystery with a friend made it less frightening.

They agreed that Dom should not fly to Portland and begin his odyssey
until he saw how bad his sleepwalking became now that he had thrown away
the Valium and Dalmane. Maybe somnambulism would not recur, as he
expected it would, in which case he could travel without fear of losing
control of himself in a distant place.  But if he resumed his night
rambling, he would need a couple weeks to decide on the best way of
restraining himself during sleep, before heading to Portland.

Besides, by waiting awhile, he might receive additional letters from his
unknown correspondent.  Those clues might make the trek from Portland to
Mountainview unnecessary or might target a specific area along that
route as the place where Dom would encounter some sight or experience
that would free his imprisoned memories.

By midnight, when Dom rose to leave Parker's hillside house, the artist
had become so intrigued by the situation that he looked as if he would
be up for hours yet, his mind spinning.  "You're sure it's wise to be
alone tonight?" he asked at the front door.

Dom stepped outside onto a walkway patterned with spikey geometric forms
of darkness and wedge-shaped slices of yellow light, which were formed
by the beams of a decorative iron lantern half obscured by
shadow-casting palm fronds. Looking back at his friend, he said, "We've
been through this before.  It might not be wise, but it's the only way."

"You'll call if you need help?"

"I'll call," Dom said.

,,And take those precautions we talked about."

Dom attended to those precautions a short while later at home.  He
removed the pistol from his nightstand, locked it in a drawer of his
office desk, and buried the desk key under a package of ice cream in the
freezer.  Better to be unprepared for a burglar than to risk firing the
gun while sound asleep. Next, from a coil of rope in the garage, he cut
a ten-foot length.  After brushing his teeth and undressing, he knotted
one end of the line securely around his right wrist in such a way that
he could escape only by untying four difficult knots, He secured the
other end of the rope to one post of the headboard, taking care to
fasten it tightly.  With one foot of the line's length used for the
knots, he was left with nine feet of play, enough to assure his comfort
while keeping him tethered within a safe distance of the bed.

In previous somnambulistic episodes, he had performed complex tasks that
had required some concentration, though nothing quite so tedious as the
unraveling of well-made knots, which were often a challenge to him when
he was awake.  In his sleep, he would surely lack the coordination and
mental focus to free himself and the effort to do so would be
frustrating enough to wake him.

Being thus hampered involved some danger.  If a fire broke out in the
night or if the house were damaged in an earthquake, he might be so
delayed by the need to untie himself that he would perish in the smoke
or beneath a collapsing wall.  He had to risk it.

When he turned out the bedside light and slipped under the blanket,
trailing the rope from one arm, the glowing red numerals of the digital
clock read twelve-fifty-eight.  Staring at the dark ceiling, wondering
what in the name of God he had become involved in out there on the road
the summer before last, he waited for sleep to creep upon him.

On the nightstand, the telephone was silent.  If his number had not been
unlisted, he might have received, at that moment, a long-distance call
from a lonely and frightened young woman in Boston, a call that would
have radically changed the course of the next few weeks and might have
saved lives.

Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

In the guest room of her only daughter's house, where a nightlight
burned in consideration of Ernie's phobia, Faye Block listened to her
husband as, asleep and dreaming, he mumbled into his pillow.  A few
minutes ago, she had been awakened when he had let out a soft cry and
had thrashed for a moment in the sheets.  Now she raised herself on one
elbow, cocked her head, and listened intently, trying to decipher his
muffled speech.  He was saying the same thing again and again into the
pillow.  The almost panicky urgency in his voice made Faye nervous.  She
leaned closer to him, straining to understand.

Suddenly he shifted his head just enough to turn his mouth from the
pillow, and his words became clear though no less mysterious than when
they had been muffled: "The moon, the moon, the moon, the moon .

Las Vegas, Nevada.

Jorja took Marcie into her own bed that night, because it did not seem
like a good idea to leave the girl alone after the disturbing events of
the day.  She did not get much rest because all night Marcie seemed to
phase in and out of nightmares, frequently kicking at the sheets,
squirming vigorously as if to free herself from restraining hands, and
talking in her sleep about doctors and needles. Jorja wondered how long
this had been going on.  Their bedrooms were separated by back-to-back
closets insulated by hanging clothes, and the child's sleep-talk was
very soft, so it was possible that she had passed a lot of nights in
unconscious terror without Jorja being aware of it. Her voice raised
gooseflesh on Jorja's arms.

In the morning, she would take Marcie to the doctor.  Given her
unexplained dread of all physicians, the girl might cause a hell of a
scene.  But as much as Marcie feared going to a doctor, Jorja feared not
going.  If it had not been so hard to locate the right physician on
Christmas Day, Jorja would have gone for help already.  She was scared.

Following Marcie's outburst, when her grandfather's teasing about taking
her to a hospital had driven her away from the table in a mad panic, the
day had gone downhill.  The girl was so overcome by fear that she peed
her pants, and for ten or fifteen hideously embarrassing and terrifying
minutes, she resisted all Jorja's efforts to get her cleaned up.  She
screamed, scratched, and kicked.  The tantrum passed at last, and she
submitted to a bath.  But she was like a little zombie, slackfaced and
empty-eyed, as if the terror, in passing out of her, had taken with it
all her strength and her mind as well.

That quasicatatonic state lasted almost an hour while Jorja made a dozen
telephone calls in an attempt to track down Dr.  Besancourt, the
pediatrician who treated Marcie on those rare occasions when she was
sick.  As Mary and Pete tried unsuccessfully to get a smile or at least
a word of response from the stricken girl, and as Marcie continued to
act as if she were deaf and mute, Jorja's mind was increasingly filled
with half-remembered magazine articles about autistic children.  She
couldn't recall whether autism was a condition that began in infancy or
whether it was possible for a perfectly normal little girl of seven to
suddenly withdraw into a private place and close out the rest of the
world forever.  Not being able to remember made her a little crazy.

Gradually, however, Marcie came out of her daze.  She began to answer
Mary and Pete, though in one-word replies delivered in a flat,
emotionless voice nearly as unsettling as her screams had been earlier.
Sucking on her thumb as she had not done in at least two years, she went
into the living room to play with her new toys.  Most of the afternoon,
she played without any visible pleasure, a faint scowl having taken
unchallenged possession of her small face.  Jorja was no less worried
because of this change, but she was relieved to see that Marcie showed
no further interest in the Little Ms.  Doctor kit.

By four-thirty, the girl's scowl had faded, and she had become sociable
once more.  In a good mood again, she was such a natural charmer that
she almost made it seem as if her outburst at the table had been no
worse than any child's temper tantrum.

In fact, on the outside stairs of the apartment complex, beyond Marcie's
hearing, Jorja's mother paused on the way down to the car and said,
"She's just trying to let us know that she's hurt and confused.  She
doesn't understand why her father left, and right now she needs a lot of
special attention, Jorja, a lot of love.  That's all."

Jorja knew the problem was worse than that.  She had no doubt that
Marcie was still disturbed by her father's behavior, deeply hurt by his
abandonment, and full of unresolved conflicts.  But something else was
eating the girl, something that seemed disturbingly irrational, and
Jorja was scared of it.

Not long after Pete and Mary left, the girl began playing Little Ms.
Doctor with the same unnerving intensity she had exhibited earlier, and
when bedtime came she wanted to take the kit with her.  Now, some of the
Little Ms.  Doctor things lay on the floor at Marcie's side of the bed,
some on the nightstand.  And in the dark bedroom the child dreamed and
whimpered about doctors, nurses, needles.

Jorja would have been unable to sleep even if Marcie had been perfectly
still and quiet.  Worry induced insomnia even more effectively than a
dozen cups of coffee.  Since she was awake anyway, she listened
attentively to her daughter's every dreamy utterance, hoping that she
would hear something that would help her understand or that would assist
the doctor in arriving at his diagnosis.  It was after two o'clock in
the morning when Marcie mumbled something different from what she had
mumbled before, something that had nothing to do with doctors and nurses
and big sharp needles.  With a flurry of violent kicks, the girl flopped
from her stomach onto her back,

gasped, and went rigid, perfectly still.  "The moon, moon, the moon,"
she said, in a voice that was filled with both amazement and fear, "the
moon," a voice of such chilling whispery urgency that Jorja knew it was
not just meaningless sleeptalk.  "The moon, moon, oooooonnn .

Chicago, Illinois.

Brendan Cronin, priest on probation, slept warmly under a blanket and
patchwork quilt, smiling at something in a dream.  The winter wind
sighed through the giant pine tree outside, fluted and soughed in the
caves, and moaned at his window, exerting itself in evenly spaced gusts
as if nature were ventilating the night with a huge mechanical bellows
that faithfully produced eight exhalations to the minute.  Even lost in
his dream, Brendan must have been aware of the wind's slow pulse, for
when he began to talk in his sleep, the words issued from him in a
sympathetic rhythm: "The moon .  .  .  the moon .  .  .  the moon .  . .
the moon.........

Laguna Beach, California.

"The moon!  The moon!"

Dominick Corvaisis was awakened by his own fearful shouting and by a
burning pain in his right wrist.  He was on his hands and knees in the
darkness beside his bed, wrenching frantically at something that had a
grip on his arm.  He continued to struggle for a few seconds until the
mists of sleep cleared, whereupon he realized that he was being held by
nothing more sinister than the rope with which he had tethered himself.

Breathing raggedly, heart pounding, he fumbled for the lamp switch and
winced as the sudden light stung his eyes. A quick look at the
restraining rope showed that in his sleep (and in the dark) he had
completely untied one of the four tightly drawn knots and partially
unraveled a second before losing patience for the task.  Then, in the
panic that always accompanied his sleepwalking, he evidently had begun
to pull and tug and twist against the belaying line as if he were a dumb
animal protesting a leash, painfully abrading his right wrist.

Dom got off the floor and, pushing aside the tangled blankets, sat on
the edge of the bed.

He knew he had been dreaming, though he could not recall anything about
the dream.  However, he was pretty sure that it was not the nightmare he
had endured on other occasions during the past month, for that one had
had nothing to do with the moon.  This was another dream, equally
terrifying but in a different way.

His shouts, which had been partly responsible for waking him, had been
so importunate, so haunted, so fright-filled that he could even now
summon them in memory as clearly as he had first heard them: "The moon!
The moon!" He shuddered and raised his hands to his throbbing head.

The moon.  What did it mean?

Boston, Massachusetts.

Ginger sat straight up in bed with a shrill cry.

Lavinia, the Hannabys'housekeeper, said, "Oh, I'm sorry, Dr.  Weiss.
Didn't mean to scare you.  You were having a nightmare."

"Nightmare?" Ginger had no recollection of a dream.

"Oh, yes," Lavinia said, "and a really bad one from the sound of it.  I
was passing in the hall when I heard you crying out.  I almost came in
right away, until I realized you must be dreaming.  I hesitated then,
but you went on and on, shouting it over and over again, until I thought
I'd better wake you."

Blinking, Ginger said, "Shouting?  What was I shouting?"

"Over and over again," the housekeeper said."

"The moon, the moon, the moon." You sounded so frightened."

"I don't remember."

"The moon,' " Lavinia assured her, "

"the moon,' over and over again, in such a voice that I half-thought
someone was killing you."

Days of Discovery Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear-not
absence of fear.

_MARK TWAIN

Is there some -meaning to this life?

What purpose lies behind the strife?

Whence do we come, where are we bound?

These cold questions echo and resound through each day, each lonely
night. We long to find the splendid light that will cast a revelatory
beam upon the meaning of the human dream.

-THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS

A friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of Nature.

-RALPH WALDO EMERSON


December 26-January 11

1.

Boston, Massachusetts

Between December 27 and January 5, Dr.  Ginger Weiss went to Pablo
Jackson's Back Bay apartment six times.  On six of those visits he used
hypnotic therapy to probe cautiously and patiently at the Azrael Block
that sealed off a portion of her memory.

To the old magician, she grew more beautiful each time she arrived at
his door-more intelligent, charming, and appealingly tough-minded, too.
Pablo saw in her the kind of woman he would have wanted as a daughter.
Ginger had stirred in him protective fatherly feelings that he had never
known before.

He told her nearly everything he had learned from Alexander Christophson
at the Hergensheimers' Christmas party. She resisted the idea that her
memory block had not developed naturally but had been implanted by
persons unknown. "Too bizarre.  Things like that don't happen to
ordinary people like me.  I'm just afarmishteh from Brooklyn, not
someone who gets involved in international intrigue."

The only thing about his conversation with Alex Christophson that he did
not tell her was that the retired espionage officer had warned against
becoming involved with her.  If Ginger knew Alex had been deeply
disturbed, she might decide that the situation was too dangerous to
justify Pablo's involvement.  Out of concern for her and out of a
selfish desire to be part of her life, he withheld that information.

At their first meeting on December 27, prior to the session of hypnosis,
he prepared a lunch of quiche and salad.  As they ate, Ginger said,
"But, I've never been around a sensitive military installation, never
been involved in any defense research, never associated with anyone who
could conceivably be part of a spy ring.  It's ludicrous!"

"If you stumbled on some dangerous bit of knowledge, it wasn't in a high
security area.  It was someplace you had every right to be .  .  .
except you just happened to be there at the wrong time."

"But listen, Pablo, if they brainwashed me, that would've taken time.
They'd have had to hold me in custody somewhere.  Right?"

"I imagine it would take a few days."

"So you can't be right," she said.  "Of course, I realize that while
they were forcing me to forget the thing I'd accidentally seen, they'd
also repress the memory of the place where they held me for the
brainwashing.  But there'd be a blank spot in my past somewhere, an
empty time when I couldn't remember where I'd been or what I'd done."

"Not at all.  They'd implant a set of false recollections to cover the
missing days, and you'd never know the difference."

"Good God!  Really?  They could do that?"

"One thing I hope to do is locate those false memories," Pablo explained
as he finished his quiche.  "It'll take a long time, slowly regressing
you back through your life week by week, but when I find the phony
memories, I'll recognize them tout de suite because they won't have the
detail, the substance, of genuine memories.  Mere stage sets, you see.
If we find two or three days of tissue-thin memories, we'll have
pinpointed the origin of your problem because those will be the dates
when you were in the hands of these people .  .  .  whoever they may
be."

"Yes, yes, I see," she said, suddenly excited.  "The first day of the
mushy memories will be the day that I saw something I shouldn't have
seen.  And the last day will be the day they finished brainwashing me.
It's terribly difficult to believe.  .  .  .  But if someone really did
implant this memory block, and if all my symptoms-the fugues-are a
result of those repressed memories struggling to the surface, then my
problem isn't really psychological.  There's a chance I could practice
medicine again.  All I've got to do is dig out the memories, bring them
into the light, and then the pressure will be relieved."

Pablo took her hand and gave it a squeeze.  "Yes, I believe there's real
hope.  But it's not going to be easy.  Every time I probe at the block,
I risk plunging you into a coma .  .  .  or worse.  I intend to be
oh-so-careful, but the risk remains."

The first two sessions of deep hypnosis were conducted in armchairs by
the huge bay window, one on December 27, one on Sunday the 29th, each
lasting four hours.  Pablo regresse'd her day by day through the
previous nine months but found no obviously artificial memories.

Also on Sunday, Ginger suggested he question her about Dominick
Corvaisis, the novelist whose picture affected her in such a peculiar
manner.  When Pablo hypnotized her and established that he was speaking
to the inner Ginger, to her deep subconscious self, he asked if she had
ever met Corvaisis, and after a brief hesitation she said, "Yes." Pablo
pursued the point cautiously and diligently, but he could get almost
nothing more out of her.  At last a thin vapor of memory escaped her:
"He threw salt in my face."

"Corvaisis threw salt on you?" Puzzled, Pablo asked, "Why?"

"Can't .  .  .  quite .  .  .  remember."

"Where did this happen?"

Her frown deepened, and when he continued to pursue the subject, she
withdrew, sinking into that frightening comatose state.  He quickly
retreated before she had spiraled down as deep as she had done before.
He assured her that he would ask no further questions about Corvaisis if
only she would return, and gradually she responded to that promise.

Clearly, Ginger had at one time met Corvaisis.  And her encounter with
him was associated with the memories of which she had been robbed.

In the next two sessions-Monday the 30th and Wednesday, the first day of
the New Year-Pablo regressed Ginger yet another eight months, to the end
of July, two summers ago, without discovering any tissue-thin memories
that would indicate the work of mind-control specialists.

Then on Thursday, January 2, Ginger asked him to question her about her
previous night's unremembered dream. For the fourth time since
Christmas, she had cried out in her sleep-"The moon!"-with such
insistence that she woke others in Baywatch.  "I think the dream's about
the place and time that's been stolen from me.  Put me in a trance, and
maybe we'll learn something."

But when hypnotized and returned to last night's dream, she refused to
answer questions and drifted into a deeper sleep than a mere hypnotic
trance.  He had pulled the Azrael Trigger once more, which was positive
proof that her dreams involved those forbidden memories.

On Friday they did not meet.  Pablo needed the day to read further about
memory blocks of all kinds and to think about how best to proceed.

In addition, he had recorded all five post-Christmas sessions, so he sat
at the reproduction Sheraton desk in his booklined study and listened to
portions of those tapes for hours. He was searching for a single word or
a change in Ginger's voice that might make a particular answer seem more
important on rehearing than it had seemed at the time.

He found nothing startling, though he noticed that, during hypnotic
regression, a subtle note of anxiety had entered her voice when their
backward journey through time had reached August 31 of the year before
last.  It was nothing dramatic that would have caught his attention at
the time the recordings were made.  But by telescoping all the sessions
into one afternoon, using the fast-forward control to skip from day to
day, he saw the pattern of steadily building anxiety, and he suspected
they were getting close to the event now hidden behind the Azrael Block.

Therefore, during their sixth post-Christmas session on Saturday,
January 4, Pablo was not surprised when the breakthrough came.  As
usual, Ginger was sitting in one of the armchairs by the bay window,
beyond which a fine snow was falling.  Her silver-blond hair glowed with
spectral light.  As he regressed her back through July of the previous
year, her brows knitted, and her voice became whispery and tense, and
Pablo knew she was drawing closer to the moment of her forgotten ordeal.

Since they were going backward in time, he had already taken her through
her busy months as a surgical resident at Memorial Hospital, back to the
moment when she first reported to George Hannaby for duty on Monday,
July 30,

more than seventeen months ago.  Her memories remained sharp and richly
detailed as Pablo conveyed her into Sunday, July 29, when she still had
been settling into her new apartment.  July 28, 27, 26, 25, 24 ...
through those days she had been unpacking and shopping for furniture ...
all the way back to July 21, 20, 19.  .  .  .  On July 18, the moving
van arrived with her household goods, which she had shipped from Palo
Alto, California, where she had lived the previous two years while
taking an advanced course of study in vascular surgery.  Farther back ..
.

On July 17, she arrived in Boston by car and booked a room overnight at
the Holiday Inn Government Center, as close to Beacon Hill as possible,
not yet able to stay at her new apartment because she had no bed there.

"By car?  You drove cross-country from Stanford?"

"It was the first vacation I ever really had.  I like to drive, and it
was a chance to see a little of the country," Ginger said, but in such
an ominous voice that she might have been talking about a journey
through hell rather than a transcontinental holiday.

So Pablo began to regress her through the days of her journey, back
across the midwestern heartland, around the northernmost horn of the
Rocky Mountains, through Utah, into Nevada, until they came to Tuesday
morning, July 10. She had stayed the previous night at a motel, and when
he asked for the name of it, a shudder passed through her.

"T-Tranquility."

"Tranquility Motel?  Where is this place?  Describe it, too."

On the arms of her chair, her hands curled into fists.  "Thirty miles
west of Elko, on Interstate 80." Haltingly, reluctantly, she described
the twenty-unit Tranquility Motel and Grille. Something about the place
terrified her.  Every muscle in her body went rigid.

Pablo said, "So you stayed the night of July ninth at the motel.  That
was a Monday.  All right, so now it's Monday, July ninth.  You're just
arriving at the motel.  You haven't stayed there yet; you're just
driving up to it.  .  .  .  What time of the day is it?"

She did not answer, and her tremors grew more pronounced, and when he
asked again, she said, "I didn't arrive on Monday.  F-Friday."

Startled, Pablo said, "The previous Friday?  You stayed at the
Tranquility Motel from Friday, July sixth, through Monday, July ninth?
Four nights at this small motel in the middle of nowhere?" He leaned
forward in his chair, sensing that they had found the time when her mind
had been tampered with.  "Why would you want to stay so long?"

In a slightly wooden voice, she said, "Because it was peaceful.  I was
on vacation, after all." Her strangely stilted voice became more flat
and devoid of nuance with each word she spoke.  "I needed to relax, you
see, and this was a perfect place to relax."

The old magician looked away from her, watched the faintly luminous snow
slanting down through the dreary gray afternoon beyond the window, and
carefully considered his next question.  "You said this motel has no
swimming pool.  And the rooms you've described aren't luxurious.  Not
resort-style rooms for long-term visits.  What on earth did you do for
four days out there in the middle of nowhere, Ginger?"

"Like I said, I relaxed.  Just relaxed.  Napped.  Read a couple of
books.  Watched some TV.  They have good TV even way out there on the
plains because they've got their own little satellite receiver dish on
the roof." Her manner of speech was now entirely altered, and she
sounded as if she were reading from a script.  "After two intense years
at Stanford, I needed a few days of doing absolutely nothing."

"What books did you read while at the motel?"

" I ...  I don't remember." Her hands were still fisted, and she was
still rigid.  Fine pearly beads of sweat popped out along her hairline.

" Ginger, you're there now, in the motel room, reading. Understand?  You
are reading whatever you were reading then.  Now look at the title of
the book and tell me what it is."

"I .  .  .  no .  .  .  no title."

"Every book has a title."

"No title."

"Because there really is no book-is there?" he said.

"Yes.  I just relaxed.  Napped.  Read a couple of books. Watched some
TV," she said in a soft, dead, emotionless voice.  "They have good TV
even way out there on the plains because they've got their own little
satellite receiver dish on the roof."

"What TV shows did you watch?" Pablo asked.

"News.  Movies."

"What movies?"

She flinched.  "I ...  don't remember."

Pablo was quite sure that the reason she did not remember these things
was precisely because she had never done them. She had been at that
motel, all right, because she could describe it in minute detail, but
she could not recall the books and the TV programs because she had never
passed any of that time in those pursuits.  Through clever post-hypnotic
suggestions, she had been instructed to say that she had done those
things, and she had actually been made to remember vaguely having done
them, but they were merely artificial memories designed to cover what
had really transpired at that motel.  A specialist in brainwashing could
insert false memories in a subject's mind, but even if he worked very
hard at it and built an intricate web of interlocking details, he could
not make the phony memories as convincing as real ones.

Pablo said, "Where did you eat dinner each night?"

"The Tranquility Grille.  It's a small place, and it doesn't have much
of a menu, but the food is reasonably good." That response was, once
again, delivered in a flat and hollow voice.

Pablo said, "What did you eat at the Tranquility Grille?"

She hesitated.  "I .  .  .  I don't remember."

"But you told me the food was good.  How could you make that judgment if
you don't remember what you ate?"

"Uhhh .  .  .  it's a small place, and it doesn't have much of a menu."

The more insistently he pressed for details, the more tense she became.
Her voice remained emotionless as she spewed out her programmed
responses, but her face twisted and hardened with anxiety.

Pablo could have told her that her apparent memories of those four days
at the Tranquility Motel were false.  He could have ordered her to blow
them out of her mind the way one might blow dust from an old book, and
she would have done it.  Then he could have told her that her true
memories were locked behind an Azrael Block, and that she must hammer it
into more dust.  But if he had done so, she would have plunged, as
programmed, into a coma-or worse.  He would have to spend many days,
possibly weeks, looking for tiny cracks to exploit cautiously.

For today, he contented himself with identifying the precise number of
hours of her life that had been stolen from her. He took her back to
Friday, July 6, of the summer before last, and asked exactly when she
signed the register at the Tranquility Motel.

"A little after eight o'clock." She no longer spoke in a wooden voice
because these were real memories.  "It was still an hour before sunset,
but I was exhausted.  All I wanted was dinner, a shower, and bed." She
described the man and woman behind the check-in counter in detail.  She
even recalled their names: Faye and Ernie.

Pablo said, "Once you had checked in, you ate at the Tranquility Grille
next to the motel.  So describe the place."

She did so, and in convincing detail.  But when he jumped her ahead to
the moment at which she left the restaurant, her recollections were
phony again, thin and without color. Clearly, her memories had been
altered from some point after she had gone into the Tranquility Grille
on that Friday evening until she had left the motel and had headed
toward Utah the following Tuesday morning.

Pablo backtracked, returning Ginger to the small restaurant once more,
searching for the exact moment at which the genuine memories ended and
the false began.  "Tell me about your dinner from the moment you went
into Tranquility Grille that Friday evening.  Minute by minute."

Ginger sat up straight in her chair.  Her eyes were still closed, but
under the shuttered lids, they moved visibly, as if she were looking
left and right upon entering the Tranquility Grille.  She unfisted her
hands and got up, much to Pablo's surprise.  She walked away from her
chair, toward the center of the room.  He walked beside her to prevent
her from bumping into furniture.  She did not know she was in his
apartment but imagined herself to be making her way between the tables
in the restaurant.  As she moved, the tension and fear left her, for now
she was wholly in that time, prior to all her trouble, when she had had
nothing about which to be tense or afraid.

In a quiet, anxiety-free voice she said, "Took me a while to freshen up
and get over here, so it's almost twilight.  Outside, the plains are
orange in the late sunlight, and the inside of the diner is full of that
glow.  I think I'll take that booth over in the corner by the window."

Pablo went with her, guiding her past the Picasso painting toward one of
the sofas that was decorated with colorful pastel accent pillows.

She said, "Mmmm.  Smells good.  Onions .  .  .  spices .  .  .  French
fries .  .  ."

"How many people in the diner, Ginger?"

She paused and turned her head, surveying the room with closed eyes.
"The cook behind the counter and a waitress. Three men.....  truck
drivers, I guess.....  on stools at the counter.  And.....  three at
that table.....  and the chubby priest .  .  .  another guy over at that
booth .  .  ." Ginger continued pointing and counting.  "Oh, eleven in
all, plus me."

"All right," Pablo said, "let's go to that booth by the windows."

She began walking again, smiled vaguely at someone, sidestepped an
obstacle that only she could see, then suddenly twitched in surprise,
jerked one hand to her face.  "Oh!" She stopped.

"What is it?" Pablo asked.  "What's happened?"

She blinked furiously for a moment, smiled, and spoke to someone in the
Tranquility Grille back there on July 6 of last year.  "No, no, I'm all
right.  It's nothing.  I've already brushed it off." She wiped her face
with one hand.  "See?" She had been looking down, as if the other person
was seated, and now she raised her eyes as he got up.

Pablo waited for her to continue the conversation.

She said, "Well, when you spill salt you'd better throw some over your
shoulder, or God knows what'll happen.  My father used to throw it three
times, so if you'd been him, you'd have buried me in the stuff."

She started walking again, and Pablo said, "Stop.  Wait, Ginger.  The
man who threw salt over his shoulder-tell me what he looks like."

"Young," she said.  "Thirty-two or thirty-three.  About five-ten.  Lean.
Dark hair.  Dark eyes.  Sort of handsome.  Seems shy, sweet."

Dominick Corvaisis.  No doubt about it.

She began to move again.  Pablo stayed at her side until, realizing she
was about to sit in the restaurant booth, he guided her gently to the
sofa.  She sat back on it and looked out a window, smiling at her
private panorama of Nevada plains washed in the light of a dying sun.

Pablo watched and listened while Ginger exchanged pleasantries with the
waitress and ordered a bottle of Coors.  The beer was served, and Ginger
pantomimed sipping it while she watched the sun fade.  Seconds ticked
past, but Pablo didn't speed her through the scene because he knew they
were approaching the crucial moment when her real memories gave way to
phony ones.  The event-the thing that she saw and should not have
seen-had transpired around this time, and Pablo wanted to learn
everything he could about the minutes leading up to it.

Twilight arrived back there in the past.

When the waitress returned, Ginger ordered a bowl of the homemade
vegetable soup and a cheeseburger with all the trimmings.

Night fell out there in Nevada.

Abruptly, before her food had been served, Ginger frowned and said,
"What's that?" She looked out the imagined window, scowling.

"What do you see?" Pablo asked, chained to his inconvenient vantage
point in present-day Boston.

A worried look came over her face, and she stood up. "What the devil is
that noise?" She looked toward other people in the restaurant with a
puzzled expression, and she spoke to them: "I don't know.  I don't know
what it is." She suddenly tottered sideways and nearly fell.  "Gevalt!"
She reached out as if supporting herself against the side of a booth or
table.  "Shaking.  Why's everything shaking?" She jumped in surprise.
"It's knocked over my beer glass.  Is it an earthquake?  What's
happening?  What is that sound?" She stumbled again.  Now she was
frightened.  "The door!" She started to run across the living room,
though in her mind she was heading toward the exit from the restaurant
that, in reality, she had long ago departed.  "The door," she cried
again, but then she stopped abruptly, swaying, gasping, shuddering.

When Pablo caught up with her, she dropped to her knees and hung her
head.  "What's happening, Ginger?"

"Nothing." She had changed in an instant.

"What's that noise?"

"What noise?" The robot voice again.

"Ginger, damn it, what's happening in the Tranquility Grille?"

Horror was on her face, but she merely said, "I'm having dinner."

"That's a false memory"Having dinner."

He tried to make her continue with the crucial memory of the frightening
thing that had been about to happen.  But at last he had to accept that
the Azrael Block, behind which her memories were repressed, took form
when she had been running for the restaurant door, and it did not end
until the following Tuesday morning, when she drove east toward Salt
Lake City.  In time, he might be able to chip it down to smaller
dimensions, but enough had been accomplished for one day.

At last they were making real headway.  They knew that on the night of
Friday, July 6, the year before last, Ginger had seen something she had
not been meant to see.  Having seen it, she had almost certainly been
detained in a room at the Tranquility Motel, where someone had used
sophisticated brainwashing techniques to conceal the memory of that
event from her and thereby prevent her from carrying word of it to the
world.  They had worked on her for three days-Saturday, Sunday, and
Monday-releasing her, with sanitized recollections, on Tuesday.

But, in God's name, who were these omnipotent strangers?

And what had she seen?

2.

Portland, Oregon

Sunday, January 5, Dominick Corvaisis flew to Portland and took a hotel
room near the apartment house in which he had once lived.  Rain was
falling hard, and the air was cold.

Except for dinner in the hotel restaurant, he spent the remaining hours
of Sunday afternoon and evening at a table by the window of his room,
alternately staring out at the rainlashed city and studying the
roadmaps.  Again and again, he mentally reviewed the trip he had taken
the summer before last (and would take again starting tomorrow).

As he had told Parker Faine on Christmas, he was convinced that he had
stumbled into a dangerous situation out there on the road, and that
(paranoid as it sounded) the memory of it had been wiped from his mind.
The mail from his unknown correspondent pointed to no other conclusion.

Two days ago, he had received a third envelope without a return address,
postmarked New York.  Now, when Dom tired of looking at the maps and
staring thoughtfully out at the Oregon rain, he picked up that envelope,
shook out the contents, and studied them.  This time there had been no
note, just two Polaroid photographs.

The first picture had the least effect on him, although it made him
tense-unaccountably tense, considering that it was a photograph of
someone who, as far as he knew, was a stranger to him.  A young, pudgy
priest with unruly auburn hair, freckles, and green eyes.  He was facing
the camera, sitting in a chair near a small writing desk, a suitcase at
his side.  He was very erect, head up and shoulders squared off, hands
limp in his lap, knees together.  The picture disturbed Dom because the
expression on the priest's face was only one step removed from the
lifeless, sightless stare of a corpse. The man was alive; that much was
evident from his rigid posture, yet his eyes were chillingly empty.

The second photograph hit Dom much harder than the first, and its
powerful effect did not diminish with familiarity.  A young woman was
the subject of this snapshot, and she was no stranger.  Although Dom
could not recall where they had met, he knew they were acquainted.  The
sight of her made his heart quicken with a fear similar to that which
filled him when he woke from one of his episodes of sleepwalking.  She
was in her late twenties.  Blue eyes.  Silver-blond hair.  Exquisitely
proportioned face.  She would have been exceptionally beautiful if her
expression had not been precisely that of the priest: slack, dead,
empty-eyed.  She had been photographed from the waist up, lying in a
narrow bed, sheets pulled up chastely to her neck.  Restraining straps
held her down.  One arm was partially bared to allow clearance for an IV
needle in her wrist vein.  She looked small, helpless, oppressed.

The photograph instantly brought to mind his own nightmare in which
unseen men were shouting at him and forcing his face into a sink.  A
couple of times, that bad dream had not begun at the sink itself but in
a bed in a strange room, where his vision was blurred by a saffron mist.
Looking at the young woman, Dom was convinced that somewhere there was a
Polaroid shot of him in similar circumstances: strapped to a bed, an IV
needle in his arm, his face without expression.

When he had shown the two photographs to Parker Faine on Friday, the day
they came in the mail, the artist jumped to similar conclusions.  "If
I'm wrong, roast me in hell and make sandwiches for the devil, but I
swear this is a snapshot of a woman in a trance or drug-induced stupor,
undergoing the brainwashing that you evidently underwent.  Christ, this
situation gets more bizarre and fascinating day by day!  It's something
you ought to be able to go to the cops aboutbut you can't, because who's
to say which side they'd be on?

It may have been a branch of our own government you ran afoul of out
there on the road.  Anyway, you weren't the only one who got in trouble,
good buddy.  This priest and this woman also stumbled into it.  Whoever
went to this much trouble is hiding something damned big, a lot bigger
than I thought before."

Now, sitting at the table by his hotel room window, Dom held one picture
in each hand, side by side, and let his gaze travel back and forth from
the priest to the woman.  "Who are you?" he asked aloud.  "What're your
names?  What happened to us out there?"

Outside, lightning cracked whiplike in the night over Portland, as if a
cosmic coachman were urging the rain to fall faster.  Like the drumming
hooves of a thousand harried horses, fat, hard-driven raindrops hammered
against the wall of the hotel and galloped down the window.

Later, Dom fastened himself to the bed with a tether that he had
improved considerably since Christmas.  First he wrapped a length of
surgical gauze around his right wrist and secured it with adhesive tape,
a barrier between rope and flesh to prevent abrasion.  He was no longer
using an ordinary allpurpose line but a hawser-laid nylon rope, only a
quarterinch in diameter but with a breaking strength of twenty-six
hundred pounds.  It was expressly made for rock- and mountain-climbing.

He had switched to the sturdier rope because, on the night of December
28, he had slipped his previous tether by chewing all the way through it
while asleep.  The mountaineering rope was fray-resistant and nearly as
impervious to teeth as copper cable would have been.

That night in Portland, he woke three times, wrestling fu riously with
the tether, perspiring, panting, his racing heart's accelerator floored
beneath a heavy weight of fear.  "The moon!  The moon!"

3.

Las Vegas, Nevada

The day after Christmas, Jorja Monatella took Marcie to Dr. Louis
Besancourt, and the examination turned into an ordeal that frustrated
the physician, frightened Jorja, and embarrassed them both.  From the
moment Jorja took her into the doctor's waiting room, the girl screamed,
screeched, wailed, and wept.  "No doctors!  They'll hurt me!"

On those rare occasions when Marcie misbehaved (and they were rare,
indeed), one hard slap on the bottom was usually all that was required
to restore her senses and induce contrition.  But when Jorja tried that
now, it had the opposite effect of what she intended.  Marcie screamed
louder, wailed more shrilly, and wept more copiously than before.

The assistance of an understanding nurse was required to convey the
shrieking child from the waiting area into an examination room, by which
time Jorja was not only mortified but worried sick by Marcie's complete
irrationality.  Dr.  Besancourt's good humor and bedside manner were not
enough to quiet the girl, and in fact she became more frightened and
violent the moment he appeared.  Marcie pulled away from him when he
tried to touch her, screamed, struck him, kicked him, until it became
necessary for Jorja and a nurse to hold her down.  When the doctor used
an ophthalmoscope to examine her eyes, her terror reached a crescendo
indicated by a sudden loosening of her bladder that was dismayingly
reminiscent of the fiasco on Christmas Day.

Her uncontrolled urination marked an abrupt change in her demeanor.  She
became sullen, silent, just as she had for a while on Christmas.  She
was shockingly pale, and she shivered constantly.  She had that eerie
detachment that made Jorja think of autism.

Lou Besancourt had no simple diagnosis with which to comfort Jorja.  He
spoke of neurological and brain disorders,

and psychological illness.  He wanted Marcie to check into Sunrise
Hospital for a few days of tests.

The ugly scene at Besancourt's office was just a warmup for a series of
fits Marcie threw at the hospital.  The mere sight of doctors and nurses
catapulted her into panic, and invariably the panic became outright
hysteria that escalated until, exhausted, the child fell into that
semicatatonic trance from which she needed hours to recover.

Jorja took a week of sick-leave from the casino and virtually lived at
Sunrise for four days, sleeping on a rollaway bed in Marcie's room.  She
didn't get much rest.  Even in a drugged sleep, Marcie twitched, kicked,
whimpered, and cried out in her dreams: "The moon, the moon .  .  ." By
the fourth night, Sunday, December 29, worried and weary, Jorja almost
needed medical attention for herself.

Miraculously, on Monday morning, Marcie's irrational terror simply went
away.  She still did not like being hospitalized, and she pleaded
aggressively to go home.  But she no longer appeared to feel that the
walls were going to close in and crush her.  She remained uneasy in the
company of doctors and nurses, but she did not shrink from them in
horror or strike them when they touched her.  She was still pale,
nervous, and watchful.  But for the first time in days, her appetite was
normal, and she ate everything on her breakfast tray.

Later in the day, after the final testing had been completed, while
Marcie was sitting in bed eating lunch, Dr.  Besancourt spoke with Jorja
in the hall.  He was a hound-faced man with a bulbous nose and moist,
kind eyes.  "Negative, Jorja.  Every test, negative.  No brain tumors,
no cerebral lesions, no neurological dysfunction."

Jorja almost burst into tears.  "Thank God."

"I'm going to refer Marcie to another doctor," Besancourt said.  "Ted
Coverly.  He's a child psychologist, and a good one.  I'm sure he'll
ferret out the cause of this.  Funny thing is .  .  .  I have a hunch we
may have cured Marcie without realizing we were doing it."

Jorja blinked.  "Cured her?  What do you mean?"

"In retrospect I can see that her behavior had all the earmarks of a
phobia.  Irrational fear, panic attacks .  .  .  I suspect she'd begun
to develop a severe phobic aversion to all things medical.  And there's
a treatment called "flooding," wherein the phobic patient is
purposefully, even ruthlessly exposed to the thing he fears for such a
long time-hours and hoursthat the power of the phobia is shattered.
Which is what we might've inadvertently done to Marcie when we forced
her into the hospital."

"Why would she have developed such a phobia?" Jorja asked.  "Where would
it've come from?  She's never had a bad experience with doctors or
hospitals.  She's never been seriously ill."

Besancourt shrugged, sidled out of the way of some nurses pushing a
patient on a gurney.  "We don't know what causes phobias.  You don't
have to crash in a plane in order to be afraid of flying.  Phobias just
.  .  .  spring up.  Even if we accidentally cured her, there'll be a
residual apprehension that Ted Coverly can identify.  He'll root out any
remaining traces of phobic anxiety.  Don't worry, Jorja."

That afternoon, Monday, December 30, Marcie was released from the
hospital.  In the car on the way home, she was almost her old self,
happily pointing out animal shapes in the clouds.  At home, she dashed
into the living room and settled down immediately among the piles of new
Christmas toys which she had not yet had much opportunity to enjoy. She
still played with the Little Ms.  Doctor kit, though not exclusively or
with that disturbing intensity that she had exhibited on Christmas Day.

Jorja's parents raced over to the apartment.  Jorja had kept them away
from the hospital by arguing that they might disturb Marcie's delicate
condition.  Marcie remained in a splendid mood at dinner, sweet and
amusing, leaving Jorja's parents disarmed.

For the next three nights, Marcie slept in Jorja's bed in case she
suffered an anxiety attack, but none materialized. The nightmares came
with less frequency and less power than before, and Marcie's sleeptalk
awakened Joria only twice in three nights.  "The moon, moon, the moon!"
But now it was a soft and almost forlorn call rather than a shout.

In the morning, at breakfast, she asked Marcie about the dream, but the
girl could not remember it.  "The moon?" she said, frowning into her
bowl of Trix.  "Didn't dream about the moon.  Dreamed about horses.  Can
I have a horse someday?"

"Maybe, when we don't live in an apartment any more."

Marcie giggled.  "I know that.  You can't keep a horse in an apartment.
The neighbors would complain."

Thursday, Marcie saw Dr.  Coverly for the first time.  She liked him. If
she still had an abnormal fear of doctors, she hid it well.

That night Marcie slept in her own bed, with only the company of a teddy
bear named Murphy.  Jorja got up three times between midnight and dawn
to look in on her daughter. Once she heard the now-familiar chant-"moon,
moon, moon"-in a whisper that, because it was an eerie blend of fear and
delight, made the hair prickle on her scalp.

And on Friday, with three days of school vacation still ahead for
Marcie, Jorja put her in Kara Persaghian's care once more and returned
to work.  It was almost a relief to get back to the noise and smoke of
the casino.  Cigarettes, stale beer, and the occasional blast of
halitosis were infinitely more pleasing than the antiseptic stink of the
hospital.

She picked up Marcie at Kara's place, and on the way home the girl
excitedly showed her the product of a day spent drawing on butcher's
paper: scores of pictures of the moon in every imaginable hue.

On Sunday morning, January 5, when Jorja got out of bed and went to brew
coffee, she found Marcie at the dining room table, engaged in a curious
task.  The girl, still in her pajamas, was taking all the photographs
out of their picture album and making neat stacks of them.

"I'm putting the pictures in a shoebox, because I need the .  .  .
album," the girl said, frowning over the hard word. "I need it for my
moon collection." She held up a picture of the moon clipped from a
magazine.  "I'm going to make a big collection."

"Why?  Baby, why're you so interested in the moon?"

"It's pretty," Marcie said.  She put the picture on a blank page of the
photo album and stared at it.  In her fixed gaze, in the intensity of
her fascination with the photograph, there was an echo of the
single-mindedness with which she had played Little Ms.  Doctor.

With a quiver of apprehension, Jorja thought, This is how the damn
doctor phobia started.  Quietly.  Innocently.  Has Marcie merely traded
one phobia for another?

She had the urge to run to the telephone and somehow get hold of Dr.
Coverly, even if it was Sunday and his day off.

But as she stood by the table, studying her daughter, Jorja decided she
was overreacting.  Marcie certainly had not traded one phobia for
another.  After all, the girl wasn't afraid of the moon.  Just .  .  .
well, strangely fascinated by it.  A temporary enthusiasm.  Any parent
of a bright seven-year-old was accustomed to these short-lived but
fiercely burning fascinations and infatuations.

Nevertheless, Jorja decided she would tell Dr.  Coverly about it when
she took Marcie to his office for a second session on Tuesday.

At twelve-twenty A M.  Monday, before she turned in for the night, Jorja
looked in on Marcie to see if she was sleeping soundly.  The girl was
not in bed.  In her dark room, she had drawn a chair up to the window
and was sitting there, staring out.

"Honey?  What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong.  Come see

Marcie said softly, dream ily.

Heading toward the girl, Jorja said, "What is it, Peanut?"

"The moon," Marcie said, her eyes fixed on the silvery crescent high in
the black vault of the sky.  "The moon."

4.

Boston, Massachusetts

On Monday, January 6, the wind from the Atlantic was bitterly cold and
unrelenting, and all of Boston was humbled by it.  On the blustery
streets, heavily bundled and bescarfed people hurried toward sanctuary
with their shoulders drawn up and heads tucked down.  In the hard gray
winter light, the modern glass office towers appeared to be constructed
of ice, while the older buildings of historic Boston huddled together,
presenting a drab and miserable face utterly unlike their charm and
stateliness in better weather.  Last night, sleet had fallen.

The barren trees were jacketed in glittering ice, bare black branches
poking through the white crust like the marrow core revealed beneath the
outer layers of shattered bones.

Herbert, the efficient major domo who kept the Hannaby household
functioning smoothly, drove Ginger Weiss to her seventh post-Christmas
meeting with Pablo Jackson.  The wind and the previous night's ice-storm
had brought down power lines and disrupted the traffic lights at more
than half the intersections.  They finally reached Newbury Street at
eleven-oh-five A. M., just five minutes past Ginger's eleven o'clock
appointment.

After the breakthrough during Saturday's session, Ginger had wanted to
contact the people at the Tranquility Motel in Nevada and broach the
subject of the unremembered event that had transpired there on the night
of July 6, the summer before last.  Either the owners of that motel were
accomplices of those who had tampered with Ginger's memory, or they were
victims like her.  If they had been subjected to brainwashing, perhaps
they also were experiencing anxiety attacks of one sort or another.

Pablo was firmly opposed to immediate confrontation.  He felt the risks
were too great.  If the owners of the motel were not victims but
associates of the victimizers, Ginger might be putting herself in grave
danger.  "You've got to be patient. Before approaching them, you must
have as much information as you can possibly obtain."

She had suggested they go to the police, seeking protection and an
investigation, but Pablo had convinced her that the police would not be
interested.  She had no proof that she had been the victim of a mental
mugging.  Besides, the local constabulary could not unravel a crime
across state lines. She'd have to go to the federal authorities or local
Nevada police, and in either case she might be unwittingly seeking help
from the very people responsible for what had been done to her.

Frustrated but unable to find a hole in Pablo's arguments, Ginger had
agreed to continue following his program of treatment.  He had wanted
Sunday to himself, so he could review the crucial tape of Saturday's
session, and he had said he was not available Monday morning because he
intended to see a friend in the hospital.  "But you come back at, say,
one o'clock Monday afternoon, and we'll begin chipping away at the edges

of that memory block-en pantoufles, 'in slippers' as they say, in a
relaxed manner."

This morning he had called her from the hospital to say that his friend
was being discharged sooner than expected, and that he, Pablo, would be
home by eleven o'clock if she would like to come earlier than planned.
"You can help me make lunch."

Now, disembarking from the elevator and stepping quickly along the short
hall to Pablo's apartment, Ginger decided that she would make every
effort to control her natural impatience and to settle for making
progress en pantoufles, as the magician was determined they would.

The front door was ajar.  Assuming he had left it open for her, she
stepped into the foyer.  Closing the door, she said, "Pablo?"

In another room, someone grunted.  Something clattered softly. Something
thudded to the floor.

"Pablo?" He did not answer.  Moving into the living room, she called out
louder than before.  "Pablo?"

Silence.

One of the library's double doors was open, and a light was on.  Ginger
entered-and saw Pablo lying face-down on the floor near the Sheraton
desk.  He had evidently just returned from his visit to his hospitalized
friend, for he was still wearing galoshes and an overcoat.

As she rushed to him and knelt at his side, grim possibilities occurred
to her-cerebral hemorrhage, thrombosis, or embolism; massive heart
attack-but she was not prepared for what she found when she eased him
onto his back.  Pablo had been shot high in the chest, and bright red
arterial blood welled from the bullet hole.

His eyes fluttered open, and although they looked unfocused, he seemed
to know who she was.  Blood bubbled over his lower lip.  He got out a
single word in an urgent whisper: "Run."

Her instinctive reaction upon seeing him prone before the desk had been
that of a friend and physician: Anguished, she had gone immediately to
his aid.  But until Pablo said, "Run, Ginger did not understand that her
own life might be in jeopardy.  Suddenly she realized that she had heard
no gunfire, which meant a silencer-equipped pistol.  The assailant was
no ordinary burglar.  Someone infinitely more dangerous.  All those
considerations flashed through her mind in an instant.

Her heart pounding, she rose and turned toward the door. The gunman-tall
and broad-shouldered, wearing a leather topcoat belted tightly at the
waist-came out from behind the door, holding the silencer-equipped
pistol.  He was big, but surprisingly less threatening in appearance
than she had expected.  He was her age, clean-cut, with innocent blue
eyes and a face unsuited for menace.

When he spoke, the disparity between his unremarkable appearance and his
murderous actions was even greater, for his first words were a tremulous
apology of sorts.  "Shouldn't have happened.  Didn't have to happen, for
Christ's sake.  I just .  .  .  I was duping those tapes on a high-speed
recorder. That's all I wanted-dupes of the tapes."

He was pointing to the desk, and for the first time Ginger noticed an
open attachs case in which was nestled a compact piece of electronic
equipment.  Tape cassettes were scattered across the top of the desk,
and she knew at once what tapes they were.

"Let's call an ambulance," she said.  She edged toward the phone, but he
stopped her by gesturing pointedly and angrily with the gun.

"High-speed duplication," he said, torn between rage and tears.  "I
could've made copies of all six of your sessions and been out of here.
He wasn't supposed to be home for another fucking hour at least!"

Ginger grabbed a chair cushion and used it to prop up Pablo's head, so
he would not choke on the blood and phlegm in his throat.

Obviously stunned by what had happened, the gunman said, "He just comes
in so quiet, gliding in here like a goddamned ghost."

Ginger remembered how gracefully and elegantly the magician carried
himself, as if each movement was prelude to an act of prestidigitation.

Pablo coughed, closed his eyes.  Ginger wanted to do more for him, but
the only remedy was heroic surgery.  At the moment, she could only keep
a hand on his shoulder in a feeble attempt to reassure him.

She looked up entreatingly, but the gunman only said, "And what the
hell's he doing packing a gun?  A fucking eighty-year-old man, a gun in
his fist, as if he knows how to handle something like this."

Until now, Ginger had not noticed the pistol on the carpet, a few feet
from Pablo's out-flung hand.  When she saw it, a cripplingly sharp pang
of horror went through her, and she nearly passed out, for in that
instant she knew Pablo had been aware all along that it was dangerous to
help her.  She had not suspected that the mere attempt to probe at the
memory block would quickly draw the unwanted attentions of men like this
one in the leather topcoat.  Because this meant she was being watched.
Maybe not hour by hour or even every day.  But they were keeping tabs on
her.  The moment she first called Pablo, she unwittingly endangered his
life.  And somehow he had known, for he had been packing a gun. Now,
Ginger felt the weight of guilt.

"If he hadn't pulled that stupid .22," the gunman said miserably, "and
if he hadn't insisted on calling the cops, I'd have walked away without
laying a hand on him.  I didn't want to hurt him.  Shit."

" For God's sake," Ginger said beseechingly, "let me call an ambulance.
If you didn't mean to hurt him, then let's get help."

The gunman shook his head, and his gaze moved to the crumpled magician.
"Too late anyway.  He's dead."

Those last two words, like a pair of hard punches, knocked the breath
out of her and drew the shadowy curtain of unconsciousness to the edges
of her vision.  One glance at the old man's glassy eyes was enough to
confirm what the gunman had said, yet she resisted the truth.  She
lifted his left hand and put her fingertips to his thin black wrist,
feeling for a pulse.  Finding none, she searched along the carotid
artery in his throat, but in spite of the remaining warmth of the flesh,
there was only an awful stillness where once had been the throb of life.
"No," she said.  "Oh, no." She touched Pablo's dark brow, not with the
diagnostic intent of a physician but tenderly, lovingly.  Her heart was
so painfully constricted with grief that it was difficult to believe she
had known the magician only two weeks.  Like her father, she was quick
to give her heart, and because Pablo was the man he was, the gift of
affection and love was even more easily bestowed than usual. "I'm
sorry," the killer said shakily.  "I'm really sorry.  If he hadn't tried
to stop me, I'd have walked right out of here. Now, I've killed someone,
haven't I?  And .  .  .  you've seen my face."

Blinking back her tears, suddenly aware that she could not afford to
grieve right now, Ginger rose slowly to her feet and faced him.

As if thinking aloud, the gunman said, "You've got to be dealt with now,
too.  I'll have to ransack the place, empty out drawers, take a few
things of value, and make it look like you two walked in on a burglar."
He chewed worriedly on his lower lip.  "Yeah, it'll work.  Instead of
copying the tapes, I'll just take them, so they won't be here to raise
suspicions."

He looked at Ginger and winced.  "I'm sorry.  Jesus, I really am, but
that's the way it'll have to be.  I wish it didn't.  It's partly my
fault.  Should've heard the old bastard coming in. Shouldn't have let
him surprise me." He moved toward her. "Should I maybe rape you, too?  I
mean, would a burglar just shoot a good-looking girl like you?  Wouldn't
he rape you first?  Wouldn't that make this look more real?" He came
closer, and she began to back away.  "God, I don't know if I can do it.
I mean, how can I get a hard-on and do it to you when I know I've got to
kill you afterward?" He kept coming toward her, and she backed up
against the bookshelves.  "I don't like this.  Believe me, I don't. This
shouldn't have to happen.  I really hate this."

His apparently genuine pity, repeated apologies, and sorrowful
self-recriminations gave Ginger the creeps.  He would have been less
frightening if he had been pitiless and bloodthirsty.  The fact that he
had scruples but could set them aside long enough to commit one rape and
two murders .  .  .  that made him more of a monster.

He stopped six feet from her and said, "Please take off your coat."

It was useless to beg, but she hoped to make him overconfident.  "I
won't give a good description of you.  I swear. Please let me go."

"Wish I could." His face defined remorse.  "Take off your coat."

Buying time while she arrived at a course of action, Ginger slowly
unbuttoned the coat.  Her hands were shaking, but she exaggerated those
genuine tremors and fumbled with the buttons.  At last she shrugged out
of the coat and let it drop to the floor.

He stepped closer.  The pistol was only inches from her chest.  He was
more relaxed, holding the gun less rigidly than before, thrusting it
forward less aggressively, though he was by no means lax with it.

"Please don't hurt me." She continued to beg because, if he thought she
was nearly paralyzed with abject fear, he might slip up and give her an
opportunity for escape.

"I don't want to hurt you," he said, as if deeply offended by the
implication that he had any choice in the matter.  "Didn't want to hurt
him, either.  That old fool was responsible for this.  Not me.  Listen,
I'll make it as painless as I can.  I promise you that."

Still holding the gun in his right hand, he used his left hand to touch
her breasts through her sweater.  She endured his fondling because he
might become careless as he grew aroused. In spite of his claims that
his empathy would render him impotent, Ginger was certain he'd have no
difficulty raping her.  Beneath his regret and sympathy, beneath the
sensitivity he wished to project more for his own benefit than for hers,
he was taking an unconscious savage pleasure in what he had done and
would do.  In spite of his gentle voice, violence burned in every word
he spoke; he stank of violence.

He said, "Very pretty.  Petite yet so nicely built." He slipped his hand
under her sweater, gripped her bra, gave it a hard yank that broke it.
As elastic snapped, the bra straps dug painfully into her shoulders; the
metal clasp at her back bit the skin.  He grimaced as if her pain was
transmitted to him. "I'm sorry.  Did I hurt you?  I didn't mean it. I'll
be more careful." He pushed aside the ruined brassiere and put his cool,
clammy hand on her bare breasts.

Filled equally with terror and revulsion, Ginger pressed back even
harder against the bookshelves, which jabbed painfully into her back.
The gunman was less than an arm's length away from her now, but he kept
the pistol between them. The muzzle was pressed coldly against her bare
midriff, leaving her no room to maneuver.  If she tried to twist free of
him, she would be gut-shot for her temerity.

Fondling her, he continued to speak soerly and to express great sadness
at the necessity of raping and killing her, as though she simply must
understand, as though it would be unthinkably cruel of her not to bestow
upon him full absolution for the sin of taking her life.

With nowhere to run, with his monotonous self-justifications washing
over her in numbing waves of words, subjected to his groping hand,
Ginger was gripped by a claustrophobia so intense she felt the urge to
claw at him and force him to pull the trigger, just to end it.  His
Certs-scented breath had a cloying minty aroma that, by its
pervasiveness, gave her the feeling she was closed up in a bell-jar with
him.  She whimpered, pleaded with wordless sounds, turned her head from
side to side as if trying to deny the reality of the assault. The
picture of demoralization and terror that she presented could not have
been more convincing if she'd had days to practice, but there was
unfortunately little calculation in it.

Further inflamed by her distress, he pawed at her more roughly than
before.  "I think I can do it, baby.  I think I can do it to you.  Feel
me, baby.  Just feel me." He pressed his body to hers and ground his
pelvis against her.  Incredibly, he seemed to think that, under such
stressful and tragic circumstances, his rampant timescence was a tribute
to her erotic appeal and that somehow she ought to be flattered.

Her reaction could only have been a disappointment for him.

When he pressed and rubbed himself against her, he was obliged to stop
jamming the gun into her belly.  Swept away by his own excitement,
convinced that Ginger was weak and helpless, he did not even keep the
weapon pointed at her but held it to one side with the muzzle aimed at
the floor.  Ginger's terror was exceeded by her loathing and anger, and
the moment the pistol swung away from her, she translated those pent-up
emotions into action.  Turning her head to the side, she slumped against
him as if about to faint in fear or in a swoon of reluctant passion, an
action that brought her mouth to his throat.  In swift succession, she
bit him hard in the Adam's apple, slammed one knee into his crotch, and
clawed at his gun hand to keep the pistol away from her.

He partially blocked the knee, limiting the damage to his privates, but
he was unprepared for the bite.  Shocked, horrified, and reeling from
the devastating pain in his throat, the gunman pushed away from her and
stumbled backward two steps.

She had bitten deep, and now she gagged on the taste of his blood,
though she did not permit her revulsion to delay her counterattack.  She
grabbed his gun hand, brought it to her mouth, and bit his wrist.

A sharp cry of pain and astonishment burst from him.  Because she was
delicate, waiflike, he had not taken her seriously.

As she bit him again, he dropped the gun, but simultaneously he made a
fist of his other hand and with tremendous force slammed it into her
back.  She was driven to her knees and thought for a moment that he had
broken her spine.  Pain as bright and scintillant as an electric current
shot up her back into her neck, flashed through her skull.

Stunned, her vision briefly blurred, Ginger almost did not see him
bending to retrieve the gun.  Just as his fingers touched the butt, she
frantically threw herself at his legs.  Seeing her coming and hoping to
jump out of her reach, he whipped upright as if he were a lashed-down
sapling suddenly cut loose.  When she hit him a fraction of a second
later, he windmilled his arms in a brief attempt to keep his balance.
Falling backward, he crashed into one of the library's chairs, knocked
over a small table and a lamp, and rolled onto Pablo Jackson's corpse.

Equally breathless, staring warily at each other, they were both
petrified for a moment.  They were on their sides on the floor, curled
fetally in reaction to their pains, gasping for breath.

To Ginger, the gunman's eyes seemed as wide and round as clock faces,
proof that he was filled with fevered thoughts of his own mortality
ticking close.  The bite would not kill him.  She had not bitten through
the jugular vein or the carotid artery, had merely pierced the thyroid
cartilage, mangling tissue, severing a few small vessels.  However, it
was easy to understand why he might be convinced it was a mortal wound;
the pain must be excruciating.  He put his unbitten hand to his damaged
throat, then pulled it away and stared aghast at his own gore dripping
off his fingers.  The killer thought he was dying, and that might make
him either less or more dangerous.

Simultaneously, they saw that his pistol had been kicked halfway across
the library during their tussle.  It was closer to him than to Ginger.
Bleeding from throat and wrist, making a strange wheezing-gurgling
noise, he scrambled across the floor toward the weapon, and Ginger had
no option but to get up and run.

She fled from the library into the living room, hobbling more than
running, slowed by the pain in her back, which pulsed through her in
diminishing but still debilitating waves. She intended to leave the
apartment by the front door, but then she realized there was no escape
in that direction because the only exits from the public corridor were
the elevator and the stairs.  She could not wait for the elevator, and
in the stairwell she could easily be trapped.

Instead, hunched because of her aching back, she scurried crablike
across the living room, down a long hall, into the kitchen, where the
swinging door softly swished shut behind her.  She went directly to the
utensils rack on the wall by the stove and took down a butcher's knife.

She became aware that a shrill, eerie keening was issuing from her.  She
held her breath, cut off the sound, and got a grip on herself.

The gunman did not immediately burst into the kitchen, as Ginger
expected.  After a few seconds she realized that she was lucky he had
not yet appeared, because the butcher's knife was of no use against a
pistol at a distance of ten feet. Silently cursing herself for almost
having made a fatal error, she quickly and light-footedly returned to
the door and took up a position to one side of it.  Her back still
ached, but the sharpest pain was gone.  Now she was able to stand
straight and flat against the wall.  Her heart was pounding so loud that
it seemed as if the wall against which she leaned was a drumhead,
responding to her heartbeat, amplifying it until the hollow booming of
atrium and ventricle must be echoing throughout the entire apartment.

She held the knife low, ready to swing it up and into him in a deadly
arc.  However, that desperate scenario depended on his slamming through
the kitchen door in a fit of hysteria and rage, reckless, crazed by the
conviction that he was dying from his throat wound, bent on blind
revenge.  If instead he came slowly, cautiously, nudging the swinging
door open inch by inch with the barrel of the gun, Ginger would be in
trouble. But every second that passed without his appearance made it
less likely that he would play the drama out in the way she hoped.

Unless the throat wound was far worse than she had realized.  In that
case, he might be still in the library, bleeding to death on the Chinese
carpet.  She prayed that was what had happened to him.

But she knew better.  He was alive.  And he was coming.

She could scream and perhaps alert a neighbor who would call the police,
but the gunman would not be driven off in time.  He would not run until
he killed her.  Screaming was a waste of energy.

She pressed harder against the wall, as if trying to melt into it.  The
swinging door, just inches from her face, riveted her as a blacksnake
might command the full attention of a fieldmouse.  She was tense, poised
to react to the first sign of movement, but the door remained still,
maddeningly still.

Where the hell was he?

Five seconds passed.  Ten.  Twenty.

What was he doing?

The taste of blood in her mouth became more rather than less acrid as
the seconds ticked past, and nausea worked its greasy fingers in her. As
she had more time to consider what she'd done to him in the library, she
grew acutely aware of the bestiality of her actions, and she was shaken
by her own potential for savagery.  She had time, as well, to think
about what she still intended to do to him.  She had a mental image of
the wide blade of the butcher's knife spearing deep into his body, and a
shudder of revulsion shook her.  She was not a killer.  She was a
healer, not merely by education but by nature as well.  She tried to
stop thinking about stabbing him. It was dangerous to think too much
about it, dangerous and confusing and enervating.

Where was he?

She could not wait any longer.  Afraid that her inaction was damping the
animal cunning and savage ferocity that she needed if she were to
survive, uneasily certain that each passing second was somehow giving
him a greater advantage, she eased to the doorway and put one hand on
the edge of the door.  But as she was about to pull it open a crack and
peer out at the hallway and into the living room, she was chilled by the
sudden feeling that he was there, inches away, on the other side of the
portal, waiting for her to make the first move.

Ginger hesitated, held her breath, listened.

Silence.

She brought her ear to the door, still could not hear anything.

The handle of the knife had grown slippery in her sweaty hand.

At last, she took hold of the edge of the door and cautiously pulled it
inward, until a half-inch gap opened.  No shots rang out, so she put one
eye to the crack.  The gunman was not right in front of her, as she had
feared, but at the far end of the hall where it met the foyer; he was
just reentering the apartment from the public corridor, pistol in hand.
Evidently, he had first looked for her at the elevator and on the
stairs. Not finding her, he had returned.  Now, by the way he closed the
door, locked it, and engaged the chain to delay her exit, it was clear
that he had decided she was still in the apartment.

He held his bitten hand to his bitten throat.  Even at a distance she
could hear his wheezy breathing.  However, he was clearly no longer
panicked.  Having survived this long, he was gaining confidence by the
second.  He had begun to realize that he would live.

Moving to the edge of the foyer, he looked left toward the living room
and right toward the bedroom.  Then he looked straight back down the
long shadowy hall, and Ginger's heart stumbled through a flurry of
irregular beats as, for a moment, he seemed to be staring directly at
her.  But he was too far away to see that the door was being held half
an inch ajar. Instead of coming straight toward her, he went into the
bedroom.  He moved with a quiet purposefulness that was disheartening.

She let the kitchen door go shut, unhappily aware that her plan would no
longer work.  He was a professional, accustomed to violence, and
although he was initially thrown off balance by the unexpected ferocity
of her attack, he was rapidly regaining his equilibrium.  By the time he
searched the bedrooms and the closets in there, he would be completely
cool and calculating once more.  He would not come charging into the
kitchen and make an easy target of himself.

She had to get out of the apartment.  Fast.

She had no hope of reaching the front door.  He might already be
finished in the bedroom and on his way back into the hall.

Ginger put the knife down.  She reached under her sweater, pulled off
her ruined bra, and dropped it on the floor.  She stepped silently
around the kitchen table, pulled the curtains

away from the window, and looked out at the fire-escape landing in front
of her.  Quietly, she twisted the latch.  She slid up the lower sash,
which unfortunately was not quiet. The wooden frame, swollen by the
winter dampness, moved with a squeak and squeal and scrape.  When it
abruptly loosened and slid all the way up with a solid thump and a
rattle of glass, she knew she had alerted the gunman.  She heard him
coming at a run along the hallway.

She climbed hastily out of the window, onto the iron fire escape, and
started down.  The bitter wind lashed her, and the piercing subzero cold
penetrated to her bones.  The metal steps were crusted with ice from
last night's storm, and icicles hung from the handrails.  In spite of
the treacherous condition of those switchback stairs, she had to descend
quickly or risk a bullet in the back of her head.  Repeatedly, her feet
almost slipped out from under her.  She could not get a secure grip on
the icy railing with her ungloved hands, but it was even worse when she
took hold of the bare metal, for she stuck to the frigid iron, pulling
loose only by sacrificing the top layer of skin.

When she was still four steps from the next landing, she heard someone
curse above her, and she glanced back.  Pablo Jackson's killer was
coming out of the kitchen window in frantic pursuit of her.

Ginger took the next step too fast, and the ice did its work. Her feet
flew out from under her, and she fell over the final three steps onto
the landing, crashing down on her side, reigniting the pain in her back.
Her fall shattered the ice that coated the metal grid, and chunks fell
through lower levels of the fire escape, making brittle music,
disintegrating as they struck the steps below.

In the wind's maniacal howling, the whisper of the silenced pistol was
lost altogether, but Ginger saw sparks leap off the iron inches from her
face, and she knew a shot had narrowly missed her.  She looked up in
time to see the gunman taking aim-and to see him slip and stumble down
several treads. He pitched forward, and she thought he was going to fall
atop her.  He grabbed at the railing three times before he was able to
halt his uncontrolled descent.

He was sprawled on his back across several risers, clutching a step with
one hand, one leg shot out into space between two of the narrow iron
balusters.  His other arm was hooked around a baluster, which was how he
had arrested his fall; that was the hand holding the pistol, which was
why he could not immediately take another shot at her.

Ginger scrambled to her feet, intent upon making as rapid a descent as
possible.  But when she cast one last quick look at the gunman, she was
arrested by the sight of the buttons on his topcoat, which were the only
colorful objects in that wintry gloom.  Bright brass buttons, each
decorated with the raised image of a lion passant, the familiar cadence
mark from English heraldry.  She had seen nothing special about the
buttons before; they were similar to those on many sports jackets,
sweaters, coats.  But now her eyes fixed on them, and everything else
faded away, as if only the buttons were real. Even the gabbling-hooting
wind, which filled the day and blustered coldly in every corner of it,
could not keep a grip on her awareness.  The buttons.  Only the buttons
held her attention, and they generated in her a terror far more powerful
than her fear of the gunman.

"No," she said, uselessly denying what was happening to her.  The
buttons.  "Oh, no." The buttons.  This was the worst possible time and
place to lose control of herself.  The buttons.

She could not forestall the attack.  For the first time in three weeks,
Ginger was overwhelmed by a crushing, irrational terror.  It made her
feel small, doomed.  It plunged her into a strange and lightless
interior landscape through which she was compelled to run blindly.

Turning from the buttons, she fled down the fire escape, and as total
blackness claimed her, she knew that her reckless flight would terminate
in a broken leg or fractured spine. Then, while she lay paralyzed, the
killer would come to her, put the gun to her head, and blow her brains
out.

Darkness.

Cold.

When the world returned to Ginger-or she to the worldshe was huddled in
dead leaves and snow and shadows at the foot of a set of exterior cellar
steps behind a townhouse, an unguessable distance along Newbury Street
from Pablo's building.  A dull pain throbbed the length of her back. Her
entire right side ached.  The badly abraded palm of her left hand
burned.  But the severe cold was the worst discomfort.

A chill lanced up through her from the snow and ice in which she sat.  A
frost passed into her by osmosis from the concrete retaining wall
against which she leaned.  The raw wind rushed down the single flight of
ten steep steps, snuffling and growling like a living creature.

She did not know how long she had been cowering there, but she ought to
get moving or risk pneumonia.  However, the gunman might be nearby,
searching for her, and if she revealed herself, the chase would be on
again, so she decided to wait a minute or two.

She was astonished that she had clambered all the way down the
ice-sheathed fire escape and had fled, by whatever roundabout route, to
this hiding place without breaking her neck.  Evidently, in her fugue,
reduced to the miserable condition of a frightened and mindless animal,
there was at least the compensation of an animal-like fleetness and
sure-footedness.

Like a pair of industrious morticians, the wind and cold continued to
drain the warmth from her.  The narrow, gray concrete stairwell
increasingly resembled an unlidded sarcophagus.  Ginger decided it was
time to go.  She rose slowly. The small backyard was deserted, as were
the yards of houses on both sides.  Ice-crusted snow.  A few bare trees.
Nothing threatening.  Shivering, sniffing, blinking away tears, Ginger
climbed the stairs and followed a brick walkway that linked the rear of
the house to the gate at the end of the small property.

She intended to find her way back to Newbury Street, locate a telephone,
and call the police, but as she reached the gate, that plan was abruptly
forgotten.  On each of the two gateposts was a wrought-iron carriage
lamp with amber panes of glass. Either they'd been left burning by
accident or were activated by a solenoid that had mistaken the dreary
winter morning for twilight.  They were electric lamps but had those
flickering bulbs that imitated gas flames, so the lantern-glass was
alive with shimmering, dancing amber light.  That throbbing, yellowish
luminosity made Ginger's breath catch, and she was once more pitched
into a state of unreasoning panic.

No!  Not again.

But, yes.  Yes.  The mist.  Nothingness.  Gone.

Colder.

Her feet and hands were going numb.

She was apparently on Newbury Street again.  She had crawled under a
parked truck.  Lying in the gloom under the oil pan, she peered out from
beneath her sanctuary, getting a wheel-level view of the vehicles parked
on the other side of the street.

Hiding.  Every time she recovered from a fugue, she was hiding from
something unspeakably terrifying.  Today, of course, she was hiding from
Pablo's killer.  But what about other days?  What had she been hiding
from then?  Even now, she was hiding not only from the gunman but from
something else that hovered tantalizingly at the edge of remembrance.
Something she had seen out in Nevada.  Something.

"Miss?  Hey, miss?"

Ginger blinked and turned stiffly toward the voice, which came from the
back of the truck.  She saw a man on his hands and knees, looking under
the tailgate.  For a moment she thought it was the gunman.

"Miss?  What's wrong?"

Not the gunman.  Evidently, he had given up when he couldn't find her
quickly and had fled.  This was someone she had never seen before, and
this was one occasion when a stranger's face was welcome.

He said, "What the hell are you doing under there?"

Ginger was filled with self-pity.  She realized how she had looked,
running crazily through the neighborhood like some demented freak.  All
dignity had been stolen from her.

She squirmed toward the man who had spoken to her, grasped the gloved
hand he offered, and allowed him to help her slide out from beneath the
truck, which proved to be a Mayflower Moving Company van.  The rear
doors were open. She glanced inside and saw boxes, furniture.  The guy
who had pulled her out was young, brawny, and dressed in quilted thermal
coveralls with the Mayflower logo stitched across the chest.

"What's going on?" he asked.  "Whore you hiding from, lady?"

As the Mayflower man spoke, Ginger noticed a policeman standing in the
middle of the intersection half a block away,

directing traffic, where a signal light had failed.  She ran toward him.

The Mayflower man called after her.

She was surprised she could run at all.  She felt as if she were a
creature constructed of nothing but aches and pains and chills.  Yet she
ran with a dreamy effortlessness into the shrieking wind.  The gutters
were full of icy slush, but the street itself was relatively dry and
calcimine-streaked with deicing compounds.  Dodging out of the way of a
couple of oncoming cars, she even found the strength to call out to the
cop as she drew near him.  "There's been a man killed!  Murder!  You've
got to come!  Murder!" Then, when he started toward her with a look of
concern on his broad Irish face, she saw the shiny brass buttons on his
heavy, winter-weight uniform coat, and all was lost again.  They were
not exactly like the buttons on the leather topcoat the killer had been
wearing; they were not decorated with a lion passant, but with some
other raised figure.  But one glimpse sent her thoughts flashing toward
remembrance of buttons she had seen then, durinp- the mysterious events
at the Tranquility Motel.  Some forbidden recollection began to surface,
and that pulled the Azrael Trigger.

As she lost control and ran off into her private darkness, the last
thing she heard was her own pathetic cry of despair.

Coldest.

That morning, at least for Ginger Weiss, Boston was the coldest place on
earth.  Bitter, polar, piercing, marrow-freezing, the January day
induced a glaciation of the spirit as well as the flesh.  When the fugue
receded, she was sitting on the ground in ice and snow.  Her hands and
feet were numb, stiff. Her lips were chapped and cracked.

This time she had taken refuge in the narrow space between a row of
well-manicured bushes and a brick building, in a shadowy corner where
the angled wall of a bay-windowed tower met a flat portion of the main
facade.  The former Hotel Agassiz.  Where Pablo had his apartment. Where
he had been killed.  She had come nearly full circle.

She heard someone approaching.  Between the hoary branches of the
snow-dressed and ice-laced shrubs, she saw someone climbing over the low
wrought-iron fence that separated the front lawn from the sidewalk.  She
did not see the person himself, merely his booted feet, legs clad in
blue trousers, and the flaps of a long, heavy, navy-blue coat.  But as
he came across the narrow strip of lawn toward the shrubbery, she knew
who he was: the traffic cop from whom she had turned and run.

Fearing yet another seizure at the sight of his coat buttons, Ginger
closed her eyes.

Perhaps irreversible psychological damage was a side-effect of the
brainwashing she had undergone, an inevitable result of the tremendous
and constant stress generated by the artificially repressed memories
struggling mightily to make themselves known.  Even if she could find
another hypnotist to do for her what Pablo had done, perhaps there was
no way the block could be broken or the pressure relieved, in which case
she was destined to deteriorate further.  If she was stricken by three
fugues in one morning, what was to prevent three more in the next hour?

The policeman's boots crunched noisily through the sleetskinned snow. He
stopped in front of her.  She heard him pressing against the low bushes
and parting them to look into her hiding place.  "Miss?  Hey, what's
wrong?  What were you shouting about murder?  Miss?"

Maybe she would fall into a fugue and remain there forever.

" Oh, now, what're you crying about?" the cop said sympathetically.
"Darlin', I can't help if you won't tell me what's wrong."

She would not be the daughter of Jacob Weiss if she failed to respond
warmly and eagerly to the slightest sign of kindness in others, and the
policeman's concern finally affected her. She opened her eyes and looked
up at the topmost brass button on his coat.  The sight of it did not
bring the hateful darkness upon her.  But that meant nothing, for the
ophthalmoscope, black gloves, and other triggering items had not
affected her later, when she had forced herself to confront them again.

In a crackle of ice, the cop pushed between the bushes. She said,
"They've killed Pablo.  They murdered Pablo."

And as she spoke those words, her distress over her condition was made
worse by a rush of guilt.  The 6th of January

would forever be a black day in her life.  Pablo was dead. Because he
tried to help her.

Such a very cold day.

5.

On the Road

Monday morning, the 6th of January, Dom Corvaisis cruised his old
Portland neighborhood in a rented Chevrolet, trying to recapture the
mood he had been in when he had left Oregon for Mountainview, Utah, more
than eighteen months ago.  The rain, as heavy as any he had ever seen,
had stopped near dawn.  Now the sky, though still cloudy from horizon to
horizon, was a particularly powdery, dry-looking shade of gray, like a
burnt field, as if there had been a fire behind the clouds that had
forced out all that precipitation.  He drove through the university
campus, stopping repeatedly to let the familiar scenes stir feelings and
attitudes of times past.  He parked across the street from the apartment
where he'd lived, and as he stared up at the windows, he tried to recall
the man he had been then.

He was surprised at how difficult it was to recollect the timidity with
which that other Dom Corvaisis had viewed life. Though he could bring to
mind the way he had been, there was no intimacy or poignancy to those
memories.  He could see those old days again, but he could not feel
them, which seemed to indicate that he could never be that old Dom
again, regardless of how much he feared the possibility.

He was convinced that he had seen something terrible on the road the
summer before last, and that something monstrous had been done to him.
But that conviction generated both a mystery and a contradiction.  The
mystery was that the event had wrought in him an undeniably positive
change. How could an experience fraught with pain and terror effect a
beneficial change in his outlook?  The contradiction was that, in spite
of the beneficial effect on his personality, the event filled his dreams
with horror.  How could his ordeal have been both terrifying and
positive, both horrible and uplifting at the same time?

The answer, if it could be found, was not here in Portland

but out on the highway.  He started the engine, put the Chevy in gear,
pulled away from his old apartment building, and went looking for
trouble.

The most direct route from Portland to Mountainview began with
Interstate 80 north.  But as he had done nineteen months ago, Dom took a
more roundabout trail, heading south on Interstate 5.  That special
summer, he had scheduled a layover in Reno for a few days to do some
research for a series of short stories about gambling, so the less
direct route had been necessary.

Now in his rented Chevy, he followed the familiar highway, keeping his
speed down to fifty, even as low as forty on the steeper hills, for he
had been pulling a U-Haul trailer that last day in June, and he had not
made good time.  And, as before, he stopped for lunch in Eugene.

Hoping to spot something that would goose his memory and provide a link
with the mysterious events of the previous trip, Dom looked over the
small towns that he passed.  However, he saw nothing that made him
uneasy, and nothing bad happened all the way to Grants Pass, where he
arrived shortly before six o'clock that evening, right on schedule.

He stayed in the motel where he had been a guest eighteen months ago. He
remembered the number of the room-tenbecause it was near the soft drink
and ice machines, which had been the source of irritating noises half
the night.  It was unoccupied, and he took it, vaguely explaining to the
clerk that it had sentimental associations for him.

He ate at the same restaurant, across the road from the motel.

He was seeking satori, which was a Zen word meaning "sudden
enlightenment," a profound revelation.  But enlightenment eluded him.

All day he had used the rearview mirror, hoping to spot a tail.  During
dinner, he surreptitiously watched the other customers.  But if he was
being followed, his tail was masterful, invisible.

At nine o'clock, rather than use the telephone in his room, he walked to
a nearby service station pay phone.  With his credit card, he placed a
call to the number of another pay phone in Laguna Beach.  By
prearrangement, Parker Faine was waiting there with a report on the mail
that he had collected for Dom earlier in the day.  There was little
chance that either of their phones was tapped; however, after receiving
those two disturbing Polaroid snapshots, Dom had decided (and Parker had
agreed) that in this case prudence and paranoia were synonymous.

"Bills," Parker said, "advertisements.  No more strange messages, and no
more'Polaroids.  How's it going at your end?"

"Nothing so far," Dom said, leaning wearily against the Plexiglas and
aluminum wall of the phone booth.  "Didn't sleep well last night."

"But you didn't go for a walk?"

"Didn't even get one knot untied.  Had a nightmare, though. The moon
again.  Anybody follow you to that pay phone?"

"Not unless he was as thin as a dime and a master of camouflage," Parker
said.  "So you can call me here again tomorrow night and not have to
worry that they've tapped the line."

"We sound like two madmen," Dom said.

"I'm kind of having fun," Parker said.  "Cops and robbers, hide and
seek, spies-I was always good at games like that when I was a kid.  You
just hang in there, my friend.  And if you need help, I'll come fast."

"I know," Dom said.

He walked back to the motel through a cold damp wind. As in the hotel in
Portland, he woke three times before dawn, always surfacing from an
unremembered nightmare, always shouting about the moon.

Tuesday, January 7, Dom rose early and drove to Sacramento, then took
Interstate 80 east toward Reno.  Rain fell, silvery and cold, for most
of the drive, and by the time he reached the foothills of the Sierras,
it was snowing.  He stopped at an Arco station, bought tire chains, and
put them on before heading into the mountains.

The summer before last, he had taken more than ten hours to get from
Grants Pass to Reno, and this time the drive took even longer.  When he
finally checked in at Harrah's Hotel where he had stayed before, called
Parker Faine from a pay phone, and had a bite of dinner in the coffee
shop, he was too tired to do anything but pick up a copy of the Reno
newspaper and return to his room.  So at eight-thirty that evening,
sitting in bed in his underwear, he saw the story about Zebediah Lomack.

MOON MAN'S ESTATE

WORTH HALF A MILLION DOLLARS

RENO-Zebediah Harold Lomack, 50, whose suicide on Christmas Day led to
the discovery of his bizarre obsession with the moon, left an estate
valued at more than $500,000.  According to documents filed with the
probate court by Eleanor Wolsey, sister of the deceased and executrix of
Lomack's will, most of the funds are in accounts at various savings and
loan associations and in treasury bills. The modest house in which
Lomack lived at 1420 Wass Valley Road, has an appraised value of only
$35,000.

Lomack, a professional gambler, is said to have amassed his wealth
primarily from the game of poker.  "He was one of the best players I
ever knew," said Sidney "Sierra Sid" Garfork of Reno, another
professional gambler and winner of last year's World Championship of
Poker at Binion's Horseshoe Casino in Las Vegas. "He took to cards when
he was just a kid the way some others might have a natural knack for
baseball or math or physics." According to Garfork and other friends of
Lomack, the gambler's estate would have been even larger if he had not
had a weakness for dice games.  "He lost back more than half his
winnings at the craps tables, and the IRS took a big chunk, of course,"
Garfork said.

On Christmas night, responding to a neighbor's report of shotgun fire,
Reno police officers found Lomack's body in the garbagestrewn kitchen of
his home.  Upon further investigation, they found thousands of
photographs of the moon decorating walls, ceilings, and furniture.

There was more to the story, which had apparently been a local sensation
for the past two weeks.  Dom read with growing fascination and
uneasiness.  Most likely, Zebediah Lomack's mad obsession with the moon
had nothing to do with Dom's own problems.  Coincidence Yet .  .  .  he
felt a stirring of precisely that fear-part terror, part horror, and
part awe-that filled him when he woke from his nightmares, that also
overwhelmed him when he went sleepwalking and tried to nail windows
shut.

He pored over the article several times, and at nine-fifteen, in spite
of his weariness, he decided that he had to get a look in the Lomack
house.  He dressed, retrieved his rented car from the hotel's valet
parking, and got directions to Wass Valley Road from the attendant. Reno
was below the snowline, so the night was dry and the roads clean.  Dom
stopped at an all-night Save-On drugstore to buy a flashlight.  He
arrived at 1420 Wass Valley Road shortly after ten o'clock and parked
across the street.

The house was actually a bungalow with large porches, every bit as
modest as the news account had indicated.  It sat on a half-acre lot.
From previous storms, snow lay in patches on the roof, covered the lawn,
weighted the branches of several large pines.  The windows were dark.

According to the article in the Reno newspaper, Eleanor Wolsey, Zebediah
Lomack's sister, had flown in from Florida three days after his death,
on December 28.  She arranged the funeral services, which had been
conducted on the thirtieth, and was staying over until the estate was
settled.  However, she was at a hotel rather than in her brother's
house, because the bungalow was too depressing.

Dom was a law-abiding citizen; the prospect of breaking into the house
gave him no thrill.  But it had to be done because there was no way he
could see it except by forced entry.  He saw no point in trying to
persuade Eleanor Wolsey to allow a visit tomorrow, for she had been
quoted in the newspaper as saying that she was sick and tired of gawkers
and that she was repulsed by the perverse curiosity of strangers.

Five minutes later, on the back porch of the Lomack bungalow, Dom
discovered that the door was equipped with a deadbolt in addition to its
regular lock.  He tried the windows that faced onto the porch.  The one
above the kitchen sink was unlatched.  He slid it open and clambered
inside.

Hooding the flashlight with one hand to avoid drawing the notice of
anyone outside, he swept the narrowed beam around the kitchen, which was
no longer in the disgusting condition in which Reno policemen had found
it on Christmas.  According to the newspaper, just two days ago Lomack's
sister began cleaning the house and preparing it for sale.  Evidently
she had started here.  The garbage was gone.  The counters were clean,
and the floor was spotless.  The air was filled with the stink of new
paint and Spectracide.  A single startled roach scurried along the
baseboard and disappeared behind the refrigerator, but there was no
longer a gross infestation.  And there were no pictures of the moon.

Dom was suddenly worried that Eleanor Wolsey and her helpers might have
made too much progress.  Perhaps all traces of Zebediah Lomack's
obsession had been stripped down, scrubbed out, and thrown away.

But that concern was quickly put to rest when Dom followed the pale
probing beam of the flashlight into the living room, where the walls and
ceiling and windows were still papered with big posters of the moon.  It
seemed as if he were hanging in deep space, in some crowded realm where
half a hundred cratered worlds orbited impossibly close to one another.
The effect was disorienting.  He felt dizzy, and his mouth went dry.

He moved slowly out of the living room into a hallway, where hundreds of
pictures of the moon-some color and some black-and-white, some large and
some small, some overlapping others-had been fixed to every inch of the
walls with glue, Scotch tape, masking tape, and staples.  The same
decorations had been applied in both bedrooms as well, so the
omnipresent moons seemed almost like a fungus that had spored and spread
throughout the house, creeping into every corner.

The newspaper report had said that no one but Lomack had been in the
house for more than a year prior to his suicide. Dom believed it, for if
visitors had seen the work of this lunatic cut-and-paste Michelangelo,
they would have contacted the mental health authorities at once.  The
neighbors told of the gambler's rapid metamorphosis from a hail-fellow
to a recluse.  Apparently his fascination with the moon had begun the
summer before last.

The summer before last .  .  .  The timing uncannily paralleled the
changes in Dom's own life.

Second by second, Dom grew more uneasy.  He could not understand the
insane behavior that had created this eerie display, could not put
himself inside the fevered mind of Lomack, but he could empathize with
the gambler's terror. Just moving through the moon-crowded house,
shining his flashlight on the lunar faces, Dom felt a tingling along the
back of his neck.  The moons did not mesmerize him as they had evidently
mesmerized Lomack, but as he stared at them he sensed instinctively that
the impulse that had driven Lomack to paper his house with moon images
was the same impulse that drove Dom himself to dream of them.

He and Lomack had shared some experience in which the moon had figured
or of which it was an apt and powerful symbol.  The summer before last
they had been in the same place at the same time.  The wrong place at
the wrong time.

Lomack had been driven mad by the stress of repressed memories.

Will I be driven mad, too?  Dom wondered as he stood in the master
bedroom, turning slowly in a circle.

A new and grim thought struck him.  Suppose Lomack had not killed
himself out of despair over his unshakable obsession but had, instead,
been compelled to shove the shotgun barrel into his mouth because he had
finally remembered what had happened to him the summer before last.
Maybe the memory was far worse than the mystery.  Maybe, if the truth
were revealed, sleepwalking and nightmares would seem less terrifying
than what had happened during that drive from Portland to Mountainview.

Moons .  .  .  The oppressiveness of those pendulant forms drastically
increased.  The claustrophobic mural made breathing difficult.  The
moons seemed to portend some unreadable but manifestly evil fate that
awaited him, and he stumbled out of the room, suddenly eager to flee
from them.

Among a herd of leaping and prancing shadows whipped up by the bobbling
beam of the flashlight, he ran down the short hall, into the living
room, tripped over a stack of books, and fell with a jarring crash.  For
a moment he lay stunned. But his senses swiftly cleared, and he was
jolted to find himself staring at the word "Dominick," which was
scrawled in felttip pen across the luminous moon-face in one of the
dozens of identical big posters.  He had not noticed it when he had come
through from the kitchen earlier, but now he had fallen so that the
flash in his right hand was aimed just right.

A chill rippled through Dom.  He had read nothing about this in the
newspaper, but the handwriting surely belonged to Lomack.  To the best
of his knowledge, he had not known the gambler.  Yet to pretend that
this was another Dominick would be to embrace an outrageous coincidence.

He got up from the floor and took a couple of steps toward the poster
that bore his name, stopping six feet from it.  In the penumbra of the
flashlight beam, he saw writing on an adjacent poster.  His own name was
only one of four that Lomack had scribbled across four lunar images:
DOMINICK, GINGER, FAYE, ERNIE.  If his name was here because he had
shared a forgotten nightmarish experience with Lomack, then the other
three must have been fellow sufferers as well, though Dom could remember
nothing whatsoever about them.

He thought of the priest in the Polaroid snapshot.  Was that Ernie?

And the blond strapped to the bed.  Was she Ginger?  Or Faye?

As he moved the light from one name to the other and back again, some
dark and awesome memory did indeed stir in him.  But it remained far
down in his subconscious, an amorphous blur like a giant ocean creature
swimming past just below the mottled surface of a murky sea, its
existence revealed only by the rippled wake of its passage and by the
flicker of shadow and light in the water.  He tried to reach out for the
memory and seize it, but it dove deep and vanished.

From the moment he had come into the Lomack place, Dom had been in the
hands of fear, but now frustration took an even tighter grip on him.  He
shouted in the empty house, and his voice echoed coldly off the
moon-papered walls.  "Why can't I remember?" He knew why, of course:
Someone had mucked with his mind, scrubbing out certain memories.  But
still he shouted-fearful, furious.  "Why can't I remember?

I've got to remember!" He held his left hand toward the poster that
featured his name, as if to wrench from its substance the memory that
had been in Lomack's mind when he had scrawled "Dominick." His heart
thumped.  He roared with hot anger: "Goddamn it, goddamn you whoever you
are, I will remember. I will remember you sons of bitches.  You
bastards!  I will."

Suddenly, impossibly, even though he was not touching it, though his
hand was still a few feet from it, the poster bearing his name tore
loose from the wall.  It was fixed in place with four strips of masking
tape angled across its corners, but the tape peeled up with the sound of
zippers opening, and the poster leapt off the wall as if a wind had
blown straight through the lathe and plaster behind it.  With a rattle
and rustle of paper Vikings, it swooped at him, and he staggered back
across the living room in surprise, nearly falling over the books again.

In his unsteady hand, his flashlight revealed that the poster had
stopped a few feet from him.  It hung at eye-level, unsupported in thin
air, undulating slightly from top to bottom, first bulging out at him
and then bending away when the direction of undulation reversed itself.
As the pocked surface of that moon rippled, his own handwritten name
fluttered and writhed as if it were the legend on a wind-stirred banner.

Hallucination, he thought desperately.

But he knew it was really happening.

He could not breathe, as if the cold air were so syrup-thick with
miraculous power that it could not be inhaled.

The poster floated closer.

His hands shook.  The flashlight jiggled.  Sharp glints of light lanced
off the undulant surface of the glossy paper.

After a timeless moment in which the only sound was the crackle of the
animated poster, other noise abruptly arose from every part of the room:
the zipper-sound of masking tape being pulled loose.  On the ceiling,
walls, and windows, the other posters simultaneously disengaged
themselves.  With a brittle clatter-rattle-whoosh, half a hundred moon
images exploded toward Dom from every direction, and he cried out in
surprise and fear.

The loosed cry was like a blockage expelled from his windpipe, for he
was suddenly able to breathe.

The last of the tape pulled loose.  Fifty posters hung unmoving in
midair, not even rippling, as if pasted firmly to nothing whatsoever.
The silence in the dead gambler's house was as profound as in a temple
devoid of worshipers, a cold and penetrating silence that seemed to
pierce to the core of Dom, seeking to replace even the soft liquid
susurration of his blood's movement through his arteries and veins.

Then as if they were fifty parts of a single mechanism brought to life
with the flick of a switch, the three-by-five-foot lunar images
shivered, rustled, flapped.  Although there was not the slightest breeze
to propel them, they began to whirl around the room in the orderly
manner of horses on a carousel.  Dom stood in the middle of that eerie
merry-go-round, and the moons circled him; they capered and twirled,
curled and uncurled, flexed and flapped, here seen as half-moons and
here as crescents and here full-face, and they waxed and waned, ascended
and descended, faster, faster, faster still.  In the flashlight glow, it
seemed like a procession set in motion by the sorcerer's apprentice who,
in the old story, had magically imparted life to a bunch of broomsticks.

Dom's fear receded, making room for wonder.  At the moment there seemed
no threat in the phenomenon.  In fact a wild delight burgeoned in him.
He could think of no explanation for what he was witnessing, but stood
in dumb astonishment, puzzled and amazed.  Usually nothing was so
terrifying as the unknown, but perhaps he sensed a benign power at work.
Wonderstruck, he turned slowly in a circle, watching the moons parade
around him, and at last a tremulous laugh escaped him.

In an instant, the mood changed dramatically.  In a cacophony of
imitation wings, the posters flew at Dom as if they were fifty enormous
and furious bats.  They swooped and darted over his head, slapped his
face, beat against his back. Though they were not alive, he attributed
malevolent intent to their assault.  He put one arm across his face and
flailed at the moons with the hand that held the flashlight, but they
did not fall back.  The noise grew louder and more frantic as the paper
wings beat on the chilly air and on one another.

His previous delight forgotten, -Dom stumbled across the room in a
panic, searching for the way out.  But he could see nothing but zooming,
soaring, spinning moons.  No doors.  No windows.  He staggered one way,
then another, disoriented.

The noise grew still worse as, in the hallways and other rooms of the
bungalow, a thousand moons began to tear free of their petrified orbits
upon the walls.  Tape pulled loose, and staples popped out of plaster,
and glue suddenly lost its adhesiveness.  A thousand cratered
moonforms-and then a thousand more-detached themselves and rose into
suspension with ten thousand rustles, spun and swooped toward the living
room with a hundred thousand clicks and crackles and hisses, swinging
into orbit around Dom with a steadily swelling roar that sounded as if
he were immersed in raging flames. The glossy full-color pictures torn
from magazines and books now flashed and sparkled and shimmered as they
darted through the flashlight beam, contributing to the scintillant
illusion of fire, and the black-and-white pictures cascaded down and
spiraled up like bits of ash caught in thermal currents.

Gasping for breath, he sucked in slick-paper and newsprint moons and had
to spit them out.  Thousands of small paper worlds seethed around him in
layer upon layer, and when he hysterically parted one curtain composed
of false planetoids, there was only another behind it.

Intuitively, he perceived that this impossible display was meant to help
him break through to a full recollection of his unremembered nightmares.
He had no idea who or what lay behind the phenomenon, but he sensed the
purpose.  If he immersed himself in the storm of moons and let them
sweep him away, he'd understand his dreams, understand the frightening
cause of them, and know what had happened to him on the road eighteen
months ago.  But he was too scared to let go and be drawn into a trance
by the mesmerizing weaveand-bobble of the pale spheres.  He longed for
that revelation but was terrified of it.  He said, "No.  No." He pressed
his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes shut.  "Stop it!  Stop
it!" His heart hammered two beats to each exclamation.  "Stop it!" His
throat cracked as his cries broke loose: "Stop it!"

He was astonished when the tumult was cut off with the suddenness of a
symphony orchestra terminating a thunderous crescendo on one last
bone-shaking note.  He did not expect his shouted commands to be obeyed,
and he still did not think his words had done the trick.

He took his hands away from his ears.  He opened his eyes.

A galaxy full of moons hung around him.

With a trembling hand, he pfucked one of the pictures from its
unsupported perch upon the air.  Wonderingly, he turned it over in his
hand.  Tested its substance between two fingers. There was nothing
special about the picture, yet it had been suspended magically before
him, just as thousands more were still suspended, motionless.

"How?" he said shakily, as if the moons, being able to levitate, ought
also to be able to speak.  "How?  Why?"

The moons fell as one.  As by the breaking of some spell, the thousands
of pieces of paper dropped straight to the floor, where they lay in
uneven heaps, in a drift over Dom's winter boots, with no lingering
trace of the mysterious life-force that had possessed them.

Bewildered and half in shock, Dom shuffled toward the doorway that led
to the hall.  The moons crunched and rustled like dry autumn leaves.  At
the door he stopped and played his flashlight beam slowly over the short
corridor, where not a single lunar image remained moored by staples,
tape, or glue.  The walls had been stripped bare.

Turning, he took a couple of steps into the center of the living room
once more, then knelt among the debris.  He put down the glowing
flashlight and sifted paper moons through his trembling hands, trying to
understand what he had seen.

Within him, fear fought delighted amazement and terror battled awe.  But
in truth he could not decide how he ought to feel, because there was no
precedent for what he had experienced.  One moment a giddy laugh began
to build, but then joy was frozen by a breath of cold horror.  Now he
felt he'd been in the presence of something unspeakably evil, but now he
was just as convinced it had been something good and pure.  Evil.  Good.
Perhaps both .  .  .  or neither.  Just ...

well something.  Some mysterious thing beyond the descriptive,
definitive power of words.

He knew one thing only: Whatever had happened to him the summer before
last was far stranger than he had realized heretofore.

Still sifting paper moons through his fingers, he noticed something
unusual on his hands.  He brought them palms-up into the direct beam of
the flashlight.  Rings.  On each palm blazed a ring of swollen red skin,
each as perfect as if the inflamed tissues had conformed to a pattern
drawn with a draftsman's compass.

Even as he watched, the stigmata faded, vanished.

It was Tuesday, January 7.

6.

Chicago, Illinois

In his bedroom on the second floor of St.  Bernadette's rectory, Father
Stefan Wycazik woke to the thump of a drum. The beat had the deep boom
of a bass drum and the hollow reverberation of tympani.  It sounded like
the pounding of an enormous heart, although it embellished the simple
two-stroke rhythm of the heart with an extra beat: LUB-DUBdub .  .  .
LUB-DUB-dub .  .  .  LUB-DUB-dub .  .  .

Bewildered and still half asleep, Stefan switched on the lamp, squinted
in the blaze of light, and looked at his alarm clock.  It was
two-oh-seven, Thursday morning, certainly not a reasonable hour for a
parade.

LUB-DUB-dub ...  LUB-DUB_dub ...

After each triad of thumps, there was a three-second pause, then a set
of beats identical to all the others, then another three-second pause.
The precise timing and unfaltering repetition of the noise began to seem
less like the work of a drummer and more like the laborious
piston-stroke of an enormous machine.

Father Wycazik threw back the covers and padded barefoot to the window
that looked out on the courtyard between the rectory and the church.  He
saw only snow and bare-limbed trees in the backwash of the carriage lamp
above the sacristy door.

The beats grew louder, and the pause between the groups shortened to
about two seconds.  He took his robe from the back of a chair and
slipped it on over his pajamas.  The sonorous pounding was so loud now
that it was no longer merely an annoyance and puzzlement.  It had begun
to frighten Stefan.  Each burst of sound rattled the windowpanes and
shook the door in its frame.

He hurried into the upstairs hall.  He fumbled in the dark for the wall
switch and finally turned on the overhead light.

Farther along the short hall, on the right, another door opened, and
Father Michael Gerrano, Stefan's other curate, dashed out of his room,
struggling into his own robe.  "What is that?"

"Don't know," Stefan said.

The next triple-thud was twice as loud as the group preceding it, and
the entire house reverberated as if it had been struck by three!
gigantic hammers.  It was not a hard sharp sound, but mufflid'in spite
of its loudness-as if the hammers were thinly padded yet swung with
tremendous force.  The lights flickered.  Now the thumps were separated
by no more than a second of silence, not long enough for the echo of the
previous fulminations to fade away.  And with each powerful hammering,
the lights flickered again and the floor under Stefan trembled.

In the same instant, Father Wycazik and Father Gerrano perceived the
locus of the noise: Brendan Cronin's room. They moved swiftly to that
door, which was directly across the hall from Father Gerrano.

Incredibly, Brendan was fast asleep.  In spite of the thunderous
explosions that made Father Wycazik flash back to the mortar fire of
vietnam, Brendan dreamed on, untroubled. In fact, in the pulsing light,
there seemed to be a vague smile tugging at the young priest's lips.

The windows rattled.  Drapery hooks clicked against the rods to which
they were attached.  On the dresser, a hairbrush bounced up and down,
and several coins clinked together, and Brendan's breviary slid first to
the left and then to the right.  On the wall above the bed, a crucifix
jiggled wildly under the picture hook from which it was hung.

Father Gerrano shouted, but Stefan could not hear what the curate said,
for now there were no pauses between muffled detonations.  With each
tripartite beat, Father Wycazik retreated further from his initial
mental image of a huge drum and became increasingly convinced that what
he was hearing was the throbbing of some enormous and immeasurably
powerful machine.  But it seemed as if the sound came from all sides, as
if the machinery was hidden within the walls of the house itself,
laboring at some mysterious and unknowable task.

As the breviary finally slid off the dresser and the coins began to
spill to the floor, Father Gerrano backed to the doorway and stood there
wide-eyed, as if he might flee.

But Stefan went to the bed, bent over the dozing priest, and shouted his
name.  When that had no effect, he grabbed Brendan by the shoulders and
shook him.

The auburn-haired curate blinked and opened his eyes.

The hammering stopped abruptly.

The sudden cessation of thunderous noise jolted Father Wycazik as badly
as the first boom that had shattered his sleep.  He let go of Brendan
and looked around the room, disbelieving.

"I was so close," Brendan said dreamily.  "I wish you hadn't wakened me.
I was so close."

Stefan pulled aside the covers, took hold of the curate's hands, and
turned them palms-up.  There was an angry red ring in each palm.  Stefan
stared at them in fascination, for this was the first time that he had
seen the stigmata.

What in God's name is this all about?  he wondered.

Breathing hard, Father Gerrano approached the bed.  Staring at the
rings, he said, "What're those from?"

Ignoring the question, Father Wycazik spoke to Brendan: "What was that
sound?  Where did it come from?"

"Calling," Brendan said in a voice still thick with sleepand with a
soft, excited pleasure.  "Calling me back."

"What was calling you?" Stefan demanded.

Brendan blinked, sat up, and leaned against the headboard. His eyes had
been out of focus.  Now his gaze cleared, and he really looked at Father
Wycazik for the first time.  "What happened?  You heard it, too?"

"Somehow, yes," Stefan said.  "It shook the whole house.

Amazing.  What was it, Brendan?"

"A call.  It was calling me, and I was following the call."

"But what was calling you?"

"I .  I don't know.  Something.  Calling me back "Back where?"

Brendan frowned.  "Back into the light.  The golden light of the dream I
told you about."

"What's this all about?" Father Gerrano persisted.  His voice was shaky,
for he was not as accustomed to the miraculous as were his rector and
his fellow curate.  "Will somebody clue me in?"

The other priests continued to ignore him.

To Brendan, Stefan said, "This golden light .  .  .  what is it?  Could
it have been God calling you back to His fold?"

"No," Brendan said.  "Just ...  something.  Calling me back. Next time,
maybe I'll get a better look at it."

Father Wycazik sat on the edge of the bed.  "You think this will happen
again?  You think it'll keep calling to you?"

"Yes," Brendan said.  "Oh, yes."

It was Thursday, January 9.

7.

Las Vegas, Nevada

Friday afternoon, Jorja Monatella was at the casino, working, when she
learned that her ex-husband, Alan Rykoff, had killed himself.

The news came by way of an emergency telephone call from Pepper
Carrafield, the hooker with whom Alan had been living.  Jorja took the
call on one of the phones in the blackjack pit, cupping a hand over one
ear to block out the roar of voices, the click and snap of cards being
dealt and shuffled, the ringing of slot machines.  When she heard that
Alan was dead, she was shocked and sickened, but she felt no grief.  By
his own selfish and cruel behavior, Alan had ensured she would have no
reason to grieve for him.  Pity was the only emotion she could summon.

"He shot himself this morning, two hours ago," Pepper elaborated.  "The
police are here now.  You've got to come."

"The police want to see me?" Jorja said.  "But why?"

"No, no.  The police don't want to see you.  You got to come and clean
his stuff out.  I want his stuff out of here as soon as possible."

"But I don't want his things," Jorja said.

"It's still your job, whether you want them or not."

"Miss Carrafield, it was a bitter divorce.  I neither want nor-',

" He had a will drawn up last week.  He named you executor, so you got
to come.  I want his stuff out of here now.  It's your job."

Alan had lived with Pepper Carrafield in a high-rise condominium, a
ritzy place called The Pinnacle, on Flamingo Road, where the call-girl
owned an apartment.  It was a fifteen-story white concrete monolith with
bronze windows.  Surrounded by undeveloped desert land, it appeared to
be even taller than it was.  And because it stood alone, it looked oddly
like a monument, the world's largest, swankiest tombstone.  The grounds
were lushly planted with sprinkler-tended lawns and flowerbeds, but a
few dry tumbleweeds had blown in from the bordering plots of sand and
scrub.  The chill and desolate wind which stirred the tumbleweeds also
fluted hollowly under the condominium's portico.

Two police cars and a morgue wagon stood in front of the building, but
no cops were in the lobby: just a young woman on a mauve sofa near the
elevators, forty feet away; and at a desk near the entrance, a man in
gray slacks and blue blazer, who was security guard and doorman.  The
travertine marble floor, crystal chandeliers, oriental carpet, Henredon
sofas and chairs, and brass elevator doors contributed to a decor that
strained too hard to convey class-but conveyed it nonetheless.

As Jorja asked the doorman to announce her, the young woman on the sofa
rose and said, "Mrs.  Rykoff, I'm Pepper Carrafield. Er ...  I think you
use your maiden name now."

"Monatella," Jorja said.

Like the building in which she lived, Pepper strained for Fifth Avenue
class, but her efforts were less successful than those of the interior
designers who had worked on The Pinnacle.  Her blond hair had been cut
in an excessively shaggy carefree style that hookers preferred, perhaps
because when you spent your workday in a series of beds, shaggy hair
required less grooming.  She wore a purple silk blouse that might have
been a Halston, but she'd left too many buttons open, revealing a daring
amount of cleavage.  Her gray slacks were well tailored but too tight.
She wore a Cartier watch encrusted with diamonds, but the elegant effect
of the watch was spoiled by her indulgence in flashy diamond rings: She
wore four of them.

"I couldn't bear to stay upstairs in the apartment," Pepper said,
motioning for Jorja to join her on the sofa.  "I'm not going back up
there until they've taken the body away." She shivered.  "We can talk
right here, just so we keep our voices low." She nodded toward the
doorman at the desk.  "But if there's going to be a scene, I'll just get
up andwalk away. You understand?  People here don't know what I do for a
living.  I intend to keep it that way.  I never do business out of my
home.  I'm strictly out-call.  " Her gray-green eyes were flat.

Jorja stared coldly at her.  "If you think I'm a scorned, suffering
wife, you can relax, Miss Carrafield.  Anything I ever felt for Alan is
gone now.  Even knowing he's dead, I feel nothing.  Nothing much.  I'm
not proud of it.  I was in love with him once, and we created a lovely
child together.  I should feel something, and I'm ashamed that I don't.
But I'm definitely not going to cause a scene."

" Great," Pepper said, genuinely pleased, so involved with herself and
her own concerns that she was oblivious of the domestic tragedy Jorja
had just described.  "There're a lot of high-class people live here, you
know.  When they hear my boyfriend killed himself, they're going to be
standoffish for a long time.  These kind of people don't like messy
scenes. And if they found out what I do for a living .  .  .  well,
there'd be no way I'd ever fit in here again.  You know?  I'd have to
move, and I sure don't want to.  No way, honey.  I like it here a lot."

Jorja looked at Pepper's ostentatiously diamond-encumbered hands, looked
at her plunging neckline, looked into her avaricious eyes, and said,
"What do you suppose they think you are-an heiress?"

Astonishingly, missing the sarcasm, Pepper said, "Yeah. How'd you know?
I paid for the condo with hundred-dollar bills, so no credit check was
necessary, and I've let them all think my family has money."

Jorja did not bother to explain that heiresses did not pay for
condominiums with bundles of hundred-dollar bills.  She simply said,
"Could we talk about Alan?  What happened?

What went wrong?  I would never have thought Alan was the type to .  . .
to kill himself."

Glancing at the doorman to make sure he had not left his post and
drifted nearer, Pepper said, "Me neither, honey. I'd never have pegged
him as the type.  He was so .  .  .  macho. That's why I wanted him to
move in and take care of me, manage me.  He was strong, tough.  Of
course, a few months ago he started acting a little weird, and lately he
was downright creepy.  Weird and creepy enough that I was thinking about
maybe finding someone else to look after me.  But I didn't expect he'd
screw things up for me by killing himself. Christ, you just never know,
do you?"

"Some people have no consideration," Jorja said.  She saw Pepper's eyes
narrow, but before the hooker could say anything, Jorja said, "Am I to
understand that Alan was pimping for you?"

Pepper scowled.  "Listen, I don't need a pimp.  Whores need pimps.  I'm
no whore.  Whores give fifty-dollar blow-jobs, screw eight or ten johns
a day for whatever they can get, spend half their lives with the clap,
and wind up broke.  That's not me, sister.  I'm an escort for gentlemen
of means.  I'm on the approved escort lists of the finest hotels, and
last year I made two hundred thousand bucks.  What do you think of that?
I got investments.  Whores don't have investments, honey.  Alan wasn't
my pimp.  He was my manager.  In fact, he managed a couple of my
girlfriends, too.  I fixed him up with them because, at first, before he
started getting strange, he was the best."

Dazzled by the woman's self-delusion, Jorja said, "And Alan took a
managerial fee for handling your career-and theirs?"

Her scowl fading, somewhat placated by Jorja's willingness to use
euphemisms, Pepper said, "No.  That was one of the best things about our
arrangement with him.  He was still a blackjack dealer, see; that's
where he made his money.  He had all the contacts needed to manage us,
but all he wanted for his trouble was free trade.  I never knew a man
who needed so much pussy.  He couldn't get enough.  In fact, the last
couple of months, he seemed obsessed with pussy.  Was he like that with
you, honey?".  Repulsed by this sudden intimacy, Jorja tried to stop the
woman, but Pepper would not be quiet.  "In fact, the last few weeks he
was so horny all the time that I started to think maybe I should dump
him.  I mean, there was something a little crazy about it.  He'd do it
and do it and do it until he just couldn't get his pecker up to do it
any more, and then he'd want to watch X-rated videotapes."

Jorja was suddenly angry that Alan had made her executor, forcing her to
witness the moral squalor in which he had passed the last year of his
life.  And she was angry because she would have to find a way to explain
his death to Marcie, who was already treading a psychological tightrope.
But she was not really angry with Pepper Carrafield; not angry but
appalled, yes, because even Alan deserved a little mourning and respect
from his live-in lover, more than this shark could ever give him.  But
there was no point in blaming the shark for being a shark.

One of the elevators opened, disgorging uniformed policemen, morgue
employees, and a gurney bearing a corpse in an opaque plastic body bag.

Jorja and Pepper rose from the sofa.

Even as the stretcher was being rolled out of the first elevator, the
doors of the second opened, and four more cops appeared, two in uniform
plus a team of plainclothes detectives.  A detective came to Pepper
Carrafield and asked a few final questions.

No one asked any questions of Jorja.  She stood rigid and suddenly numb,
staring at the body bag that contained her ex-husband.

They rolled the gurney across the travertine.  The wheels squeaked.

Jorja watched it moving away.

Two cops held the lobby doors while the morgue attendants pushed the
gurney outside.  It moved past the lobby windows. Jorja turned to
observe its progress.  She still felt no grief, but she was swept by a
powerful wave of melancholy, a profound sadness at what might have been.

From the nearest of the elevators, where she was holding a door open,
Pepper said, "Let's go up to my place."

Outside, they closed the doors of the coroner's van.

In the elevator on the way up, and in a discreet whisper in the
fourteenth-floor hallway, then continuing in a normal tone of voice as
they entered her big living room, Pepper insisted on describing Alan's
peculiar sexual hunger.  He had always had the carnal appetite of a
gourmand, but apparently sex had become a sick obsession with him as his
life had wound down through its last couple months.

Jorja did not want to hear about it, but stopping the hooker seemed more
difficult than simply enduring her chatter.

In recent weeks, Alan's days had been devoted to erotic pursuits, though
it all sounded feverish and desperate rather than pleasurable.  He had
used sick leave and vacation time to spend long-often frantic-hours in
bed with Pepper or others whose "careers" he managed, and there was no
variation or perversion that he failed to explore to excess.  The hooker
chattered on: Alan had developed a fascination with lascivious
substances, devices, appliances, and clothing-dildos, penis rings,
spike-heeled shoes, vibrators, cocaine ointment handcuffs.  .  .  .

Jorja, already weak-kneed and dizzy since seeing the body bag, grew
queasy.  "Please stop.  What's the point?  He's dead, for God's sake."

Pepper shrugged.  "I thought you'd want to know.  He threw away a lot of
his money on this .  .  .  this sex thing.  Since you're the executor of
the estate, I thought you'd want to know."

The last will and testament of Alan Arthur Rykoff, which he had left
with Pepper for safekeeping, was a simple preprinted one-page form of
the type obtainable at any business supply store.

Jorja sat on a cobalt-blue Ultrasuede chair beside a lacquered black
Tavola table, quickly scanning the will in the light from a high-tech,
burnished-steel, cone-shaped lamp. The most surprising thing was not
that Alan had named Jorja as executor, but that he had left what he
owned to Marcie, whose fatherhood he had been prepared to deny.

Pepper sat on a black lacquered chair with white upholstery, near a wall
of windows.  "I don't figure it's much of an estate.  He spent money
pretty freely.  But there's his car, some jewelry."

Jorja noticed that Alan's will had been notarized just four days ago,
and she shivered.  "He must've been considering suicide when he had this
notarized; otherwise, he wouldn't have felt the need for it."

Pepper shrugged.  "I guess."

"But didn't you see the danger?  Didn't you see he was troubled?"

"Like I told you, honey, he'd been weird for a couple months."

"Yes, but there must've been a noticeable change in him during the last
few days, something different from that other strangeness.  When he told
you he'd made out a will and asked you to put it in that lockbox of
yours, didn't you wonder?

Wasn't there anything about him-his manner, his look, his state of
mind-that worried you?"

Pepper stood up impatiently.  "I'm no psychologist, honey. His stuff's
in the bedroom.  If you want to give his clothes to Goodwill, I'll call
them.  But his other stuff-jewelry, personal things-you can get them out
of here right now.  I'll show you where everything is."

Jorja was sickened by the moral squalor into which Alan had sunk, but
she also felt a measure of guilt for his death. Could she have done
something to save him?  By leaving his few possessions to Marcie and by
naming Jorja executor of his will, he seemed to have reached out to them
in his last days, and although that gesture was pathetic and inadequate,
it touched Jorja.  She tried to remember how he had sounded on the
telephone before Christmas, when she had last spoken with him.  She
remembered his coldness, arrogance, and selfishness, but perhaps there
had been other more subtle things that she should have heard beneath the
surface cruelty and bravado: distress, confusion, loneliness, fear.

Brooding on that, she followed Pepper toward the bed room.  She loathed
this task, pawing through Alan's things, but it had to be done.

Halfway down a long hall, Pepper stopped at a door, pushed it inward.
"Oh, shit.  I can't believe the damned cops left it like this."

Jorja looked in the open door before she realized that this was the
bathroom in which Alan had killed himself.  Blood was all over the beige
tile floor.  More blood was spattered over the glass door of the shower
stall, sink, towels, wastecan, and toilet.  The wall behind the toilet
was stained with dried blood in a macabre pattern resembling a Rorschach
blot, as if Alan's psychological condition and the meaning of his death
were there to be read by anyone with sufficient insight.

"Shot himself twice," Pepper said, supplying details Jorja did not want
to hear.  "First in the crotch.  Is that queer or what?  Then he put the
gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger."

Jorja could smell the vague coppery scent of blood.

"The damned cops should've cleaned up the worst of it," Pepper said, as
if she thought policemen ought to be armed not only with guns but with
scrub brushes and soap.  "My housekeeper doesn't come until Monday.  And
she's not going to want to deal with this disgusting mess."

Jorja broke the bloody bathroom's hypnotic hold on her and stumbled
blindly a few steps along the hall.

"Hey," Pepper Carrafield said, "you okay?"

Jorja gagged, clenched her teeth, moved quickly along the hall, and
leaned against the jamb of another doorway.

"Hey, honey, you were still carrying a torch for him, weren't you?"

"No," Jorja said softly.

Pepper moved closer, too close, putting an unwanted consoling hand upon
her shoulder.  "Sure, you were.  Jesus, I'm sorry." Pepper oozed
unctuous sympathy, and Jorja wondered if the woman was capable of any
genuine emotion that did not have its roots in self-interest.  "You said
you were burnt out on him, but I should've seen."

Jorja wanted to shout: You stupid bitch, I'm not carrying a torch for
him, but he was still a human being, for Christ's sake.  How can you be
so callous?  What's wrong with you?  Is something migsing in you?

But she only said, "I'm all right.  I'm all right.  Where are his
things?  I want to sort through them and get out of here."

Pepper ushered Jorja through the doorway in which she had been leaning,
into a bedroom.  "He had the bottom drawers of the highboy, plus the
left side of the dresser, and that half of the closet.  I'll help." She
pulled out the lowest drawer of the highboy.

For Jorja, the room suddenly was as eerie and unreal as a place in a
dream.  Her heart began to pound, and she moved around the bed toward
the first of three things that had filled her with fear.  Books.  Half a
dozen books were stacked on the nightstand.  She had seen the word
"moon" on the spines of two of them.  With trembling hands, she sorted
through them and found that all six dealt with the same subject.

"Something wrong?" Pepper asked.

Jorja moved to the dresser, on which stood a globe the size of a
basketball.  A cord trailed from it.  She clicked a switch on the cord
and found the globe was opaque with a light inside.  It was not a globe
of the earth but of the moon, with geological features-craters, ridges,
plains-clearly named. She gave the glowing sphere a spin.

The third thing that frightened her was a telescope on a tripod beside
the dresser, in front of a window.  Nothing about the instrument was
different from other amateur telescopes, but to Jorja it seemed ominous,
even dangerous, with dark and unknowable associations.

"Those're Alan's things," Pepper said.

"He was interested in astronomy?  Since when?"

"For the past couple months," Pepper said.

The similarities between Alan's and Marcie's conditions troubled Jorja.
Marcie's irrational fear of doctors.  Alan's compulsive sex drive. Those
were different psychological problems-obsessive fear in one case,
obsessive attraction in the other-but they shared the element of
obsession.  Apparently, Marcie had been cured of her phobia.  Alan was
not as fortunate.  He'd had no one to help him, and he had snapped,
shooting off the genitals that had come to control him, putting a bullet
in his brain.  Jorja shuddered.  It was too coincidental that father and
daughter had been stricken by psychological problems simultaneously, but
what made it more than coincidence was the other strangeness they
shared: their interest in the moon.  Alan had not seen Marcie in six
months, and their most recent phone conversation had been in September,
weeks before either had become fascinated by the moon.  There had been
no contact by which either could have transmitted that fascination to
the other; it appeared to have sprung up spontaneously in each of them.

Remembering Marcie's moon-troubled sleep, Jorja said, "Do you know if he
was having unusual dreams?  About the moon?"

"Yeah.  How'd you figure that?  He was having them, but he could never
remember any details when he woke up.  They started .  .  .  back in
late October, I think it was.  Why?  What's it matter?"

"These dreams-were they nightmares?"

Pepper shook her head.  "Not exactly.  I'd hear him talking in his
sleep.  Sometimes he sounded afraid, but lots of times he'd smile, too."

Jorja felt as if ice had formed in her marrow.

She turned to look at the lighted globe of the moon.

What in the hell is going on?  she wondered.  A shared dream?  Is that
possible?  How?  Why?

Behind her, Pepper said, "Are you okay?"

Something had driven Alan to suicide.

What might happen to Marcie?

8.

Saturday, January 11

Boston, Massachusetts.

The memorial service for Pablo Jackson was held at eleven o'clock
Saturday morning, January 11, in a nondenominational chapel on the
grounds of the cemetery where he was to be buried.  The coroner and
police pathologists had not been finished with the body until Thursday,
so five days had passed between Pablo's murder and his funeral.

When the last eulogy was delivered, the mourners adjourned to the grave,
where the casket waited.  Snow had been cleared around Pablo's plot, but
the space was insufficient.  Scores of people stood outside the prepared
area, some in snow deeper than their boots.  Others remained on the
sidewalks that crisscrossed the memorial park, watching from a distance.
Three hundred had come to pay their last respects

to the old magician.  The chilly air steamed with the breath of the rich
and the poor, the famous and the unknown, Boston socialites, magicians.

Ginger Weiss and Rita Hannaby stood in the first circle around the
gravesite.  Since Monday, Ginger had not had much of an appetite and had
gotten little sleep.  She was pale, nervous, and very tired.

Both Rita and George had argued against Ginger's attendance at the
services.  They were concerned that such a wrenchingly emotional
experience would trigger a fugue.  But the police had encouraged her,
hoping she might see Pablo's killer at the services.  In self-defense
she'd hidden the truth from the cops, leading them to believe that the
killer was an ordinary burglar, and sometimes burglars were driven by
such sick compulsions.  But she knew that he was no mere burglar and
that he would not risk arrest by coming to the cemetery.

Ginger wept during the eulogies, and by the time she walked from the
chapel to the grave, her grief was a vise squeezing her heart.  But she
did not lose control.  She was determined not to make a circus of this
solemn occasion, determined to pay her respects with dignity.

Besides, she had come with a second purpose that could not be fulfilled
if she spiraled down into a fugue or suffered an emotional collapse. She
was sure that Alexander Christophson-former Ambassador to Great Britain,
former United States Senator, and former Director of the CIA-would be at
the funeral of his old friend, and she wanted very much to speak with
him.  It was to Christophson, on Christmas Day, that Pablo had turned
for advice about Ginger's problems. And it was Alex Christophson who had
told him about the Azrael Block.  She had an important question to ask
Christophson, though she dreaded the answer.

She had seen him in the chapel, recognized him from his days in public
life, when he had been on television and in newspapers.  He was a
striking figure, tall, thin, white-haired, unmistakable.  Now, they
stood on opposite sides of the grave, the draped casket between them. He
had glanced at her a couple times, though without recognition.

The minister said a brief final prayer.  After a moment, some of the
mourners greeted one another, formed small groups to talk.  Others,
including Christophson, moved away through a forest of headstones, past
snow-laden pines and winter-stripped maples, toward the parking lot.

"I've got to talk to that man," Ginger told Rita.  "Be right back."

Startled, Rita called after her, but Ginger did not pause or offer
further explanation.  She caught up with Christophson in the jagged
shadows cast by the skeletal branches of an immense oak that was all
black bark and crusted snow.  She called his name, and he turned.  He
had piercing gray eyes, which widened when she told him who she was.

"I can't help you," he said, and began to turn away from her.

"Please," she said, putting a hand on his arm.  "If you blame me for
what happened to Pablo-"

"Why should you care what I think, Doctor?"

She held fast to his arm.  "Wait.  Please, for God's sake."

Christophson surveyed the slowly dispersing crowd in the cemetery, and
Ginger knew that he was afraid the wrong people-dangerous people-might
see him with her and assume he was helping her as Pablo had done.  His
head twitched slightly, and Ginger thought it was an indication of his
nervousness, but then she realized it was the faint tremor of
Parkinson's disease.  He said, "Dr.  Weiss, if you're seeking some form
of absolution, then by all means let me provide it.  Pablo knew the
risks, and he accepted them.  He was the captain of his own fate."

"Did he understand the risks?  That's what I've got to know."

Christophson seemed surprised.  "I warned him myself."

"Warned him about who?  About what?"

"I don't know who or what.  But considering the enormous effort expended
to tamper with your memory, you must've seen something of tremendous
importance.  I warned Pablo that whoever had brainwashed you was no
amateur and that if they realized the two of you were trying to break
through the Azrael Block, they might come after not just you but him as
well." Christophson's gray eyes searched her eyes for a moment, and then
he sighed.  "He did tell you about his conversation with me?"

"He told me everything-except about your warning.  " Her eyes filled
with tears again.  "He didn't breathe a word of that."

He withdrew one elegant but palsied hand from his pocket

and gripped her arm reassuringly.  "Doctor, now that you've told me
this, I can't possibly lay any of the blame at your doorstep."

"But I blame me," Ginger said in a voice thin with misery.

"No.  You can't blame yourself for any of it." Looking around again to
make sure they were not under surveillance, Christophson opened the top
two buttons of his overcoat, reached inside, plucked the display
handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit jacket, and gave it to
Ginger.  "Please stop punishing yourself.  Our friend lived a full and
fortunate life, Doctor.  His death might've been violent, but it was
relatively quick, which can be a blessing."

Drying her eyes on the swatch of pale blue silk that he had given her,
Ginger said, "He was a dear man."

"He was," Christophson agreed.  "And I'm beginning to understand why he
took the risks he did for you.  He said you were a very dear woman, and
I see his judgment was as accurate and reliable as usual."

She finished blotting her eyes.  Her heart still felt pinched in a vise,
but she began to believe there was a chance that guilt and grief would
eventually give way to grief alone.  "Thank you." As much to herself as
to him, Ginger said, "What now?

Where do I go from here?"

"I'm in no position to help you," he said at once.  "I've been out of
the intelligence business for almost a decade, and I've no contacts any
more.  I've no idea who might be behind your memory block or why."

"I wouldn't ask you to help me.  I'm not risking any more innocent
lives.  I just thought you might have some idea how I can help myself."

"Go to the police.  It's their job to help."

Ginger shook her head.  "No.  The police are slow, too slow. Most of
them are overworked, and the rest are just bureaucrats in uniforms.  My
problem's too urgent to wait for them to solve it.  Besides, I don't
trust them.  Suddenly I don't trust authorities of any kind.  The tapes
Pablo made of our sessions were gone when I took the police back to his
apartment, so I didn't mention them.  I spooked.  I didn't tell the cops
about my fugues or about how Pablo had been helping me.  I just said
we'd been friends, that I'd stopped by to have lunch and walked in on
the killer.  I let them think it was an ordinary

burglary.  Sheer paranoia.  Didn't trust them.  Still don't.  So the
cops are out." "Then find another hypnotist to regress you-"

"No.  I'm not risking any more innocent lives," she repeated.

"I understand.  But those are the only suggestions I have."

He shoved both hands into the deep pockets of his overcoat. "I'm sorry."

"No need to be," she said.

He started to turn away, hesitated, sighed.  "Doctor, I want you to
understand me.  I served in the war, the big war, with some distinction.
Later, I was a good ambassador.  As head of the CIA and as a senator, I
made many difficult decisions, some that put me in personal danger.  I
never backed away from risk.  But I'm an old man now.  Seventy-six, and
I feel older.  Parkinson's.  A bad heart.  High blood pressure.  I have
a wife I love very much, and if anything happens to me, she'll be alone.
I don't know how well she'd deal with being alone, Dr.  Weiss."

"Please, there's no need to justify yourself," Ginger said. She realized
how completely and quickly their roles had reversed.  In the beginning,
he had been the one full of reassurances and absolution; now she was
returning the favor. Jacob, her father, had often said that the capacity
for mercy was humankind's greatest virtue, and that the giving and
receiving of mercy formed a bond unbreakable.  Ginger remembered Jacob's
words now because, in allowing Alex Christophson to allay her guilt and
in trying to allay his, she felt that bond.

Apparently, he felt it, too, for although he did not stop trying to
explain himself, his explanations became more intimate and were offered
now in a tone of voice that was less defensive and more conspiratorial.
"Quite frankly, Doctor, my reluctance to get involved is not so much
because I find life infinitely precious but because I am increasingly
afraid of death." As he spoke, he reached into an inside pocket and
withdrew a notepad and pen.  "In my life I've done some things of which
I'm not proud." Holding the pen in his palsied right hand, he began to
print.  "True, most of those sins were committed in the line of duty.
Government and espionage are both necessary, but neither is a clean
business.  In those days, I didn't believe in God or an afterlife.  Now
I wonder....  And wondering, I'm sometimes afraid." He tore the top page
from the pad.  "Afraid of what might await me after death, you see.
That's why I want to hold on to life as long as I can, Doctor.  That's
why, God help me, I've become a coward in my old age."

As Christophson folded and passed to her the slip of paper on which he
had been printing, Ginger realized that he had managed to put his back
to all of the remaining mourners before he had removed the notepad and
pen from his coat. No one could have seen what he had done.

He said, "I've just given you the phone number of an antique store in
Greenwich, Connecticut.  My younger brother, Philip, owns the place. You
can't call me direct because the wrong people may have seen us talking;
my telephone might be tapped.  I won't risk associating with you, Dr.
Weiss, and I won't pursue any investigation of your problem.  However, I
have many years of broad experience in these matters, and there may be
times when that experience will be of help to you.  You may encounter
something you don't understand, a situation you don't know how to deal
with, and I may be able to offer advice.  Just call Philip and leave
your number with him.  He'll immediately call me at home and use a
prearranged codeword.  Then I'll go out to a pay phone, return his call,
get the number you left with him, and contact you as quickly as
possible.  Experience, my peculiar kind of malevolent experience, is all
I'm willing to offer you, Dr.  Weiss."

"It's more than enough.  You're not obligated to help me at all."

"Good luck." He turned abruptly and walked away, his boots crunching in
the frozen snow.

Ginger returned to the grave, where Rita, the mortician, and two
laborers were the only people remaining.  The velvet curtain around the
grave had been collapsed and removed. A plastic tarpaulin had been
pulled off a waiting mound of earth.

"What was that all about?" Rita asked.

"Tell you later," Ginger said, bending down to pick up a rose from the
pile of flowers beside Pablo Jackson's final resting place.  She leaned
forward and tossed the bloom into the hole, on top of the casket.  "Alay
ha-sholem.  May this sleep be only a little dream between this world and
something better.  Baru(Th ha-Shem."

As she and Rita walked away, Ginger heard the laborers begin to shovel
dirt onto the casket.

Elko County, Nevada.

On Thursday, Dr.  Fontelaine was satisfied that Ernie Block was cured of
his disabling nyctophobia.  "Fastest cure I've ever seen," he said.  "I
guess you Marines are tougher than ordinary mortals."

On Saturday, January 11, after only four weeks in Milwaukee, Ernie and
Faye went home.  They flew into Reno on United, then caught a ten-seat
commuter flight to Elko, arriving at eleven-twenty-seven in the morning.

Sandy Sarver met them at the airport in Elko, though Ernie did not
immediately recognize her.  She was standing by the small terminal, in
the crystalline Winter sunshine, waving as Ernie and Faye disembarked.
Gond was the pale-faced mouse, the familiar slump-shouldered frump.  For
the first time since Ernie had known her, Sandy was wearing a little
makeup, eye shadow, and lipstick.  Her nails were no longer bitten. Her
hair, always limp and dull and neglected in the past, was now full,
glossy.  She had gained ten pounds.  She had always looked older than
she was.  Now she looked years younger.

She blushed when Ernie and Faye raved about her makeover.  She pretended
the changes were of little consequence, but she was clearly pleased by
their praise, approval, and delight.

She had changed in other ways, as well.  For one thing, she was usually
reticent and shy, but as they walked to the parking lot and put the
baggage in the back of her red pickup, she asked lots of questions about
Lucy, Frank, and the grandchildren.  She did not ask about Ernie's
phobia because she knew nothing of it; they had kept his condition
secret and had explained the extension of their Wisconsin visit by
saying they wanted to spend more time with the grandchildren.  In the
truck, as Sandy drove through Elko and onto the interstate, she was
downright garrulous as she spoke of the Christmas just past and of
business at the Tranquility Grille.

 As much as anything, Sandy's driving surprised Ernie.  He knew she had
an aversion to four-wheel travel.  But now she drove fast, with an ease
and skill Ernie had never seen in her before.

Faye, sitting between Ernie and Sandy, was aware of this change, too,
for she gave Ernie meaningful looks when Sandy maneuvered the pickup
with special fluidity and audacity.

Then a bad thing happened.

Less than a mile from the motel, Ernie's interest in Sandy's
metamorphosis was suddenly displaced by the queer feeling that had first
seized him on December 10, when he'd been coming home from Elko with the
new lighting fixtures: the feeling that a particular piece of ground,
half a mile ahead, south of the highway, was calling him.  The feeling
that something strange had happened to him out there.  As before, it was
simultaneously an absurd and gripping feeling, characterized by the
eerie attraction of a talismanic place in a dream.

This was an unsettling development because Ernie had supposed that the
peculiar magnetism of that place had been, somehow, a part of the same
mental disturbance that resulted in his crippling dread of the dark. His
nyctophobia cured, he had assumed that all other symptoms of his
temporary psychological imbalance would disappear along with his fear of
the night.  So this seemed like a bad sign.  He did not want to consider
what it might indicate about the permanency of his cure.

Faye was telling Sandy about Christmas morning with the grandkids, and
Sandy was laughing, but to Ernie the laughter and conversation faded. As
they drew nearer the plot of ground that exerted a mesmeric attraction
on him, Ernie squinted through the sun-streaked windshield, possessed by
a sense of impending epiphany.  Something of monumental importance
seemed about to happen, and he was filled with fear and awe.

Then, as they were passing that beguiling place, Ernie became aware that
their speed had dropped.  Sandy had slowed to under forty miles an hour,
half the speed she had maintained since Elko.  Even as Ernie realized
the truck had slowed, it accelerated again.  He looked at Sandy too late
to be certain that she also had been temporarily spellbound by that same
portion of the landscape, for now she was listening to Faye and watching
the road ahead and bringing the pickup back to speed.  But it seemed to
him there was a strange look on her face, and he stared at her in
bewilderment, wondering how she could share his mysterious and
irrational fascination with that piece of quite ordinary land.

"It's good to be home," Faye said as Sandy switched on the right-turn
signal and steered the truck toward the exit lane.

Ernie watched Sandy for an indication that she had slowed the truck in
answer to the same eerie call that he felt, but he saw none of the fear
that the call engendered in him.  She was smiling.  He must have been
wrong.  She had slowed the truck for some other reason.

A chill had taken residence in his bones, and now as they drove up the
sloped county road and turned into the motel lot, he felt a cold damp
dew of sweat on his palms, on his scalp.

He looked at his watch.  Not because he needed to know the time.  But
because he wanted to know how long until sundown.  About five hours.

What if it wasn't darkness in general that he feared?  What if it was a
specific darkness?  Perhaps he had quickly overcome his phobia in
Milwaukee because he was only mildly frightened by the night out there.
Perhaps his real fear, his deep fear, was of the darkness of the Nevada
plains.  Could a phobia be that narrowly focused, that localized?

Surely not.  Yet he looked at his watch.

Sandy parked in front of the motel office, and when they got out of the
truck and went around to the tailgate to get the luggage, she hugged
both Faye and Ernie.  "I'm glad you're back.  I missed you both.  Now
I'd better get over to the diner and help Ned.  Lunch hour's started."

Ernie and Faye watched Sandy as she hurried away, and Faye said, "What
on earth do you suppose happened to her?"

"Damned if I know," Ernie said.

Her breath steaming in the cold air, Faye said, "At first, I thought she
must've learned she's pregnant.  But now I don't think so.  If she was
pregnant and overjoyed about it, she'd have told us.  She'd have been
bursting with the news.  I think it's something .  .  .  else."

Ernie pulled two of the four suitcases out of the back of the truck and
stood them on the ground, surreptitiously glancing at his watch as he
put the bags down.  Sundown was five minutes closer.

Faye sighed.  "Well, whatever the cause, I'm sure happy for her."

"Me, too," Ernie said, lifting the other two bags out of the truck.

"Me too,' " Faye said, affectionately mimicking him as she picked up the
two lightest suitcases.  "Don't play cool with me, you big softy.  I
know you've worried about her almost like you used to worry about our
own Lucy.  When you first saw the change in Sandy back at the airport, I
was watching you, and I thought your heart was going to melt."

He followed her with the two heavier bags.  "Do they have a medical term
for a calamity like that, for a melting heart?"

"Sure.  Cardio-liquefaction."

He laughed in spite of the tension that knotted his stomach. Faye was
always able to make him laugh-usually when he needed it most.  When they
got inside; he would put his arms around her, kiss her, and convey her
straight upstairs and into bed.  Nothing else would be as certain to
chase away the fear that had popped up in him like a jack-in-the-box.
Time spent with Faye was always the best medicine.

She put her two bags down by the office door and fished her keys out of
her purse.

When it had become clear, early on, that Ernie was likely to have an
exceptionally swift recovery and that they would not need to stay in
Milwaukee for months, Faye had decided against flying home to search for
a motel manager.  They simply kept the place closed.  Now they needed to
unlock, turn up the thermostat, clean away the accumulated dust.

A lot of work to be done .  .  .  but still enough time for a little
horizontal dancing first, Ernie thought with a grin.

He was standing behind Faye as she put the key in the office door, so
fortunately she did not see him twitch and jump in surprise when the
bright day was suddenly claimed by shadows.  They were not actually
plunged into darkness; a large cloud merely moved across the sun; the
level of light dropped by no more than twenty percent.  Yet even that
was sufficient to startle and unnerve him.

He looked at his watch.

He looked toward the east, from whence the night would come.

I'll be all right, he thought.  I'm cured.

On the road: Reno to Elko County. Following the paranormal experience in
Lomack's house on Tuesday, when countless paper moons took orbit around
him, Dominick Corvaisis spent a few days in Reno.  On his previous
journey from Portland to Mountainview, he had stayed over to research a
series of short stories about gambling.  Re-creating that trip, he
passed Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday in "The Biggest Little City in
the World."

Dom wandered from casino to casino, watching gamblers. There were young
couples, retirees, pretty young women, middle-aged women in stretch
pants and cardigans, leatherfaced cowboys fresh from the range and
soft-faced rich men on junkets from far cities, secretaries, truckers,
executives, doctors, ex-cons and off-duty cops, hustlers and dreamers,
escapees from every social background, drawn together by the hope and
thrill of organized games of chance, surely the most democratizing
industry on earth.

As during his previous visit, Dom gambled only enough to be part of the
scene, for his primary purpose was to observe. After the storm of paper
moons, he had reason to believe that Reno was the place where his life
had been changed forever and where he would find the key to unlock his
imprisoned memories.  Those around him laughed, chattered, grumbled
about the unkindness of cards, shouted to encourage the rolling dice,
but Dom remained cool and alert, among them yet distanced from them, the
better to spot any clue to the unremembered events in his past.

No clue was revealed.

Each night he contacted Parker Faine in Laguna Beach, hoping that the
unknown correspondent had sent an additional message.

No message was received.

Each night before sleep came, he tried to understand the impossible
dance of paper moons.  And he sought an explanation of the circular,
swollen, red rings in his hands, which he had watched fade as he knelt
in a drift of moons in Lomack's living room.  No understanding came.

Day by day, his craving for Valium and Dalmane diminished, but his
unremembered nightmares-the moon-grew worse.  Each night, he fought
fiercely against the tether with which he moored himself to his bed.

By Saturday, Dom still suspected that the answer to his night fear and
somnambulism lay in Reno.  But he decided that he must not change his
plans, must go on to Mountainview.  If he concluded the journey without
achieving satori, he could return to Reno at that time.

The summer before last, he departed Harrah's at ten-thirty a m.  Friday,
July 6, after an early lunch.  On Saturday, January 11, he therefore
followed that timetable, driving onto I-80 at ten-forty, heading
northeast across the Nevada wasteland toward distant Winnemucca, where
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had robbed a bank in another age.

The immense unpopulated expanses of land were little different from the
way they had been a thousand years ago.  The highway and power lines,
often the only signs of civilization, followed the route that had been
called the Humboldt Trail in the days of wagon trains.  Dom drove over
barren plains and hills bearded with scrub, through an uninviting yet
starkly beautiful primeval world of sagebrush, sand, alkaline flats, dry
lakes, solidified lava beds with columnar crystallizations, distant
mountains.  Sheered bluffs and veined monoliths showed traces of borax,
sulfur, alum, and salt.  Isolated rocky buttes were splendidly painted
in ocher, amber, umber, and gray. North of the trackless Humboldt Sink,
where the Humboldt River simply vanished into the thirsty earth, were
more streams, as well as the Humboldt itself, and here the forbidding
land featured some contrastingly fertile valleys with lush grasses and
trees-cottonwoods, willows, though not in profusion. Adequate water
meant communities and agriculture, but even in the hospitable valleys,
the settlements were small, the grip of civilization tenuous.

As always, Dom was humbled by the vastness of the West. But the
landscape also aroused new feelings this time: a sense of mystery and an
unsettling awareness of limitless-and eeriepossibilities.  Hurtling
through this lonely realm, it was easy to believe something frightening
had happened to him here.

At two-forty-five he stopped for gasoline and a sandwich in Winnemucca,
a town of only five thousand souls yet by far the largest in a county of
sixteen thousand square miles.  Then I-80 turned eastward.  The land
rose gradually toward the rim of the Great Basin.  More mountains peaked
on every horizon, with snow far down their slopes, and more bunch-grass
appeared midst the sagebrush, and there were genuine meadows in some
places, though the desert was by no means left entirely behind.

At sunset, Dom pulled off the interstate at the Tranquility Motel,
parked near the office, got out of the car, and was surprised by a cold
wind.  Having driven so long through deserts, he was psychologically
prepared for heat, though he knew it was winter on the high plains.  He
reached into the car, grabbed a fleece-lined suede jacket, and put it
on.  He started toward the motel .  .  .  then stopped, suddenly
apprehensive.

This was the place.

He did not know how he knew.  But he knew.

Here, something strange had happened.

He had stopped here on Friday evening, July 6, the summer before last.
He had found the curious isolation of the place and the majesty of the
land enormously appealing and inspiring.  Indeed, he had become
convinced that this territory was good material for fiction, and he had
decided to stay a couple of days to familiarize himself with it and to
brood about story ideas suitable to the background.  He had not left for
Mountainview, Utah, until Tuesday morning, the 10th of July.

Now, he turned slowly, studying the scene in the fast-fading light,
hoping to prick his memory.  As he turned, he became convinced that what
had happened to him here was more important than anything that would
ever happen to him, anywhere, as long as he lived.

The diner, with its big windows and blue neon sign, was at the western
end of the complex, detached from the motel, surrounded by a large
parking lot to accommodate long-haul trucks, of which three were in
attendance.  The entire length of the single-story white motel was
served by a breezeway sheltered under an aluminum awning that glistened
darkly with a well-kept coat of forest-green enamel.  The west wing had
ten rooms with glossy green doors.  It was separated from the east wing
by a two-story section that housed the office on the first floor and, no
doubt, the owner's quarters on the second.  Unlike the west wing, the
east wing was L-shaped, with six rooms in the first section, four in the
shorter arm. Dom kept turning and saw the dark sky in the east, the
interstate dwindling into that gloom, then the immense and uninhabited
panorama of shadowed land to the south.  More plains and mountains lay
in the west, where the sky above was streaked crimson by the sunset.

Moment by moment, Dom's apprehension grew, until he had turned in a
complete circle and was looking once more at the Tranquility Grille.  As
if in a dream, he moved toward the diner.  By the time he reached the
door, his heart was hammering.  He had the urge to flee.

Steeling himself, he opened the door and went inside.

It was a clean well-lighted place, cozy and warm.  Delicious odors
filled the air: French fries, onions, fresh hamburger sizzling on the
griddle, frying ham.

In dreamlike fear, he crossed to an empty table.  A ketchup bottle, a
squeeze-bottle of mustard, a sugar bowl, salt and pepper shakers, and an
ashtray were clustered in the center. He picked up the salt shaker.

For a moment he did not know why he had picked it up, but then he
remembered sitting at this very table the summer before last, his first
night at the Tranquility Motel.  He had spilled a bit of salt and had
reflexively cast a pinch of it over his shoulder, inadvertently throwing
it in the face of a young woman approaching behind him.

He sensed that the incident was important, but he did not know why.
Because of the woman?  Who had she been?  A stranger.  What had she
looked like?  He tried to recall her face but could not.

His heart raced without apparent reason.  He felt as if he were on the
brink of some devastating revelation.

He strove to recall additional details, but they eluded him.

He put the salt shaker down.  Still moving dreamily, shivering with
unfocused anxiety, he crossed to the corner booth by the front windows.
It was unoccupied, but Dom was sure that the young woman, having blinked
the salt out of her eyelashes, had come here that other night.

"Can I help you?"

Dom was aware that a waitress in a yellow sweater was standing beside
him and had spoken to him, but he remained spellbound by the tantalizing
ascension of some terrible memory.  It had not swum into view yet, but
it was rising, rising. The woman out of his past, whose face remained a
blank to him, had sat in this booth, radiantly beautiful in the orange
light of the sunset.

"Mister?  Is something wrong?"

The young woman had ordered dinner, and Dom had gone on with his meal,
and the sunset had faded, and night had fallen, and- No!.

The memory swam out of the deeps, almost broke through the murky surface
into light, into his consciousness, but at the last moment he recoiled
from it in panic, as if he had seen the horrible face of some
monstrously evil leviathan streaking toward him.  Abruptly not wanting
to remember, refusing, Dom loosed a wordless cry, stumbled back, turned
away from the startled waitress, and ran.  He was aware of people
staring, aware that he was making a scene, but he did not give a damn.
All he cared about was getting out.  He hit the door, flung it open, and
rushed out under a post-sunset, black, purple, and scarlet sky.

He was afraid.  Afraid of the past.  Afraid of the future.

But afraid mostly because he did not know why he was afraid.

Chicago, Illinois.

Brendan Cronin was saving his announcement for after dinner, when Father
Wycazik, with a full belly and with a glass of brandy in hand, would be
in his best mood of the day.  Meanwhile, in the company of Fathers
Wycazik and Gerrano, he ate a hearty dinner: double portions of potatoes
and beans and ham, disposing of a third of a loaf of homemade bread.

Though he had regained his appetite, he had not regained his faith. When
his belief in God had collapsed, it had left in him a terrible dark
emptiness and despair, but now the despair was gone, and the emptiness,
though not entirely filled, was shrinking.  He was beginning to perceive
that one day he might lead a meaningful life that had nothing to do with
the Church. For Brendan-for whom no temporal pleasures had been as
enticing as the spiritual joy of the Mass-the mere contemplation of a
secular life was a revolutionary development.

Perhaps his despair had lifted because, since Christmas, he had at least
journeyed along from atheism to a qualified agnosticism.  Recent events
had conspired to make him consider the existence of a Power that, though
not necessarily God, was nevertheless above nature.

After dinner, Father Gerrano went upstairs to spend a few hours with the
latest novel by James Blaylock, the fantasist whom Brendan, too, found
interesting, but whose colorful tales of bizarre fantasy creatures and
even more bizarre human beings were too imaginative for a hard-nosed
realist like Father Wycazik.  Adjourning to the study with Brendan, the
rector said, "He writes well, but when I'm finished with one of his
stories, I get the peculiar feeling that nothing's what it seems to be,
and I don't like that feeling."

"Maybe nothing is what it seems to be," Brendan said.

The rector shook his head, and his gray hair caught the light in such a
way that it looked like steel wire.  "No, when I read for entertainment,
I prefer it in big, solid, heavy blocks that let you grapple with the
reality of life."

Grinning broadly, Brendan said, "If there's a heaven, Father, and if I
somehow manage to get there with you, I hope I'll have a chance to
arrange a meeting between you and Walt Disney.  I'd love to see you
convince him that he should've spent his time animating the collected
works of Dostoevsky instead of the adventures of Mickey Mouse."

Laughing at himself, the rector poured their drinks, and they settled
into armchairs, the fallen priest with a glass of schnapps, his superior
with a small brandy.

Deciding there would be no better time for his news, Brendan said, "If
it's all right with you, I'll be going away for a while, Father.  I'd
like to leave on Monday, if I can.  I need to go to Nevada."

"Nevada?" Father Wycazik made it sound as if his curate had just said
Bangkok or Timbuktu.  "Why Nevada?"

With the taste of peppermint schnapps on his tongue and the scent
burning his sinuses, Brendan said, "That's where I'm being called ' Last
night, in the dream, though I still saw nothing but a brilliant light, I
suddenly knew where I was. Elko County, Nevada.  And I knew I must go
back there in order to find an explanation for Emmy's cure and Winton's
resurrection."

"Back there?  You've been there before?"

"The summer before last.  Just before I came to St.  Bernadette's."

Upon leaving his post with Monsignor Orbella in Rome, Brendan had flown
directly to San Francisco to carry out a final assignment from his
Vatican mentor.  He stayed two weeks with Bishop John Santefiore, an old
friend of Orbella. The bishop was writing a book on the history of papal
selection, and Brendan came laden with research material provided by the
monsignor in Rome.  It was his job to answer any questions about those
documents.  John Santefiore was a charming man with a sly dry wit, and
the days flashed past.

His task concluded, Brendan was left with two weeks to himself before he
was required to report to his superiors in Chicago, his hometown, where
he would be assigned as curate to some parish in that archdiocese.  He
spent a few days in Carmel, on the Monterey Peninsula.  Then, making up
his mind to see some of the country that he had never seen before,
Brendan set out on a long drive eastward in a rental car.

Now, Father Wycazik leaned forward, brandy snifter clasped in both
hands.  "I remembered about Bishop Santefiore, but I'd forgotten you
drove from there to here.  And you passed through Elko County, Nevada?"

"Stayed there, at a motel in the middle of nowhere.  Tranquility Motel.
I stopped for the night, but it was so peaceful, the countryside so
beautiful, that I stayed a few days.  Now I've got to go back."

"Why?  What happened to you out there?"

Brendan shrugged.  "Nothing.  I just relaxed.  Napped.  Read a couple
books.  Watched TV.  They have good TV reception even way out there
because they've got their own little receiver dish on the roof."

Father Wycazik cocked his head.  "What's wrong?  There for a moment you
sounded .  .  .  odd.  Wooden .  .  .  as if repeating something you'd
memorized."

"I was just telling you what it was like."

"So if nothing happened to you there, why is the place so special?  What
will happen when you go back there?"

"I'm not sure.  But it's going to be something .  .  .  incredible."

Finally revealing his frustration with his curate's obtuseness, Father
Wycazik put the question bluntly: "Is it God calling you?"

"I don't think so.  But maybe.  A slim maybe.  Father, I want your
permission to go.  But if I can't have your blessing, I'll go anyway."

Father Wycazik took a larger swallow of brandy than was his habit.  "I
think you should go, but I don't think you should go alone."

Brendan was surprised.  "You want to come with me?"

"Not me.  I've got St.  Bette's to run.  But you should be in the
company of a qualified witness.  A priest familiar with these things,
one who can verify any miracle or miraculous visitation-"

"You mean some cleric who has the Cardinal's imprimatur to investigate
every hysterical report of weeping statues of the Holy Mother, bleeding
crucifixes, and divine manifestations of all kinds."

Father Wycazik nodded.  "That's right.  Someone who knows the process of
authentication.  I had in mind Monsignor Janney of the archdiocese's
office of publications.  He's had a lot of practice."

Reluctant to disappoint his rector but determined to proceed in his own
fashion, Brendan interrupted: "There's no visitation involved here, so
there's no need for Monsignor Janney.  None of this has an obvious
Christian significance or source."

"And who ever said God isn't permitted to be subtle?"

Father Wycazik asked.  His grin made it clear he expected to win this
argument.

"These things could all be merely psychic phenomena."

"Bah!  Claptrap.  Psychic phenomena are just the nonbeliever's pathetic
explanation for glimpses of the divine hand at work.  Examine these
events closely, Brendan; open your heart to the meaning of them, and
you'll see the truth.  God's calling you back to His bosom.  And I
believe a divine visitation is what this may be building toward."

"But if this is building to a divine manifestation, why couldn't it
happen right here?  Why's it necessary to go all the way to Nevada?"

"Perhaps it's a test of your obedience to the will of God, a test of
your underlying desire to believe again.  If your desire's strong
enough, you'll discomfit yourself by taking this long journey, and as
reward you'll be shown something to make you believe again."

"But why Nevada?  Why not Florida or Texas-or Istanbul?"

"Only God knows."

"And why would God go to all this trouble to recapture the heart of one
fallen priest'?"

"To Him who made the earth and stars, this is no trouble

at all.  And one heart is as important to Him as a million hearts."

:"Then why did He let me lose my faith in the first place?"

' Perhaps losing and regaining it is a tempering process. You may have
been put through it because God needs you to be stronger."

Brendan smiled and shook his head in admiration.  "You're never caught
without an answer, are you, Father?"

Looking self-satisfied, Stefan Wycazik settled back in his chair.  "God
blessed me with a quick tongue."

Brendan was aware of Father Wycazik's reputation as a savior of troubled
priests, and he knew the rector would not give up easily-or at all.  But
Brendan was determined not to go to Nevada with Monsignor Janney in tow.

From the other armchair, over the rim of his brandy snifter, Father
Wycazik watched Brendan with evident affection and iron determination,
waiting eagerly for another argument that he could swiftly refute, for
another thrust that he could parry with his unfailing Jesuitical aplomb.

Brendan sighed.  It was going to be a long evening.

Elko County, Nevada.

After hurrying out of the Tranquility Grille in fear and confusion, into
the last fading scarlet and purple light of dusk, Dom Corvaisis went
directly to the motel office.  There, he walked into the middle of a
scene that initially appeared to be a domestic quarrel, though he
quickly saw that it was something stranger than that.

A squarely built man in tan slacks and a brown sweater stood in the
center of the room, this side of the counter.  He was only two inches
taller than Dom, but in other dimensions he was considerably larger.  He
seemed to have been hewn from massive slabs of oak.  The gray of his
brush-cut hair, the weathered lines of his face, indicated he was in his
fifties, although his bull-strong body had a younger presence and power.

The big man was shaking, as if enraged.  A woman stood beside him,
staring up at him with an odd and urgent expression.  She was a blond
with vivid blue eyes, younger than him, though it was difficult to judge
her age.  The man's pale face was shiny with sweat.  As Dom stepped
across the threshold, he realized that his flash impression was wrong:
This guy was not enraged but terrified.

"Relax," the woman said.  "Try to control your breathing."

The big man was gasping.  He stood with his thick neck bent, head
lowered, shoulders hunched, staring at the floor, inhalation following
exhalation in an arhythmic pattern that betrayed a growing panic.

"Take deep slow breaths," the woman said.  "Remember what Dr. Fontelaine
taught you.  When you're calm, we'll go outside for a walk."

"No!" the big man said, shaking his head violently.

"Yes, we will," the woman said, putting a reassuring hand on his arm.
"We'll go outside for a walk, Ernie, and you'll see that this darkness
is no different from the darkness in Milwaukee."

Ernie.  The name chilled Dom and immediately brought to mind those four
posters of the moon on which names had been scrawled in Zebediah
Lomack's living room, in Reno.

The woman glanced at Dom, and he said, " I need a room."

"We're full," she said.

"The vacancy sign is lit."

"Okay," she said.  "Okay, but not now.  Please.  Not now.

Go over to the diner or something.  Come back in half an hour.  Please."

Until that exchange, Ernie had seemed unaware of Dom's intrusion.  Now,
he looked up from the floor, and a moan of fear and despair escaped him.
"The door.  Close it before the darkness comes in!"

"No, no, no," the woman told him, her voice firm yet full of compassion.
"It's not coming in.  Darkness can't hurt you, Ernie."

"It's coming in," he insisted miserably.

Dom realized that the room was unnaturally bright.  Table lamps, a floor
lamp, a desk lamp, and the ceiling fixtures blazed.

The woman turned to Dom again.  "For God's sake, close the door."

He stepped in, rather than out, and shut the door behind him.

"I meant, close it as you leave," the woman said pointedly.

The expression on Ernie's face was part terror, part embarrassment. His
eyes shifted from Dom to the window.  "It's right there at the glass.
All the darkness .  .  .  pressing, pressing." He looked sheepishly at
Dom, then lowered his head again, shut his eyes tight.

Dom stood transfixed.  Ernie's irrational fear was horribly like the
terror which drove Dom to walk in his sleep and to hide in closets.

 Using anger to repress her tears, the woman turned to Dom.  "Why won't
you go?  He's nyctophobic.  He's afraid of the dark sometimes, and when
he has one of these attacks, we have to work it out together."

Dom remembered the other names scrawled on the posters in Lomack's
house-Ginger, Faye-and he chose one by instinct.  "It's all right, Faye.
I think I understand a little of what you're going through."

She blinked in surprise when he used her name.  "Do I know you?"

"Do you?  I'm Dominick Corvaisis."

"Means nothing to me," she said, staying with the big man as he turned
and, eyes still closed, shuffled toward the back of the office.

Ernie moved blindly toward the gate in the counter.  ,Got to get
upstairs, where I can pull the drapes, keep the dark out."

Faye said, "No, Ernie, wait.  Don't run from it."

Stepping in front of Ernie, putting a hand on the man's chest to halt
him, Dom said, "You have nightmares.  When you wake up, you can't
remember what they were, except they had something to do with the moon."

Faye gasped.

Ernie opened his eyes in surprise.  " How'd you know that?"

"I've had nightmares for over a month," Dom said.  "Every night.  And I
know a man who suffered from them so bad he killed himself."

They stared at him in astonishment.

"In October," Dom said, "I started walking in my sleep. I'd creep out of
bed, hide in closets, or gather weapons to protect myself.  Once, I
tried to nail the windows shut to keep something out.  Don't you see,
Ernie, I'm afraid of something in the dark.  I'll bet that's what you're
afraid of, too.  Not just the dark itself but something else, something
specific that happened to you"-he gestured toward the windows-"out there
in the darkness on that same weekend, the summer before last."

Still baffled by this turn of events, Ernie glanced at the night beyond
the windows, then immediately looked away. "I don't understand."

"Let's go upstairs, where you can draw the drapes," Dom said.  "I'll
tell you what I know.  The important thing is you aren't alone in this.
You're not alone any more.  And, thank God, neither am I."

New Haven County, Connecticut.

Clockwork.  Jack Twist's heists always ticked along like clockwork
mechanisms.  The armored-car job was no exception.

The night was solidly roofed with clouds.  No stars, no moon. No snow
was falling, but a cold moist wind swept up from the southwest.

The Guardmaster truck rumbled past empty fields, coming from the
northeast toward the knoll from which Jack had watched it Christmas Eve.
Its headlights bored through thin ragged sheets of patchy winter fog. In
the snow-wrapped fields, the county lane resembled a strip of black
satin ribbon.

Dressed in a white ski suit with hood, Jack lay half buried in snow,
south of the roadway, across from the knoll.  On the other side of the
road, at the foot of the knoll, the second member of the team, Chad
Zepp, also in white camouflage, sprawled in another drift.

The third member of the team, Branch Pollard, was halfway down the knoll
with a Heckler and Koch HK91 heavy assault rifle.

The truck was two hundred yards away.  Refracting the headlights, fog
formations drifted across the road, into the lightless fields.

Suddenly the muzzle of the HK91 flashed up on the hillside.

A shot cracked above the sound of the grinding engine.

The HK91, perhaps the finest combat rifle made, could fire hundreds of
rounds without jamming.  Extremely accurate, effective at a thousand
yards, the HK91 could put a 7.62 NATO round through a tree or concrete
wall, with sufficient punch left to kill someone on the other side.

Tonight, however, they did not intend to kill anyone.  Aided by an
infra-red telescopic sight, Pollard put the first shot where he wanted
it, blowing out the right front tire of the Guardmaster transport.

The truck swerved wildly.  Encountering ice, it began to slide.

Even while the armored transport was sliding, its fate unsettled, Jack
was up and running.  He leaped a ditch and dashed onto the road in front
of the vehicle, which loomed like a tank.  At the last moment, when it
seemed bound inexorably for the ditch, the driver regained control and
brought the truck to a jerky halt thirty feet from Jack.

He saw one of the Guardmaster crewmen talking excitedly into a radio
handset.  That call for help was futile.  The moment Pollard had fired
from the knoll, Chad Zepp, still concealed in the snow north of the
road, had switched on a batterypowered transmitter, jamming the
transport's radio frequency with shrill electronic static.

As the rising wind harried fog-ghosts past Jack, he stood in the middle
of the road, feeling naked in the blazing headlights, taking time to aim
the tear-gas rifle at the truck's grille. The gun was of British
manufacture, designed for anti-terrorist squads.  Other tear-gas weapons
fired grenades that spewed disabling fumes on impact, requiring the
marksman to aim at windows.  But upon seizing an embassy, terrorists
usually boarded up the windows.  The new British gun, which Jack had
acquired from a black-market arms dealer in Miami, had a two-inch bore
and fired a high-velocity, steel-jacketed tear-gas shell that could
penetrate most wooden doors or punch through a boarded window.  When
Jack fired, the shell smashed through the truck's grille into the engine
compartment.  A noxious yellow vapor began roiling into the cab by way
of its ventilation system.

The guards had been trained to remain in their secure roost in a crisis,
for the cab had steel doors and bulletproof glass. But when they
switched off the heater and closed the vents too late, they found
themselves choking in the gas-filled cabin. They opened their locked
doors, spilled out into the cold winter night, wheezing, coughing'

In spite of the blinding, suffocating gas, the driver had drawn his
revolver.  Dropping to his knees, gagging, he squinted his copiously
watering eyes in search of a target.

But Jack kicked the gun out of his hand, grabbed him by the coat, and
dragged him to the front of the truck, where he handcuffed him to a
support strut on the bumper.

After firing the shot that disabled the truck, Branch Pollard had
sprinted down the knoll.  Now, at the other end of the front bumper, he
handcuffed the other protesting guard to another strut.

Both guards were blinking furiously, trying to clear their gas-blurred
vision to get a look at their attackers' faces, but that was wasted
effort because Jack, Pollard, and Zepp were wearing ski masks.

Leaving the securely shackled men, Jack and Pollard ran to the back of
the truck, moving fast, though not because they feared being seen by
other traffic on that lonely road. No traffic would pass until they were
gone.  The moment the Guardmaster unit had entered the flats, the last
two members of the robbery team, Hart and Dodd, had sealed off both ends
of the road with stolen vans that had been repainted and equipped with
Department of Highway signs.  Against an impressive backdrop of
emergency beacons flashing on the roofs of their vans and on sawhorses
they had set out on the pavement, Dodd and Hart would turn back everyone
who wanted through, spinning a tale of a tanker-truck accident.

Clockwork.

When Jack and Pollard got to the rear of the truck, Chad Zepp was
already there.  In the glow of a battery-powered light that he had fixed
to the truck with a magnet, Zepp was unscrewing the faceplate that
covered the lock mechanism on the doors to the cargo hold.

They had brought explosives, but when trying to peel a truck as
well-constructed as the Guardmaster, there was a risk that explosives
would fuse the lock pins, sealing the honeypot even tighter.  They had
to try going in through the lock, leaving explosives as a last resort.

Some older armored cars had locks that operated with a key or pair of
keys, and some had combination dials, but this was a new vehicle with
state-of-the-art equipment.  This lock was engaged and disengaged by
pressing a sequence of code numbers on a ten-digit keyboard that was the
size and appearance of the "dial" on a touch-tone telephone.  To
activate the lock, the guard closed the doors and simply punched in the
middle number of the three-number code.  To deactivate

it, he pressed all three numbers in the correct order.  The code was
changed every morning, and of the two men crewing the truck, only the
driver knew it.

There were one thousand possible three-number sequences in ten digits.
Because it would take between four and five seconds to key in each
sequence and wait for it to be accepted or rejected, they would have to
delay at least an hour and a quarter to try every combination.  That was
far too risky.

Chad Zepp removed the faceplate from the lock.  The ten numbered buttons
remained, but now it was possible to see a bit of the mechanism between
and behind them.

Hung on a strap from Zepp's shoulder was a battery-powered,
attache-sized computer, which could assess and control the circuitry of
electronic locks and alarms.  It was SLICKS, an acronym for Security
Lock Intervention and Circumvention Knowledge System.  Intended solely
for military or intelligence-agency personnel with security clearance,
SLICKS was unavailable to the public.  Unauthorized possession was a
criminal violation of the Defense Security Act.  To obtain a SLICKS,
Jack had gone to Mexico City and had paid twentyfive thousand dollars to
a black-market arms dealer who had a contact inside the firm that
manufactured the device.

Zepp unslung the computer and held it so he and Jack and Pollard could
see the four-inch-square video display, which was dark.  Three
retractable probes were slotted in the SLICKS, and Jack withdrew the
first of these from its niche: It looked like a copper-tipped steel
thermometer on a two-foot wire umbilical.  Jack looked closely at the
partially exposed guts of the electronic lock and carefully inserted the
slender probe between the first two buttons, touching it to the contact
point at the base of the button marked #1.  " The display screen
remained dark.  He moved the probe to button number 2, then 3.  Nothing.
But when he touched number 4, a pale green word-CURRENT-appeared on the
screen, plus numbers that measured trace-electricity in the contact.

This meant that the middle number of the three-digit lockcode was 4.
After loading sacks of money and checks into the cargo-hold at the last
stop on the route, the driver had pushed 4 to activate the lock.  The
contact point of that button would remain closed until the entire code
was punched in, thereby unlocking the door.

With three unknown numbers, the possible combinations had been one
thousand.  But now that they needed to find only the first and last
numbers, the search was reduced to one hundred combinations.

Ignoring the howling wind, Jack withdrew another instrument from the
SLICKS.  This was also on a two-foot cord but resembled a watercolor
brush though with a single bristle. The bristle glowed with light and
was thicker than a sixtypound fishing line, stiff yet flexible.  Jack
inserted it into a crack at the base of the #1 button on the lock
keyboard, glanced at the computer video display, but was not rewarded,
He moved the bristle-probe from number to number.  The display screen
blinked, then showed a partial diagram of a circuit board.

The bristle that he had thrust inside the mechanism was actually the end
filament of an optical laser, a more sophisticated cousin of the similar
device which, in supermarket cash registers, read the bar codes on
grocery items.  The SLICKS was not programmed to read bar codes but to
recognize circuitry patterns and render models of them on the display
screen.  The screen would register nothing whatsoever until the
bristle-probe was aimed directly at a circuit or portion thereof, but
then it would faithfully reproduce the hidden pattern that it saw.

Jack had to move the probe three times, insert it into the lock
mechanism at three different points, before the computer was able to
piece together a picture of the entire circuitry from partial views. The
diagram glowed in bright green lines and symbols on the miniature video
display.  After three seconds of consideration, the computer drew boxes
around two small portions of the diagram to indicate those points at
which a tap could easily be applied to the circuitry.  Then it
superimposed an image of the ten-digit keyboard over the diagram, to
show where those two weak points were in relation to that portion of the
lock mechanism that was visible to Jack.

"There's a good tap-in spot below the number four button," Jack said.

"You need me to drill?" Pollard asked.

"I don't think so."

Jack returned the optical probe to its slot and withdrew a third slender
instrument with a spongy mesh tip of some material he could not
identify, which the designer of SLICKS had labeled the "tap-wand." He
inserted it through the tiny gap in the lock mechanism at the base of
the 4 button, slowly moved it up and down, left and right, until the
computer beeped and flashed INTERVENTION on the miniature video display.

While Jack held the tap-wand in place and Chad Zepp held the SLICKS
upright, Pollard used the computer's small programming board to quickly
type instructions.  INTERVENTION disappeared, and onto the screen came
other words: SYSTEM CONTROL ESTABLISHED.  The computer could now feed
commands directly to the microchip that processed the lock codes and
that directed the sliding steel bolts to either close or open.

Pollard hit two more keys, and the SLICKS began to send sequences of
three numbers to the microchip, one combination every six-hundredths of
a second, all of which used the already known 4 as the middle digit of
the code.  SLICKS hit the right code-545-in only nine seconds.

With four simultaneous thumps, the lock bolts retracted as one.

Jack returned the tap-wand to its niche, switched off the computer. Only
four minutes had passed since the rifle-shot that had blown out the
truck's right front tire.

Clockwork.

As Zepp slung the SLICKS over his shoulder again, Pollard opened the
rear doors of the armored car.  The money was theirs for the taking.

Zepp laughed with delight.  With a gleeful whoop, Pollard clambered into
the truck and began to push out bulging canvas bags.

But Jack still felt empty and cold inside.

A few snow flurries suddenly appeared in the wind.

The unexplained change in Jack, which had begun weeks ago, had now
reached completion.  He no longer cared about getting even with society.
He felt purposeless, as adrift as the wind-borne flakes of snow.

Elko County, Nevada.

Faye Block had turned on the NO VACANCY notice to ensure that they would
not be disturbed.

Sitting around the table in the cheery kitchen of their apartment above
the motel office, with the blinds shut against the night, the Blocks
sipped coffee and listened spellbound as Dom told his story.

The only point at which they registered disbelief was when he told them
of the impossible dance of paper moons in Zebediah Lomack's house in
Reno.  But he was able to describe that startling event in such sharp
detail that he felt gooseflesh pimpling his arms, and he saw that his
own awe and fear were being transmitted to Faye and Ernie.

They appeared most impressed by the two Polaroid photographs that had
arrived in the mail from the unknown correspondent two days before Dom
had flown to Portland.  They studied the picture in which the
zombie-faced priest was sitting at a writing desk, and they were certain
it had been taken in one of their motel rooms.  The photo of the blond
in bed with an IV line in her arm was a closeup that showed nothing of
the room, but they recognized the floral-patterned bedspread visible in
one corner of the shot; it was the kind that had been in use in some
units until ten months ago.

To Dom's surprise, they had been sent a similar photograph.  Ernie
remembered receiving it in a plain envelope on December 10, five days
before thee had flown to Milwaukee. Faye got it from the center drawer
of the desk in the downstairs office, and they hunched conspiratorially
over the kitchen table, studying the print.  It was a shot of three
people-man, woman, child-standing in sunshine by the door to Room 9.

All three were dressed in shorts, T_shirts, and sandals.

"Do you recognize them?" Dom asked.

" No," Faye said.

"But I feel like I ought to remember them," Ernie said.

Dom said, "Sunshine .  .  .  summer clothes .  .  .  so we can almost
certainly conclude it was taken the summer before last, that weekend,
between Friday the sixth of July and the following Tuesday.  These three
people were part of whatever happened.  Maybe innocent victims like us.
And our unknown correspondent wants us to think about them, remember
them."

Ernie said, "Whoever sent the pictures would've been one of the people
who erased our memories.  So why would he want to stir us up like this
after so much trouble was taken to make us forget?"

Dom shrugged.  "Maybe he never believed it was rightwhat was done to us.
Maybe he only went along with it because he had to, and maybe it's been
on his conscience ever since.  Whoever he is, he's afraid to come right
out with what he knows.  He's got to do it indirectly."

Abruptly, Faye pushed her chair back from the table.  "Five weeks of
mail piled up while we were away.  Might be something more in it."

As the sound of Faye's descending footsteps echoed up from the stairs,
Ernie said, "Sandy-that's our waitress at the Grille-sorted through the
mail and paid the bills as they arrived.  But the rest of the mail she
just dropped in a paper sack.  Since we came back this morning, we've
been so busy getting the place open, we didn't bother looking to see
what the postman brought."

Faye returned with two plain white envelopes.  In a state of high
excitement, they opened the first.  It contained a Polaroid of a man
lying on his back in bed, an intravenous needle in his arm.  He was in
his fifties.  Dark hair, baking.  In ordinary circumstances, he probably
had a jovial look, for he resembled W.  C.  Fields.  But he was staring
blankly toward the camera, face bleak.  Zombie eyes....

"My God, it's Calvin!" Faye said.

"Yeah," Ernie said.  "Cal Sharkle.  He's a long-haul trucker movin'
freight between Chicago and San Francisco."

"He stops at the Grille most every trip," Faye said.  "Sometimes, when
he's beat, he stays overnight.  Calvin's such a nice man."

"What company's he drive for?" Dom asked.

"He's independent," Ernie said.  "Owns his own rig."

"Would you know how to get in touch with him?"

"Well," Ernie said, "he signs the registry every time he checks in, so
we'll have his address .  .  .  around Chicago somewhere, I think."

"We'll check later.  First, let's look in that other envelope."

Faye opened it and produced another Polaroid.  Again, it was a shot of a
man lying in one of the Tranquility Motel's beds, an IV line in one arm.
Like all the others, he had no expression whatsoever, and soulless eyes
that reminded Dom of horror movies about the living dead.

But this time, they all recognized the man in the bed.  It was Dom.

Las Vegas, Nevada.

When Marcie's bedtime came, she was sitting at the little desk in the
corner of her room, occupied with her collection of moons.

Jorja stood in the doorway, watching.  The girl was so thoroughly
engaged by the task that she remained unaware she was being observed.

A box of crayons lay beside the album full of moons.  Marcie was hunched
over the work surface, carefully coloring one of the lunar faces.  This
was a new development, and Jorja wondered what it meant.

In the week since Marcie had begun her collection with magazine
clippings, she had filled the album.  She had few sources for photos, so
she drew hundreds of pictures to add to the monotonous gallery.  Using
templets as varied as coins, jar lids, vases, drinking glasses, cans,
and thimbles, she traced lunar forms of all sizes on tablet paper,
construction paper, paper bags, envelopes, and wrapping, paper.  She did
not spend most of her time with the album, but each day she devoted a
bit more time to it than she had the day before.

Dr.  Ted Coverly, the psychologist treating Marcie, believed the anxiety
that had generated the girl's irrational fear of doctors had not been
relieved.  Now, the child was expressing that anxiety through her lunar
preoccupation.  When Jorja noted that Marcie did not seem to be
particularly frightened of the moon, Coverly said, "Well, her anxiety
doesn't have to seek expression in another phobia.  It can show itself
in other ways .  .  .  such as an obsession." Jorja could not understand
where her daughter's extraordinary anxiety came from.  Coverly said,
"That's why the therapy-to seek understanding.  Don't worry, Miss
Monatella."

But Jorja was worried.

She was worried because Alan had killed himself only yesterday.  Jorja
had not yet told Marcie of her father's death. On leaving Pepper
Carrafield's apartment, she had called Coverly to ask his advice.  He
was astonished to learn that Alan, too, had been dreaming of the moon
and had independently developed an intense lunar fascination of his own.
That one would take time to ponder.  Meanwhile, Coverly thought it wise
to withhold the bad news from Marcie until Monday.  "Come with her to
the appointment.  We'll tell her

together." Jorj a was afraid that, in spite of Alan's inattention,
Marcie would be devastated by his death.

As she stood in the bedroom doorway, watching Marcie diligently applying
a crayon to one of the moons, Jorja was stricken by an acute awareness
of the girl's fragility.  Although she was seven years old and in second
grade, the three-quarterscale chair was still too big for her, and only
the toes of her sneakers touched the floor.  Even for a macho man
armored with muscles, life was tenuous, and every additional day of
existence was against the odds.  But for a child as petite as Marcie,
continued life seemed downright miraculous.  Jorja realized how easily
her precious daughter could be taken from her, and her heart swelled and
ached with love.

When at last Jorja said, "Honey, better put your pajamas on and brush
your teeth," she could not keep a tremor out of her voice.

The girl looked bewildered, as if she were not quite sure where she was
or who Jorja was.  Then her eyes cleared, and she gave her mother a
smile that could melt butter.  "Hi, Mommy.  I been coloring moons."

"Well, now it's time to get ready for bed," Jorja said.

"In a little while, okay?" The girl appeared to be relaxed, yet she was
gripping a crayon so tightly that her knuckles were white.  "I want to
color some more moons."

Jorja wanted to destroy the hateful album.  But Dr.  Coverly had warned
that arguing with the child about the moons and forbidding her to
collect them would only strengthen her obsession.  Jorja was not sure he
was right, but she stifled the urge to destroy the album.

,,Tomorrow, you'll have lots of time to color, Peanut."

Reluctantly, Marcie closed the album, put away her crayons, and went to
the bathroom to brush her teeth.

Alone beside the child's desk, Jorja was overcome by weariness.  In
addition to working a full shift, she'd arranged a mortician for Alan's
body, ordered flowers, and settled details with the cemetery for
Monday's funeral.  She had also called Alan's estranged father in Miami
to break the bad news.  She was drained.  Wearily, she opened the album.

Red.  The girl was coloring all the moons red, both those she had drawn
and those clipped from newspapers and magazines.  She had already
painted more than fifty lunar images. The obsessive quality of the
girl's work was evident in the great care she had taken to keep the
crayon from slipping past the outline of each moon.  The crayon had been
applied more heavily picture by picture, until some moons were coated
with so much scarlet wax that they had a glisteningly wet look.

The use of red-and red alone-profoundly disturbed Jorja. It almost
seemed as if Marcie had glimpsed an augury of some onrushing terror, a
premonition of blood.

Elko County, Nevada.

Faye Block had gone downstairs to the file cabinets, from which she had
extracted the motel registry that had been in use the summer before
last.  Upon her return, she put the book on the kitchen table, in front
of Dom, open to the guest lists of Friday and Saturday, July 6 and 7.

"There, just like Ernie and I remembered.  That Friday was the night
they closed the interstate because of a toxic spill. A truckload of
dangerous chemicals headed out to Shenkfield. That's a military
installation about eighteen miles southwest of here.  We had to close
the motel until Tuesday, until they got the situation under control."

Ernie said, "Shenkfield's an isolated testing ground for chemical and
biological weapons, so the crap in that truck was damned nasty."

Faye continued, a new wooden note in her voice, as if reciting carefully
memorized lines.  "They erected roadblocks and ordered us to evacuate
the danger zone.  Our guests left in their own cars." Her face remained
expressionless.  "Ned and Sandy Sarver were allowed to go up to their
trailer near Beowawe because it was outside the quarantine area."

Astonished and confused, Dom said, "Impossible.  I don't remember any
evacuation.  I was here.  I remember reading, researching the geography
for a series of short stories .  .  .  but those memories are so thin I
suspect they aren't real.  No substance to them.  Still, I was here and
nowhere else, and something weird was done to me." He indicated the
Polaroid snapshot of himself.  "There's the proof."

When Faye spoke, she sounded stiffer than before, and Dom saw a
strangeness in her eyes, a slightly glazed look. "Until the all-clear
was given, Ernie and I stayed with friends who have a small ranch in the
mountains ten miles northeast of here-Eiroy and Nancy Jamison.  It was a
difficult spill to clean up. The Army needed more than three days to do
the job.  They wouldn't let us back here until Tuesday morning."

"What's wrong with you, Faye?" Dom asked.

She blinked.  "Huh?  What do you mean?"

"You sound as if you'd been .  .  .  programmed with that little
speech."

She seemed genuinely baffled.  "What're you talking about?"

Frowning, Ernie said, "Faye, your voice went .  .  .  flat."

"Well, I was only explaining what happened." She leaned over and put one
finger on Friday's page of the registry.  "See, we'd rented out eleven
rooms by the time they closed the interstate that night.  But nobody
paid for the rooms because nobody stayed.  They were evacuated."

"There's your name, seventh on the list," Ernie said.

Dom stared at his signature and at the Mountainview, Utah, address to
which he had been moving at the time.  He could remember checking in,
but he sure as hell could not remember climbing back into his car and
driving out the same night in response to an evacuation order.  He said,
"Did you actually see the accident, the tanker truck?"

Ernie shook his head.  "No, the truck overturned a couple miles from
here." He spoke in that by-rote tone that had marked Faye's speech. "The
Army experts from Shenkfield were concerned the chemicals would be
dispersed by the wind, so the quarantine zone was very large."

Chilled by the unconscious artificiality in Ernie's voice, Dom looked at
Faye and saw that she too had noticed her husband's unnatural tone.  He
said, "That's what you sounded like a moment ago, Faye." He looked at
Ernie.  "You two have been programmed with the same script."

Faye frowned.  "Are you saying the spill never happened?"

"It happened, all right." Ernie told Dom.  "For a while we saved a bunch
of newspaper clippings about it from the Elko Sentinel.  But I think we
eventually threw them out.  Anyway, people around these parts still
wonder what might've happened if we'd gotten big winds and been
contaminated with that top-secret stuff before the evacuation order was
even given.  No, it's not just some delusion of Faye's and mine."

"You can ask Elroy and Nancy Jamison," Faye said.  "They were here that
night, visiting.  When we had to evacuate, they offered to take us back
to their place and put us up for the duration."

Dom smiled sourly.  "I wouldn't put much credence in their recall of
events.  If they were here, then they saw what the rest of us saw, and
it was scrubbed from their minds.  They remember taking you back to
their place because that's what they were told to remember.  In fact
they were probably right here, being brainwashed with the rest of us."

"My head's swimming," Faye said.  "This is positively Byzantine."

 "But, damn it, the toxic spill and evacuation happened," Ernie said.
"It was in the newspapers."

Dom thought of a disturbing explanation that made his scalp crawl. "What
if everyone here at the motel that night was contaminated with some
chemical or biological weapon headed for Shenkfield?  And what if the
Army and the government covered it up to avoid bad press, millions of
dollars in lawsuits, and the disclosure of top-secret information? Maybe
they closed the highway and announced that everyone was safely
evacuated, when in fact we had not been gotten out in time.  Then they
used the motel as a clinic, decontaminated us as much as they could,
scrubbed the memory of the incident out of our minds, and reprogrammed
us with false memories, so we'd never know what had happened to us."

They stared at one another in shocked silence for a moment.  Not because
the scenario sounded entirely right, which it did not.  But because it
was the first scenario they'd come up with that made sense of the
psychological problems they had been having and explained the drugged
people in those Polaroid snapshots.

Then Ernie and Faye began to think of objections.  Ernie voiced the
first: "In that case, the logical thing for them to've done was to make
our false memories tie in closely with their cover story about the toxic
spill and evacuation.  That's exactly what they did with Faye and me,
with the Jamisons, Ned and Sandy Sarver.  So why didn't they do the same
with you?

Why'd they program you with different memories that didn't have anything
to do with the evacuation?  That was irrational and risky.  I mean, the
radical differences between our memories is virtually proof that you or
we or all of us-were brainwashed.

"Don't know," Dom said.  "That's just one more mystery to unravel."

"And here's another flaw in that theory," Ernie said.  "If we'd been
contaminated by a biological weapon, they wouldn't have let us go in
just three days.  They'd have been afraid of contagion, epidemic." Dom
said, "All right.  So it was a chemical agent, not a virus or bacterium.
Something they could wash off or flush out of our systems."

"That doesn't make sense, either," Faye said.  "Because the things they
test at Shenkfield are meant to be deadly. Poison gas.  Nerve gas.
Hideous damn stuff.  If we'd got caught in a cloud like that, we'd have
been dead on the spot or braindamaged or crippled."

"Maybe it was a slow-acting agent," Dom said.  "Something that generates
tumors, leukemia, or other conditions that only begin to show up two or
three or five years from the date of contamination."

That thought also shocked them into silence.  They listened to the
ticking of the kitchen clock, to the mournful fluting of the wind at the
windows, wondering if malignancies were even now sprouting within them.

Finally, Ernie said, "Maybe we were contaminated, and maybe we're all
slowly rotting inside, but I don't think so. After all, they test
potential weapons at Shenkfield.  And what use would a weapon be that
didn't kill the enemy for years and years?"

"Virtually no use at all," Dom acknowledged.

"And," Ernie said, "how could chemical contamination explain that
bizarre experience you had in Lomack's house in Reno?"

"I've no idea," Dom said.  "But now that we know they cordoned off this
whole area using the excuse of a toxic spillwhether it was a real spill
or not-my theory that we were brainwashed is a lot more credible.
Because, see, before this I wasn't able to explain how someone could've
rounded us up at will and held us long enough to make us forget the
thing we saw.  But the quarantine gave them the time they needed, and it
also kept away prying eyes.  So .  .  .  at least now we have a good
idea who we're up against.  The United States Army, maybe acting in
collusion with the government, maybe acting alone, has been trying to
hide something that happened here, something it did but shouldn't have
done.  I don't know ' about you, but the thought of being up against an
enemy that big and that potentially ruthless scares the hell out of me."

"An old Leatherneck like me is bound to be scornful of the Army," Ernie
said.  "But they're not devils, you know. We can't leap to the
conclusion we're victims of a wicked right-wing conspiracy.  That
crackpot stuff makes millions for paranoid novelists and for Hollywood,
but in the real world, evil is more subtle, less identifiable.  If Army
and government officials are behind what happened to us, they don't
necessarily have immoral motives.  They probably think they did the only
wise thing they could've done in the circumstances."

"But whether or not it's wise," Faye said, "we've got to dig into this
situation.  If we don't, Ernie's nyctophobia will surely get worse.  And
your sleepwalking will also get worse, Dom.  And what then?"

They all knew "what then."

"What then" was a shotgun barrel jammed in the mouth, the route to peace
that Zebediah Lomack had taken.

Dom looked down at the motel registry on the table before him.  Four
spaces above his own name, he saw another entry that electrified him.
Dr.  Ginger Weiss.  Her address was in Boston.

"Ginger," he said.  "The fourth name on those moon posters."

Furthermore, Cal Sharkle, the Blocks' trucker-friend from Chicago, the
zombie-eyed subject of one of the Polaroid snapshots, had checked into
the motel just before Dr.  Weiss.  The first guests to sign in that day
were Mr.  and Mrs.  Alan Rykoff and daughter, of Las Vegas.  Dom was
willing to bet that they were the young family photographed in front of
the door to Room 9.  Zebediah Lomack's name was not in the registry, so
he had probably just been unlucky enough to stop at the Grille for
dinner that night, on his way between Reno and Elko.  One of the other
names might have been that of the young priest in the other Polaroid,
but if so, he had signed without appending his title.

"We'll have to talk to all these people," Dom said excitedly.  "We can
start calling them first thing tomorrow and see what they remember about
those days in July."

Chicago, Illinois.

By allowing no slightest hairline crack to appear in his resolve, by
showing no equivocation whatsoever, Brendan managed to obtain Father
Wycazik's permission to go to Nevada alone on Monday, without Monsignor
Janney trailing him in expectation of miracles.

By ten-ten, he was in bed with the lights out, lying on his side in
blackness, staring at the window, where the palest light glistered
softly in the frost that skinned the pane.  The window looked out upon
the courtyard, where no lights burned at this hour, so Brendan knew that
he was seeing indirect moonglow refracted by the thin layer of ice that
had welded itself to the glass.  It had to be indirect light because the
moon was traversing the sky on a course that had made it visible from
the study windows earlier in the evening, and the study was on the other
side of the rectory; the moon could not now be over the courtyard unless
it had made a sudden ninetydegree turn in the path it had previously
been following, which was not possible.  As he patiently lay waiting for
sleep, he became increasingly intrigued by the subtle patterns made by
the second-hand moonbeams that had been trapped in the frost; light
splintered at every point where one ice crystal interfaced with another,
each beam shattering into a hundred beams, a hundred more.

"The moon," he whispered, surprised by his voice.  "The moon."

Gradually, Brendan realized that something uncanny was happening.

At first he was merely fascinated by the harmonious interaction of frost
and moonlight, but soon fascination evolved into a more intense
attraction.  He could not look away from the pearly window.  It offered
an indefinable promise, and he was drawn as a sailor by a siren's song.
Before he knew what he intended, he had slipped one arm out from beneath
the blankets and was reaching toward the window, though it was ten feet
away and could not be touched from where he lay. The black silhouette of
his spread-fingered hand was clearly defined against the niveous pane of
glass that glowed softly beyond, and his futile straining was the
essence of yearning. Brendan longed to be within the light, not the
light that lived in the frost but that other golden light of his dreams.

"The moon," he whispered, again surprised that he had spoken.

His heartbeat accelerated.  He began to tremble.

Suddenly, upon the glass, the sugary-looking frost underwent an
inexplicable change.  As Brendan watched, the thin timemelted away from
the edges of the pane, toward the center.  In a few seconds, when the
melting stopped, there remained only a perfect circle of ice, about ten
inches in diameter, glowing eerily in the middle of an otherwise clear,
dry, dark rectangle of glass.

The moon.

Brendan knew it was a sign, though he did not know from whom or what or
where it came, nor did he understand it.

On Christmas night, when he had stayed at his parents' house in
Bridgeport, Brendan had apparently had a dream featuring the moon, for
he had awakened his mother and father with his loud and panicky cries.
But he could remember nothing of the dream.  Since then, as far as he
knew, none of his dreams had involved the moon, but were concerned
exclusively with that mysterious place full of dazzling golden light,
where he felt himself called toward some incredible revelation.

Now, as he still reached with one hand toward the glimmering frost on
the window, the vaguely phosphorescent time grew brighter, as if some
peculiar chemical reaction was at work within the ice crystals.  The
moon-image changed from a milky hue to the crisper white of sun-dappled
snow, then grew even brighter, until it was a scintillant circle of
silver blazing on the glass.

Heart pounding furiously, certain he was teetering on the edge of some
astounding epiphany, Brendan continued to hold his hand toward the
window, and he gasped in shock as a shaft of light leapt out from the
frost-moon and fell across the bed.  It was like the beam of a spotlight
and every bit as brilliant.  As he squinted into the glare, trying to
see how such fierce incandescence could possibly originate from ordinary
hoarfrost and glass, the light changed to pale red, to darker red, to
crimson, to scarlet.  Around him, the rumpled blankets shone like molten
steel, and his outstretched hand appeared to be wet with blood.

He was gripped by diji vu, absolutely convinced that he had once really
stood under a scarlet moon, bathed in its bloody glow.

Although he wanted to understand how this strange red light related to
the wondrous golden light of his dreams, although he still felt himself
being called by something unknown that waited in that radiance, he was
suddenly afraid.  As the scarlet beams intensified, as his room became a
caldron of heatless red fire and red shadows, his fear grew into terror
of such power that it made him shake and sweat.

He pulled his hand back, and the scarlet light rapidly faded to silver,
and the silver dimmed as well, until the circle of frost on the window
shone with only a natural reflection of the January moon.

As darkness laid claim to his room once more, Brendan sat up and hastily
switched on the lamp.  Damp with sweat, as full of the night-shakes as
any child frightened by fantasies of carnivorous goblins, he went to the
window.  The icy circle was still there, a moon image in the center of
the otherwise unfrosted pane of glass.

He had wondered if the light had been but a dream or hallucination.  In
a way, he almost wished it had been only that.  But the frost-moon was
still there, proof that what he had seen was real, not a delusion.

Hesitantly, he touched the glass.  He felt nothing unusual. Just the
bitter cold of winter pressing against the other side of the pane.

With a start, he realized that he felt the swollen rings in his palms.
He turned his hands over and watched as the stigmata faded.

He returned to bed.  For a long while he sat with his back against the
headboard, with his eyes open and the light on, waiting for the courage
to lie down in darkness.

Elko County, Nevada.

Ernie stood by the tub in the bathroom, trying to recall precisely what
he had thought and felt in the early hours of Saturday, December 14,
when he had been driven by some strange impulse to open the window and
had suffered that frightening hallucination.  The writer, Dominick
Corvaisis, stood by the sink, and Faye watched from the doorway.

Reflections of the ceiling light and the light above the mirror imparted
a warmth to the ceramic-tile floor, glimmered in the chrome faucets and
shower rod, gave a bright flat sheen to the plastic shower curtain, and
gradually illuminated the memories that Ernie sought.

"Light.  I came in here for the light.  My fear of the dark was at a
peak then, and I was trying to hide it from Faye. Couldn't sleep, so I
slipped out of bed, came here, closed the door, and just .  .  .  just
sort of reveled in the light." He told how his gaze was drawn to the
window above the tub and how he was overcome by an irrational and urgent
need to escape.  "It's hard to explain.  But suddenly crazy thoughts . .
.  whirled into my head.  For some reason, I panicked.  I thought, This
is my one chance to escape, so I'd better take it, go through that
window, head up into the hills .  .  .  get to a ranch, get help."

"help for what?" Cor-vaisis asked.  "Why did you need help?  Why did you
feel you needed to escape from your own home?"

Ernie frowned.  "Don't have the foggiest notion.  He remembered the way
he had felt that night-the eeriness, urgency strangely mixed with
dreaminess.  He pointed to the window.  "I actually slid back the bolt.
Opened it.  Might've crawled out, too, except I saw someone outside.  On
the roof of the utility room."

"Who?" Corvaisis asked.

"Sounds silly.  It was a guy in motorcycle gear.  White crash helmet.
Dark visor over his face.  Black gloves.  In fact, he reached one hand
through the window, as if making a grab for me, and I stepped backward,
fell over the edge of the tub.

"That's when I came running," Faye said.

"I got off the floor," Ernie said, "went back to the window, looked out
on the roof.  No one there.  It'd- been just .  .  . hallucination."

Faye said, "In extreme cases of phobia, when the sufferer is in almost
constant anxiety, hallucinations sometimes occur."

The writer stared at the opaque window above the tub, as if hoping to
find some vital secret revealed in the uneven milky texture of the
glass.  At last he said, "It wasn't exactly a hallucination.  I have a
hunch that what you saw, Ernie, was a .  .  .  well, call it a
memory-flash.  From the summer

before last.  From the lost days.  For a moment, back on December
fourteenth, your repressed memories surged toward the surface.  You had
a flashback to a time when you really were a prisoner in your own home,
when you really did try to escape."

"And I was stopped by that guy on the roof of the utility room?  But
what was he doing there in a motorcycle helmet?

Strange, isn't it'?"

Dom said, "A man in a decontamination suit, sent to deal with a spill of
chemicals or biological toxins, would wear an airtight helmet."

"Decontamination," Ernie said.  "But if they were actually here in suits
like that, then there must've really been a spill."

"Maybe," Dom said.  "We still don't know enough to decide."

Faye said, "But listen, if we all went through this experience, like you
think we did, then how come only you and Ernie and that Mr.  Lomack are
suffering repercussions?  How come I'm not having bad dreams and
psychological problems?"

The writer's gaze drifted back to the window.  "I don't know.  But those
are some of the questions we've got to answer if we've any hope of
relieving the subconscious anxiety that this experience left in us, if
we've any hope of getting on with normal lives."

Connecticut to New York City.

After the money had been removed from the armored car, Jack and his men
drove only nine miles and parked the two phony Department of Highway
vans in a four-stall rented garage leased with fake IDs, where they had
left their cars. The garage was one of a long row that faced both sides
of a litter-strewn alley in a shabby neighborhood, where relaxed zoning
laws permitted intermingling of commercial and industrial facilities
with residences.  The area was characterized by peeling paint, grime,
broken streetlamps, empty storefronts, and mean-looking mongrel dogs on
the loose.

They emptied the contents of the canvas bags on the oily concrete floor
of the garage and did a hasty count of the cash. They split it quickly
into five shares of approximately three hundred fifty thousand dollars
each, all in used bills that could never be traced.

Jack felt no triumph, no thrill.  Nothing.

In five minutes, the gang had dispersed like dandelion fluff on a brisk
wind.  Clockwork.

As Jack headed home to Manhattan, spits of snow fell in brief squalls,
though not enough to dust the highway or interfere with travel.

During the drive from Connecticut, in a strange mood, he underwent a
change he could not have anticipated.  Minute by minute and mile by
mile, the grayness in him began at last to be colored by emotion; his
ennui gave way to feelings that surprised him.  He would not have been
surprised by a new welling-up of grief or loneliness, for Jenny had been
dead only seventeen days.  But the emotion that steadily tightened its
grip on him was guilt.  The stolen money in the trunk of the car began
to weigh on his conscience as heavily as if it were the first ill-gotten
goods ever to fall into his hands.

Through eight busy years of meticulously planned and triumphantly
executed larcenies, several on an even grander scale than the armored
car, he had never experienced the mildest quiver of guilt.  Until now.
He had seen himself as a just avenger.  Until now.

Cruising to Manhattan.  through the blustery winter night, he began to
see himself as little more than a common thief. Guilt wrapped him like
flypaper.  He tried repeatedly to shake it off.  It clung.

Sudden as it seemed, the guilt had actually been building for a long
time; that was where his growing dissatisfaction had been leading for
months.  Disillusionment had set in noticeably with the jewelry-store
job last October, and he'd thought the changes had begun then.  But now,
forced into self-analysis, he realized he had stopped getting a full
measure of pleasure from his work long ago.  As he scrolled backward in
his memory, seeking the most recent job that had left him fulfilled, he
was startled to discover it was the McAllister burglary in Marin County,
north of San Francisco, the summer before last.

Ordinarily, he worked only in the East near Jenny, but Branch
Pollard-with whom he had pulled off the just-completed Guardmaster
heist-had settled in California for a while, and during that Pacific
sojourn he had spotted Avril McAllister, a sheep waiting to be sheared.
McAllister, an industrialist worth two hundred million, lived on an
eightacre estate in Marin County, protected by stone walls, a complex
electronic security system, and guard dogs.  With information developed
from a half-dozen sources, Branch had determined that McAllister was a
collector of rare stamps and coins, two eminently fenceable commodities.
Besides, the industrialist was a gambler who went to Vegas three times a
year, usually dropping a quarter of a million each visit, but sometimes
winning big; he always took his winnings in cash to avoid the taxman,
and some of that cash was surely in the mansion.  Branch needed Jack's
sense of strategy and expertise in electronics, and Jack needed a change
of scenery, so they pulled it off with the help of a third man.

After considerable planning, getting onto the estate and into the house
went smoothly.  They were prepared with an electronic listening device
that could detect the soft tick of a safe's tumblers and amplify them,
which made deducing the combination mere child's play, but as insurance
they also took a full set of safe-cracking tools and a plastic
explosive.  The problem was that Avril McAllister had no mere safe.  He
had a damn vault.  The industrialist was so certain of the vault door's
inviolability that he'd made no effort to conceal it with a sliding
partition or tapestry; it was in one wall of the immense game room, a
massive stainless-steel portal as big as anything in a first-class bank.
The listening device Jack had brought was not sensitive enough to detect
the movement of tumblers through twenty inches of stainless steel.  The
plastic explosive would have peeled any safe, but the vault was
blastproof.  The set of safecracker's tools was a joke.

They left the estate with no stamps or coins, but with sterling silver,
a complete collection of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett first
editions, a few jewels that Mrs. McAllister carelessly left out of the
vault, and a handful of other items, which they fenced for only sixty
thousand dollars, split three ways.  The take was by no means a
pittance, but it was far less than anticipated, insufficient to cover
their expenses and to make their time, planning, and risks worthwhile.

In spite of this debacle, Jack had gotten a kick out of the job.  Once
they had safely fled the McAllister estate, he and Branch had seen the
humor in the catastrophe and had been able to laugh about it.  They
spent two days relaxing in the California sun; then, on a whim, Jack
took his twenty thousand to Reno to see if he could do better at craps
and blackjack than he had done at burglary. Twenty-four hours after
checking into Harrah's, he checked out, the twenty thousand having grown
to an amazing $107,455.  The exquisite symmetry of bad-luck money
bringing good luck was enormously appealing. Deciding to extend his
vacation, he rented a car and drove back to New York, all the way across
the country, in a splendid mood, eager to see Jenny.

Now, more than eighteen months later, as he entered Manhattan on his
return trip from Connecticut, Jack realized that, curiously, the fiasco
at the McAllister estate had been the last enterprise to provide
untainted satisfaction.  At that point he had begun a long journey from
dead-end amorality all the way across the moral spectrum until he had
become, once more, capable of guilt.

But why?  What had initiated the change in him?  What continued to power
it?  He had no answers.

All he knew was that he was no longer able to think of himself as a
melancholy and romantic bandit with a just mission to redress the wrongs
done to him and to his beloved wife.  He was merely a thief.  For eight
years he had been deluding himself.  Now he saw himself for what he
really was, and the sudden insight was devastating.

He had not merely become a man without purpose.  Worse, without
realizing it, he had been lacking a worthwhile purpose for eight years.

He drove aimlessly through the streets of Manhattan, going nowhere in
particular, unwilling to return straightaway to the apartment.

He soon found himself on Fifth Avenue, approaching St. Patrick's, and on
impulse he pulled to the curb, parked illegally before the main doors of
the immense cathedral.  He got out of the car, went around to the trunk,
opened it, and pulled half a dozen banded stacks of twenty-dollar bills
from the plastic garbage bag.

It was foolhardy to leave the car illegally parked in so prominent a
location when its trunk contained more than a third of a million dollars
in stolen money, an illegally obtained device like SLICKS, and guns.  If
a cop stopped to give him a ticket and became suspicious and demanded to
search the car, Jack would be finished.  But he had ceased to care.  In
some ways, he was a dead man who still walked, just as Jenny had been a
dead woman who still breathed.

Though not a Catholic, he pulled open one of the sculpted bronze doors
of St.  Patrick's, went inside, into the nave, where a handful of people
knelt in the front pews, praying or saying the rosary, and where an old
man was lighting a votive candle even at this hour.  Jack stood for a
moment looking up at the elegant baldachin above the main altar. Then he
located the poor-boxes, removed the bundles of twenty-dollar bills from
inside his winter jacket, broke the paper bands that bound them, and
stuffed the money into the containers as if he were jamming garbage into
trash receptacles.

Outside again, as he was descending the granite steps, he stopped
abruptly and blinked at the night-draped cityscape, for something was
different about Fifth Avenue.  As a few huge snowflakes spiraled lazily
through the glow of streetlamps and through the lights of cars moving
along the thoroughfare, Jack gradually realized the city had reacquired
a fraction of the glitter, glamour, and mystery that it always had for
him before he'd gone to Central America but which it had not possessed
in ages.  It seemed cleaner now than it had been in a long time, and the
air was crisper, less polluted.

Staring around in amazement, he slowly understood that the city had not
undergone a metamorphosis during the past few minutes.  It was the same
city that it had been an hour ago-and yesterday.  But when he had come
back from Central America, he had been a different man from the one who
had gone away, and on returning he had been unable to see anything good
in the metropolis or in any other works of the society he hated.  Much
of the Big Apple's dreariness and degeneration had been merely a
reflection of his own blasted, burnt-out, corrupted inner landscape.

Jack returned to the Camaro, went west to Sixth Avenue, north to Central
Park, made a right turn, then another right onto Fifth Avenue again,
heading south, not sure where he was going until he reached the Fifth
Avenue Presbyterian Church.  Once more, he parked illegally, took cash
from the trunk, and went into the church.

There was no poor-box as in St.  Patrick's, but Jack found a young
assistant minister in the process of closing the place

for the night.  From various pockets, Jack produced bundles of ten- and
twenty-dollar bills wrapped with rubber bands, and handed them to the
startled cleric, claiming to have won a fortune in the casinos of
Atlantic City.

In two stops, he had given away thirty thousand dollars. But that was
not even one-tenth of what he had brought back from Connecticut, and
those dispensations did not allay his guilt.  In fact, his newfound
shame was growing stronger by the minute.  The bag of money in the trunk
was, to him, like the telltale heart buried under the floorboards in the
story by Poe, a throbbing annunciator of his guilt, and he was as
anxious to be rid of it as Poe's narrator had been anxious to silence
the incriminating heartbeat of his dismembered victim.

Three hundred thirty thousand dollars remained.  For some New Yorkers,
Christmas was about to come two and a half weeks late.

Elko County, Nevada.

The summer before last, Dom had stayed in Room 20.  He remembered it
well because it was the last unit in the motel's L-shaped east wing.

Ernie Block's curiosity was more compelling than his nyctophobia, so he
decided to accompany Faye and Dom to Room 20, where it was hoped that
Dom's memories would be stilled by the sight of the familiar walls and
furnishings. Ernie walked between Faye and Dom, who held his arms.
During the trip along the breezeway, the frigid night wind made Dom glad
for his fleece-lined jacket.  More concerned about the black night than
the chill, Ernie kept his eyes shut for the entire journey.

Faye went in first, snapping on the lights, closing drapes. Dom followed
with Ernie, who opened his eyes only when Faye shut the door.

Upon entering the room, Dom was filled with apprehension.  He walked to
the queen-sized bed, stared down at it.

He tried to remember lying here, drugged and helpless.

Faye said, "The bedspread's not the same, of course."

The Polaroid had shown the corner of a floral-patterned spread.  The
current model was brown- and blue-striped.

"The bed itself is the same, and all the furniture," Ernie said.

The padded headboard was upholstered with a coarse brown fabric,
slightly snagged and worn.  The nightstands were plain two-drawer chests
with laminated walnut veneer.  The bases of the lamps resembled large
hurricane lanterns, black metal with two panes of smoky amber glass in
each side; the cloth shades were the same amber hue as the glass in the
base. Each lamp had two bulbs: The main one, under the shade, provided
most of the light; the second bulb, inside the base, was shaped like a
candle flame and gave off a dim flickering glow that imitated a real
flame and was used only for its decorative effect, to enhance the
illusion of hurricane lanterns.

Dom remembered every detail of the place now that he was standing in it,
and he had the impression that a multitude of ghosts flitted teasingly
through the room, staying just at the periphery of his vision.  The
ghosts were actually bad memories rather than spirits, and they haunted
not the room but the shadowy corners of his own mind.

"Remember anything?" Ernie asked.  "Is it coming back to you?"

"I want to have a look at the john," Dom said.

It was small and strictly functional, with a shower stall but no
bathtub, a speckled tile floor, and durable Formica counter tops.

Dom was interested in the sink, for it was surely the one in his
recurring nightmare.  But when he looked into the bowl, he was surprised
to see a mechanical stopper.  And an inch below the rim of the bowl, the
overflow drain consisted of three round holes, a more modern design than
the six slanted lozenge-shaped outlets in the sink of his dreams.

"This isn't the same," he said.  "The sink was old, with a rubber
stopper attached to a bead-chain and hung from the cold-water faucet."

"We're always upgrading the place," Ernie said from the doorway.

"We took that sink out eight or nine months ago," Faye said.  "We
replaced the Formica then, too, although it's the same color as before."

Dom was disappointed because he had been convinced that at least some
memories from those lost days would begin to return to him when he
touched the sink.  After all, judging from the stark terror of the
nightmare, something particularly frightening had happened to him at
that very spot; therefore, it seemed likely that the sink might act as a
lightning rod upon the supercharged memories that drifted in the
darkness of his subconscious, drawing them back in a sudden crackling
blaze of recollection.  He put his hands on the new sink, but he felt
only cold porcelain.

'Anything?" Ernie asked again.

"No," Dom said.  "No memories .  .  .  but bad vibrations. If I give it
time, I think the room might break down the barriers.  I'll sleep here
tonight, give it a chance to work on me .  .  .  if that's all right."

"No problem Faye said.

The room's yours."

Dom said, "I have a hunch the nightmare will be worse here than it's
ever been before."

Laguna Beach, California.

Although Parker Faine was one of the most respected of living American
artists, although his canvases were assiduously collected by major
museums, although he had been commissioned to create works for the
President of the United States and other luminaries, he was not too old
and certainly not too dignified to get a thrill from the intrigue upon
which he was engaged in Dominick Corvaisis' behalf.  To be a successful
artist, one needed maturity, an adult's perception and sensitivity and
dedication to craftsmanship, but one also had to hold on to a child's
curiosity, wonder, innocence, and sense of fun.  Parker held tighter to
those things than most artists did; therefore, he fulfilled his role in
Dom's plans with a spirit of adventure.

Each day, when he picked up Dom's mail, Parker pretended to go about his
business without the slightest suspicion that he might be under
surveillance, but in fact he searched surreptitiously, diligently for
the watchers-spies, cops, or whatever they might be.  He never saw
anyone observing him, and he never detected a tail.

And each night, when he left his house and went to a different pay phone
to await Dom's prearranged call, he drove miles out of his way, turned
back on his own route, made sudden turns calculated to throw off a tail,
until he was sure that he was not being followed.

A few minutes before nine o'clock, Saturday night, he arrived by his
usual devious means at a telephone booth beside a Union 76 station.  A
hard rain fell, sluicing down the Plexiglas walls, distorting the world
beyond and screening Parker from prying eyes.

He was wearing a trenchcoat and a rainproof khaki hat with the rim
turned down all the way around to let the rain run off.  He felt as if
he belonged in a John le Cared tale.  He loved it.

Promptly at nine o'clock, the phone rang.  It was Dom. "I'm on schedule,
at the Tranquility Motel.  This is the place, Parker."

Dom had a lot to tell: a disturbing experience in the Tranquility
Grille, Ernie Block's nyctophobia....  And by indirection, he managed to
convey that the Blocks had received strange Polaroid snapshots, too.

Discretion was essential; if the Tranquility Motel was, indeed, the
center of the unremembered events of the summer before last, the Blocks'
phones might be tapped.  If the listeners heard about the photographs,
they would know they had a traitor in their midst, and they would surely
find him, and there would be no more notes or photos forthcoming.

"I've got news, too," Parker said.  "Ms.  Wycombe, your editor, left a
message on your answering machine.  Twilight in Babylon had another
printing, and there are now a hundred thousand copies in the stores."

"Good God, I'd forgotten the book!  Since Lomack's house four days ago,
I haven't thought about anything but this crazy situation."

"Ms.  Wycombe has more good news she wants to share, so you're to call
her as soon as you get a chance."

"I'll do that.  Meanwhile .  .  .  seen any interesting pictures?" Dom
asked, indirectly inquiring if any more Polaroids had been received.

"Nope.  No amusing notes, either." When the headlights of passing cars
swept across the booth, the thin skin of flowing water on the
transparent walls flared briefly with a ripplingshimmering brilliance.
Parker said, "But something came in the mail that'll knock your socks
off, buddy.  You've identified

three of the names on those moon posters at Lomack's.  So how'd you like
to hear who the fourth one is?"

"Ginger?  I forgot to tell you.  I think her name's on the motel
registry.  Dr.  Ginger Weiss of Boston.  I intend to call her tomorrow."

"You've stolen some of my thunder.  But you'll be surprised to hear you
got a letter today from Dr.  Weiss.  She sent it to Random House on
December twenty-sixth, but it got caught in their bureaucracy.  Anyway,
she's at the end of her rope, see, and then she gets hold of a copy of
your book, gloms your photo, and she gets this feeling she's met you
before, and that you are a part of what's been happening to her."

"Do you have the letter with you?" Dom asked excitedly.

Parker had it in his hand, waiting.  He read it, glancing now and then
at the night beyond the booth.

"I've got to call her right away," Dom said when Parker finished the
letter.  "Can't wait till morning now.  I'll talk to you again tomorrow
night.  Nine o'clock."

"If you'll be calling from the motel, where the phones are likely to be
tapped, there's no point in my running out to a phone booth."

"You're right.  I'll call you at home.  Take care," Dom said.

"You, too." With mixed feelings, Parker put the receiver on the hook,
relieved that these inconvenient nightly journeys to a pay phone were at
an end, but also certain that he would miss the intrigue.

He stepped out of the phone booth, into the rain, and he was almost
disappointed when no one took a shot at him.

Boston, Massachusetts.

Pablo Jackson had been buried that morning, but he was with Ginger Weiss
throughout the afternoon and evening. Like a ghost, his memory haunted
her, a smiling revenant in the chambers of her mind.

Keeping to herself in the guestroom at Baywatch, she tried to read,
could not concentrate.  When not preoccupied with memories of the old
magician, she was eaten up by worry, wondering what would become of her.

She got into bed at a quarter past midnight and was reaching for the
switch to turn off the lamp when Rita Hannaby came to tell her that
Dominick Corvaisis was on the phone and that she could take the call in
George's study, down the hall, adjacent to the master bedroom.  Excited
and trepidatious, Ginger put on a robe over her pajamas.

The study was warm and shadowy with dark oak paneling. The Chinese
carpet was beige and forest-green, and the stainedglass lamp on the desk
was either a genuine Tiffany or a superb reproduction.

George's puffy eyes made it clear that the call woke him. He began
surgery early most mornings and was usually in bed by nine-thirty.

"I'm sorry," Ginger told him.

"No need," George said.  "Isn't this what we've been hoping for?"

"Maybe," she said, unwilling to raise her hopes.

Rita said, "We'll give you privacy."

"No," Ginger said.  "Stay.  Please." She went to the desk, sat down,
picked up the uncradled handset.  "Hello?  Mr. Corvaisis?"

"Dr.  Weiss?" His voice was strong yet melodic.  "Writing to me was the
best thing you could've done.  I don't think you're nuts.  Because
you're not alone, Doctor.  There are more of us with strange problems."

Ginger tried to respond, but her voice cracked.  She cleared her throat.
"I ...  I'm sorry .  .  .  I'm not ...  I don't ...  don't usually cry."

Corvaisis said, "Don't try to talk until you're ready.  I'll tell you
about my problem: sleepwalking.  And my dreams .  .  .  about the moon."

A thrill, half cold fear and half exultation, throbbed through her. "The
moon," she agreed.  "I never remember the dreams, but they must involve
the moon because that's what I wake up screaming about."

He told her about a man named Lomack in Reno, dead by his own hand,
driven to suicide by an obsession with the moon.

Ginger sensed some vast gulf beneath her, a fearful unknown.

"We've been brainwashed," she blurted.  "All these problems we're having
are the result of repressed memories trying to surface."

For a moment there was a stunned silence on the line.  Then

the writer said, "That's been my theory, but you sound sure of it."

"I am.  I underwent hypnotic regression therapy after I wrote to you,
and we turned up evidence of systematic memory repression."

"Something happened to us the summer before last," he said.

"Yes!  The summer before last.  The Tranquility Motel in Nevada."

"That's where I'm calling from."

Startled, she said, "You're there now?"

"Yes.  And if possible, you ought to come.  A lot has happened that I
can't risk talking about on the phone."

"Who are they?" she asked in frustration.  "What are they hiding?"

"We'll have a better chance finding out if we all work together."

"I'll come.  Tomorrow, if I can book a flight that quickly."

Rita started to protest that Ginger was in no condition to travel.  In
the many-colored light of the Tiffany lamp, George's scowl deepened.

To Corvaisis, Ginger said, "I'll let you know how and when I'll arrive."

When Ginger hung up, George said, "You can't possibly go all that way in
your condition."

Rita said, "What if you black out on the airplane, become violent?"

"I'll be all right."

"Dear, you had three seizures last Monday, one after the other."

Ginger sighed and slumped back in the green leather chair. "Rita,
George, you've been wonderful to me, and I can never adequately repay
you.  I love you, I really do.  But I've been living with you for five
weeks, five helpless weeks during which I've been more like a dependent
child than an adult, and I'm just not capable of going on that way. I've
got to go to Nevada.  I've no other option.  I've got to."

New York, New York.

A couple of blocks farther down Fifth Avenue from the Presbyterian
Church, Jack stopped again, in front of St. Thomas's Episcopal Church.
In the nave, he stared in fascination at the huge reredos of Dunville
stone behind the altar.  He met the strangely portentous gazes of the
statues in the shadowy niches along the walls-Saints, Apostles, the
Blessed Virgin, Christ-and he realized that the primary purpose of
religion was the expiation of guilt, to provide people with forgiveness
for being less than they were meant to be. The human species seemed
incapable of living up to its potential, and some would be driven mad by
guilt if they did not believe that a god-be it Jesus, Yahweh, Mohammed,
Marx, or some other-looked on them with favor in spite of themselves.
But Jack found no comfort in St.  Thomas's, no expiation of his sins,
not even when he left twenty thousand dollars in the charity box.

In the Camaro again, he set out to dispose of the rest of the cash from
the Guardmaster heist, not because giving it away would salve his guilt;
it would not, for redistribution of the funds was not the moral
equivalent of repayment.  He had too much to atone for to expect to
shrive himself of all his transgressions in one night.  But he did not
need or want the money any more, could not simply throw it in the trash,
so giving the damn stuff away was his only possible course of action.

He stopped at more churches and temples.  Some were open, some locked.
Where he could gain entrance, he left money.

He drove down to the Bowery and left forty thousand dollars with the
startled night attendant at the Salvation Army Mission.

On Bayard Street in nearby Chinatown, Jack saw a sign in a second-floor
window that proclaimed, in both Chinese characters and in English: THE
ALLIANCE AGAINST OPPRESSION OF CHINESE MINORITIES.  The place was above
a quaint apothecary that specialized in the herbs and powdered roots of
traditional Chinese medicines.  The apothecary was closed, but a light
shone in a window of the Alliance offices.  Jack rang the bell at the
street-level door, rang it and rang it until an elderly and wizened
Chinese man came down the stairs and spoke to him through a small
grille.  When Jack ascertained that the Alliance's current major project
was the rescue of brutalized Chinese families from Vietnam (and
resettlement in the States), he passed twenty thousand in cash through
the grille.  The Chinese gentleman reverted to his native language in
surprise

and came out into the cold winter wind, insistent upon shaking hands.
"Friend," the elderly mandarin said.  "You can't know what suffering
this gift will relieve." Jack echoed the old man, "Friend." In that
single word, and in the warm grasp of the venerable Oriental's callused
hand, Jack found something he thought he had lost forever: a sense of
belonging, a feeling of community, fellowship.

In his car again, he drove up Bayard to Mott Street, turned right, and
had to pull to the curb.  A flood of tears blurred his vision.

He could not remember ever having been more confused than he was now. He
wept in part because the stain of guilt, for the moment at least, seemed
an ineradicable mark upon his soul.  Yet some of the tears were tears of
joy, for he was abruptly brimming over with brotherhood.  For the better
part of a decade, he had been outside society, distanced in mind and
spirit if not in body.  But now, for the first time since Central
America, Jack Twist had the need, desire, and ability to reach out to
the society around him, to make friends.

Bitterness was a dead-end.  Hatred hurt no one more than he who harbored
it.  The wine of alienation was loneliness.

During the past eight years, he had often wept for Jenny, and he had
sometimes wept in fits of self-pity.  But these tears were different
from all others he had let previously, for they were cleansing tears,
purging tears, washing all the rage and resentment out of him.

He still did not understand the cause of these radical and rapid changes
taking place in him.  However, he sensed that his evolution-from outcast
and criminal to law-abiding citizen-was not finished and would generate
several more surprises before it reached a conclusion.  He wondered
where he was bound and by what route he would arrive there.

That night in Chinatown, hope swept back into his world like a summer
breeze stirring music from a cluster of wind chimes.

Elko County, Nevada.

Ned and Sandy Sarver were able to run the diner by themselves because
they were hard workers by nature, but also because their menu was simple
and because Ned had learned efficient food service as a cook in the U S.
Army.  A hundred tricks were employed to make the Tranquility Grille
function smoothly with as little effort as possible.

Nevertheless, at the end of work, Ned was always glad that Ernie and
Faye provided the motel's guests with a free continental breakfast in
their rooms, so it was not necessary to open the diner before noon.

Saturday evening, while he grilled hamburgers and made French fries and
served chili-dogs, Ned Sarver glanced frequently at Sandy as she worked.
He still could not get used to the change in her, the sudden flowering.
She had added ten pounds, and her figure had acquired an appealing
female roundness it never possessed before.  And she no longer shuffled
slump-shouldered through the diner, but moved with a fluid grace and a
jaunty good humor that Ned found enormously appealing.

He was not the only man who had eyes for the new Sandy. Some of the
truckers watched the roll of her hips and the flex of her buttocks as
she crossed the room with plates of food or bottles of cold beer.

Until recently, although Sandy had been unfailingly polite to the
customers, she had not been chatty.  That changed, too.  She was still
somewhat shy, but she responded to the truckers' teasing and even teased
them in return, and came up with some damn good quips.

For the first time in eight years of marriage, Ned Sarver feared losing
Sandy.  He knew she loved him, and he told himself that these changes in
her appearance and personality would not also change the nature of their
relationship.  But that was precisely what he feared.

This morning, when Sandy went to Elko to meet Ernie and Faye at the
airport, Ned had worried that she would not come back.  Maybe she would
just keep going until she found a place she liked better than Nevada,
until she met a man who was handsomer, richer, and smarter than Ned.  He
knew that he was being unfair to Sandy by harboring such suspicions,
that she was incapable of infidelity or cruelty.  Maybe his fear lay in
the fact that he'd always thought Sandy deserved better than him.

At nine-thirty, when the dinner crowd thinned to seven customers, Faye
and Ernie came into the Grille with that dark, good-looking guy who had
caused a scene earlier in the evening when he had wandered through the
door as if in a dream and then had turned and run out as though hell
hounds were at his heels.  Ned wondered who the guy was, how he knew
Faye and Ernie, and whether they knew their friend was a little weird.

Ernie looked pale and shaky, and to Ned it seemed as if his boss was
taking considerable care to keep his back to the windows.  When he
raised a hand in greeting to Ned, there was a visible tremor in it.

Faye and the stranger sat facing each other across the table, and from
the looks they gave Ernie, you could see they were concerned about him.
They didn't look so good themselves.

Something peculiar was going on.  Intrigued by Ernie's condition, Ned
was briefly distracted from thoughts of Sandy leaving him.

But when Sandy stopped at their table, she was so long taking their
order that Ned's concern rose again.  From his post behind the counter,
with a hamburger and a pair of eggs sizzling noisily on the griddle, he
could not hear what they were saying over there, but he had the crazy
notion that the stranger was taking undue interest in Sandy and that she
was responding to his slick patter.  Jealous nonsense, of course. Yet
the guy was handsome, and he was younger than Ned, closer Sandy's age,
and apparently successful, just the kind of guy she ought to run off
with because he would be better for her than Ned could ever be.

In his own view, Ned Sarver was not much to brag about. He was not ugly,
but certainly not handsome.  His brown hair had receded from his
forehead in a deep widow's peak; unless you were Jack Nicholson, such a
hairline was not sexy.  He had pale-gray eyes that perhaps had been
startling and magnetic when he was a young man, but with the passing
years, they merely made him appear tired and washed-out.  He was neither
rich nor destined to be rich.  And at forty-two, ten years older than
Sandy, Ned Sarver was not likely to be gripped suddenly by the driving
need to make something of himself.

All of this dismaying self-criticism roiled through his mind as he
watched Sandy finally leave the stranger's table and come to the
counter.  With an odd and troubled expression, she handed the order slip
to him and said, "What time we closing?  Ten or ten-thirty?"

"Ten." Indicating the few customers, Ned added: "Two profit hanging
around tonight."

She nodded and went back to Faye, Ernie-and the stranger.

Her brusqueness and her speedy return to the stranger aggravated Ned's
worries.  As far as he could see, he had only three qualities that gave
Sandy any reason to stay with him. First, he could always make a decent
living as a short-order cook because he was good.  Second, he had a
talent for fixing things, both inanimate objects and living creatures.
If a toaster, blender, or radio went on the blink, Ned set to work with
a tool kit and soon had the appliance back in operation.  Likewise, if
he found a panicky bird with a broken wing he stroked it until it grew
calm, took it home, nursed it back to health, then sent it on its way.
Having the talent to fix things seemed important, and Ned was proud of
it.  Third, he loved Sandy with all his body, mind, and heart.

Preparing the order for Faye, Ernie, and the stranger, Ned glanced
repeatedly at Sandy, and he was surprised when she and Faye started
moving around the room, lowering the Leyolor blinds over the windows.

Something unusual was going on.  Returning to Ernie's table, Sandy
leaned forward in earnest conversation with the goodlooking stranger.

It was ironic that he was worried about losing Sandy, for it had been
his talent for fixing things that contributed to her transformation from
duckling to swan.  When Ned first met her at a diner in Tucson, where
they worked, Sandy was not just bashful and self-conscious but painfully
shy, fearful.  She was a hard worker, always willing to lend a hand to
other waitresses when they got behind in their orders, but she was
incapable of interacting with anyone on a personal level.  A pale,
scuttling girl (twenty-three, but still more girl than woman), she was
reluctant to open the door on friendship, for fear she would put her
trust in someone who might hurt her.  She had been drab, mousy, meek,
beaten by life-and the instant Ned had seen her, he had felt the need to
fix things for her.  With enormous patience, he began work on her, so
subtly that, at first, she was not aware that he was interested in her.

They were married nine months later, although his repair work on her was
far from finished.  She was more badly broken than any creature he'd
encountered before, and there were times when, in frustration, he felt
that, even with his talent, he would be unable to fix her and would
spend the rest of his life tinkering endlessly without much effect.

During their first six years of marriage, however, he had witnessed a
slow healing in her, maddeningly gradual.  Sandy had an indisputably
bright mind, but she was retarded emotionally; she learned to take and
give affection only with tremendous effort, much as a dim-witted child
struggles mightily to learn to count to ten.

The first indication Ned had had that major changes were taking place in
Sandy was the sudden marked improvement in her sexual appetite.  The
turnaround had come in late August, two summers ago.

She'd never been a hesitant lover.  She exhibited extensive carnal
knowledge, but she made love more like a machine than a woman, with a
joyless expertise.  He had never known a woman as silent in bed as Sandy
had been.  He suspected something in her childhood had stunted her, the
same thing that had broken her spirit.  He tried to get her to talk
about it, but she was adamant about letting the past stay buried, and
his persistence was the one thing that might have caused her to leave
him; so he asked about it no more, though it was difficult to fix
something when you could not get at the part of it that was broken.

Then, in August of the summer before last, she came to the conjugal bed
with a noticeably different attitude.  Nothing dramatic at first.  No
sudden release of long-imprisoned passions.  Initially, the change
involved only a subtle new relaxation during the act of love.  Sometimes
she smiled or murmured his name as he made love to her.

Slowly, slowly, she blossomed.  By that Christmas, four months after the
change began, she no longer lay upon the bed as if she were made of
metal.  She strove to find and match his rhythm, searching for the
fulfillment that still eluded her.

Slowly, slowly, she freed the erotic power chained within her.  Finally,
on April 7, last year, a night Ned would never forget, Sandy had an
orgasm for the first time.  It was a climax of such power that for a
moment it frightened Ned.  Afterward, she wept with happiness and clung
to him with such gratitude, love, and trust that he wept as well.

He thought her orgasmic breakthrough would finally enable her to speak
of the source of her long-hidden pain.  But when he cautiously inquired,
she rebuffed him: "The past is past, Ned.  Won't help to dwell on it. If
I talk about it .  .  .  that might just give it a new hold on me."

Through last spring, summer, and early autumn, Sandy gradually achieved
satisfaction more often until, by September, their love-making nearly
always brought her fulfillment. And by Christmas Day, less than three
weeks ago, it was clear that her sexual maturation was not the only
change in her but was accompanied by a new pride and self-respect.

Concomitant with her sexual development, Sandy learned to enjoy driving,
an activity she had once found even less pleasurable than sex.
Initially, she expressed the modest intention of driving to work from
their trailer out near Beowawe.  Before long she was lighting out in the
truck on solo spins.  Sometimes Ned stood at a window and watched his
uncaged bird soar off, and he viewed each flight with delight but also
with an uneasiness he could not explain.

By New Year's Day, just past, the uneasiness became dread and was with
him twenty-four hours a day, and by then he understood it.  He was
afraid Sandy would fly away from him.

Maybe with the stranger who'd come in with Ernie and Faye.

I'm probably overreacting, Ned thought as he put three hamburger patties
on the griddle.  Fact is, I know damn well I'm overreacting.

But he worried.

By the time Ned prepared cheeseburgers with all the fixings for the
Blocks and their friend, the other customers were gone.  As Sandy served
the loaded plates, Faye locked the door and switched on the CLOSED sign
that was visible from I-80, though it was shy of ten o'clock.

Ned joined them for a closer look at the stranger, and to insinuate
himself between the guy and Sandy.  When he got to their table, he was
surprised to see that Sandy had a bottle of beer and had opened one for
him, too.  He did not drink much; Sandy drank less.

"You'll need it when you hear what they have to tell us," Sandy said.
"In fact, you might even need a couple more bottles."

The guy's name was Dominick Corvaisis, and he had an amazing tale that
drove all worries of infidelity from Ned's mind.  When Corvaisis was
finished, Ernie and Faye had an incredible story of their own, and that
was when Ned first learned about the ex-Marine's fear of the dark.

"But I remember we were evacuated," Ned said.  "We couldn't have been
here at the motel those three days, 'cause I remember we had a sort of
mini-vacation at home-watching TV, reading Louis L'Amour."

"I believe that's what you were told to remember," Corvaisis said.  "Did
anyone visit you at the trailer during that time?  Any neighbors drop
by?  Anyone who could confirm that you were actually there?"

"We're outside Beowawe, where we don't really have neighbors.  Far as I
remember, we didn't see anybody who could swear we was there."

Sandy said, "Ned, they wondered if anything strange has been happening
to either of us."

Ned met his wife's eyes.  Without words, he let her know it was up to
her whether she told them about the changes she had been undergoing.

Corvaisis said, "The two of you were here the night it happened.
Whatever it was, it started while I was having dinner.  So you must have
been a part of it.  But the memory was stolen from you."

The thought of strangers messing with his mind gave Ned the creeps.
Uneasy, he studied the five Polaroid snapshots that Faye had fanned out
on the table, especially the picture of Corvaisis staring empty-eyed.

To Sandy, Faye said, "Honey, Ernie and I would have to've been blind not
to've noticed the changes in you recently. I don't mean to embarrass
you, and I don't want to pry, but if those changes might be related to
whatever happened to us, then we ought to know about it."

Sandy reached for Ned's hand, held it.  Her love for him was so evident
that he was ashamed of himself for the ridiculous thoughts of betrayal
that had preoccupied him earlier.

Staring intently at her beer, she said, "Most all my life, I've had the
lowest opinion of myself.  I'll tell you why, because you've got to know
how bad it was for me when I was a kid if you want to understand how
miraculous it is that I ever found any self-respect.  It was Ned who
first lifted me up, believed in me, gave me a chance to be somebody."
Her hand tightened on his.  "Almost nine years ago, he started courting
me, and he was the first person ever treated me like a lady. He married
me knowing that inside I was tied up in tangled knots, and he's spent
eight years doing his best to untie and untangle them.  He thinks I
don't know how hard he's tried to help me, but I know all right."

Her voice cracked with emotion.  She paused for a swallow of beer.

Ned was unable to speak.

Sandy said, "The thing is .  .  .  I want everyone to know that maybe
what happened the summer before last, the thing none of us remembers . .
.  maybe it did have a powerful effect on me.  But if Ned hadn't taken
me under his wing all those years ago, I never would've had a chance."

Love enwrapped Ned as if it were bands of iron, closing his throat,
constricting his chest, applying a pleasant pressure to his heart.

She glanced at him, returned her gaze to the bottle of beer, and
recounted a childhood in hell.  She did not describe her father's
violations of her in explicit detail, and she spoke demurely-almost
primly-of her periodic exploitation as a child prostitute under the
management of a Vegas pimp.  Her account of this monstrous abuse was all
the more shocking and moving because she related it without drama.
Everyone at the table listened in a silence resulting not merely from
shock but from respect for her suffering and from a certain reverence
for her ultimate triumph.

When Sandy finished, Ned embraced her, held her close. He was amazed by
her strength.  He had always known she was special, and the things she
told them tonight only strengthened his love and admiration.

Though he was deeply saddened by what had been done to Sandy, he was
delighted that she was at last able to talk about it.  Surely this meant
that the past had lost its hold on her.

Faye and Ernie commiserated with her in the awkward manner of friends
who want to help but who know they can offer only words.

Everyone needed another beer.  Ned got five bottles of Dos Equis out of
the cooler and brought them to the table.

Corvaisis, who no longer seemed like the enemy to Ned, shook his head
and blinked as if Sandy's story had left him in a daze of horror.  "This
turns things upside down.  I mean, if our unremembered experience had
one basic effect on the rest of us, it was terror.  Oh, I benefited
because I was brought out of my shell; I share that with Sandy.  But
Ernie, Dr.  Weiss, Lomack, and me .  .  . we were for the most part left
with a residue of fear.  Now Sandy tells us the effect on her was
strictly beneficial, not frightening in the least. How could it affect
us so differently?  You really have no fear, Sandy?"

"None," Sandy said.

Ever since Ernie pulled a chair up to the table, he'd been sitting with
his shoulders hunched and his head lowered, as if protecting his neck
from attack.  Now, with one hand clamped around a bottle of Dos Equis,
he leaned back and relaxed, though not much.  "Yeah, fear's the core of
it.  But you remember that place along the interstate I told you about,
little more than a quarter-mile from here?  I'm sure something weird
happened there, something that relates to the brainwashing. But when I'm
standing at that place, I feel more than just fear.  My heart starts to
race .  .  .  and I get excited .  .  .  but it's not entirely a bad
excitement.  Fear's a part of it, yeah, maybe the biggest part of it,
but there's a stew of other emotions, as well."

Sandy said, "I think the place Ernie's talking about is where I often
wind up when I take the truck out for a ride. I'm .  .  .  drawn there."

Ernie leaned forward, excited.  "I knew it!  Coming back from the
airport this morning, as we were passing that place, you let the truck
slow way down.  And I said to myself, 'Sandy feels it, too." "

Faye said, "Sandy, what exactly do you feel when you're drawn to that
piece of ground?"

With a smile so warm that Ned could almost feel the heat of it, Sandy
said, "Peace.  I feel at peace there.  It's hard to explain .  .  .  but
it's as if the rocks, dirt, and trees all radiate harmony, tranquility."

"I don't feel peaceful there," Ernie said.  "Fear, yes.  A queer
excitement.  An eerie sense that something .  .  .  shattering will
happen.  Something that I'm eager for, even though it scares the hell
out of me."

"And I feel none of what you feel," Sandy said.

"We ought to go there," Ned suggested.  "See if the place affects the
rest of us."

"In the morning," Corvaisis said.  "When it's light."

Faye said, "I can see this might've had a different effect on each of
us.  But why has it changed Dom's and Sandy's and Ernie's lives-and the
lives of that Mr.  Lomack in Reno and Dr.  Weiss in Boston-yet done
nothing to Ned and me. Why aren't we having problems, too?"

Dom said, "Maybe the brainwashers did a better job on you and Ned."

That thought gave Ned the heebie-jeebies again.

For a while they discussed their situation, and then Ned suggested that
Corvaisis try to re-create his actions on that Friday night, July 6, up
to the point where his memories were erased.  "You recollect the early
part of the evening better than we do.  And when you came in the first
time tonight, you were close to remembering something important."

"Close," Corvaisis agreed, "but at the last moment, when I felt the
memory within grasp, it scared the crap out of me .  .  .  and the next
thing I knew, I was running for the door.  Made quite a spectacle of
myself.  I was totally freaked out.  It was such a visceral thing,
instinctual, so utterly uncontrollable, that I think it would probably
happen again if I made a second attempt to force the memories."

"Still, it's worth a try," Ned said.

"And you've got us for moral support this time," Faye said.

Corvaisis needed coaxing, which Ned interpreted as meaning that the
experience earlier this evening had been considerably more unnerving
than words could express.  But at last the writer got up and, carrying
his glass of beer, went to the front door of the diner.  He stood with
his back to the exit, chugged a long swallow of Dos Equis.  He looked
around the room, trying hard to see the people of that other time.

He said, "There were three or four men sitting at the counter. Maybe a
dozen customers altogether.  I can't remember their faces." Moving away
from the door, he walked past Ned and the others, to the next table,
where he pulled out a chair and sat with his back turned partly toward
them.  "This is where I sat.  Sandy waited on me.  I took a bottle of
Coors while I looked at the menu.  Ordered the ham-and-egg sandwich.
French fries, coleslaw.  As I was salting the fries, the shaker slipped
out of my hand.  Salt spilled on the table.  I threw a pinch over my
shoulder.  Silly gesture.  Threw it too hard.  Dr. Weiss!  Ginger Weiss
was the woman I threw the salt on.  I didn't remember that before, but I
can see her clearly now. The blond in the photo."

Faye tapped the Polaroid snapshot of Dr.  Weiss that was on the table in
front of Ned.

Still sitting alone at the other table, Corvaisis said, "Quite a
beautiful woman.  Pixie-cute yet also sophisticated-looking, a really
interesting mix.  Could hardly take my eyes off her."

Ned looked more closely at the photo of Ginger Weiss.  He supposed she
might, indeed, be unusually attractive when her face was not so pale and
slack, when her eyes were not so cold, empty, dead.

In a voice that had grown odd, as if he were actually speaking to them
from out of the past, Corvaisis said, "She sits in the corner booth by
the window, facing this way.  Sunset is near.  The sun's out there on
the horizon, balanced like a big red ball, and the diner's filled with
orange light slanting in through the windows.  Almost like firelight.
Ginger Weiss looks especially lovely in that light.  I can hardly keep
from staring openly at her.  .  .  .  Twilight now.  I've got a second
beer." He sipped some Dos Equis.  When he continued, his voice was
softer: "The plains are all purple ...  then black ...

night .  .  ."

Like Ernie and Faye and Sandy, Ned was spellbound by the writer's
struggle to remember, for it stirred in him, at last, faint and
shapeless-but compelling-memories of his own.  He began to recall that
particular evening out of the many he'd spent in the Tranquility Grille.
The young priest had been here, the one in the Polaroid snapshot now
lying on the table.  And the young couple with their little girl.

"Not long after nightfall ...  nursing my second beer mainly so I can
stare at Ginger Weiss a little longer." Corvaisis looked left, right,
raised his right hand to his ear.  "An unusual sound of some kind.  I
remember that much.  A distant rumble .  .  .  getting louder." He was
silent for awhile.  "Can't remember what happened next.  Something .  .
.  something ...

but it just won't come."

As the writer spoke of the rumbling, Ned Sarver experienced the vaguest
possible memory of that frightening, swelling sound, but he could not
clearly call it to mind.  He felt as if Corvaisis had brought him to the
edge of a dark chasm into which he was desperately afraid to look but
into which he must look, and now they were turning away without shining
a light down in those black depths.  Heart racing, he said, "Concentrate
on remembering the sound, the exact sound, and maybe that'll bring the
rest of it back to you."

Corvaisis pushed his chair back from the table, got up. "Rumbling .  . .
like thunder, very distant thunder ...  but growing closer." He stood
beside the table, seeking the direction from which the sound had come,
looking left, right, up, down at the floor.

Suddenly Ned heard the noise, not in memory but in reality, not back
there in the past but now.  The hollow roll of faraway thunder.  But it
came in one endless peal, not a series of rising and falling crashes,
and it was growing louder, louder.  .  .  .

Ned looked at the others.  They heard it, too.

Louder.  Louder.  Now he could feel the vibrations in his bones.

He could not remember what had happened that night, but he knew the
astonishing events they had endured had started with this sound.

He pushed back his chair and got up.  He was awash in a rising tide of
fear, and he had to fight against the urge to run.

Sandy stood, and there was fear in her face, as well.  Though the
unknown events seemed to have had an entirely positive effect on her,
she was frightened now.  She put one hand on Ned's arm for reassurance.

Ernie and Faye were frowning, looking around for the source of the
noise, but they did not yet appear frightened.  Their memory of the
sound was apparently more thoroughly scrubbed away, so they could not as
easily connect it with the events of that Friday night in July.

Another sound arose, underlying the thunderlike rumble: a queer,
ululating whistle.  That, too, was unpleasantly familiar to Ned.

It was happening again.  Whatever had taken place that night more than
eighteen months ago was somehow being repeated.  Jesus, happening all
over again, and Ned heard himself saying, "No, no.  No!"

Corvaisis backed a couple of steps away from his table, cast a glance at
Ned and the others.  He was white-faced.

The growing roar began to resonate in the window glass, behind the
closed blinds.  A loose pane, unseen, started rattling in its frame.

The Levolor blinds were vibrating now, adding a jangly chorus.

Sandy's hold on Ned became a panicky clutch.

Ernie and Faye were on their feet, and they were no longer merely
bewildered but as afraid as everyone else.

The ululant whistle had grown in volume with the thunder. Now it became
piercingly shrill, an oscillating electronic shriek.

"What is it?" Sandy cried, and the continuous fulminations attained such
volume and power that the walls of the Tranquility Grille shook.

On the table at which Corvaisis had been sitting, the beer glass fell on
its side, cracking, spilling what Dos Equis remained in it.

Ned looked at the table beside him and saw the objects on it-ketchup
bottle, mustard dispenser, salt and pepper shakers, ashtray, glasses,
plates, and silverware-bouncing, clinking against one another, moving
back and forth across the surface.  A beer glass toppled, and another,
and the ketchup bottle.

Wide-eyed, Ned and the others turned this way and that, as if in
anticipation of the imminent materialization of a demonic entity.

Throughout the room, objects fell off tables.  The clock with the Coors
logo leapt from the hook on which it hung, crashed to the floor.

This very thing had happened that night in July-Ned remembered as much.
But he could not remember what had come next.

"Stop it!" Ernie shouted with the conviction and authority of a Marine
officer accustomed to obedience-but without effect.

Earthquake?  Ned wondered.  A quake did not explain the electronic
shriek that accompanied the thunder.

The chairs jittered across the floor, bumping against one another.  One
of them slid into Corvaisis, and the writer jumped in surprise.

Ned could feel the floor shaking.

The thunderlike rumble and the accompanying oscillatory shriek rose to
an ear-splitting peak, and with the hard flat crash of a bomb blast, the
big front windows imploded.  Faye screamed and threw her arms up in
front of her face, and Ernie stumbled backward and nearly fell over a
chair.  Sandy buried her face against Ned's chest.

They might have been badly cut by flying glass if the closed blinds had
not imposed a barrier between them and the shattering panes.  Even so,
the force of the implosion flung the blinds up as a strong wind might
blow curtains at an open window, and some glittering shards fell onto
the booths, rained over Ned, and smashed on the floor around him.

Silence.  The implosion of the windows was followed by a profound
silence disturbed only by a few last, loose, little pieces of glass
falling out of window frames, one at a time.

On that Friday night in July, the summer before last, much more than
this had happened, though Ned could not remember what.  Tonight,
however, the mysterious drama apparently was not going to progress as
far as it had gone then. For now, it was over.

Dom Corvaisis was bleeding lightly from a nick in his cheek, hardly
worse than a shaving cut.  Ernie's forehead and the back of his right
hand had been slightly scratched by splinters of glass.

When he had determined that Sandy was unhurt, Ned reluctantly left her
and rushed to the front door.  He went out into the night in search of
the cause of the weird noise and destruction, but he found only the
deep, dark, solemn silence of the plains.  No smoke or blackened rubble
marked the source of an explosion.  At the bottom of the hill on which
the Tranquility Motel and Grille stood, widely separated cars and trucks
moved on the interstate.  Over at the motel, drawn by the commotion, a
few guests had come outside in their nightclothes.  The sky above was
full of stars.  The air was numbingly cold, but there was no wind, only
a soft breeze, like the frigid sigh of Death.  Nothing in sight could
have caused the thunder, shaking, or implosion of the windows.

Dom Corvaisis came out of the Grille, bewildered.  "What the hell?"

"I was hoping you'd know," Ned responded.

"It's what happened the summer before last."

"I know."

,'But just the start of it.  Damn it, I can't remember what happened
that night after the windows blew in."

"Me neither," Ned replied.

Corvaisis turned his hands palms-up, held them out for inspection.  In
the blue neon light from the sign on the diner's roof, Ned saw rings of
swollen flesh in the writer's palms. Because the light was blue, he
could not ascertain the true color of the marks.  But from what
Corvaisis had told them earlier, Ned knew the rings were an angry red.

"What the hell?" Corvaisis said again.

Sandy was standing in the open door of the diner, backlit by the
fluorescent glow from inside, and Ned went to her, embraced her.  He
felt one shudder after another passing through her.  But he did not
realize how badly he was trembling until she said, "You're shaking like
a leaf."

Ned Sarver was scared sick.  With an almost clairvoyant vividness, he
sensed that they were involved in something of monumental importance,
something unimaginably dangerous, and that it was likely to end in death
for some or all of them.  He was a natural-born fixer of both inanimate
objects and people, a damned good repairman.  But this time he was up
against a force with which he did not know how to tinker. What if Sandy
were killed?  He took pride in his talents, but even the best fixer in
the whole damned world could not undo the wreckage wrought by Death.

For the first time since meeting her in Tucson, Ned felt powerless to
protect his wife.

At the horizon, the moon had begun to rise.

January 12-January 14

1.

Sunday, January 12

Air as dense as molten iron.

In the nightmare, Dom could not draw breath.  A tremendous pressure bore
down on him.  He was choking violently. He was dying.

He could not see much; his vision was clouded.  Then two men came close,
both wearing white vinyl decontamination suits with dark-visored helmets
similar to those of astronauts. One man was at Dom's right, frantically
disconnecting the IV line, withdrawing the intravenous spike from his
arm.  The other man, on the left, was cursing the cardiological data on
the video readout of the EKG machine.  One of them unbuckled the straps
and tore off the electrodes connecting Dom to the EKG, and the other
lifted him into a sitting position. They pressed a glass to his lips,
but he could not drink, so they tipped his head back and forced his
mouth open and poured some noxious stuff down his throat.

The men communicated with each other via radios built into their
helmets, but they were leaning so close to Dom that he could hear their
voices clearly even through the muffling Plexiglas of their dark visors.
One of them said, "How many detainees were poisoned?" And the other
said, "Nobody's sure yet.  Looks like at least a dozen." The first said,
"But who'd want to poison them?" And the second said, "One guess." The
first said, "Colonel Falkirk.  Colonel fucking Falkirk." The second man
said, "But we'll never prove it, never nail the bastard."

Flash-cut.  The motel bathroom.  The men were holding Dom on his feet,
forcing his face down into the sink.  This

time, he understood what they were saying to him.  With growing urgency,
they were insisting that he vomit.  Colonel fucking Falkirk had somehow
had him poisoned, and these guys had made him drink a foul-tasting
emetic, and now he was supposed to purge himself of the poison that was
killing him.  But even as sick as he was, he still could not puke.  He
gagged, retched; his stomach roiled; sweat poured off him like melting
fat off a broiling chicken; but he could not rid himself of the poison.
The first man said, "We need a stomach pump." And the second said, "We
don't have a stomach pump." They pressed Dom's face deeper into the
porcelain bowl.  The crushing pressure grew worse, and Dom could hardly
breathe at all now, and hot greasy waves of nausea washed through him,
and sweat gushed from him, but he could not puke, could not, could not.
And then he did.

Flash-cut.  In bed again.  Weak, kitten-weak.  But able to breathe,
thank God.  The men in the decontamination suits had cleaned him up and
strapped him to the mattress once more.  The one on the right prepared a
hypodermic and administered an injection of something apparently meant
to counteract the remaining effects of the poison.  The one on the left
reconnected him to the intravenous drip from which he was receiving
drugs, not nourishment.  Dom was woozy, holding on to consciousness only
with considerable effort. They hooked him to the EKG again, and as they
worked, they talked.  "Falkirk's an idiot.  We can keep a lid'on this,
given half a chance."

"He's afraid the memory block will wear off.  He's afraid that some of
them will eventually remember what they saw."

"Well, he may be right.  But if the asshole kills them all, how's he
going to explain the bodies?

That's going to draw reporters like raw meat draws jackals, and then
there'll be no way to keep the lid on.  A nice memory wipe-that's the
only sensible answer."

"You don't have to convince me.  Go burn Falkirk's ear about it."

The dream-figures faded away, as did their voices, and Dom passed into a
different nightmare country.  He no longer felt weak, no longer sick,
but his fear exploded into stark terror, and he began to run with that
maddening slow-motion panic indigenous to nightmares.  He did not know
what he was running from, but he was certain that something was pursuing
him, something threatening and inhuman, he could sense it right behind
him, closer, reaching for him, closer, and finally he knew he could not
outrun it, knew he must face it, so he stopped and turned and looked up
and cried outin surprise: "The moon!"

Dom was awakened by his own cry.  He was in Room 20, on the floor beside
the bed, kicking, flailing.  He got up and sat on the bed.

He looked at his travel clock.  Three-oh-seven A. M.

Shivering, he blotted his damp palms on the sheets.

Room 20 was having precisely the effect on him that he had thought it
would.  The bad vibrations of the place stimulated his memory, made his
nightmares more vivid and more detailed than ever.

These dreams were radically different from all others he had ever known,
for they were not fantasies but glimpses of a past reality seen through
a distorting lens.  They were not dreams as much as they were memories,
forbidden recollections that had been weighted and dropped into the
black sea of his subconscious, like dead bodies encumbered with cement
shoes and thrown from a bridge into the deeps.  Finally, the memories
had slipped out of the cement and were surging to the surface.

He really had been imprisoned here, drugged, brainwashed.  And during
that ordeal, someone named Colonel Falkirk had actually poisoned him to
prevent him from talking about whatever he had seen.

Falkirk was right, Dom thought.  Eventually, we'll overcome the
brainwashing and remember the truth.  He should have killed us all.

Sunday morning, Ernie purchased panels of plyboard from a friend in Elko
who owned a building supply.  With his portable tablesaw, he cut the
panels to fit the busted-out diner windows.  Ned and Dom helped nail the
plyboard in place, and by noon they had completed the job.

Ernie did not want to call a glazier and have the windows replaced
because last night's phenomena might recur.  Until they knew what had
caused the thunderous noise and shaking, installing new glass seemed
foolhardy.  In the interim, the Tranquility Grille would not be open.

The Tranquility Motel also would be closed.  Ernie did not want business
to distract him from helping Dom and the others probe into the mystery
of the "toxic spill." When the last of yesterday's check-ins departed
later today, the motel would house only Ernie, Faye, Dom, and any other
victims who, when contacted, might decide to journey to Elko County to
participate in the investigation.  He did not know how many rooms he
might need for those fellow-sufferers, so he decided to reserve all
twenty.  For the time being, the Tranquility was less a motel than a
barracks, where the troops would be quartered until this war with an
unknown enemy was finally brought to a conclusion.

When the diner was boarded up, they all got into the motel's Dodge van,
and Faye drove them down to the interstate and just over a quarter of a
mile east, where she parked on the shoulder of the highway near the
place that had a special attraction for Ernie and Sandy.  The five of
them stood along the guardrail, staring south, seeking a communion with
the landscape that might illuminate the past.  The winter solstice was
three weeks behind them, so the sunlight was almost as hard and flat and
cold as fluorescent light.  In the grip of January, the scrub- and
grass-covered plains, rugged hills, arroyos and gnarled rock formations
were basically trichromatic, rendered in browns and grays and deep reds,
with only an occasional patch of white sand, snow, or vein of borax. The
scene was stark and dreary under a sky that grew more clouded and gray
by the hour, but it also possessed an undeniable austere grandeur.

Faye wanted very much to feel something special about this place, for if
she felt nothing, that would mean the people who brainwashed her had
totally controlled her, totally violated her.  She allowed no room in
her self-image for the concept of absolute submission.  She was a proud,
capable woman.  But she felt nothing other than the winter wind.

Ned and Dom appeared to be no more moved than Faye was, but she could
see that Ernie and Sandy were receiving some cryptic message from the
vista before them.  Sandy was smiling beatifically.  But Ernie had that
look he got when night fell: pale, drawn, with haunted eyes.

"Let's go closer," Sandy said.  "Let's go right down there."

All five climbed over the guardrail and plunged down the steep
embankment of the elevated road.  They moved across the plain-fifty
yards, a hundred-carefully avoiding the coldweather prickly pear which
grew in profusion near the foot of the interstate but soon disappeared
in favor of sagebrush and bunch-grass, which in turn gave way to another
kind of grass which was also brown but thicker, silkier.  Portions of
the plain were rocky and sandy and in the grip of worthless bristly
scrub, while other portions were almost like small lush meadows, for
this was a land in transition from the semidesert of the south to the
rich mountain pastures of the north.  More than two hundred yards from
the interstate, they stopped on a patch of ground not appreciably
different from surrounding territory.

"Here," Ernie said with a shudder, jamming his hands in his pockets and
pulling his neck down into the rolled sheepskin collar of his coat.

Sandy smiled and said, "Yes.  Here."

They spread out and moved back and forth across the ground. Here and
there, in one shadowed niche or another, meager patches of snow lay
hidden from the evaporating effect of the dry wind and from the cold
winter sun.  Those traces of winter, plus the lack of green grass and
scattered late-blooming wildflowers, were the only things that made the
landscape different from the way it had looked two summers ago.  After a
minute or two, Ned announced that he did, indeed, feel an inexplicable
connection with the place, though it did not bring him peace as it did
his wife.  His fear became so acute that, expressing surprise and
embarrassment at his reaction, he turned and walked away.  As Sandy
hurried after Ned, Dom Corvaisis admitted that he was strangely affected
by the place, too.  However, he was not merely frightened, like Ned;
Dom's fear, like Ernie's, was spiced by an unexplained awe and a sense
of impending epiphany.  Only Faye remained unaffected, unmoved.

Standing in the middle of the area in question, Dom turned slowly in a
circle.  "What was it?  What the hell happened here?"

The sky had turned to gray slate.

The blunt wind became sharp.  Faye shivered.

She remained unable to feel what Ernie and the others felt, and that
inability increased her sense of violation.  She hoped she would one day
meet the people who had messed with her mind.  She wanted to look in
their eyes and ask them how they could have so little respect for the
personal integrity of another human being.  Now that she knew she had
been manipulated, she would never again feel entirely secure.

Stirred by the wind, the dry sagebrush made a scrapingrustling noise.
Ice-crusted twigs clicked against one another with a sound that,
fancifully, made Faye think of small, scurrying skeletons of little
animals long-dead but somehow reanimated.

Back at the motel, in the Blocks' apartment, Ernie and Sandy and Ned sat
at the kitchen table, while Faye made coffee and hot chocolate.

Dom perched on a stool by the wall phone.  On the counter in front of
him lay the Tranquility Motel's registration book that had been in use
the year before last.  Referring to the page for Friday, July 6, he
began to call those who must have shared the unremembered but important
experiences of that faraway summer night.

In addition to his own name and that of Ginger Weiss, there were eight
on the list.  One of them, Gerald Salcoe of Monterey, California, had
rented two rooms for himself, his wife, and two daughters.  He had
entered an address but no telephone.  When Dom tried to get it from the
Area Code 408 Information Operator, he was told the number was unlisted.

Disappointed, he moved on to Cal Sharkle, the long-haul trucker, a
repeat customer known to Faye and Ernie.  Sharkle lived in Evanston,
Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.  He had included his telephone number in
the motel registry.  Dom dialed it but discovered that the telephone had
been disconnected and that no new number was listed.

"We can check his more recent entries on the current registry," Ernie
said.  "Maybe he's moved to another town.  Maybe we have his new address
somewhere."

Faye put a cup of coffee on the counter where Dom could reach it, then
joined the others at the table.

Dom had better luck on his third attempt, when he dialed Alan Rykoff in
Las Vegas.  A woman answered, and he said, "Mrs.  Rykoff?"

She hesitated.  "I was Mrs.  Rykoff.  My name's Monatella now, since the
divorce."

"Oh.  I see.  Well, my name's Dominick Corvaisis.  I'm calling from the
Tranquility Motel up here in Elko County.  You, your former husband, and
your daughter stayed here for a few days in July, two summers ago?"

"Uh .  .  .  yes, we did."

"Miss Monatelia, are either you or your daughter or your ex-husband
having .  .  .  difficulties-frightening and extraordinary problems?"

This time her hesitation was pregnant with meaning.  "Is this some sick
joke?  Obviously, you know what happened to Alan."

"Please, Miss Monatella, believe me: I don't know what happened to your
ex-husband.  But I do know there's a good chance that you or him or your
daughter-or all of you-are suffering from inexplicable psychological
problems, that you're having frightening and repetitive nightmares you
can't remember, and that some of these nightmares involve the moon."

She gasped twice in surprise as Dom was speaking, and when she tried to
respond she had difficulty talking.

When he realized she was on the verge of tears, he interrupted.  "Miss
Monatella, I don't know what's happened to you and your family, but the
worst is past.  The worst is past. Because whatever might still be to
come .  .  .  at least you're not alone any more."

Over twenty-four hundred miles east of Elko County, in Manhattan, Jack
Twist spent Sunday afternoon giving away more money.

On returning from the Guardmaster heist in Connecticut the previous
night, he had driven through the city, looking for those who were both
in need and deserving, and he had not rid himself of all the cash until
five o'clock in the morning. On the edge of physical and emotional
collapse, he'd returned to his Fifth Avenue apartment, gone immediately
to bed and instantly to sleep.

He dreamed again of the deserted highway in an empty moon-washed
landscape, and of the stranger in the darkvisored helmet who pursued him
on foot.  As the moonlight suddenly turned blood-red, he woke from the
dream in panic at one o'clock Sunday afternoon, flailing at his pillow.
A blood-red moon?  He wondered what it all meant, if anything.

He showered, shaved, dressed, and took time for only a quick breakfast
consisting of an orange and a half-stale croissant.

In the large walk-in closet that served the master bedroom, he removed
the cleverly concealed false panel and inventoried the contents of the
three-foot-deep secret storage space.  The jewelry from the job in
October was finally gone, successfully fenced, and most of the money
from the fratellanza warehouse in early December had been converted to
scores of cashiers' checks and mailed to Jack's accounts at three Swiss
banks.  Only a hundred twenty-five thousand remained, his emergency
getaway fund.

He transferred most of the cash to a briefcase: nine banded pickets of
hundred-dollar bills, a hundred bills in each, and five packets of
twenty-dollar bills, a hundred in each.  That left twenty-five thousand
still in his cache, which seemed more than enough now that he was no
longer involved in criminal activity and would not be putting himself in
situations that might necessitate a swift exit from the state or
country.

Although Jack intended to dispose of a considerable portion of his
ill-gotten wealth, he certainly did not plan to give away all of it and
leave himself penniless.  That might be good for his soul, but it would
be bad for his future and undeniably foolish.  However, he had eleven
safe-deposit boxes in eleven of the city's banks-additional emergency
caches in case he needed to escape but could not reach the money behind
the false partition in his bedroom closet-and those caches contained
more than another quarter of a million.  His Swiss accounts were worth
in excess of four million.  It was far more than he needed.  He was
looking forward to shedding half of that fortune during the next couple
of weeks, at which point he would pause to decide what he wanted to do
with his future.  Eventually, he might give away even more.

At three-thirty Sunday afternoon, he carried his moneyfilled briefcase
out into the city.  All the strangers' faces, which for eight years had
seemed fiercely hostile, every one, now seemed like animated portraits
of promise and dazzling possibilities, every one.

The Block kitchen smelled of coffee and hot chocolate, then of cinnamon
and pastry dough when Faye took a package of breakfast rolls from the
freezer and popped them in the oven.

While the others sat at the table, listening, Dom continued to call the
people who had registered at the motel on that special Friday night.

He reached Jim Gestron, who turned out to be a photographer from L A.
Gestron had driven throughout the West that summer, shooting on
assignment for Sunset and other magazines.  Initially, he was friendly,
but as he heard more of Dom's story, he cooled off.  If Gestron had been
brainwashed, the mind-control experts had been as successful with him as
with Faye Block.  The photographer was having no dreams, no problems.
Dom's tale of brainwashing, somnambulism, nyctophobia, obsessions with
the moon, suicides, and paranormal experiences struck Gestron as the
babbling of a seriously disturbed person.  He said as much and hung up
in the middle of the conversation.

Next, Dom called Harriet Bellot in Sacramento, who was no more troubled
than Gestron.  She was, she said, a fiftyyear-old unmarried
schoolteacher who had developed an interest in the Old West when, as a
young WAC, she was stationed in Arizona.  Every summer, she traveled old
wagontrain routes and visited the sites of the forts and Indian
settlements of another age, usually sleeping in her little camper but
sometimes splurging on a motel room.  She sounded like one of those
likable, dedicated, but stern teachers who brooked no nonsense from her
pupils, and she brooked none from Dom.  When he started talking about
fanciful stuff like poltergeist phenomena, she hung up, too.

"Does that make you feel better, Faye?" Ernie asked. "You're not the
only one whose memories were so thoroughly scrubbed away."

"Doesn't make me feel one damn bit better," Faye said. "I'd rather be
suffering problems like you or Dom than feel nothing.  I feel as if a
piece of me was cut out and thrown away."

Perhaps she's right, Dom thought.  Perhaps nightmares, phobias, and
terrors of one kind or another are better than having a little pocket of
absolute emptiness inside, cold and dark, which would be like carrying a
fragment of death around within her for the rest of her life.

When Dominick Corvaisis telephoned St.  Bernadette's rectory at 4:26
Sunday afternoon, seeking Brendan Cronin, Father Wycazik was in the
study with officers of the Knights of Columbus, concluding the first of
many planning sessions for the annual St.  Bernadette's Spring Carnival.

At four-thirty, Father Michael Gerrano interrupted with the news that
the call he had just taken on the kitchen phone was from Father
Wycazik's "cousin" in Elko, Nevada.  Only a few hours ago, one day ahead
of schedule, Brendan Cronin had boarded a United flight to Reno, taking
advantage of cancellations that had opened up some seats, and intending
to use a small commuter airline from Reno to Elko on Monday.  At the
moment, Brendan was still in the air with United, not yet even as far as
Reno and in no position to be calling anyone, so Michael's message
intrigued Father Wycazik and instantly pried him loose of the planning
session without alerting the visitors that something extraordinary was
happening in the lives of their parish clergy.

Leaving the young priest to conclude matters with the Knights, the
rector hurried to the kitchen phone and took the call meant for Brendan.
Dominick Corvaisis, with a writer's appreciation for the fantastic, and
Stefan, with a priest's appreciation for mystery and mysticism, became
increasingly excited and voluble as they spoke to each other.  Stefan
swapped his knowledge of Brendan's problems and adventures-lost faith,
miraculous cures, strange dreams-for Corvaisis' stories of poltergeist
phenomena, somnambulism, nyctophobia, lunar obsessions, and suicides.

Finally, Stefan could not resist asking, "Mr.  Corvaisis, do you see any
reason for an old unregenerate religious like me to hold out the hope
that what is happening to Brendan is somehow divine in nature?"

"Quite frankly, Father, in spite of the miraculous cures of that police
officer and the little girl you mentioned, I don't see the hand of God
in this.  There are too many indications of human connivery in this to
support the interpretation you'd like to put on it."

Stefan sighed.  "I suppose that's true.  But I'll still cling to the
hope that what Brendan's being called to witness there

in Nevada is something meant to bring him back into the hands of Christ.
I won't give up on the possibility."

The writer laughed softly.  "Father, just from what I've learned of you
during this conversation, I suspect you'd never give up on the
possibility of redeeming any soul, anywhere, any time.  I'd guess you
don't save souls quite the way other priests do-by finesse, by gentle
and genteel encouragement. You strike me more as .  .  .  well, as a
blacksmith of the soul, hammering out the salvation of others by the
sweat of your brow and the application of plenty of muscle.  Please
understand: I mean this as a compliment."

Stefan laughed, too.  "How else could I possibly take it?  I firmly
believe that nothing easy is worth doing.  A blacksmith bent over a
glowing forge?  Yes, I do rather like the image."

"I'll look forward to Father Cronin's arrival here tomorrow.  If he's
anything like you, Father, we'll be glad to have him on our side."

"I'm on your side as well," Father Wycazik said, "and if there's
anything I can do to help with your investigation, please call on me. If
there's the slightest chance these strange events involve the manifest
presence of God, then I do not intend to sit on the sidelines and miss
all the action."

The next entry on the guest list was for Bruce and Janet Cable of
Philadelphia.  Neither of them was having trouble of the sort that
plagued Dom, Ernie, and the others.  However, they were more willing to
hear Dom out than Jim Gestron and Harriet Bellot had been, but in the
end they were no more swayed by his story.

The final name on the list was Thornton Wainwright, who had given a New
York City address and telephone number. When Dom dialed it, he reached a
Mrs.  Neil Karpoly, who said the number had been hers for more than
fourteen years and that she had never heard of Wainwright.  When Dom
read the Lexington Avenue address from the registry and inquired if that
was where Mrs.  Karpoly lived, she asked him to repeat it, then laughed.
"No, sir, that's not where I live. And your Mr.  Wainwright's not a
trustworthy sort if he told you that's my address.  Nobody lives there,
although I'm sure there are thousands who might enjoy it.  I know I
enjoyed working there.  That's the address of Bloomingdale's."

Sandy was astonished when Dom reported this news: "Phony name and
address?  What's that mean?  Was he really a guest that night?  Or did
someone add the name to the registry just to confuse us?  Or .  .  .
what?"

Jack Twist possessed complete sets of sophisticated false IDsdriver's
licenses, birth certificates, Social Security cards, credit cards,
passports, even library cards-in eight names, including "Thornton Bains
Wainwright," and he always employed an alias when planning and executing
a heist.  But he worked anonymously that Sunday afternoon, portioning
out another hundred thousand dollars to startled recipients all over
Manhattan.  The largest gift was fifteen thousand to a young sailor and
his bride of one day, whose battered old Plymouth had broken down on
Central Park South, near the statue of Simon Bolivar.  "Get a new car,"
Jack told them as he stuffed money into their hands and playfully stuck
a wad of bills under the sailor's hat.  "And if you're wise, you won't
tell anyone about this, especially not the newspapers.  That'll just
bring the IRS down on you.  No, you don't need to know my name, and
there's no need to thank me.  Just be kind to each other, all right?
Always be kind to each other, because we never know how much time we
have on this world."

In less than an hour, Jack gave away the entire hundred thousand that he
had taken from the secret compartment in the back of his bedroom closet.
With plenty of time on his hands, he bought a bouquet of coral-red roses
and drove out to Westchester County, an hour from the city, to the
memorial park in which Jenny had been buried over two weeks ago.

Jack had not wanted to put her to rest in one of the city's crowded and
grim cemeteries.  Although he knew he was being sentimental, he felt
that the only suitable resting place for his Jenny was in open country,
where there would be expansive green grassy slopes and shade trees in
the summer and peaceful vistas of snow in the winter.

He arrived at the memorial park shortly before twilight. Although the
uniform headstones were set flush with the earth, with no features to
distinguish one from another, and although most of them were covered
with snow, Jack went directly to Jenny's plot, the location of which was
branded on his heart.

While the dreary day faded into a drearier dusk, in a world colorless
except for the blazing roses, Jack sat in the snow, oblivious of the
dampness and cold, and spoke to Jenny as he had spoken to her during her
years in a coma.  He told her about the Guardmaster heist yesterday,
about giving away all the money.  As the curtain of twilight pulled down
the heavier drape of night, the memorial park's security guard began
driving slowly around the grounds, warning the few late visitors that
the gates would soon close.  Finally Jack stood and took one last look
at Jenny's name cast in bronze letters on the headstone plaque, now
illuminated by the vaguely bluish light of one of the streetlamps that
lined the park's main drive.  "I'm changing, Jenny, and I'm still not
sure why.

It feels good, right .  .  .  but also sort of strange.-,' What he said
next surprised him: "Something big is going to happen, Jenny.  I don't
know what, but something big is going to happen to me." He suddenly
sensed that his newfound guilt and subsequent peace with society were
only the beginning steps of a great journey that would take him places
he could not yet imagine.  "Something big is going to happen," he
repeated, "and I sure wish you were here with me, Jenny."

The blue Nevada sky had been armoring itself with dark storm clouds ever
since Ernie, Ned, and Dom had begun boarding up the diner's broken
windows.  Hours later, when Dom drove his rental car to the Elko airport
to pick up Ginger Weiss, the world turned under a gloomy light, girdled
in battlefield gray.  He was too restless to wait inside the small
terminal. He stood on the windswept tarmac, huddled in his heavy winter
jacket,, so he heard the twin engines of the ten-seat commuter craft
even before he saw it descend through the low clouds.  The roar of the
engines contributed to the mood of impending warfare, and Dom realized
uneasily that, in a sense, they were assembling their army; war against
their unknown enemy loomed nearer day by day.

The plane taxied within eighty feet of the terminal, and Dr.  Weiss was
the fourth passenger to disembark.  Even in a bulky, thoroughly
unattractive carcoat, she looked petite and beautiful.  The wind made a
streaming banner of her silky silver-blond hair.

Dom hurried toward her; she stopped and put down her bags.  They
hesitated, staring at each other in silence, with a peculiar mixture of
amazement, excitement, pleasure, and apprehension.  Then with an
impulsiveness that obviously surprised her as much as it did him, they
virtually threw themselves at each other, embracing as if they were old
and dear friends too long apart.  Dom held her close, and she held him
tightly, and he felt her heart pounding as hard and as fast as his.

What the hell is happening here?  he wondered.

But he was in too much turmoil to analyze the situation. For the moment,
he could feel but not think.

Neither of them wanted to let go, and when they finally separated,
neither could speak.  She tried to say something, but her voice cracked
with emotion, and Dom was incoherent. So she picked up one of her bags,
and he picked up the other, and they went out to the parking lot.

In the car, with the engine running and the heater blowing warm air in
their faces, Ginger said, "What was that all about?"

Still shaken, but curiously not embarrassed by the bold greeting he had
given her, Dom cleared his throat.  "Don't really know.  But I think
maybe, together, you and I went through something so shattering that the
experience created a special bond between us, a powerful bond we weren't
entirely aware of until we saw each other in the flesh."

"When I first came across your picture on the book jacket, it had a very
odd effect on me, but nothing like this.  Stepping off the plane, seeing
you there .  .  .  it was as if we'd known each other all our lives. No,
not exactly that.  More precisely .  .  .  it was as if we'd known each
other far better, more completely, than we'd ever known anyone else, as
if we shared some tremendous secret that all the world might want to
know but that only we possessed.  Does that sound crazy?"

He shook his head.  "No.  Not at all.  You've put into words what I was
feeling .  .  .  as nearly as words can explain it."

"You've met some of the others," Ginger said.  "Was it like this when
you first encountered them?"

"No.  I instantly felt .  .  .  a certain warmth toward them, a strong
sense of community, but nothing a fraction as powerful as what I felt
when you got off that plane.  All of us went through something unusual
that linked our lives, our futures, but evidently you and I shared an
experience even stranger and more affecting than anything we shared with
them.  Damn. It's as layered as an onion, one strangeness on another."

For half an hour they sat in the car, in the airport parking lot,
talking.  Outside, cars and pickups came and went around them, and the
January wind buffeted the Chevy and moaned at the windows; however, they
were seldom aware of anything but each other.

She told him about her fugues, the hypnotic regression sessions with
Pablo Jackson, and the mind-control technique known as the Azrael Block.
She told him about Pablo's murder and her own narrow escape.

Although, clearly, Ginger sought neither sympathy for her suffering nor
praise for the way she hadhandled herself in trying circumstances, Dom's
respect and admiration for her grew by the minute.  She was only
five-two, a hundred pounds, but somehow she had a physical presence more
imposing than many men twice her size.

Dom recounted the events of the past twenty-four hours, and when Ginger
heard about his dream of the previous night and about the new memories
that surfaced in it, she appeared immensely relieved.  In Dom's dream,
there was proof of Pablo Jackson's theory: Her fugues were not caused by
mental aberration; they were, instead, always triggered by objects
associated with her imprisonment at the motel two summers ago.  The
black gloves and dark-visored helmet had terrified her because they made
a direct connection with the repressed memories of the people in
decontamination suits who tended her while she underwent brainwashing.
The drain in the hospital scrub sink threw the panic switch because she
probably had been one of those "detainees" poisoned by Colonel Falkirk
(whoever the hell he was), then forced to vomit up the deadly substance,
just as Dom had been.  While strapped in the motel bed, she must have
undergone many eye examinations to determine the depth of her
drug-induced trance, which was why an ophthalmoscope had sent her
reeling away in a dark terror that night in George Hannaby's office. Dom
saw a relaxation of the tension at this irrefutable evidence that her
blackouts were not a sign of madness and were, in fact, a desperate but
entirely rational method of avoiding the repressed memories that the
mind-control experts had forbidden her to recall.

She said, "But what about the brass buttons on the coat of the man who
killed Pablo?  And on the policeman's uniform?  Why did they terrify me
and throw me into a fugue?"

"We know the military is involved in this cover-up," Dom said, turning
up the heater to counteract the cold air pouring off the car's
wind-buffeted windows, "and officers' uniforms have brass buttons like
that, though not a lion passant.  Most likely .  .  .  raised images of
eagles.  The buttons on the killer's and cop's coats were probably
similar to the buttons on the uniforms of those who imprisoned us in the
motel."

"Okay, but you said they wore decontamination suits, not uniforms."

"Maybe they didn't wear the decon suits for the entire three and a half
days.  At some point they decided it was safe to take them off."

She nodded.  "I'm sure that's right.  Which leaves only one thing. Those
carriage lamps behind the house on Newbury Street, the day Pablo was
murdered.  I told you about them: black iron with pebbled amber panes of
glass.  They had those bulbs that flickered like a gas flame.  Perfectly
innocent lamps. But they kicked me into another blackout."

"The bases of the lamps in the rooms at the Tranquility Motel are
designed like hurricane lamps, with little windows of amber glass."

"I'll be damned.  So every blackout was triggered by an object that
reminded me of something from those days when I was being brainwashed."

Dom hesitated, then reached inside his sweater and withdrew the Polaroid
photograph from his shirt pocket and handed it to her.

She paled and shuddered when she saw herself staring up with vacant eyes
at the camera.  "Gevalt!" She looked away from the picture.

Dom gave her time to recover from the shock of the snapshot.

Outside, in the fading dirty-gray light, a score of vehicles waited
silently like dark, dumb, brooding beasts.  The wind harried collections
of litter, dead leaves, and miscellaneous debris across the macadam.

"It's meshugge," she said, lowering her troubled gaze to the photo
again.  "It's crazy.  What could possibly have happened to us that would
justify this elaborate, risky conspiracy?

What could we have seen that was so dreadfully goddamned important?"

"We'll find out," he promised.

"Will we?  Will they let us?  They killed Pablo.  Won't they do
whatever's necessary to keep us from uncovering the truth?"

Adjusting the heater again, Dom said, "Well, I figure there're two
factions among the conspirators.  There are the hard-asses represented
by Colonel Falkirk and his people, and the better guys-can't call them
good guys exactly-represented by the fella who sent us these snapshots
and by the two men in decontamination suits in my dream last night.  The
hard-asses wanted to kill all of us right at the start, so there'd never
be any doubt that the cover-up would be permanent.  But the better guys
wanted to scrub our memories, use mind-control techniques instead of
violence, so we could go on living, and the better guys must be the
stronger of the two factions because they got their way."

"The gunman who killed Pablo was most likely one of the hard-asses."

"Yeah.  Working for Falkirk.  The colonel's evidently still willing to
kill anyone who jeopardizes the cover-up, which means none of us is
safe.  But there's the other faction that doesn't believe in Falkirk's
ultimate solution, and they're still trying to protect us, I think.  So
we have a chance.  Anyway, we can't walk away.  We can't go home and try
to get on with our lives just because the enemy looks formidable."

"No," Ginger agreed, "we can't.  Because until we find out what
happened, we don't really have lives to get on with."

The wind blew withered leaves against the windshield, over the roof.
Ginger swept the parking lot with her gaze.  "They must know we're
gathering at the motel, that things are falling apart.  Do you think
they're watching us now?"

"Very likely they've got the motel under surveillance," Dom said.  "But
no one followed me to the airport.  I watched for a tail."

"They wouldn't need to tail you here," she said grimly. "They knew where
you were going.  They knew who you were picking up."

"Are we laboring under a delusion of free will?  Are we only bugs on a
giant's palm, and can the giant crush us whenever he wants?"

"Maybe," Ginger Weiss said.  "But by God, we can at least give him a
couple of nasty bites before he smashes us."

She spoke with a fierce determination that was convincing but also
amusing in the context of a metaphor as basically comic as a giant and a
bunch of bugs.  Though he was pleased by her fierce resolution in the
face of such overwhelmingly poor odds, Dom could not help laughing.

Blinking at him in surprise, she laughed too.  "Hey, am I spunky, or
what?  Might be smashed by a giant, but I feel triumphant 'cause I'll be
able to bite him just before he reduces me to a bloody smear."

"Spunky should be your middle name," Dom agreed, laughing harder.

As he watched Ginger laughing at her own expense, Dom was again stricken
by her beauty.  His response to her, on seeing her disembark from the
plane, had been instant and powerful because of unremembered experiences
they shared. But even if they had been complete strangers whose lives
had never crossed, he would have felt something more at the sight of her
than he felt when he saw other beautiful women.  Under any
circumstances, she would have turned his head.  She was special.

He drew a deep breath.  "Shall I take you to meet the others?"

"Oh, yes," she said, dabbing her slender fingers at the corners of her
eyes to wipe away tears that her graveyard laughter had occasioned.
"Yes, I'm eager to meet them.  The other bugs on the giant's hand."

Less than half an hour before nightfall, the shadows on the high plains
were long, and the muddy gray light of the overcast dusk lent an air of
mystery even to such ordinary objects as clumps of sagebrush, rock
formations, and twisted mounds of dead brown bunch-grass.

Before taking her to the motel, Dom Corvaisis had brought Ginger to what
he called "the special place," more than two hundred yards south of
Interstate 80.  The wind rustled halfseen vegetation.  The ice on the
grass and sagebrush, when glimpsed at all, looked black, shiny black.

The writer stood away from her, hands jammed in his jacket pockets,
silent.  He had told her that he did not want to influence her reaction
to the place or color her first feelings with a description of his own.

Ginger wandered slowly back and forth, feeling slightly foolish, as if
taking part in a half-baked experiment in psychic perception, seeking
clairvoyant vibrations.  But she quickly stopped feeling foolish when
the vibrations actually began to shake her.  A queer uneasiness arose,
and she found herself staying away from the deeper pockets of shadows,
as if something hostile lurked in them.  Her heart pounded.  Uneasiness
became fear, and she heard the tempo of her breathing change.

"It's inside me.  It's inside me."

She whirled toward that voice.  It was Dom's voice, but it had not come
from him.  The words had been spoken behind her.  But no one was there:
only dry sagebrush and a thin patch of snow glowing softly, luminously
within a nest of shadows.

"What's the matter?" Dom asked, moving toward her.

She was wrong.  Dom's other voice, the ghostly-sounding voice, had not
come from behind her.  It had come from within her.  She heard that
other Dom again, and she realized she was hearing a fragment of memory,
an echo from the past, something he had said to her that Friday night,
July 6, perhaps when they had both stood in this same place.  The scrap
of memory came with no visual or olfactory element because it was part
of the events locked behind the Azrael Block.  There were just those
three urgent words repeated twice: "It's inside me.  It's inside me."

Abruptly, her simmering fear flashed bright.  The landscape around her
seemed to embody a nameless but monstrous threat.  She started back
toward the highway, walking fast, and Dom asked what was wrong, and she
walked even faster, unable to answer because fear was like a paste in
her mouth and throat.  He called her name, and she began to run.  Every
object in sight seemed to have been wounded on its eastern flank, for
black blood-shadows spilled in that direction.

She was not able to speak until they were back in the Chevy, with the
doors locked, the engine running, and the heater blowing warm air on her
chilled face.  Shakily, she told him about the nameless threat she had
felt on that ordinary-looking piece of ground, and about the memory of
his urgent voice and the three-word sentence.

" 'It's inside me,' " he said thoughtfully.  "You're sure it's really
something I said to you that night?"

"Yes." She shivered.

" 'It's inside me." What in the world did I mean by that?"

"I don't know," Ginger said.  "But it gives me the creeps."

He was silent a moment.  Then he said, "Yeah.  Me, too."

That evening, at the motel, Ginger Weiss felt almost as if she was with
her family on a holiday gathering like Thanksgiving. In spite of the
difficulties in which they found themselves, their spirits were high;
for in the manner of a real family, they drew strength from one another.
The six of them crowded into the kitchen and prepared dinner together,
and through that domestic labor, Ginger got to know the others better
and felt a strengthening of the ties that bound her to them.

Ned Sarver, being a professional cook, prepared the main dish-chicken
breasts baked in a spicy green tomatillo sauce with sour cream.
Initially, Ginger mistakenly thought Ned was a brooding, unfriendly
sort, but she soon changed her opinion.  Taciturnity sometimes could be
a sign of a healthy ego that did not require constant gratification,
which was the case with Ned.  Besides, Ginger could not help but like a
man who loved his wife as deeply as Ned loved Sandy, a love apparent in
every word he spoke to her, in every glance he cast her way.

Sandy, the only one of them to be affected only positively by their
mysterious ordeal, was so sweet-tempered, so delighted with the recent
changes in herself, that she was especially good company.  Together, she
and Ginger prepared the dinner salad and vegetables, and as they worked,
an almost sisterly affection developed between them.

Faye Block made the dessert, a refrigerator pie with a chocolate crust
and banana-cream filling.  Ginger liked Faye, who reminded her of Rita
Hannaby.  That cultured society woman was different from Faye in many
ways, but in fundamental respects they were alike: efficient,
take-charge types, tough of mind, tender of spirit.

Ernie Block and Dom Corvaisis put the extra leaf in the table and
arranged six place settings.  Ernie had seemed gruff and intimidating at
first, but now she saw he was a sweetheart. He inspired much affection
because of his fear of darkness, which made him seem boyish in spite of
his size and age.

Of the five people among whom Ginger found herself, only Dominick
Corvaisis stirred emotions that she could not understand.  For him, she
felt the same friendship that she felt for the others, and she was aware
of a special bond between them related to an unremembered experience
just the two of them had shared.  But she was also sexually attracted to
him. That surprised her because she never felt desire for a man until
she knew him for several weeks, at least, and knew him well.  Wary of
her romantic yearnings, Ginger kept a tight rein on her emotions, and
she tried hard to convince herself that Dom did not feel a similar
attraction for her, which he so patently did.

Through dinner, the six of them continued to discuss their strange
predicament and search for clues that might have been overlooked.

Like Dom, Ginger had no recollection of the toxic spill two years ago,
though the Blocks and Servers recalled it clearly.

I-80 had really been closed, and an environmental emergency had been
declared; there was no doubt about that much.  Last night, however, Dom
convinced the Blocks that their memories of evacuating to Elroy and
Nancy Jamison's mountain ranch were phony and that both they and the
Jamisons had almost surely been kept at the motel.  (According to Faye
and Ernie, the Jamisons had not mentioned having any nightmares or odd
problems lately, so their brainwashing must have been effective, though
it would be necessary to talk to them soon.)  Likewise, Ned and Sandy
had reluctantly concluded that their own recollections of sitting out
the crisis at their trailer were too shallow to be real and that they
had been strapped into motel beds, drugged, and brainwashed like
everyone else in those Polaroids.

"But," Faye wondered, "why wouldn't they give us all approximately the
same false memories?"

Ginger said, "Maybe all you locals have had the toxic spill and the
highway closure woven into your false memories. That'd be necessary
because, later, people would be asking you where you went during the
emergency, and you'd have to know what they were talking about.  But Dom
and I are from distant places, unlikely ever to return, unlikely to run
into anyone who would know that we'd been within the quarantine zone, so
they didn't bother including that bit of reality in the set of fake
memories they gave us."

Sandy paused with a morsel of chicken on her fork.  "But wouldn't it be
safer and easier to make your memories fit the toxic spill, too?"

"Ever since Pablo Jackson helped me discover that my mind had been
tampered with," Ginger said, "I've been reading about brainwashing, and
I think maybe it's a lot less difficult to implant recollections that
are entirely false than it is to weave in threads of reality such as the
environmental emergency and the road closure.  It probably takes a lot
longer to construct fake memories that have some reality to them, and
maybe they simply didn't have time to do that with all of us.  So they
gave the super-deluxe brainwashing job only to you locals."

"That feels like the truth," Ernie said, and everyone agreed.

Faye said, "But did the toxic spill really happen, or was it just a
cover story that gave them an excuse to close I-80 and bottle us up, a
way of preventing us from talking about what we'd seen Friday night?"

"I suspect there was contamination of some sort," Ginger said.  "In
Dom's nightmare, which we know is really more memory than dream, those
men were wearing decontamination suits.  Now, when they came into the
quarantine zone, maybe they'd wear costumes like that for the benefit of
newsmen or other onlookers.  But once here, where only we could see
them, they wouldn't keep the suits on unless they absolutely had to."

Glancing uneasily at the blind-covered window nearest the table, as if
he thought he had seen a trickle of darkness dribbling in from the night
beyond, Ernie cleared his throat and said, "Yeah, uh .  .  .  well,
which was it, do you think?  You're the doctor.  Does it sound like
chemical or biological contamination?  The story they gave the media was
that it involved chemicals being delivered to Shenkfield's testing
facilities."

Ginger had been thinking about this question for some time, long before
Ernie asked it.  Chemical or biological contamination?  She had arrived
at an answer that deeply disturbed her.  "Generally speaking, the suits
required for a chemical spill don't have to be air-tight.  They just
have to cover the worker from head to toe in order to prevent any
caustic or toxic substance from coming into contact with his skin, and
they have to include a respirator, rather like a scuba diver's tank and
mask, so he won't breathe deadly fumes. They're usually made of
lightweight nonporous cloth, and the headgear consists of a simple cloth
hood with a plastic visor. But Dom described heavy-looking suits with an
outer level of thick vinyl, with gloves that were of one piece with the
sleeves, and a hard helmet that locked into an airtight seal at the
collar.  That is unquestionably gear that's been designed to prevent
exposure to a dangerous biological agent, microbes."

For a while no one said a word, pondering this disquieting news.

Then Ned took a long swallow of his Heineken for fortification and said,
"So we must've been infected with something."

Faye said, "Some virus they developed for biological warfare."

"If it was headed for Shenkfield, that's the only kind of bug it
could've been," Ernie said.  "Something mean."

"Yet we lived," Sandy said.

"Because they were immediately able to quarantine us and treat us,"
Ginger said.  "Surely they wouldn't be intending to test a genetically
engineered virus, some new and deadly organism that could be used as a
weapon, unless they had simultaneously developed an effective cure for
it.  So they had a supply of a new antibiotic OT serum to guard against
just such an accident.  If they contaminated us, they also cured US."

Ernie said, "It sounds right, doesn't it?  Maybe it's all starting to
fall together, piece by piece."

Dom disagreed.  "It still doesn't explain what happened on that Friday
night, what we saw that they didn't want us to see.  It doesn't explain
what made the whole damned diner shake or what blew out the
windows-either on that first night or again last night."

"And it doesn't explain the other weird stuff," Faye said. "Like all
those paper moons whirling around Dom in Lomack's house.  Or Father
Wycazik's claim that this young priest's been performing miracle cures."

They looked at one another, waiting in silence for someone to put forth
an explanation that would tie biological contam ination with those
paranormal events, but no one had an answer.

Less than three hundred miles west of the Tranquility Motel, in another
motel in Reno, Brendan Cronin had gone to bed and turned out the lights.
Although it was only a few minutes after nine o'clock, he was still
functioning on Chicago time, so for him it was after eleven.

However, sleep eluded him.  After checking into the motel and having
dinner at a nearby Bob's Big Boy, he had telephoned St.  Bette's rectory
and had spoken with Father Wycazik, who had told him of the call from
Dominick Corvaisis. Brendan was electrified by the news that he was not
the only one caught up in this mystery.  He considered calling the
Tranquility, but they already knew he was on his way, and whatever they
could say on the phone could be said better in person, tomorrow.
Thoughts of tomorrow and speculations about what might happen were what
kept sleep at bay.

He had lain awake less than an hour and his thoughts had drifted to the
eerie luminescence that had filled his rectory bedroom two nights ago,
when suddenly that phenomenon appeared once more.  This time, there was
no visible source of light, not even one so unlikely as the frost-moon
upon the window from which the uncanny radiance had sprung last Friday
night.  Now, the glow appeared above him and on all sides, as if the
very molecules of the air had acquired the ability to produce light.  It
was a lunar-pale, milky shimmer at first, growing brighter by the
second, until it seemed as if he must be lying in an open field, under
the looming countenance of a full moon.

This was different from the peaceful golden light that was featured in
his recurring dream, and as it had done two nights ago, it filled him
with conflicting emotions-horror and rapture, fear and wild excitement.

As in his rectory bedroom, the lactescent light changed color, darkening
to scarlet.  He seemed suspended in a radiant bubble of blood.

It's inside me, he thought, wondering what that meant. Inside me.  The
thought reverberated in his mind.  Suddenly he was cold with fear.

His thundering heart seemed about to explode.  He lay rigid.  In his
hands, the rings appeared.  Throbbing.

2.

Monday, January 13

When they gathered in Ernie and Faye's kitchen for breakfast the next
morning, Dom was excited to learn that the previous night had been an
ordeal for most of them.  "It's unraveling the way I hoped it might," he
said.  "By gathering together here, by re-creating the group that was
gathered here that night, and by working together to get at the truth,
we're putting constant pressure on the memory blocks that've been
implanted in us.  And now, that barrier is crumbling a bit faster."

Last night, Dom, Ginger, Ernie, and Ned experienced exceptionally vivid
nightmares of such similarity that they were surely fragments of
forbidden memories.  In every case they had involved being strapped to
motel beds and tended by men in decontamination suits.  Sandy had a
pleasant dream, although it lacked the clarity and detail of the others'
nightmares.  Faye was the only one who did not dream at all.

Ned had been so disturbed by his nightmare that on Monday morning, when
he and Sandy arrived from Beowawe for breakfast, he announced they were
moving into a room at the motel for the duration.  "During the night,
after the dream woke me, I couldn't get back to sleep.  And while I was
laying there, I got to thinking how lonely it is at our trailer, empty
plains all around.  .  .  .  Maybe this Colonel Falkirk will decide to
kill us like he wanted to do in the first place.  And if he comes for
us, I don't want me and Sandy to be alone out there at the trailer."

Dom sympathized with Ned because these dark and vivid dreams were new to
the cook.  Over recent weeks, Dom, Ginger, and Ernie had learned a
little about coping with the frighteningly powerful nightmares, but Ned
had developed no armor, so he was badly shaken.

And, of course, Ned was well advised to fear Falkirk.  The closer they
came to exposing the conspiracy and learning the truth, the more likely
they were to become targets of a preemptive strike.  Dom did not think
Falkirk would make a move until Brendan Cronin, Jorja Monatella, and
perhaps other victims had gathered at the Tranquility.  But once they
were in one place, they would need to be prepared for trouble.

Now, in the Blocks' kitchen, Ned Sarver picked at his breakfast without
appetite as he spoke of the images that had disturbed his sleep.  At
first he had dreamed of being held prisoner by men in decontamination
suits, but later they had worn either lab coats or military uniforms, an
indication that the biological danger had passed.  One of the uniformed
men had been Colonel Falkirk, and Ned described that officer in detail:
about fifty years old, black hair graying at the temples, gray eyes like
circles of polished steel, a beakish nose, thin lips.

Ernie was able to confirm the word-portrait that Ned painted, for
Falkirk had also been in his nightmare.  The amazing coincidence of the
same man appearing in both Ned's and Ernie's dreams made it clear that
his face was not merely a figment of imagination but a memory of a real
face that both Ernie and Ned had seen two summers ago.

"And in my nightmare," Ernie said, "another Army officer referred to
Falkirk by his first name.  Leland.  Colonel Leland Falkirk."

"He's probably stationed at Shenkfield," Ginger said.

"We'll try to find out later," Dom said.

The barriers to memory were definitely crumbling.  That prospect boosted
Dom's spirits higher than they had been in months.

In Ginger's nightmare, which she recounted for them, she had not been
the only person being brainwashed in Room 5, the room she had occupied
that summer and which she now occupied again.  "There was a rollaway bed
in one corner, and the redhead in it was someone I'd never seen before.
She was about forty years old.  They had her connected to her own IV
drip and EKG machine.  She had that ...  vacant stare."

Just as Ernie and Ned had shared a new developmentthe appearance of
Colonel Falkirk-in their nightmares, Dom and Ginger had shared this
other discovery.  In Dom's dream, there had been a rollaway bed, flanked
by an IV stand and an EKG monitor, and in the bed had been a young man
in his twenties with a pale face, bushy mustache, and zombie eyes.

"What does it mean?" Faye Block asked.  "Did they have so many subjects
for brainwashing that they more than filled all twenty rooms?"

"But," Sandy said, "the registry showed only eleven rooms rented."

Ginger said, "There must've been people on the interstate, in transit,
who saw what we saw.  The Army managed to stop them and bring them here.
None of their names would appear on the registry."

"How many?" Faye wondered.

"We'll probably never know for sure," Dom said.  "We never actually met
them; we only shared rooms with them while we were drugged.  We might
eventually remember the faces of those we saw, but we can't possibly
remember names and addresses we never knew in the first place."

But at least those reprogrammed memories, those tissues of lies, were
dissolving, allowing the truth to show through. Dom was grateful for
that much.  In time, they would uncover the entire story-if Colonel
Falkirk did not first come after them with heavy artillery.

Monday morning, while the group at the Tranquility ate breakfast, Jack
Twist was being escorted to a safe-deposit box in a vault of a Fifth
Avenue branch of Citibank, in New York. The attending bank employee, an
attractive young woman, kept calling him "Mr.  Farnham," for that was
the false identity under which he had acquired the box.

After they used their separate keys to remove the box from the wall of
the vault, when he was alone with it in a cubicle, he opened the lid and
stared in shock at the contents.  The rectangular metal container held
something that he had not put there, which was an impossibility since
only he knew about the box and possessed the only master key.

It should have contained five white envelopes, each filled with five
thousand dollars in hundred-dollar and twenty-dollar bills, and indeed
that money appeared to be untouched.  This was one of eleven emergency
caches he kept in safe-deposit boxes all over the city.  He had set out
this morning to remove fifteen thousand dollars from each, a total of
$165,000, which he intended to give away.  He opened each of the five
envelopes and counted the contents with trembling hands.  Not a single
bill was missing.

Jack was not even slightly relieved.  Though his money was still there,
the presence of the other object proved that his false identity had been
penetrated, his privacy violated, and his freedom jeopardized.  Someone
knew who "Gregory Farnham" really was, and the item that had been left
in the box was a bold notification that his elaborately constructed
cover had been penetrated.

It was a postcard.  There was no writing on the back, no message; the
presence of the card itself was message enough. On the front was a
photograph of the Tranquility Motel.

The summer before last, after he and Branch Pollard and a third man had
burglarized the Avril McAllister estate in Marin County, north of San
Francisco, and after Jack paid a profitable visit to Reno, he rented a
car and drove east, stopping the first night at the Tranquility Motel
along Interstate 80.  He had not thought about the place since, but he
recognized it the instant he saw the photograph.

Who could possibly know he had stayed at that motel?  Not Branch
Pollard.  He'd never told Branch about Reno or about his decision to
drive back to New York.  And not the third man on the McAllister job, a
guy named Sal Finrow from Los Angeles; Jack had never seen him again
after they had split the take from that sour job.

Then Jack realized that at least three of his phony IDs had been
penetrated.  He rented this safe-deposit box as "Farnham" but he stayed
at the Tranquility Motel as "Thornton Wainwright." Both noms de guerre
were now blown, and the only way anyone could have linked them was by
connecting Jack with his "Phillipe Delon" identity, under which he
resided at his Fifth Avenue apartment, so that name was blown as well.

Jesus.

He sat in the bank cubicle, stunned but thinking furiously, trying to
decide who his enemy might be.  It could not be the police or the FBI or
any other legitimate authority, for they would simply have arrested him
once they had accumulated this much evidence; they would not play games.
Nor could it be any of the men with whom he ever worked on a heist, for
he took great care to keep his acquaintances in the criminal underworld
well out of his life on Fifth Avenue.  None of them knew where he really
lived; in the event they scouted a job requiring his planning skills and
special knowledge, they could reach him only through a series of mail
drops or through a chain of pseudonymously listed phone numbers backed
up by answering machines.  He was confident of the effectiveness of
those precautions.  Besides, if some hoodlum had gotten into this box,
he would not have left the twenty-five thousand bucks untouched; he
would have taken every dollar of it.

So who's on to me?  Jack wondered.

He focused on the fratellanza warehouse robbery that he and Mort and
Tommy Sung had pulled off December 3.  Was the mafia after him?  When
they wanted to find someone, those boys had more contacts, sources,
determination, and sheer perseverance than the FBI.  And the fratellanza
would most likely not have taken the twenty-five thousand, leaving it as
dilominous notice that they wanted more than the money he had stolen
from them.  It was also in character for the fratellanza to leave a
teaser like the postcard, because those guys enjoyed making a target
sweat a lot before they finally pulled the trigger.

On the other hand, even if the mob tracked him down, then somehow
searched back through his criminal career to see who else he had hit,
they would not have gone to the trouble of acquiring cards from the
Tranquility Motel just to put the fear of God in him.  If they had
wanted to leave an upsetting teaser in the safe-deposit box, they would
have left a photo of the warehouse that he had robbed in New Jersey.

So it was not the mafia.  Then who?  Damn it, who?

The tiny cubicle began to seem even smaller than it was. Jack felt
claustrophobic and vulnerable.  As long as he was in the bank, there was
nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.  He stuffed the twenty-five thousand
into his overcoat pockets, no longer intending to give away any of it;
suddenly, it had become his escape money.  He put the postcard in his
wallet, closed the empty box, and rang the buzzer for the attendant.

Two minutes later, he was outside, drawing deep breaths of the freezing
January air, studying the people on Fifth Avenue for one who might be
tailing him.  He saw no one suspicious.

For a moment he stood rocklike in the river of people that flowed around
him.  He wanted to get out of the city and the state as quickly as
possible, flee to an unlikely destination, where they would not look for
him.  Whoever they were.  Yet he was not entirely sure that flight was
necessary.  In Ranger training, he had been taught never to act until he
understood why he was acting and until he knew what he hoped to achieve
by his actions.  Besides, fear of his faceless enemy was outweighed by
curiosity; he needed to know who he was up against, how they had broken
his various covers, and what they wanted from him.

Outside the Citibank Building, Jack hailed a cab and went to the corner
of Wall Street and William Street, in the heart of the financial
district, where he had six safe-deposit boxes in six banks.  He went to
five of them, from each of which he collected twenty-five thousand
dollars and a postcard of the Tranquility Motel.

He decided to stop after the fifth, because his coat pockets were
already bulging with $125,000, a sufficiently dangerous sum to be
carrying, and because, by now, he knew beyond a doubt that his other six
phony identities and clandestine safe-deposit boxes had been found out
as well.  He had enough money with which to travel, and he was not
particularly worried about leaving the remaining $150,000 in the other
six boxes.  For one thing, Jack had four million in his Swiss accounts;
and for another thing, the distributor of the postcards would already
have taken the available money if that had been his intention.

By now, he'd had time to think about that motel out in Nevada, and he
had begun to realize something was strange about the time that he had
spent at the place.  He had remained there for three days, relaxing,
enjoying the quiet and the scenery.  But now, for the first time, it
seemed to him that he would have done no such thing.  Not with so much
cash in the trunk of his rental car.  Not when he had already been away
from New York (and Jenny) for two weeks.  He would have driven straight
home from Reno.  Now that he was forced to contemplate it, the three-day
stay at the Tranquility Motel did not make much sense.

Another taxi conveyed him to his Fifth Avenue apartment building, where
he arrived shortly before eleven.  He promptly telephoned Elite Flights,
a company that chartered small jets, with whom he had dealt previously,
and he was relieved to discover that, fortuitously, they had an unhooked
Lear available for departure at his convenience.

He took the twenty-five thousand from the secret compartment in the back
of his bedroom closet.  With the funds he had removed from the
safe-deposit boxes, he now had $150,000 in immediate operating capital,
enough to deal with virtually any contingency that might arise.

He hurriedly packed three suitcases, distributing a few clothes in each,
but leaving most of the space for other items.  He stowed away two
handguns: a Smith & Wesson Model 19 Combat Magnum, chambered for the
.357 Magnum cartridge but also capable of firing .38 Special cartridges
with considerably less kick; and a .32 Beretta Model 70, its stubby
barrel grooved to accept a screw-on, pipe-type silencer, of which Jack
included two.  He also took an Uzi submachine gun, which he'd illegally
modified for full automatic fire, plus plenty of ammunition.

Jack's newly acquired guilt had substantially transformed him during the
past forty-eight hours, but it had not overwhelmed him to such an extent
that he was incapable of dealing violently with those who might deal
violently with him.  His determination to be an honest and upstanding
citizen did not interfere with his instinct for self-preservation.  And
considering his background, no one was better prepared to preserve
himself than Jack Twist.

Besides, after eight years of alienation and loneliness, he had begun to
rejoin society, had begun to hope for a normal life.  He would not let
anyone destroy what might be his last chance for happiness.

He also packed the portable SLICKS computer, which he had used to get
through the armored transport's sophisticated electronic lock the night
before last in Connecticut.  In addition, he decided he might need a
Police Lock Release Gun, a tool that could instantly open any type of
pin-tumbler lockmushroom, spool, or regular-without damaging the
mechanism, and which was sold only to law-enforcement agencies, And a
Star Tron MK 202A, a compact, hand-held "night vision" device that could
also be rifle-mounted.  And a few other things.

Although he distributed the heaviest weapons and equipment equally among
the three large suitcases, none of the bags was light when he finally
closed and locked them.  Any one who helped him with his luggage might
wonder about the contents, but no one would ask embarrassing questions
or raise an alarm.  That was the advantage of leasing a Lear jet for the
journey: He would not be required to pass through airport security, and
no one would inspect his baggage.

From his apartment, he taxied to La Guardia.

The waiting Lear would take him to Salt Lake City, Utah, the nearest
major airport to Elko, a shade closer than Reno International, and a lot
closer if you considered the necessity of overflying to Reno and then
doubling back in a conventional-engine commuter plane to Elko.  Elite
Flights had told him that Reno was anticipating a major snowstorm that
might close them down later in the day, and the same was true of the two
smaller fields in southern Idaho that were capable of handling Lear-size
jets.  But the weather forecast for Salt Lake City was good throughout
the day.  At Jack's request, Elite was already arranging the lease of a
conventional-engine plane from a Utah company to carry him from Salt
Lake to the little county airport in Elko.  Although it was in the
easternmost fourth of Nevada, Elko was still within the Pacific time
zone, so he would benefit from a gain of three hours, though he did not
think he would arrive in Elko much before nightfall.

That was all right.  He'd need darkness for what he was planning.

To Jack, the taunting postcards, retrieved from his safedeposit boxes,
implied there were people in Nevada who had learned everything worth
knowing about his criminal life.  The cards seemed to be saying that he
could reach those people through the Tranquility Motel or perhaps find
them in residence there.  The postcard was an invitation.  Or a summons.
Either way, he could ignore it only at his peril.

He did not know if he was being followed to La Guardia; he did not
bother looking for a tail.  If his apartment phone was tapped, they knew
he was coming the moment he called Elite Flights.  He wanted them to see
him approaching openly, for then they might be off-guard when, on
arrival in Elko, he suddenly shook loose of them and went underground.

Monday morning, after breakfast, Dom and Ginger went into Elko, to the
offices of the Sentinel, the county's only news paper.  The biggest town
in the county, Elko boasted a population of less than ten thousand, so
its newspaper's offices were not housed in a gleaming glass high-rise
but in a humble one-story concrete-block building on a quiet street.

Like most papers, the Sentinel provided access to its backissue files to
anyone with legitimate research needs, though permission for the use of
the files was granted judiciously.

In spite of the financial success of his first novel, Dom still had
difficulty identifying himself as a writer.  To his own ears, he sounded
pretentious and phony, though he realized his uneasiness was a holdover
from his days as an excessively self-effacing Milquetoast.

The receptionist, Brenda Hennerling, did not recognize his name, but
when he mentioned the title of his novel that Random House had just
shipped to the stores, she said, "It's the book-club selection this
month!  You wrote it?  Really?"

She had ordered it a month ago from the Literary Guild, and it had just
arrived in the mail.  She was (she said) an avid reader, two books a
week, and it was truly a thrill to meet a genuine novelist.  Her
enthusiasm only added to Dom's embarrassment.  He was of a mind with
Robert Louis Stevenson, who had said, "The important thing is the tale,
the well-told tale, not he who tells it."

The Sentinel's back-issue files were kept in a narrow, windowless
chamber.  There were two desks with typewriters, a microfilm reader, a
file of microfilm spools, and six tall filing cabinets with oversize
drawers containing those editions of the newspaper that had not yet been
transferred to film.  The exposed concrete-block walls were painted pale
gray, and the acoustic-tile ceiling was gray, too, and the fluorescent
lights shed a cold glare.  Dom had the odd sensation that they were in a
submarine, far beneath the surface of the sea.

After Brenda Hennerling explained the filing system to them and left
them alone to do their work, Ginger said, "I'm so caught up in our
problems that I keep forgetting you're a famous author."

"So do I," Dom said, reading the labels on the filing cabinets that held
issues of past Sentinels.  "But of course, I'm not famous."

"Soon will be.  It's a shame: With all that's happening to us, you're
getting no chance to savour the publication of your first novel."

He shrugged.  "This isn't a picnic for any of us.  You've had to put an
entire medical career on hold."

"Yes, but now I know I'll be able to go back to medicine once we've dug
to the bottom of this," Ginger said, as if there was no doubt they would
triumph over their enemies.  By now, Dom knew that conviction and
determination were as much a part of her as the blueness of her eyes.
"But this is your first book."

Dom had not yet recovered from his embarrassment at being treated like a
celebrity by the receptionist.  Now Ginger's kind comments kept a blush
on his cheeks.  However, this was not the mark of embarrassment; it was
an indication of the intense pleasure he took in being the object of her
concern.  No woman had ever affected him as this one did.

Together, they went through the file drawers and removed the pertinent
back issues of the Sentinel.  They would not need to use the microfilm
reader, for the newspaper was running two years behind in the
transferral to film.  They withdrew a full week's editions, beginning
with Saturday, July 7, of the summer before last, and took them to one
of the desks, where they both pulled up chairs.

Although the unremembered event that they had witnessed, and the
possible contamination, and the closure of I80 had happened on Friday
night, July 6, the Saturday paper carried no report of the toxic spill.
The Sentinel was primarily a source of local and state news and, though
it included some national and international material, was not interested
in fastbreaking stories.  Its halls would never ring with that dramatic
cry, "Stop press!" There would be no last-minute recomposition of the
front page.  The pace of life in Elko County was rural, relaxed,
sensible, and no one felt a burning need to be breathlessly
up-to-the-minute on anything.  The Sentinel was put to bed late in the
evening, for distribution in the morning; therefore, since no Sunday
edition was published, the story of the toxic spill and the closure of
I-80 did not appear until the edition of Monday, July 9.

But Monday's and Tuesday's editions were emblazoned with urgent
headlines: TOXIC SPILL CLOSES- 80, and ARMY ESTABLISHES QUARANTINE ZONE,
and NERVE GAS LEAKING FROM DAMAGED TRUCK?, and ARMY SAYS EVERYONE
EVACUATED FROM DANGER ZONE, and WHERE ARE EVACUEES?, and SHENKFIELD ARMY
TESTING GROUNDS: WHAT REALLY GOES ON THERE?, and

- 80 CLOSURE ENTERS FOURTH DAY, and CLEAN-UP ALMOST FINISHED; HIGHWAY
OPEN BY NOON.

For both Dom and Ginger, it was eerie to read about these events that
had transpired during days when they remembered nothing more than
relaxing quietly at the Tranquility Motel.  As Dom read about the
crisis, he became convinced Ginger's theory was correct; it seemed
obvious that the mindcontrol technicians would have needed an extra week
or two in order to have incorporated this elaborate toxic-spill cover
story into the phony memories of both Elko County locals and
passers-through, and there was no way they could have kept the highway
closed and the area sealed tight for that long.

The edition of Wednesday, July 11, continued the saga: I80 OPENS!, and
QUARANTINE REMOVED: NO LONG-TERM CONTAMINATION, and FIRST EVACUEES
LOCATED: THEY SAW NOTHIN(;.

Editions of the Sentinel, distinctly a small-town paper, averaged
between sixteen and thirty-two pages.  During those days in July, most
of its news space was given to reports of the toxic crisis, for this
event had drawn reporters from all over the country, and the low-key
Sentinel found itself at the center of a big story.  Poring over that
wealth of material, Dom and Ginger discovered a lot that was pertinent
to their quest and that would help them plan their next move.

For one thing, the degree of security imposed by the United States Army
was soberly instructive of the lengths to which they would go to keep
the lid on the truth.  Although it was not strictly within their
authority to do so, Army units attached to Shenkfield had established
roadblocks and closed a ten-mile stretch of I-80 immediately after the
accident; they had not even informed the Elko County Sheriff or the
Nevada State Police of the crisis until they had secured the quarantine
zone.  That was a startling breach of standard procedure. Throughout the
emergency, the sheriff and state police complained with increasing
vehemence that the Army was freezing them out of every aspect of crisis
management and usurping civilian authority; state and local police were
neither included in the maintenance of the quarantine line nor consulted
on essential contingency planning for the possibility that increased
winds or other factors might spread the nerve gas beyond the initial
area of danger.  Clearly, the military trusted only its own people to
keep the secret of what was actually happening in the quarantine zone.

Following two days of frustration, Foster Hanks, the Elko County
Sheriff, had complained to a Sentinel reporter that: "This here's my
bailiwick, by God, and the people elected me to keep peace.  This is no
military dictatorship.  If I don't get some cooperation from the Army,
I'll see a judge first thing tomorrow and get a court order to make them
respect the legal jurisdictions in this matter." The Tuesday Sentinel
reported that Hanks had, indeed, gone before a judge, but before a
determination could be made, the crisis was drawing to an end and the
argument about jurisdiction was moot.

Huddling over the newspaper with Dom, Ginger said, "So we don't have to
worry that all authorities are aligned against us in this.  The state
and local police weren'tpart of it.  Our only adversary is-"

"The United States Army," Dom finished, laughing at the unconscious
element of graveyard humor in her assessment

of the enemy.

She also laughed sourly.  "Us against the Army.  Even with state and
local police out of the battle, it's hardly a fair match,

is it?"

According to the Sentinel, the Army kept sole and iron control of the
roadblocks on I-80, the only east-west artery through forbidden
territory, and also closed eight miles of the north-south county road.
Civilian air traffic was restricted from passing over the contaminated
area, necessitating the rerouting of flights, while the Army maintained
continuous helicopter patrols of the perimeter of the proscribed land.
Obviously, substantial manpower was required to secure eighty square
miles, but regardless of expense and difficulty, they were determined to
stop anyone entering the danger zone on foot, on horseback, or in
four-wheel-drive vehicles.  The choppers flew in daylight and after
dark, as well, sweeping the night with searchlights.  Rumors circulated
that teams of soldiers, equipped with infrared surveillance gear, were
also patrolling the perimeter at night, looking for interlopers who
might have slipped past the big choppers' searchlights.

"Nerve gases rate among the deadliest substances known to man," Ginger
said as Dom turned a page of the newspaper they were currently perusing.
"But even so, this much security seems excessive.  Besides, though I'm
no expert on chemical warfare, I can't believe any nerve gas would pose
a threat at such a distance from a single point of release.  I mean,
according to the Army, it was only one cylinder of gas, not an enormous
quantity, not a whole tanker truck as Ernie and Faye remembered it.  And
it's the nature of gas to disperse, to expand upon release.  So by the
time the stuff spread a couple of miles, it would've been diluted to
such a degree that surely the air would've contained no more of it than
a few parts per billion.  In three miles ...  not even one part per
billion.  Not enough to endanger anyone."

"This supports your idea that it was biological contamination."

"Possibly," Ginger said.  "It's too early to say.  But it was certainly
more serious than the nerve-gas story they put out."

By Saturday, July 7, less than one day after the interstate was closed,
an alert wire-service reporter had noted that the uniforms of many of
the soldiers in the quarantine operation bore-in addition to rank and
standard insignia-an unusual company patch: a black circle with an
emerald-green star in the center.  This was different from the markings
on the uniforms of the men from Shenkfield Testing Grounds.  Among those
wearing the green star, the ratio of officers to enlisted men was high.
When questioned, the Army identified the green-star soldiers as a
little-known, super-elite company of Special Forces troops.  "We call
them DERO, which stands for Domestic Emergency Response Organization,"
an Army spokesman was quoted by the Sentinel.  "The men of DERO are
superbly trained, and they've all had extensive field experience in
combat situations, and all of them carry topsecurity clearances, as
well, which is essential because they may find themselves operating in
highly classified areas, witness to sensitive sights."

Dom translated that to mean DERO men were chosen, in part, for their
ability and willingness to keep their goddamn mouths shut.

The Sentinel quoted the Army spokesman further: "They're the cream of
our young career soldiers, so naturally many have attained the rank of
at least sergeant by the time they qualify for DERO.  Our intention is
to create a superbly trained force to deal with extraordinary crises,
such as terrorist attacks on domestic military installations, nuclear
emergencies on bases housing atomic weapons, and other unusual problems.
Not that there's any aspect of terrorism involved in this case. And
there's no nuclear emergency here, either.  But several DERO companies
are stationed around the country, and since one was near when this
nerve-gas situation arose, it seemed prudent to bring in the best we had
to insure public safety." He refused to tell reporters where this DERO
company had been stationed, how far they had been flown, or how many
were involved.  "That's classified information."

Not one of the DERO men would speak with any member of the press.

Ginger grimaced and said, "Shmontses!"

Dom blinked.  "Huh?"

"Their whole story," she said, leaning back in her chair and rolling her
head from side to side to work out a cramp in her lovely neck.  "It's
all just shmontses."

"But what's shmontses?"

"Oh.  Sorry.  Yiddish word, adapted from German, I guess. One of my
father's favorites.  It means something of no value, something foolish,
absurd, nonsense, worthy of contempt or scorn.  This stuff the Army put
out is just shmontses." She stopped rolling her head, leaned forward in
her chair, and stabbed one finger at the newspaper.  "So this DERO team
just happened to be hanging around here in the middle of nowhere
precisely when this crisis arose, huh?  Too damned neat.

Dom frowned.  "But, Ginger, according to these stories, although the
roadblocks on I-80 were set up by men from Shenkfield, the DERO team
took over little more than an hour later.  So if they didn't just happen
to be nearby, the only way they could've gotten here so quickly was if
they were airborne and on their way before the accident ever happened."

"Exactly."

"You're saying they knew in advance there'd be a toxic spill?"

She sighed.  "At most, I'm willing to accept a DERO team might've been
at one of the nearest military bases ...  in western Utah or maybe up in
southern Idaho.  But even that's not near enough to make the Army's
scenario work.  Even if they dropped everything and flew in here the
moment they heard about the spill, they couldn't have been manning those
roadblocks within an hour.  No way.  So, yeah, it sure looks to me as if
they had a little advance warning that something was going to happen out
at the western end of Elko County. Not much warning, mind you.  Not
days.  But maybe a oneor two-hour advance notice."

"Which means the toxic spill couldn't have been an accident.  In fact,
probably wasn't a spill at all, neither chemical nor biological.  So why
in hell were they wearing decontamination suits when they were treating
us?" Dom was frustrated by the elaborate maze of this mystery, which
twisted and turned inward but not toward a solution, toward nothing but
twistier and more complex pathways that led into ever deeper puzzlement.
He had the irrational urge to tear the newspapers to shreds, as if, by
ripping them to pieces, he would also be ripping apart the Army's lies
and would somehow find the truth revealed, at last, in the resultant
confetti.

With a note of frustration that matched his own, Ginger said, "The only
reason the Army called in a DERO company to enforce the quarantine was
because the men patrolling the zone would have a view of something
highly classified, something absolutely top-secret.  The Army felt they
couldn't trust ordinary soldiers who didn't have the very highest
security clearance.  That's the sole reason the DERO team was used."

"Because they could be trusted to keep their mouths shut."

"Yes.  And if it'd been nothing more than a toxic spill out there on
I-80, the DERO men wouldn't have been required for the job.  I mean, if
it was just a spill, what would there've been to see except maybe an
overturned truck and a damaged, leaking canister of gas or liquid?"

Turning their attention once more to the newspapers spread before them,
they found additional evidence indicating the Army had had at least some
warning that unusual and spectacular trouble would erupt in western Elko
County that hot July night.  Both Dom and Ginger distinctly remembered
that the Tranquility Grille had been filled with a strange sound and
shaken by earthquake-like tremors about half an hour after full darkness
had settled on the land; and because sunset came later during the summer
(even at 41 degrees North Latitude), the trouble must have started
approximately at eight-ten.  Their memory blocks began at the same time,
which further pinpointed The Event.  Yet Dom spotted a line in one of
the Sentinel's stories stating that the roadblocks on I-80 had been
erected almost at eight o'clock on the dot.

Ginger said, "You mean the Army had the highway closed off five or ten
minutes before the 'accidental' toxic spill even happened?"

"Yeah.  Unless we're wrong about the time of the sunset."

They checked the weather column in the July 6 edition of the Sentinel.
It painted a more than adequate portrait of that fateful day.  The high
temperature had been expected to hit ninety degrees, with an overnight
low of sixty-four.  Humidity between twenty and twenty-five percent.
Clear skies.  Light to variable winds.  And sunset at seven-thirty-one.

"Twilight's short out here," Dom said.  "Fifteen minutes, tops.  Figure
full darkness at seven-forty-five.  Now, even if we're wrong to think it
was half an hour after nightfall that trouble hit, even if it came just
fifteen minutes after dark, the Army still had its roadblocks up first."

"So they knew what was coming," Ginger said.

"But they couldn't stop it from happening."

"Which means it must've been some process, some series of events, that
they initiated and then were unable to control."

"Maybe," Dom said.  "But maybe not.  Maybe they weren't really at fault.
Until we know more, we're just speculating. No point to it."

Ginger turned the page of the Sentinel's edition for Wednesday, July 11,
which they were currently examining, and her gasp of surprise directed
Dom's attention to a headand-shoulders photograph of a man in an Army
officer's uniform and cap.  Although Colonel Leland Falkirk had appeared
in neither Dom's nor Ginger's dreams last night, they both recognized
him at once because of the description that Ernie and Ned had supplied
from their nightmares: dark hair graying at the temples, eyes with an
eerie translucency, a beakish nose, thin lips, a face of flat hard
planes and sharp angles.

Dom read the caption under the picture: Colonel Leland Falkirk,
commanding officer of the company of DERO troops manning the quarantine
line, has been an elusive target for reporters.  This first photograph
was obtained by Sentinel photographer, Greg Lunde.  Caught by surprise,
Falkirk was angry about being photographed.  His answers to the few
questions asked of him were even shorter than the standard "no comment."

Dom might have smiled at the quiet humor in the last sentence of the
caption, but Falkirk's stony visage chilled him. He instantly recognized
the face not only because of Ernie's and Ned's description, but because
he had seen it before, the summer before last. Furthermore, there was a
ferocity in that hawklike countenance and in those predatory eyes that
was dismaying; this man routinely got what he wanted.  To be at his
mercy was a frightening prospect.

Staring at the photograph of Falkirk, Ginger softly said, "Kayn
aynhoreh.  " Aware of Dom's puzzlement, she said, "That's Yiddish, too.
Kayn aynhoreh.  It's an expression that's used to .  .  .  to ward off
the evil eye.  Somehow, it seemed appropriate."

Dom studied the photograph, half mesmerized by it.

After a moment, he said, "Yes.  Quite appropriate."

Colonel Falkirk's sharply chiseled face and cold pale eyes were so
striking that it seemed as if he were alive within this photograph, as
if he were returning their scrutiny.

While Dom and Ginger were examining the back-issue files at the Elko
Sentinel, Ernie and Faye Block were working in the office of the
Tranquility Motel, trying to contact the people whose names were on the
guest list for July 6, two summers ago, but who had thus far been
unreachable.  They were behind the check-in counter, sitting opposite
each other at the oak desk, which had kneeholes on both sides.  A pot of
coffee stood within reach on an electric warming-plate.

Ernie composed a telegram to Gerald Salcoe, the man who had rented two
rooms for his family on July 6, the summer before last, and who was
unreachable by phone because his number in Monterey, California, was
unlisted.  Meanwhile, Faye went back through last year's guest book, day
by day, looking for the most recent entry for Cal Sharkle, the trucker
who had stayed with them on that July 6.  Yesterday, Dom had tried the
telephone number Cal had printed in the guest registry that night, but
it had been disconnected.  The hope was that a more recent entry would
provide his new address and phone number.

As they performed their separate tasks, Ernie was reminded of countless
other times throughout their thirty-one years of marriage when they had
sat facing each other at a desk or, more often, at a kitchen table.  In
one apartment or another, in one house or another, at one end of the
world or another, from Quantico to Pendleton to Singapore, nearly
everywhere the Marines sent him, the two of them had spent long evenings
at a kitchen table, working or dreaming or worrying or happily planning
together, often late into the night.  Ernie was suddenly filled with
poignant echoes of those thousands of huddled conferences and shared
labors.  How very fortunate he had been to find and marry Faye.  Their
lives were so inextricably linked that they might as well have been a
single creature.  If Colonel Falkirk or others resorted to murder to
terminate this investigation, if anything happened to Faye, then Ernie
hoped he would die, too, simultaneously.

He finished composing the telegram to Gerald Salcoe, called it in to
Western Union, and requested immediate deliveryall the while warmed by a
love that was strong enough to make their dangerous situation seem less
threatening than it really was.

Faye found five occasions during the past year when Cal Sharkle had
stayed overnight, and in every case he had listed the same Evanston,
Illinois, address and phone number that he had entered in the registry
for July 6 of the previous year. Apparently, he had not moved, after
all.  Yet, when they dialed this number, they obtained the recording
that Dom had gotten yesterday, informing them that the telephone had
been disconnected and that no new Evanston listing existed.

On the chance that Cal had moved out of Evanston into the "Windy City"
itself, Faye dialed Area Code 312 Information and asked if there was a
number for Calvin Sharkle in Chicago.  There was not.  Using a map of
Illinois, she and Ernie placed calls to Information in the Chicago
suburbs: Whiting, Hammond, Calumet City, Markham, Downer's Grove, Oak
Park, Oakbrook, Elmhurst, Des Plaines, Rolling Meadows, Arlington
Heights, Skokie, Wilmette, Glencoe.  .  .  .  No luck.  Either Cal
Sharkle had moved out of the Chicago area, or had dropped off the face
of the earth.

While Faye and Ernie worked in the first-floor office, Ned and Sandy
Sarver were already preparing dinner in the kitchen upstairs.  This
evening, after Brendan Cronin arrived from Chicago, after Jorja
Monatelia and her little girl flew in from Vegas, there would be nine
for dinner, and Ned did not want to leave preparations until the last
minute.  Yesterday, when all six of them joined forces to prepare and
serve the evening meal, Ginger Weiss had observed that the occasion was
almost like a family holiday gathering; and indeed, they felt an
extraordinary closeness though they hardly knew one another.  With the
idea that reinforcement of their special affection and camaraderie might
give them strength to face whatever lay ahead of them, Ned and Sandy had
decided that tonight's meal ought to be like a Thanksgiving feast.
Therefore, they were preparing a sixteen-pound turkey, pecan stuffing,
scalloped potatoes, baked corn, carrots with tarragon, pepper slaw,
pumpkin pie, and made-from-scratch crescent rolls.

As they chopped celery, diced onions, cubed bread, and grated cabbage,
Ned occasionally wondered if what they were cooking was not only a
family feast but also the last hearty meal of the condemned.  Each time
that morbid thought rose, he chased it away by pausing to watch Sandy as
she worked. She smiled almost constantly, and sometimes softly hummed a
song.  Surely, an event that had induced this radical and wonderful
change in Sandy could not ultimately culminate in their deaths.  Surely,
they had nothing to worry about.  Surely.

After three hours at the Elko Sentinel, Ginger and Dom ate a light
lunch-chef's salads-at a restaurant on Idaho Street, then returned to
the Tranquility Motel at two-thirty.  Faye and Ernie were still in the
office, which was filled with appetizing aromas drifting down from the
apartment upstairs: pumpkin, cinnamon, nutmeg, onions fried lightly in
butter, the yeasty odor of baking bread dough.

"And you can't smell the turkey yet," Faye said.  "Ned just put that in
the oven half an hour ago."

"He says dinner's at eight," Ernie told them, "but I suspect the
odors'll drive us mad and force us to storm the kitchen before then."

Faye said, "Learn anything at the Sentinel?"

Before Ginger could tell them what she and Dom had uncovered, the front
door of the motel office opened, and a slightly pudgy man entered in a
burst of cold whirling wind. He had hurried from his car without
bothering to put on a topcoat; although he wore gray slacks, a dark blue
blazer, a light blue sweater, and an ordinary white shirt, rather than a
black suit and Roman collar, his identity was not for a moment in doubt.
He was the auburn-haired, green-eyed, round-faced young priest in the
Polaroid snapshot that the unknown correspondent had sent to Dom.

"Father Cronin," Ginger said.

She was as immediately and powerfully drawn to him as she'd been to
Dominick Corvaisis.  With the priest as with Dom, Ginger sensed a shared
experience even more shattering than the one which she had shared with
the Blocks and Servers.  Within The Event that they had all witnessed
that Friday in July, there had been a Second Event experienced by only
some of them.  Although it was a frightfully improper way to greet a man
who was a virtual stranger and a priest, Ginger rushed to Father Cronin
and threw her arms around him.

But apologies were not required, for Father Cronin evidently sensed the
same thing she did.  Without hesitation, he returned her hug, and for a
moment they clung to each other, not as if they were strangers but
brother and sister greeting each other after a long separation.

Then Ginger stepped back as Dom said, "Father Cronin," and came forward
to embrace the priest.

"There's no need to call me 'Father." At the moment I neither want nor
deserve to be considered a priest.  Please just call me Brendan."

Ernie shouted upstairs to Ned and Sandy, then followed Faye out from
behind the check-in counter.  Brendan shook Ernie's hand and embraced
Faye, obviously feeling great affection for them, though not a closeness
as powerful and inexplicable as the tremendous emotional magnetism that
pulled him toward Dom and Ginger.  When Ned and Sandy came downstairs,
he greeted them the same as he had Ernie and Faye.

Just as Ginger had done last night,- Brendan said, "I have a truly
wonderful sense of .  .  .  being among family.  You all feel it, don't
you?  As if we've shared the most important moments of our lives .  .  .
went through something that'll always make us different from everyone
else."

In spite of his insistence that he did not deserve the deference
accorded a priest, Brendan Cronin had a profoundly spiritual air about
him.  His somewhat pudgy face, sparkling eyes, and broad warm smile
conveyed joy; and he moved among them, touched them, and spoke with an
ebullience that was infectious and that somehow lifted Ginger's soul.

Brendan said, "What I feel in this room only reassures me that I've made
the right decision in coming.  I'm meant to be with you.  Something will
happen here that'll transform us, that's already begun to transform us.
Do you feel it?  Do you feel it?"

The priest's soft voice sent a pleasant shiver up Ginger's spine, filled
her with an indescribable sense of wonder reminiscent of what she'd felt
the first time that, as a medical student, she had stood in an operating
room and had seen a patient's thorax held open by surgical retractors to
reveal the pulsing, mysterious complexity of the human heart in all its
crimson grandeur.

"Called," Brendan said.  The softly spoken word echoed eerily around the
room.  "All of us.  Called back to this place."

"Look, " Dom said, packing a paragraph of amazement into that one
syllable, raising his arms and holding his hands out to show them the
red rings of swollen flesh that had appeared in his palms.

Surprised, Brendan raised his hands, which were also branded by the
strange stigmata.  As the men faced each other, the air thickened with
unknown power.  Yesterday, on the telephone, Father Wycazik had told Dom
that Brendan was relatively certain no religious element was involved in
the miraculous cures and other events that had recently transformed the
young priest's life.  Yet the motel office seemed, to Ginger, to be
filled with a force that, if not supernatural, was certainly beyond the
ken of any man or woman.

"Called," Brendan said again.

Ginger was gripped by breathless expectancy.  She looked at Ernie, who
stood behind Faye with his hands on her shoulders, and both their faces
were full of tremulous suspense. Ned and Sandy, who were by the rack of
postcards, holding hands, were wide-eyed.

Ginger felt the flesh prickling on the back of her neck.  She thought,
Something's going to happen, and even as the thought took form,
something did.

Every lamp in the motel office was aglow in deference to Ernie's
uneasiness in the presence of deep shadows, but abruptly the place was
even brighter than it had been.  A milkywhite light filled the room,
springing magically from molecules of air.  It shimmered on all sides
but rained mostly from overhead, a silvery mist of luminosity.  She
realized this was the same light that featured in her unremembered lunar
dreams. She turned in a circle, looking around and up through spangled
curtains of brilliant yet soft radiance, not in search of the source but
with the hope of remembering her dreams and, ultimately, the events of
that long-lost summer night that had inspired the dreams.

Ginger saw Sandy reach into the glowing air with one hand, as if to
grasp a fistful of the miraculous light.  A tentative smile pulled at
Ned's mouth.  Faye smiled, too, and Ernie's expression of childlike
wonder was almost laughably out of place on his ruggedly hewn face.

"The moon," Ernie said.

"The moon," Dom echoed, the stigmata still blazing on his hands.

For one thrilling moment, Ginger Weiss was poised on the brink of
complete understanding.  The black, blank membrane of her memory block
trembled; revelation pressed strenuously against the far side, and that
membrane seemed certain to split and spill forth everything that had
been dammed beyond it.

Then the light changed from moon-white to blood-red, and with it the
mood changed from wonder and growing delight to fear.  She no longer
sought revelation but dreaded it, no longer welcomed understanding but
withdrew from it in terror and revulsion.

Ginger stumbled back through the bloody glow, bumped against the front
door.  Across the room, beyond Dom and Brendan, Sandy Sarver had ceased
reaching up to seize a handful of light; she was holding tightly to Ned,
whose smile had become a rictus of repulsion.  Faye and Ernie were
pressing back against the check-in counter.

As scarlet incandescence welled like fluid into the room and filled it
from corner to corner, the stunning visual phenomena were augmented by
sound.  Ginger jumped in surprise as a loud three-part crash shook the
sanguineous air, jumped once more as it repeated, then flinched but did
not jump when it came again.  It had a cardiac quality, like the
thunderous beating of a great heart, though it featured one more stroke
than a usual heartbeat: LUB-DUB-dub, LUBDUB-dub, LUB-DUB-dub....  She
knew at once that it was the apparitional noise of which Father Wycazik
had spoken in his telephone conversation with Dom, the noise that had
arisen in Brendan Cronin's bedroom and had shaken St. Bernadette's.

But she also knew that she had heard this very thing before. This entire
display-the moonlike light, the blood-red radiance, the noise-was part
of something that had happened the summer before last.

LUB-DUB-dub ...  LUB-DUB-dub ...

The window frames rattled.  The walls shook..The bloody light and the
lamplight began to pulse in time with the pounding.

LUB-DUB-dub ...  LUB-DUB-dub ...

Again, Ginger was approaching a shocking recollection. With each crash
of sound and throb of light, long-buried memories surged nearer.

However, her inhibiting fear grew; a towering black wave of terror bore
down on her.  The Azrael Block was doing what it was designed to do;
rather than let remembrance have its way with her, she would plunge into
a fugue state, as she had not done since the day Pablo Jackson had been
killed, one week ago.  The familiar signs of oncoming blackout were
present: She was having difficulty breathing; she trembled with a sense
of mortal danger so strong it was palpable; the world around her began
to fade; an oily darkness seeped in at the edges of her vision.

Run or die.

Ginger turned her back on the phenomenal events transpiring in the
office.  With both hands, she gripped the frame of the front door, as if
to anchor herself to consciousness and thwart the black wave that sought
to sweep her away.  In desperation, she looked through the glass at the
vast Nevada landscape, at the somber winter sky, trying to block out the
stimuli-the impossible light and sound-that pushed her toward a dark
fugue.  Terror and mindless panic grew so unbearable that escape into a
hateful fugue seemed almost preferable, yet she somehow held fast to the
doorframe, held tight, held on, shaking and gasping, held on, terrified
not so much by the strange events occurring behind her but by the
unremembered events of that summer of which these phenomena were only
dim echoes, and still she held on, held on ...  until the three-stroke
thunder faded, until the red light paled, until the room was silent, and
until the only light was that coming through the windows or from
ordinary lighting fixtures.

She was all right now.  She was not going to black out.

For the first time, she had successfully resisted a seizure. Maybe her
ordeal of the past few months had toughened her. Maybe just being here,
within reach of all the answers to the mystery, had given her the heart
to resist.  Or maybe she had drawn strength from her new "family."
Whatever the reason, she was confident that, having once fended off a
fugue, she would find it easier to deal with future attacks.  Her memory
blocks were crumbling.  And her fear of facing up to what had happened
that July 6 was now far outweighed by the fear of never knowing.

Shaky, Ginger turned toward the others again.

Brendan Cronin tottered to the sofa and sat, trembling visibly.  The
rings were no longer visible in either his hands or Dom's.

To the priest, Ernie said, "Did I understand you?  That same light
sometimes fills your room at night?"

"Yes," Brendan acknowledged.  "Twice before."

"But you told us it was a lovely light," Faye said.

"Yeah," Ned agreed.  "You made it sound .  .  .  wonderful."

"It is," Brendan said.  "Partly, it is.  But when it turns red .  .  .
well, then it scares the hell out of me.  But when it first starts .  .
.  oh, it uplifts me and fills me with the strangest joy."

The ominous scarlet light and the frightening three-part hammering had
generated such terror in Ginger that she had temporarily forgotten the
exhilarating moon-white glow that had preceded it and that had filled
her with wonder.

Wiping his palms on his shirt, as if the vanished rings had left an
unwanted residue upon his hands, Dom said, "There was both a good and
evil aspect to the events of that night. We long to relive a part of
what happened to us, yet at the same time it scares us .  .  .  scares
us .

"Scares us shitless," Ernie said.

Ginger noticed that even Sandy Sarver, who heretofore had perceived only
a benign shape to the mystery, was frowning.

When Jorja Monatella buried her ex-husband, Alan Rykoff, at eleven
o'clock Monday morning, the Las Vegas sun beamed down between scattered
iron-gray clouds.  A hundred shafts of golden sunshine, some half a mile
across, some only a few yards wide, like cosmic spotlights, left many
buildings in winter shadows while highlighting others.  Several shafts
of sunshine moved across the cemetery, harried by the rushing clouds,
sweeping eastward across the barren floor of the desert.  As the portly
funeral director concluded a nondenominational prayer, as the casket was
lowered into the waiting grave, a particularly bright beam illuminated
the scene, and color burst from the flowers.

In addition to Jorja and Paul Rykoff-Alan's father, who had flown in
from Florida-only five people had shown up. Even Jorja's parents had not
come.  By his selfishness, Alan had assured an exit from life
accompanied by a minimum of grieving.  Paul Rykoff, too like his son in
some respects, blamed Jorja for everything.  He had been barely civil
since his arrival yesterday.  Now that his only child was in the ground,
he turned from Jorja, stone-faced, and she knew she would meet him again
only if his stubbornness and anger eventually were outweighed by a
desire to see his grandchild.

She drove only a mile before she pulled to the side of the road,
stopped, and finally wept.  She wept neither for Alan's suffering nor
for the loss of him, but for the final destruction of all the hope with
which their relationship had begun, the burnt-out hopes for love,
family, friendship, mutual goals, and shared lives.  She had not wished
Alan dead.  But now that he was dead, she knew it would be easier to
make the new beginning toward which she had been planning and working,
and that realization made her feel neither guilty nor cruel; it was just
sad.

Last night, Jorja told Marcie her father was dead, though not that he'd
committed suicide.  Initially, Jorja had not intended to tell her until
this afternoon, in the presence of Dr. Coverly, the psychologist.  But
the appointment with Coverly had to be canceled because, later today,
Jorja and Marcie were flying to Elko to join Dominick Corvaisis, Ginger
Weiss, and the others.  Marcie took the news of Alan's death
surprisingly well.  She cried, but not hard or long.  At seven, she was
old enough to understand death, but still too young to grasp the cruel
finality of it.  Besides, by his abandonment of Marcie, Alan unwittingly
had done the girl a favor; in a sense, for her, he had died more than a
year ago, and her mourning had already been done.

One other thing had helped Marcie overcome her grief: her obsession with
the collection of moon pictures.  Only an hour after she learned of her
father's death, the child was sitting at the dining room table, eyes
dry, small pink tongue poked between her teeth in total concentration, a
crayon stub in one hand.  She'd begun the moon-coloring project on
Friday evening and pursued it through the weekend.  By breakfast this
morning, every one of the photographs and all but fifty of the hundreds
of hand-drawn moons had been transformed into fiery globes.

Marcie's obsession would have disturbed Jorja even if she had not known
others shared it and that two had killed themselves.  The moon was not
yet the focus of the girl's every waking hour.  However, Jorja required
little imagination to see that, if the obsession progressed, Marcie
might travel irretrievably into the land of madness.

Her anxiety about Marcie was so acute that she quickly overcame the
tears that had forced her to pull to the side of the road.  She put the
Chevette in gear and drove to her parents' house, where Marcie waited.

The girl was at the kitchen table with the wiquitous album of moons,
applying a scarlet crayon.  She glanced up when Jorja arrived, smiled
weakly, and returned at once to the task before her.

Pete, Jorja's father, was also at the table, frowning at Marcie.
Occasionally, he thought of a stratagem to interest her in some activity
less bizarre and more wholesome than the endless coloring of moons, but
all his attempts to lure her away from the album failed.

In her parents' bedroom, Jorjia changed from her dress into jeans and a
sweater for the trip north, while Mary Monatella badgered her.  "When
will you take that book away from Marcie?  Or let me take it away?"

"Mother, I told you before: Dr.  Coverly believes taking the book from
her right now would only reinforce her obsession."

"That doesn't make any sense to me," Jorja's mother said.

"Dr.  Coverly says if we make an issue of the moon collection at this
early stage, we'll be emphasizing its importance and-" "Nonsense.  Does
this Coverly have kids of his own?"

"I don't know, Mom."

"I'll bet he doesn't have kids of his own.  If he did, he wouldn't be
giving you such dumb advice."

Having put her dress on a hanger, having stripped down to bra and
panties, Jorja felt naked and vulnerable, for this situation reminded
her of when her mother used to watch her dress for dates with boys who
did not meet approval.  No boy ever met Mary's approval.  In fact, Jorja
married Alan in part because Mary disapproved of him.  Matrimony as
rebellion. Stupid, but she had done it and paid dearly.  Mary had driven
her to it-Mary's suffocating and authoritarian brand of love. Now, Jorja
grabbed the jeans that were laid out on the bed and slipped into them,
dressing fast.

Mary said, "She won't even say why she's collecting those things."

"Because she doesn't know why.  It's a compulsion.  An irrational
obsession, and if there's a reason for it, the reason is buried down in
her subconscious, where even she can't get a look at it."

Mary said, "That book should be taken away from her."

"Eventually," Jorja said.  "One step at a time, Mom."

"If it was up to me, I'd do it right now."

Jorja had packed two big suitcases and had left them here earlier.  Now,
when it was time to go to the airport, Pete drove, and Mary went along
for the opportunity to engage in more nagging.

Jorja and Marcie shared the back seat.  On the way to the airport, the
girl paged continuously, silently back and forth through her album.

Between Jorja and Mary, the subject of conversation had changed from the
best way to deal with Marcie's obsession to the imminent trip to Elko.
Mary had doubts about this expedition and did not hesitate to express
them.  Was the plane just a twelve-seater?  Wasn't it dangerous to go up
in a bucket of bolts owned by a small-time outfit that was probably
short of cash and skimped on maintenance?  What was the purpose of
going, anyway?  Even if some people in Elko were having problems like
Marcie's, how could it possibly have anything to do with the fact that
they'd all stayed at the same motel?

"This Corvaisis guy bothers me," Pete said as he braked for a red
traffic light.  "I don't like you getting involved with his kind."

"What do you mean?  You don't even know him."

"I know enough," Pete said.  "He's a writer, and you know what they're
like.  I read once that Norman Mailer hung his wife out a high window by
her heels.  And isn't it Hemingway who's always getting into
fist-fights?"

Jorja said, "Daddy, Hemingway's dead."

"See?  Always getting in fights, drunk, using drugs.  Writers are a
flaky bunch.  I don't like you being involved with writers."

"This trip is a big mistake," Mary said flatly.

It never ended.

At the airport, when she kissed them goodbye, they told her they loved
her, and she told them the same, and the strange thing was that they
were all telling the truth.  Though they continuously sniped at her and
though she had been deeply wounded by their sniping, they loved one
another. Without love, they would have stopped speaking long ago. The
parent-child relationship was sometimes even more perplexing than the
mystery of what had happened at the Tranquility Motel two summers ago.

The feeder line's bucket of bolts was more comfortable than Mary would
have believed, withsix well-padded seats on each side of a narrow aisle,
free headphones providing bland but mellowing Muzak tapes, and a pilot
who handled his craft as gently as a new mother carried her baby.

Thirty minutes out of Las Vegas, Marcie closed the album and, in spite
of the daylight streaming through the portholes, she drifted off to
sleep, lulled by the loud but hypnotic droning of the engines.

During the flight, Jorja thought about her future: the business degree
toward which she was working, her hope of owning a dress shop, the hard
work ahead-and loneliness, which was already a problem for her.  She
wanted a man.  Not sexually.  Although that would be welcome too!  She
had dated a few times since the divorce but had been to bed with no one.
She was no female eunuch.  Sex was important to her, and she missed it.
But sex was not the main reason she wanted a man, one special man, a
mate.  She needed someone to share her dreams, triumphs, and failures.
She had Marcie, but that was not the same.  The human species seemed
genetically compelled to make life's journey two-by-two, and the need
was particularly strong in Jorja.

As the plane droned north-northeast, Jorja listened to Mantovani on the
headphones and indulged in a bit of uncharacteristic, girlish
fantasizing.  At the Tranquility Motel, perhaps she would meet a special
man with whom she could share this new beginning.  She recalled Dominick
Corvaisis' gentle but confident voice, and included him in her fantasy.
If Corvaisis was the one for her, imagine what her father would say when
he learned she was marrying one of those flaky, drunken writers who held
their wives by the heels and dangled them out high windows!

She scrapped that particular fantasy soon after the plane landed, for
she quickly perceived that Corvaisis' heart was already claimed.

At four-thirty in Elko, half an hour before sunset, the sky was plated
with dark clouds, and the Ruby Mountains were purple-black on the
horizon.  A penetratingly cold wind, sweeping in from the west, was
ample proof that they had come four hundred miles north from Las Vegas.

Corvaisis and Dr.  Ginger Weiss were waiting on the tarmac beside the
small terminal, and the moment that Jorja saw them, she had the odd but
reassuring feeling that she was among family.  That sensation was
something of which Corvaisis had spoken on the phone, but Jorja had not
understood what he meant until she experienced it.  And it was quite
separate from the feelings she had for Ginger as her roadside savior.

Even Marcie-bundled in coat and scarf, her eyes still puffy from the nap
on the plane, the album clutched to her chest was stirred from her moody
trancelike state by the sight of the writer and the physician.  She
smiled and answered their questions with more enthusiasm than had marked
her speech in days.  She offered to show them her album, and she
submitted with a giggle when Corvaisis scooped her up in his arms to
carry her to the parking lot.

We were right to come, Jorja thought.  Thank God we did.

Carrying Marcie, Corvaisis led the way to the car, while Jorja and
Ginger followed with the suitcases.  As they walked, Jorja said, "Maybe
you don't remember, but you provided emergency treatment for Marcie that
Friday evening in July, even before we checked into the Tranquility."

The physician blinked.  "In fact, I hadn't remembered.  Was that you and
your late husband?  Was that Marcie?  But of course it was!"

"We had parked along I-80, five miles west of the motel," Jorja
recalled.  "The view to the south was so spectacular, such a wonderful
panorama, that we wanted to use it as a backdrop for some snapshots."

Ginger nodded.  "And I was driving east in your wake.  I saw you up
ahead, parked along the shoulder.  You were focusing the camera.  Your
husband and Marcie had stepped over the guardrail and were standing a
few feet farther out, posing at the edge of the highway embankment."

"I didn't want them standing so close to the brink.  But Alan insisted
it was the best position for the best picture, and when Alan insisted on
something, there was no use arguing with him."

However, before Jorja had been able to click the shutter, Marcie had
slipped and fallen backward, over the edge, tumbling down the thirty- or
forty-foot embankment.  Jorja screamed-"Marcie!"-flung the camera aside,
vaulted the guardrail, and started down toward her daughter.  Fast as
she was, however, Jorja had just reached Marcie when she heard someone
shouting: "Don't move her!  I'm a doctor!" That had been Ginger Weiss,
and she had descended the slope so rapidly that she had arrived at
Marcie's side simultaneously with Alan, who had started down before her.
Marcie was still and silent but not unconscious, only stunned, and
Ginger quickly determined that the girl had not sustained a head injury.
Marcie began to cry, and because her left leg was tucked under her at a
somewhat odd angle, Jorja was certain it was broken.  Ginger was able to
allay that fear, too.  In the end, because the slope was rock-free and
cushioned by bunchgrass, Marcie came through with only minor injuries-a
few scrapes and bruises.

"I was so impressed by you," Jorja said.

"Me?" Ginger looked surprised.  She waited for an incoming single-engine
plane to pass overhead.  Then: "I did nothing special, you know.  I only
examined Marcie.  She didn't need heroic care, just Band-Aids."

As they put the suitcases in the trunk of Dom's car, Jorja said, "Well,
I was impressed.  You were young, pretty, feminine, yet you were a
doctor-efficient, quick-thinking.  I'd always thought of myself as a
born cocktail waitress, nothing more, but that encounter with you
started a fire in me.  Later, when Alan walked out on us, I didn't fall
apart.  I remembered you, and I decided to make more of myself than I'd
ever thought I could.  In a way, you changed my life."

Closing the trunk lid, locking it, handing the keys to Dom (who had
already put Marcie in the car), Ginger said, "Jorja, I'm flattered.  But
you're giving me much too much credit. You changed your own life."

"It wasn't what you did that day," Jorja said.  "It's what you were. You
were exactly the role model I needed."

Embarrassed, the physician said, "Good God!  No one's ever called me a
role model before!  Oh, honey, you're definitely unbalanced!"

"Ignore her," Dom told Jorja.  "She's the best role model I've ever
seen.  Her humble mutterings are pure shmontses.

Ginger Weiss whirled on him, laughing.  "Shmontses?"

Dom grinned.  "I'm a writer, so it's my job to listen and absorb.  I
hear a good expression, I use it.  Can't fault me for doing my job."

"Shmontses, huh?" Ginger Weiss said, pretending anger.

Still grinning, the writer said, "If the Yiddish fits, wear it."

That was the moment when Jorja knew Dominick Corvaisis' heart was
already claimed and that she would have to exclude him from any romantic
fantasies she might cook up in the future.  The spark of desire and
glimmer of deep affection shone brightly in his eyes when he looked at
Ginger Weiss.  The same heat warmed the physician's gaze.  The funny
thing was, neither Dom nor Ginger appeared quite to realize the true
power of their feelings for each other.  Not quite yet, butsoon.

They drove out of Elko, toward the Tranquility, thirty miles to the
west.  As twilight faded toward night in the east, Dom and Ginger told
Jorja what had happened prior to her and Marcie's arrival.  Jorja found
it increasingly difficult to hold the good mood she'd been in since
stepping off the plane.  As they sped through the gloom-mantled barrens,
with craggy and threatening black mountains thrusting up at the horizon
under a blood-dark sky, Jorja wondered if this place was, as she had
thought, the threshold of a new beginning .  .  .  or a doorway to the
grave.

After the Lear landed in Salt Lake City, Utah, Jack Twist quickly
transferred to a chartered Cessna Turbo Skylane RG piloted by a polite
but tight-lipped man with a huge handlebar mustache.  They arrived in
Elko, Nevada, at four-fifty-three, in the last light of day.

The airport was too small to have Hertz and Avis counters, but a local
entrepreneur operated a modest little taxi company.  Jack had the cab
take him-and his three big suitcases-to a local Jeep dealership, where
they were getting ready to close, and where he startled the salesman by
paying cash for a four-wheel-drive Cherokee wagon.

To this point, Jack, took no evasive action to shake off a tail or even
to determine if he had one.  His adversaries clearly possessed great
power and resources, and regardless of how frantically he tried to elude
them, they would have sufficient manpower to keep tabs on a lone target
trying to escape on foot or by taxi in a town as small as Elko.

Once the Cherokee was his, Jack drove away from the dealership, and for
the first time he looked for a tail.  He glanced repeatedly at the
rearview and side mirrors, but he spotted no suspicious vehicles.

He went directly to an Arco Mini-Mart that he had noticed during the
taxi ride from the airport.  He parked at the dark end of the lot,
beyond the reach of the are lamps, got out of the wagon, and surveyed
the shadowy street behind for an indication of a pursuer.

He saw no one.

That didn't mean they weren't out there.

In the Mini-Mart, the blindingly excessive fluorescent lighting and
chrome display fixtures made him long for the good old days of quaint
corner groceries operated by immigrant couples who spoke with appealing
accents, where the air would have been redolent of Mama's homemade baked
goods and Papa's made-to-order deli sandwiches.  Here, the only aromas
were a vague trace of disinfectant and the thin odor of ozone coming off
the motors of refrigerated display cases.  Squinting in the glare, Jack
bought a map of the county, a flashlight, a quart of milk, two packages
of dried beef, a little box of small chocolate doughnuts-and, on a
morbid impulse, something called a "Hamwich," which was "a guaranteed
delicious onepiece sandwich of pulverized, blended, remolded ham paste,
bread, and spices," and which was claimed to be especially "convenient
for hikers, campers, and sportsmen." Ham paste?

At the bottom of the airtight plastic package was this legend: REAL
MEAT.

Jack laughed.  They had to tell you it was "real meat" because, even
though it was wrapped in clear plastic, you couldn't tell what the hell
it was by looking at it.  Yes, siroh, yes-ham paste and real meat: That
was why he had gone to Central America to fight for his country.

He wished Jenny were alive and here with him.  Real meat. As opposed to
fake, polyester meat.  She'd have gotten a kick out of that.

When he walked out of the Mini-Mart, he paused to study the street
again, but again he saw no one suspicious.

He returned to the Cherokee at the dark end of the lot and put up the
tailgate.  He opened one of his suitcases, withdrew an empty nylon
rucksack, the Beretta, a loaded clip, a box of .32 ammunition, and one
of the pipe-type silencers.  As his breath steamed from him in the cold
air, he transferred the groceries from the paper bag to the rucksack. He
screwed the silencer onto the gun, slammed the loaded clip into the
butt.  When he had distributed all the loose ammunition among the many
pockets of his heavily insulated leather jacket, he closed the tailgate.

Behind the wheel of the Cherokee once more, Jack put the Beretta on the
seat beside him and set the rucksack on top of it for concealment. Using
the new flashlight, he passed a few minutes studying the map of Elko
County.  When he switched the flashlight off and put the map away, he
was ready to engage the enemy.

For the next five minutes, he drove through Elko, using every trick he
knew to reveal a tail, staying on quiet residential streets where
traffic was light and where a surveillance team would be as obvious as a
festering cold sore, no matter how good they were.  Nothing.

He parked at the end of a cul-de-sac and got an anti-surveillance
broadband receiver from one of the suitcases.  This device, the size of
two packs of cigarettes, with a short antenna that telescoped out of the
top, received all possible radio bands from 30 to 120, including FM from
88 to 108.  If a transmitter had been fixed to the Jeep while he was in
the market, enabling a tail to follow at a distance, his broadband
receiver would pick up the signals; a feedback loop would cause the
receiver to emit an ear-piercing squeal.  He pointed the antenna at the
Jeep and slowly circled the vehicle.

The Cherokee had not been bugged.

He put the broadband receiver away and got behind the wheel of the wagon
again, where he sat for a minute in thought. He was under neither visual
nor electronic surveillance.  Did that make sense?  When his adversaries
put those Tranquility Motel postcards in his safe-deposit boxes, they
must have known he would come to Nevada at once.  Surely they also knew
that he was a potentially dangerous man, and surely they would not allow
him to plot against them on their own turf unobserved.  Yet that seemed
to be precisely what they were doing.

Frowning, Jack twisted the key in the ignition.  The engine roared.

On the Lear from New York, he had pondered the situation at length and
had arrived at several theories (most of them half-baked) as to the
identity and intentions of his adversaries. Now he decided that nothing
he dreamed up was half as strange as whatever was actually happening.

No one was watching.  That spooked him.

The inexplicable always spooked him.

When you couldn't understand a situation, that usually meant you were
missing something important.  If you were missing something important,
that meant you had a blind side. If you had a blind side, you could get
your ass shot off when you were least expecting it.

Alert, cautious, Jack Twist drove north from Elko on State Route 51.
After a while, he turned west, following a series of gravel and dirt
tracks, sneaking behind the Tranquility Motel instead of making an open
approach on I-80.  Eventually he was reduced to traveling overland on
sometimes dangerous terrain, from an elevation as high as four thousand
feet, down across sloping foothills toward the plains.  When the clouds
parted, revealing a three-quarter moon, he switched off the headlights
and continued, guided only by the glow of the lunar lamp, and his eyes
soon adjusted to the night.

Jack topped a rise and saw the Tranquility Motel, a lonely group of
lights in a vast dark emptiness, a mile and a half below and southwest
of him, this side of I-80.  There were not as many lights as there ought
to have been; either the place had little business or it was not open.
He did not want to advertise his arrival, so he would proceed on foot.

He left the Beretta in the Jeep and took the Uzi submachine gun.
Actually, he did not expect trouble.  Not yet.  His adversaries, whoever
the hell they were, had not teased him into coming all this way merely
to kill him.  They could have killed him in New York if that was all
they wanted.  Nevertheless, he was prepared for violence.

In addition to the Uzi-and a spare magazine-he took the rucksack of
groceries, a battery-powered directional microphone, and the Star Tron
night-vision device.  He pulled on gloves and a toboggan cap.

Jack found the hike invigorating.  The night was cold, and when the wind
gusted, it stung but not unpleasantly.

Because he'd expected to go to ground immediately upon arrival in
Nevada, he had dressed suitably when he left New York.  He wore
high-topped hiking shoes with hard rubber soles and heavy tread,
longjohns and jeans, a sweater, and a leather jacket with a thick
quilted lining.  The crew of the chartered Lear was surprised by his
appearance, but they treated him as if he were in tuxedo and top hat;
even an ugly man with one cast eye, dressed like an ordinary laborer,
elicited respect when he could afford to lease a private jet rather than
fly commercial airlines.

Now Jack walked.  Ragged tears in the clouds disrobed the moon, and the
few widely scattered patches of snow shone brightly, as if they were
shards of bone glimpsed in the darker carcass of the hump-backed hills;
the bare earth, rock formations, sagebrush, and plentiful dry grass
accepted the caress of moonlight and were limned in a vague milky-blond
hue.  But when the moon slipped behind the clouds, deep rich darkness
flooded forth.

At last he reached a suitable observation point on the southern slope of
a hill, only a quarter of a mile behind the Tranquility Motel.  He sat
down, putting the Uzi and his rucksack aside.

The Star Tron night-vision device took available lightstarlight,
moonlight, the natural phosphorescence of snow and of certain plants,
meager electric light if any-and am plified it eighty-five thousand
times.  With the gadget's single lens, Jack could transform all but the
very blackest nights into gray daylight or better.

He propped his elbows on his knees, held the Star Tron in both hands,
and focused on the Tranquility.  The rear of the structure popped into
view with sufficient clarity for him to determine that no lookouts were
posted in any shadowed niches.  None of the motel units had windows
along the back wall, so no guards could be watching from those rooms.
The center third of the motel had a second floor, probably the owner's
apartment, and light shone at most of those windows. However, he could
not see into the apartment because the drapes and blinds were drawn.

He put the Star Tron in the rucksack and picked up the battery-powered,
hand-held, directional microphone, which resembled a futuristic gun.
Only a few years ago, "rifle mikes" were effective to a distance of only
two hundred yards.  But these days, a good power-amplified unit could
suck in a conversation up to a quarter of a mile, much farther if
conditions were ideal.  The device included a pair of compact earphones,
which he put on.  He aimed the mike at a window shielded by drapes, and
at once heard animated voices.  However, he got only scraps of their
conversation because he was trying to pull their voices out of a closed
room and through a quartermile of blustery wind.

With great caution, he grabbed the Uzi and other gear, and moved closer,
choosing a second observation point less than a hundred yards from the
building.  When he aimed the mike at the window again, he picked up
every word spoken beyond the glass, in spite of the muffling draperies.
He heard six voices, maybe more.  They were eating dinner and
complimenting the cook (someone named Ned) and his helper (Sandy) on the
turkey, the pecan stuffing, and other dishes.

They're not just eating dinner, Jack thought enviously, they're having a
damned banquet in there.

He'd eaten a light lunch on the Lear but had taken nothing since.  He
was still on Eastern Standard Time, so for him it was almost eleven
o'clock.  He would probably be eavesdropping for hours, piecing together
these people's identities, gradually determining if they were his
adversaries.  He was too hungry to wait that long for his own dinner,
such as it was.  With a few rocks, he made a brace for the microphone to
keep it angled toward the window.  He unwrapped the Hamwich and bit into
that "pulverized, blended, and remolded" treat.  It tasted like sawdust
soaked in rancid bacon fat.  He spat out the gummy mouthful and settled
down to a meager meal of dried beef and doughnuts, which would have been
more satisfying if he had not had to listen to those strangers indulging
in a modern version of a harvest feast.

Soon, Jack had heard enough of the conversation in the apartment to know
these people were not his enemies. Strangely, one way or another, they
had been drawn or summoned here, as he'd been.  Monitoring them, he
began to think their voices were curiously familiar, and he was overcome
with the feeling that he belonged among them as a brother among family.

A woman named Ginger and a man-either Don or Dombegan to tell the others
about research they'd done earlier in the offices of the Elko Sentinel.
Listening to talk of toxic spills, roadblocks, and highly trained DERO
troops, Jack felt his appetite fading.  DERO!  Shit, he'd heard about
the DERO companies, though they'd been formed after he'd left the
service.  They were gung-ho types who'd happily accept an order to go
into a pit against a grizzly bear, armed only with a meat grinder; and
they were tough enough to make sausages out of the bear.  Forced to
choose between a quick, painless suicide and hand-to-hand combat with a
DERO, the ordinary man would be well-advised to blow his own brains out
and save himself pain.  Jack realized he was involved in something far
bigger and more dangerous than fratellanza revenge or any of the other
things he had hypothesized during his flight from New York.

Although the picture he got from eavesdropping was full of holes, he
began to grasp that these people had come together to discover what had
happened to them the summer before last, the same weekend Jack had
stayed here.  They'd made considerable headway in their investigation,
and Jack winced as they openly discussed their progress.  They were so
naive that they thought closed doors and covered windows ensured
privacy.  He wanted to shout: Hey, for God's sake, shut up already!  If
I can hear you, they can hear you.

DERO.  That bit of news made him even sicker than the Hamwich.

In the motel they continued to chatter, revealing their strat egy to the
enemy even as they worked it out, and at last Jack tore off the
earphones, frantically grabbed his guns and equipment, and hurried down
through the darkness toward the Tranquility Motel.

The apartment had no dining room, just the alcove in the kitchen, but
that area was too small to seat nine.  In the living room, they moved
the furniture against the walls, brought in the kitchen table, and used
both extra leaves to extend it, accommodating everyone.  To Dom, the
impromptu arrangements contributed to the feeling of a family gathering
and to the mood of cautious festivity.

Rather than have to repeat themselves, Dom and Ginger had waited until
dinner, when the group was gathered, to report on their research at the
newspaper in Elko.  Now, over the clinking of silverware, they revealed
that the Army had blockaded I-80 minutes before the toxic spill that
Friday night. Which meant that choppers full of soldiers had been
dispatched from distant Shenkfield at least half an hour earlier, and
that the Army knew in advance the "accident" was going to happen.

Tearing a crescent roll, Dom said, "If Falkirk and a DERO company flew
in and took over security on the quarantine line so soon after the
crisis hit .  .  .  well, it means the Army must've had advance
warning."

"But then why didn't they stop it from happening?" Jorja Monatella asked
as she cut her daughter's serving of turkey into bite-size pieces.

"Apparently, they couldn't stop it," Dom said.

"Maybe there was a terrorist attack on the truck, and maybe Army
Intelligence only got wind of it just before it went down," Ernie said.

"Maybe," Dom said doubtfully.  "But they would've gone public with that
kind of story if it happened.  So it must've been something else.
Something involving top-secret data of such importance that only DERO
troops could be trusted to keep quiet about it."

Brendan Cronin had a heartier appetite than anyone at the table, but his
temporal appetite did not diminish the spiritual air that had surrounded
him.  He swallowed some baked corn and said, "This explains why there
weren't hundreds of people on those ten miles of interstate when the
thing happened, as there should've been at that hour.  If the Army
sealed it off ahead of the event, they had time to get most traffic out
of the danger zone before anything actually happened."

Dom said, "Some didn't get out, saw too much, and were held and
brainwashed with the rest of us who were already here at the motel."

For a while everyone joined in the discussion and arrived at all the
same theories and unanswerable questions that had occurred to Dom and
Ginger at the newspaper offices earlier in the day.

Finally, Dom told them about the important discovery he and Ginger had
made when, as an afterthought, they had looked through issues of the
Sentinel published during the weeks following the toxic spill.  When
they had finished poring through editions for the week of the crisis,
Ginger had suggested that clues to the secret of what really happened on
the closed highway that night might be hidden in other news, in unusual
stories that appeared to have nothing to do with the crisis but were, in
fact, related to it.  They pulled more issues from the files, and by
studying every story from a paranoid perspective, they soon found what
they hoped for.  One place in particular figured in the news in such a
way that it seemed linked to the closure of I-80.

"Thunder Hill," Dom said.  "We believe that's where our trouble came
from.  Shenkfield was just a ruse, a clever misdirection to focus
attention away from the real source of the crisis.  Thunder Hill."

Faye and Ernie looked up from their plates in surprise, and Faye said,
"Thunder Hill's ten or twelve miles northnortheast of here, in the
mountains.  The Army has an installation up there, too-the Thunder Hill
Depository.  There're natural limestone caves in those hills, where they
store copies of service records and a lot of other important files, so
they won't lose all copies if military bases in other parts of the
country are wiped out in a disaster ...  nuclear war, like that."

Ernie said, "The Depository was here before Faye and me. Twenty years or
more.  Rumors have it that files and records aren't the only things in
storage there.  Some believe there's also huge supplies of food,
medicines, weapons, ammunition. Which makes sense.  In case a big war
breaks out, the Army wouldn't want all its weapons and supplies on
ordinary military bases because those would be the first nuked. They've
surely got fallback caches, and I guess Thunder Hill is one of those."

"Then anything might be up there," Jorja Monatella said uneasily.

"Anything," Ned Sarver said.

"Is it possible the place isn't just a storage dump?" Sandy asked.
"Could they also maybe be doing some kind of experiments up there?"

"What kind of experiments?" Brendan asked, leaning over to look past
Ned, beside whom he was seated.

Sandy shrugged.  "Any kind."

"It's possible," Dom said.  The same thought had occurred to him.

"But if there wasn't a toxic spill on I-80, if it was something at
Thunder Hill that went wrong," Ginger said, "how could it have affected
us, more than ten miles to the south?"

No one could think of an answer.

Marcie, who had been preoccupied with her moon collection for most of
the evening and who had said nothing during dinner, put down her fork
and piped up with a question of her own: "Why's it called Thunder Hill?"

"Sweetie," Faye said, "that's one I can answer.  Thunder Hill's really
one of four huge, connecting mountain meadows, a long sloping piece of
high pastureland.  It's surrounded by a great many high peaks, and
during a storm, the place acts like a sort of .  .  .  well, a sort of
funnel for sound.  The Indians named it Thunder Hill hundreds of years
ago because thunder echoes between those peaks and rolls down the
mountainsides, and it all pours in on that one particular meadow in a
most peculiar way, so that it seems as if the roar isn't coming out of
the sky, but as if it's coming right up out of the ground around you."

"Wow," Marcie said softly.  "I'd probably pee my pants."

"Marcie!" Jorja said as everyone broke into laughter.

"Well, gee, I probably would," the child replied.  "You member when
Grandma and Grandpa came over to dinner at our place, and there was a
big storm, really big, and some lightning struck the tree in our yard,
and there was this boom!

and I peed my pants?" Looking around the table at her new extended
family, she said, "I was soooo embarrassed."

Everyone laughed again, and Jorja said, "That was more than two years
ago.  You're a bigger girl now."

To Dom, Ernie said, "You haven't told us yet why Thunder Hill is the
place, rather than Shenkfield.  What'd you find in the newspaper?"

In the Sentinel for Friday, July 13, exactly one week after the closure
of I-80 and three days after its reopening, there was a report of two
county ranchers-Norvil Brust and Jake Dirkson-who were having trouble
with the Federal Bureau of Land Management.  A disagreement between
ranchers and the BLM was not unusual.  The government owned half of
Nevada, not merely deserts but a lot of the best grazing land, some of
which it leased to cattlemen for their herds.  Ranchers were always
complaining that the BLM kept too much good land out of use, that the
government ought to sell off part of its holdings to private interests,
and that leases were too expensive.  But Brust and Dirkson had a new
complaint.  For years they leased BLM land surrounding a
three-hundredacre Army installation, the Thunder Hill Depository.  Brust
held eight hundred acres to the west and south, and Dirkson was using
over seven hundred acres on the east side of Thunder Hill.  Suddenly, on
Saturday morning, July 7, though four years remained on Brust's and
Dirkson's leases, the BLM took five hundred acres from Brust, three
hundred from Dirkson; and at the request of the Army, those eight
hundred acres were incorporated into the boundaries of the Thunder Hill
Depository.

"Which just happens to be the very morning after the toxic spill and the
closure of I-80," Faye observed.

"Brust and Dirkson showed up Saturday morning to inspect their herds,
per their usual routine," Dom said, "and both discovered that their
livestock had been driven off most of the leased pasture.  A temporary
barbed-wire fence was being thrown into place along the new perimeter of
the Thunder Hill Depository."

Having finished dinner, Ginger pushed her plate aside and said, "The BLM
simply told Brust and Dirkson it was unilaterally abrogating their
leases, without compensation.  But they didn't receive an official
written notice till the following Wednesday, which is extremely unusual.
Ordinarily, a notice of termination comes sixty days in advance."

"Was that kind of treatment legal?" Brendan Cronin asked.

"Right there's the problem of doing business with the government," Ernie
told the priest.  "You're dealing with the very people who decide what's
legal and what isn't.  It's like playing poker with God."

Faye said, "The BLM's despised around these parts.  No bunch of
bureaucrats is more high-handed."

"That's what we gathered from reading the Sentinel, " Dom said.  "Now,
Ginger and I might've figured the Thunder Hill business was just
coincidental, that the BLM just happened to go after that land the same
time as the crisis on I-80.  But the way the government dealt with Brust
and Dirkson after the land was seized was so extraordinary it made us
suspicious.  When the ranchers hired attorneys, when stories about the
cancellation of their leases began appearing in the Sentinel, the BLM
did a sudden about-face and offered compensation, after all."

"That's not a bit like the BLM!" Ernie said.  "They'll always make you
drag them into court, hoping litigation will wear you down."

"How much were they willing to pay Brust and Dirkson?" Faye asked.

"The figure wasn't revealed," Ginger said.  "But it was evidently darned
good, because Brust and Dirkson accepted it overnight."

"So the BLM bought their silence," Jorja said.

"I think it was the Army working secretly through the BLM," Dom said.
"They realized the longer the story was in the news, the more chance
there was of someone wondering about a link between the crisis on I-80
that Friday night and the unorthodox seizure of land the very next
morning, even if the two events were ten or twelve miles apart."

"Surprises me somebody didn't make the connection," Jorja said.  "If you
and Ginger could spot it this long after the fact, why didn't anyone
think of it then?"

"For one thing," Ginger said, "Dom and I had the enormous benefit of
hindsight.  We know there was a lot more going on during the days of the
crisis than anyone suspected at the time.  So we were specifically
looking for connections. But that July, all the hoopla about a toxic
spill diverted attention from Thunder Hill.  Furthermore, there was
nothing extraordinary about ranchers fighting the BLM, so nothing in the
situation linked it in anyone's mind with the I-80 quarantine.  In fact,
when the BLM made that totally out-of-character offer to Brust and
Dirkson, a Sentinel editorial praised the repentant attitude of the
government and prophesied a new age of reason."

"But from what you've told us," Dom said to Faye and Ernie, "and from
what else we've read, that was the first and last time the Bureau of
Land Management dealt reasonably with ranchers.  So it wasn't a new
policy-just a one-time response to a crisis.  And it's too coincidental
to believe that the crisis evolving at Thunder Hill was unrelated to the
crisis simultaneously under way here along the interstate."

"Besides," Ginger said, "once our suspicion was aroused, we got to
thinking that if the trouble that night had been related to Shenkfield,
there'd have been no need for the Army to use DERO troops for security.
Because the soldiers stationed at Shenkfield would already have full
security clearance in all matters related to that base, and there
would've been nothing about a Shenkfield crisis too sensitive for them
to see.  The only reason DERO would've been called in is if the crisis
was utterly unrelated to Shenkfield, involving something the soldiers at
that base were not cleared for."

"So if there're answers to our problems," Brendan said, "we'll most
likely find them at the Thunder Hill Depository."

"We already suspected the story about a spill was less than half true,"
Dom said.  "Maybe there was no truth to it at all. Maybe the crisis had
nothing to do with Shenkfield.  If the real source was Thunder Hill, the
rest was just smoke they blew in the public's eyes."

"It sure feels right," Ernie said.  He had finished dinner, too.  His
silverware was neatly arranged on the plate, which was almost as clean
as before dinner, evidence that his military discipline and order had
not departed him.  "You know, part of my service career was in Marine
Intelligence, so I'm speaking with some experience when I say this
Shenkfield stuff truly does smack of an elaborate cover-story."

Ned's frown exaggerated his pronounced widow's peak. "There're a couple
of things I don't understand.  The quarantine didn't extend from Thunder
Hill all the way down here. There were miles of territory in between
that weren't sealed off.  So how did the effects of an accident on
Thunder Hill leap-frog over all that distance and come down on our
heads, without causing trouble between there and here?"

"You're not dull-witted," Dom said.  "I can't explain it, either."

Still frowning, Ned said, "Another thing: The Depository doesn't need a
lot of land, does it?  From what I've heard, it's underground.  They've
got a couple of big blast-doors in the side of the hill, a road leading
up to the doors, maybe a guard post, and that's it.  The three hundred
acres you mentioned-the area around the entrance-is plenty big enough
for a security zone.  So why the land-grab?"

Dom shrugged.  "Beats me.  But whatever the hell happened up there on
July sixth, it prompted two emergency actions on the part of the Army:
first, a temporary quarantine down here, ten or twelve miles away, until
we witnesses could be dealt with; second, an immediate enlargement of
the security zone around the Depository, up there in the mountains; a
secondary quarantine that's still in effect.  I have a hunch ...  if
we're ever going to find out what happened to us-what's still
happening-we're going to have to dig into the activities up on Thunder
Hill."

They were all silent.  Though everyone was finished with dinner, no one
was ready for dessert.  Marcie was using her spoon to draw circles in
the greasy residue of turkey gravy on her plate, creating fluid and
temporary moon-forms.  No one moved to clear away the dirty dishes, for
at this point in the discussion, no one wanted to miss a word.  They
were at the crux of their dilemma: How were they to move against enemies
as mighty as the U S.  Government and Army?  How were they to penetrate
an iron wall of secrecy that had been forged in the name of national
security, with the full power of the state and the law behind it?

"We've put together enough to go public," Jorja Monatella said.  "The
deaths of Zebediah Lomack and Alan, the murder of Pablo Jackson.  The
similar nightmares that many of you have shared.  The Polaroids.  It's
the kind of sensational stuff the media thrives on.  If we let the world
know what we think happened to us, we'll have the power of the press and
public opinion on our side.  We won't be alone."

"No good," Ernie said.  "That kind of pressure'll just make the military
stonewall like hell.  They'll construct an even more confusing and
impenetrable cover-up.  They don't crack under pressure the way
politicians do.  On the other hand, as long as they see us stumbling
around on our own, fumbling for explanations, they'll be confident-which
might give us time to probe for their weak spots."

"And don't forget," Ginger warned, "apparently Colonel Falkirk advocated
killing us instead of just blocking our memories, and we've no reason to
believe he's mellowed since then.  He was obviously overruled, but if we
tried to go public, he might be able to persuade his superiors that a
final solution is required, after all."

"But even if it's dangerous, maybe we've got to go public," Sandy said.
"Maybe Jorja's right.  I mean, there's no way we can get inside the
Thunder Hill Depository to see what's going on.  They've got lots of
security and a pair of blast-doors built to take a nuclear hit."

Dom said, "Well, it's like Ernie told us ...  we'll have to just stay
loose and search for their weaknesses until we find a way."

"But it looks like they don't have any weaknesses," Sandy said.

"Their cover-up has been falling apart ever since they brainwashed us
and let us go," Ginger said.  "Each time one of us remembers another
detail, that's another gaping hole in their cover-up."

"Yeah," Ned said, "but seems to me they're in a better position to keep
patching the holes than we are to keep poking new ones."

"Let's can the goddamn negative thinking," Ernie said gruffly.

Smiling beatifically, Brendan Cronin said, "He's right.  We must not be
negative.  We need not be negative because we're meant to win." His
voice was again infused with the eerie serenity and certitude which
arose from his belief that the revelation of their special fate was
inevitable.  At moments like this, however, the priest's tone and manner
did not comfort Dom, as they were meant to but, for some odd reason,
stirred up a sediment of fear and muddied his emotions with anxiety.

"How many men are stationed at Thunder Hill?" Jorjia asked.

Before Dom or Ginger could respond with information they'd gleaned from
the Sentinel, a stranger appeared in the doorway at the head of the
stairs that led up from the motel office.  He was in his late thirties,
lean and tough-looking, dark-haired, dark-complexioned, with a crooked
left eye that was not coordinated with his right.  Though the downstairs
door was locked, and although the linoleum on the stairs did nothing to
quiet ascending footsteps, the intruder appeared with magical silence,
as if he were not a real man but an ectoplasmic visitation.

"For God's sake, shut up," he said, sounding every bit as real as anyone
else in the room.  "If you think you can plot in privacy here, you're
badly mistaken."

Eighteen miles southwest of the Tranquility Motel, at Shenkfield Army
Testing Grounds, all the buildings-laboratories, administration offices,
security command center, cafeteria, recreation lounge, and living
quarters-were underground. In the blazing summers on the edge of the
high desert and in the occasionally bitter winters, it was easier and
more economical to maintain a comfortable temperature and humidity level
in underground rooms than in structures erected on the
less-than-hospitable Nevada barrens.  But a more important consideration
was the frequent open-air testing of chemicaland occasionally even
biological-weapons.  The tests were conducted to study the effects of
sunlight, wind, and other natural forces on the distribution patterns
and potency of those deadly gases, powders, and superdiffusible mists.
If the buildings were aboveground, any unexpected shift in the wind
would contaminate them, making unwilling guinea pigs of base personnel.

 No matter how involved they became in work or leisure, the staff of
Shenkfield never forgot they were beneath the earth, for they had two
constant reminders of their condition: the lack of windows; plus the
susurration of the piped-in air coming through the wall vents, and the
echoing hum of the motors that fanned the air along the pipes.

Sitting alone at a metal desk in the office to which he had been
temporarily assigned, waiting impatiently and worriedly for the phone to
ring, Colonel Leland Falkirk thought: God, I hate this place!

The never-ending whine and hiss of the air-supply system gave him a
headache.  Since his arrival on Saturday, Falkirk had been eating
aspirin as though they were candy.  Now he tipped two more out of a
small bottle.  He poured a glass of ice-water from the metal carafe that
stood on the desk, but he did not use it to wash down the pills.
Instead, he popped the dry aspirin into his mouth and chewed them.

The taste was bitter, disgusting, and he almost gagged. But he did not
reach for the water.

He did not spit out the aspirin, either. He persevered.

A lonely, miserable childhood filled with uncertainty and pain, followed
by an even worse adolescence, had taught Leland Falkirk that life was
hard, cruel, and utterly unjust, that only fools believed in hope or
salvation, and that only the tough survived.  From an early age, he had
forced himself to do things that were emotionally, mentally, and
physically painful, for he had decided that self-inflicted pain would
toughen him and make him less vulnerable.  He tempered the steel of his
will with challenges that ranged from chewing dry aspirin to major tests
like the outings that he called "desperation survival treks." Those
expeditions lasted two weeks or longer, and they put him face-to-face
with death.  He parachuted into a forest or jungle wilderness, far from
the nearest outpost, without supplies, with only the clothes on his
back. He carried no compass or matches.  His only weapons were his bare
hands and what he could fashion with them.  The goal: reach civilization
alive.  He spent many vacations in that self-imposed suffering, which he
judged worthwhile because he came back a harder and more self-reliant
man than he'd been at the start of each adventure.

Now he crunched dry aspirin.  The tablets were reduced to powder, and
the powder turned his saliva to an acidic paste.

"Ring, damn you," he said to the telephone on the desk. He was hoping
for news that would get him out of this hole in the ground.

In DERO, the Domestic Emergency Response Organization, a colonel was
less a desk-jockey and more a field officer than in any other branch of
the Army.  Falkirk's home base was in Grand Junction, Colorado, not
Shenkfield, but even in Colorado, he spent little time in his office. He
thrived on the physical demands of the job, so the low-ceilinged,
windowless rooms of Shenkfield felt like a many-chambered coffin.

If he had been engaged upon any mission but this one, he might have
established temporary unit headquarters up at Thunder Hill Depository.
That place was also underground but its caves were huge, high-ceilinged,
not like these tombsized rooms.

But there were two reasons he had to keep his men away from Thunder
Hill.  First, he dared not draw attention to the place because of the
secret it harbored.  Several ranchers lived in the highlands along the
road leading to the gated Thunder Hill turnoff.  If they spotted a fully
equipped DERO company moving into the Depository, they'd speculate about
it.  Locals must not start wondering about Thunder Hill.  Two summers
ago, he'd used Shenkfield as a red herring to divert attention from the
Depository.  Now, with another crisis building, he would stay here at
Shenkfield again, so he would be in position to spread the same kind of
disinformation to the press and public that he'd spread before.  The
second reason he set up HQ at Shenkfield was because he had certain dark
suspicions about everyone in the Depository: He trusted none of them,
would not feel safe among them.  They might be .  .  .  changed.

The residue of crushed aspirin had been in his mouth so long that he had
adjusted to the bitter taste.  He was no longer sickened, no longer had
to struggle against the gag reflex, so it was all right to drink the
water now.  He drained the glass in four swallows.

Leland Falkirk suddenly wondered if he had crossed the line that
separated the constructive use of pain from the enjoyment of it.  Even
as he asked the question, he knew the answer: Yes, to some degree, he
had become a masochist. Years ago.  He was a very well-disciplined
masochist, one who benefited from the pain he inflicted on himself, one
who controlled the pain instead of letting it control him, but a
masochist nonetheless.  At first he subjected himself to pain strictly
to make himself tough.  But along the way, he began to enjoy it, too.
That insight left him blinking in surprise at the empty water-glass.

An outrageous image formed in his mind: himself more than a decade from
now, a sixty-,year-old pervert sticking bamboo shoots under his
fingernails every morning for the thrill and to get his heart running.
That grotesque picture was grim.  It was also funny, and he laughed.

As recently as a year ago, Leland would not have been capable of
self-critical insights of this nature.  He had never been much of a
laugher, either.  Until recently.  Lately, he was not merely
noticing-and being amused by-traits in himself that he had never noticed
before, but he was also becoming aware that he could and should change
some of his attitudes and habits.  He saw that he could become a better
and more satisfied person, without losing the toughness he prized.  This
was a strange state of mind for him, but he knew the cause of it.  After
what had happened to him two summers ago, after all the things that he
had seen, and considering what was happening right now up at Thunder
Hill, he could not possibly go on with his life exactly as before.

The telephone rang.  He grabbed it, hoping it was news about the
situation in Chicago.  But it was Henderson from Monterey, California,
reporting that the operation at the Salcoe house was going smoothly.

The summer before last, Gerald Salcoe, with his wife and two daughters,
rented a pair of rooms at the Tranquility Motel. On the wrong night.
Recently, all of the Salcoes had experienced marked deterioration of
their memory blocks.

The CIA's experts in brainwashing, who were usually used only in covert
foreign operations, had been borrowed for the Tranquility job that July
and had promised to repress witnesses' memories without fail; now they
were embarrassed by the number of subjects whose conditioning was
breaking down.  The experience these people had undergone was too
profound and shattering to be easily repressed; the forbidden memories
possessed mythopoeic power and exerted relentless pressure on the memory
blocks.  The mind-control experts now claimed that another three-day
session with the subjects would guarantee their eternal silence.

In fact, the FBI and CIA, working in conjunction, were illegally holding
the Salcoe family incommunicado in Monterey at this very moment, putting
them through another intricate program of memory repression and
alteration.  Although Cory Henderson, the FBI agent on the phone,
claimed it was going well, Leland decided it was a lost cause.  This was
one secret that could not be kept.

Besides, too many agencies were involved: FBI, CIA, one entire DERO
company, others.  Which made too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

But Leland was a good soldier.  In charge of the military side of the
operation, he'd carry out his assignment even if it was hopeless.

In Monterey, Henderson said, "When are you moving in on the other
witnesses at the motel?"

That was the word they used for everyone who had been brainwashed that
July-witnesses.  Leland thought it was apt, for in addition to its
obvious meaning, it also embodied mystical and religious overtones.  He
remembered, as a child, being taken to tent revivals at which scores of
Holy Rollers writhed upon the floor while the raving minister screamed
at them to "be a witness to the miraculous, be a heartfelt witness for
the Lord!" Well, what the witnesses at the Tranquility Motel had seen
was every bit as paralyzing, amazing, humbling, and terrifying as the
face of God that those spasming Pentecostals had longed to see.

To Henderson, Leland said, "We're standing by, ready to seal off the
motel with half an hour's notice.  But I'm not giving the go-ahead until
someone straightens out the mess in Chicago with Calvin Sharkle.  Not
until I know for sure what's going on out in Illinois."

"What a screwup!  Why was the situation with Sharkle allowed to
deteriorate so far?  He should've been grabbed, put into a new
memory-repression program days ago, like we've done with the Salcoes
here."

"Wasn't my screwup," Leland said.  "Your Bureau is in charge of
monitoring the witnesses.  I only come in and mop up after you."

Henderson sighed.  "I wasn't trying to shift the blame to your men,
Colonel.  And hell, you can't blame us, either.  The trouble is, even
though we're only doing visual surveillance of each witness four days a
month and listening to only about half the tapes of their phone calls,
we need twenty-five agents. But we only have twenty.  Besides, the damn
case is so highly classified that only three of the twenty know why the
witnesses have to be watched.  A good agent doesn't like being kept in
the dark like that.  Makes him feel he's not trusted.  Makes him sloppy.
So you get a situation like this Sharkle: The witness starts breaking
through his memory block, and nobody notices until it's at crisis stage.
Why'd we ever think we could maintain such an elaborate deception for an
unlimited length of time?  Nuts.  I'll tell you what our problem was: We
believed the CIA's brain-scrubbers.  We believed those motherfuckers
could do what they said they could do.  That was our mistake, Colonel."

"I always said there was a simpler solution," Leland reminded him.

"Kill them all?  Kill thirty-one of our own citizens just because they
were in the wrong place at the wrong time?"

"I wasn't proposing it seriously.  My point was that, short of
barbarism, we couldn't contain the secret and shouldn't have tried."

Henderson's silence made it clear he did not believe Leland's
disclaimer.  Finally: "You will move on the motel tonight?"

"If the Chicago situation clears up, if I can figure what's going on
there, we'll move tonight.  But there're questions need answers.  These
strange .  .  .  psychic phenomena.  What's it mean?  We both have
ideas, don't we?  And we're scared pukesick.  No, sir, I'm not moving
against the motel and jeopardizing my men until I understand the
situation."

Leland hung up.

Thunder Hill.  He wanted to believe that what was happening up in the
mountains would lead to a better future than mankind deserved.  But in
his heart he was afraid it was, instead, the end of the world.

When Jack stepped into the living room-which they had converted to a
dining room-and spoke to the group, some gasped in surprise and started
to rise, bumping the table in their eagerness to turn around, sending up
a clatter of dishes and flatware.  Others flinched in their chairs as if
they thought he had been sent to kill them.  He'd left the Uzi
downstairs to avoid causing just such a panic, but his unexpected
arrival still scared them.  Good.  They needed a nasty shock to make
them more cautious.  Only the little girl, playing in her gravysmeared
plate with a spoon, did not react to his arrival.

"All right, okay, be calm.  Sit down, sit," Jack said, gesturing
impatiently.  "I'm one of you.  That night, I registered at the motel as
Thornton Wainwright.  Which is how you've probably been looking for me.
But that's not my real name. We'll get into that later.  For now-"

Suddenly, everyone was excitedly pitching questions at him.

"Where did you-"

-scared the bejesus-"

"How did you-"

"-tell us if-"

Raising his voice enough to silence them, Jack said, "This isn't the
place to discuss these things.  You can be heard here, for God's sake.
I've been eavesdropping for nearly an hour. And if I can listen in on
everything you say, then so can the people you're pitted against."

They stared dumbly at him, startled by his assertion that their privacy
was an illusion.  Then a big, blocky man with gray brush-cut hair said,
"Are you telling us these rooms are bugged?  'Cause I find that hard to
believe.  I mean, I've searched, you know; I've checked, found nothing.
And I've had some experience in these matters."

"You must be Ernie," Jack said, speaking in a sharp cold tone of voice
meant to keep them on edge and get his message through to them.  They
had to understand, right away, that their conversations must be far
better guarded, and the lesson had to be driven into them so hard and
deep that they would not forget it.  "I heard you mention your years in
Marine Intelligence, Ernie.  Christ, how long ago was that?  Better part
of a decade, I'll bet.  Things have changed since then, man.  Haven't
you heard about the high-tech revolution?  Shit, they don't need to come
in here and physically plant listening devices.  Rifle mikes are a hell
of a lot better than they used to be.  Or they can just hook up an
infinity transmitter to their phone and dial your number." Jack pushed
rudely past Ernie and stepped to the living room extension, which stood
on a table by the sofa.  He put his hand on the phone.  "You know what
an infinity transmitter is, Ernie?  When they dial your number here, an
electric tone oscillator deactivates the bell while it simultaneously
opens the microphone in your telephone handset.  There's no ringing for
you to hear; you've no way of knowing you've been called, that your
line's wide open.  But they can monitor you in any room where you've got
an extension." He plucked up the handset and held it toward them with a
calculated look of scorn.  "Here's your bug.  You had it installed
yourself." He slammed the handset back into the cradle.  "You can bet
your ass they've been tuning in on you a lot lately.  Probably listened
all through dinner. You people keep this up, you might as well just cut
your own throats and save everybody a lot of trouble."

Jack's caustic performance had been effective.  They were stunned.  He
said, "Now, is there a room without windows,

big enough to hold a war council?  Doesn't matter if there's a phone;
we'll just unplug it."

An attractive middle-aged woman, apparently Ernie's wife, whom Jack
vaguely remembered from checking into the motel two summers ago, thought
for a moment and said, "There's the restaurant, the diner, next door."

"Your restaurant doesn't have any windows?" Jack asked.

"They were .  .  .  broken," Ernie said.  "Right now they're boarded
up."

"Then let's go," Jack said.  "Let's work out our strategy in privacy,
then come back here for some of that pumpkin pie I heard you talking
about.  I had a lousy dinner while you people were in here eating
yourselves into a stupor."

Jack went quickly down the stairs, confident they would follow.

Ernie loathed the crooked-eyed bastard for five minutes.  But slowly,
the hatred turned to grudging respect.

For one thing, Ernie admired the caution and stealth with which the guy
had answered his own call to the Tranquility Motel.  He had not just
walked in like the others.  He'd even brought a submachine gun.

But as he watched "Thornton Wainwright" slip the carrying-strap of the
Uzi over one shoulder and head out the front door of the motel office,
Ernie was still stung by the criticism he had endured.  In fact, his
rage was so great he did not pause to grab a coat, as most of the others
did, but plunged after the stranger, through the door and across the
macadam toward the diner, keeping pace with him in order to chew him
out.  "Listen, what the hell's the point of being a wise-ass?  You
could've made your point without being so goddamn snide."

The stranger said, "Yeah, but I couldn't have made it as fast."

Ernie was about to reply when he abruptly realized he was outside,
vulnerable, at night, in the dark.  Halfway between the office and the
diner.  His lungs seemed to collapse; he could not draw the slightest
wisp of breath.  He made a disgustingly pitiful mewling sound.

To Ernie's surprise, the newcomer immediately grasped his arm, providing
support, with no trace of the scorn he'd shown

before.  "Come on, Ernie.  You're halfway there.  Lean on me, and you'll
make it."

Furious with himself for letting this bastard see him disabled and weak
with childish fear, furious with the guy, too, for playing the
Samaritan, humiliated, Ernie jerked his arm away from the helping hand.

"Listen," the newcomer said, "while I was eavesdropping, I heard about
your problem, Ernie.  I don't pity you, and I don't find your condition
amusing.  Okay?  If your fear of the dark has something to do with this
situation we all find ourselves in, it's not your fault.  It's those
bastards who messed with us.  We need one another if we're going to get
through this thing.  Lean on me.  Let me help you over to the diner,
where we can turn on some lights.  Lean on me."

When the newcomer began to talk, Ernie was unable to breathe, but by the
time the guy finished his spiel, Ernie had the opposite problem; he was
hyperventilating.  As though pulled by a magnetic force, he turned from
the diner and looked southeast, out into the terrifyingly immense
darkness of the barrens.  And suddenly he knew the darkness itself was
not what he feared, but something that had been out there on the night
of July 6, that bad summer.  He was looking toward that special place
along the highway, where they had gone yesterday to commune with the
land in search of clues. That strange place.

Faye had arrived, and Ernie had not shaken loose of her when she had
taken hold of him.  But now the crooked-eyed man tried to take his arm
again, and he was still angry enough to reject that assistance.

"Okay, okay," the guy said.  "You're a bull-headed old Leatherneck
bastard, and it's going to take your hurt pride a while to heal.  If you
want to be a thick-skulled mule, go ahead, stay pissed at me.  It was
only your blind anger that got you this far into the dark, wasn't it?
Sure as hell wasn't Marine backbone.  Just dumb blind anger.  So if you
stay pissed at me, maybe you'll be able to get to the diner."

Ernie knew the crooked-eyed man was cleverly taunting him into
completing the trip to the Tranquility Grille, that he was not really
being cruel.  Hate me enough, the guy was saying, and you'll fear the
darkness less.  Focus on me, Ernie, and take one step at a time.  This
was not much different than taking the guy's arm and leaning on it, and
if Ernie had not been scared half to death by the surging night on all
sides of him, he would have been amused at being conned this way. But he
held fast to his anger, fanned the flames of it, and used it to light
his way to the diner.  He stepped through the door after the newcomer,
and sighed with relief when the lights came on.

"It's freezing in here," Faye said.  She went directly to the thermostat
to switch on the oil furnace.

Sitting in a chair in the center of the room, his back to the door,
Ernie recuperated from his ordeal as the others entered behind him.  He
watched the crooked-eyed newcomer moving from window to window, checking
the plyboard slabs that had been nailed up to replace the shattered
glass.  And that was when, to Ernie's surprise, he realized he no longer
loathed the guy, merely harbored an extreme dislike for him.

The newcomer examined the payphone near the door.  Being a coin-operated
unit, it did not unplug, so he lifted the receiver, tore the cord free
of the wall-mounted box, and threw the useless handset aside.

"There's a private phone back of the counter," Ned said.

The newcomer told him to unplug it, and Ned obliged.

Then he told Brendan and Ginger to push three tables together and pull
up chairs to accommodate everyone, and they did as they were told.

Ernie watched the crooked-eyed man with keen interest.

The newcomer was concerned about the diner's front door, which had not
shattered during the weird phenomena on Saturday night because it was
made of much thicker glass than the windows had been.  It was not
boarded up, so it offered a weak point to anyone trying to monitor them
with a directional microphone.  He wanted to know if any plywood was
left from the window job, and Dom told him there was, and he sent Ned
and Dom to bring back a suitable piece from the stack in the maintenance
room behind the motel.  They soon returned with a section of wood that
was slightly larger than the door, and the newcomer stood it in front of
the glass portal, bracing it in place with a table.  "Not perfect," he
said, "but good enough to defeat a rifle mike, I think." Then he headed
toward the back of the restaurant to "have a look in the storeroom," and
on his way he told Sandy to plug in the jukebox, switch it to free-play,
and punch in some songs. "Some background noise makes eavesdropping more
difficult." Even before he explained why he wanted music, Sandy jumped
up and headed for the jukebox, quick to obey him.

Abruptly, Ernie realized why the crooked-eyed man fascinated him.  The
guy's quick thinking, precision movements, and ability to command
indicated that he was-or had once been-a career soldier, an officer, a
damn good one.  He could tune an intimidatingly hard edge into his voice
one moment, and the next moment tune it out in favor of cajolery.

Hell, Ernie thought, he's fascinating because he reminds me of me!

That was also why the newcomer had been able to needle Ernie so
effectively back in the apartment.  The guy knew just where to stick the
sharp points because he and Ernie were, in some ways, two of a kind.

Ernie laughed softly.  Sometimes, he thought, I can be such a perfect
jackass.

The crooked-eyed man returned from the storeroom and smiled with
satisfaction when he saw everyone seated at the long table which he had
told Brendan and Ginger to put together from three smaller ones.  He
came to Ernie and said, "No hard feelings?"

"Hell, no," Ernie said.  "And thanks ...  thanks a lot."

The newcomer went to the head of the table, where a chair had been left
for him.  With Kenny Rogers crooning on the jukebox, the guy said, "My
name's Jack Twist, and I don't know any more than you what in hell's
happening, probably less than you know.  The whole thing gives me the
heebiejeebies, but I also have to tell you this is the first time in
eight years that I've really and truly felt like I'm on the right side
of an issue, the first time I've felt like one of the good guysand dear
God in Heaven, you can't know how much I've needed to feel that!"

Lieutenant Tom Forner, Colonel Falkirk's aide-decamp, had enormous
hands.  The small tape recorder was totally concealed in his right hand
when he carried it into the windowless office.  His fingers were so
large that he seemed certain to have trouble using the little control
buttons.  But he was remarkably dextrous.  He produced the recorder,
placed it on the desk, switched it on, and set it in the playback mode.

The tape had been duplicated from the reel-to-reel machine on which all
phone-monitored conversations were recorded. It was a portion of an
exchange that had taken place between several people at the Tranquility
only minutes ago.  The first part of the tape concerned the witnesses'
discovery that the source of their trouble was not Shenkfield but
Thunder Hill. Leland listened with dismay.  He had not anticipated that
their quest would take the right trail so soon.  Their cleverness
worried and angered him.

On the tape: "For God's sake, shut up.  If you think you can plot in
privacy here, you're badly mistaken."

"That's Twist," Lieutenant Forner said.  He had a big voice, too, which
was as well controlled as his enormous hands: a soft rumble.  He stopped
the tape.  "We knew he was coming here.  And we know he's dangerous.  We
figured he'd be more cautious than the others, sure, but we didn't
expect him to act as if he was at war from the get-go."

As far as they knew, Jack Twist's memory block had not seriously
deteriorated.  He was not suffering fugues, sleepwalking, phobias, or
obsessions.  Therefore, only one thing might have motivated him to
suddenly lease a plane and fly to Elko County: mail from the same
traitor who had sent Polaroids to Corvaisis and to the Blocks.

Leland Falkirk was furious that someone involved in the cover-up,
probably someone at Thunder Hill, was sabotaging the entire operation.
He had made this discovery only last Saturday night, when Dominick
Corvaisis and the Blocks had sat at the kitchen table and discussed the
strange snapshots they'd been sent.  Leland had ordered an immediate
investigation and intense screening of everyone at the Depository, but
that was going a lot slower than he had anticipated.

"There's worse," Horner said.  He switched on the tape again.

Leland listened to Twist tell the others about rifle microphones and
infinity transmitters.  Shocked, they adjourned to the diner, where they
could discuss their strategy without being overheard.

"They're in the diner now," Horner said, shutting off the recorder.
"Ripped out the phones.  I've spoken by radio with the observers we have
stationed south of I-80.  They watched the witnesses move to the Grille,
but they haven't had any luck tuning in with a rifle mike."

And won't," Leland said softly.  "Twist knows what he's doing."

"Now that they 're aware of Thunder Hill, we've got to move on them as
soon as possible."

"I'm waiting to hear from Chicago."

'Sharkle's still barricaded in his house?"

'Last I heard, yes," Leland said.  "I've got to know if his memory block
has completely crumbled.  If it has, and if he gets a chance to tell
anyone what he saw that summer, then the operation's blown, anyway, and
it'd be a mistake to move against the witnesses at the motel.  We'll
have to fall back to another plan."

Under the diner's wagonwheel lights, safe in her mother's lap, Marcie
dozed off even as Jack Twist introduced himself. In spite of the nap the
girl had taken on the plane, sooty rings of weariness encircled her
eyes, and a tracery of blue veins marked her porcelain-pale skin.

Jorja was tired, too, but Twist's dramatic arrival was an effective
antidote to the narcotizing effects of the dinner.  She was wide awake
and eager to hear what he had to tell them of his own tribulations.

He began by briefly mentioning his imprisonment in Central America, with
which his military career had ended.  He made the experience sound more
boring and frustrating than frightening, but Jorja sensed that he had
endured grueling hardship.  From his matter-of-fact tone, she had the
impression that he was a man so secure in his self-image, so certain of
his emotional and physical and intellectual strengths, that he never
needed to boast or to hear the praise of others.

When he spoke of Jenny, his late wife, he was less able to maintain an
air of detachment.  Jorja heard the cadences of lingering grief in this
part of his story; a river of love and longing flowed beneath his
feigned placidity.  The intimacy of mind and spirit between Jack Twist
and Jenny, prior to her coma, had surely been extraordinary, for only a
special and magical relationship would have ensured his unflagging
devotion through the woman's long deathlike sleep.  Jorja tried to
imagine what a marriage of that sort might be like, then realized that,
regardless of how magical their marriage had been, Jack would not have
committed himself so totally to his afflicted wife if he'd been any less
than the man he was. Their relationship had been special, yes, but even
more special was this man himself.  That realization increased Jorja's
already strong interest in Twist and his story.

He was vague in describing the enterprises by which he had financed
Jenny's long stay at a sanitarium.  He made it clear only that what he
had done was illegal, that he was not proud of it, and that his lawless
days were over.  "At least I never killed any innocent bystanders, thank
God.  Otherwise, I think it's best if you don't know any details that
might somehow make you accessories-after-the-fact."

Their mutual unremembered ordeal had affected Jack Twist. But as with
Sandy, the mysterious events of that July night had wrought only
beneficial changes in him.

Ernie Block said, "I think what you've indirectly told us is that you
were a professional thief." When Jack Twist said nothing, Ernie
continued: "It occurs to me that you were almost certainly forced to
reveal your criminal life to the people who brainwashed us.  In fact,
from what little you've said, I figure those safe-deposit boxes in which
the postcards turned up were kept under the identities you also used
when committing robberies; therefore, since that July, the Army and
government must've known about your illegal activities."

Jack's silence was confirmation that he had, indeed, been a thief.

Ernie said, "Yet, once they'd blocked your memories of what really
happened here that summer, they turned you loose and let you continue
with what you'd been doing.  Why in the hell would they do that?  I can
understand the Army and government bending-even breaking-the law to hide
whatever happened at Thunder Hill if it involves national security.  But
otherwise, you'd expect them to uphold the law, wouldn't you?  So why
wouldn't they at least anonymously inform the New York police or arrange
for you to be caught in the middle of a crime?"

Jorja said, "Because from the start they've not been certain that our
memory blocks would hold up.  They've been monitoring us, at least
checking in on us once in awhile, to be sure we don't need a refresher
course in forgetfulness.  What happened to Ginger and Pablo Jackson
seems to prove they're watching, all right.  And if they decided it was
necessary to grab Jack-or any of us-and put him through another session
with the mind-control doctors, they'd want him where they could reach
him without too much trouble.  It'd be a lot easier to snatch Jack out
of his apartment or from his car than to spirit him out of prison."

"Good grief," Jack said, smiling at her, "I think you've hit on it.
Absolutely." Although Jorja had been slightly chilled by his smile the
first time she'd seen it, she perceived it differently now; it was a
warmer smile than it had seemed initially.

Marcie murmured wordlessly in her sleep.  Suddenly and curiously shy
about meeting Jack Twist's eyes, Jorja used her daughter's dreamy
mutterings as an excuse to look away from him.

Jack said, "Whatever secret they're protecting is so important they had
to let me carry on with whatever crimes I chose to commit."

Ginger Weiss shook her head.  "Maybe not.  Maybe they engineered this
guilt.  Maybe they planted the seed, so you'd change."

"No," Jack said.  "If they didn't have time to weave the story of the
toxic spill into everyone's false memories, they sure wouldn't have had
time to finesse me toward the straightand-narrow path.  Besides .  .  .
this is difficult to explain .  .  .

but, since coming here tonight, I feel in my heart that I've learned
guilt and found my way back into society because something so important
happened to us two summers ago that it put my own suffering in
perspective and made me see that none of my bad experiences was so bad
as to justify the warping of my entire life."

"Yes!" Sandy said.  "I feel that, too.  All the hell I went through as a
child .  .  .  none of it matters after what happened that July."

They were silent, trying to imagine what experience could have been so
shattering as to make even the most painful of life's tricks seem of
little consequence.  But none of them could puzzle it out.

After he selected more songs on the jukebox, Jack asked a lot of
questions of the others, filling the gaps in his knowledge of their
various ordeals and putting together a complete picture of their
discoveries to date.  That done, he guided them through a discussion of
strategy, formulating a set of tasks for tomorrow.

Jorja was again intrigued by Jack's leadership skills.  By the time the
group discussed what steps should be taken next and settled on an
agenda, they had agreed to undertake precisely the tasks Jack thought
ought to be accomplished, though there was never a sense that he had
commanded or manipulated them.  When he'd first appeared in the Blocks'
apartment, he'd proved he could take control of a situation and, by
sheer force of personality, make people obey him.  But now he chose
indirection, and the speed with which everyone came around to his
purposes was proof this was the right tactic.

Jorja realized that he impressed her for many of the same reasons that
Ginger Weiss had impressed her.  She saw in him the kind of person she
had been struggling to become since her divorce-and the kind of man that
Alan could never have been.

The final problem the group dealt with was the danger of an attack by
Falkirk's men.  Now that there was a real chance their memory blocks
would substantially decay-or crumble completely-in the near future, they
posed a greater threat to their enemy than at any time since July, the
summer before last.  Tomorrow, they would be separated most of the day
as they carried out their various tasks and researches, but tonight they
were in danger if they all stayed at the motel, making one easy target.
Therefore, they agreed that most of them would go to bed now, while two
or three drove into Elko and spent part of the night circling through
town, always on the move, alert.  Assuming that the Tranquility was
under observation, the enemy would at once realize they could no longer
seize everyone in a clean sweep.  At four o'clock in the morning, a
second group of outriders could rendezvous with the first team in Elko
and relieve them, so they could come back here and get some sleep.

"I'll volunteer for the first team," Jack said.  "I just have to fetch
my Cherokee from the hills, where I left it.  Who'll go with me?"

"I will," Jorja said at once, then became aware of the weight of her
daughter on her lap.  "Uh, that is, if someone'll let Marcie sleep in
their room tonight."

"No problem," Faye said.  "She can stay with Ernie and me .

Jack said they ought to divide their numbers further, and Brendan Cronin
volunteered to join him and Jorja on the first team.  The priest's
response triggered a peculiar feeling in Jorja, a pang she would not
identify as disappointment until much later.

Because everyone else had errands to run early tomorrow, the second team
was composed of only Ned and Sandy.  A rendezvous between the teams was
set for four o'clock in the morning at the Arco Mini-Mart.

"If you get there first," Jack said, "for God's sake don't buy a
Hamwich.  Okay, I guess that's it.  We should get moving."

"Not quite yet," Ginger said.  The physician folded her hands and looked
down at her interlaced fingers, collecting her thoughts.  "Since this
afternoon, when Brendan first arrived, when the rings appeared on his
and Dom's hands, when the motel office was filled with that strange
noise and the light ...  I've been chewing over everything we've been
able to learn, trying to make those bizarre phenomena fit in somehow.
I've hit on an explanation for some of it; not all, but some of it."

Everyone expressed an eagerness to hear the theory, halfformed though it
might be.

Ginger said, "As different as our dreams are, one element links all of
them: the moon.  Okay.  Our other dreams-decon suits, IV needles, beds
with restraining straps-proved to be based on real experiences, real
threats.  In fact, they weren't dreams but memories surfacing in the
form of dreams.  So it seems reasonable to suppose the moon also
featured prominently in whatever happened to us, that the moon, too, is
a memory trying to surface in our dreams.  Agreed?"

"Agreed," Dom said, and everyone else nodded.

"We've seen how Marcie's lunar obsession changed to a fascination with a
scarlet moon," Ginger continued.  "And Jack's told us that, a couple
nights ago, the ordinary moonlight in his own nightmare turned into a
bloody glow.  None of the rest of us has dreamed of a red moon yet, but
I submit that the appearance of this scarlet image in Marcie's and
Jack's dreams is proof that it's also a memory.  In other words, on the
night of July 6, we saw something that made the moon turn red.  And the
apparitional light, which sometimes fills Brendan's bedroom, which some
of us witnessed today in the motel office, is a strange sort of
reenactment of what happened to the real moon on the night in July. The
apparitional light is a message meant to nudge our memories."

"Message," Jack said.  "All right.  But who the devil's sending the
message?  Where's the light come from?  How is it generated?"

"I've got an idea about that," Ginger said.  "But let me take this one
step at a time.  First, let's consider what might've happened to make
the moon turn red that night."

Jorja listened, as did the others, with interest at first and then with
growing uneasiness, while Ginger got up from her chair and, pacing,
outlined an unnerving explanation.

Ginger Weiss wholeheartedly embraced the scientific worldview.  To her,
the universe unfailingly operated by the rules of logic and reason, and
no mystery could long endure once attacked in a logical fashion.  But
unlike some in the scientific community-and many in the
medical'community-she did not believe that a vivid imagination was
necessarily a hindrance to logic and reason.  Otherwise, she might not
have devised the theory she now conveyed to the others in the
Tranquility Grille.

It was a pretty strange theory, and she was nervous about how the others
would receive it.  So she paced to the jukebox, over to the service
counter, back to the table, moving constantly as she talked:

"The men who dealt with us in the first day or two of imprisonment were
wearing decontamination suits designed to handle biological risks.  They
must've been worried we were infected with something.  So perhaps part
of what we saw was a scarlet cloud of biological contaminant.  When it
passed overhead, it turned the moon red."

"And we were all infected with some strange disease," Jorja said.

Ginger said, "That may be why, yesterday at the special place along the
highway, I had the memory-flash of Dom shouting, 'It's inside me.  It's
inside me." That would have been a logical thing for him to shout if,
that night, he had found himself caught up in a red cloud of some
contaminant and realized he was breathing it in.  And Brendan's told us
that the same words-'It's inside me'-came spontaneously to his lips last
night in Reno, when the red apparitional light filled his room."

"Bacteria?  Disease?  Then why didn't we get sick?" Brendan said.

"Because they treated us immediately," Dom said.  "We've already worked
that one out, Brendan-yesterday, before you got here.  But, Ginger, the
light that filled the office this afternoon was too bright to represent
moonlight filtered through a red cloud."

"I know," Ginger said, pacing.  "Underdeveloped as it is, my idea
doesn't explain everything-like the rings on your hands.  So maybe it's
not the right idea.  On the other hand, it does explain some things, and
maybe if we think about it long enough, we'll see how it explains these
other puzzles, as well.  And as a theory, it has one big plus."

"What's that?" Ned asked.

"It could explain why Brendan was involved in two miracle cures in
Chicago.  It could explain the whirling paper moons in Zebediah Lomack's
house.  And the destruction here at the diner on Saturday night, when
Dom was trying to recall what had happened the summer before last.  It
could explain the source of the apparitional light."

On the jukebox, the last of a series of songs had faded to its end as
Ginger began to speak.  But no one got up to choose more music, for they
were riveted by her promise to explain the inexplicable.

"To this point," Ginger said, "the theory's pretty mundane. A red cloud
of contaminant.  Nothing hard to accept in that. But now .  .  .  you've
got to take a big leap of imagination with me.  We've been assuming that
the miraculous healing and certainly the poltergeist phenomena have some
mysterious external source.  Father Wycazik, Brendan's rector, thinks
that external source is God.  The rest of us don't feel it's exactly
divine.  We don't know what the hell it is, but we all assume that it's
an external power, something out there somewhere that's taunting us or
trying to reach us with a message or threatening us.  But what if these
wonders have an internal source.  Suppose Brendan and Dom really possess
some power, and suppose that they possess it because of what happened
during the night of the red moon.  Suppose they have telekinesis-which
is the power to move objects without touching them, which would explain
the whirling paper moons and the destruction in the diner."

Everyone looked at Dom and Brendan in amazement, but no one was more
startled than those two men, who gaped at Ginger, shocked.

Dom said, "But that's ridiculous!  I'm no psychic, no sorcerer."

"Me neither," Brendan said.

Ginger shook her head.  "Not consciously, no.  I'm saying maybe the
power is in you, and you're just not aware of it. Bear with me.  Think
about it.  The first time the rings appeared on Brendan's hands, the
first time he exercised his healing power, was when he was combing the
hair of the little girl in the hospital.  He's said he was overwhelmed
with pity for her and filled with frustration and anger that he couldn't
help her.  Maybe it was his intense frustration and anger that freed the
power in him, even though he wasn't aware of it. He couldn't be aware of
it because the acquisition of this power is part of what he's been made
to forget.  Okay, the second time, with the wounded policeman, Brendan
found himself in an extreme crisis, which might trigger these powers."
She began pacing and talking more rapidly to prevent debate until she'd
finished.  "Now think about Dom's experiences.  The first one, in Reno,
at Lomack's house.  The way you told it to us, Dom ...  as you wandered
through the house, you became so frustrated by the ever-deepening nature
of the mystery that you wanted to rush through those rooms and tear
those paper moons off the walls.  Those were your very words.  And, of
course, that's what happened: You pulled those moons off the walls, not
with your hands but with this power.  And remember, the pictures only
fell to the floor when you shouted, 'Stop it, stop it!" When it did
stop, you thought something had heard you and obeyed or relented, but in
fact you stopped it yourself."

Brendan, Dom, and a couple of the others still looked skeptical.

But Ginger had captured Sandy Server's imagination.  "It makes sense! It
makes even more sense if you think about what happened here on Saturday
night, right in this very room.  Dom was trying to remember back to that
Friday in July, trying to remember what happened right up to the second
where his memory block took effect.  And while he was struggling to
remember .  .  .  all of a sudden this strange noise, this thunder,
started to rumble through the diner, and everything started to shake. He
could've been unconsciously using this power of his to re-create the
effects of whatever happened back then."

"Good!" Ginger said encouragingly.  "See?  The more you think about it,
the more it hangs together."

"But the strange light," Dom said.  "You're saying Brendan and I somehow
manufactured that?"

"Yes, possibly," Ginger said, returning to the table, leaning on her
empty chair.  "Pyrokinesis.  The ability to spontaneously generate heat
or fire with the power of the mind alone."

"This wasn't fire," Dom said.  "It was light."

"So .  .  .  call it 'photokinesis,' " Ginger said.  "But I think when
you and Brendan met, you subconsciously recognized the power in each
other.  On a deep level, you were both reminded of what happened to you
that July night, the thing you've been forced to forget.  And both of
you wanted to blast those memories into view.  So unwittingly you
generated that weird light, which was a re-creation of the way the moon
changed from white to red on the night of July 6.  It was your
subconscious trying to jolt the memory through the block."

Ginger could see that their minds were spinning with all these odd
ideas, and she wanted to keep them unsettled a while longer, because
when they were unsettled they were more likely to absorb what she was
saying.  Given time for quiet reflection, the heavy armor of skepticism
would fall back into place, and her ideas would bounce off.

Ernie Block shook his head.  "Wait a minute.  You're losing me now.  You
started all this by suggesting that what turned the moon red was a
scarlet cloud of some biological contaminant.  Then you jumped way the
hell to one side and started talking about how the thing that happened
to us was responsible for Dom and Brendan developing these supposed
powers.  Where's the connection?  What does biological contamination
have to do with all this psychic stuff, anyway?"

Ginger took a deep breath because they had come to the core of her
theory, the wildest part of it.  "What if .  .  .  what if we were
contaminated by some virus or bacterium that, as a side-effect, causes
profound chemical or genetic or hormonal changes in its host, changes in
the host's brain?  And what if those changes leave the host with
something very like psychic powers, even once the infection is gone?"

They stared at her with a variety of expressions, though not as if they
thought her mad, and not as if she was too imaginative for her own good.
Rather, they seemed impressed by the complex chain of logic which she
had forged and by the inevitability of the final link.

"Good God," Dom said, "I doubt that it's the right answer, but it's sure
the prettiest, most neatly constructed theory I ever expect to hear.
What a concept for a novel!  A genetically engineered virus that, as a
surprise side-effect, causes a sort of forced evolution of the human
brain, resulting in psychic powers.  For the first time in weeks, I have
a terrific urge to rush to a typewriter.  Ginger, if we get out of this
alive, I'll have to give you a piece of the royalties on the book that's
sure to grow out of that idea."

Gently rocking her slumbering daughter, Jorja Monatella said, "But why
couldn't it be the right answer?  Why does it just have to be a terrific
concept for a novel?"

"For one thing," Jack Twist said, "if it were true, if we'd been
contaminated with a virus like that, we'd all have developed psychic
powers.  Right?"

"Well," Ginger said, "maybe we weren't all contaminated. Or maybe we
were contaminated, but the virus didn't get a foothold in all of us."

Faye said, "Or maybe this special side-effect isn't manifested in
everyone who's infected by the bug."

"Good thought," Ginger said.  She began to pace again: this time, not
because she was nervous but because she was excited.

Ned Sarver pushed one hand through his receding hair and said, "Are you
saying the Army knew about this side-effect of the virus, knew that it
might cause these changes in some of us?"

"I don't know," Ginger said.  "Maybe they knew.  Maybe not."

"I think not," Ernie said.  "Definitely not.  From what you found in the
Sentinel, we know they closed the interstate shortly before the
'accident' happened, which means it was no accident.  So .  .  .  first
of all, I find it hard to believe our own military would intentionally
subject us to contamination with a biological-warfare microorganism in a
hare-brained scheme to test its effectiveness in the field.  But even if
such an atrocity were possible, they wouldn't expose us to a virus that
could transform us in the way Ginger has suggested. Because, my friends,
people with strong psychic powers would be a new species, a superior
breed of humanity.  Formidable psychic power would translate directly
into military, economic, and political power.  So if the government knew
it had a virus that conferred these powers, it would not expose a group
of ordinary people like us.  Not in a million years.  That blessing
would be reserved for those already in positions of high authority, for
the elite.  I agree with Dom: I find the redcloud-of-virus theory quite
fascinating .  .  .  though unlikely. However, if we were contaminated
by such a thing, the sideeffect was unknown to the government."

In light of what Ernie had said, everyone was looking at Brendan and Dom
with a new appreciation composed equally of awe, uneasiness, wonder,
respect, and fear.  Ginger saw both the priest and the writer squirm
with the exhilarating yet frightening realization that they might have
within them the potential for superhuman power, a potential that, if
fulfilled, would forever separate them from the rest of mankind.

"No," Dom said, starting to get up in protest, then sitting back down as
if he did not think his legs would support him. "No, no.  You're not
right, Ginger.  I'm no superman, no wizard, no damn .  .  .  freak.  If
you were right, I'd feel it.  I'd know it, Ginger."

Brendan Cronin, equally shaken, said, "I've thought that somehow I've
been the vehicle for the healing of Emmy and Winton.  I've thought that
something-not God, perhaps, but something-is working through me.  I
never thought of myself as the actual healer.  Listen, I was under the
impression we'd already decided the toxic-spill story was entirely a
fake, a cover, that what happened to us wasn't an accident of any kind,
neither chemical nor biological, but something altogether different."

Jack and Jorja and Faye and Ned started talking at the same time.  The
noise level rose so loud that little Marcie frowned in her sleep, and
Ginger said, "Wait, wait, wait a minute.  There's no point discussing it
because we can't prove there was such a virus any more than we can prove
there wasn't one.  Not yet.  But maybe we can prove the other part."

"What do you mean?" Sandy Sarver asked.

Ginger said, "Maybe we can prove Dom and Brendan have the power.  Not
how they got it, but just that they have it."

Dom was incredulous.  "How?"

"We'll set up a test," Ginger said.

Dom was absolutely certain that it would not work, that they were
wasting time, that the whole idea was foolish.

Yet he was also scared that it would work, and that the proof of his
power would condemn him to the condition of a freak or at least to a
life forever closed to ordinary human relationships.  If he possessed
godlike power, no one would ever regard him without wonder and fear.  In
even the most relaxed or intimate moments with friends or lovers, their
awareness of his extraordinary gifts would intrude, either overtly or in
an unspoken subtext.  Others, perhaps most, would envy or hate him.

The unfairness of his predicament grated on him.  For most of his
thirty-five years, he had been shy and ineffectual, condemned to a drab
existence by his timidity.  Then he had changed, and for fifteen months,
until his sleepwalking began last October, he'd been outgoing.  Now,
that brief, wonderful season of normality might be passing.  If the test
that Ginger outlined were to prove Dom had somehow acquired psychic
powers, he would be isolated again, not by his own sense of inferiority,
as before, but by everyone else's uneasy awareness of his superiority.

The test.  Dom hoped to God he failed.

He and Brendan Cronin were sitting by themselves at the long table, one
at each end.  Jorja Monatella had put her slumbering daughter in a
booth, and the girl had not awakened.  The adults-all seven, including
Jorja-stood in a semicircle around the table, back a couple of paces,
giving Dom and Brendan space to concentrate free of distraction.

A salt shaker stood on the table in front of Dom.  Ginger's test
required that he concentrate on moving the object without touching it.
"Just an inch," she had said.  "If you can evoke just the slightest
perceptible motion in the shaker, we'll know you've got the power."

At the far end of the three joined tables, a pepper shaker stood in
front of Brendan Cronin.  The priest was staring at the small glass
cylinder as intently as Dom was staring at his

own shaker, and his round freckled face was filled with a foreboding
only marginally less grim than Dom's.  Although Brendan had denied that
the hand of God lay behind the miraculous cures and apparitional lights,
it was clear to Dom that the priest secretly and deeply hoped to
discover that, in fact, a divine Presence was at work.  He wanted to be
drawn back into his faith, into the bosom of the Church.  If the
miracles proved to be his own work, accomplished by the exertion of
heretofore unrecognized psychic powers, and if those powers proved to
have been conferred by a mere germ, as Ginger's crazy-but-canny theory
would have it, Brendan's yearning for spiritual elevation and holy
guidance would be unfulfilled.

The salt shaker.

Dom fixed his eyes on it and tried to clear every thought from his mind
except the determined intention to move the shaker.  Although he did not
want to discover that he had these strange talents, he had to make a
sincere attempt to employ them.  He had to know if it were true.

If the power existed, neither Ginger nor any of the others could suggest
techniques for tapping it.  "But," Ginger had said, "if it can explode
spontaneously and spectacularly in moments of stress, surely you can
learn to call upon it and control it whenever and however you desire . .
.  just as a musician can apply his musical talent any time he pleases.
Or just as you apply your writing talent to the blank page."

The salt shaker remained motionless, unaffected.

Dom strove to narrow his attention until that humble glass cylinder-with
its perforated stainless-steel cap and grainy white contents-was the
only thing in his universe.  He brought all his mind to bear upon it,
every speck of his will, and tried to push it along the table, strained
until he realized he was gritting his teeth, fisting his hands.

Nothing.

He changed tack.  Instead of mentally assaulting the shaker as if he
were blasting away with a cannon at the mighty walls of a fortress, he
relaxed and studied the object to get an intimate sense of its size,
shape, and texture.  Perhaps the key was to develop an empathy for the
shaker.  "Empathy" was the word that seemed right to him, though he was
relating to an inanimate and inorganic object; instead of battling it,
perhaps he could empathize and somehow .  .  .  induce it to cooperate
in a short telekinetic journey.  Only an inch.  He leaned forward
slightly to better examine the functional simplicity of its design: five
beveled facets to make it easy to grip and hold; a thick glass bottom to
provide balance and reduce the frequency of spills; a shiny metal
cap....

Nothing.  Standing unaffected on the table before him, the shaker seemed
like the mythical immovable object, heavy beyond weighing, welded
forever to this spot in space and time.

But of course, like all forms of matter in the universe, it was not
immovable, and in some ways it was always moving, never still.  After
all, it was composed of billions of ceaselessly moving atoms, the outer
parts of which orbited, planetlike, around the billions of sunlike
nuclei.  The salt shaker was engaged in uninterrupted motion on a
subatomic level, frantically moving within its structure, so it should
not be difficult to induce it to make one additional movement, one
little jaunt on the macrocosmic level of human perception, just one
little hop and skip, just one Dom felt a sudden buoyancy, almost as if
he himself were going to be moved by some arcane force, but instead-and
at last-the salt shaker moved.  He had become so deeply involved with
that homely object that he had actually forgotten Ginger and the others;
he was reminded of their presence when, as one, they gasped and
exclaimed softly.  The shaker did not simply slide one inch along the
table-or two or ten or twenty.  It rose into the air instead, as if
gravity had ceased to have a claim on it.  Like a tiny glass balloon, it
floated upward: one foot, two, three, and stopped four feet above the
surface on which, only seconds ago, it had appeared immovable.  It
remained suspended several inches above the eye-level of those who were
standing, and they stared up at it in awe.

At the far end of the table, Brendan's pepper shaker rose, too.  Mouth
open, eyes wide, Brendan stared at the rising cylinder.  When it stopped
at precisely the same height as the salt shaker, Brendan finally dared
to take his eyes from it. He looked at Dom, glanced nervously at the
pepper shaker again, as if certain it would crash down the moment he
shifted his gaze, then looked at Dom once more when he realized that
eye-contact was not required to maintain levitation.  several sentiments
were apparent in the priest's eyes: wonder, amazement, puzzlement, fear,
and an emotional acknowledgment of the profound brotherhood that existed
between him and Dom by virtue of the strange power they shared.

Dom was intrigued that he did not need to strain to keep the salt shaker
aloft.  In fact, it seemed hard to believe that he was actually
responsible for its magical performance.  He was not conscious of either
possessing or exerting control of the object.  He felt no power surging
in him.  Evidently, his telekinetic ability functioned automatically, in
a fashion similar to respiration and heartbeat.

Brendan raised his hands.  The red rings had reappeared on them.

Dom looked at his own hands and saw the same inscrutable stigmata
burning brightly.

What did they mean?

Looming overhead, the salt and pepper shakers generated a sense of
expectancy in Dom even greater than he had felt at the beginning of this
test.  Apparently, the others felt it as well, for they began to urge
Dom and Brendan to perform additional feats.

"Incredible," Ginger said breathlessly.  "You've shown us vertical
movement, levitation.  Can you also move them horizontally?"

"Can you lift something heavier?" Sandy Sarver asked.

"The light," Ernie said.  "Can you generate the red light?"

Seeking first to accomplish a more modest task than any they had
proposed, Dom thought about giving the salt shaker a slight spin, and
immediately it began to twirl in midair, eliciting another gasp from the
onlookers.  A moment later, Brendan's pepper shaker began to spin, too.
Reflections of the overhead lights glimmered liquidly across the shiny
metal caps of the spinning dispensers, flashed off the facets of the
glass, traveled scintillatingly along the edges where one facet met
another, so the shakers looked like glittery Christmastree ornaments.

Simultaneously, the two small dispensers began drifting toward one
another, the horizontal movement Ginger had requested, though Dom was
not aware of consciously directing the salt shaker on this course.  He
supposed Ginger's suggestion was accepted by his subconscious, which now
employed psychic energy to accomplish the task, without waiting for him
to make a conscious effort.  It was eerie-the way he controlled the
shaker yet was unaware of how that control was exerted.

Above the centermost point of the three joined tables, the salt and
pepper shakers stopped moving horizontally when they were about ten
inches apart.  They hung side by side, spinning a bit faster than
before, throwing off spangles of reflected light.  Then they began to
revolve around each other in perfectly circular synchronized orbits. But
that lasted only a few seconds.  Suddenly, the shakers were spinning
faster than before, and swinging around each other much faster as well,
and in much more complex, parabolic counterorbits.

Captivated and delighted, the onlookers laughed, applauded.  Dom looked
at Ginger.  Her radiant face shone with an expression of pure, spiritual
uplift that made her more beautiful than ever.  She lowered her gaze
from the salt and pepper shakers to Dom, grinning with wild excitement,
and gave him a thumbs-up sign.  Ernie Block and Jack Twist watched the
aerobatics with open-mouthed wonder that made them look not like
hard-bitten ex-soldiers but like two small boys seeing fireworks for the
first time in their lives.  Laughing, Faye stood with her hands raised
toward the shakers, as if she were trying to feel the miraculous field
of power in which they were suspended.  Ned Sarver was laughing, too,
but Sandy was crying, a sight that startled Dom until he realized she
was also smiling and that the tears on her cheeks were tears of joy.

"Oh," Sandy said, turning to Dom as if she had sensed that he was
looking at her, "isn't it wonderful?  Whatever it means, isn't it just
wonderful?  The freedom...  the freedom of it .  .  .  the breaking away
of all the bonds.....  the rising up and above and away .  .  ."

Dom knew precisely what she was feeling and trying to say, because he
felt it too.  For the moment, he forgot that possession of these
abilities would forever alienate him from people who were without the
talent, and he was filled with a rapturous sense of transcendence, with
an appreciation for what it might mean to take a giant leap up the
ladder of evolution, breaking away from the chains of human limitations.
In the Tranquility Grille tonight, there was a sense of history being
made, a sense that nothing in the world would ever be the same again.

"Do something else," Ginger said.

"Yes!" Sandy said.  "Show us more.  Show us more."

In other parts of the room, other salt shakers flew up from the tables
on which they had been standing: six, eight, ten in all.  They hung
motionless for a moment, then began to spin like the first shaker.

Instantly, an equal number of pepper shakers took flight and began
spinning as well.

Dom still did not know how he was doing these things; he made no effort
to perform each new trick; the thought merely became fact, as if wishes
could come true.  He suspected that Brendan was equally baffled.

The jukebox had been silent.  Now it began to play a Dolly Parton tune,
though no one had punched the programming buttons.

Did I do that, Dom wondered, or was it Brendan?

Ginger said, "My God, I'm so excited I'm going to plotz!"

Laughing, Dom said, "Plotz?  What's that one mean?"

"Bust, explode," Ginger said.  "I'm so excited I'm going to bust!"

Every salt and pepper shaker spun, and the halves of every pair orbited
each other, and now all eleven sets began moving around the room in a
train, faster, faster, making a soft whoosh as they cut the air, casting
off sparks of reflected light.

Abruptly, a dozen chairs rose off the floor, not in the controlled and
playful manner in which the salt and pepper shakers had risen from the
tables, but with such violence and momentum that they shot instantly to
the ceiling, smashing against that barrier with a deafening clatter. One
of the wagonwheel lighting fixtures was struck by two chairs; its
lightbulbs burst, and the room was only three-quarters as brightly
illuminated as it had been.  That wagon wheel broke loose of its anchor
brackets and wires, crashing to the floor a few feet behind Dom.  The
chairs remained against the ceiling, vibrating as if they were a flock
of enormous bats hovering on dark wings.  Most of the salt and pepper
shakers were still whirling maniacally around the room above everyone's
head, though a few had been brought down by the upflung chairs. Now, a
few more stopped spinning, swung erratically out of their orbits, out of
the train as well, wobbled, and shot to the floor.  One of them struck
Ernie's shoulder, and he cried out in pain. Dom and Brendan had lost
control.  And because they had never known exactly how they had
established control in the first place, they did not know how to regain
it.

In a blink, the celebratory mood changed to panic.  The onlookers
scrambled for shelter under the tables, acutely aware that the levitated
chairs-rattling ominously against the ceiling were potentially far more
dangerous missiles than the salt and pepper shakers.  The noise awakened
Marcie.  She sat up in the booth where she had been sleeping, crying now
and calling for her mother.  Jorja pulled the girl off the booth and
scrambled under one of the tables with her, hugging her close, and
everyone was out of the line of fire except Brendan and Dom.

Dom felt as if this psychic power was a live grenade that had been wired
irremovably to his hand.

Overhead, three or four more shakers lost momentum and came down like
bullets.  The dozen levitated chairs began to bounce against the ceiling
more aggressively, shedding small pieces of themselves.

Dom didn't know if he should dive for cover or attempt to regain
control.  He looked at Brendan, who was equally paralyzed.

Overhead, the three remaining wagon-wheel lights swayed wildly on their
chains, causing goblin shadows to leap across the room.

The battering chairs gouged out small chunks of the ceiling.

A salt shaker dropped in front of Dom, impacting like a tiny meteorite
against the table.  The glass was too thick to shatter, but the small
jar cracked into three or four pieces, flinging up what salt it still
contained, and Dom flinched from the white spray.

Remembering the spinning carrousel of paper moons in Lomack's house six
days ago, Dom raised both hands toward the rattling chairs and whirling
shakers.  Clenching his hands into fists, shutting the red-ring stigmata
out of sight, he said, "Stop it.  Stop it now.  Stop it!"

Overhead, the chairs ceased vibrating.  The salt and pepper shakers
halted in midwhirl and hung motionless in the air.

For a second or two, the diner was preternaturally silent.

Then the twelve chairs and the last of the shakers dropped straight
down, bouncing off tables and other chairs that had never taken flight.
When everything at last came to rest in tangled rubble, Dom and Brendan
were as unscathed as those who had taken refuge under the tables.  Dom
blinked at the priest, and around them all was graveyard-still.  This
moment of silence was longer than the first.  It seemed as if time had
stopped, until Marcie's thin whimpering and her mother's murmured
assurances started the engines of reality purring again, drawing the
others from their places of shelter.

Ernie was still massaging his shoulder, where he had been hit by a salt
shaker, but he was not seriously hurt.  No one else was injured, though
everyone was shaken.

Dom saw the way they were looking at him and Brendan. Warity.  Just as
he had figured they would look at him if he proved to have the power.
Just the way he had dreaded being looked at.  Damn.

Ginger seemed to be the only one who was- not put off by his new status.
She enthusiastically embraced Dom and said, "What matters is that you've
got it.  You've got it, and eventuaily you can learn to use it, and
that's wonderful."

"I'm not so sure," Dom said, looking at the broken chairs, fallen
lighting fixtures.  Jack Twist was brushing salt and drywall dust off
his clothes.  Jorja was still comforting her frightened child.  Faye and
Sandy were picking splinters and other bits of debris out of their hair,
and Ned was pondering the danger of the live wires dangling from the
ceiling where the chandelier had torn loose.  Dom said, "Ginger, even
when I was using the power, I didn't know how I was doing it.  And when
it ran wild .  .  .  I didn't know how to stop it."

"But you did stop it," she said.  She kept one arm around his waist as
if she knew-God bless her-that he needed the reassurance of human
contact.  "You did stop it, Dom."

"Maybe next time I won't be able." He realized he was shivering.  "Look
at this mess.  My God, Ginger, someone could've been badly hurt."

"No one was."

"Someone could have been killed.  Next time-"

"It'll be better," she said.

Brendan Cronin came around the long table.  "He'll change his mind,
Ginger.  Give him time.  I know I'm going to try again.  Alone, next
time.  In a couple of days, when I've had time to think it through, I'll
go out somewhere in.  an open field, away from people, where no one can
be hurt except me, and I'll give it another try.  I think it's going to
be difficult to control the .  .  .  energy.  It's going to take a lot
of time, a lot of work, maybe years.  But I'll explore, practice.  And
so will Dom. He'll realize as much when he's had a couple of minutes to
think about it."

Dom shook his head.  "I don't want this.  I don't want to be so
different from other people."

"But now you are," Brendan said.  "We both are."

"That's damn fatalistic."

Brendan smiled.  "Though I'm having a crisis of faith, I'm still a
priest, so I believe in predestination, fate.  That's an article of
faith.  But we priests are a clever bunch, so we can be fatalistic and
believe in free will at the same time!  Both are articles of faith." For
the priest, the psychological effects of these events were far different
from the fear raised in Dom. As he talked, he repeatedly rose onto his
toes as if he were nearly buoyant enough to float away.

At a loss to understand the priest's good humor, Dom changed the
subject.  "Well, Ginger, if we've proved half of your crazy theory, at
least we've disproved the other half."

She frowned.  "What do you mean?"

"In the midst of all that .  .  .  uproar," Dom said, gesturing toward
the battered ceiling, "when I saw the rings appear on my hands again, I
decided the psychic power wasn't a sideeffect of any strange viral
infection.  I know the source of it is something else, something even
stranger, though I don't know what it may be."

"Oh?  Well, which is the case?" she asked.  "Have you merely decided, or
do you really know?"

"I know," Dom said.  "Deep inside, I know."

"Oh, yes, me too," Brendan said happily, as Ernie and Faye and the
others gathered around.  "You were correct, Ginger, when you suggested
the power was in Dom and me. And it's been in us since that July night,
like you said.  However, you're not right about the method by which we
acquired the gift.  Like Dom said .  .  .  in the middle of all the
chaos, I sensed that biological contamination wasn't the right
explanation.  I haven't the foggiest notion what the answer is, but we
can rule out that part of your theory."

Now Dom understood why Brendan was in such good spirits in spite of the
frightening exhibition in which they'd just participated.  Though he
professed to see no religious aspect to recent events, in his heart of
hearts, the priest had retained hope that the miraculous cures and
apparitional lights were of divine origin.  He had been depressed by the
dismayingly secular thought that the gift could have been bestowed on
him not by his Lord but simply as the chance side-effect of an exotic
infection, by the unwitting office of a mindless virusand a man-made
virus, as well.  He was relieved to be able to dismiss that possibility.
His high spirits and good humor, even amidst the destruction of the
diner, arose from the fact that a divine Presence was once again, for
Brendan, at least a viable-if still unlikely-explanation.

Dom wished he, too, could find courage and strength in the notion that
their troubles were part of a divine scheme. But at the moment, he
believed only in danger and death, twin juggernauts that he sensed
bearing down on him.  The personality changes that had occurred in him
during his move from Portland to Mountainview were laughably minor in
comparison to the changes that had begun working in him tonight, with
the discovery of this unwanted power.  He almost felt as if the power
was alive in him, a parasite that in time would eat away everything that
had been Dominick Corvaisis and, having assumed his identity, would
stalk the world in his body, masquerading as human.

Crazy.

Nevertheless, he was worried and scared.

He looked at each of the others who were gathered around him.  Some met
his eyes for a moment, then quickly looked away, just as one might
hesitate to meet the gaze of a dangerous-or intimidating-man.
Others-most notably Jack Twist, Ernie, and Jorja-met his eyes
forthrightly, but were incapable of concealing the uneasiness and even
apprehension with which they now regarded him.  Only Ginger and Brendan
seemed to have suffered no change in their attitude toward him.

"Well," Jack said, breaking the spell, "we should call it a night, I
guess.  We've got a lot to do tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," Ginger said, "we'll have cleared up even more of these
mysteries.  We're making progress every day."

"Tomorrow," Brendan said softly, happily, "will be a day of great
revelation.  I feel it somehow."

Tomorrow, Dom thought, we might all be dead.  Or wish we were.

Colonel Leland Falkirk still had a splitting headache.  With his new
talent for introspection-acquired gradually since his involvement in the
emotionally and intellectually shattering events of two summers ago-he
was able to see that, on one level, he was actually glad that the
aspirin had been ineffective.  He thrived on the headache in the same
way he thrived on other kinds of pain, drawing a perverse strength and
energy from the relentless throbbing in his brow and temples.

Lieutenant Horner had gone.  Leland was alone once more in his
temporary, windowless office beneath the testing grounds of Shenkfield,
but he was no longer waiting for the call from Chicago.  It had come
soon after Horner departed, and the news had been all bad.

The siege at Calvin Sharkle's house in Evanston, which had begun earlier
today, was still under way, and that volatile situation would probably
not be brought to an end within the next twelve hours.  If possible, the
colonel did not want to commit his men to another closure of I-80 and
another quarantine of the Tranquility Motel until he could be certain
the operation would not be compromised by revelations that Sharkle might
make either to Illinois authorities or to the news media.  Delay made
Leland nervous, especially now that the witnesses at the motel were
focused on Thunder Hill and were planning their moves beyond the reach
of rifle microphones and infinity transmitters.  He figured he could
afford to wait, at most, one more day.  However, if the dangerous
standoff in Illinois was still under way by sunset tomorrow, he would
give the order to move on the Tranquility in spite of the risks.

The other news from Chicago was that operatives had discreetly
investigated Emmeline Halbourg and Winton Tolk and had found reasons to
believe their amazing recoveries could not be adequately explained by
current medical knowledge.  And a reconstruction of Father Stefan
Wycazik's activities on Christmas Day-including visits to Halbourg and
Tolk, and a stop at the Metropolitan Police Laboratory to consult a
ballistics expert-confirmed that the priest had been convinced that his
curate, Brendan Cronin, had been responsible for those miraculous cures.

Leland had first become aware of Cronin's healing powers just yesterday,
Sunday, when he had monitored a telephone call between Dominick
Corvaisis at the Tranquility and Father Wycazik in Chicago. That
conversation would have been a real shocker if the events of Saturday
night had not prepared him for the unexpected.

Saturday night, when Corvaisis had arrived at the Tranquility, Leland
Falkirk and his surveillance experts had monitored the first
conversations between the Blocks and the writer with growing disbelief.
The outlandish tale of moon photographs animated by a poltergeist in
Lomack's Reno house had sounded like the product of a fevered mind no
longer able to distinguish between fiction and reality.

Later, however, after Corvaisis and the Blocks had eaten dinner at the
Grille, the writer had attempted to relive the minutes just before the
trouble had started on the night of July 6.  What happened then was
astonishing, confirmed both by the hidden surveillance team watching the
Tranquility from a point south of the interstate and by the infinity
transmitter tap on the diner's payphone.  Everything in the Grille had
begun to shake, and a strange rumble had filled the place, then an eerie
electronic ululation, culminating in the implosion of all the windows.

These phenomena came as a total-and nasty-surprise to Leland and to
everyone involved in the cover-up, especially the scientists, who were
electrified.  The following day's discovery of Cronin's healing power
added voltage to the excitement.  At first, these developments seemed
inexplicable. But after only a little thought, Leland arrived at an
explanation that made his blood cold.  The scientists had come to
similar conclusions.  Some of them were as scared as Leland was.

Suddenly, no one knew what to expect.  Anything might happen now.

We believed we were in control of the situation that night in July,
Leland thought somberly, but perhaps it had escalated beyond our control
even before we arrived on the scene.

The single consolation was that, thus far, only Corvaisis and the priest
appeared to be .  .  .  infected.  Maybe "infected" wasn't exactly the
right word.  Maybe "possessed" was better. Or maybe there wasn't a word
for what had happened to them, because what had happened to them had
never happened to anyone else in history, so a specific word for it had
not heretofore been required.

Even if the siege at Sharkle's house ended tomorrow, even if that
possibility of media exposure was eliminated, Leland would not be able
to strike at the group at the motel with full confidence.  Corvaisis and
Cronin-and perhaps the others-might be more difficult to apprehend and
incarcerate than they'd been two summers ago.  If Corvaisis and Cronin
weren't entirely themselves any more, if they were now someone else-or
something else-dealing with them might prove downright impossible.

Leland's headache was worse.

Feed on it, he told himself, getting up from the desk.  Feed on the
pain.  You've been doing that for years, you dumb son of a bitch, so you
can feed on it for another day or two, until you've dealt with this mess
or until you're dead, whichever comes first.

He left the windowless office, crossed a windowless outer chamber,
walked a windowless hall, and entered the windowless communications
center, where Lieutenant Horner and Sergeant Fiw sat at a table in one
corner.  "Tell the men they can hit the sack," Leland said.  "It's off
for tonight.  I'll risk another day to see if the situation at Sharkle's
house gets resolved."

"I was just coming to you," Horner said.  "There's a development at the
motel.  They finally left the diner.  After they came out, Twist brought
a Jeep Cherokee in from the hills behind the motel.  He, Jorja
Monatella, and the priest piled in it and drove off toward Elko."

"Where the hell are they going at this time of night?"

Leland asked, uncomfortably aware that those three might have slipped
through his fingers if he had ordered his men to move against the motel
tonight, for he'd been certain the witnesses were settled down until
morning.

Horner pointed to Fiw, who was wearing headphones and listening to the
Tranquility.  "From what we've heard, the others are going to bed.
Twist, Monatella, and Cronin have gone off as .  .  .  as sort of
insurance against us getting our hands on all the witnesses in one quick
clean sweep.  This had to be Twist's idea."

"Damn." Massaging his throbbing temples with his finger tips, Leland
sighed.  "All right.  We aren't going after them tonight, anyway."

"But what about tomorrow?  What if they split up all day tomorrow?"

"In the morning," Leland said, "we'll put tails on all of them." To this
point, he had seen no need to tail the witnesses everywhere they went,
for he had known that, in the end, they would all wind up at the same
place-the motel-making it easier for him to deal with them.  But now, if
they were going to be spread out when the time came to take them into
custody, he would need to know where they were at all times.

Horner said, "Depending on where they go tomorrow, they're likely to
spot any tails we put on them.  In this kind of open country, it's not
easy to be discreet."

"I know," Leland said.  "So let them see us.  I've wanted to stay out of
sight, but we're at the end of that approach. Maybe seeing us will throw
them off balance until it's too late.  Maybe, scared, they'll even get
back together for protection and make our job easier again."

"If we have to take some of them at a place other than the motel, say in
Elko, it'll be difficult," Horner said worriedly.

"If they can't be taken, they've got to be killed." Leland pulled up a
chair, sat down.  "Let's work out surveillance details now and have the
tails in position before dawn."

3.

Tuesday, January 14

At seven-thirty Tuesday morning, in response to a telephone call from
Brendan Cronin very late the previous night, Father Stefan Wycazik
prepared to set out on a drive to Evanston, to the last known address of
Calvin Sharkle, the trucker who had been at the Tranquility Motel that
summer but whose telephone was now disconnected.  In light of the
enormity of last evening's developments in Nevada, everyone was agreed
that every possible effort must be made to contact the other victims who
had thus far been unreachable.  Standing in the warm rectory kitchen,
Stefan buttoned his topcoat and put on his fedora.

Father Michael Gerrano, who was just sitting down to oat meal and toast
after celebrating sunrise Mass, said, "Perhaps I should know more about
this whole situation, about what on earth's wrong with Brendan, in case
.  .  .  well, in case something happens to you."

"Nothing's going to happen to me," Father Wycazik said firmly.  "God
hasn't let me spend five decades learning how the world works just to
have me killed now that I'm able to do my best work for the Church."

Michael shook his head.  "You're always so . "Certain in my faith?  Of
course I am.  Rely on God, and He will never fail you, Michael."

"Actually," Michael said, smiling, "I was going to say: You're always so
bullheaded."

"Such impudence from a curate!" Stefan said, winding a thick white scarf
around his neck.  "Attend thee, Father: What is wanted of a curate is
humility, self-effacement, the strong back of a mule, the stamina of a
plow horse-and an unfailingly adoring attitude toward his rector."

Michael grinned.  "Oh, yes, I suppose if the rector is a pious old
geezer grown vain from the praise of his parishioners-" The telephone
rang.

"If it's for me, I'm gone," Stefan said.

Stefan pulled on a pair of gloves but was not quite able to make it to
the back door before Michael held the receiver toward him.

"It's Winton Tolk," Michael said.  "The cop whose life Brendan saved. He
sounds almost hysterical, and he wants to talk to Brendan."

Stefan took the phone and identified himself.

The policeman's voice was haunted and full of urgency. "Father, I've got
to talk to Brendan Cronin right away, it can't wait."

"I'm afraid he's away," Stefan said, "out at the other end of the
country.  What's the matter?  Can I be of assistance?"

"Cronin," Tolk said shakily.  "Something ...  something's happened, and
I don't understand, it's strange, Jesus, it's the strangest craziest
thing, but I knew right away it was somehow related to Brendan."

"I'm sure I can help.  Where are you, Winton?"

"On duty, end of the shift, graveyard shift, Uptown.  There's been a
knifing, a shooting.  Horrible.  And then .  .  .  Listen,

I want Cronin to come up here, he's got to explain this, he's got to,
right away."

Father Wycazik elicited an address from Tolk, left the rectory at a run,
and drove too fast.  Less than half an hour later, he arrived in a block
of identical, shabby, six-story, brick tenements in the Uptown district.
He was unable to park in front of the address he had been given and
settled for a spot near the corner, for the prime space was occupied by
police vehicles-marked and unmarked cars, an SID wagon-whose radios
filled the cold air with a metallic chorus of dispatchers' codes and
jargon.  Two officers were watching over the vehicles to prevent
vandalism.  In answer to Stefan's question, they told him the action was
on the third floor, in 3-B, the Mendozas' apartment.

The glass in the front door was cracked across one corner, and the
temporary repair with electrician's tape looked as if it had become a
permanent solution.  The door opened on a grim foyer.  Some floor tiles
were missing and others were hidden by grime.  The paint was peeling.

As he climbed the stairs, Stefan encountered two beautiful children
playing "dead doll" with a battered Raggedy Ann and an old shoebox.

When he walked through the open door and into the Mendozas' third-floor
apartment, Father Wycazik saw a beige sofa liberally stained with
still-wet blood, so much that in some places the cushions were almost
black.  Hundreds of drops had sprayed across the pale-yellow wall behind
the sofa, a pattern that evidently had resulted when someone in front of
the wall had been hit by large-caliber slugs that passed through him.
Four bullet holes marred the plaster.  Blood was spattered over a
lampshade, coffee table, bookshelf, and part of the carpet.

The gore was even more disgusting than it might ordinarily have been
because the apartment was otherwise extremely well-kept, which made the
areas of bloody chaos more shocking by comparison.  The Mendozas could
afford to live only in a slum tenement, but like some other poor people,
they refused to surrender to-or become part of-the Uptown squalor.  The
filth of the streets, the grime of public hallways and staircases,
stopped at their door, as if their apartment was a fortress against
dirt, a shrine to cleanliness and order. Everything gleamed.

Removing his fedora, Stefan took only two steps into the living
room-which flowed without interruption into a small dining area., which
itself was separated from a half-size kitchen by a serving counter.  The
place was crowded with detectives, uniformed officers, lab
technicians-maybe a dozen men altogether.  Most of them were not acting
like cops.  Their demeanor puzzled Stefan.  Apparently, the lab men had
completed their work and the others had nothing to do, yet no one was
leaving.  They were standing in groups of two or three, talking in the
subdued manner of people at a funeral parlor-or in church.

Only one detective was working.  He was sitting at the dinette table
with a Madonna-faced Latino woman of about forty, asking questions of
her (Father Wycazik heard him call her Mrs.  Mendoza), and recording her
answers on legal-looking forms.  She was trying to cooperate but was
distracted as she glanced repeatedly at a man her own age, probably her
husband, who was pacing back and forth with a child in his arms.  The
child was a cute boy of about six.  Mr.  Mendoza held the child in one
burly arm, talking constantly to him, patting him, ruffling his thick
hair.  Obviously, this man had almost lost his son in whatever violence
had occurred earliere, and he needed to touch and hold the child to
convince himself that the worst had not actually happened.

One of the patrolmen noticed Stefan and said, "Father Wycazik?"

The officer's voice was soft, but at the mention of Stefan's name, the
entire group fell silent.  Stefan could not remember ever seeing
expressions quite like those that came over the faces of the people in
the Mendozas' small apartment: as if he were expected to deliver unto
them a single sentence that would shed light upon all the mysteries of
existence and succinctly convey the meaning of life.

What in the world is going on here?  Stefan wondered uneasily.

"This way, Father," said a uniformed officer.

Pulling off his gloves, Stefan followed the officer across the room. The
hush prevailed, and everyone made way for the priest and his guide. They
went into a bedroom, where Winton Tolk and another officer were sitting
on the edge of the bed.  "Father Wycazik's here," Stefan's guide said,
then retreated to the living room.

Tolk was sitting bent forward, his elbows on his knees, his face hidden
in his hands.  He did not look up.

The other officer rose from the edge of the bed and introduced himself
as Paul Armes, Winton's partner.  "I ...  I think you'd better get it
directly from Win," Armes said.  "I'll give you some privacy." He left,
closing the door behind him.

The bedroom was small, with space for only the bed, one nightstand, a
half-size dresser, one chair.  Father Wycazik pulled the chair around to
face the foot of the bed and sat down, so he could look directly at
Winton Tolk.  Their knees were almost touching.

Removing his scarf, Father Wycazik said, "Winton, what's happened?"

Tolk looked up, and Stefan was startled by the man's expression.  He had
thought Tolk was upset by whatever had happened in the living room.  But
his face revealed that he was exhilarated, filled with an excitement he
could barely contain.  Simultaneously, he seemed fearful-not terrified,
not quaking with fear, but troubled by something that prevented him from
giving in completely, happily, to his excitement.

"Father, who is Brendan Cronin?" The tremor in the big man's voice was
of an odd character that might have betrayed either incipient joy or
terror.  "What is Brendan Cronin?"

Stefan hesitated, decided on the full truth.  "He's a priest."

Winton shook his head.  "But that's not what we were told."

Stefan sighed, nodded.  He explained about Brendan's loss of faith and
about the unconventional therapy that had included a week in a police
patrol car.  "You and Officer Armes weren't told he was a priest because
you might've treated him differently .  .  .  and because I wished to
spare him embarrassment."

"A fallen priest," Winton said, looking baffled.

"Not fallen," Father Wycazik said confidently.  "Merely faltering. He'll
regain his faith in time."

The room's inadequate light came from a dim lamp on the nightstand and
from a single narrow window, leaving the dark policeman in velvet gloom.
The whites of his eyes were twin lamps, very bright by contrast with the
darknesses of shadows and genetic heritage.  "How did Brendan heal me
when I was shot?  How did he perform that .  .  .  miracle?  How?"

"Why have you decided it was a miracle?"

"I was shot twice in the chest, point-blank.  Three days later I left
the hospital.  Three days!  In ten days, I was ready to go back to work,
but they made me stay home two weeks.  Doctors kept talking about my
hardy physical condition, the extraordinary healing that's possible if a
body's in tip-top shape. I started thinking they were trying to explain
my recovery not to me but to themselves.  But I still figured I was just
really lucky.  I came back to work a week ago, and then .  .  .

something else happened." Winton unbuttoned his shirt, pulled it open,
and lifted his undershirt to reveal his bare chest. "The scars."

Father Wycazik shivered.  Though he was close to Winton, he leaned
closer, staring in amazement.  The man's chest was unmarked.  Well, not
entirely unmarked, but the entry wounds had already healed until they
were just discolored spots as big as dimes.  The surgeon's incisions had
almost vanished thin lines visible now only on close inspection.  This
soon after major trauma, some swelling and inflammation should have been
evident, but there was none.  The minimal scar tissue was pale
pink-brown against dark-brown skin, neither lumpy nor puckered.

"I've seen other guys with old bullet wounds," Winton said, his
excitement still restrained by a rope of fear.  "Lots of them. Gnarly,
thick.  Ugly.  You don't take two .38s in the chest, undergo major
surgery, and look like this three weeks later or ever."

"When's the last time you visited your doctor?  Has he seen this?"

Winton rebuttoned his shirt with trembling hands.  "I saw Dr.  Sonneford
a week ago.  The sutures hadn't been removed long before, and my chest
was still a mess.  It's only been the past four days that the scars
melted away.  I swear, Father, if I stand at a mirror long enough, I can
see them fading."

Finishing with his shirt buttons, Winton said, "Lately, I've been
thinking about your visit to the hospital Christmas Day. The more I've
gone over it in my mind, the more it seems your behavior was peculiar. I
remember some of what you said, some of the questions you asked about
Brendan, and I start wondering.  .  .  .  One thing I wonder about-one
thing I've got to know -is whether Brendan Cronin ever healed anyone
else."

"Yes.  Nothing as dramatic as your case.  But there's an other.  I'm . .
.  not at liberty to reveal who," Stefan said. "But this isn't why you
called the rectory, Winton.  Not to show Brendan how well you've healed.
Your voice was so full of urgency, even panic.  And what about all these
policemen with the Mendozas ...  ?  What's happened here, Winton?"

A mercurial smile appeared on-and quickly faded fromthe man's broad
face, followed by a transient glimmer of fear. Emotional turmoil was
also evident in his voice.  "We're cruising.  Me and Paul.  We get a
call.  This address.  We get here, find a sixteen-year-old kid high on
PCP.  You know what they're like on PCP sometimes?  Crazy.  Animals.
Damn stuff eats brain cells.  Later, after it's over, we find out his
name's Ernesto, son of Mrs.  Mendoza's sister.  He came to live here a
week ago because his mother can't control him any more. The Mendozas ...
they're good people.  You see how they keep this place?"

Father Wycazik nodded.

Winton said, "The kind of people take in a nephew when he's gone wrong,
try to set him straight.  But you can't set a kid like that straight.
You break your heart trying, Father. This Ernesto, he's been in trouble
since he was in fifth grade. Juvenile arrest record.  Six offenses.  Two
of them pretty serious.  We get here, he's naked as a jaybird, screaming
his head off, eyes bugged out like the pressure in his head's going to
blow his skull apart."

Winton's gaze unfocused, as if he were seeing back into time and had as
clear a view of that scene as when he had first encountered it.

"Ernesto's got Hector, the little boy you probably saw when you came in,
he's got him down on the sofa, holding him, and he's got a goddamn
six-inch switchblade at Hector's throat. Mr.  Mendoza ...  well, he's
going crazy, wanting to rush Ernesto and take the knife, but scared
Ernesto will slash Hector.  Ernesto's screaming, he was blissed on angel
dust. He's PCP-crazy, and you can't talk sense to him.  We drew our guns
because you don't just walk up to some doped-out freak with a knife and
shake hands.  But we didn't want to try to shoot him because he had the
knife at Hector's throat, Hector was crying, and Ernesto could've killed
the kid if we made the wrong move.  So we tried to talk him down, talk
him away from Hector, and we seemed to make headway, cause he started to
take the knife off the boy.  But then all of a sudden, Jesus, he slashed
quick, cut Hector's throat almost from ear to ear, deep"-Winton
shuddered-"deep. Then he raised the knife over his head, so we shot him,
I'm not sure how many times, blew him away, and he fell dead on top of
Hector.  We pulled him off, and there was little Hector, one hand trying
to close up the hole in his throat, blood spurting between his fingers,
eyes already glazing over.........

The cop took a deep breath and shuddered again.  His eyes came back into
focus, as if he needed to retreat from the horror of the past.  He
looked toward the window, beyond which the gray winter daylight sifted
like soot over the gray Uptown street.

Stefan's heart had begun to pound, not because of the bloody horror that
Winton had described but because he could see where the cop's story had
to be leading, and he was eager to hear the miracle described.

Looking at the window, Winton continued.  His voice grew shakier as he
spoke: "There's no first aid for that kind of wound, Father.  Severed
arteries, veins.  Big arteries in the neck.  Blood pumps out like water
from a hose, and you can't use a tourniquet, not on a neck, and direct
pressure won't seal up a carotid artery.  Shit, no.  I knelt on the
floor beside the sofa, and I saw Hector was dying fast.  He looked so
little, Father, so little.  That kind of wound, they're gone in two
minutes, sometimes a lot less, and he was so little.  I knew it was
useless, but I put my hands on Hector's neck, like somehow I could hold
the blood in him, hold the life in him.  I was sick, angry, scared, and
it just wasn't right that a boy so little should die that way, that
hard, not right he should die at all, not right, and then .  .  .
then..  .  ."

"And then he healed," Father Wycazik said softly.

Winton Tolk finally looked away from the gray light at the window and
met Stefan's eyes.  "Yes, Father.  He healed.  He was soaked in his own
blood, seconds away from death, but he healed.  I didn't even know what
was happening, didn't feel it happening, nothing special in my hands.
Wouldn't you think I'd feel something special in my hands?  But the
first I realized that something incredible was happening was when the
blood stopped spurting against my fingers, and the boy shut his eyes at
the same time, which was when I thought he was dead for sure, and I just
.  .  .  I shouted, 'No!  God, no!' And I started to take my hands away
from Hector's throat, to look at it, and that's when I saw the wound was
...  the wound was closed up.  It still had a raw, ugly look to it, an
awful line where the knife cut deep, but the flesh was knit together
into a bright red scar, a healing scar."

The big man stopped speaking because shimmery lenses of tears had formed
over his eyes.  He was overcome once more. If he'd been racked by grief,
he probably would have suppressed it, but this was something even more
powerful: joy. Pure wild disbelieving joy.  He could not contain several
explosive, wrenching sobs.

With hot tears in his own eyes, Father Wycazik held out both hands.

Winton took them, squeezed them tight, and did not let go as he
continued: "Paul, my partner, saw it happen.  So did the Mendozas.  And
two other uniforms arrived just as we shot Ernest: They saw it, too. And
when I looked at that red line across his throat, somehow I knew what I
had to do. I put my hands on the boy again, covered up the wound again,
and I thought about him being alive, sort of wished him alive. My mind
was in high gear, and I made the connection with Brendan and me, the
sandwich shop.  I thought about how the scars on my chest had been
disappearing the last few days, and I knew somehow it's connected.  So I
kept my hands on his throat, and in a minute or so he opened his eyes,
he smiled at me, you should've seen that smile, Father, so I took my
hands away again, and the scar was there but lighter.  The boy sat up
and asked for his mother, and that's ...  that's when I went to pieces."
Winton paused and gulped some air. "Mrs.  Mendoza took Hector into the
bathroom, stripped him out of his bloody clothes, bathed him, and all
the time more people from the department kept showing up.  Word was
getting around.  Thank God, the reporters haven't cottoned to it yet."

For a while the two men sat facing each other in silence, gripping
hands.  Then Stefan said, "Did you try to bring Ernesto back?"

"Yes.  In spite of what he'd done, I put my hands on his wounds.  But it
didn't work with him, Father.  Maybe because he was already dead. Hector
was only dying, not yet gone, but Ernesto was dead."

"Did you notice odd marks in your hands, on your palms?

Red rings of swollen flesh?"

"Nothing like that.  What would it've meant if there'd been rings?"

"I don't know," Father Wycazik said.  "But they appear in Brendan's
hands when ...  when these things happen."

They were silent again, and then Winton said, "Is Brendan ...  is Father
Cronin some kind of saint?"

Father Wycazik smiled.  "He's a good man.  But he's no saint."

"Then how did he heal me?"

"I don't know precisely.  But surely it's a manifestation of the power
of God.  Somehow.  For some reason."

"But how did Brendan pass along this power to heal?"

"I don't know, Winton.  If he did pass it along.  Maybe the power isn't
yours.  Maybe it's just God acting through you, first through Brendan
and then through you."

At last Winton let go of Father Wycazik's hands.  He turned his palms up
and stared at them.  "No, the power's still here, still in me.  I know
that.  Somehow.  I feel it.  And not just ...  not just the power to
heal.  There's more."

Father Wycazik raised his eyebrows.  "More?  What else?"

Winton frowned.  "I don't know yet.  It's all so new.  So strange.  But
I feel ...  more.  It'll take time for it to develop."

He looked up from the pale palms of his callused black hands,
awe-stricken and fearful.  "What is Father Cronin, and what has he made
of me?"

"Winton, get rid of the notion there's anything evil or dangerous about
this.  It's entirely a wondrous thing.  Think of Hector, the child you
saved.  Remember what it was like to feel life regaining its hold in his
small body.  We're players in a divine mystery, Winton.  We can't
understand the meaning of it until God allows us to understand."

Father Wycazik said he wanted to have a look at the boy, Hector Mendoza,
and Winton said, "I'm not ready to go out there and face that crowd,
even though they're mostly my people.  I'll stay here a while.  You'll
come back?"

" I've got other rather urgent business this morning, Winton.  I have to
get on with it soon.  But I'll be in touch with you.  Oh, you can be
sure of that!  And if you need me, just call St.  Bette's."

When Stefan left the bedroom, the waiting crowd of policemen and lab
technicians fell silent as before.  They parted in his path as he
crossed to the dinette table, where little Hector was now perched on his
mother's lap, nibbling happily at a Hershey bar with almonds.

The boy was small, even for a six-year-old, with delicate facial bones.
His eyes were bright and full of intelligence, proof that he'd suffered
no brain damage in spite of losing most of his blood.  But even more
astonishing was the fact that his lost blood had evidently been
replaced, without need of transfusions, which made the boy's recovery
even more miraculous than Tolk's.  The power in Winton's hands seemed
greater than it had been in Brendan's.

When Father Wycazik stooped down to be at eye-level with Hector, the
child grinned at him.  "How are you feeling, Hector?"

"Okay," the boy said shyly.

"Do you remember what happened to you, Hector?"

The child licked chocolate from his lips and shook his head: no.

"Is that a good candy bar?"

The boy nodded and offered Father Wycazik a bite.

The priest smiled.  "Thank you, Hector, but that's all yours."

"Mama might give you one," Hector said.  "But don't drop any on the
carpet.  That's big trouble."

Stefan looked up at Mrs.  Mendoza.  "He really doesn't remember .  .
.?"

"No," she said.  "God lifted the memory from him, Father."

"You're Catholic, Mrs.  Mendoza?"

,,Yes, Father," she said, crossing herself with her free hand.

"Do you attend Our Lady of Sorrow?  Yes, well, that's Father Nilo's
parish.  Have you called him?"

"No, Father.  I didn't know if .  .  ."

Father Wycazik looked up at Mr.  Mendoza, who stood on the other side of
his wife's chair.  "Call Father Nilo.  Tell him what's happened, ask him
to come.  Explain that I'll be gone when he gets here but that I'll talk
to him later.  Explain that I've much to tell him, that what he sees
here isn't the whole story."

Mr.  Mendoza hurried to the telephone.

Looking up at one of the detectives who had come close, Stefan said,
"Have you taken pictures of the boy's throat wound?"

The detective nodded.  "Yeah.  Standard procedure." He laughed
nervously.  "What am I saying?  There's nothing standard about this."

"Just so you have photographs to prove this happened," Father Wycazik
said.  "Because I think soon there will be little or no scar."

He turned to the boy again.  "Now, Hector, if it's okay, I'd like to
touch your throat.  I'd like to feel that mark."

The boy lowered the candy bar.

Father Wycazik's fingers were trembling when they touched the fiery scar
tissue and moved slowly around the boy's neck from one end of the wound
to the other.  A strong pulse beat in the carotid arteries on each side
of the slender young throat, and Stefan's heart leapt when he felt the
miracle of life.  Death had been defeated here, and Stefan believed he
had been privileged to witness a fulfillment of the promise which was at
the root of the Church's existence: "Death shall not last; unto you
shall be given life everlasting." Tears rose in the priest's eyes.

When at last Stefan reluctantly took his hand away from the boy and
stood, one of the policemen said, "What's it mean, Father?  I heard you
tell Mr.  Mendoza this wasn't the whole story.  What's happening?"

Stefan turned to look upon the assembly, which now numbered twenty.  In
their faces, he saw a longing to believe, not particularly in the truths
of Catholicism or Christianity, for not all were Catholics or
Christians, but a deep-seated longing to believe in something greater
and better and cleaner than humankind, an intense yearning for spiritual
transcendence.

"What's it mean, Father?" one of them asked again.

"Something's happening," he told them.  "Here, elsewhere. A great and
wonderful something.  This child is part of it.  I can't tell you for
sure what it means or that we've seen the hand of God here, though I
believe we have.  Look at Hector on his mother's lap, eating candy, and
remember God's promise: "There shall be no more death, neither sorrow
nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things
are passed away." In my heart of hearts, I feel that the former things
are about to pass away.  Now I must go.  I've urgent business."

Somewhat to his surprise, even though his explanation had been vague,
they parted to make way for him and did not detain him further, perhaps
because the miracle of Hector Mendoza had not been vague-had in fact
been emphatically specific-and had already given them more answers than
they could handle.  But as Stefan went, some reached out to touch him,
to squeeze his hand or shoulder, not with religious fervor but with an
emotional camaraderie.  Stefan was overcome by the need to touch them as
well, to share a profound sense of the community of humankind, which had
filled everyone -in the room, to share the conviction that they were
being swept toward some great destiny.

In Boston, at ten o'clock, Alexander Christophson, former United States
Senator and Ambassador to Great Britain, former Director of the CIA, now
retired for a decade, was reading the morning newspaper when he received
a telephone call from his brother, Philip, the antiques dealer in
Greenwich, Connecticut.  They spoke for five minutes about nothing
important, just two brothers keeping in touch, but the conversation had
a secret purpose.  At the end Philip said, "Oh, by the way, I spoke with
Diana just this morning.  Do you remember her?"

"I certainly do," Alex said.  "How's she doing?"

"Oh, she has her troubles," Philip said.  "Too boring to discuss.  But
she says hello." Then he changed the subject, recommending two new books
that Alex might enjoy, as if Diana were of no real importance.

Diana was the code word that meant Ginger Weiss had phoned Philip and
needed to speak with Alex.  The moment he had seen Ginger at Pablo's
funeral, her silver-blond hair a-shimmer as if with a light of its own,
she had made him think of Diana, goddess of the moon.

After he said goodbye to Philip, he told his wife, Elena, that he
intended to drive to the mall.  "I want to stop at the bookstore and
pick up a couple of novels that Philip recommended."

He actually went to the mall, but before he bought the books, he found a
public phone booth and, using his AT&T credit card, called Philip to get
the number that Ginger Weiss had left.

"She says it's a pay phone in Elko, Nevada," Philip told him.

When Alex put the Nevada call through, Ginger Weiss did not answer until
the fifth ring.  "Sorry," she said.  "I was in the car, parked beside
the booth.  It was just too cold to stand here and wait."

"What are you doing in Nevada?" Alex asked.

"If I understood you correctly at Pablo's funeral, you really don't want
me to answer questions like that."

"Right.  Less I know, the better.  What did you want to ask me?"

She explained, with a minimum of detail, that she had found others
suffering from memory blocks similar to hers, some with different false
memories covering the same time span.  Since Alex was the expert on
brainwashing, Ginger wanted to know if implanting fake memories that
included threads of reality was more difficult than implanting entirely
false recollections, and he was able to assure her that, indeed, it was.

"That's what we figured," Ginger said.  "But it's good to hear you
confirm it.  Shows we're on the right track.  Now, one more thing: I
want you to get some information for us. We need to know whatever you
can learn about a Colonel Leland Falkirk, an officer in one of the
Army's elite DERO companies.  I also need-"

"Wait, wait," Alex said, looking nervously through the glass door of the
booth at shoppers walking past in the mall, as if he were already under
observation or even targeted for removal.  "At the cemetery, I said I'd
provide advice or background on mind-control techniques.  But I warned
you I wouldn't dig up information.  I explained my position."

"Well, even though you've been retired for years, you must still know
people in many of the right places-"

"Didn't you hear me, Doctor?  I will not get actively involved in your
problems.  I simply can't afford to.  I've got too much to lose."

"Now, don't worry about digging up anything exotic or highly classified.
We don't expect that," she said, as if she had not heard him.  "Just the
bare details of Falkirk's service record might help us understand him
and form an idea of what to expect from him."

"Please, I-" But she was indefatigable: "I also need to know about the
Thunder Hill Depository, an Army facility here in Elko County."

"No."

"It's supposed to be an underground storage facility, and maybe that's
all it was for a long time, or maybe it's always been something else,
but I know it's not just an underground warehouse these days."

"Doctor, I won't do this for you."

"Colonel Leland Falkirk and Thunder Hill Depository.  It's not so much
to ask: no deep snooping, just what details you can glean.  Talk to your
old friends whore still in the game. Then report to either Dr.  George
Hannaby there in Boston or to Father Stefan Wycazik, a priest in
Chicago."." She gave him phone numbers.  "I can get in touch with them,
and they won't mention your name when they tell me what you've reported.
That way you don't have to call me direct, and you stay in the clear."

He tried and failed to control the palsied shaking of his hands.
"Doctor, I'm sorry I volunteered even limited assistance.  I'm an old
man who's afraid to die."

"You're also worried about sins you might've committed in the name of
duty," she said, repeating what he'd told her at the cemetery.  "And
you'd probably like to do something to atone for some of those sins,
real or imagined.  This would be atonement of a sort, Mr.  Christophson.
" She repeated the telephone numbers for Hannaby and Wycazik.

"No.  If you're interrogated, remember I said no, emphatically no."

With maddening good cheer, she said, "Oh, and it would help if you had
something for me within the next six or eight hours.  I know that's a
tall order.  But then again, I'm only asking for basic information,
whatever's in the unclassified files."

"Goodbye, Doctor," he said pointedly.

"I'll look forward to hearing from you."

"You will not hear from me."

"Toodle-oo," she said, and hung up on him first.

"Christ!" he said, slamming the receiver down.

She was an attractive woman, personable, intelligent, appealing in so
many ways.  But her absolute conviction that she would always get what
she wanted-this was a trait he sometimes admired in a man, seldom or
never in a woman.  Well,

she'd be disappointed this time.  This time, she'd not get what she
wanted.  Damned if she would.

Yet ...  with his Cross pen, he had made note of the telephone numbers
for Hannaby and Wycazik, which she had given him.

Dom and Ernie set out early Tuesday morning to reconnoiter at least part
of the perimeter of Thunder Hill Depository. They went in Jack Twist's
new Jeep Cherokee.  Jack himself was sleeping back at the motel, having
gone to bed only a few hours ago, after spending half the night driving
around Elko, staying on the move with Brendan Cronin and Jorja
Monatella.  Both the Cherokee and the motel's Dodge van had four-wheel
drive, but the Jeep was tougher, more maneuverable.  The foothill and
mountain roads up toward Thunder Hill might be icy in spots, and as the
day promised new snow, they wanted the most reliable transportation.

Dom did not like the look of the sky.  Thick dark clouds hung low over
the high plains, lower over the foothills, and obscured the tops of the
mountains.  The weather forecast called for the first big storm of the
year (later than usual this season), as much as fourteen inches of snow
in the higher elevations.  Not a single flake had fallen yet.

The raised and threatening lash of winter did not induce a pensive mood
in Dom or Ernie; they were in high spirits upon setting out from the
motel.  They were finally doing something, acting not just reacting.  In
addition, there was the pleasant fellowship that exists when men who
like each other set out on an adventure together-a fishing trip or an
expedition to a ballpark.  Or a scouting trip to explore the perimeter
defenses of a military installation.

In no little measure, their excellent mood grew from the unexpected
peacefulness of the night just past.  For the first time in weeks, Dom's
sleep hadn't been disturbed by nightmares or sleepwalking.  He'd dreamed
only of an undetailed chamber filled with golden light, evidently the
same place that featured in Brendan's dreams.  Likewise, instead of
lying awake in fear of the shadows beyond the glow of the bedside lamp,
Ernie had drifted off to sleep at once.  The others also said it was the
most restful night in recent memory.  Ginger's theory, put forth over a
quick cup of coffee this morning, was that their worst dreams had been
related not to the mysterious events they'd witnessed on the night of
July 6, but to the subsequent brainwashing.  Therefore, now that they
had an idea of what they'd endured at the hands of the mindcontrol
experts, the subconscious pressure related to those experiences was
relieved, eliminating the source of those particular bad dreams.

And Dom had a reason of his own to feel good about the day.  This
morning, no one had looked warily at him or treated him with deference
because of his telekinetic power.  At first he was baffled by their
quick adjustment to his new status. Then he realized what must be going
through their minds: Since they had shared his experiences of the summer
before last, it was logical that they would also share his strange power
sooner or later.  They must believe their own development of paranormal
abilities was merely lagging behind his.  Eventually, if they did not
acquire the power, they might build the emotional, intellectual, and
psychological walls between them and him that would isolate him, as he
feared.  But for the moment, anyway, they were acting as if no gulf
separated them from him, and he was grateful.

Now, humming softly, Ernie drove north on the two-lane county road,
leaving the motel and the interstate behind them. They climbed some of
the same rugged hills down which Jack Twist had come last night when
making his clandestine approach to the Tranquility (although Jack had
traveled overland), and Dom studied the changing terrain with interest.
The rising land seemed leaner the higher it rose, revealing less flesh
and more rocky bones that poked up everywhere in clavicles and scapulae
and sternums of limestone, in fibulae and femurs of crumbling shale, in
occasional ribs and spines of formidable granite.  As if in awareness of
the colder air of higher altitudes, the land wore more clothes: thicker
petticoats of grass; more lavish skirts of sage and other bushes; then
trees, trees, more trees-mountain mahogany, tall pines, cedar,
quaking-aspen, and on eastern slopes, an occasional spruce or fir.

They'd gone only three miles when they reached the snow line.  A thin
mantle flanked the road at first, but in the next two miles it deepened
to eight inches.  Although a winter drought had held sway from September
until early December, and although no major storm had swept the area yet
this season, a few light snows had put down a respectable groundcover,
also frosting the bristled boughs of the evergreens.

But for a few small scattered patches of ice, the county road was
cleared for easy travel.  "They always keep it clean as far as Thunder
Hill, even in killing weather," Ernie explained.  "But up beyond the
Depository, the road crews don't do as thorough a job."

In no time they had gone ten miles, always following the crest of the
valley that fell away on the east, and always with rising mountains on
the west.  They passed several dirt and gravel lanes leading to isolated
homes and ranches in the eastward-sloping lands to their right, and at
the ten-mile point they reached the guarded entrance road to Thunder
Hill Depository, also on the right.

Ernie slowed the Cherokee but did not turn into the entranceway.
"Haven't been this far up here in a long time. They've made changes
since I saw the place last.  Didn't used to look this formidable."

A sign announced the Depository.  Beside the sign another paved road
branched off the county lane, leading away between towering pines of
such a dark-green hue they seemed nearly black in the somber prestorm
light.  Fifteen feet in from the turnoff, the lane was blocked by long
metal spikes that speared up from the pavement, precisely angled to
puncture the tires of any vehicle that tried to proceed farther, but
also large enough to catch on the axle of a hurtling truck or car and
instantly arrest its progress.  Twenty feet beyond the spikes, there was
a massive steel gate, crowned with spears, painted red.  A
concrete-block guardhouse-twenty feet by ten-stood inside the gate, and
its black metal door looked capable of withstanding a bazooka barrage.

Ernie pulled to the edge of the main road and slowed almost to a full
stop as they eased past the entrance to Thunder Hill. He pointed to a
yard-square post at the verge of the entrance lane, just this side of
the wicked spikes.  "Looks like an intercom to the guardhouse.  Not just
a voice link, either.  One of those systems like they have in drive-in
banks, with a video monitor so they can see you in your car.  The man in
the guardhouse approves' a visitor before the road spikes lower and the
gate opens.  Even then, I'll bet there're permanently emplaced machine
guns to take you out if the guard decides he's been duped after he's
already opened the gates."

From each end of the gate, an eight-foot-high chainlink fence with a
barbed-wire overhang disappeared into the trees, and Dom noted a white
sign with red lettering that warned DANGER-ELECTRiFIED.  Although the
perimeter fence led into the forest, no trees overhung it; from the
small sections that he could see flanking the main gate, there appeared
to be a twenty-foot-wide no-man's-land on each side.

Dom's good mood faded.  He'd thought that the security along the
perimeter of the facility would be minimal.  After all, once you got
onto the grounds, the actual entrance to Thunder Hill was through eight-
or ten-foot-thick blast doors set in the hillside.  That barrier was so
impregnable that it seemed wasteful to install maximum security around
the entire outer edge of the property.  Yet that was what they had done.
Which meant the secret they were guarding was so important that they did
not even trust nuclearproof doors and subterranean limestone vaults to
keep it safe.

"The spikes in the road are new," Ernie said.  "And the gate they had a
couple of years ago was pretty flimsy by comparison.  The fence was
always here, but it wasn't electrified before."

"We've no hope at all of getting a look inside."

Although no one had said as much (for fear of sounding foolish), they
all hoped they might get as far as the blast doors of the facility, have
a look around the newly expanded grounds that had been taken from
ranchers Brust and Dirkson, and be fortunate enough to stumble across
another piece of the puzzle they were committed to solve.  Dom had never
imagined they would actually get inside the underground rooms of Thunder
Hill.  That was an improbable scenario.  But from the comfort of the
Tranquility Motel, getting onto the grounds and snooping around had not
seemed like an impossible dream. Until now.

Dom wondered if his newly discovered telekinetic powers might be used to
circumvent the Depository's fortifications, but he dismissed that
thought as quickly as it occurred to him.  Until he could control the
gift, it was of little use.  It scared him.  He sensed that the power
was sufficient to cause tremendous destruction and death if he lost
control of it, and he would not take the chance again-except under very
tightly controlled conditions.

"Well," Ernie said, "it was never our intention to try waltzing through
the front gate.  Let's have a look along some of the perimeter fence."
He touched his foot lightly on the accelerator.  Looking in the rearview
mirror, he said, "Oh, and by the way, we're being followed."

Startled, Dom turned and looked through the rear window of the Cherokee.
Less than a hundred yards behind was a pickup truck, an all-terrain job,
loftily perched on tires twice as wide and more than twice as high as
ordinary tires.  Spotlights, currently unlit, were mounted on the roof,
and a snowplow, currently raised off the road, was fitted to the front.
Although Dom was certain that private citizens living in the mountains
might own similar trucks, this one had the look of a military vehicle.
The windshield was tinted, the driver unrevealed.

He said, "You sure they're following us?  When did they show up?"

Piloting the Cherokee up the county road, Ernie said, "I noticed them
about half a mile after we left the motel.  When we slow down, they slow
down, too.  When we speed up, so do they."

"You think there's going to be trouble?"

"There will be if they ask for it.  They're probably only Army pussies,"
Ernie said.  He grinned.

Dom laughed.  "Don't get me in a war just to prove Leathernecks are
tougher than GIs.  I'll happily accept your word for it."

The road became steeper.  The somber ashen sky grew lower. The dark
trees drew closer on both sides.  The pickup stayed behind them.

Mrs.  Halbourg, Emmy's mother, answered the door, letting a puff of warm
air out of the house into the frigid Chicago morning.

Father Wycazik said, "Sorry to come unannounced like this, but the most
extraordinary thing is happening, and I had to find out if Emmy-"

He stopped in midsentence when he realized that Mrs. Halbourg was in
terrible distress.  Her eyes were wide with shock-with fear, too.

Before he could ask what was wrong, she said, "My God, it's you, Father.
From the hospital, I remember.  But how did you know to come?  We
haven't called anyone yet.  How'd you know to come?"

"What's happened?"

Rather than answer, she took him by the arm, ushered him inside, slammed
the door, and hurried him upstairs.  "This way.  Quickly."

Coming directly from the Mendozas' apartment Uptown, he expected to find
something odd at the Halbourg place, but not this state of crisis.  When
they reached the second-floor hallway, Mr.  Halbourg was there with one
of Emmy's older sisters.  They were standing halfway down the hall at an
open door, staring into a room at something that seemed equally to
attract and repel them.  In the room, something thumped, rattled, then
thumped twice again, followed by a musical burst of girlish laughter.

Mr.  Halbourg turned, a ghastly expression on his face, and blinked in
surprise at Stefan.  "Father, thank God you're here, we didn't know what
to do, didn't want to make complete fools of ourselves by calling for
help and then maybe nothing's happening when help gets here, you know.
But now you've come, so it's settled, and I'm relieved."

Stefan looked warily through the open doorway and saw the usual
accouterments of a bedroom occupied by a girl of ten-going-on-eleven,
the changeling age between childhood and adolescence: half a dozen teddy
bears; big posters of the current teenage idols, boys utterly unknown to
Stefan; a wooden hat rack hung with a collection of exotic chapeaux
probably purchased from thrift shops; roller skates; a tape deck; a
flute lying in an open case.  Emmy's other sister-in a white sweater,
tartan-plaid skirt, and kneesocks-was standing a few feet inside the
room, pale and half-paralyzed. Emmy was standing up in bed, pajama-clad,
looking even healthier than on Christmas Day.  She was hugging a pillow,
grinning at the same astonishing performance-a poltergeist at play-that
riveted her sister and frightened the rest of her family.

As Father Wycazik stepped into the room, Emmy laughed delightedly at the
antics of two small teddy bears waltzing in midair.  Their movements
were nearly as precise and formal as those of real dancers.

But the bears were not the only inanimate objects infused with magical
life.  The roller skates were not standing still in a corner but were
moving about on separate courses, this one past the foot of the bed and
then to the closet door, that one to the desk, this one to the window,
moving fast, then slow. The hats jiggled on the rack. A Care Bear on a
bookshelf bounced up and down.

Stefan went to the foot of the bed, careful to avoid the roller skates,
and looked up at Emmy, who still stood on the mattress.  "Emmy?"

The girl glanced down at him.  "Pudge's friend!  Hello, Father. Isn't it
terrific?  Isn't it wild?"

"Emmy, is this you?" he asked, gesturing at the capering objects.

"Me?" she said, genuinely surprised.  "No.  Not me."

But he noticed that the flying-waltzing bears faltered when she turned
her attention away from them.  They did not drop to the floor, but
bobbled and turned and bumped against one another in a clumsy and
aimless manner quite different from their previous measured grace.

He also saw indications that the previous phenomena had not all been
this harmless.  A ceramic lamp had been knocked to the floor and broken.
One of the posters was torn.  The dresser mirror was cracked.

Seeing the direction of his gaze, Emmy said, "It was scary at first. But
it calmed down, and now it's just .  .  .  fun.  Isn't it fun?"

As she was speaking, the flute rose out of the open carrying case, up
and up, until it was about seven feet off the floor, only a few feet to
the left of the floating teddy bears.  Out of the corner of her eye, the
girl caught a glimpse of the rising instrument.  When she turned to look
directly at the flute, sweet music began to issue from it, not just
random notes but a well-executed tune.  Emmy jumped up and down on the
bed excitedly.  "That's 'Annie's Song'!  I used to play that."

"You're playing it now," Stefan said.

"Oh, no," she said, still staring at the flute.  "My hands got so bad,
my knuckle joints, that I had to give up the flute a year ago.  I'm
cured now, but my hands still aren't good enough to play."

Stefan said, "But you aren't using your hands to play it,

Emmy."

His meaning finally penetrated.  She looked down at him.

"Me?"

Deprived of her focused attention, the flute produced only a few more
poorly executed notes and fell silent.  It still hung in the air, but
now it bobbled and dipped erratically.  Emmy returned her attention to
the instrument.  It steadied in the air and began to play again.

"Me," she said wonderingly.  She turned to her sister, who was still
paralyzed by fear and amazement.  "Me," Emmy said, then looked at her
parents, who were standing in the doorway.  "Me!"

Stefan appreciated what the child must be feeling, and his throat was
pinched so tightly with emotion that he had difficulty swallowing.  A
month ago, she'd been a cripple, unable to dress herself, with nothing
to look forward to except further deterioration, pain, and death.  Now
she was not only cured and her damaged bones reknit, but she was also in
possession of this spectacular gift.

Father Wycazik wanted to tell her that somehow this gift had been given
to her unwittingly by Brendan Cronin, her Pudge, but then he would have
to explain where Brendan had gotten his gift, and he could not do that.
Besides, he hadn't time even to tell them what he did know.  It was
ninefifteen.  He should have been in Evanston by now.  Time was of the
essence, for Stefan was beginning to suspect that he would be catching a
flight for Nevada before the day ended. Whatever was happening in Elko
County was bound to be even more incredible than what was happening
here, and he was determined to be a part of it.

Emmy looked at the floating bears, and they resumed their formal dance
once more.  She giggled.

Stefan thought about what Winton Tolk had said only a short while ago in
the Mendozas' Uptown apartment: The power's still here, still in me.  I
know .  .  .  I feel it.  And not just .  .  .  not just the power to
heal.  There's more.  Winton had not known what powers he might possess
in addition to the healing touch, but Stefan suspected that the
policeman was in for some surprises similar to those that had thrown the
Halbourg household into turmoil.

"Father, will you do it yourself?" Mr.  Halbourg asked from the doorway,
where he stood with his wife, his voice sharp

with anxiety.

Mrs.  Halbourg said, "Please, we want it to be done as soon as possible.
Immediately.  Can't you begin at once?"

Baffled, Stefan said, "I'm sorry .  .  .  but what is it you want done?"

Mr.  Halbourg said, "An exorcism, of course!"

Stefan stared at them incredulously, only now fully realizing why they
had been in such distress when he had arrived and why they had greeted
him with such relief.  He laughed.  "There won't be any need for an
exorcism.  This isn't Satan at work. Oh, no.  My heavens, no!"

From the corner of his eye, Stefan saw movement on the floor.  He looked
down at a two-foot-high teddy bear that was tottering past him on stiff
little stuffed legs.

Winton Tolk had said that he sensed he would need a long time to learn
what his powers were and to be able to control them.  Either he was
wrong or the task was far easier for Emmy than for him.  That might be
the case.  Children were much more adaptable than adults.

Emmy's parents and her other sister edged into the room, fascinated but
wary.

Stefan understood their wariness.  All seemed well, the power benign.
But the situation was so awesome, so profoundly affecting on a primitive
level, that even an unfaltering optimist like Stefan Wycazik felt a
tingle of fear.

After using a pay phone at a Shell service station in Elko to get in
touch with Alexander Christophson in Boston, Ginger accompanied Faye to
Elroy and Nancy Jamison's ranch in the Lemoille Valley, twenty miles
from Elko.  The Jamisons were the Blocks' friends who had been visiting
on the evening of July 6, the summer before last.  They had surely been
caught up in the unknown events of that night and had been detained at
the motel for brainwashing, with everyone else, though they remembered
differently, of course.  According to their program of false memories,
they had been allowed to evacuate the danger zone, taking Ernie and Faye
with them.  They believed they had returned to their small ranch, where
they and the Blocks had passed the next few days.  That was also what
Faye and Ernie had believed-until recently.

Ginger and Faye were paying a visit to the Jamisons not to inform them
of what had actually happened but to determine, as indirectly as
possible, if the Jamisons were having troubles of the kind afflicting
Ginger, Ernie, Dom, and some

of the others.  If they were suffering, they would be brought into the
mutually supportive community at the motel-the members of which had come
to think of themselves as the "Tranquility family"-and would join the
search for answers.

But if the brainwashing had been effective, the Jamisons would not be
told anything.  To tell the Jamisons would be to endanger them.

Besides, given the urgent strategy developed last night with Jack Twist,
if the Jamisons were not already suffering, there was no point wasting a
lot of time convincing them that they'd' been brainwashed.  Time was
precious, and every passing hour carried the Tranquility family deeper
into danger.  Jack believed-and convinced Ginger-that their enemies
would soon move against them.

The drive from Elko in the motel's van was quick and scenic.  The
picturesque Lemoille Valley-fifteen miles long, four miles wide-began at
the foot of the Ruby Mountains. Wheat, barley, and potato farms occupied
the lowlands, though the fields were unplanted now, slumbering under
scattered patches of snow.

Between the valley floor and the mountains, the higher lands and
foothills offered lush pasturage, and that was where the Jamisons had
their ranch.  At one time, they owned hundreds of acres on which they
raised cattle, but eventually they sold off much of their property,
which had risen substantially in value, and got out of the livestock
business.  Now, in their early sixties and retired, they owned about
fifty acres in the foothills, employed no ranch hands, and kept only
three horses and a few chickens.

As Faye turned off the main valley road onto a lane leading into the
highlands, she said, "I think someone's following US.

The back doors of the van had no windows, so Ginger looked at the
side-mounted mirror.  A nondescript sedan was about a hundred feet
behind them.  "How do you know?"

"Same car's been back there since the Union 76 in town."

"Maybe it's coincidence," Ginger said.

When they had followed the lane over halfway up the valley wall, they
reached the long narrow driveway to the Jamisons' ranch, which led half
a mile back through deep shadows thrown by flanking rows of big pines.
Faye pulled into the driveway and slowed to see what the other car would
do.  Instead of going past, farther up into the hills, it pulled to a
stop and parked along the outer lane, directly across from the entrance
to the Jamisons' property.

In the sideview mirror, Ginger could see that the car was a late-model
Plymouth, painted a flat ugly brown-green.

"Obviously a government heap," Faye said.

"Pretty bold, aren't they?"

"Well, if they've been eavesdropping on us the way Jack says, through
our own telephones, then they know we're on to them, so maybe they
figure there's no point in playing coy with us." Faye took her foot off
the brake and headed up the driveway.

Watching the unmarked Plymouth dwindle in the side mirror, Ginger said,
"Or maybe they're getting in position to take us into custody.  Maybe
they've put tails on all of us, and maybe they're just waiting for the
order to snatch us all at the same time."

On the narrow, gravel driveway, the interlacing shadows of the
overarching pines wove a darkness nearly as deep as night.

As they drove up the two-lane road through the broad snowcovered meadow
toward the massive blast doors, Colonel Falkirk sat in the front
passenger's seat of the Wagoneer, thinking about the catastrophe that
would ensue from the revelation of Thunder Hill's secret.

From a political perspective, this would make the Watergate mess look
like a tea party.  An unprecedented number of competing government
institutions were involved in the cover-up, organizations that often
operated in jealous opposition to one another-the FBI, CIA, National
Security Agency, the United States Army, the Air Force, and others. It
was a testament to the degree of potential danger that these groups
could work together with nary a hitch and without a single leak in more
than eighteen months.  But if the coverup were uncovered, the scandal
would extend throughout so much of the government that the faith of the
American people in their leaders would be severely shaken.  Of course,
very few in any of those organizations knew what had happened, no more
than six in the FBI, fewer in the CIA; most of their men involved in the
cover-up didn't know what they were covering up, which was why there had
been no leaks.  But the numero uno of each organization-the Director of
the FBI, the Director of the CIA, the Chief of Staff of the Armywas
completely in the know.  Not to mention the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff.  And the Secretary of State.  And the President, his closest
advisers, the Vice-President.  A lot of prominent men might fall from
grace if this affair was not kept under lock and key.

The political destruction wrought by the release of the secret would be
only a small part of the devastation.  The CISGa think-tank of
physicists, biologists, anthropologists, sociologists, theologists,
economists, educators, and other learned people-had pondered precisely
this crisis at great length and depth, years before it had arisen here
in Nevada.  The CISG had issued a 1220-page top-secret report on its
conclusions, a document that offered some disturbing reading.  Leland
knew that report by heart, for he was the military representative to the
CISG and had helped write several position papers included in the final
text.  Within the CISG, the opinion was unanimous that the world would
never be the same if such an event were to occur.  All societies, all
cultures would be radically changed forever.  Projected deaths over the
first two years ranged in the millions.

Lieutenant Horner, who was driving the Wagoneer, braked twenty feet in
front of the giant blast doors that were set in the sudden steep upper
slope of the meadow.  He didn't wait for the huge barriers to open, for
he was not driving directly into Thunder Hill.  Horner turned right,
into a small parking lot, where three minibuses, four Jeep wagons, a
Land Rover, and several other vehicles stood side by side.

The twin blast doors, each thirty feet high and twenty feet wide, were
so thick they could be opened only at a ponderous pace, producing a
rumble that could be heard a mile away and felt in the air and in the
ground at least half as far.  When a truck-loaded with ammunition,
weapons, or suppliespulled up in front of the drive-in entrance, the
doors required five minutes to roll apart.  Opening those hangar-sized
portals every time a lone man needed to walk in or out was unthinkably
inefficient, so a second, man-sized door-nearly as formidable-was set in
the hillside thirty feet to the right of the main entrance.

There was no better vault than Thunder Hill in which to keep the secret
of July 6.  It was an impregnable fortress.

Leland and Lieutenant Horner hurried through the bitter air to the
walk-in entrance.  The small steel door, almost as blastproof as the
massive versions to the left, had an electronic lock that could be
disengaged only by tapping the proper four numbers on a keyboard.  The
code changed every two weeks, and those entrusted with it were required
to commit it to memory.  Leland punched in the code, and the
fourteen-inchthick, lead-core door slid aside with a sudden pneumatic
whoosh.

They stepped into a twelve-foot-long concrete tunnel about nine feet in
diameter and brightly lit.  It angled to the left. At the end was
another door identical to the first, but it could not be opened until
the outer door was closed.  Leland touched a heat-sensitive switch just
inside the tunnel entrance, and the outer door hissed shut behind him
and Lieutenant Horner.

Immediately, a pair of video cameras, mounted on the ceiling at opposite
ends of the chamber, clicked on.  The cameras tracked the two men as
they walked to the inner door.

No human eyes were watching the colonel and lieutenant on any video
display, for the system was operated entirely by VIGILANT, the security
computer, as a precaution against the possibility that a traitor within
Thunder Hill's own guard unit might open the facility to hostile forces.
VIGILANT was not linked to the installation's main computer or to the
outside world; therefore, it was invulnerable to saboteurs seeking to
take control of it by means of a modern or other electronic tap.

The guard at the perimeter fence had notified VIGILANT that Colonel
Leland Falkirk and Lieutenant Thomas Homer would be arriving.  Now, as
they approached the inner door under the gazes of video cameras, the
computer compared their appearance to stored holographic images of them,
rapidly matching forty-two points of facial resemblance.  It was
impossible to deceive VIGILANT either with makeup or with a look-alike
for an approved visitor.  If Leland or Horner had been an imposter or
unauthorized visitor, VIGILANT would have sounded an alarm,
simultaneously filling the entrance tunnel with a sedative gas.

The lock on the inner door had no keyboard; no code would open it.
Instead, a one-foot-square panel of glass was set in the wall beside the
door.  Leland almost pressed his right hand palm-down against the panel,
hesitated, then used his left, and the glass lit, and a faint humming
arose.  VIGILANT scanned his palmprint and fingerprints, comparing them
to the prints in its files.

Lieutenant Horner said, "Almost as hard to get in here as into heaven."

"Harder," Leland said.

The light behind the milky glass winked out, and Leland took his hand
away.  The inner door opened.

They stepped into a huge natural tunnel that had been improved by human
hands.  The domed rock overhead was lost in darkness because the
lighting fixtures were suspended from black metal scaffolding, creating
the illusion of a ceiling perhaps twenty or thirty feet below the true
ceiling.  The tunnel was sixty feet across and led into the mountain
about a hundred and twenty yards.  In some places the rock walls had
natural contours, but in other places they carried the imprints of
dynamite blasts and jackhammers and other tools that had been used to
widen the narrow portions of the passageway. Incoming trucks could drive
along the concrete floor to unloading bays beside immense cargo
elevators that went down into deeper regions of the facility.

A guard sat at a table beyond the door by which Leland and Horner
entered.  Considering the remoteness of Thunder Hill, the extent of
sophisticated defenses, and the thoroughness with which VIGILANT
examined all visitors, a lone sentry seemed superfluous to Leland.

Evidently, the sentry was of that same opinion, for he was not prepared
for trouble.  His revolver was holstered.  He was eating a candy bar.
Reluctantly, he looked up from an old novel by Jack Finney.

He wore a coat because the open areas of the Depository were never
heated; only the enclosed living quarters and work areas were kept warm.
An enormous power supply was provided by a mini hydroelectric plant that
harnessed an underground river, plus backup diesel generators, but there
was not enough to warm the mammoth caverns.  The subterranean
temperature was a stable fifty-five degrees, quite bearable if one
dressed for long work periods in the chilly air, as the guard had done.

He saluted.  "Colonel Falkirk, Lieutenant Horner, you're cleared to see
Dr.  Bennell.  You know how to find him, of course."

"Of course," Falkirk said.

Ten feet to the left, the burnished steel surface of the giant blast
doors glimmered softly in the fluorescent light, looking rather like the
sheer face of a great glacier.  Leland and Lieutenant Horner turned
right, away from the big doors, and walked deeper into the mountain,
toward the elevators.

Thunder Hill Depository was equipped with hydraulic lifts of three
sizes, the largest of which rivaled the enormous elevators on aircraft
carriers.  A carrier's lifts were used to bring planes from the ship's
hold onto the flight deck, and Thunder Hill's also lowered and raised
planes, among other things.  In addition to 2.4 billion dollars of
equipment and materielfreeze-dried food, medicine, portable field
hospitals, clothing, blankets, tents, handguns, rifles, mortars, field
artillery, ammunition, light military vehicles such as Jeeps and armored
personnel carriers, and twenty backpack nukes-the vast storage dump
contained a variety of useful aircraft.  First, the helicopters: thirty
Sikorsky S-67 Blackhawk antitank gunships; twenty Bell Kingcobras; eight
Anglo-French Westland Pumas, general purpose transports; and three big
Medevac choppers.  No conventional aircraft were stored at Thunder Hill,
but there were twelve vertical takeoff jets of the type manufactured in
England by Hawker Siddeley and known there as Harriers, but which were
called AV-8As when in U S.  service.  Because the Harriers were equipped
with powerful vectored-thrust engines, the craft could land and take off
vertically, without need of a runway.  In a grave crisisfor example,
subsequent to a limited nuclear strike and a land invasion by enemy
troops-the aircraft of Thunder Hill, both choppers and Harriers, could
be lifted to the top level, rolled out through the massive blast doors,
and sent hurtling into the sky.

However, the current crisis did not involve war or require the
unleashing of the Depository's aircraft, so Leland and the lieutenant
bypassed the two immense elevators.  They also passed the two smaller
but still oversize cargo elevators, their footsteps echoing off the
stone walls, and took one of the three smallest cabs-about the size of a
standard lift in a hotel-down into the bowels of Thunder Hill.

Medical supplies, food, guns, and all ammunition were stored on the
third level, the bottom floor of the complex, in a network of chambers
which had been caulked, equipped with pressure-release bores, and fitted
with doors for the purpose of blast containment.  On the second-the
middle-level, all the vehicles and aircraft were kept in other huge
caverns, and it was there, too, that the staff lived and worked.

Leland and Lieutenant Horner got off the lift at the second level.  They
stepped into a lighted, circular, rock-wall chamber three hundred feet
in diameter.  It served as a hub-in fact, persofinel called it The
Hub-from which four other caverns opened; and still more rooms lay
beyond those four.  The larger of those deep vaults contained-among
other thingsthe aircraft, Jeeps, and armored personnel carriers.

There were no doors on three of the four caverns which led off The Hub,
for there was no serious danger of fire or explosion on that level.  But
the fourth chamber did, indeed, have doors, for it contained the secret
of July 6, which Leland and many others had conspired to conceal.  He
stopped now, a few steps out of the elevator, to study those portals,
which were twenty-six feet high and sixty-four feet wide.  They were
made of cross-braced two-by-fours rather than steel, because they had
been jerry-built to meet an emergency situation; there had been no time
to order a fabricated metal door to close off the cavern.  They reminded
the colonel of the enormous wooden doors in the wall that had protected
the frightened natives from the beast on the other half of their island
in the original King Kong.  Considering what lay behind these doors,
that horror-movie image did not inspire confidence. Leland shuddered.

Lieutenant Horner said, "Still gives you the creeps, huh?"

"You mean you're comfortable with it now?"

"Hell, no, sir.  Hell, no."

Inset in the bottom of one of those huge wooden barriers was a much
smaller, man-sized door through which researchers entered and exited the
room beyond.  An armed guard was positioned there to allow entrance only
to those with the proper pass.  The activities in that forbidden chamber
had nothing to do with the other-primary-functions of the Depository,
and ninety percent of the personnel were not permitted access to the
area.  Indeed, ninety percent did not know what was in that cavern.

Around the circumference of The Hub, between the openings to other
caverns, buildings had been erected along the walls and anchored to the
rock.  The structures dated to the first year of the Depository's
construction, back in the early 1960s.  Then, they had served as offices
for engineers, superintendents, and the Army's project officers.  Over
the years, an entire subterranean town had been erected in other
caverns-sleeping quarters, cafeteria, recreation rooms, laboratories,
machine shops, vehicle service center, computer rooms, even a PX, among
other things.  They were now occupied by the military and government
personnel who were doing one- and two-year tours of duty at Thunder
Hill.  In the buildings, there was heat, better lighting, inside and
outside telephone lines, kitchens, bathrooms, and all the myriad
comforts of home.  They were constructed of metal panels coated with
baked blue or white or gray enamel, with only small windows and narrow
metal doors.  Though they had no wheels, they somewhat resembled motor
homes or house trailers drawn in a circle, as if they were the property
of a modern-day encampment of gypsies who had found their way to this
snug haven, 240 feet below the winter snows.

Now, turning from the forbidden chamber with the wooden doors, Leland
walked across The Hub toward a white metal structure-Dr.  Miles
Bennell's offices.  Lieutenant Horner fell in dutifully at his side.

The summer before last, Miles Bennell (whom Leland Falkirk loathed) had
moved into Thunder Hill to head all scientific inquiry into the events
of that fateful July night.  He'd only been out of the Depository on
three occasions since then, never for longer than two weeks.  He was
obsessed with his assignment.  Or something worse than obsessed.

A dozen officers, enlisted men, and civilians were in sight within The
Hub, some crossing from one adjoining cavern to another, some just
standing in conversation with one another. Leland looked them over as he
passed them, unable to understand what kind of person would volunteer to
work underground for weeks and months at a stretch.  They were paid a
thirty percent hardship bonus, but to Leland's way of thinking, that was
inadequate compensation.  The Depository was less oppressive than
Shenkfield's small, windowless warrens, but not by much.

Leland supposed he was slightly claustrophobic.  Being underground made
him feel as if he were buried alive.  As an admitted masochist, he
should have relished his discomfort, but this was one kind of pain he
did not seek or enjoy.

Dr.  Miles Bennell looked ill.  Like nearly everyone in Thunder Hill, he
was pasty-faced from being too long beyond the reach of sunlight.  His
curly black hair and beard only made his pallor more pronounced.  In the
fluorescent glare of his office, he looked almost like a ghost.  He
greeted Leland and Lieutenant Horner curtly, and he did not offer to
shake hands with either of them.

That suited the colonel fine.  He was no friend of Bennell's. A
handshake would have been sheer hypocrisy.  Besides, Leland was
half-afraid that Miles Bennell had been compromised, that the scientist
was no longer who or what he appeared to be ...  was no longer entirely
human.  And if that crazy, paranoid possibility was in fact true, he
wanted no physical contact with Bennell, not even a quick handshake.

"Dr.  Bennell," Leland said coldly, using the hard tone of voice and icy
demeanor that always elicited quaverous obedience, "your handling of
this security breach has been either criminally inept, or you're the
traitor we're looking for.  Now, hear me loud and clear: this time,
we're going to find the bastard who sent those Polaroid snapshots-no
more broken lie detectors, no more botched interrogations-and we're
going to find out if he's the one who teased Jack Twist into returning,
and we're going to come down on him so hard he'll wish he'd been born a
fly and spent his life in a stable sucking up horseshit."

Utterly unruffled, Miles Bennell smiled and said, "Colonel, that was the
best Richard Jaeckel impression I've ever seen, but entirely
unnecessary.  I'm as anxious as you to find the leak and plug it."

Leland wanted to punch the son of a bitch.  This was one reason he
loathed Miles Bennell: The bastard could not be intimidated.

Calvin Sharkle lived on O'Bannon Lane in a pleasant middleclass
residential neighborhood in Evanston.  Father Wycazik had to stop twice
at service stations to ask directions.  When he got to the corner of
O'Bannon and Scott Avenue, only two blocks from Sharkle's address, he
was turned back by policemen manning an emergency barricade formed by
two black-and-white cruisers and one paramedic van.  There were also
television crews running around with minicams.

He also knew at once that the trouble on O'Bannon Lane was not merely
coincidental.  Something was happening at the Sharkle house.

In spite of temperatures in the mid-twenties and wind gusting to thirty
miles an hour, a crowd of about a hundred had gathered outside the
police barricade-on the sidewalks and on the lawns of the corner houses.
Passing traffic on Scott Avenue was slowed by gawkers, and Stefan had to
drive almost two blocks at a frustratingly slow pace before he found a
parking space.

When he walked back to the crowd and became part of it, seeking
information from the well-bundled onlookers, Father Wycazik found that
they were for the most part a friendly and strangely excited group.  But
creepy, too.  Not blatantly weird.  In fact, they were ordinary
people-except for their totally insensitive fascination with the tragedy
unfolding before them, as if it were as legitimate a source of thrills
as a football game.

It was definitely a tragedy, and one of a particularly horrible nature,
which Father Wycazik discovered a minute after he joined the crowd and
began to ask questions.  A florid-faced, mustachioed man in a plaid
hunting jacket and toboggan hat said, "Jesus, man, don't you watch the
goddamned TV?" He was not the least restrained because he did not know
he was talking to a priest; Stefan's topcoat and scarf concealed all
evidence of his holy office.  "Christ, fella, that's Sharkle down there.
Sharkle the Shark, man.  That's what they're callin' him.  Guy's a
dangerous loony.  Been sealed up in his house there since yesterday,
man.  He shot him two of his neighbors and one cop already, and he's got
him two goddamn hostages who, if you ask me, got about as much chance as
a fuckin' cat at a Doberman convention."

Tuesday morning, via Pacific Southwest Airlines, Parker Faine flew into
San Francisco from Orange County, then caught a connecting West Air
flight to Monterey.  It was an hour's trip up the California coast on
PSA, a one-hour layover in San Francisco, and then only thirty-five
minutes to Monterey.  The journey seemed shorter because one of the
other travelers, a pretty young woman, recognized his name, liked his
paintings, and was in the mood to be enthralled by his burly charms.

In Monterey, at the small airport rental agency, he hired a vomit-green
Ford Tempo.  It was an offense to his refined sense of color.

The Tempo's tempo was satisfyingly allegro on flat roads but a bit
adagio on the hills.  Nevertheless, he required less than half an hour
to find the address Dom had given him for Gerald Salcoe, the man who had
stayed at the Tranquility Motel with his wife and two daughters on the
night of July 6, and who had thus far been unreachable by both phone and
Western Union.  It was a big Southern Colonial manor house, hideously
out of place on the California coast, set on a prime half-acre, in the
shade of massive pines, with enough elaborately tended shrubbery to
employ a gardener one full day a week, including beds of impatiens that
blazed with red and purple flowers even now, in January.

Parker swung the Tempo into the majestic circular driveway and parked in
front of broad, flower-bordered steps that led up to a deep pillared
veranda.  In the shadows of the trees, there was sufficient gloom to
require lights indoors, but he saw none at the front windows.  All of
the drapes were tightly shut, and the house had a vacant look.

He got out of the Tempo, hurried up the steps, and crossed the wide
veranda, voicing his objection to the chilly air as he went: "Brrrrrrr."
The area's usual morning fog had cleared from the airport, permitting
landings, but it was still clinging to this part of the peninsula,
bearding the pines, weaving tendrils between their trunks, muting the
impatiens' brilliant blooms.  Winter in northern California was a more
bracing season than in Laguna Beach, and with the added damp chill of
fog, it was not at all to Parker's taste.  He had come dressed for it,
however, in heavy corduroy slacks, a green-plaid flannel shirt, a green
pullover that mocked Izod-Lacoste by featuring a goofy-looking appliqudd
armadillo on the breast instead of an alligator, and a
three-quarter-length navy peacoat with sergeant's stripes on one sleeve:
quite an outfit, especially when accented by Day-Glo-orange running
shoes.  As he rang the doorbell, Parker looked down at himself and
decided that maybe sometimes he dressed too eccentrically, even for an
artist.

He rang the doorbell six times, waiting half a minute between each ring,
but no one came.

Last night, when a man named Jack Twist had called him at eleven o'clock
from a pay phone in Elko, claiming to have a message from Dom, and had
asked him to go to a specific pay phone in Laguna for a callback in
twenty minutes, Parker had still been working on a new and exciting
painting that he had begun at three o'clock that afternoon.
Nevertheless, deeply involved as he was with the work, he had hastened
to the booth as directed.  And he had agreed to the trip to Monterey
without hesitation.  The fact was that he had plunged into work as a
means of taking his mind off Dom and the unfolding events in Elko
County, for that was where he really wanted to be, neck-deep in the
mystery.  When Twist told him about Dom's and the priest's psychic
demonstration-floating salt and pepper shakers, levitating
chairs!-nothing short of World War III could have prevented Parker from
going to Monterey. And now he was not going to be defeated by an empty
house. Wherever the Salcoes were, he would find them, and the best place
to start was with the neighbors.

Because of the half-acre lots and walls of intervening shrubbery, he
could not easily walk next door.  Back in the Tempo, as he put the car
in gear, he glanced at the house again, and at first he thought he saw
movement at one of the downstairs windows: a slightly parted drape
falling back into place.  He sat for a moment, staring, then decided the
movement had been a trick of fog and shadows.  He popped the handbrake
and drove around the second half of the circular driveway, out to the
street, delighted to be playing spy again.

Ernie and Dom parked the Jeep Cherokee at the end of the county road,
and the pickup with the tinted windshield halted two hundred yards
behind them.  Perched on its high allterrain tires, with goggle-eyed
spotlights on its roof, it looked (Dom thought) like a big insect poised
alertly on the downsloping lane, ready to skitter toward a hidey-hole if
it saw someone with a giant economy-size can of Raid.  The driver did
not get out, nor did the passenger, if there was one.

"Think there's going to be trouble here?" Dom asked, getting out of the
Cherokee and joining Ernie at the side of the road.

"If they'd meant trouble, they'd already have made it," Ernie said.  His
breath steamed in the frigid air.  "If they want to tag along and watch,
that's all right by me.  To hell with them."

They got two hunting rifles-a Winchester Model 94 carbine loaded with
.32 special cartridges, and a .30/06 Springfield-from the back of the
Jeep Cherokee, handling the weapons conspicuously in the hope that the
men in the pickup would be encouraged to remain peaceable by the
realization that their quarry could fight back.

The mountain still rose on the western side of the lane, and forest
still clothed those slopes.  But the land that fell away to the east had
become a broad treeless field, the northern end of the series of meadows
that lay along the valley wall.

Although snow had not yet begun to fall, the wind was picking up.  Dom
was thankful for the winter clothes he had purchased in Reno, but he
wished he had an insulated ski suit like Ernie was wearing.  And a pair
of those rugged laceup boots instead of the flimsy zippered pair he now
wore. Later today, Ginger and Faye would stop at a sporting-goods store
in Elko with a list of gear needed for tonight's operation, including
suitable clothes for Dom and everyone else who did not already have
them.  At the moment, however, the insistent wind found entrance at
Dom's coat collar and at the unelasticized cuffs of his sleeves.

Leaving the Cherokee, he and Ernie went over the side of the road, down
into the sloping meadow, continuing their inspection of the Thunder Hill
perimeter on foot.  The high, electrified chainlink fence with the
barbed-wire overhang led out of the trees farther back; it ceased to
parallel the northward course of the county road, turning east and down
toward the valley floor.  The snow in the meadow was ten inches deep,
but still below the tops of their boots.  They slogged two hundred yards
to a point along the fence from which they could see, in the distance,
the enormous steel blast doors set in the side of the valley wall.

Dom saw no signs of human or canine guards.  The snow on the other side
of the fence was not marked by footprints or pawprints, which meant no
one walked the perimeter on a regular schedule.

'A place like this, they're not going to be sloppy," Ernie said.  "So if
there aren't any foot patrols, there must be one hell of a lot of
electronic security on the other side of this fence."

Dom had been glancing toward the top of the meadow, a little worried
that the men in the all-terrain truck might be up to something with the
Cherokee.  This time, when he looked back, he saw a man in dark clothes,
starkly silhouetted against the snow.  The guy wasn't around the
Cherokee and seemed to have no interest in it, but he had come down from
the edge of the county road, descending a few yards into the inclined
meadow.  He was standing up there, unmoving, maybe a hundred and eighty
yards above Dom and Ernie, watching them.

Ernie noticed the observer, too.  He tucked his Winchester under his
right arm and lifted the binoculars he had been carrying on a strap
around his neck.  "He's Army.  At least that looks like a regulation
Army greatcoat he's wearing.  Just watching us."

"You'd think they'd be more discreet."

"Can't follow anyone discreetly, not in these wide-open spaces.  Might
as well be forthright.  Besides, he wants us to see what he's carrying,
so we'll know our rifles don't worry him."

"What do you mean?" Dom asked.  "What's he carrying?"

"A Belgian FN submachine gun.  Damn fine weapon.  It can fire up to six
hundred rounds a minute."

If Father Wycazik had watched television news, he would have heard about
Calvin Sharkle last night, for the man had been a hot story for
twenty-four hours.  However, he'd stopped watching TV news years ago,
for he'd decided that its relentless simplification of every story into
stark black and white issues was intellectually corrupt and that its
gleeful concentration on violence, sex, gloom, and despair was morally
repellent.  He also might have read about the tragedy on O'Bannon Lane
on the front pages of this morning's Tribune and Sun-Times, but he had
left the rectory in such a ' hurry that he'd had no time for newspapers.
Now he pieced the story together from information provided by those in
the crowd behind the police barricades.

For months, Cal Sharkle had been acting .  .  .  odd.  Ordi narily
cheerful and pleasant, a bachelor who lived alone and was well-liked by
everyone on O'Bannon Lane, he'd become a brooder, dour and even grim. He
told neighbors he had "a bad feeling about things," and believed
something "important and terrible is going to happen." He read
survivalist books and magazines, and talked about Armageddon.  And he
was plagued by vivid nightmares.

December first, he quit trucking, sold his rig, and told neighbors and
relatives the end was imminent.  He wanted to sell his house, buy remote
property in the mountains, and build a retreat like those he had seen in
the survivalist magazines.  "But there isn't time," he told his sister,
Nan Gilchrist. "So I'll just prepare this house for a siege." He didn't
know what was going to happen, did not understand the source of his own
fear, though he said he was not concerned about nuclear war, Russian
invasion, economic collapse, or anything else that alarmed most
survivalists.  "I don't know what .  .  .  but something strange and
horrible is going to happen," he told his sister.

Mrs.  Gilchrist made him see a doctor, who found him fit, suffering only
from job-related stress.  But after Christmas, Calvin's previously
garrulous nature gave way to a closedmouth suspicion.  During the first
week of January, he had his phone disconnected, cryptically explaining:
"Who knows how they'll get at us when they come?  Maybe they can do it
over the phone." He was unable or unwilling to identify "they."

No one considered Cal really dangerous.  He had been a peaceful,
kind-hearted man all his life.  In spite of his new eccentric behavior,
there was no reason to think he would turn violent.

Then, yesterday morning at eight-thirty, Cal visited the Wilkersons, the
family across the street, with whom he had once been close but from whom
he had recently kept his distance.  Edward Wilkerson told reporters that
Cal said, "Listen, I can't be selfish about this.  I'm all prepared, and
here you are defenseless.  So when they come for us, Ed, it'll be okay
if you and your family hide out at my place." When Wilkerson asked who
"they" were, Cal said, "Well, I don't know what they'll look like, or
what they'll call themselves. But they're going to do something bad to
us, maybe turn us into zombies." Cal Sharkle assured Wilkerson that he
had plenty of guns and ammunition in his house and had taken steps to
make a fortress of the place.

Alarmed by talk of weapons and shootouts, Wilkerson had humored Cal and,
as soon as the man left, had called his sister.  Nan Gilchrist had
arrived at half-past-ten with her husband and had told a worried
Wilkerson that she would handle it, that she was sure she could persuade
Cal to enter the hospital for observation.  But after she and Mr.
Gilchrist went into the house, Ed Wilkerson decided they might need some
backup, so he and another neighbor, Frank Krelky, went to the Sharkle
house to provide what assistance they could.

Wilkerson expected Mr.  or Mrs.  Gilchrist to answer the bell, but Cal
himself came to the door.  He was distraught, nearly hysterical-and
armed with a .20-gauge semiautomatic shotgun.  He accused his neighbors
of being zombies already. "You've been changed, " he shouted at
Wilkerson and Krelky. "Oh God, I should've seen it.  I should've known.
When did it happen, when'd you stop being human?  My God, now you've
come to get us all in one swoop." Then, with a wail of terror, he opened
fire with the shotgun.  The first blast took Krelky in the throat at
such close range that it decapitated him.  Wilkerson ran, was hit in the
legs as he reached the end of Sharkle's front walk, fell, rolled, and
played dead, a ruse that saved his life.

Now Krekly was in the morgue, and Wilkerson was in the hospital in good
enough condition to talk to reporters.

And Father Wycazik was at the entrance to O'Bannon Lane, where a young
man in the crowd behind the police line was eager to fill in the last of
it for him.  The man's name was Roger Hasterwick, a "temporarily
unemployed beverage concoctionist," which Stefan suspected was an
out-of-work bartender.  He had a disturbing gleam in his eyes that might
have been a sign of intoxication, drug use, lack of sleep, psychopathy,
or all four, but his information was detailed and apparently accurate:

"So, see, the cops close the block, evacuate the people out their
houses, then they try to talk with this Sharkle the Shark. But he don't
have a phone, see, and when they use a bullhorn, he won't answer them.
The cops figure his sister and brotherin-law are in there alive,
hostages, so nobody wants to do nothin' rash."

"Wise," Father Wycazik said bleakly, feeling even colder than the winter
day in which he stood.

"Wise, wise, wise," Roger Hasterwick said impatiently, making it clear
he preferred not to be interrupted.  "So finally, with a half-hour
daylight left, they decide they'll send in the SWAT guys to dig him out,
maybe save the sister and brotherin-law.  So they lob tear gas in there,
see, and the SWAT guys rush the place, but when they get in they hit
trouble.  Sharkle must've been workin' on the house for weeks, settin'
traps. The cops start fallin' over these thin wires he's strung
everywhere, and one gets brained by a deadfall, which don't kill him but
sure does some damage.  Then, Christ, Sharkle opens fire on 'em because
he's wearin' a gas mask same as they are and just waitin' like a cat.
The dude was prepared.  So he blows one cop away, utterly, and wounds
one, then he heads down into the cellar and pulls the door shut, and
nobody can get in after him 'cause it's not any regular cellar door but
a steel door he's put in special.  Not only that, but the outside cellar
door, around back, is steel, too, and what he's done is he's put heavy
sheet-metal shutters over the insides of the cellar windows, so it's
your typical stalemate, see."

By Stefan's calculations, two people were dead, three wounded.

Hasterwick said, "So the cops they pulled in their horns real fast and
figured to wait him out through the night.  This mornin', Sharkle the
Shark slides open one of them sheetmetal shutters on a basement window,
see, and he shouts a bunch of stuff, really crazy stuff, and they figure
somethin' more is gonna go down, but then he closes the shutter again,
and since then nothin'.  I sure hope he does somethin' soon, ,cause it's
cold and I'm beginnin' to get bored."

"What did he shout?" Stefan asked.

"Huh?"

"This morning, what crazy stuff did he yell from the basement?"

"Oh, well, see, what he says .  Roger Hasterwick stopped when he
realized that a piece of news, passing in from the edge of the crowd,
had electrified everyone.  People hurried away from the barricade, some
walking fast and some running south on Scott Avenue.  Appalled by the
prospect of missing new bloodshed, Hasterwick grabbed frantically at a
blotchyfaced man in a deerstalker cap, the flaps of which were down but
flopping loose.  "What is it?  What's happenin'?"

Trying to pull away from Hasterwick, the man in the deerstalker cap
said, "Guy down here has a van with his own police-band radio.  He's
tuned in on the cops, the SWAT team, they're getting ready to wipe that
fuckin' Sharkle off the map!" He wrenched loose of Hasterwick and rushed
away, and Hasterwick hurried after him.

Father Wycazik stared after the departing throng for a moment.  Then he
glanced around at the ten or twelve onlookers who had remained, at the
officers manning the barricade, past the barricade.  More death, murder.
He could sense it coming.  He should do something to stop it.  But he
could not think.  He was numb with dread.  Until now, he had seenand
been able to see-only a positive side to the unfolding mystery.  The
miraculous cures and other phenomena had engendered only joy and an
expectation of divine revelations to come.  But now he was seeing the
dark side of the mystery, and he was badly shaken by it.

Finally, hoping he would not be mistaken for just another ghoul in the
bloodthirsty crowd, Stefan hurried after Roger Hasterwick and the
others.  They had gathered almost a block south of O'Bannon Lane, around
a recreational van, a metallic-blue Chevrolet with a California-beach
mural on the side.  The owner, a huge and hugely bearded man sitting
behind the wheel, had opened both doors and turned up the volume on the
police-band radio, so everyone could hear the cops in action.

In a minute or two, the essentials of their attack plan were clear.  The
SWAT team was already moving into place, back into the first floor of
Sharkle's house.  They would use a small, precisely shaped charge of
plastic explosives to blow the steel cellar door off its pins, not
enough to send shrapnel cutting through the basement.  Simultaneously,
another group of officers would blow off the exterior cellar door with a
similar carefully gauged charge.  Even as the smoke was clearing, the
two groups would storm into the basement and catch Cal Sharkle in a
pincer attack.  That strategy was terribly dangerous for the officers
and the hostages, though the authorities had decided that they would be
in far greater danger if action was delayed any further.

Listening to the radio-relayed voices crackle in the cold January air,
Father Wycazik suddenly knew he must stop the attack.  If it was carried
out, the slaughter would be worse than anyone imagined. He had to be
allowed to go past the barricade, to the house, and talk to Cal Sharkle.
Now.  Right away.  Now.  He turned from the Chevy van and raced back
toward the entrance to O'Bannon Lane, a block away.  He was not sure
what he would say to Sharkle to get through his paranoia. Perhaps, "You
are not alone, Calvin." He'd think of something.

His abrupt departure from the van apparently gave the crowd the idea
that he had heard or seen something happening up at the barricade.  He
was less than halfway back to the entrance to O'Bannon Lane when younger
and fleeter onlookers began to pass him, shouting excitedly, plunging
off the sidewalk and out into the street, bringing a complete halt to
the already crawling traffic on Scott Avenue.  Brakes barked. Horns
blew.  There was the thud of one bumper hitting another.  Stefan was
jostled by runners and struck so hard that he fell to his hands and
knees on the pavement.  No one stopped to help him.  Stefan got up and
ran on.  The air seemed to have thickened with animal madness and
bloodlust.  Stefan was horrified at the behavior of his fellow men, and
his heart was pounding, and he thought, This is what it might be like in
Hell, running forever in the midst of a frantic and gibbering mob.

By the time Stefan reached the police blockade, more than half the
frenzied crowd had returned ahead of him.  They were jammed against the
sawhorses and police cars, craning to see into the forbidden block of
O'Bannon Lane.  He pushed in among them, desperate to get to the head of
the mob, so he could speak to the police.  He was pushed, shoved, but he
shoved back, telling them he was a priest, but no one was listening, and
he felt his fedora knocked off his head, but he persisted, and then at
last he was through to the front of the surging multitudes.

The policemen angrily ordered the mob to move back, threatened arrest,
drew batons, lowered the visors on their riot helmets.  Father Wycazik
was prepared to lie, to tell the police anything that might get them to
postpone the imminent attack on the house, tell them that he was not
just a priest but Sharkle's own priest, that he knew what was wrong,
knew how to get Sharkle to surrender.  Of course, he didn't really

know how to obtain Sharkle's surrender, but if he could buy time and
talk to Sharkle, he might think of something.  He caught the attention
of an officer who ordered him to step back.  He identified himself as a
priest.  The cop wasn't listening, so Stefan tore open his topcoat and
pulled off his white scarf to reveal his Roman collar.  "I'm a priest!"
But the crowd surged forward, pushing Stefan against a sawhorse, and the
barrier fell over, and the cop shoved back angrily, in no mood to
listen.

An instant later, two small explosions shook the air, one a split-second
after the other, low and flat but hard.  The hundred voices of the crowd
gasped as one, and everybody froze, for they knew what they had heard:
the SWAT team blowing the steel doors off the cellar.  A third explosion
followed the first two, an immense and devastating blast that shook the
pavement, that hurt the ears, that vibrated in bones and teeth, that
shot slabs and splinters of Sharkle's house into the wintry sky, that
seemed to shatter the day itself and cast it down in a billion broken
pieces.  Again with a single voice, the crowd cried out.  Instead of
pressing toward the blockade this time, they scrambled back in fear,
suddenly realizing that death could be not just an interesting spectator
sport but a participatory activity.

" He had a bomb!" one of the barricade cops said.  "My God, my God,
Sharkle had a bomb in there!" He turned to the emergency medical van in
which two paramedics were waiting, and he shouted, "Go!  Go!"

The red beacons flashed atop the paramedics wagon.  It pulled out of the
barricade, speeding toward the middle of the block.

Shaking with horror, Father Wycazik tried to follow on foot.  But one of
the cops grabbed him and said, "Hey, get the hell back there."

:'I'm a priest.  Someone may need comforting, last rites."

'Father, I wouldn't care if you were the pope himself.  We don't know
for sure that Sharkle's dead."

Numbly, Father Wycazik obeyed, though the tremendous power of the
explosion left no doubt in his mind that Cal Sharkle was dead.  Sharkle
and his sister.  And his brother-inlaw.  And most members of the SWAT
team.  How many altogether?  Maybe five?  Six?  Ten?

Moving aimlessly back through the crowd, absentmindedly tucking his
scarf in place and buttoning his coat, partially in a state of shock,
murmuring a Pater Noster, he saw Roger Hasterwick, the unemployed
bartender with the queerly gleaming eyes.  He put a hand on Hasterwick's
shoulder, and said, "What did he shout to the police this morning?"

Hasterwick blinked.  "Huh?  What?"

"Before we got separated, you told me Calvin Sharkle slid open the metal
shutter on one of the cellar windows and shouted a lot of weird stuff
this morning, and you thought something was going to happen, but then
nothing did.  What exactly did he say?"

Hasterwick's face brightened with the memory.  "Oh, yeah, yeah.  It was
real weird, see, straight-out crazy stuff." He scrunched up his face,
striving to recall the madman's exact words.  When he had them, he
grinned, rolled his mouth as if savoring the revelation, then repeated
Sharkle's ravings for Stefan's enjoyment.

Stefan not only failed to enjoy the performance, but second by dreadful
second, he became increasingly convinced that Calvin Sharkle had not
been insane.  Confused, yes, baffled and afraid because of the
tremendous stress generated by his brainwashing and by the collapse of
his memory blocks, badly confused but not insane.  Roger Hasterwick and
everyone else thought Sharkle's shouted accusations and declarations and
imprecations, flung at the world through the shielded window of a
jerry-built fortress, were obviously the lunatic fantasies of a demented
mind.  But Father Wycazik had an advantage over everyone else: He saw
Sharkle's statements in the context of events at the Tranquility Motel,
in the context of miracle cures and telekinetic phenomena, and he
wondered if there might be some truth in the claims and accusations that
the poor frightened man had shouted through the basement window.  And
wondering, he felt the fine hairs rise on the back of his neck.  He
shivered.

Seeing that reaction, Hasterwick said, "Hey, ain't no point takin' it
serious, for Christ's sake.  You don't think what he said was true?
Hell, the guy was a nut.  He blowed himself up, didn't he?"

Father Wycazik ran north along Scott Avenue to the parish car.

Even before he had arrived in Evanston and discovered the unfolding
tragedy at Calvin Sharkle's house, Stefan Wy cazik had half-expected to
be on a flight to Nevada before the day was through.  The events at the
Mendozas' apartment and at the Halbourgs' place had set a fire of wonder
and curiosity burning in him, and the blaze would not be quenched unless
he plunged into the activities of the troubled group in Elko County.

Now, because of what he had just learned from Hasterwick, the urge to go
to Nevada had become a burning need.  If only half of what Sharkle had
shouted through the basement window was true, Stefan had to go to
Nevada, not only to witness a miracle but to do what he could to protect
those who had gathered at the Tranquility.  All his life, he had been a
rescuer of troubled priests, a shepherd bringing lost souls back into
the fold.  This time, however, he might be called upon to save minds and
lives as well.  The threat of which Calvin Sharkle had spoken was one
that might put body and brain in as much jeopardy as the spirit.

He slipped the car in gear again.  He drove out of Evanston.

He decided not to return to the rectory to pack.  There was no time.  He
would head straight to O'Hare International Airport and take the first
available seat on the first available flight west.

Dear God, he thought, what have You sent us?  Is it the greatest gift
for which we could have asked?  Or a plague to make all Biblical plagues
pale by comparison?

Father Stefan Wycazik put the pedal to the metal and drove south and
then west toward O'Hare like .  .  .  well, like a bat out of Hell.

Ginger and Faye spent the larger part of the morning with Elroy and
Nancy Jamison under the pretense that Ginger, supposedly the daughter of
an old friend of Faye's, was moving west for unspecified health reasons
and was interested in learning about Elko County.  The Jamisons were
local-history buffs, eager to talk about the county, especially about
the beauty of the Lemoille Valley.

Actually, indirectly and directly, Ginger and Faye were seeking
indications that Elroy and Nancy were suffering from the effects of
collapsing memory blocks.  They found none. The Jamisons were happy,
untroubled.  Their brainwashing had been as successful as Faye's; their
false memories were firmly rooted.  Bringing them into the Tranquility
family would put them in jeopardy while serving no great purpose.

In the motel van, as they pulled away from the Jamison house (with Elroy
and Nancy waving from the front porch), Ginger said, "Good people.
Really nice people."

"Yes," Faye said.  "Reliable.  Wish they were standing beside us in this
thing.  On the other hand, I'm happy they're well out of it."

Both women were quiet then, and Ginger figured Faye's thoughts were the
same as her own: They were wondering if the government car was still
parked along the county road, near the entrance to the Jamisons' place,
and if the men in it would still be content merely to follow them. Ernie
and Dom had armed themselves for their expedition into the mountains
around Thunder Hill Depository.  However, considering the unprovocative
nature of Faye's and Ginger's errands, no one had thought that they
might be in special danger, too.  Ginger, like many attractive women
living alone in a city, knew how to use a handgun, and Faye, a good
Marine wife, was something of an expert, but their knowledge and
expertise was of no use when they were not armed.

Having driven only a quarter-mile along the Jamisons' halfmile driveway,
Faye stopped the van in one of the deepest pools of shadows cast by the
overhanging pines.  "I'm probably being melodramatic," she said.  She
slipped open a few buttons on her coat and reached under her sweater.
"And these won't be much good if they point guns at our heads."

Grimacing, she withdrew two steak knives and put them on the seat
between her and Ginger.

Surprised, Ginger said, "Where'd you get these?"

"This is why I insisted on drying the breakfast dishes while Nancy
washed them.  Putting away the silverware, I swiped these.  Didn't want
to ask straight-out for a weapon; that would've meant bringing Nancy and
Elroy into it, which it was clear we weren't going to have to do.  I can
return them later, when this is over." She picked up one of the knives.
"The end's nicely pointed.  The blade's sharp and serrated.  Like I
said, not much help if they've got a gun at your head.  But if they were
to run us off the road and try to force us into their car, you keep the
knife a secret until you get your opening, then stab the bastard."

"Got it," Ginger said.  She grinned and shook her head.

"Someday, I hope you'll get a chance to meet Rita Hannaby."

"Your friend in Boston."

"Yes.  You and Rita are a lot alike, I think."

"Me and a high-society lady?" Faye said doubtfully.  "Can't imagine what
we'd have in common."

"Well, for one thing, you both have such equanimity, such serenity,
regardless of what's happening."

Putting the knife back on the seat, Faye said, "When you're a service
wife, you either learn to go with the flow, or you go crazy."

"And both you and Rita look so feminine, soft and dependent on the
outside-but inside, each of you is, in your own way, tough as nails."

Faye smiled.  "Honey, you got a bit of that yourself."

They drove the last quarter-mile of the pinion-shaded driveway, out of
the shadows and into the midday gloom of the pending storm.

The brown-green, stripped-down government car was still parked along the
county road.  Two men were in it.  They looked impassively at Ginger.
Impulsively, she waved at them. They did not wave back.

Faye drove down toward the floor of the Lemoille Valley. The car
followed.

Miles Bennell slumped in the big chair behind his gray metal desk and
looked bored, and Miles Bennell ambled around his office while answering
questions in a tone of voice that was sometimes indifferent and
sometimes amusedly ironic, but Miles Bennell never fidgeted, groveled,
looked frightened, or became angry, as almost any other man would have
done in the same situation.

Colonel Leland Falkirk hated him.

Sitting at a scarred table in one corner of the room, Leland worked
slowly through a stack of personnel files, one for each of the civilian
scientists who were conducting studies and experiments in the cavern
with the immense wooden doors, where the secret of July 6 was contained.
He was hoping to narrow the field of possible traitors by determining
which men and women could have been in New York City during the time the
two notes and Polaroid snapshots had been mailed to Dominick Corvaisis
in Laguna Beach.  He had told Thunder Hill's military security staff to
do this work on Sunday, and they professed to have completed the
inquiries and to have found nothing to pinpoint the leak.  But in light
of the screwups in their investigation thus far-including two sabotaged
lie detectors-he no longer trusted them any more than he trusted Bennell
or the other scientists, He had to do it himself.

But right away Leland ran into problems.  For one thing, during the past
eighteen months, two damn many civilians had been brought into the
conspiracy.  Thirty-seven men and women, representing a broad spectrum
of scientific disciplines, had possessed both high-security clearances
and specialized knowledge essential to the research program Bennell had
devised.  Thirty-eight civilians, counting Bennell.  It was a miracle
that thirty-eight eggheads, utterly lacking in military discipline,
could have kept any secret so long, let alone this one.

Worse, only Bennell and seven others were engaged in the research
full-time, to the exclusion of all other professional pursuits and to
the extent that they actually lived in Thunder Hill.  The other thirty
had families and university positions they could not leave for long
periods of time, so they came and went as their schedules permitted,
sometimes staying a few days, maybe a few weeks, rarely as long as a few
months. Therefore, it would be a long and arduous job to investigate
each and determine if and when he-or she-had been in New York.

Worse still, of the eight members of the full-time investigatory team,
three had been in New York in December, including Dr.  Miles Bennell
himself.  In short, the list of suspects currently numbered at least
thirty-three among the scientific research staff alone.

Leland was also suspicious of the entire Depository security staff,
though Major Fugata and Lieutenant Helms, the head of security and his
right-hand man, were supposedly the only security personnel who knew
what was happening in the forbidden cavern.  On Sunday, soon after
Fugata began questioning the full-time research staff and those
part-time researchers currently in residence, he discovered that the
polygraph was damaged and could not produce reliable results. Yesterday,
when a new machine was sent up from Shenkfield, it also proved
defective.  Fugata said that the second machine was already damaged when
it arrived from Shenkfield, but that was bullshit.

Someone involved in the project had seen reports that the witnesses'
memory blocks were breaking down.  Deciding to exploit that opportunity,
he egged some of them along with cryptic notes and Polaroids stolen from
the files.  The bastard had nearly gotten away with it, and now that the
heat was coming down on him, he had sabotaged the lie detectors.

Pausing in his perusal of the personnel files, Leland looked at Miles
Bennell, who was standing in the small window. "Doctor, give me the
benefit of your insight into the scientific mind."

Turning away from the window, Bennell said, "Certainly, Colonel."

"Everyone working with you knows about the classified CISG report that
was done seven years ago.  They know the terrible consequences that
might result if we went public with our discoveries.  So why would any
of them be so irresponsible as to undermine project security?"

Dr.  Bennell assumed a tone of earnest helpfulness, but Leland heard the
acid-sharp disdain beneath the surface: "Some disagree with CISG's
conclusions.  Some think going public with these discoveries wouldn't
result in a catastrophe, that the CISG was fundamentally'wrong, too
elitist in its viewpoint."

"Well, I believe the CISG was correct.  And you, Lieutenant Horner?"

Horner was sitting near the door.  "I agree with you, Colonel.  If the
news is broken to the public, they'll have to be prepared slowly, over
maybe ten years.  And even then .  .  ."

Leland nodded.  To Bennell, he said, "I have a low but realistic opinion
of my fellow men, Doctor, and I know how poorly most would cope with the
new world that would follow the release of these discoveries.  Chaos.
Political and social upheaval.  Just like the CISG report said."

Bennell shrugged.  "You're entitled to your view." But his tone said:
Even if your view is ignorant and arrogant and narrow-minded.

Leaning forward in his chair, Leland said, "How about you, Doctor?  Do
you believe the CISG was right?"

Evasively, Bennell said, "I'm not your man, Colonel.  I didn't send
those notes and Polaroids to Corvaisis and the Blocks."

"Okay, Doctor, then will you support my effort to have everyone in the
project interrogated with the assistance of drugs?  Even if we get the
polygraph fixed, the answers we obtain will be less reliable than those
we'd get with sodium pentothal and certain other substances."

Bennell frowned.  "Well, there are some who'd object strenuously.  These
are people of superior intellect, Colonel. Intellectual life is their
primary life, and they won't risk subjecting themselves to drugs that
might, as a side-effect, have even the slightest permanent detrimental
effect on their mental function."

"These drugs don't have that effect.  They're safe."

"They're safe most of the time, maybe.  But some of my people will have
moral objections to using drugs for any reason-even safe drugs, even for
a worthwhile purpose."

"Doctor, I'm going to push for drug-assisted interrogation of everyone
in Thunder Hill, those who know the secret and those who don't.  I'm
going to demand General Alvarado approve." Alvarado was commanding
officer of the Thunder Hill Depository, a pencil-pushing desk-jockey who
had spent his career on his backside.  Leland liked Alvarado no more
than he liked Bennell.  "If the general approves drug-assisted
interrogation, and if any of your people then refuse, I'll come down
hard on them, hard enough to break them.  That includes you, if you
refuse.  You understand me?"

"Oh, perfectly," Bennell said, still unruffled.

Disgusted, the colonel pushed the remaining personnel files aside. "This
is too damn slow.  I need the traitor quickly, not a month from now.
We'd better repair the polygraph." He started to get up, then sat down
as if he'd just thought of what he was about to ask, though it had been
on his mind since he entered the Depository.  "Doctor, what do you think
of this development with Cronin and Corvaisis?  These miraculous cures,
the other bizarre phenomena.  What do you make of it?"

Finally Bennell showed strong, genuine emotion.  He unfolded his hands
from behind his head and leaned forward in his chair.  "I'm sure it
scares the hell out of you, Colonel.  But there could be another, less
cataclysmic explanation than the one on which you've fixated.  Fear is
your only reaction, while I think it might be the greatest moment in the
history of the human race.  But whatever the case-we've absolutely got
to talk with Cronin and Corvaisis.  Tell them everything and seek their
cooperation to discover exactly how they obtained these wonderful
powers.  We can't simply eliminate them or put them through another
memory-wipe without knowing all the answers."

"If we bring everyone at the Tranquility into this, tell them the
secret, and then don't wipe their memories again, the cover-up can't be
maintained."

"Possibly not," Bennell said.  "And if that's the case ...  then the
public will just have to be told.  Damn it, Colonel, because of these
recent developments, studying Cronin and Corvaisis takes precedence over
everything else, including the coverup.  Not only studying them ...  but
letting them have a chance to develop whatever strange talents they may
have.  In fact, when will you take them into custody?"

"This afternoon, at the latest."

"Then we can expect you to bring them to us sometime tonight?"

"Yes." Leland rose from his chair again.  He picked up his coat and
walked to the office door, where Lieutenant Horner was waiting.  He
paused.  "Doctor, how will you know if Cronin and Corvaisis are changed
or not?  You think there's no real chance of .  .  .  possession.  But
if you're wrong, if they're not entirely human any more, and if they
don't want you to know the truth, how would you possibly discover it?
Obviously, they could defeat a lie detector or any truth serums we
have."

"That's a puzzler, all right." Miles Bennell stood up, jammed his hands
into the pockets of his lab coat, and began to pace energetically.  "My
God, it's a real challenge, isn't it?  We've been working on the problem
ever since we learned about their new powers from you on Sunday.  We've
been through ups and downs, despair, but now we think we can deal with
it.  We've devised medical tests, psychological tests, some tricky damn
stuff, and we think that all of it taken together will accurately
determine whether or not they're infected, whether or not they're .  . .
human any more.  I think your fears are utterly unfounded.  We thought
infection .  .  .  possession was a danger at first, but it's been more
than a year since we learned we were wrong.  I think they can be
entirely human and still have these powers.  Are entirely human."

"I don't agree.  My fears are well founded.  And if Corvaisis and Cronin
and the others have changed, and if you believe you can get the truth
out of them, you're kidding yourself. If they've changed, they're so
superior to you that deceiving you would be child's play."

"You haven't even heard what we've-"

"And something else, Doctor.  Something you haven't thought of but which
I must consider.  Maybe this will help you appreciate my position, with
which you've thus far had little sympathy.  Don't you realize I have to
be suspicious and scared of more than just the people at the
Tranquility?  Ever since we've learned of these recent developments,
these paranormal powers, I've been scared of you, as well."

Bennell was thunderstruck.  "Me?"

"You've been working here with it, Doctor.  You're in that cavern nearly
every day, doing lab work every day, probing, testing every damn day for
eighteen months, with only three brief vacations.  If Corvaisis and
Cronin were changed in a few hours of contact, why shouldn't I suspect
you've been changed after eighteen months?"

For a moment Bennell was too shocked to speak.  Then he said, "But this
isn't the same at all.  My studies here were after the fact.  I'm
essentially a .  .  .  well, a fire marshal, a guy who came in after the
blaze to sift through the ashes and figure out what happened.  The
potential for possession or infection-if it ever existed-was at the
beginning, in the first hours, not later."

"How can I be sure of that?" Leland asked, staring at him coldly.

"But under these lab conditions, with safety precautions-"

"We're dealing with the unknown, Doctor.  We can't foresee every problem
that might arise.  That's the very nature of the unknown.  And you can't
take precautions against something you can't foresee."

Bennell shook his head violently in denial of the very possibility. "No,
no, no.  Oh, no."

"If you think I'm exaggerating my concern just to irritate you," Leland
said, "then you might ask yourself why Lieutenant Horner sat in that
chair so alertly during our long conversation.  After all, as you know,
he's an expert in polygraphs, and he could have gone and repaired yours
while you and I talked.  But I didn't want to be in a room with you
alone, Doctor Bennell.  Not alone.  No way."

Blinking, Bennell said, "You mean, because I might've somehow .  .  ."

Leland nodded.  "Because if you have been changed, then you might have
been able to change me, too, by some process I can't even begin to
imagine.  Alone, you might have used the opportunity to attack me,
infect me, arrange for me to be possessed, pour the human spirit out of
me and pour something else in." Leland shuddered.  "Hell, I don't know
how to put it best, but we both know what I mean."

"We even wondered if two of us were enough to insure our safety,"
Lieutenant Horner said, his voice rumbling through the low-ceilinged
room and vibrating vaguely in the metal walls.  "I kept a close eye on
you, Doctor.  You didn't notice my hand was always near my revolver."

Bennell was too astonished to speak.

Leland said, "Doctor, you may think I'm a suspicious bastard who's too
quick on the trigger, an unregenerate xenophobic fascist.  But I've been
put in charge of this not merely to keep the truth from the public but
also to protect them, and it's part of my job to think of the worst and
then to act as if it will inevitably happen."

"Jesus H.  Christ!" Bennell said.  "You're total, off-the-wall
paranoids, both of you!"

"I'd expect you to react that way," Leland told him, "whether or not
you're still a full-fledged member of the human race."

To Horner he said, "Let's go.  You have a polygraph to repair."

Horner went out into The Hub, and Leland started after him.

Bennell said, "Wait, wait.  Please."

Leland looked back at the pale, black-bearded man.

"All right, Colonel.  Okay.  Maybe I can see why you've got to be
suspicious, why it's just part of your job.  It's crazy nonetheless.
There's no chance that I or any of my people could've been .  .  .
inhabited by something else.  No chance. But if you were ready to kill
me if I aroused your suspicion, would you also kill everyone working
under me if you decided they'd all been taken over?"

"Without hesitation," Leland said bluntly. "But if I and my people
could've been changed, if that much was possible-and it isn't
possible-then don't you realize that the entire staff in Thunder Hill
could've been changed, too?  Not just the people who know what's in that
cavern, but everyone, military as well as civilians, all the way up to
and including General Alvarado."

"Well, sure," Leland said.  "I realize that."

"And you'd be willing to kill everyone in the facility?"

"Yes."

"Jesus!"

"If you've decided to split," Leland said, "you can forget about leaving
for the duration.  Eighteen months ago, looking ahead to this
possibility, I secretly had a special program entered into VIGILANT, the
security system.  At my direction, VIGILANT can institute a new policy
that makes it impossible for anyone to leave Thunder Hill without a
special code.  I'm the only one with the code, of course."

Bennell's posture was the essence of indignation and righteous outrage.
"You mean, you'd imprison us out of some misguided .  .  ." He fell
silent as the truth hit him.  Then: "My God, you wouldn't have told me
this if you hadn't already activated VIGILANT'S new program."

"That's right," Leland said.  "When I came in, I identified myself with
my left hand on the ID plate, instead of my right. That was the signal
to VIGILAMT to institute the new order. No one but Lieutenant Horner and
I can get out of Thunder Hill until I decide it's safe."

 Leland Falkirk left the office, walked out into The Hub, as pleased
with himself as was possible under these disturbing conditions.  It had
taken eighteen months, but he had at last shattered Miles Bennell's
infuriating composure.

If he had chosen to make one more revelation, he could have brought the
scientist all the way to his knees.  But there was one secret the
colonel had to keep to himself.  He had already devised a plan to kill
everyone and everything in Thunder Hill in the event that he decided
they were infected and only masquerading as human.  He had the means to
reduce the installation to molten slag and stop the plague right here.
The hitch was that he would have to kill himself along with everyone
else.  But he was prepared for that sacrifice.

After sleeping only five and a half hours, Jorja showered, dressed, and
went to the Blocks' apartment, where she found Marcie sitting at the
kitchen table with Jack Twist.  She stopped at the end of the living
room, just outside the kitchen doorway, and watched them for a moment,
while they remained unaware they were being observed.

Last night, at four-forty a m., after Jorja and Jack and Brendan had
rendezvoused at the Mini-Mart with the second team of outriders and had
returned from Elko, Jack had slept on the floor in the Blocks' living
room, so Marcie would not be alone in the morning after Faye and Ernie
had gone off on their respective tasks.  Jorja had wanted to move the
girl to their own room, but Jack had insisted that he did not mind doing
a little babysitting after Marcie woke.  "Look," he said, "she's
sleeping with Faye and Ernie in their bed.  If we try to move her now,
we'll wake all of them, and everyone needs whatever sleep he can get
tonight." Jorja said, "But Marcie's been sleeping for hours, so she'll
be up and around before you are in the morning.  She'll wake you." And
he said, "Better me than you.  Really, I don't need much sleep.  Never
have." And she said, "You're a nice guy, Jack Twist." He said
self-mockingly, "Oh, I'm a saint!" And she said with great seriousness,
"You may be the nicest guy I've ever met."

She had firmly settled on that opinion during the hours they had cruised
through the night-clad streets of Elko in his Cherokee.  He was smart,
witty, perceptive, gentle, and the best listener she'd ever encountered.
At one-thirty in the morning, Brendan pleaded exhaustion and curled up
in the back of the Cherokee, instantly falling asleep.  Jorja, dismayed
that the priest had come with them, had not really understood her dismay
until Father Cronin went to sleep; then she realized that her feelings
had nothing to do with the priest, but resulted from her desire to have
Jack Twist to herself.  With Brendan out of the way, she got what she
unconsciously wanted, and she fell entirely under Jack's spell, telling
him more about herself than she had told anyone since her all-time
closest friend had moved away when they were both sixteen.  In almost
seven years of marriage, she had never had a conversation with Alan that
was half as profound as that she had with Jack Twist, a man she'd known
less than twelve hours.

Now, as she stood just outside the kitchen doorway in the Blocks'
apartment and watched Jack with Marcie, Jorja saw another good side of
him.  He could talk comfortably with a child, without the slightest note
of condescension or boredom, something few adults could manage.  He
joked with Marcie, questioned her about her favorite songs, foods, and
movies, helped her color one of the last untinted moons in her album.
But Marcie was in a deeper and even more frightening trance than she had
been yesterday. She did not answer Jack; she rewarded his attention with
nothing more than an occasional blank or puzzled look, but he was not
discouraged.  Jorja realized that he had spent eight years talking to a
comatose wife who had never responded, so he would not lose patience
with Marcie anytime soon.  Jorja stood in the shadows just beyond the
doorway for several minutes, unannounced, torn between the pleasure of
watching Jack be Jack and the agony of watching her daughter descend
even farther into a state increasingly similar to some of the behavior
of an autistic child.

"Good morning!" Jack said, looking up from the book of red moons,
spotting Jorja.  "Sleep well?  How long have you been standing there?"

"Not long," she said, entering the kitchen.

"Marcie, say good morning to your mother," Jack told the girl.

But Marcie did not look up from the moon that she was coloring.

Jorja met Jack's eyes and saw sympathy and concern in them.  She said,
"Well, it's not really morning any more. Almost noon."

She went to Marcie, put a hand under her chin, lifted her head.  The
child's gaze focused on her mother's eyes, but only for a moment, then
turned inward.  It was a terrible and empty look.  When Jorja let go,
Marcie turned immediately to the image of the moon before her and began
to scrub hard at the paper with her last red crayon.

Jack pushed his chair back, got up, and went to the refrigerator.
"Hungry, Jorja?  I'm starved.  Marcie ate earlier, but I've been waiting
breakfast on you." He pulled open the refrigerator door.  "Eggs and
bacon and toast?  Or I could whip up an omelet with some cheese, herbs,
just a touch of onion, a few slivers of green peppers."

:'You cook, too," Jorja said.

'I'll never win any prizes," he said.  "But it's usually edible, and at
least half the time you can even tell what it is when I put it on your
plate." He pulled open the freezer door.  "They have frozen waffles.  I
could toast a few of those to go along with the omelet."

"Whatever you're having." She was unable to look away from Marcie, and
as she watched her stricken daughter, her appetite faded.

Jack loaded his arms with a carton of milk, another of eggs, a package
of cheese, a green pepper, and a small onion, and carried the fixings to
the cutting board beside the sink.

When Jack began cracking eggs into a bowl, Jorja joined him at the
counter.  Although she did not think Marcie would hear her even if she
shouted, she spoke sotto voce to Jack: "Did she really eat breakfast?"

He whispered too: "Sure.  Some cereal.  A piece of toast with jelly and
peanut butter.  I had to help her a little, that's all."

Jorja tried not to think about what Dom had told her of Zebediah Lomack,
or about how Lomack tied in with what had happened to Alan.  But if two
grown men had been unable to cope with the sick obsessions that had
evolved from what they'd seen on July 6 and from the subsequent
brainwashing, what chance did Marcie have of coping, living?

"Hey, hey," Jack said softly, "don't cry, Jorja.  Crying won't help
anything." He took her in his arms.  "She'll be all right. I promise
you.  Listen, just this morning, the others were saying they had a
terrific night last night, no dreams for a change, and Dom didn't
sleepwalk, and Ernie wasn't half as afraid of the dark as usual.  Know
why?  Because just being here, pulling together like a family-it's
already making the memory blocks crumble, relieving the pressure.  All
right, yes, Marcie's a bit worse this morning, but that doesn't mean
it's all downhill for her.  She'll improve.  I know she will."

Jorja was not expecting the embrace, but she welcomed it. God, how she
welcomed it!  She leaned against him and allowed herself to be held, and
instead of feeling weak and foolish, she felt a new strength flowing
into her.  She was tall for a woman, and he was not tall for a man, so
they were almost the same height, yet she had the atavistic feeling of
being protected, guarded.  She was reminded of what she'd been thinking
yesterday, on the flight north from Las Vegas: Human beings were not
meant for solitude, lonely struggles; the very essence of the species
was its need to give and receive friendship, affection, love.  Right
now, she needed to receive, and Jack needed to give, and the confluence
of their needs gave new purpose and determination to both of them.

"An omelet with cheese, herbs, a little bit of chopped onion, and
slivers of green pepper," he said softly, his lips against her ear, as
if sensing that she had regained her footing and was ready to go on.
"Does that sound all right?"

"Sounds delicious," she said, reluctantly letting go of him.

"And one other ingredient," he said.  "I warned you I wouldn't win any
cooking prizes.  I always get one little chip of eggshell in every
omelet, no matter how careful I am."

"Oh, that's the secret of a good omelet," she said.  "One bit of
eggshell for texture.  The finest restaurants make omelets that way."

"Yeah?  Do they also leave one bone in every fish?"

"And a bit of hoof in every order of beef Bourguignon," she said.

"one antler in every chocolate mousse?"

"And one shoemaker's nail in every apple cobbler."

"One old maid in every apple pandowdy?"

"Oh, God, I hate puns."

"Me too," he said.  "Truce?"

"Truce.  I'll grate the cheddar for the omelet."

Together they made breakfast.

At the kitchen table, Marcie colored moons.  And colored moons.  And
murmured that one word in monotonous, mesmeric, rhythmic chains.

In Monterey, California, Parker Faine had almost fallen into the lair of
a trap-door spider.  He counted himself fortunate to have gotten out
alive.  A trap-door spider-that was how he thought of the Salcoes'
neighbor, a woman named Essie Craw.  The trap-door spider constructed a
tubular nest in the ground and fixed a cleverly concealed hinged lid at
the top. When other hapless insects, innocent and unsuspecting, crossed
the perfectly camouflaged lid, it opened and dropped them down to the
rapacious arachnoid beast below.  Essie Craw's tubular nest was a lovely
large Spanish home far more suited to the California coast than the
Salcoes' Southern Colonial manse, with graceful arches and leaded-glass
windows and flowers blooming in large terra cotta pots on the portico.
One look at the place, and Parker was prepared to encounter charming and
exquisitely gracious people, but when Essie Craw answered the door he
knew he was in deep trouble. When she discovered that he was seeking
information about the Salcoes, she virtually seized him by his sleeve
and dragged him inside and slammed the lid of her tubular nest behind
him, for those who sought information often had information to give in
return, and Essie Craw fed on gossip as surely as the trap-door spider
fed on careless beetles, centipedes, and pillbugs.

Essie did not look like a spider but rather like a bird.  Not a scrawny,
thirmecked, meager-breasted sparrow.  More like a well-fed sea gull. She
had a quick birdlike walk, and she held her head slightly to the side in
the manner of a bird, and she had beady little avian eyes.

After leading him to a seat in the living room, she offered coffee, but
he declined, and she insisted, but he protested that he did not want to
be a bother.  She brought coffee anyway, plus butter cookies, which she
produced with such alacrity that he suspected she was as perpetually
prepared for drop-in guests as was the trap-door spider.

Essie was disappointed to hear that Parker knew nothing about the Salcoe
family and had no gossip.  But since he was not their friend, either, he
offered a fresh pair of ears for her observations, tales, slanders, and
mean-spirited suppositions. He did not even have to ask questions in
order to learn more than he wanted to know.  Donna Salcoe, Gerald's
wife, was (Essie said) a brassy sort, too blond, too flashy,
phony-sweet. Donna was so thin she was surely a problem drinker who
survived on a liquid diet-or maybe she was anorexic.  Gerald was Donna's
second husband, and although they had been married eighteen years, Essie
did not think it would last.  Essie made the sixteen-year-old twin girls
sound so wild, so unrestrained, so nubile and licentious, that Parker
pictured packs of young men sniffing around the Salcoe house like dogs
seeking bitches in heat.  Gerald Salcoe owned three thriving shops-an
antiques store, two art galleries-in nearby Carmel, though Essie could
not understand how any of these enterprises showed a profit when Salcoe
was a hard-drinking libertine and a thick-headed boob with no business
sense.

Parker drank only two sips of his coffee and didn't even nibble at the
butter cookies, because Essie Craw's enthusiasm for malicious gossip
went beyond the limits of ordinary behavior into a realm of weirdness
that made him uncomfortable and unwilling to turn his back on her-or
consume much of what she provided.

But he learned a few useful things, as well.  The Salcoes had taken an
impromptu vacation-one week in the wine country, Napa and Sonoma-and had
been so desperate to escape the pressures of their various enterprises
that they had not wanted to reveal the name of the- hotel where they
could be reached, lest it get back to the very business associates from
whom they needed a rest.

"He called me Sunday to tell me they were off and wouldn't be back until
Monday, the twentieth," Essie said.  "Asked me to keep a watch over the
place, as usual.  They're terrible gadabouts, and it's such a bother to
be expected to look out for burglars and God knows what.  I have my own
life to live, which of course concerns them not at all."

"You didn't speak with any of them face to face?"

"I guess they were in a hurry to be off."

"Did you see them leave?"

"No, though I .  .  .  well .  .  .  I looked out a couple of times, but
I must've missed them."

"The twins went with them?" Parker asked.  "Isn't school in?"

"It's a progressive school-too progressive, I say-and travel is thought
to be as broadening as classroom work.  Did you ever hear such-"

"How did Mr.  Salcoe sound when you spoke with him on the phone?"

Impatiently, Essie said, "Well .  .  .  he sounded .  .  .  like he
always sounds.  What do you mean?"

"Not at all strained?  Nervous?"

She pursed her tight little mouth, cocked her head, and her bird-bright
eyes glittered at the prospect of potential scandal.  "Well, now that
you mention it, he was a bit odd.  Stumbled over his words a few times,
but until now I didn't realize he'd probably been drinking.  Do you
think ...  oh, that he's had to go off to some clinic to dry out or-"

Parker had heard enough.  He rose to leave, but Essie got between him
and the doorway, trying to delay him by making him feel guilty that he
had not finished his coffee or even tasted a cookie.  She suggested tea
instead of coffee, some strudel, or "perhaps an almond croissant." By
dint of the same indomitable will that had made him a great painter, he
managed to get to the front door, through it, and onto the portico.

She followed him all the way to the rental car in her driveway.  The
little vomit-green Tempo looked, for that one moment, as beautiful as a
Rolls-Royce, for it offered escape from Essie Craw.  As he sped away, he
quoted Coleridge aloud, an apt passage.

Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.

He drove around for half an hour, working up the courage to do what must
be done.  Finally, upon his return to the Salcoe house, he parked boldly
at the head of the circular driveway, in the shadows of the massive
pines.  He went to the front door again, insistently pressed the bell
for three minutes.  If anyone was home and merely unwilling to see
visitors, he would have answered that unrelenting ring out of sheer
desperation.  But no one responded.

Parker walked along the veranda, studying the front windows, being
nonchalant, acting as if he belonged there, though the property was so
shrouded by trees and lush landscaping that he could not be spotted
easily from the street-or from Essie Craw's windows.  The drapes were
shut, preventing a glimpse of the interior.  He expected to see the
telltale electricity-conducting tape of an alarm system on the glass.
But there was no tape and no other indication of electronic security.

He stepped off the end of the veranda and went around the western side
of the house, where the morning sun had not shrunk the long, deep
shadows of the pines.  He tried two windows there.  They were locked.

In back of the house were more shrubs, flowers, and a large brick patio
with a lattice cover, outdoor wet-bar, expensive lawn furniture.

He used his coat-protected elbow to smash in a small pane on one of the
French doors.  He unlocked the door and went inside, pushing through the
drapes into a tile-floored family room.

He stood very still, listening.  The house was silent.

It would have been uncomfortably dark if the family room had not opened
onto a breakfast area and the breakfast area onto the kitchen, where
light entered through the glass in that uncurtained door to the patio.
Parker moved past a fireplace, billiards table-and froze when he spotted
the motion-detection alarm unit on the wall.  He recognized it from when
he had investigated security systems for his Laguna house.  He was about
to flee when he recalled that a small red light should have been visible
on the unit if it was in operation.  The bulb was there-but dark.
Apparently the system had not been activated when the Salcoes had left.

The kitchen was roomy, with the best appliances.  Beyond that was a
serving pantry, then the dining room.  The light from the kitchen did
not reach that far, so he decided to risk turning on lights as he went.

In the living room, he stood very still again, listening.

Nothing.  The silence was deep and heavy, as in a tomb.

When Brendan Cronin entered the Blocks'kitchen after rising late and
taking a long hot shower, he found little Marcie coloring moons and
murmuring eerily to herself.  He thought of how he had mended Emmeline
Halbourg with his hands, and he wondered if he could cure Marcie's
psychological obsession by the application of that same psychic power.
But he dared not try.  Not until he learned to control his wild talent,
for he might do irreparable harm to the girl's mind.

Jack and Jorja were finishing omelets and toast, and they greeted him
warmly.  Jorja wanted to make breakfast for Brendan, too, but he
declined.  He only wanted a cup of coffee, black and strong.

As Jack ate, he examined four handguns that were lying on the table
beside his plate.  Two of them were Ernie's.  Jack had brought the other
two with him from the East.  Neither Brendan nor anyone else referred to
the firearms, for they knew their enemy might be listening right now. No
point revealing the size of their arsenal.

The guns made Brendan nervous.  Maybe because he had a prescient feeling
that the weapons would be used repeatedly before day's end.

His characteristic optimism had left him, largely because he had not
dreamed last night.  He'd had his first uninterrupted sleep in weeks,
but for him that was no improvement. Unlike the others, Brendan had been
having a good dream every night, and it had given him hope.  Now the
dream was gone, and the loss made him edgy.

"I thought it would be snowing by now," he said as he sat down at the
table with a cup of coffee.

"Soon," Jack said.

The sky looked like a great slab of dark-gray granite.

Ned and Sandy Sarver, serving as the second team of outriders, had
driven into Elko to rendezvous with Jack, Jorja, and Brendan at the Arco
Mini-Mart at four in the morning, then had cruised around town until
seven-thirty, by which time some of those back at the Tranquility would
have set out on their tasks for the day.  They returned to the motel at
eight o'clock, ate a quick breakfast, and went back to bed to get a few
more hours of rest in order to cope with the busy day ahead.

Ned woke after little more than two hours, but he did not get out of
bed.  He lay in the dimness of the motel room for a while, watching
Sandy sleep.  The love he felt for her was deep and smooth and flowing
like a great river that could bear them both away to better places and
times beyond all the worries of the world.

Ned wished he was as good a talker as he was a fixer. Sometimes he
worried that he had never been able to tell her exactly how he felt
about her.  But when he tried to put his sentiments into words, he
either became tongue-tied or heard himself expressing his emotions in
hopelessly inarticulate sentences and leaden images.  It was good to be
a fixer, with the talent to repair everything from broken toasters to
broken cars to broken people.  Yet sometimes, Ned would have traded all
his mending skills for the ability to compose and speak one perfect
sentence which would convey his deepest feelings for her.

Now, watching her, he realized that she was no longer sleeping. "Playing
possum?" he asked.

She opened her eyes and smiled.  "I was scared, the way you were
watching me, that I was going to get eaten alive, so I played possum."

"You look good enough to eat; that's for sure."

She threw aside the covers and, naked, opened her arms to him.  They
fell at once into the familiar silken rhythms of love-making at which
they had become so sensuously adept during the past year of her sexual
awakening.

In the afterglow, as they lay side by side, holding hands, Sandy said,
"Oh, Ned, I'must be the happiest woman on earth.  Since I met you down
in Arizona all those years ago, since you took me under your wing,
you've made me very happy, Ned.  In fact, I'm so crazy-happy now that if
God struck me dead this minute, I wouldn't complain."

"Don't say that," he told her sharply.  Rising up on one elbow, leaning
over her, looking down at her, he said, "I don't like you saying-that.
It makes me ...  superstitious.  All this trouble we're in-it's possible
some of us will die.  So I don't want you tempting fate.  I don't want
you saying things like that."

"Ned, you're about the least superstitious man I know."

"Yeah, well, I feel different about this.  I don't want you saying
you're so happy you wouldn't mind dying, nothing like that.  Understand?
I don't want you even thinking it."

He slipped his arms around her again, pulling her very tightly against
him, needing to feel the throb of life within her.  He held her so close
that after a while he could no longer detect the strong and regular
stroking of her heart, which was only because it had become synchronized
with-and lost inhis own beat.

In the Salcoe family's Monterey house, Parker Faine was looking
primarily for two things, either of which would fulfill his obligation
to Dom.  First, he hoped to find something to prove they had actually
gone to Napa-Sonoma: If he found a brochure for a hotel, he could call
and confirm that the Salcoes had checked in safely; or if they went to
the wine country regularly, perhaps an address book would contain the
telephone number of the place where they stayed.  But he half-expected
to find the other thing instead: overturned

furniture, bloodstains, or other evidence that the Salcoes had been
taken against their will.

Of course, Dom had only asked him to come talk with these people.  He
would be appalled to know that Parker had gone to these illegal lengths
when the Salcoes had been unlocatable.  But Parker never did anything by
halves, and he was enjoying himself even though his heart had begun to
pound and his throat had clutched up a bit.

Beyond the living room was a library.  Beyond that, a small music room
contained a piano, music stands, chairs, two clarinet cases, and a
ballet exercise bar.  Evidently, the twins liked music and dance.

Parker found nothing amiss on the first floor, so he slowly climbed the
stairs, staying in the runner of plush carpet between oak inlays.  The
light from the first floor reached just to the top step.  Above, the
second-floor hallway was dark.

He stopped on the landing.

Stillness.

His hands were clammy.

He did not understand why he was clutching up.  Maybe instinct.  It
might be wise to pay attention to his more primitive senses.  But if
anyone had wanted to ambush him, there had been plenty of places on the
first floor ideal for the purpose, yet the rooms had been deserted.

He continued upward, and when he reached the secondfloor hallway, he
finally heard something.  It was a cross between a beep-sound and a
blip-sound, and it came from rooms on both ends of the hall.  For a
moment he thought the alarm system was about to go off, after all, but
an alarm would have been a thousand times louder than these beep-blips.
The sounds came in counterpointed, rhythmic patterns.

He found a switch at the head of the stairs and snapped on the overhead
lights in the hall.  Standing motionless once more, he listened for
noises other than the curious beep-blips. He heard none.  There was
something familiar about the sound, but it eluded him.

His curiosity was greater than his fear.  He had always been compelled
by a chronic curiosity, with frequent acute attacks of same, and if he
had not allowed it to drive him in the past, he'd never have become a
successful painter.  Curiosity was the heart of creativity.  Therefore,
he looked both ways along the hall, then turned right and walked
cautiously toward one source of the beep-blips.

At the end of the hallway, there were two distinct sets of beeping
sounds, each with a slightly different rhythm, both coming from a dark
room where the door was three-quarters shut.  Poised to flee, he pushed
the door all the way open. Nothing leaped at him out of the darkness.
The beeping became louder, but only because the door was out of the way
now.  He saw that the room was not entirely dark.  On the far wall, thin
ribbons of pale gray light outlined drapes that were drawn across a very
large window or perhaps a pair of balcony doors; the Salcoes' Southern
Colonial had lots of balconies. In addition, around the corner from the
doorway, out of sight, were two sources of eerie soft green light that
did little to dispel the gloom.

Parker eased forward, clicked the light switch, entered the room, saw
the Salcoe twins, and thought for an instant that they were dead.  They
were lying on their backs in a queensized bed, covers drawn up to their
shoulders, unmoving, eyes open.  Then Parker realized that the beeping
and the green light came from EEG and EKG monitors to which both girls
were connected, and he saw the IV racks trailing lines to spikes
inserted in their arms, so he knew they were not dead but merely in the
process of being brainwashed.  The chamber had none of the quality of a
teenaged girl's room; from the lack of personal mementos or any stamp of
individuality, he assumed it was a guest room and that the girls had
been put here in a single bed simply to make it easier to monitor them.

But where were their captors and tormentors?  Were the mind-control
experts so certain of the effectiveness of their drugs and other devices
that they could leave the family alone and dash out for a Big Mac and
fries at McDonald's?  Was there no risk at all that one of the Salcoes,
in a moment of lucidity, might tear out his IV line, rise up, and flee?

Parker went to the nearest girl, looked into her blank eyes. For a few
seconds she peered up unblinking, then suddenly blinked furiously-ten,
twenty, thirty times-then stared unblinking again.  She did not see
Parker.  He waved a hand across her eyes and got no reaction.

He saw that she was wearing a pair of earphones connected to a tape
recorder that lay on the pillow beside her head.  He leaned close to
her, lifted one earphone an inch, and listened to a soft, melodic, and
very soothing voice, a woman's voice: "On Monday morning, I slept in
late.  It's a wonderful hotel "We're sleeping late because the staff is
so quiet, so respectful.  It's actually a country club as well as a
hotel, so it's not like other places, where maids make a racket in the
halls as soon as the sun rises.  Oh, don't you just love the wine
country!  I'd like to live there someday.  Anyway, after we finally got
up, Chrissie and I took a long walk around the grounds, sort of hoping
we'd run into some neat boys, but we couldn'tfind any.  .  .."

The hypnotic rhythms of the woman's voice spooked Parker. He put the
earphones back in place.

Evidently, one or more of the Salcoes had remembered what they had
experienced at the Tranquility Motel the summer before last.  So those
memories had again been repressed. Now to cover the time span of this
current brainwashing session, new false memories were being implanted, a
process that included the repeated playing of a tape recording that
undoubtedly had subliminal as well as audible messages to impart.

Dom had explained some of it to Parker on the telephone, Saturday and
Sunday nights.  But Parker had not fully appreciated the hideousness of
the conspiracy until he heard that insidious whisper in the Salcoe
girl's ear.

He moved to the foot of the bed and studied the other twin, whose eyes
also alternated between blihkless stares and abrupt, machine-gun bursts
of blinks.  He wondered if he would do any physical or mental harm to
them if he pulled out their IV lines, disconnected them from the
machines, and moved them out of the house before their captors returned.
Better to find a phone, call the police How long they were watching him
he did not know, but suddenly he was aware that he and the twins were
not alone. He jumped and whirled toward the door, where two men had
entered the room.  They were wearing dark slacks, white shirts with the
sleeves rolled up and the collars unbuttoned, neckties loosened and
askew.  At the doorway behind them was another man, bespectacled and in
a suit with his tie in place. They had to be government agents, for no
one else would bother to wear business clothes while engaged upon
activities of such a dubious nature.

One of them said, "And who the fuck are you?"

Parker did not attempt to jive them, did not foolishly claim his rights
as a U S.  citizen, did not bother to say anything at all.  He just took
three running steps toward the drawn drapes, praying that a big window
or sliding-glass balcony door lay beyond them, that it would shatter on
impact, that the drapes would protect him from serious cuts, and that he
would be outside and gone before they knew what happened.  If the drapes
were a lot wider than the window, covering more blank wall than glass,
he was in big trouble.  Behind him, the men shouted in surprise ' just
as he hit the drapes, for they'd obviously believed they'd trapped him.
He went through the material with the unstoppable power of a locomotive.
The impact was tremendous, sending a devastating shock across his
shoulder and through his chest, but something gave way with a crack and
a screech and a crash of glass, and he was through into daylight,
vaguely aware that the doors had been French rather than sliding panels
and that he had been lucky the lock was flimsy.

He found himself on a second-floor balcony with a pair of redwood lounge
chairs and a glass-topped table, over which he fell.  Even as he was
going down on top of chairs, banging knees and barking shins, he was
already coming up again, up and over the balcony rail, leaping out into
space, praying he would not land in a particularly woody shrub and be
castrated by a sharp, sturdy branch.  He fell only twelve feet onto bare
lawn, jarring his other shoulder and his back but breaking no bones.  He
rolled, scrambled to his feet, and ran.

Suddenly, in front of his eyes, foliage snapped-flutteredshredded, and
he didn't know what was happening, and then as he continued to run,
pieces of bark exploded off a tree, and he realized they were shooting
at him.  He heard no gunfire.  Silencer-equipped weapons.  He zigzagged
toward the perimeter of the property, fell in an azalea bed, scrambled
up, ran on, reached a hedge, threw himself over it, and kept on running.

They had been ready to kill him to stop him from spreading the news of
what he had seen in the Salcoe house.  Right now, they were probably
hastily moving-or killing-the Salcoes. If he found a phone and called
the police, and if the killers were agents of the U S.  government,
whose side would the police be on?  And who would they believe?  One
eccentric and rather curiously dressed artist with a woolly beard and
flyaway hair?  Or three neatly attired FBI men claiming they were in the
Salcoe house on a legitimate stakeout of some kind, and that Parker
Faine was, in fact, the felon they had attempted to arrest.  If they
demanded custody of him, would the police cooperate?

Jesus.

He ran.  Abandoning the Tempo, he sprinted down the sloped wall of a
shallow glen, along the rocky course of a narrow brook, between trees,
through underbrush, up another wall of the same glen, into someone's
back yard, across that lawn and into another yard, alongside a house,
out into a street, from that street to another.  He slowed to a fast
walk to avoid drawing attention to himself, but he continued to follow a
twisty route away from the Salcoe house.

He knew what he had to do.  The horror he had just seen had made the
extremity of Dom's plight clearer than ever. Parker had known his friend
was in danger, deep in a conspiracy of monumental proportions, but
knowing it in his mind was not the same as knowing it in his guts. There
was nothing for him to do but go to Elko County.  Dom Corvaisis was his
friend, perhaps his best friend, and this was what friends did for each
other: shared their trouble, fought back the darkness together.  He
could walk away, go back to Laguna Beach to continue work on the
painting that he had begun yesterday.  But if he chose that course, he
would never like himself very much again-which would be an intolerable
circumstance, for he had always liked himself immensely!

He had to find a ride back to the Monterey Airport, catch a flight to
San Francisco International, and head east from there toward Nevada.  He
was not concerned that the men in the Salcoes' house would be looking
for him at the airport. The only words any of them had spoken in his
presence were: "And who the fuck are you?" If they did not know who he
was, they would most likely figure he was a local.  The keys to the
Tempo had a rental-company tag on them, but they were in his pocket.  In
an hour or two, of course, the bad guys would trace the car to the
airport, but by then he should have taken off for San Francisco.

He kept walking.  On a quiet residential street he saw a young man,
about nineteen or twenty, in the driveway of a more modest house than
the Salcoes', carefully scrubbing the whitewalls on the tires of a
meticulously restored, banana yellow, 1958 Plymouth Fury, one of those
long jobs with a plenitude of grille and big sharity fins.  The kid had
a slickedback ducktail haircut to match the era of his vehicle.  Parker
went up to him and said, "Listen, my car broke down, and I've got to get
to the airport.  I'm in a big hurry, so would you drive me out there for
fifty bucks?"

The kid knew how to hurry.  If he had not been a superb driver, he would
have fishtailed out of control and spun them off the road into trees or
ditches on a half-dozen tight turns, for he got all possible speed out
of the big Fury.  After they came through the third sharp turn alive,
Parker knew he was in good hands, and he finally relaxed a bit.

At the airport, he bought a ticket for one of two remaining seats on a
West Air flight leaving for San Francisco in ten minutes.  He boarded
the plane, half-expecting it to be halted by federal agents before it
could take off.  But soon they were airborne, and he could worry about
something else: getting another flight from San Francisco to Reno before
they tracked him that far.

Jack Twist went through the Blocks' apartment from northto west- to
south- to east-facing windows, surveying the vast landscape for signs of
the enemy's observation post or posts. At least one surveillance team
would be watching the motel and diner, and no matter how well concealed
they were, he had a device that would pinpoint their location.

He'd brought it from New York with the other gear-an instrument the
armed forces called the HS101 Heat Analyzer. It was shaped like a sleek
futuristic raygun from the movies, with a single two-inch-diameter lens
instead of a barrel.  You held it by the butt and looked through the
eyepiece as if peering into a telescope.  Moving the viewfinder across
the landscape, you saw two things: an ordinary magnified image of the
terrain, and an overlaid representation of heat sources within that
terrain.  Plants, animals, and sun-baked rocks radiated heat, but thanks
to microchip technology, the HS's computer could differentiate among
types of thermal radiation and screen out most natural background
sources.  The device would show only heat from living sources larger
than fifty pounds: animals bigger than house-dogs and human beings. Even
if they were out there in insulated ski suits that trapped a lot of body
heat, enough would escape their garments to give him a fix on them.

Jack spent a considerable length of time studying the land north of the
motel, through which he had approached the place last night, but finally
he decided no one was watching from that direction, and he moved to the
west-facing windows in other rooms.  The west also looked clear, so he
went next to the windows on the south side of the apartment.

Marcie had colored the last moon in her album, and when Jack set out
with the HS101 to look for surveillance teams, she came with him,
staying close by his side.  Maybe she had taken a liking to him because
he'd spent hours talking to her in spite of her failure to respond.  Or
maybe she was scared of something and felt safer in his presence.  Or
another reason too strange to imagine.  He could do nothing for her
except keep talking softly to her as she accompanied him.

Jorja followed along as well, and though she did not interrupt with
questions, she was considerably more distracting than her daughter.  She
was a strikingly beautiful woman, but more importantly he liked her a
lot.  He thought she liked him, too, although he didn't suppose she was
attracted to him, not in the man-woman sense.  After all, what would a
woman like her see in a guy like him?  He was an admitted criminal, and
he had a face like an old battered shoe, not to mention one cast eye.
But they could be friends, at least, and that was nice.

At the living room windows, he finally spotted what he was seeking:
points of body heat out there in the cold barrens. Across the top of the
image that filled the lens-Nevada plains and overlaid heat patterns-came
a digital readout of data that told him there were two sources of heat,
that they were due south of his position, and that they were
approximately four-tenths of a mile away.  That information was followed
by numerals that represented an estimation of the size of each source's
radiant surface, which told him he had found two men.  He switched off
the HS's heat-analysis function and turned up the magnification, using
the device as a simple telescope, zeroing in on the area in which the
heat had been detected.  He had to search for a couple of minutes, for
they were wearing camouflage suits.

"Bingo," he said at last.

Jorja did not ask what he saw, for she had learned well the lesson he
had taught them last night: Everything spoken in the apartment was
sucked directly into the enemy's electronic ears.

Out there on the barrens, the two observers were prone on the cold
ground.  Jack saw that one man had a pair of binoculars.  But the guy
was not using the glasses at the moment, so he was not aware of Jack
watching him from the window.

He moved to the east windows and surveyed that landscape, as well, but
it was uninhabited.  They were being watched only from the south, which
the enemy figured was sufficient because the front of the motel and the
only road leading to it could be seen from that single post.

They were underestimating Jack.  They knew his background, knew that he
was good, but they didn't realize how good.

At one-forty, the first snowflakes fell.  For a while they came down
only as scattered flurries, with no particular force.

At two o'clock, when Dom and Ernie returned from their scouting trip
around the perimeter of the Thunder Hill Depository, Jack said, "You
know, Ernie, when the storm really hits later, there might be some
people on the interstate who'll see our wheels out front and pull in
here, looking for shelter, even if we leave the sign and other lights
off.  Better move my Cherokee, the Servers' truck, and the cars around
back. We don't want a lot of people rapping at your door wanting to know
why you're giving rooms to some people and not to them."

Actually, certain that the enemy was even now listening to them, Jack
was using the specter of weary snow-bound motorists as a plausible
excuse to move the pickup truck and the Cherokee, the two
four-wheel-drive vehicles, out of sight of the observers south of I-80.
Later, when heavier snow and the early darkness of the storm settled in,
the entire Tranquility family would surreptitiously leave the motel from
the rear, heading overland in the truck and the Cherokee.

Ernie sensed Jack's real purpose; equally aware of eavesdroppers, he
played along.  He and Dom went outside again to move all the vehicles
around back.

In the kitchen, Ned and Sandy had nearly finished preparing and
packaging the sandwiches that everyone would be issued for dinner.

Now they had only to wait for Faye and Ginger.

The snow flurries intermittently surrendered to furious but short-lived
squalls.  The day dimmed.  By two-forty, the squalls turned to steady
snow that, in spite of a complete cessation of wind, reduced visibility
to a few hundred feet.  Out on the barrens, the camouflaged observers
were probably picking up their gear and moving closer to the motel.

Jack checked his watch more frequently.  He knew time was running out.
But he had no way of knowing how fast it might be running out.

While Lieutenant Horner repaired the sabotaged polygraph in the security
office, Falkirk lectured the Depository's chief of security and his
assistant-Major Fugata and Lieutenant Helms-letting them know they were
on his list of possible traitors.  He made two enemies, but that didn't
matter.  He did not want them to like him-only to respect and fear him.

He had not yet finished chewing out Fugata and Helms when General
Alvarado arrived.  The general was a lardass with a pot gut, fingers
like sausages, and jowls.  He stormed into the security office in a
red-faced outrage, having just heard the bad news from Dr.  Miles
Bennell: "Is it true, Colonel Falkirk?  By God, is it true?  Have you
actually taken control Of VIGILANT and made prisoners of us all?"

Sternly but in a tone that could not be construed as disrespectful,
Leland informed Alvarado that he had the authority to include the secret
program in the security computer and to activate it at his discretion.
Alvarado demanded to know whose authority, and Leland said, "General
Maxwell D.  Riddenhour, Chief of Staff of the Army and Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs." Alvarado said he knew perfectly well who Riddenhour was,
but he did not believe that the colonel's mentor in this matter was the
Chief of Staff himself.  "Sir, why don't you call him and ask?" Leland
suggested.  He took a card out of his wallet and gave it to Alvarado.
"That's General Riddenhour's number."

"I have the Staff HQ number," Alvarado said scornfully.

"Sir, that's not Staff HQ.  That's General Riddenhour's unlisted home
line.  If he's not in his office, he'd want you to contact him on the
unlisted phone.  After all, this is a deadly serious matter, sir."

Burning a brighter red, Alvarado stalked out, the card pinched between
thumb and forefinger and held away from his side as if it were an
offensive object.  He was back in fifteen minutes, no longer flushed but
pale.  "All right, Colonel, you have the authority you claim.  So .  . .
I guess you're in command of Thunder Hill for the time being."

"Not at all, sir," Leland said.  "You're still the CO."

"But if I'm a prisoner-"

Leland interrupted.  "Sir, your orders take precedence as long as they
don't directly conflict with my authority to guarantee that no dangerous
persons-no dangerous creaturesescape from Thunder Hill."

Alvarado shook his head in amazement.  "According to Miles Bennell, you
have this crazy idea that we're all ...  some kind of monsters." The
general had used the most melodramatic word he could think of, with the
intent of belittling Leland's position.

"Sir, as you know, one or more people in this facility attempted, by
indirection, to bring some of the witnesses back to the Tranquility,
evidently with the hope that the witnesses will remember what they've
been made to forget and will create a media circus that'll force us to
reveal what we've hidden.  Now, these traitors are probably just
well-intentioned men, most likely members of Bennell's staff, who simply
believe the public should be informed.  But the possibility also exists
that they've got other and darker motives."

"Monsters," Alvarado repeated sourly.

When the polygraph was repaired, Leland charged Major Fugata and
Lieutenant Helms with interrogating everyone in Thunder Hill who had
knowledge of the special secret harbored there for more than eighteen
months.  "If you screw up again," Leland warned them, "I'll have your
heads." If they failed again to find the man who'd sent the Polaroids to
the witnesses, he would view their failure as one more bit of evidence
that rot had spread widely through the Thunder Hill staff, and that it
was not ordinary human corruption but the result of an extraordinary and
terrifying infection.  Their failure would cost them their lives.

At one-forty-five, Leland and Lieutenant Horner returned to Shenkfield,
leaving the Depository's entire staff locked deep in the bosom of the
earth.  Upon his return to his windowless office in that other
underground facility, the colonel received several doses of bad news,
all courtesy of Foster Polnichey, the head of the Chicago office of the
FBI.

First, Sharkle was dead out in Evanston, Illinois, which should have
been good news, but he had taken his sister, brother-in-law, and an
entire SWAT team with him.  The siege of Sharkle's house had become
national news due to the extreme violence of its conclusion.  The
blood-hungry media would be focused on O'Bannon Lane until endless
rehashing of the story drained it of thrills.  Worse, among Sharkle's
mad ravings, there had been enough truth to lead a perceptive and
aggressive reporter to Nevada, to the Tranquility, and perhaps all the
way to Thunder Hill.

Worst of all, Foster Polnichey reported that "something almost .  .  .
well .  .  .  supernatural is happening here." A stabbing and shooting
in an Uptown apartment, involving a family named Mendoza, had caused
such a sensation within the city's police department that newspaper
reporters and television crews had virtually set siege to the tenement
house hours ago.  Evidently, Winton Tolk, the officer whose life had
been saved by Brendan Cronin, had brought a stabbed child back from
near-death.

Incredibly, Brendan Cronin had passed his own amazing talents to Tolk.
But what else had he passed on to the black policeman?  There might be
only a wondrous new power in Winton Tolk .  .  .  or something dark and
dangerous, alive and inhuman, living within the cop.

The worst possible scenario was, after all, unfolding.  Leland was
half-sick with apprehension as he listened to Polnichey.

According to the FBI agent, Tolk was giving no interviews to the press
and was, in fact, now in seclusion in his own house, where another mob
of reporters had gathered.  Sooner or later, however, Tolk would agree
to speak with the press, and he would mention Brendan Cronin, and from
there they would eventually find the link to the Halbourg girl.

The Halbourg girl.  That was another nightmare.  Upon receiving this
morning's news of Tolk's unexpected healing powers, Polnichey had gone
to the Halbourgs' home to determine if Emmy had acquired unusual powers
subsequent to her own miraculous recovery.  What he found there beggared
description, and he immediately isolated the entire Halbourg family from
the press and public before their secret was discovered.

Now all five Halbourgs were in an FBI safe-house, under the watchful
eyes of six agents who'd been informed only that the family was as much
to be feared as protected and that no agent was to be alone with any
member of the family at any time.  If the Halbourgs made threatening or
unusual moves, they would all be killed instantly.

"But I think it's all pointless now," Polnichey said on the phone from
Chicago.  "I think we've lost control of it.  ' It's spread, and we've
no hope of containing it again.  So we might as well call an end to the
cover-up, go public."

"Are you mad?" Leland demanded.

"If it's come to the point where we have to kill people, lots of people,
like the Halbourgs and the Tolks and all the witnesses there in Nevada,
in order just to keep the story contained, then the cost of containment
has gotten too damn high."

Leland Falkirk was furious.  "You've lost sight of what's at stake here.
My God, man, we're no longer merely trying to keep the news from the
public.  That's almost immaterial now. Now, we're trying to protect our
entire species from obliteration.  If we go public, and if then we
decide to use violence to contain the infection, every goddamn
politician and bleeding-heart will be second-guessing us, interfering,
and before you know it, we'll have lost the war!"

"But I think what's being proven here is that the danger isn't that
great," Polnichey said.  "Sure, I've told the men guarding the Halbourgs
to regard them as a threat, but I don't really believe they're a danger
to us.  That little Emmy ...  she's a darling, not a monster.  I don't
know how the power got in Cronin or how he conveyed it to the girl, but
I'm almost willing to bet my life that the power is the only thing
inside the child.  The only thing inside any of them.  If you could meet
Emmy and watch her, Colonel!  She's a delight.  All evidence points to
the fact that we should regard what's happening as the greatest event in
the history of mankind."

"Of course," Leland said coldly, "that's what an enemy like this would
want us to believe.  If we can be convinced that accommodation and
surrender are a great blessing, we'll be conquered without a fight."

"But Colonel, if Cronin and Corvaisis and Tolk and Emmy have been
infected, if they're no longer human, or at least no longer like you and
me, they wouldn't advertise by performing miraculous cures and feats of
telekinesis.  They'd keep their amazing abilities secret in order to
spread their infection to more people without detection."

Leland was unmoved by that argument.  "We don't know exactly how this
thing works.  Maybe a person, once infected, surrenders control to the
parasite, becomes a slave.  Or to answer the point you've just made,
maybe the relationship between the host and parasite is benign, mutually
supportive-and maybe the host doesn't even know the parasite is inside
him, which would explain why the Halbourg girl and the others don't know
where their power comes from.  But in either case, that person is no
longer strictly human.  And in my estimation, Polnichey, that person can
no longer be trusted.  Not an inch.  Now, for God's sake, you've got to
take the entire Tolk family into custody, too.  Isolate them at once."

"As I told you, Colonel, journalists surround the Tolk house. If I go in
there with agents and take the Tolks into custody in front of a score of
reporters, our cover-up is blown.  And although I no longer believe in
the cover-up, I'm not going to sabotage it.  I know my duty."

"You've at least got agents watching the house?"

"Yes."

"What about the Mendozas?  If Tolk infected the boy the way Cronin
apparently infected him .  .  ."

"We're watching the Mendozas," Polnichey said.  "Again, we can't make a
bold move because of the reporters."

The other problem was Father Stefan Wycazik.  The priest had been to the
Mendozas' apartment and then to the Halbourg house before Foster
Polnichey had known what was going on at either location.  Later, an FBI
agent had seen Wycazik at barricades near the Sharkle house in Evanston,
at the very moment when Sharkle had detonated his bomb. But no one knew
where he had gone; no one had seen him in almost six hours.  "Obviously
he's putting it together, piece by piece.  One more reason to call off
the cover-up and go public, before we're all caught in the act anyway."

Leland Falkirk suddenly felt that everything was flying apart, out of
control, and he had trouble breathing, for he had dedicated his life to
the philosophy and principles of control, unremitting iron control in
all things.  Control was what mattered more than anything else.  First
came self-control.  You had to learn to exert unfaltering control over
your desires

and ignoble impulses, or otherwise you risked destruction by one vice or
another: alcohol, drugs, sex.  He had learned that much from his
ultra-religious parents, who had begun drumming the lesson into him
before he was even old enough to understand what they were saying.  And
you also had to control your intellectual processes; you had to force
yourself to rely always on logic and reason, for it was human nature to
drift into superstition, into patterns of behavior based on irrational
assumptions.  That was a lesson he had learned in spite of his parents,
from attending Pentecostal services with them and watching in shock and
fear as they fell to the floor of the church or revival tent, where they
screamed and thrashed in wild abandon, transported by what they claimed
was the spirit of God-though it was actually just hysterical Holy
Rollerism.  You had to control your fear, too, or you could not hold on
to sanity for long.  He had taught himself to conquer his fear of his
parents, who had routinely beat and punished him while claiming it was
for his own good because the devil was in him and must be driven out.
One way of learning to control fear was by subjecting yourself to pain
and thereby increasing your tolerance for it, because you couldn't be
afraid of anything if you were sure you could bear the pain it might
cause you.  Control.  Leland Falkirk controlled himself, his life, his
men, and any assignment that he was given, but now he felt control of
this situation slipping quickly out of his grasp, and he was closer to
panic than he had been in more than forty years.

"Polnichey," he said, "I'm going to hang up, but you stand by your
phone.  My man will set up a scrambled conference call between me, you,
your director, Riddenhour in Washington, and our White House contact.
We're going to agree on a tough policy and the best way of implementing
it.  Damned if I'll let you gutless wonders fall apart on this.  We'll
keep control.  We're going to eradicate the infected people if that's
necessary, even if some of them are cute little girls and priests, and
we're going to save our asses.  By God, I'm going to make sure we do!"

When Faye and Ginger returned from Elko at two-forty-five in the motel
van, the green-brown car followed them down the exit ramp from I-80.
Ginger was half-convinced it would swing into the motel lot and park
beside them, but it stopped along the county road, a hundred feet short
of the Tranquility, and waited in the slanting snowfall.

Faye parked in front of the motel office door, and Dom and Ernie came
out to help them unload the purchases they had made in Elko: ski suits,
ski masks, boots, and insulated gloves for those who didn't already have
them, based on sizes everyone had provided last night; two new
semiautomatic .20gauge shotguns; ammunition for those weapons and the
others; backpacks, flashlights, two compasses, a small acetylene torch
with two bottles of gas, and a number of other items;

Ernie embraced Faye, and Dom embraced Ginger.  Simultaneously, both men
said, "I was worried about you."

And Ginger heard herself saying, "I was worried about you, too," even as
Faye said it.  Ernie and Faye kissed.  With snowflakes frosting his
eyebrows and melting into jeweled beads of water on his lashes, Dom
lowered his face to Ginger's, and they kissed, too-a sweet, warm,
lingering kiss.  Somehow, it was as right for her and Dom to greet each
other in such a fashion as it was for Faye and Ernie, husband and wife.
That rightness was part of everything Ginger had felt for him since
arriving in Elko two days ago.

When everything had been unloaded from the van and stashed in the
Blocks' apartment, all ten members of the Tranquility family adjourned
to the diner.  Jack, Ernie, Dom, Ned, and Faye brought guns.

As she pulled some chairs up to the table where Brendan and Dom had
tested their powers last night, Ginger noticed that the priest regarded
the weapons with a mixture of displeasure and fear, that he seemed far
less optimistic than yesterday, when his discovery of his amazing gift
had sent his spirit soaring.  "No dream last night," he explained when
she asked the reason for his grim mood.  "No golden light, no voice
calling to me.  You know, Ginger, I told myself all along that I didn't
believe I was being called here by God.  But deep down that is what I
believed.  Father Wycazik was right: There was always a core of faith in
me.  Recently, I've been edging back to an acceptance of God.  Not only
acceptance: I need Him again.  But now .  .  .  no dream, no golden
light ...  as if God's abandoned me."

"No, you're wrong," Ginger said, taking his hand as if she could absorb
his distress by osmosis and leave him feeling

better.  "If you believe in God, He never abandons you.  Right?

You can abandon God, but never the other way around.  He always
forgives, always loves.  Isn't that what you tell a parishioner?"

Brendan smiled wanly.  "Sounds like you went to seminary."

She said, "The dream was probably just a memory surging against the
block that's holding it down in your subconscious. But if it was really
God summoning you here ...  well, the reason you no longer have the
dream is because you've arrived.  You've come as He wanted, so there's
no need for Him to send you the dream any more.  See?"

The priest's face brightened a little.

They took up seats around the table.

With dismay, Ginger saw that Marcie's condition had worsened since last
night.  The girl sat with her head bent, face half-hidden by her thick
black hair staring at her tiny hands, which lay limply in her lap.  She
mumbled: "Moon, moon, the moon, moon.........  She was in all-out
pursuit of those memories of July 6, which remained teasingly on the
edge of her awareness and which, by their tantalizing inaccessibility,
had drawn her into obsessive contemplation of their halfglimpsed forms.

"She'll come out of it," Ginger told Jorja, knowing how empty and
foolish the statement was, yet unable to think of anything else to say.

"Yes," Jorja said, apparently not finding it empty or foolish but
reassuring.  "She has to come out of it.  She has to."

Jack and Ned stood the plywood panel against the door and braced it with
a table again, assuring freedom from eavesdroppers.

Quickly, Faye and Ginger told of their visit to the Jamisons' ranch and
of being followed by the two men in the Plymouth. Ernie and Dom had been
followed, too.

This news made Jack edgy.  "If they're coming out in the open to keep
tabs on us, that means they're almost ready to grab us again."

Ned Sarver said, "Maybe I'd just better stand watch, make sure nobody's
moving in on us already." Jack agreed, and Ned went to the door and put
one eye against the narrow crack between the plywood and the door frame,
looking out at the snow-swept parking lot.

At Jack's request, Dom and Ernie explained what they had found on their
tour of the Thunder Hill Depository's perimeter fence.

Jack listened carefully, asking a number of questions for which Ginger
could not always discern the purpose.  Were any thin bare wires woven
through the chainlink fence?  What were the fenceposts like?  Finally,
he asked, "No guard dogs or men on patrol?"

Dom said, "No.  There'd have been prints in the snow along the fence.
Must be heavy electronic security.  I'd hoped we'd be able to get on the
grounds-but not after I got a close-up view of the place."

"Oh, we'll get on the grounds all right," Jack said.  "The tricky part
will be getting inside the Depository itself."

Dom and Ernie looked at him with such astonishment that Ginger knew
Thunder Hill must have looked formidable, indeed.

"Get inside?" Dom said.

"No can do," Ernie said.

"If they rely on multiple electronic systems for the perimeter
security," Jack said, "they'll very likely also rely on electronics at
the main entrance.  That's the way it is these days. Everyone's dazzled
by high-tech.  Oh, sure, Thunder Hill will have a guard at the front
gate, but he'll be so used to depending on computers, video cameras, and
other gadgets that he'll be lax.  So we might be able to surprise him,
get by him. Once inside, though, I don't know how far we can go or what
we might be able to get a peek at before we're nailed."

Ginger said, "But how can you be so sure-"

"For eight years," Jack reminded her, "getting into and back out of
difficult places was my line of work.  And it was the government that
originally trained me, so I know their routines and tricks." He winked
his misaligned eye.  "I have some tricks of my own."

Jorja spoke up, obviously more than a little distressed: "But you've as
much as said you'll be caught in there."

"Oh, yes," Jack said.

"But then what's the point of going in?" Jorja asked.

He had it all planned out, and Ginger listened at first in utter
bafflement and then with growing admiration for his sense of strategy.

Jack laid out the details of his plan as if it were a foregone
conclusion that the other nine members of the group would agree to do
precisely what he told them, regardless of the risks involved.  He
employed every trick of coercion and leadership that he knew, not
because he was unwilling to consider alternatives to his strategy or
modifications of it, but because there simply was no time to explore
other courses of action. His intellect and his instinct had the same
message for him: Time is running out.  So he explained to the rest of
the Tranquility family that:

Within the next hour, everyone-except Dom, Ned, and Jack himself-would
pile in the Cherokee, leave overland from the rear of the motel, and
drive into Elko by a roundabout route, thereby slipping the waiting
tails.  In Elko the group would split up.  Ernie, Faye, and Ginger would
drive the Cherokee north to Twin Falls, Idaho, then to Pocatello. From
there they would arrange to fly to Boston, where they would stay with
Ginger's friends, the Hannabys.  They should get to Boston late Thursday
or early Friday.  Immediately upon their arrival, they would tell the
Hannabys every detail of what they had discovered.  Then, within an hour
or two, Ginger would call together as many of her colleagues at Boston
Memorial as possible, and she and the Blocks would tell those physicians
what had been done to a lot of innocent people in Nevada two summers
ago.  Meanwhile, George and Rita Hannaby would contact influential
friends and arrange meetings at which Ginger and the Blocks could spread
their tale.  Only then would Ginger, Faye, and Ernie go to the press.
And only after they had gone to the press would they go to the police
with a statement contesting the heretofore accepted wisdom that Pablo
Jackson had been murdered by an ordinary burglar eight days ago.

"The trick," Jack said, "is to get your story into wide circulation
among some important people, so if you have an 'accident' before you've
convinced the press to take up your cause, there will be a whole lot of
powerful folks demanding to know who killed you and why.  That's the
special value you have for us now, Ginger-your associations with a
spectrum of important people in one of the country's most influential
cities.  If you can electrify those people with your story, you'll be
creating an imposing group of advocates.  Just remember, when you get
back there, you're going to have to move fast, before the conspirators
discover you've gone home and decide to grab you or blow you away."

Outside, the wind suddenly rose, keening at the plywoodcovered windows.
Good.  If the storm worsened, cutting visibility farther, they would
have a better chance of slipping away from the motel unobserved.

"After Ginger, Faye, and Ernie leave Elko in the Cherokee, heading up
toward Pocatello," Jack said, using a tone of voice that implied these
steps were not suggestions but immutable necessities, "you other
four-Brendan, Sandy, Jorja, and Marcie-will go to the local Jeep
dealership and buy another four-wheel-drive vehicle with cash that I'll
give you before you leave the Tranquility.  Immediately after signing
the papers, you'll head out of Elko in a different direction from Ginger
and the Blocks-east toward Salt Lake City, Utah.  The snow will slow you
down, of course, but you should be able to reach Salt Lake, get a flight
out as soon as the storm subsides, and be in Chicago by Thursday
afternoon or evening." He turned to the priest.  "Brendan, when you
touch down at O'Hare, you'll contact your rector, this Father Wycazik
you've told us about.  He must use his pull to arrange an immediate,
emergency meeting with whoever's head of the Chicago Archdiocese."

"Richard Cardinal O'Callahan," Brendan said.  "But I don't know if even
Father Wycazik could arrange an immediate meeting with him."

"He has to," Jack said firmly.  "Brendan, you've got to move fast, just
as Ginger will be moving fast in Boston.  We've got to assume our
enemies will be quick about spotting you when you turn up in Chicago.
Anyway, at the meeting with Cardinal O'Callahan, you and Jorja and Sandy
will explain what's happened in Elko County-and Brendan, you'll give a
demonstration of your newly discovered telekinetic ability. Pull out all
the stops, okay?  Do cardinals wear pants under their robes?"

Brendan blinked in surprise.  "What?  Of course, they wear pants."

"Then I want you to scare the pants off your Cardinal O'Callahan.  Give
him a show that'll let him know he's part of the biggest story since
they found the stone rolled away from the mouth of that tomb two
thousand years ago.  And I don't mean to be blasphemous, Brendan.  I
really think it is the biggest story since."

"So do I," Brendan said.  Though he had been glum all morning, he seemed
to take heart from Jack's tone of authority and quiet excitement.

Now, the wild wind was vibrating the sheets of plywood at the windows,
filling the restaurant with a low and ominous thrumming.

Ernie Block cocked his gray-bristled head, listening, and said, "With
winds like this already, so soon after the snow hits, it's going to be a
roof-raiser later on."

Jack didn't want the weather to deteriorate too rapidly, for if the
enemy was going to strike within the next few hours, as he anticipated,
they might accelerate their schedule to avoid the messy complications of
conducting the round-up in a full-scale blizzard.

"Okay, Brendan," Jack said, "convince Cardinal O'Callahan and get him to
arrange quick meetings with the mayor, city councilmen, social and
financial leaders.  You might have as much as twenty-four hours to
spread your story before your life is in danger.  The farther you spread
it, the less danger you're in.  But in any case, you shouldn't risk
spending more than twelve hours putting together a network of powerful
advocates before you ask them to arrange a press conference. Just
picture it: the city's most prominent citizens forming a backdrop for
you, reporters wondering what the hell is about to happen-and then you
display your telekinetic ability by levitating a chair and sending it on
a nice slow trip around the room!"

Brendan grinned broadly.  "That'll put an end to their coverup for sure.
No way they can continue it after that."

"Let's hope so," Jack said.  "Because while the rest of you are off on
your various missions, Dom and Ned and I will be inside Thunder Hill,
perhaps under military arrest, and our only chance of getting out in the
same condition we went in is if you blow this wide open."

Jorja said, "I don't like that part of it-the three of you going into
the mountain.  Why's it necessary?  I asked you that same question
fifteen minutes ago, and you still haven't answered me, Jack.  If we can
slip out of here, back to Boston and Chicago, use Ginger's and Brendan's
connections to blast

this story wide open, then there's no need to go poking around in the
Depository.  Once we've set the wheels of the press in motion, the Army
and whatever government agencies are involved will eventually have to
come clean.  They'll have to tell us what happened that summer and what
they've been doing in Thunder Hill."

Jack took a deep breath, for this was the part at which they might
balk-especially Ned and Dom.  "Sorry, Jorja.  But that's naive.  If we
all split and tell our stories, there'll be enormous pressure on the
military and government to reveal the truth, yes, but they'll delay.
They'll drag their feet and spread contradictory stories for weeks,
months.  That'll give them time to devise a convincing lie to explain
everything, yet reveal nothing.  Our only hope of exposing the truth is
to make them open up fast.  And to speed things along, the rest of you
have to be able to tell the world that three of your friends-Dom, Ned,
and me-are being held against our will inside the mountain.  Hostages.
The element of a hostage drama, with agencies of our own government in
the role of terrorists, will be the final ingredient that might make it
impossible for the Army to stonewall more than a day or two."

He could see that this revelation startled everyone.  Ernie and Faye
regarded him with a mixture of shock and sadness, as if he were already
dead-or mind-wiped.

Fear had risen like a dark moon in Jorja's face.  She said, "But you
can't.  No, no.  You simply can't sacrifice yourselves-"

"If the rest of you do your jobs properly," Jack said quickly, "we won't
be sacrificing ourselves.  You'll pry us out of Thunder Hill with the
lever of public protest that you create.  That's why it's so important
we all do exactly what we're supposed to."

"But," Jorja said, "what if, by some chance, you get inside the mountain
and manage to see something that explains what happened to us that July.
And what if you could snap a few pictures of it and get back out alive.
Surely, in that case, you'd try to escape.  You're not saying that the
hostage drama has to be a part of it-are you?"

Jack said, "No, of course not."

He was lying.  Though there was at least a small chance of getting deep
into the Depository, Jack knew there was little hope of getting all the
way back out again undetected.  As for finding something in there that
would immediately explain what they had seen the summer before
last-there was no hope whatsoever.  For one thing, they had no idea what
they were looking for.  It was possible-even probable-that they would
pass right by the thing they were after without knowing what they had
seen.  Furthermore, if dangerous experiments had been taking place in
Thunder Hill, and if one of those experiments had gotten out of hand
that July night, the answer to the mystery was likely to lie in paper or
microfilm files or in lab reports; even if they could gain access to the
labs, he and Dom and Ned would not have time to pore leisurely through
tons of paperwork looking for the few pertinent ounces that would shed
light upon their experience. He did not say any of this to Jorja or the
others.  He could not permit the meeting to degenerate into debate about
potential risks and other options.

Outside, the wind howled.

Jorja said, "And if you absolutely insist on going in there, why
couldn't the rest of us stay as near to you as possible?  I mean, the
seven of us could just go into Elko, to the offices of the Sentinel, and
Brendan could demonstrate his power to the local press.  We could start
exposing the conspiracy here instead of in Chicago and Boston."

"No." Jack was moved but also frustrated by her concern for him.  (The
hands on his wristwatch seemed to be spinning, for God's sake.)  "The
national media wouldn't pay quick enough attention to a small-town
newspaper's report that it had turned up a man with psychic powers and a
major government conspiracy.  It would be viewed as just another
jerkwater story in the same league as reports of abominable snowmen and
UFOS.  Our enemies would find you and squash you-squash any local
reporters you spoke with-long before the national media would bother
sending anyone to check it out.  You've got to go, Jorja.  The way I've
outlined it-that's our best hope."

She slumped in her chair with a defeated look.

"Dom," Jack said, "are you with me?"

"Yeah, I guess I am," the writer said, as Jack had known he would.
Corvaisis was one of those stand-up types you could rely on, though he
probably didn't see himself that way.  He smiled ironically and said,
"But, Jack, mind telling me why the honor fell on my shoulders?"

"Sure.  Ernie's still not entirely over his nyctophobia, so it's hard
enough on him just to ride all night to Pocatello.  He isn't up to
making a- night-assault on the Depository.  Which leaves you and Ned.
And frankly, Dom, it won't hurt our case if one of the hostages in
Thunder Hill is a novelist, a celebrity of sorts.  That adds one more
bit of the kind of sensationalism the press thrives on."

Ginger Weiss had been frowning as Jack outlined his plan. Now she spoke:
"You're a great strategist, Jack, but you're also chauvinistic.  You're
only considering men for the expedition into Thunder Hill.  I think the
three who go should be you, Dom, and me."

"But-"

"Hear me out," she said, getting up, moving around to the far end of the
table, drawing everyone's attention from Jack to her.  Jack was aware of
how she focused her intellect, will, and beauty upon him, for her
techniques were similar to his own methods of compelling everyone to
accept his plans without argument.  "Ned and Sandy could go to Chicago,
which would still give Brendan two adults to back up his story.  Jorja
and Marcie could go with Faye and Ernie to the Hannabys in Boston, with
a note from me.  George and Rita will take them seriously, get them an
audience.  My note alone will assure they're welcome and listened to.
But their reception is doubly assured because in ten minutes Rita will
recognize herself in Faye, and they'll be like sisters, and Rita will go
to the mat for her.  My presence is not essential there.  I'm needed
more here.  For one thing, the infiltration of the Depository will be a
dangerous undertaking.  Either of you-Dom, Jack-might be hurt and need
emergency medical attention. We don't know for sure that Dom has the
same healing power as Brendan, and even if he has it, he might not be
able to control it.  So a doctor might come in handy, huh?  Second, if
it'll help having a famous author-all right, Dom, moderately famous-as a
hostage, then we'll get even more press attention if a woman's held in
Thunder Hill.  God damn it, you really need me, Jack!"

"You're right," he said, startling her by his quick agreement.  But what
she said made sense, and there was no point wasting time debating it.
"Ned, you'll go with Sandy and Brendan to Chicago."

"I don't mind going to the Depository with you, if that's what you
think's best," Ned told him.

"I know," Jack said.  "I did think it was best, but now I don't.  Jorja,
you and Marcie will go to Boston with Ernie and Faye.  Now, if we don't
get the hell out of here soon, the whole question of who goes where
won't matter anyway, because we'll be back in the hands of the people
who had us drugged senseless the summer before last."

Ned pulled the table away from the door.  Ernie removed the panel of
plywood standing there, and beyond the glass the world was a whirling
white wall of wind and snow.

"Terrific," Jack said.  "Good cover."

As they stepped out into the driving snow, they could see only as far as
the place where the green-brown, government Plymouth had been parked out
by the county road.  It was gone.  That made Jack uneasy.  He preferred
the watchers out in the open-where he could also watch them.

The conference call did not progress as Colonel Leland Falkirk had
foreseen.  He intended to seek agreement that the witnesses at the motel
must be rounded up at once and conveyed to the Thunder Hill Depository.
He expected that he and General Riddenhour would be able to convince the
others that the threat of a spreading infection was both real and acute,
and that he should be permitted to destroy everyone in the Tranquility
group as well as the entire staff of Thunder Hill the moment he put his
hands on proof that those individuals were no longer human, proof he
fully expected to obtain.  But from the moment he picked up the phone,
nothing went his way.  The situation deteriorated.

Emil Foxworth, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had
news of yet another disastrous development. The team making new memory
modifications in the Salcoe family in Monterey, California, had been
visited by a persistent intruder.  They had thought they'd cornered
him-a burly, bearded man-but he had made a spectacular escape. The four
Salcoes were quickly transferred to a medical van and moved to a
safe-house for continuation of memory modifications.  A registration
check on the bearded intruder's abandoned car identified it as a rental
from the local airport agency, and the lessee was not merely a burglar
but Parker

Faine, Corvaisis' friend.  "Subsequently," the Director said, "we traced
Faine on a flight out of Monterey to San Francisco, but there we've lost
him.  We have no idea where he's been or what he's been up to since his
West Air flight landed at SFX."

Foster Polnichey, in the FBI's Chicago office, was already of the view
that maintaining the cover-up was impossible, and news of Faine's escape
confirmed that opinion.  The two political appointees-Foxworth of the
FBI, and James Herton, National Security Adviser to the President-were
in agreement with him.

Furthermore, with oily skill, Foster Polnichey argued that every
development-the miraculous cures effected by Cronin and Tolk; the
wondrous telekinetic powers of Corvaisis and Emmy Halbourg-indicated
that the ultimate effects of the events of July 6 were going to be
beneficial to mankind, not detrimental.  "And we know that Doctor
Bennell and most of the people working with him are of the opinion that
there is no threat whatsoever and never was.  They've been convinced of
it for many months now.  Their arguments are quite persuasive."

Leland tried to make them see that Bennell and his people might be
infected and unreliable.  No one inside Thunder Hill could be trusted
any more.  But he was a military leader, not a debater, and in a contest
with Foster Polnichey, Leland knew he sounded like a raving paranoid.

Leland did not even get much support from the one source on which he had
counted most: General Maxwell Riddenhour.  The Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs was noncommittal at first, listening carefully to every point of
view, playing the role of mediator, for his position put him somewhere
between a political appointee and a career soldier.  But it soon became
clear that he agreed more with Polnichey, Foxworth, and Herton than he
did with Leland Falkirk.

"I understand your instincts in this situation, Colonel, and I admire
them," General Riddenhour said.  "But I believe the matter has gone
beyond the scope of our authority.  It requires the input not just of
soldiers but of neuropathologists, biologists, philosophers, and others
before precipitous action can be taken.  Upon disclosure of any evidence
of an imminent threat, I will of course change my mind; I'll favor the
roundup of the witnesses at the motel, order the quarantine on Thunder
Hill continued indefinitely, and take most of the other strong measures
you now favor.  But for the moment, in the absence of a grave and
obvious threat, I believe we should move a bit more cautiously and leave
open the possibility that the cover-up will have to be undone."

"With all due respect," Leland said, barely able to control his fury,
"the threat seems both grave and obvious to me.  I don't believe there's
time for neuropathologists or philosophers.  And certainly not for the
spineless equivocating of a bunch of gutless politicians."

That honest appraisal brought a stormy reaction from Foxworth and
Herton, the mealy spawn of politicians.  When they shouted at Leland, he
lost his usual reserve and shouted back at them.  In an instant the
conference call degenerated into a noisy verbal brawl that ended only
when Riddenhour exerted control.  He forced a quick agreement that no
moves would be made against the witnesses or any steps taken to further
cement the cover-up, while at the same time no steps would be taken to
weaken the cover-up, either.  "I'll seek an emergency meeting with the
President the instant I end this call," Riddenhour said.  "In
twenty-four hours, forty-eight at the latest, we'll try to have a plan
that satisfies everyone from the Commander-in-Chief to Bennell and his
boys out there in Thunder Hill."

That, Leland thought sourly, is impossible.

When Leland hung up, the ill-fated conference call having concluded in
unanticipated humiliation, he stood for at least a minute at his desk in
the windowless room at Shenkfield, seething with such pure anger that he
did not trust himself to summon Lieutenant Horner.  He did not want
Horner to know that the tide had gone against him, did not want Horner
to have any reason to suspect that the operation he was about to launch
was in absolute contradiction of General Riddenhour's orders.

His duty was clear.  Grim, terrible-but clear.

He would order the closure of I-80 under the pretense of a toxic spill,
in order to isolate the Tranquility Motel.  He would then take the
witnesses into custody and transport them directly to the Thunder Hill
Depository.  When they were all underground with Dr.  Miles Bennell and
the other suspect workers staffing the Depository, trapped behind
massive blast doors, Leland would take them-and himself-out with a pair
of the five-megaton backpack nukes that were stored among the munitions
in the subterranean facility.  A couple of five-megatoners would
incinerate everyone and everything inside the mountain, reduce them all
to ash and bone fragments.  That would eliminate the primary source of
this hideous contamination, the home nest of the enemy.  Of course,
other potential sources of contamination would remain: the Tolk family,
the Halbourg family, all remaining witnesses whose brainwashing had not
developed holes and who had not returned to Nevada, others.  . . .  But
Leland was confident that, once he had taken the courageous action
required to eliminate the largest and primary source of contamination,
Riddenhour would be shamed by his example of self-sacrifice and would
find the backbone to do what was necessary to finish the work and scrub
every trace of contagion from the face of the earth.

Leland Falkirk was trembling.  Not with fear.  It was pride that made
him tremble.  He was enormously proud to have been chosen to fight and
win the greatest battle of all time, thus saving not just one nation but
all the world from a menace with no equal in history.  He knew he was
capable of the sacrifice required.  He had no fear.  As he wondered what
he would feel in the split-second it took him to die in a nuclear blast,
a thrill coursed through him at the prospect of pitting himself against
the most intense pain of which the human mind could conceive. Oh, it
would be cruelly intense and yet so short in duration that there was no
doubt he'd prove capable of enduring it as stout-heartedly as he had
endured all other pain to which he had subjected himself.

He was calm now.  Perfectly calm.  Serene.

Leland savored the sweet anticipation of the blistering pain to come.
That brief atomic agony would be of such exquisite purity that the
endurance of it would ensure the reward of heaven, which his Pentecostal
parents, seeing the devil in every aspect of him, had always sworn he
would not attain.

Stepping out of the Tranquility Grille behind Ginger, Dom Corvaisis
looked up into the maelstrom of driving-whirlingspinning snow, and for
an instant he saw and heard and felt what was not there:

Behind him rang out the atonal musical clatter of demolished glass
stillfallingfrom the explosion of the windows, and ahead lay the glow of
the parking-lot lights and the hot summer darkness beyond, and all
around the thunder-roar and earthquakeshudder of mysterious source; his
heart pounding; his breath like taffy that had stuck in his throat,- and
as he ran out of the Grille he looked around and then up....

"What's wrong?" Ginger asked.

Dom realized that he had staggered across the snowy pavement, skidding
not on that surface but on the slippery recollection that had escaped
his memory block.  He looked around at the others, all of whom had come
out of the diner.  "I saw ...  like I was there again ...  that July
night......  Two nights ago, in the diner, when he'd come close to
remembering, he had unconsciously re-created the thunder and shaking of
July 6.  This time, there was no such manifestation, maybe because the
memory was no longer repressed and was breaking through and needed no
help.  Now, unable to adequately convey the intensity of the memory, he
turned away from the others and peered up into the falling snow, andThe
roar was so loud that it hurt his ears, and the vibrations so strong
that he felt them in his bones and in his teeth the way thunder
sometimes reverberated in window glass, and he stumbled out across the
macadam, looking up into the night sky and-there!-an aircraft flying
only a few hundred feet above the earth, red and white running
lightsflashing across darkness, so low that the glow from within the
cockpit was visible, a jet judging by the speed with which it rocketed
past, a fighter jet judging by the powerful scream of its engines,
and-there!another one, sweeping past and wheeling up across the field of
stars that filled the clear black sky in a panoramic specklesplash; but
the roar and the shaking that had shattered the diner's windows and had
set small objects adance on the tables now grew worse instead of better,
even though he would have expected it to subside once the jets were
past, so he turned, sensing the source behind him' and he cried out in
terror when a third jet shot over the Grille at an altitude of no more
than forty feet, so low that he could see the markings-serial numbers
and an American flag-on the bottom of one wing, illuminated by the
parking-lot light bouncing up from the macadam; Jesus, it was so low
that he fell flat on the ground in panic, certain that the jet was
crashing, that debris would be raining over him in a second, perhaps
even a shower of burning jet fuel....

"Dom!"

He found himself lying face-down in the snow, clutching the ground in a
reenactment of the terror he had felt on the night of July 6, when he'd
thought the jet was crashing on top of him.

"Dom, what's wrong?" Sandy Sarver asked.  She was kneeling beside him, a
hand on his shoulder.

Ginger was kneeling at his other side.  "Dom, are you all right?"

With their support, he got up from the snow.  "The memory block is
going, crumbling." He turned his face up toward the sky again, hoping
that the white snowy day would flash away, as before, and be replaced by
a dark summer night, hoping that the recollections would continue to
pour forth.  Nothing. Wind gusted.  Snow lashed his face.  The others
were watching him.  He said, "I remembered jets, military fighter
craft...  two at first, swooping by a couple of hundred feet above.....
and then a third one so low that it almost took the roof off the diner."

"Jets!" Marcie said.

Everyone looked at her in surprise, even Dom, for it was the first word-
other than "moon"-that she had spoken since dinner the previous night.
She was in her mother's arms, bundled against the weather.  She had
turned her small face to the sky.  In response to what Dom had said, she
seemed to be searching the stormy heavens for some sign of the
longdeparted jets of a summer lost.

"Jets," Ernie said, looking up as well.  "I don't .  .  .  recall.

"Jets!  Jets!" Marcie reached up with one hand toward the heavens.

Dom realized that he was doing the same thing, although with both hands,
as if he could reach up beyond the blinding snow of time-present, into
the hot clear night of time-past, and pull the memory down into view.
But he could not bring it back, no matter how hard he strained.

The others were not able to recall what he described, and in a moment
their tremulous expectation turned to frustration again.

Marcie lowered her face.  She put a thumb in her mouth and sucked
earnestly on it.  Her gaze had turned inward again.

"Come on," Jack said.  "We've got to get the hell out of here."

They hurried toward the motel, to dress and arm themselves for the
journeys and battles ahead of them.  Reluctantly, with the smell of July
heat still in his nose, with the roar of jet engines still echoing in
his bones, Dom Corvaisis followed.

Night on Thunder Hill

Courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy lift us above the
simple beasts and define humanity.

-THE BOOK OF COUNTED SORROWS

By foreign hands thy humble grave

adorned; By strangers honored, and by strangers mourned.

-ALEXANDER POPE


Tuesday Night, January 14

1.

Strife

Father Stefan Wycazik flew Delta from Chicago to Salt Lake City, then
caught a feeder flight into the Elko County Airport. He landed after
snow had begun to fall but before the rapidly dropping visibility and
the oncoming false dusk of the storm had curtailed air traffic.

In the small terminal, he went to a public phone, looked up the number
of the Tranquility Motel, and dialed it.  He got nothing, not even a
ring.  The line hissed emptily.  He tried again with no success.

When he sought help from an operator, she was also unable to ring the
number.  "I'm sorry, sir, there seems to be trouble with the line."

Taking that as very bad news, Father Wycazik said, "Trouble?  What
trouble?  What's wrong?"

"Well, sir, I suppose the storm.  We're getting really gusty wind."

But Stefan was not as certain as she was.  The storm had hardly begun.
He could not believe telephone lines had already succumbed to the first
tentative gusts, which he had experienced on his way into the terminal.
The isolation of the Tranquility was an ominous development, more likely
to be the handiwork of men than of the impending blizzard.

He placed a call to St.  Bette's rectory in Chicago, and Father Gerrano
answered on the second ring.  "Michael, I've arrived safely in Elko. But
I haven't gotten Brendan.  Their phone isn't working."

"Yes," Michael Gerrano said, "I know."

"You know?  How could you possibly know?"

"Just minutes ago," Michael said, "I received a call from a man who
refused to identify himself but who said he was a friend of this Ginger
Weiss, one of those people out there with Brendan.  He said she called
him this morning and asked him to dig up some information for her.  He
found what she wanted, but he couldn't get through to the Tranquility.
She'd apparently foreseen that problem, so she'd given him our number
and the number of friends of hers in Boston, told him to tell us what
he'd found, and she'd call us at her convenience."

"Refused to give his name?" Father Wycazik said, puzzled.

And you say she asked him to dig up information?"

" Yes," Michael said.  "About two things.  First, this place called the
Thunder Hill Depository.  He says to tell her that, as far as he could
determine, the Depository is what it's always been: an elaborate
blastproof storage depot, one of eight virtually identical underground
facilities situated across the country, and not the largest one.  She
also asked him to get her some background on an army officer, Colonel
Leland Falkirk, who's with something called the Domestic Emergency
Response Organization.........

As he stared at one glimmering and bejeweled moment of the storm framed
in the terminal window, Father Wycazik listened to Michael rattle off a
service biography of the colonel.  Just as Stefan was beginning to sweat
with the strain of remembering all the details, his curate told him none
of that was important.  Michael said, "Mr.  X seemed to feel that only
one part of Colonel Falkirk's background might have a bearing on what's
happened to the people at the Tranquility Motel."

"Mr.  X?" Father Wycazik said.

"Since he wouldn't give me his name, X will have to do."

"Go on," Father Wycazik said.

"Well, Mr.  X believes the key fact here is that Colonel Falkirk was the
military's representative to a government committee, the CISG, that
undertook some important thinktank-type research starting about nine
years ago.  The reason Mr.  X thinks the key is CISG is because, while
poking around, he discovered two odd things.  First, many of the same
scientists who served on that committee are now-or have recently been-on
long and unusual vacations, leaves of absence, or unexplained furloughs.
Second, a new level of security restrictions was put on the CISG files
on July eighth, two

summers ago, exactly two days after Brendan and the others had trouble
out there in Nevada."

"What does CISG stand for?  What was that committee studying?"

Michael Gerrano told him.

Father Wycazik said, "My God, I thought that might be it!"

"You did?  Father, you're hard to surprise.  But this!  Surely you can't
have foreseen this was what lay behind Brendan's problems.  And ...  you
mean ...  that's really ...  really what might've happened out there?"

"Coxild still be happening, but I must admit I can't claim to have
deduced it sheerly by the application of my gigantic intellect.  This is
part of what Calvin Sharkle was shouting at the police just this
morning, before he blew himself to smithereens."

Michael said, "Dear God."

Father Wycazik said, "We may be teetering on the brink of a whole new
world, Michael.  Are you ready for it?"

"I .  I don't know," Michael said.  "Are you ready, Father?"

"Oh, yes!" Stefan said.  "Oh, yes, very ready.  But the way to it might
be filled with danger."

Ginger was aware of Jack Twist's growing agitation as the minutes
passed.  He was operating on a hunch that told him the last few grains
of sand were dribbling through the neck of the hourglass.  As Jack
assisted with the tasks required for their departure, he kept glancing
at windows and doors, as if he expected to see hostile faces.

They needed almost half an hour to suit up for the bitter winter night
ahead, load all the guns and spare ammunition clips, and transfer the
gear to the Servers' pickup and to Jack's Cherokee behind the motel.
They did not work in silence, for that might have given warning of their
imminent departure to the eavesdroppers.  Instead, they chatted about
inconsequential things as they hurried through their preparations.

Finally, at four-ten, turning on a radio very loud, hoping to cover
their absence for a while, they left by the rear door of the maintenance
room.  They milled around in the wind and snow, hugging one another and
saying, "goodbye," and

"take care of yourself," and "I'll pray for you," and ,it's going to be
all right," and "we'll beat the bastards." Ginger noticed that Jack and
Jorja spent an especially long time together, embracing, and when he
kissed Marcie and hugged her goodbye, it was as if she were his own
child.  It was worse than the end of a family reunion, for in spite of
protestations to the contrary, the members of this family were more than
half-convinced that some of them would not survive to attend another
gathering.

Squeezing back her tears, Ginger said, "All right, enough already, let's
get the hell out of here."

With Ned driving, the seven who would go to Chicago and Boston left
first, crammed in the Cherokee.  The fine snow was falling so fast and
heavy that the Cherokee was half-lost to sight within a hundred feet and
became only a ghostly form within a hundred and fifty.  Nevertheless, it
did not head straight up the hills, for fear of being spotted by the
observers Jack had located with his heat-reading device.  Instead, the
Cherokee entered the sloping folds of land by way of a narrow glen.  Ned
would stay in glens, vails, and gulleys as long as he could.  The sound
of the engine was swallowed up in the greater howl of the wind even
before the Jeep began to vanish in the snow.

Ginger, Dom, and Jack climbed into the cab of the Servers' pickup and
followed in the tracks of the Cherokee.  But with its headstart, the
Jeep soon disappeared into the white turmoil that claimed the land.  As
they thumped, jolted, tilted, and rocked upward through the glen, Ginger
sat between Jack and Dom, looking through the windshield and past the
beating wipers, wondering if she would ever see those in the Jeep again.
In a few days, Ginger had come to love them all.  She was afraid for
them.

We care.  That is what differentiates us from the beasts of the field.
That's what Jacob had always said.  Intellect, courage, love,
friendship, compassion, and empathy-each of those qualities was as
important to the human species as all the others, Jacob had said.  Some
people thought only intellect counted: knowing how to solve problems,
knowing how to get by, knowing how to identify an advantage and seize
it. All were important factors that had contributed to the ascendancy
and supremacy of humankind, yes, but the many functions of intellect
were insufficient without courage, love,

friendship, compassion, and empathy.  We care.  It is our curse. It is
our blessing.

At first Parker Faine was afraid that the pilot of the ten-seat feeder
flight would not descend through the storm front and attempt a landing
but would instead divert to another airfield farther south in Nevada.
When, after all, the plane descended through the leading edge of the
storm, Parker almost wished they had diverted.  The buffeting wind and
blinding snow seemed too hazardous even for a veteran pilot accustomed
to instrument landings.  Then they were safely on the ground, one of the
last planes in before the Elko County Airport shut down.

The small airport provided no covered ramp for debarkation.  Parker
hurried across the snow-patched macadam toward the door of the small
terminal, wincing as his bare face was stung by wind-driven snow like
thousands of tiny cold needles.

After his Air West flight from Monterey had landed in San Francisco
earlier today, he bought scissors and an electric razor at an airport
gift shop and hastily shaved off his beard in the men's room.  He had
not seen his own unadorned visage in a decade.  It was much prettier
than he had expected.  He trimmed his hair, too.  When he was in the
midst of this transformation, another guy in the men's room, washing his
hands at the next sink, said jokingly, "On the run from the cops, huh?"
And Parker said, "No, from my wife." And the guy said, "Yeah, me, too,"
as if he meant it.

To avoid leaving a credit-card trail, he paid cash for a ticket on an
Air Cal jet to Reno.  After a forty-five-minute trip over the Sierra
Nevada to the Biggest Little City in the World, he had the good fortune
to find a feeder line with a single empty seat on a flight departing for
Elko in twelve minutes.  He paid cash again, leaving only twenty-one
dollars in his wallet.  For two hours and fifteen minutes, he endured a
frequently turbulent journey east across the Great Basin, toward the
higher country of northeastern Nevada, where he sensed his friend was in
desperate trouble.

By the time he pushed through the doors into the humble but clean little
building that served as the Elko County Airport's offices and public
terminal, Parker should have felt wrung-out both because of the horrible
experience in Monterey and because of his hectic travels.  Strangely,
however, he felt vital, energetic, brimming with purpose and overflowing
with determination.  He saw himself as a bull, storming into a field to
deal with a fox that had been frightening the herd.

He found the two public telephones, only one of which was in use.  He
looked up the number of the Tranquility, tried to call Dom, but the
motel's phones were out of service.  He supposed the storm might have
something to do with it, but he was suspicious and worried.  He had to
get out there where he was needed, and fast.

In two minutes flat, he discovered there were no rental cars and that
the town's taxi company, equipped with only three vehicles, was so busy
because of the storm that he would have to wait ninety minutes to get a
cab.  So he looked around the terminal at a couple of stragglers from
his own flight and at a few others who evidently had landed in private
craft just as the airport was closing down, and he accosted them one by
one, seeking a ride without success.  Turning from one of them, Parker
literally collided with a distinguished gray-haired man.  The guy looked
as frantic as Parker felt.  He had pulled his coat open to reveal a
Roman collar.  To Parker, he said, "Excuse me, please, I'm a priest with
urgent business, a matter of life or death, and I'm desperately in need
of a ride to the Tranquility Motel.  Do you have a car?"

Dom Corvaisis sat tensely in the Servers' pickup truck, with the
passenger-side door on his right and Ginger Weiss on his left, squinting
ahead into a snowfall so heavy that it seemed as if they were driving
through countless barriers of gauzy white curtains.  He peered forward
as though an incredible revelation lay just beyond the next curtain. But
when each parted without resistance, it revealed only an infinite array
of additional curtains blowing-rippling-fluttering beyond.

After a while he realized what he was so tensely anticipating: a
recurrence of the memory-flash that had stricken him when he had walked
out of the Tranquility Grille.  Jets ...

What had happened after the third jet swooped over, driving him to the
pavement in terror?

Although the streaming snowflakes made the winter day appear to be a
tapestry of millions of randomly arranged white threads, they did not
help illuminate the glen.  The false twilight of the storm brought a
deep-gray gloom to the land three-quarters of an hour ahead of the real
twilight.  Gnarled, toothy rock formations and an occasional cottonwood
loomed suddenly out of the murkiness like prehistoric beasts out of a
primeval mist, never failing to startle.  However, Dom knew that Jack
dared not risk turning on the headlights yet.  Though the truck itself
was hidden by the snow and by the steep walls of the hollow in which
they were sheltered, the lights would reflect up through the falling
mega-trillion bits of ice crystals, and the glow would certainly be
visible to the observers below.

They came to a place where the fading tire tracks of the Cherokee, like
the trails of huge twin serpents, turned east into a branching glen that
led off the main hollow.  Jack did not follow Ned Sarver and the others,
for the plan required them to head in a different direction.  Instead,
he pressed the pickup steadily north, relying on Dom's reading of a
compass for guidance.

In another hundred yards, they reached the head of the glen, where it
narrowed to-and finally terminated in-a steep upward slope.  Dom thought
they would have to turn back and follow Ned, after all, but Jack shifted
gears, accelerated, and the four-wheel-drive pickup started to climb.
The slope was rocky and rutted.  The pickup progressed with many a
jounce and sway and lurch that repeatedly threw Ginger Weiss against Dom
in a series of collisions that were not without a pleasant aspect.

In the dreary gray storm light of the waning day, and in the dull and
well-worn interior of the pickup, Ginger looked, by contrast, more
beautiful than ever.  Compared to her lustrous silver-blond hair, the
white snow appeared soiled.

With a leap and a crash that bumped Dom's head against the roof, the
truck crested the long hill.  They drove down a brief incline, then
across a level strip of land.  As they started up another slope, Jack
suddenly slammed on the brakes and cried, "Jets!"

Dom gasped, looked up into the seething snowstorm, expecting to see an
aircraft plummeting at them, then realized that Jack was speaking of
jets from the past.  He had remembered the same thing that had come back
to Dom less than an hour ago.  Judging by Jack's sure-handed control of
the pickup, however, he had not seen the memory as vividly as Dom had
seen it, but had merely recalled it.

"Jets," Jack said again, keeping one foot on the brake and one on the
clutch, gripping the steering wheel hard with both hands, staring out at
the snow but trying to look back into time.  "One, two, roaring high up,
the way you said, Dom. And then another, low over the diner, and right
after that one .  .  .  a fourth.........

"didn't remember a fourth," Dom said excitedly.

Hunching over the wheel, Jack said, "The fourth jet came just as I
rushed out of the motel.  I wasn't over there in the diner with you.
There was this tremendous shaking and roaring, and I rushed out of my
room in time to see the third fighter-an F-16, I think.  It virtually
exploded out of nowhere, out of the darkness, over the roof of the
diner.  You're right: Its altitude couldn't have been more than forty or
fifty feet.  And while I was still taking that in, a fourth came
straight over the motel, from behind the place, and it was even lower.
Maybe ten feet lower than the other one, and the window behind me burst
when it passed.  .  .  ."

"And then?" Ginger asked in a whisper, as if a louder tone would shake
the emerging memory back down into Jack's subconscious.

Jack said, "The third and fourth fighters, the low ones, roared down
toward the interstate, about twenty feet above the goddamn power lines,
you could see right into the redhot intakes of their engines, and they
went screaming out over the plains beyond I-80, one of them peeling up
and out to the east, the other to the west, both swinging around and
coming back ...  and I started running toward you ...  toward the group
of you who'd come out of the diner over there .  .  .  "cause I thought
maybe you'd know what was going on........  I

Snow tapped on the windshield.

The wind whispered susurrant secrets at the tightly shut windows.  At
last Jack Twist said, "That's all.  I can't remember any more."

"You will," Dom said.  "We all will.  The blocks are crumbling."

Jack slipped the pickup into gear again and started up the next slope,
continuing their roundabout trek to Thunder Hill.

Colonel Leland Falkirk and Lieutenant Horner, accompanied by two heavily
armed DERO corporals, took one of Shenkfield's Jeep Wagoneers to the
roadblock at the western end of the quarantine zone.  Two large Army
transports had been parked across the wide eastbound lanes of I-80,
effectively blocking them.  (The westbound lanes were blocked on the
other side of the Tranquility, ten miles from this point.)  Emergency
beacons mounted on sawhorses flashed in profusion. Half a dozen DERO men
were in sight, dressed in Artic issue.  Three of them were leaning down
to the open windows of halted automobiles, talking to motorists,
courteously explaining the situation.

Telling Horner and the two corporals to wait in the car, Leland got out
and walked to the center of the blockade, to have a brief word with
Sergeant Vince Bidakian, who was in charge of this aspect of the
operation.  "How's it going so far?" Leland asked.

"Good, sir," Bidakian said, raising his voice slightly to compete with
the wind.  "Not too many people on the road. The storm hit to the west
of here earlier, so most motorists with any common sense at all stopped
earlier at Battle Mountain or even back at Winnemucca, until things
clear.  And it looks like virtually all the truckers decided to hole up
rather than try to make it through to Elko.  It'll take us an hour, I
bet, before we've got even two hundred vehicles in line."

They were not turning the motorists back to Battle Mountain.  They were
telling everyone that the closure was expected to last only an hour and
that the wait would not be insufferable.

A longer closure would have meant a massive backup even with the
reduction in traffic brought by the storm.  To deal with that larger
number of inconvenienced travelers and to enforce a longer quarantine,
Leland would have had to alert the Nevada State Police and the county
sheriff by now.  But he did not want to bring the police into it until
that was unavoidable, for they would quickly seek confirmation of his
authority from higher Army officials-and would soon learn that he had
gone rogue.  If the cops could be kept in the dark about the closure for
just half an hour, and if they could be stalled for another few minutes
once they did find out about it, no one would discover Leland's perfidy
until it was too late.  He needed only an hour to scoop up the witnesses
at the motel and convey them into the deep vaults of Thunder Hill.

To Bidakian, Leland said, "Sergeant, make sure all the motorists have
sufficient gasoline, and if any of them are running on low tanks, pump
them ten gallons from that emergency supply you've brought."

"Yes, sir.  That was my understanding, sir."

"No sign of any cops or snow plows?"

"Not yet, sir," Bidakian said, glancing beyond the short line of cars,
where two new pairs of headlights appeared in the distant snow-swaddled
dusk.  "But we'll see one or the other within ten minutes."

"You know the story to give them?"

"Yes, sir.  Truck bound for Shenkfield sprung a small leak. It's
carrying harmless and toxic fluids, so we don't-"

"Colonel!" Lieutenant Horner was hurrying from the Wagoneer.  He was
wearing so many bulky clothes he looked half-again as large as usual.
"Message from Sergeant Fiw at Shenkfield, sir.  Something's wrong at the
motel.  He hasn't heard a voice in fifteen minutes.  Just a radio,
playing real loud.  He doesn't think anyone's there."

"They go back into the damn diner?"

"No, sir.  Fiw thinks they're just-gone, sir."

"Gone?  Gone where?" Leland demanded, neither expecting an answer nor
waiting for one.  Heart pounding, he ran back to the Wagoneer.

Her name was Talia Ervy, and she looked like Marie Dressler, who'd
played Tugboat Annie in those wonderful old movies with Wallace Beery.
Talia was even larger than Dressler, who'd been far from petite: big
bones, broad face, wide mouth, strong chin.  But she was the prettiest
woman Parker Faine had seen in days, for she not only offered him and
Father Wycazik a ride from the airport to the Tranquility, but refused
to take any money for it.  "Hell, I don't mind," she said, sounding a
little like Marie Dressler, too.  "I wasn't going anywheres much special
anyway.  Just home to cook dinner for myself.  I'm a flat-out horrible
cook, so this'll just put off the punishment for a bit.  Fact is, when I
think of my meatloaf, I figure maybe you're doing me a big favor."

Talia had a ten-year-old Cadillac, a big boat of a car, with
winter-tread tires and snow chains.  She claimed it would take her
anywhere she wanted to go, regardless of the weather, and she called it
"Old Paint." Parker sat up front with her, and Father Wycazik sat in
back.

They had gone less than a mile when they heard the emergency radio
bulletin about the purported toxic spill and the closure of I-80 west of
Elko.  "Those muddle-headed, fumblefingered damn goofballs!" Talia said,
turning the volume louder but raising her voice to talk over it.
"Dangerous stuff like that, you'd think they'd treat it like a load of
babies in glass cradles, but this here's twice in two years."

Neither Parker nor Father Wycazik was capable of commenting.  They both
knew that their worst fears for their friends were now coming true.

Talia Ervy said, "Well, gentlemen, what do we do now?"

Parker said, "Is there anyplace that rents cars?  Four-wheeldrive is
what we'll need.  A Jeep, something like that."

:"There's a Jeep dealer," Talia said.

'Can you take us there?" Parker asked.

" Me and Old Paint can take you anywheres, even if it starts putting
down snowflakes big as dogs."

The salesman at the Jeep dealership, Felix Schellenhof, was far less
colorful than Talia Ervy.  Schellenhof wore a gray suit, gray tie, and
pale-gray shirt, and spoke in a gray voice. No, he told Parker, they
didn't rent vehicles by the day.  Yes, they had many for sale.  No, they
couldn't complete a deal in just twenty minutes.  The salesman said if
Parker intended to finance, that would take until tomorrow.  Even a
check would not clinch the deal quickly because Parker was from out of
state.  "No checks," Parker said.  Schellenhof raised gray eyebrows at
the prospect of cash.  Parker said, "I'll put it on my American Express
Gold Card," and Schelienhof looked grayly amused.  They took American
Express, he said, but in payment for accessories, repairs; no one had
ever bought an entire vehicle with plastic.  Parker said, "There's no
purchase limit on the card.  Listen, I was in Paris, saw a gorgeous Dali
oil in a gallery, thirty thousand bucks, and they took my American
Express!" With deliberate, plodding diplomacy, Schellenhof began to turn
them away.

"For the love of God, man, move your tired butt!" Father Wycazik roared,
slamming one fist into the top of Schellenhof's desk.  He was flushed
from his hairline to his backwards collar.  "This is a matter of life or
death for us.  Call American Express." He raised his hand high, and the
salesman's shocked gray eyes followed its swift upward are.  "Find out
if they'll authorize the purchase.  For the love of God, hurry!" the
priest shouted, slamming his fist down again.

The sight of such fury in a clergyman put some speed into the salesman
at last.  He took Parker's card and nearly sprinted out of his small
office, across the showroom to the manager's glass-walled domain.

"Good grief, Father," Parker said, "if you were a Protestant, you'd be a
famous fire-and-brimstone evangelist by now."

"Oh, Catholic or not, I've made a few sinners quake in my time."

"I don't doubt it," Parker assured him.

American Express approved the purchase.  With hasty repentance,
Schellenhof produced a sheaf of forms and showed Parker where to sign.
"Quite a week!" the salesman said, though he was still drab and gray in
spite of his new enthusiasm.  "Late Monday a fella walks in, buys a new
Cherokee with cash-bundles of twenty-dollar bills.  Must've hit it big
in a casino.  Now this.  And the week's hardly started.  Something, eh?"

"Fascinating," Parker said.

Using the telephone on Schellenhof's desk, Father Wycazik placed a
collect call to Michael Gerrano in Chicago and told him about Parker and
about the closing of I-80.  Then, when Schellenhof popped out of the
room again, Wycazik said something that startled Parker: "Michael, maybe
something'll happen to us, so you call Simon Zoderman at the Tribune the
minute I hang up.  Tell him everything.  Blow it wide open. Tell Simon
how Brendan ties in with Winton Tolk, the Halbourg girl, Calvin Sharkle,
all of it.  Tell him what happened out here in Nevada two summers ago,
what they saw.  If he finds it hard to believe, you tell him I believe
it.  He knows what a hard-headed customer I am."

When Father Wycazik hung up, Parker said, "Did I understand you right?
My God, you know what happened to them on that July night?"

"I'm almost certain I do, yes," Father Wycazik said.

Before the priest could say more, Schellenhof returned in a gray blur of
polyester.  Now that his commission seemed real to him, he was obviously
determined not to exceed Parker's time limit.

"You've got to tell me," Parker said to the priest.

"As soon as we're on our way," Father Wycazik promised.

Ned drove Jack's Cherokee eastward across the snowswept slopes, moving
at a crawl.  Sandy and Faye rode up front with him, leaning forward,
peering anxiously through the windshield, helping Ned spot the obstacles
in the chaotic whiteness ahead of them.

Riding in back-crowded in with Brendan and Jorja, with Marcie on her
mother's lap-Ernie tried to convince himself that he would not succumb
to panic when the last light of the storm-dimmed dusk gave way to
darkness.  Last night, when he'd snuggled under the covers in bed,
staring at the shadows beyond the reach of the lamp's glow, his anxiety
had been only a fraction of what he'd come to expect.  He was improving.

Ernie also took hope from Dom's resurrected memory of jets buzzing the
diner.  If Dom could remember, so could Ernie.  And when the memory
block crumbled away, when at last he recalled what he'd seen that July
night, he would stop being afraid of darkness.

"County road," Faye said as the Jeep came to a stop.

They had indeed reached the first county road, the same one that ran
past the Tranquility and under I-80.  The motel lay about two miles
south, and Thunder Hill lay eight miles north along that ribbon of
blacktop.  It had been plowed already, and recently, because the federal
government paid the county to keep the approach to the Depository open
at all times.

"Quickly," Sandy urged Ned.

Ernie knew what she was thinking: Someone going from or to Thunder Hill
might appear and accidentally discover them.

Gunning the engine, Ned drove hurriedly across the empty road, into the
foothills on the other side, traversing a series of ruts with such haste
that Brendan and Jorja were thrown repeatedly against Ernie, who sat
between them.  Once more, they took cover in the snow which fell like a
storm of ashes from a coldly burning sky.  Another north-south county
artery-Vista Valley Road-lay six miles east, and that was where they
were headed.  Once there, they would turn south and go to a third county
road that paralleled I-80 and that would carry them into Elko.

Ernie suddenly realized twilight was falling to the shadow armies of the
night.  Darkness had nearly stolen up on them. It was standing just a
little way off, not in distance but in time, only a few minutes away,
but he could see it watching them from billions of peepholes between
billions of whirling snowflakes, creeping closer each time he blinked,
soon to leap through the curtains of snow and seize him.  .  .  .

No.  There were too many other things worth fearing to waste energy on a
nonsensical phobia.  Even with a compass, they could get lost at night
in this shrieking maelstrom.  With visibility reduced to a few yards,
they might drive off the edge of a ridge crest or into a rocky chasm,
unaware of the hole until it swallowed them.  Driving blindly to their
own destruction was such a real threat that Ned could make no speed but
could only nurse the Cherokee forward at a cautious crawl.

I fear what's worth fearing, Ernie told himself adamantly. I don't fear
you, Darkness.

Faye looked over her shoulder from the front seat.  He smiled and made
an OK sign-only slightly shaky-with thumb and forefinger.

Faye started to give him an OK sign of her own, and that was when little
Marcie screamed.

In his office along the wall of The Hub, deep inside Thunder Hill, Dr.
Miles Bennell sat in darkness, thinking, worrying. The only light was
the wan glow at two windows that faced into the central cavern of the
Depository's second level, illumination insufficient to reveal any
details of the room.

On the desk in front of him lay six sheets of paper.  He'd read them
twenty or thirty times during the past fifteen months; he did not need
to read them again tonight to recall, word for word, what was typed on
them.  It was an illegally obtained printout of Leland Falkirk's
psychological profile, stolen from the computer-stored personnel records
of the elite Domestic Emergency Response Organization.

Miles Bennell-Ph D.  in biology and chemistry, dabbler in physics and
anthropology, musician proficient on the guitar and piano, author of
books as diverse as a text on neurohistology and a scholarly study of
the works of John D. MacDonald, connoisseur of fine wine, aficionado of
Clint Eastwood movies, the nearest thing to a late-twentieth-century
Renaissance man-was among other things a computer hacker of formidable
skill.  He had begun adventuring through the complex worldwide network
of electronic information systems when he had been a college student.
Eighteen months ago, when his work on the Thunder Hill project threw him
into frequent contact with Leland Falkirk, Miles Bennell had decided
that the colonel was a psychologically disturbed individual who would
have been declared unfit for military service even as a private-but for
one thing: He was apparently one of those rare paranoids who had learned
how to use his special brand of insanity to mold himself into a smoothly
functioning machine-man who looked and acted normal enough.  Miles had
wanted to know more.  What made Falkirk tick?  What stimulus might make
him explode unexpectedly?

The answers were to be found only at DERO headquarters. So sixteen
months ago, Miles began using his personal terminal and modern to seek a
route into DERO files in Washington.

The first time he'd read the profile, Miles had been frightened, though
he had developed a thousand rationalizations for staying on the job even
if it meant working with a dangerous and violent man like the colonel.
There was less chance of trouble if Miles treated Falkirk with the
coolness and grudging respect that a controlled paranoid would
understand.  You dared not be buddy-buddy with such a man-or flatter
him-for he would assume you were hiding something. Polite disdain was
the best attitude.

But now Miles was totally in Falkirk's power, sealed beneath the earth,
to be judged and sentenced according to the colonel's warped view of
guilt and innocence.  He was scared sick.

The Army psychologist who'd written the profile was neither very well
educated as psychologists went nor too perceptive.  Nevertheless, though
he had proclaimed the colonel more than fit enough for the elite DERO
companies, he had noted peculiarities of the man's personality that made
his report disturbing reading for Miles, who could read not only what
was on the paper but what lay hidden between the lines.

First: Leland Falkirk feared and despised all religion.  Because love of
God and country were prized in career military men, Falkirk tried to
conceal his antireligious sentiments. Evidently, these attitudes sprang
from a difficult childhood in a family of fanatics.

Miles Bennell decided that this fault in Falkirk was especially
troublesome because the current undertaking, in which he and the colonel
were involved, had a multiplicity of mystical connotations.  Aspects of
it had undeniable religious overtones and associations that were certain
to trigger intense negative reactions in the colonel.

Second: Leland Falkirk was obsessed with control.  He needed to dominate
every aspect of his environment and everyone he encountered.  This
urgent need to control the external world was a reflection of his
constant internal struggle to control his own rages and paranoid fears.

Miles Bennell shuddered when he thought of the terrible strain this
current assignment had put on the colonel, for the thing being hidden
here in Thunder Hill could not be controlled forever.  Which was a
realization that might lead Falkirk to a harmless breakdown-or to an
explosion of psychotic anger.

Third: Leland Falkirk suffered a mild but persistent claustrophobia that
was strongest in subterranean places.  This fear might have arisen in
his childhood as a result of his parents' unrelenting assertion that he
would one day wind up in Hell.

Falkirk, uncomfortable when underground, would be automatically
suspicious of everyone in a place like Thunder Hill.  In retrospect, it
was frighteningly obvious that the colonel's growing paranoid suspicion
of everyone on the project had been inevitable from the first day.

Fourth and worst: Leland Falkirk was a controlled masochist.  He
subjected himself to tests of physical stamina and resistance to pain,
pretending these ordeals were necessary to maintain the high level of
fitness and superb reflexes required of a DERO officer.  His dirty
little secret, hidden even from himself, was that he enjoyed the
suffering.

Miles Bennell was more disturbed by that aspect of Fal kirk's character
than by anything else in the profile.  Because the colonel liked pain,
he would not mind suffering along with everyone in Thunder Hill if he
decided their suffering was necessary to cleanse the world.  He might
actually enjoy the prospect of death.

Miles Bennell sat in darkness, troubled and bleak.

But it was not even his death or the deaths of his colleagues that most
frightened him.  What made his gut clench was the fear that, while
destroying everyone on the project, Falkirk would also destroy the
project itself.  If he did, he would be denying mankind the greatest
news in history.  And he'd also be denying the species its best-perhaps
only-chance for peace, immortality, endless plenty, and transcendence.

Leland Falkirk stood in the Blocks' kitchen, looking down at the album
that lay on the table.  When he opened it, he saw photographs and
drawings of the moon, all colored red.

Outside, searching the property end to end, a dozen DERO troops shouted
to one another, voices garbled and muffled by the raging wind.

Doing deep breathing exercises that were supposed to expel a little of
his tension with each exhalation, Leland turned a page of the album and
saw more scarlet moons: the child's weird collection.

The sound of engines rose to the kitchen window from behind the motel as
the men drove at least two vehicles around from the front.  Leland
recognized the souped-up, all-terrain pickup's distinctive snarl.

The colonel continued to page through the album, remaining calm, totally
in control in spite of the series of setbacks that continued to plague
him.  He was proud of his control.  Nothing could faze him.

Lieutenant Horner's quick heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs leading
up from the office.  A moment later he thumped across the living room,
into the kitchen.  "Sir, we've checked all the motel rooms.  No one's
there.  They left by the back, overland.  Two very vague sets of tire
tracks in the snow.  Can't have gone far.  Not in this weather, not
already."

"Have you sent the men to follow them?"

"No, sir.  But I had them pull the pickup and a Wagoneer around back.
They're ready to go."

"Move them out," Leland said in a soft, measured tone.

"Don't worry, sir, we'll get our hands on them."

"I'm sure we will," Leland said, totally in control of himself, showing
a firm and steady sense of command to his lieutenant.  Horner turned and
started to leave, and Leland said, "As soon as you've sent the men off,
meet me downstairs with a county map.  They'll intend to connect with a
county or state road somewhere.  We'll anticipate their next move and be
waiting for them."

"Yes, sir," Horner said.

Alone, Leland calmly turned a page of the album.  Red moons.

Horner's crashing footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs; then the
front door slammed shut behind him, reverberating through the walls.

Calmly, so calmly, Leland turned a page in the album, and another.

Outside, Horner was shouting orders to the men.

Leland turned a page, another, another.  Red moons.

Outside, engines reved.  Eight men, in two parties of four, moved out on
the trail of the escaped witnesses.

Leland calmly turned two, three, six pages, saw red moons and more red
moons, and calmly picked up the album and threw it across the room.  The
book slammed into cupboards, bounced off the refrigerator, fell.  A
score of scarlet moons flew free and fluttered briefly.  On a counter,
Leland saw a ceramic jar: a smiling bear sitting with forepaws clasped
over his tummy.  He scooped it up, threw it to the floor, where it
exploded in a hundred fragments.  Broken chocolate-chip cookies landed
atop the album and crumbled across the scattered red moons.  He swept a
radio off the counter, onto the floor.  A canister of sugar.  Flour.  He
pitched a breadbox against the wall and threw a Mr.  Coffee machine at
the oven.

He stood for a moment, breathing -deeply, evenly.  Then he turned and
walked calmly out of the kitchen, went calmly down the stairs to the
office, to calmly study the county map and calmly assess the situation
with his lieutenant.

"The moon!" Marcie cried, then screamed shrilly again. "Mommy, look,
look, the moon!  Why, Mommy, why?  Look, the moon!"

The girl suddenly tried to pull loose of her mother, wrenched and
flailed.  Jorja strove to hold on to her but was unsuccessful.

Startled by the screams, Ned had halted the Jeep.

Screaming again, Marcie tore loose of her mother, scrambled across
Ernie, with no particular destination as far as Ernie could determine,
with no intention but to escape from whatever she had seen in memory.
She was apparently not aware that she was in the Cherokee but believed
herself to be in another place altogether, a scary place.

Ernie grabbed her before she could scrabble and kick her way into
Brendan's lap.  He held the small child tightly in his big arms, held
her against his chest, and as she continued to scream, he cooed
soothingly to her.

Gradually, Marcie's terror subsided.  She stopped struggling and went
limp in his arms.  She stopped screaming, too, and merely chanted
softly: "Moon, the moon, moon.  .  .  ." And quietly, but with terrible
dread: "Don't let it get me, don't let it, don't let it."

"Be still, honey," Ernie said, patting her, stroking her hair, "be
still, you're safe, I won't let it get you."

"She remembered something," Brendan said as Ned drove forward again.  "A
crack opened for just a moment."

"What did you see, baby?" Jor ' ja asked her daughter.

The girl had slipped back into her deep catatonic glaze, unhearing,
unheeding .  .  .  except that, after a while, Ernie felt her arms
tighten around him in a hug.  He hugged her in return.  She said
nothing.  She was still not really with them, adrift on a dark inner
sea.  Evidently, however, she felt safe in Ernie's bearish embrace, and
she held fast to him as the Cherokee rocked and lurched through the
snowy night.

After months of living in fear of every shadow, after regarding each
oncoming twilight with despair and horror, Ernie felt indescribably
good, delighted that someone needed his strength.  It was profoundly
satisfying.  And as he held her and murmured to her and stroked her
thick black hair, he was oblivious of the fact that night now surrounded
the Cherokee and pressed its face to the windows.

Eventually, Jack turned the pickup east and finally connected with the
county road to Thunder at a point approximately one mile north of the
place where Ned should have already crossed the same lane in the
Cherokee.  He turned right and headed up toward the Depository, the
route that Dom and Ernie had covered this morning.

He had never seen a storm this bad back East.  The higher he went into
the mountains, the harder and faster the snow came down.  It was as
dense as a heavy rainfall.

"The entrance to the Depository is about a mile ahead," Dom said.

Jack cut the headlights and proceeded at a slower pace. Until his eyes
adjusted to the loss of light, the world seemed composed only of
whirling white specks and darkness.

He could not always tell if he was in his own lane.  He expected another
vehicle to hurtle out of the night and ram him head-on.

Evidently Ginger had the same thought, for she shrank down in her seat
as if for protection in a crash.  She nervously bit her lower lip.

" Those lights ahead," Dom said.  "The entrance to the Depository."

Two mercury_vapor lamps blazed on poles flanking the electric gate.  A
warmer amber glow shone in the two narrow windows of the guardhouse.

Even with those lights, Jack could see only a vague outline of the small
building on the far side of the fence, for the falling snow masked all
details.  He felt confident that, with no headlights, the pickup would
be invisible to any guard who might happen to look out a window as the
truck drifted past on the county lane.  Their engine noise would be
swallowed by the wind.

They rolled slowly up the steep slope, deeper into the night and
mountains.  The windshield wipers were doing a poorer job by the moment,
for snow had clogged the blades and turned to ice.

When they had gone a mile past the entrance to Thunder Hill, Ginger
said, "Maybe we could turn the lights on now."

Hunching over the wheel, squinting into the gloom ahead, Jack said, "No.
We'll go in darkness all the way."

In the motel office, Leland Falkirk and Lieutenant Horner unfolded the
county map on the check-in counter.  They were still studying it when
the men who had gone after the escaping witnesses returned in defeat,
only minutes after departing. The search party had followed the tire
tracks a couple of hundred yards through a glen running north into the
hills, at which point the snow and wind erased the trail.  However,
there was some evidence that at least one vehicle had turned into
another hollow leading east, and since there seemed no reason for the
witnesses to split up, it was assumed both the Servers' pickup and the
Cherokee were now headed in that general direction.

Returning his attention to the map, Leland said, "It makes sense.  They
wouldn't go west.  Nothing's out there until Battle Mountain, forty
miles away, then Winnemucca over fifty miles farther.  Neither town's
big enough to hide in for long.  And neither's exactly a transportation
hub; aren't many ways out. So they'll go east, into Elko."

Lieutenant Horner put a cigar-sized finger on the map. "Here's the road
that runs past the motel and up to Thunder Hill.  They'll have crossed
that by now and still be heading east."

"What's the next southbound road they'll come to?"

Lieutenant Horner bent down to read the small print on the map.  "Vista
Valley.  Looks to be about six miles east of the road to Thunder Hill."

A knock sounded, and Miles Bennell said, "Come in."

General Robert Alvarado, CO of Thunder Hill, opened the door and entered
the dark office in a swath of silvery light that came with him from The
Hub and coated a portion of the room in an imitation of frost.  He said,
"Sitting alone in the dark, huh?  Just imagine how suspicious that would
seem to Colonel Falkirk."

"He's a madman, Bob."

"Not long ago," Bob Alvarado said, "I'd have argued that he was a fairly
good officer, though a bit too by-the-book and much too gung-ho.  But
tonight, I have to agree with you. The man's only got one oar in the
water.  Maybe no oars.  I just got a request from him a few minutes ago,
by telephone. Supposed to be a request, but it was phrased like an
order. He wants the entire staff, all military men and all civilians, to
report to their quarters and stay there until further notice.

You'll hear my order on the public address system in a couple minutes."

"But why's he want that?" Miles asked.

Alvarado sat in a chair near the open door, the frosty swath of light
falling across his feet and up to the middle of his chest, leaving his
face in darkness.  "Falkirk's bringing in the witnesses and doesn't want
them to be seen by any of our people who don't already know about them.
Or that's what he claims is behind the request."

Astonished, Miles said, "But if the time's come to put them through
another memory-scrub, it's better to keep them at the motel.  Though as
far as I know, he's not called in the damn brain-fuckers."

"He hasn't," Bob Alvarado confirmed.  "He says the coverup might not be
continued.  He wants you to study the witnesses, especially Cronin and
Corvaisis.  He says maybe he's right, maybe they're not human any more.
But he says he's been thinking over his conversation with you, wondering
if maybe you could be right and maybe he's too paranoid about this.  He
says if you decide they're fully human, if you determine that their
gifts are not evidence of an inhuman presence within them, he'll accept
your word; he'll spare them.  Then, so he says, he might decide against
another brainwashing session and even recommend to his superiors that
the whole story be revealed to the public."

Miles was silent a moment.  Then he shifted in his chair, more uneasy
than ever.  "It sounds as if he's finally got some common sense.  Why do
I find that so hard to believe?  Do you think it's true?"

Alvarado reached out from his chair, pushed the door shut, plunging the
room into darkness.  Sensing Miles reaching for the lamp switch, he
said, "Let's keep it this way, huh?  Maybe it's a little easier to be
frank with each other when we can't see faces." Miles settled back in
his chair, leaving the lamp unlit, and Alvarado said, "Tell me, Miles,
was it you who sent the photographs to Corvaisis and the Blocks?"

Miles said nothing.

"We're friends, you and I," Alvarado said.  "At least I've felt we are.
I never met another guy I could enjoy playing both chess and poker with.
So I'll tell you .  .  .  I'm the one who got Jack Twist back here."

Startled, Miles said, "How?  Why?"

"Well, like you, I knew some of the witnesses were slowly shedding their
memory blocks and having psychological problems in the process.  So
before anyone could decide to wipe them again one by one, I figured to
do something to focus their attention on the motel.  I hoped to stir up
enough trouble to make it impossible to continue the cover-up.

"Why?" Miles repeated.

"Because I'd finally decided the cover-up was wrong."

"But why sabotage it by such a back-door approach?" Miles asked.

"Because if I'd gone public, I'd have been disobeying orders.  I'd have
been throwing my career away, maybe my pension.  And besides ...  I
thought Falkirk might kill me."

Miles had worried about the same thing.

Alvarado said, "I started with Twist because I thought his Ranger
background and his inclination to challenge authority would make him a
good candidate for organizing the other witnesses.  From the information
turned up during his memory-wipe session that summer, I knew about his
safe-deposit boxes.  So I searched the file on him, got the names of the
banks, the passwords.  The file also contained copies of all the keys to
his boxes; Falkirk had them made in case it was ever necessary to turn
up criminal evidence against Twist to use as blackmail or to put him out
of the way in prison.  I made copies of the copies.  Then, when I was on
leave for ten days in late December, I went to New York with a bunch of
postcards of the Tranquility Motel, and I put one in each of his boxes.
He didn't go to those banks often, just a few times a year, and they've
all got thousands of safe-deposit customers, so nobody remembered what
Twist looked like or suspected that I wasn't him.  It was easy."

"And ingenious," Miles said, staring with admiration and fondness at the
bulky, shadowy form of his friend.  "Finding those cards would've
electrified Twist.  And if Falkirk had gotten wind of it, he'd have no
way of knowing who'd done it."

"Especially since I always handled the postcards with gloves," Alvarado
said.  "Didn't even leave a fingerprint.  I planned to come back here,
give Twist time to find them.  Then I was going to go into Elko and,
from a pay phone, make a couple of anonymous calls to other witnesses,
give them Twist's unlisted number, tell them he had answers to their
various mental problems.  That would've set the ball rolling pretty
well.  But before it got that far, someone else had sent notes and
Polaroids to Corvaisis, more Polaroids to the Blocks, and a new crisis
was already underway. Like Falkirk, I know whoever sent those pictures
has to be here in Thunder Hill.  You going to fess up, or am I the only
one in a confessional mood?"

Miles hesitated.  His glance fell upon the vague grayness of the report
on his desk: Falkirk's psychological profile.  He shuddered and said,
"Yeah, Bob, I sent the pictures.  Great minds think alike, huh?"

From his own pocket of darkness, Alvarado said, "I told you why I picked
Twist.  And I can figure why you'd want to stir up the Blocks, since
they're local and sort of at the center of everything.  But why'd you
pick Corvaisis instead of one of the others?"

"He's a writer, which means a vivid imagination.  Anonymous notes and
odd pictures in the mail would probably grab his interest a little
faster and tighter than anyone else's.  And his first novel has had
tremendous prepublication publicity, so if he dug up some of the truth,
reporters might be more likely to listen to him than to the others."

"We're a clever pair."

"Too clever for our own good," Miles said.  "Looks like sabotaging the
cover-up was too slow.  We should've just violated our secrecy oaths and
gone public with the news, even if it meant risking Falkirk's anger and
government prosecution."

They were silent a moment, and then Alvarado said, "Why do you think
I've come here and opened up to you like this, Miles?"

"You need an ally against the colonel.  Because you don't think he meant
a word of what he told you on the phone. You don't think he's suddenly
gotten reasonable.  You don't think he's bringing the witnesses back
here to let us study them."

"He's going to kill them, I think," Alvarado said.  "And us, too.  All
of us."

"Because he thinks we've all been taken over.  The damn fool."

The public address system crackled, whistled.  A speaker was set in the
wall of Miles's office, as in every room within the Depository.  The
announcement followed the whistle: All personnel, military and civilian,
were to report first to the armory to be issued handguns, then to their
quarters to await further instructions.

Getting up from his chair, Alvarado said, "When they're all in their
quarters, I'll tell them it was Falkirk's idea to put them there but my
idea to arm them.  I'll warn them that, for reasons that'll be clear to
some and a mystery to others, we're all in danger from Falkirk and his
DEROS.  Later, if the colonel sends some of his men to round up the
staff and shoot them all, my people will be able to shoot back.  I hope
we can stop him before it goes that far."

"Do I get a handgun, too?"

Alvarado moved to the door but did not open it.  Standing in the dark,
he said, "You especially.  Wear a lab coat with the gun under it, so
Falkirk won't see you're armed.  I intend to wear my uniform coat
unbuttoned, with a small pistol tucked into the back of my waistband, so
he won't ' realize I'm armed, either.  If it seems he's about to order
our destruction, I'll pull the gun and kill him.  But I'll alert you
first, with a code word, so you can turn on Horner and kill him, too.
It's no good unless we get both, because if Horner has a chance, he'll
kill me when I open fire.  on Falkirk.  And it's imperative I survive,
not just because I'm inordinately fond of my own hide, which I am, but
because I'm a general, and I ought to be able to make Falkirk's men obey
me once their CO's dead.  Can you do that?  Can you kill a man, Miles?"

"Yes.  I'll be able to pull the trigger if it means stopping Horner.  I
consider you a good friend, too, Bob.  Not just because of the poker and
chess, either.  There's also the fact that you've actually read all of
T.  S.  Eliot."

" 'I think we are in rats' alley, Where the dead men lost their bones,'
" Bob Alvarado quoted.  Laughing softly, he pulled the door open and
stood revealed in the argentine glow of the cavern lights.  "How ironic.
Ages ago, my daddy used to worry that my interest in poetry was a sign
I'd grow up to be a skirt-wearing sissy.  Instead, I became a one-star
general, and in the hour of my greatest need, it's poetry that persuades
you to kill for me and save my ass.  Coming to the armory, Dr. Bennell?"

Miles rose from his chair and joined the general in the spill of frosty
light in the doorway.  He said, "You realize that Falkirk is, in
essence, acting in the name of the Army Chief of Staff himself and even
higher authorities.  So after you've killed him, you'll have General
Riddenhour and maybe even the President coming down hard on your neck."

"Fuck Riddenhour," Bob Alvarado said, clapping a hand on Miles's
shoulder.  "Fuck all the politicians and their toadying generals like
Riddenhour.  Even though Falkirk will take the security computer's new
codes with him when we kill him, we'll get out of here in a few days,
even if we have to dismantle the damn exit.  And then ...  do you
realize, when we take the news to the world, we're going to be two of
the most famous men on this sorry planet?  Maybe two of the most famous
men in history.  Fact is, I can't think of anyone in history who had
quite such important news to spread ...

except Mary Magdalene on Easter Morning."

Father Stefan Wycazik drove the Cherokee because he had experience with
four-wheel-drive vehicles from his service with Father Bill Nader in
Vietnam.  Of course, those adventures had been laid in swamp and jungle,
not in a blizzard. But he discovered the Jeep handled about the same in
either condition.  And though his daredevil experiences were long ago in
time, they seemed recent in his heart and mind, and he controlled the
wheel with the same reckless disregard for danger and sure-handed
expertise that he'd shown in his younger days, under fire.  As he and
Parker Faine headed away from the lights of Elko into the snow-blasted
night, Father Wycazik knew that God had called him to the priesthood
precisely because, at times, the Church required a man who carried a
thick splinter of an adventurer's soul lodged in his own.

Because I-80 was closed, they went north on State Route 51.  They
switched to a series of westward-leading county roads-macadam, gravel,
dirt, all under a mantle of snow. The roads were marked by
cat's-eye-yellow reflectors on widely spaced posts along the berm, and
the luster of those periodic guideposts, casting back the headlight
beams, was frequently the only thing that kept Stefan from going astray.
Sometimes, he had to drive overland to get from one lane to another.
Fortunately, they had bought a dash-mounted compass and a county map.
Although their route was winding and rough,

they made steady progress in the general direction of the Tranquility
Motel.

On the way, Stefan told Parker about the CISG, about which he had
learned from Michael Gerrano, after Michael had gotten the news from Mr.
X, Ginger Weiss's friend. "Colonel Falkirk was the only military member.
The CISG looks like a typical waste of tax dollars: a study group funded
to do a think-tank-type assessment of a social problem that would most
likely never arise.  The committee consisted of biologists, physicists,
cultural anthropologists, medical doctors, sociologists, psychologists.
The acronym CISG stands for Contact Impact Study Group, which means they
tried to determine the positive and negative impact on human society of
first contact with an intelligent species not of this world."

Keeping his eyes on the snowy road, Stefan paused to let his meaning
sink in, smiled slightly when he heard the artist take a sudden sharp
breath.  Parker said, "You don't mean .  .  .  you couldn't mean "Yes,"
Stefan said.

"Something came .  .  .  you mean that .  .  .  something .

For the first time in Stefan Wycazik's acquaintance, Parker Faine was
speechless.

"Yes," Stefan said.  Although this amazing development was no longer
news to him, he still shivered at the thought of it, and he appreciated
what Parker was feeling.  "Something came down that night.  Something
came down from the sky on July sixth."

"Jesus!" Parker exclaimed.  "Uh, sorry, Father.  Didn't mean to be
blasphemous.  Came down.  Holy shit.  Sorry.  Really. But .  .  .
Jesus!"

Following cat's-eye reflectors along an especially twisty gravel road
that hugged the lower contours of folded and refolded hills, Father
Wycazik said, "Under the circumstances, I don't think God's grading you
on verbal restraint.  The CISG's primary purpose was to arrive at a
consensus of how human cultures-and human beings themselves-would be
affected by face-to-face contact with extraterrestrials."

"But that's an easy question to answer.  What a joyous, wondrous thing
to discover we're not alone!" Parker said. "You and I know how people
would react.  Look how they've been fascinated by movies about other
worlds and aliens for decades now!"

"Yes," Stefan said, "but there's a difference how they react to
fictional contact and how they might react to the reality. At least
that's the opinion of many scientists, especially in the soft sciences
like sociology and psychology.  And anthropologists tell us that when an
advanced culture interacts with one less advanced, the less advanced
culture suffers a loss of confidence in-and often a complete collapse
of-its traditions, institutions.  The primitive culture loses respect
for its religions and systems of government.  Its sexual practices,
social values, and family structures deteriorate.  Look what happened to
the Eskimos following their encounter with Western civilization: soaring
alcoholism, family-destroying generational conflict, a high rate of
suicide.  .  .  .  It's not that Western culture is dangerous or evil.
It isn't.  But our culture was far more sophisticated and richly
textured than the Eskimo culture, and contact led to a serious loss of
self-esteem among the Eskimos that they've never regained and never
will."

Stefan had to pause in his elaboration of the issue, for they came to
the end of the gravel track on which they had been traveling.

Parker studied the map in the dim glow of the glove-compartment light.
Then he checked the dash-mounted compass. "That way," he said, pointing
left.  "We go three miles due west, all of it overland.  Then we'll come
to a north-south county route called .  .  .  Vista Valley Road.  We
cross Vista Valley, and from there it looks about eight or nine miles,
overland again, until we might come up behind the Tranquility."

"You keep checking the compass, make sure I stay pointed west." Stefan
drove the Cherokee into the snow-shrouded nightscape ahead.

Parker said, "This stuff about the Eskimos, all this detail about what
the CISG's point of view is like-Mr.  X didn't pass all these fine
points along to Father Gerrano in one telephone call."

"Some of it; not all of it."

"So I gather you've thought about the subject before."

"Not about extraterrestrial contact, no," Father Wycazik said.  "But
part of Jesuit education involves a hard look at both the good and bad
results of the Church's efforts to spread the faith to backward cultures
throughout history.  The general feeling is we did a disturbing amount
of damage even as we brought enlightenment.  Anyway, we study a lot of
anthropology, so I can understand the concern of the CISG."

"You're drifting north.  Angle left as soon as the land will let you,"
Parker said, checking the compass.  "Listen, I'm still not sure I
understand the CISG's concern."

"Consider the American Indian.  Ultimately, the white man's guns didn't
destroy them; the clash of cultures did them in; the influx of new ideas
forced the Indians to view their comparatively primitive societies from
a different perspective, resulting in a loss of esteem, a loss of
cultural validity and direction.  According to what Mr.  X told Father
Gerrano, the CISG believed contact between mankind and very advanced
extraterrestrials could have those same effects on us: the destruction
of religious faith, a loss of faith in all governments and other secular
belief-systems, a rising feeling of inferiority, suicide."

Parker Faine made a harsh scoffing sound in the back of his throat.
"Father, would your faith collapse because of this?"

"No.  Just the opposite," Stefan said excitedly.  "If this enormous
universe didn't contain any other life, if the trillions of stars and
billions of planets were all barren of life-that might make me think
there was no God, that our species' evolution was just happenstance.
Because if there's a God, He loves life, cherishes life and all the
creatures He created, and He'd never leave the universe so empty."

"A lot of people-most people-would feel the same," Parker said.

"And even if the species we encounter is frighteningly different from us
in physical appearance, that wouldn't shake me.  When God told us He
created us in His image, He didn't mean our physical appearance was like
His.  He meant our souls, minds, our capacity for reason and compassion,
love, friendship: Those are the aspects of humanity that are in His
image.  Which is the message I'm taking to Brendan.  I believe Brendan's
crisis of faith was related to a memory of an encounter with a race
vastly different from us-and so shatteringly superior to us-that he
subconsciously believed it put the lie to what the Church teaches us
about mankind being in God's image.  I want to tell him that it's not
what they look like that matters or whether they're far more advanced
than us.  What indicates the divine hand in them is their capacity to
love, to care-and to use their God-given intelligence to triumph over
the challenges of the universe that He gave them."

"Which they've had to do in order to come so far," Parker said.

"Exactly!" Father Wycazik said.  "I'm sure when the brainwashing loses
its hold on Brendan, when he remembers what happened and has time to
think about it, he'll come to the same conclusion.  But just in case, I
want to be there beside him, to help him, guide him."

"You love him very much," Parker said.

For several seconds, Father Wycazik squinted into the tumultuous white
world ahead, progressing more slowly and cautiously than when he'd been
following the reflectors along a known road.  At last he said, in a soft
voice: "Sometimes I've regretted entering the priesthood.  God help me,
it's true. Because sometimes I think about the family I might have had:
a wife whose life I could share, who'd share mine, and children to watch
grow.  .  .  .  The family that might have beenthat's what I miss.
Nothing else.  The thing about Brendan is .  .  .  well, he's the son I
never had and never will.  I love him more than I can say."

After a while, Parker sighed and said, "Personally, I think the CISG was
full of crap.  First contact wouldn't destroy us."

"I agree," Stefan said.  "Their fallacy lies in comparing this situation
to our contact with primitive cultures.  The difference is that we
aren't primitive.  This will be the contact between one very advanced
culture and another super-advanced culture.  The CISG believed if there
ever was contact it'd have to be concealed, if at all possible, and that
news of it would have to be broken to the public over ten or even twenty
years. But that's wrong, dead wrong, Parker.  We can handle the shock.
Because we're ready for them to come.  Oh, dear God, but we are so
desperately and longingly ready for them!"

"So ready," Parker agreed in a whisper.

For perhaps another minute they bumped and rocked along in silence,
unable to speak, unable to put in words exactly what it felt like to
know that mankind did not stand alone in creation.

Finally, Parker cleared his throat, checked the compass, and said,
"You're right on course, Stefan.  Ought to be less than a mile to Vista
Valley Road.  This man in Chicago that you mentioned a while ago ... Cal
Sharkle.  What was it he yelled to the cops this morning?"

"He insisted he'd seen aliens land and that they were hostile.  He was
afraid they were taking us over, that most of his neighbors had been
possessed.  He said the aliens tried to take control of him by strapping
him in a bed and dripping themselves into his veins.  Initially, I was
afraid maybe he was right, that what had come down here in Nevada was a
threat.  But on the trip from Chicago, I had time to think about it.  He
was confusing his incarceration and brainwashing with the landing of the
starship he'd seen.  He thought it was aliens in pressurized space suits
who'd kept him captive and stuck him full of needles.  He witnessed the
descent of a starship, and then these government men in decontamination
suits came, and by the time they'd rammed all that stuff into his
subconscious and weighted it down with a memory block, he was completely
mixed up.  No aliens apprehended him.  It was his fellow men who
mistreated him."

"You're saying government agents would've worn decontamination suits
until it was clear whether or not the alien contact carried a risk of
bacteriological contamination."

"Exactly," Stefan said.  "Some guests at the Tranquility must've
approached the ship openly, so they had to be considered contaminated
until evidence to the contrary was turned up.  And we know some at the
motel have distinctly remembered men inside decontamination suits: a few
soldiers, brainwashing specialists.  So poor Calvin was driven insane by
a misconception arising from his inability to remember clearly."

"Must be less than half a mile to Vista Valley Road," Parker said,
studying the map in the light from the open glovecompartment door.

Snow drove relentlessly through the yellow cones of the headlights.  Now
and then, when the wind faltered or briefly changed the angle of its
assault, short-lived forms of snow capered in arabesque dances, this way
and that, but always dispersing and vanishing like ghostly performers
the moment that the wind recovered its momentum and purpose.

As they started up a steep slope, Parker said softly, "Something came
down.  .  .  .  And if the government knew enough to close I-80 ahead of
the event, they must've been tracking the craft a long time.  But I
still don't see how they could

know where it would come down.  I mean, the crew of the ship might've
changed its course at any time."

"Unless it was crashing," Father Wycazik said.  "Maybe it was picked up
by satellite observation far out in space, monitored for days or weeks.
If it approached on an undeviating course that would indicate it wasn't
traveling under control, there'd have been time to calculate its point
of impact."

"Oh, no.  No.  I don't want to think it crashed," Parker said.

"Nor do I."

"I want to think they got here alive .  .  .  all that way."

When the Jeep Cherokee was halfway up the slope, the tires spun on an
especially icy patch of ground, then caught hold and propelled them
forward again with a jolt.

Parker said, "I want to believe Dom and the others didn't just see a
ship .  .  .  but encountered whoever came in it.  Imagine. Just
imagine.  .  ."

Father Wycazik said, "Whatever happened to them that night in July was
very strange indeed, a whole lot stranger than just seeing a ship from
another world."

"You mean .  .  .  because of Brendan's and Dom's powers?"

"Yes.  Something more happened, more than just contact."

They topped the crest of the hill and started down the other side.  Even
through shifting curtains of the storm, Stefan saw the headlights of
four vehicles on Vista Valley Road below. All four were stopped and
angled every which way, and their blazing beams crisscrossed like
gleaming sabers in the snowbleeding darkness.

As he drove down toward the gathering, he quickly realized that he was
heading into trouble.

"Machine guns!" Parker said.

Stefan saw that two of the men below were holding submachine guns on a
group of seven people-six adults and one child-who were lined up against
the side of a Cherokee that was different only in color from the one
Parker had just bought.  Eight or ten other men were standing around, a
substantial force, obviously military because they were all dressed in
the same Arctic-issue uniforms.  Stefan had no doubt that these were
some of the same forces involved in the closure of I-80 both tonight and
eighteen months ago.

They had turned toward him and were staring uphill, surprised at being
interrupted.

He wanted to swing the Jeep around, gun the engine, and flee, but
although he slowed down, he knew there was no point in running.  They
would come after him.

Abruptly, he recognized a familiar Irish face among those lined up
against the Cherokee.  "That's him, Parker!  That's Brendan on the end
of the lineup."

"The others must be from the motel," Parker said, leaning forward to
peer anxiously through the windshield.  "But I don't see Dom."

Now that he had spotted Brendan, Father Wycazik could not have turned
back even if God had opened the mountains for him and provided a highway
clear to Canada, as He had parted the Red Sea for Moses.  On the other
hand, Stefan was unarmed.  And as a priest, he would have had little use
for a gun even if he had possessed one.  Having neither the means nor
desire to attack, yet unable to run, he let the Cherokee roll slowly
down the hill as he frantically wracked his mind for some course of
action that would turn the tables on the soldiers below.

The same concern had gripped Parker, for he said, "What in the devil are
we going to do?"

Their dilemma was resolved by the soldiers below.  To Stefan's
astonishment, one of the men with a machine gun opened fire on them.

Dom watched as Jack Twist directed the flashlight beam over the
chainlink fence, then up to the barbed-wire overhang that thrust out
above their heads.  They were at that long length of Thunder Hill's
perimeter that ran through an open meadow, down toward the floor of the
valley.  Windblown snow had stuck to large sections of the thick,
interlocking steel loops of the fence, but other areas were bare, and
those uncrusted links were what Jack studied most closely.

"The fence itself isn't electrified," Jack said above the shrieking
wind.  "There aren't conducting wires woven through it, and the current
can't be carried by the links.  No way. There'd be just too damn much
resistance because they're too thick and because the ends of some of
them don't make tight contact with each other."

Ginger said, "Then why the warning signs?"

"Partly to spook away amateurs," Jack said.  He put the beam of the
flash on the overhang again.  "However, there are conducting wires
strung carefully through the center of that barbed-wire roll, so you'd
get fried if you went over the top.  We'll cut through the bottom."

Ginger held the flashlight while Dom dug into one of the canvas
rucksacks, found the acetylene torch, and passed it to Jack.

After he had slipped on a pair of tinted ski goggles, Jack lit the torch
and began to cut an entrance through the chainlink barrier.  The fierce
hissing of the burning gas was audible even above the keening, moaning
wind.  The intense bluewhite acetylene flame cast an eerie light that
struck a thousand jewel-bright glints in the snow.

They were not at a position where they risked being seen from the main
entrance of the Depository, which lay over the brow of a hill that
sloped up from the other side of the fence.  However, Dom was sure the
weird acetylene light reached high enough into the night to be spotted
from the other side of that rise.  If seen, it would draw guards this
way. But if Jack was right, if the Depository's security was largely
electronic, there would not be guards prowling the grounds tonight; and
in this weather, surveillance by video cameras was pretty much ruled
out, too, for their lenses would be iced-over or packed with snow.

Of course, though they wanted to get inside the Depository and have a
quick look around, it Would not be a tragedy if they were apprehended
here.  After all, being taken into custody was part of Jack's plan for
focusing attention on Thunder Hill.

Dom, Ginger, and Jack were not armed.  All the weapons had been for the
others, in the Cherokee, because their escape was essential.  If they
were stopped, all was lost.  Dom hoped they wouldn't need their guns,
and that they were already safely in Elko.

As Jack cut a crawl-through opening in the fence, the eldritch light of
the acetylene torch increasingly captivated Dom and, suddenly, made a
connection with the past, hurtling him back once more in memory:

The third jet roared over the roof of the diner, so low that he threw
himself flat on the parking lot, certain the airplane was crashing on
top of him, but it swooped past, leaving shattered air and a blast of
engine heat in its wake; he started to get up, and a fourth jet boomed
over the roof of the motel, a huge half-glimpsed shadowy shape, its
running lights carving white and red wounds through the night as it
thundered south and angled east, out across the barrens beyond I-80,
where the thirdjet had gone, and now the first two craft, which
hadpassed over at a greater altitude, were far out there, swinging back,
one to the east and one to the west;, yet still the earth shook and the
night was filled with a great rumble like an ongoing and never-ending
explosion, and he thought there must be more jets coming, even though
the queer electronic oscillation that had throbbed under the roar was
now getting louder and shriller and stranger and was unlike anything
jets would produce; he shoved up onto his feet and turned, and there was
Ginger Weiss and Jorja and Marcie, and there was Jack running over from
the motel, and Ernie and Faye coming out from the office, and others,
all the others, Ned and Sandy; the rumble was now like the crash of
Niagara Falls combined with the base-throb pounding of a thousand
timpani; the ululant electronic whistle made him feel as if the top of
his head was going to be sliced off by a bandsaw; there was frost-silver
light of a peculiar kind; he looked up, away from the jets that had gone
past, over the roof of the diner, looked up toward the light,- he
pointed and said, "The moon!  The moon!" Others looked where he pointed;
he was filled with a sudden terror, and he cried, "The moon!  The moon!"
and staggered back several steps in surprise and fear; someone
screamed..  .  .

"The moon!" he gasped.

He was down in the snow, driven to his knees by the shock of the
memory-flash, and Ginger was kneeling in front of him, holding him by
the shoulders.  "Dom?  Dom, are you okay?"

"Remembered," he said numbly as the wind rushed between their faces and
tore their smoking breath out of their mouths.  "Something .  .  .  the
moon .  .  .  but I didn't quite get enough."

Beyond them, having cut a crawl-through in the chainlink fence, Jack
switched off the acetylene torch.  The darkness folded around them again
like the wings of a great bat.

"Come on," Jack said, turning to Dom and Ginger.  "Let's go in.  Quickly
now."

"Can you make it?" Ginger asked Dom.

"Yeah," he said, though there was an icy cramping in his guts and a
tightness in his chest.  "But all of a sudden ...  I'm scared."

"We're all scared," she said.

"I don't mean scared of getting caught.  No.  It's something else.
Something I almost remembered just then.  And I'm .  .  .

shaking like a leaf, for God's sake."

Brendan gasped in disbelief when Colonel Falkirk ordered one of his men
to open fire on the Jeep that was approaching Vista Valley Road from the
hillside above.  The madman didn't know who was in the vehicle.  The
soldier given the order also thought it was out of line, for he did not
immediately raise his weapon.  But Falkirk took a menacing step toward
him and shouted: "I told you to open fire, Corporal!  This is an urgent
national security matter.  Whoever's in that vehicle is no friend of
yours, mine, or our country.  You think any innocent civilians would be
driving overland, sneaking around the roadblock, in a goddamn blizzard
like this?  Fire!  Waste them!"

This time, the corporal obeyed.  The clatter of automatic gunfire
hammered the night, briefly overpowering the voice of the raging wind.
Up on the hillside, the headlights of the oncoming Jeep blew out.  The
two hundred hard cracks of two hundred bullets erupting in a murderous
stream from the muzzle of the machine gun were augmented by the sound of
slugs tearing through sheet metal and smacking onto more solid barriers.
The windshield imploded under raining lead, and the Jeep, which had
braked immediately after topping the crest of the hill and had been
descending slowly, abruptly gained speed and rushed down at them, then
angled left when its wheels jolted over a lateral hump that extended
across most of the slope.  Obviously no longer under anyone's control,
it started to slow again, hit another bump, slid sideways, almost tipped
over, almost rolled, but finally came to rest just forty feet away in
the already drifting snow.

Five minutes ago, when Ned had driven over the hill on the other side of
Vista Valley Road and had turned south, only to encounter the colonel
and his men waiting less than a half-mile south, it had been instantly
clear that all the shot guns and handguns-and even the Uzi that Jack had
provided-would be of no help.  Considering that their lives depended on
their escape from Elko County, they would have made a stand against a
smaller force.  But Falkirk was accompanied by too many men, all heavily
armed.  Resistance would have been purest folly.

And Brendan had been filled with frustration because he had not dared
use his special power to ensure their freedom. He felt he ought to be
able to apply his telekinetic talent to the situation.  If he
concentrated hard enough, perhaps he could cause the guns to fly out of
the soldiers' hands.  He sensed he had that much-and more-power in him,
but he did not know how to bring it to bear effectively.  He could not
forget how the experiment in the diner had gotten entirely out of hand
last night; they had been fortunate that none of them had been hurt by
the careening salt and pepper shakers, and the violently levitating
chairs.  If he used his power to wrench the weapons from the soldiers,
he might not be able to disarm all of them simultaneously, in which case
the ones still in possession of their weapons might open fire in
selfdefense.  Or at his instigation, the guns might tear free of the
soldiers' hands and go whirling through the air, out of control-firing
until their magazines had emptied, pumping bullets into everything and
everyone in sight.  Sure, he might be able to heal the wounded.  But
what if he was shot?  Could he heal himself?  Probably.  But if he was
shot dead?  He would not be able to bring himself back to life.  And if
anyone else was shot dead, he was not sure he would be able to bring
them back, either.  It was no good being gifted with the power of a god
if no clear instructions came with the blessing.

Now, watching scores of bullets slam into the Jeep, watching it rush
like a crazed and blinded beast down the hillside, seeing it come to a
shuddering stop in the headlight beams of one of the vehicles on Vista
Valley Road, Brendan felt his frustration ballooning beyond containment.
The occupants of the Jeep had been hit.  He could help them.  He knew he
could help them, and it was his duty to do so, not merely the duty of a
priest but the minimal duty of a human being.  He did not understand his
healing power, either, but there was no greater danger in trying to use
it than there was in attempting to employ telekinesis.  So he thrust
away from the Cherokee against which he had been standing, dashed
through the group of soldiers whose attention had been distracted by the
drama on the hillside, and ran toward the blasted Jeep even as it came
to a stop.

There were shouts behind him.  He distinctly heard Falkirk warning him
that he would be shot.

Brendan ran anyway, slipping on the snowy pavement.  He stepped into a
ditch, fell, scrambled up, ran on to the bulletriddled Jeep.

No one fired, but he sensed people sprinting after him.

The passenger's side of the Jeep was nearest, bathed in a beam of light
from one of the military vehicles, so he pulled open that door first.  A
stocky man of about fifty, wearing a navy peacoat, was slumped against
the door and fell out into Brendan's arms.  Brendan saw blood, but not a
lot.  The stranger was conscious, though on the precarious edge of a
faint; his eyes were unfocused.  Brendan pulled him all the way out of
the Jeep and lowered him gently onto his back on the snowcovered ground.

A pursuing soldier put a hand on Brendan's shoulder, and Brendan whirled
on him, screamed in his face: "Get away from me, you rotten-crazy son of
a bitch!  I'll heal him!  I'll heal him!" Then he vented an oath of such
a vicious, ferocious, and filthy nature that he was astounded to hear it
pass his lips.  He hadn't known he could use such obscene language. The
soldier, thrown into an instantaneous fury, swung his machine gun high,
intending to slam the butt into Brendan's face.

"Wait!" Falkirk shouted, stepping in and grabbing his man's arm to halt
the blow.  The colonel turned to Brendan and regarded him with eyes like
polished flint.  "Go ahead.  I want to see this.  I want to see you
incriminate yourself right in front of me."

"Incriminate?" Brendan said.  "What're you talking about?"

"Go ahead," the colonel said.

Brendan waited for no more encouragement but knelt at once beside the
wounded man and threw the flaps of his peacoat wide open.  Blood was
soaking through the sweater in two places: just below the left shoulder;
and low on the right side, a couple of inches above the beltline.  He
rolled up the victim's sweater, tore open the shirt beneath.  Brendan
put his hands on the abdominal wound first, for that appeared the worse
of the two.  He didn't know what to do next.  He could not recall what
he'd thought or felt when he had healed Emmy and Winton.  What triggered
the healing power?  He knelt in the snow, feeling the stranger's blood
oozing between his fingers, acutely sensitive to the life throbbing out
of the man, yet unable to concentrate the miraculous power he knew was
in him.  Frustration filled him again, turned to anger, and the anger
turned to rage at his own impotence and stupidity, at the injustice of
death, this death specifically and all death in generalA tingle.  In
each palm.

He knew the red circles had appeared again, but he did not lift his
hands from the victim to look at those stigmata.

Please, he thought desperately, please let it happen, let the healing
happen, please.

Amazingly, for the first time Brendan actually felt the mysterious
energy flowing from him into the wounded man.  It took shape in him and
raveled out of him as if he were a spinning wheel and as if the wondrous
power were the thread that he created.  He whirled it into existence in
the same manner by which the formless mass on the distaff was drawn into
a strong filament of thread by the action of a spinning wheel, and the
wounded man was the spindle onto which this power wound itself.  But
Brendan was not merely a single machine producing one meager thread; he
felt, within himself, a thousand-million wheels flashing round and round
so fast they whistled and hissed as they spewed out a thousandmillion
insubstantial and invisible-yet binding, strongly binding-filaments.

He was a loom, as well, for somehow he used the countless threads of
godlike power to weave a cloth of health.  Unlike his experiences with
Emmy Halbourg and Winton Tolk, during which he had been unaware of the
cures he was performing, Brendan was acutely aware of knitting up the
rent tissues of this gunshot stranger.  He could almost hear the clatter
of the pumping treadles, the thumping of the batten beating the threads
into place, the reeds forcing the wet to the web, the heddles guiding
the warp, the shuttle working, working, working.

Not only had he begun to acquire a conscious appreciation of his power,
but he sensed that the magical force he harbored was increasing, that he
was ten times the healer he had been when he saved Winton-and would be
twice as good tomorrow.  Indeed, beneath him, the stranger's eyes swam
into focus within seconds, blinked.  And when Brendan lifted his hands
from the wound, he was rewarded with a sight that took his breath away
and gladdened his heart: The bleeding had already stopped.  He was even
more amazed to see the bullet rise out of the man's body as if being
expelled by some inner pressure; it squeezed backwards from the entrance
wound and popped free of the flesh with a sucking sound.  Even as the
spent slug, wet and dully gleaming, rolled out onto the victim's belly,
the ragged hole began to close as if Brendan were not watching the
healing of a real wound but a timelapse film of the healing.

He quickly touched the lesser wound in the man's shoulder. At once he
felt the second bullet, not as deeply buried as the first, nudging out
of the torn flesh.  It pushed and squirmed against his palm.

A thrill of triumph raced through Brendan.  He had an urge to throw his
head back and laugh into the chaotic fury of the storm, into the night,
for the ultimate chaos and darkness of death had been defeated.

The victim's eyes cleared entirely, and he looked up at Brendan with
bewilderment at first, then with recognition, then with horror.
"Stefan," he said.  "Father Wycazik."

That familiar and beloved name, coming from the lips of this complete
stranger, startled Brendan and filled him with inexplicable fear for his
rector and mentor.  "What?  What about Father Wycazik?"

"He must need your help more than I do.  Quickly!"

For an instant, Brendan did not understand what the man was telling him.
Then with sudden dread he realized that the driver of the machine-gunned
Jeep must be his rector.  But that wasn't possible.  How had he gotten
here?  When?  Why?

For what possible purpose would he have come?

"Quickly," the stranger repeated.

Brendan leaped up, whirled toward the onlooking soldier and Colonel
Falkirk, pushed between them, slipped in the snow, stumbled against the
front bumper of the Jeep.  Holding on to the vehicle with one hand, he
clambered as fast as he could around the front to the driver's door on
the other side. It wouldn't open.  Seemed to be locked.  Or damaged by
gunfire.  He wrenched in panic, but it would not budge.  He pulled
harder.  Still nothing.  Then he willed it open, and it came

with a grinding and squealing of broken bits of metal, fell wide on
twisted hinges.  A body, slumped against the steering wheel, began to
tip slowly out through the open door.

Brendan grabbed Father Wycazik, dragged him out of the driver's seat,
and laid him on the cold blanket of snow.  This side of the Jeep was
touched by less light than the other.  In spite of the darkness, he saw
his rector's eyes, and as if his tortured voice were coming from a great
distance, Brendan heard himself say, "Dear God, no.  Oh, no." The
shepherd of St.  Bette's had flat, sightless, unmoving eyes that gazed
at nothing in this world but at something far beyond the veil. "Please,
no." Brendan saw, too, the furrow of a bullet that had dug its way along
the skull, from the corner of the right eye to a spot just past the ear.
That was not a mortal wound, but the other was: a devastating hole in
the base of the throat, gaping horribly, filled with shattered flesh and
stilled blood.

Brendan placed his trembling hands upon Stefan Wycazik's ravaged throat.
From within himself he felt the threads of power spinning out again, a
thousand-million filaments in a multitude of colors and tensile
strengths, all invisible yet sufficient to provide the wet and warp of a
strong and flexible fabric, the very fabric of life.  'Iben, reaching
psychically within the cooling body of this man he so deeply loved and
respected, Brendan tried with all his mysterious skill to weave those
threads upon the loom, to repair the torn cloth of life.

However, he soon became aware that the miraculous healing process
required an empathy between the healer and the healed.  He realized that
he had previously misunderstood the process, that he was not both the
spinning wheel, providing the threads of power, and the loom which wove
them into the cloth of life.  Instead, the patient had to provide the
loom to use the threads of life-giving power that Brendan provided. In
some strange way, the healing was a bilateral process.  And no loom of
life remained in Stefan Wycazik; he had died within seconds, had been
dead before Brendan reached the Jeep.  Therefore, the multiple threads
of healing power only tangled and knotted uselessly, unable to sew the
damaged flesh together.  Brendan could heal the wounded and cure the
sick, but he could not do what had been done for Lazarus.

A great, thick sob of grief shuddered from him, and another.  But he
refused to surrender to despair.  He shook his head violently in
stubborn denial of his loss, choked back

another sob, and redoubled his efforts, determined to raise the dead
even though he knew he could not.

He was dimly aware that he was talking, but it was a minute or two
before he realized that he was praying as he had prayed so many times in
the past, though not recently: "Mary, Mother of God, pray for us; Mother
most pure, pray for us; Mother most chaste, pray for us.........

He was praying not by reflex, not unconsciously, but ardently, with the
deep, sweet conviction that the Mother of God heard his desperate cries
and that, by the combination of his new power and the Virgin's
intercession, Father Wycazik would be raised up again.  If he had ever
lost his faith, he regained it in that dark moment.  With all his heart
and mind, he believed.  If Father Wycazik had been taken wrongly, before
his appointed time, and if the Virgin handed these pleas, wet with her
own tears, to Him who can never refuse His Mother anything she asks in
the name of love, then the ruined flesh would be made whole and the
rector would be restored to this world to complete his mission.

Keeping his hands upon the wet and awful wound, kneeling, wearing no
priestly raiments other than those the pure falling snow painted on his
humbled shoulders, Brendan chanted the Litany of the Blessed Virgin.  He
beseeched MaryQueen of Angels, Queen of Apostles, Queen of Martyrs.  But
still his cherished rector lay motionless on the bosom of the earth.  He
pleaded for the Virgin's mercy, she who was the Mystical Rose, the
Morning Star, the Tower of Ivory, Health of the Sick, Comforter of the
Afflicted.  But the dead eyes, once so full of warmth and intelligence
and affection, stared unblinking as flakes of snow spiraled into them.
"Mirror of Justice, pray for us; Cause of our joy, pray for us.  .  . ."

At last, Brendan admitted that it was the will of God that Father
Wycazik move on from this place.

He softly concluded the litany in a voice that grew shakier by the word.
He removed his hands from the monstrous wound. Instead, he took one of
Stefan Wycazik's limp dead hands in both his own and held fast to it
like a lost child.  His heart was a deep vessel of grief.

Colonel Leland Falkirk loomed over him.  "So you've got limits to your
power, do you?  Good.  That's good to know. All right, then, come on.
Get back there with the others."

Brendan looked up into the sharp face and polished-flint eyes, and he
felt none of the fear that the colonel previously aroused in him.  He
said quietly, "He died without an opportunity to make a last confession.
I am a priest, and I will stay here and do what a priest must do, and
when I'm finished I will rejoin the others.  The only way you'll move me
now is if you kill me and drag me away.  If you can't wait, then you'll
have to shoot me in the back." He turned away from the colonel.  Face
wet with tears 'and melting snow, he took a deep breath and found that
the Latin phrases came to his tongue without hesitation.

The crawl-through that Jack had cut in the chainlink fence was small,
but none of them-Jack, Dom, or Ginger-was a large person, so they all
squeezed onto the grounds of Thunder Hill without difficulty, having
pushed the rucksacks full of equipment ahead of them.

At Jack's direction, Dom and Ginger stayed close to the fence until he
had a chance to study the immediate landscape through the Star Tron
night-vision device.  He was searching for posts on which surveillance
cameras and photoelectriccell alarm systems might be rigged.  Though
blowing snow made the inspection more difficult than it would have been
in better weather, he located two poles on which were mounted cameras
that covered this portion of the Thunder Hill perimeter from different
angles.  He believed the lenses of both cameras were filmed with snow,
though due to the storm he could not be certain.  He saw no evidence of
photoelectric systems to detect movement across this part of the meadow.

Next, from a zippered pocket, he withdrew a wallet-size device-an
extremely sophisticated variation of a voltameter. It could detect the
passage of electric current through a line without making contact with
that line, although it could not measure the strength of the current.

He turned toward the open meadow, putting his back to the fence.
Crouching, he held the object out at arm's length, about two feet above
the ground, and moved slowly forward. The voltage detector would
register a current from lines buried as deep as eighteen inches
underground, unless they were sheathed in pipes.  The kind of lines he
was looking for were neither that deep nor sheathed.  Even the foot of
new and old snow would not measurably affect the device's performance.
He edged forward only about three yards before the detector began
beeping softly and flashing its amber light.

He halted immediately, stepped back a couple of feet, and called Dom and
Ginger to his side.  They huddled together, and Jack said, "There's a
pressure-sensitive alarm grid buried an inch or two under the ground. It
starts about ten feet inside the fence, and I'm sure it runs parallel to
the fence all around the facility.  It's a web of wires-sealed in thin
plastic-that carry a low-voltage current.  It's designed so the
connections of some of the wires will be broken and the current
interrupted if anything above a certain weight-oh, say fifty
pounds-steps on them.  The weight of the snow doesn't affect it because
that's evenly distributed.  It reacts to localized pressure-like a
footstep."

"Even I weigh more than fifty pounds," Ginger said.  "How wide's this
alarm grid?"

"At least eight or ten feet," Jack said.  "They want to be sure that if
someone immensely clever like me should come along and detect the
system, it'll be impossible just to jump across it."

"I don't know about you," Dom said, "but I can'tfly across."

"I'm not so sure you can't," Jack said.  "I mean, if you had time to
explore that power Of yours .  .  .  If you can levitate chairs, why
couldn't you levitate yourself?" He saw this suggestion had startled
Dom.  "But you haven't time to learn to control your power, so we'll
have to rely on what's gotten us this far."

"What's that?" Ginger asked.

"My genius," Jack said with a grin.  "Here's what we'll do. We'll walk
along the perimeter, staying in the safe ground between the fence and
the alarm grid, until we find a place where there's a big sturdy tree
standing twenty or thirty feet deeper in the meadow, well beyond the
width of the grid."

"Then?" Dom asked.

"You'll see."

"What if we don't find a tree?" Ginger asked.

"Doc," Jack said, "I had you pegged as a go-getting optimist.  If I say
we need a tree, I'd expect you to tell me we'll find a forest and have a
thousand to choose from."

They found the tree only three hundred yards down the slope toward the
valley floor.  It was a huge pine of such age and character that it
offered the thick and widely separated limbs that Jack required.  It
towered eighty feet or higher, a snow-dusted monolith looming out of the
storm, and it was thirty or thirty-five feet back from the fence, well
beyond the farther edge of the alarm grid.

Using the Star Tron again, Jack studied the massive pine until he found
exactly the right branch.  It had to be sturdy, yet not much higher than
the fence, with which it would form the opposing stanchions of a rope
bridge.  He put the Star Tron away again.

From one of the rucksacks, he removed the four-pronged grappling hook
that had been one of the many items on Ginger's and Faye's shopping list
when they had visited Elko earlier in the day.  Tied to the hook was a
hundred-foot length of hawser-laid nylon rope, five-sixteenths of an
inch in diameter, the kind made for serious climbers and capable not
only of holding one of them but of supporting all their weight at the
same time.

He tested the knot where the line tied to the hook, though he had tested
it a dozen times before.  He arranged the coil of rope at his feet,
stepping on the loose end to prevent the entire length from being
carried away when he pitched the grappling hook, but leaving most of it
free to pay out.  "Stand aside," he said.  Dangling the hook from his
right hand on two feet of line, he began to swing it around and around,
faster, faster, until the whoosh of it cutting the air was even louder
than the storm wind.  When he felt the velocity was right, he let go
with his right hand, and the rope slipped loosely through his left hand,
trailing after the grapple.  The hook arced up and out into the storm.
Though it had sufficient mass and momentum to be unbothered by the wind,
it fell short of its target by about three feet.

Jack reeled it back through the snow, churning the virgin mantle.  He
had to jerk on it a few times and then patiently finesse it when it got
caught on something.  He was not concerned about dragging it across the
buried pressure-sensitive grid, for it was not nearly heavy enough to
trigger that alarm. In a minute or two he had it in hand again.  Without
having been told what to do, Dom had knelt and coiled the rope once more
as it came in.  Now Jack was ready to try again.

His second pitch landed just where he wanted it.  The hook firmly snared
the target branch.

With the grapple securely planted, he took the other end of the rope to
the nearest fence post.  He slipped it through the chainlink about seven
feet off the ground, wrapped it around the post, threaded it through the
chainlink on the other side, and all the way around the post again.  He
pulled on it with all his strength, until the line between the post and
the distant tree was taut.  Then he enlisted Dom's and Ginger's help to
keep it taut while he knotted it tightly to the post.

As a result, they had a rope bridge that was seven feet off the ground
where it began at the fence, angling up to a height of about nine feet
at the tree.  That slight incline, even over a mere thirty-five feet,
would make the crossing more difficult, but it was as near to level as
Jack could make it.

He jumped high, grabbed the line with both hands, swung his body back
and forth a few times to get momentum, then kicked up and threw his legs
over the rope, crossing his ankles atop it.  Like a playful koala bear
clinging to the underside of a horizontal branch, he hung with his face
turned skyward and his back parallel to the ground.  By extending his
arms behind him and pulling himself on the line and by alternately
scrunching his legs up and extending them while keeping his ankles
locked, he could inchworm along with no danger of touching the ground.
He demonstrated the technique for Dom and Ginger.  Before he reached the
danger zone defined by the pressure-sensitive alarm grid, he let go
first with his feet, then with his hands, and dropped to the ground.

Dom tried getting onto the line.  He attained a handgrip with his first
jump.  But he needed a full minute to swing his legs up and over, though
he did it, then dropped back to the ground.

Ginger, only five-two, had to be given a boost to get a proper handgrip.
But to Jack's surprise she required no assistance to kick up and wrap
her legs over the line without delay.

"You're in pretty good shape," Jack told her.

"Yes, well," she said, swinging back to the ground, "that's because
every Tuesday, on my day off, I eat buckets of vareniki, several pounds
of graham cracker cake, and enough blintzes to sink a ship.  Diet, Jack.
That's the key to fitness."

Shrugging his arms through the straps on one of the rucksacks and
buckling it in place on his back, Jack said, "Okay, now, I'll cross the
rope bridge first with the two heaviest bags, which leaves one sack for
each of you.  Ginger, you'll come second.  Dom, you'll bring up the
rear.  When you come across, the rope will sag more the closer you get
to the center of the span, even as taut as we've made it, but don't
worry.  It won't droop far enough to put you in contact with the ground
and set off the alarm.  Keep your feet locked around the line, and for
God's sake don't accidentally let go with both hands at the same time as
you're pulling yourself along.  Try to make it all the way to the tree,
just to be safe.  But if your arms and legs give out, you can come down
ten or twelve feet this side of the pine if you must, which'Il probably
be past the other end of the alarm grid."

"We'll make it all the way," Ginger said confidently.  "It's only thirty
or thirty-five feet.."

"In just ten feet," Jack said, fastening the second rucksack to his
chest, "you'll feel as if your arms are coming out of their sockets.  In
fifteen feet, you'll feel as if they have come out of their sockets."

Something about Brendan Cronin's reaction to his rector's death had
jolted Leland Falkirk.  When the young priest demanded to be given time
and privacy to deliver the last rights to Stefan Wycazik, there had been
a fierce fire of indignation in his eyes and such hot grief in his voice
that his humanity could not be in doubt.

Leland's fear of alien possession was voracious, eating him alive.  He
had seen-and others had discovered-strange things inside that starship,
enough to justify his fear if not his total paranoia.  But even he found
it difficult to believe that Cronin's anguish was the clever play-acting
of an inhuman intelligence in disguise.

Yet.  Cronin, with his bizarre powers, was one of two prime suspects,
one of the two witnesses most likely to have been taken over, the other
being Dominick Corvaisis.  Where did the healing and telekinesis come
from if not from an alien puppet-master living within the man's body?

Leland was confused.

With powdery snow pluming up around his feet, he walked away from the
kneeling priest, then stopped and shook his head and tried to clear his
thoughts.  He saw the other six witnesses by Jack Twist's Cherokee,
still under guard.  He saw his soldiers caught between the need to do
their duty as they were told and a confusion worse than Leland's own. He
saw the stranger who had been with Wycazik-now up and moving around,
miraculously whole. That healing seemed wonderful, an event calling for
celebration, not fear; a blessing, not a curse.  But Leland knew what
lay inside Thunder Hill. That dark knowledge put things in a different
perspective. The healing was a ruse, clever misdirection to make him
think the benefits of cooperation with the enemy were too great to
justify resistance. They were offering an end to pain.  And perhaps an
end to all death other than that too sudden to be avoided.  But Leland
knew the very essence of life was pain. It was dangerous to believe
escape from suffering was possible.  Dangerous, because such hopes were
routinely destroyed.  And the pain following in the wake of shattered
hopes was far worse than it would have been if you had just faced it and
endured it in the first place.  Leland believed that pain-physical,
mental, emotional-was the core of the human condition, that survival and
sanity depended upon embracing pain rather than resisting it or dreaming
of escape.  You had to thrive on pain to avoid being defeated by it, and
anyone who came along with an offer of transcendence must be greeted
with disbelief, contempt, and deep distrust.

Leland was no longer confused.

The big Army truck-Jorja supposed it was a troop transport-had hard
metal benches along both sides and also against the forward wall that
separated the driver's compartment from the rear.  Dangling leather
loops, riveted to the walls at regular intervals, provided those on the
benches with something to hang on to when the ride got rough or steep.
Father Wycazik's corpse had been laid on the forward bench and secured
with lines that tied under the seat and then to the wall straps, forming
a rope basket to restrain the body's movement. Everyone else-Jorja,
Marcie, Brendan, Ernie, Faye, Sandy, Ned, and Parker-sat on the side
benches.  Usually, the rear doors were held shut only by the interior
latch, allowing soldiers to get out quickly in case of an accident or
other emergency.  But this time Colonel Falkirk himself slid the bolt
into place on the outside.  The sound of it made Jorja think of prison
cells and dungeons, and filled her with despair.  A fluorescent light
was set in the ceiling, but Falkirk did not order it lit; they were
forced to ride in darkness.

Although Ernie Block had endured the night remarkably well thus far,
everyone had expected him to come apart when he was locked in the
pitch-black bay of the truck.  But he sat beside Faye, holding her hand,
and coped.  He had periodic bouts of anxiety marked only by spells of
hyperventilation, which he quickly overcame.  "I'm beginning to remember
the jets Dom spoke of," Ernie said soon after they got in the truck,
before it started to move.  "There were at least four, swooping low, two
very low .  .  .  and then something else happened I can't recall .  . .
but after that, I remember getting in the motel van and driving like
hell down toward I-80 ...  out toward the special place along the
highway that means so much to Sandy, too.  That's all so far.  But the
more I remember .  .  .  the less afraid I am of the dark."

The colonel put no guards in with them.  He seemed to think it would be
dangerous for even two or three heavily armed soldiers to ride in their
company.

Before herding them into the truck, the colonel had seemed on the brink
of ordering their execution, right there along Vista Valley Road.
Jorja's stomach had knotted painfully with fear.  Finally Falkirk calmed
down, though Jorja was not convinced he would let them live once they
arrived wherever they were going.

He had demanded to know where Ginger, Dom, and Jack had gone.  At first,
no one would respond, which infuriated him.  He placed his hand on
Marcie's head and quietly told them what pain he would put the child
through if they continued to be difficult.  Ernie had spoken at once,
cursing Falkirk as a disgrace to his uniform-and reluctantly revealing
that Ginger, Dom, and Jack had gone west from the Tranquility, heading
for Battle Mountain, Winnemucca, and ultimately Reno.  "We were afraid
all the routes to Elko would be watched," Ernie said.  "We didn't want
to put all our eggs in one basket." It was a lie, of course.  For a
moment Jorja wanted to scream at Ernie not to jeopardize her daughter's
life with transparent lies, but she realized Falkirk had no way of
knowing for sure that it was a phony story.  The colonel was suspicious.
But Ernie provided more details of the route Jack was supposedly
following, and at last Falkirk sent four of his men to check it out.

Now, as the truck rumbled and jolted through the windy night toward a
destination Falkirk had not shared with them, Jorja hung on to a strap
with one hand and held Marcie with her free arm.  The girl made things
easier by clinging fiercely to Jorja.  Her semicatatonic limpness had
given way to a strong need for affection and contact, though she was
still by no means connected with reality.  But her sudden need to hug
and be hugged seemed, to Jorja, a hopeful sign that she would find her
way back from the dark domain into which she had retreated.

Jorja would not have believed that anything could distract her entirely
from her intense concern about her daughter. But a couple of minutes
after the truck started to move, Parker Faine began to tell them why he
and Father Wycazik had been making that risky cross-country trek through
the snowswept night.  The news he related was so momentous that it
pushed everything else from Jorja's mind and held her, rapt.  He told
them about Calvin Sharkle, about how Brendan had passed on his power to
Emmy Halbourg and Winton Tolk.  "And now .  .  .  perhaps .  .  .  to
me," Parker said with such wonder in his voice that it was communicated
instantly to Jorja and caused gooseflesh to break out all over her.
Parker spoke of the CISG.  And he told them what they must have seen on
that long-lost summer night in July: Something had come down.  something
had come down from the sky, and the world would never be the same again.

Something had come down.

As that amazing news was revealed, the darkness in the truck was filled
with an excited babble of voices.  Reactions from Faye's initial stunned
disbelief to Sandy's instant and enthusiastic acceptance.

Not only did Sandy accept, but she abruptly remembered large pieces of
the forbidden night, as if Parker's revelation had been a sledge that
had struck a wrecking blow upon her memory block.  "The jets came over,
and the fourth one blew across the roof of the motel, so low it almost
took the top off the building, and by that time we were all out of the
diner, people were coming over from the motel, but the shaking was still
going on.  The ground vibrating just like in a quake. The air vibrating
too." Her tone of voice was a peculiar mix of delight and trepidation,
both joyful and haunted.  In the darkness everyone fell silent to hear
what she had to say.

"Then Dom...  I didn't know his name then, but it was Dom, all right...
he turned away from the jets and looked up and back across the roof of
the diner, and he shouted: "The moon!  The moon!" We all turned ...  and
there was a moon, brighter than usual, creepy-bright, and for a moment
it seemed to be falling on us.  Oh, don't you remember?  Don't you
remember what it felt like to look up and see the moon falling on us?"

"Yes," Ernie said softly, almost reverently.  "I remember."

"I remember," Brendan said.

And Jorja had a glimmer of memory: the recollected image of a lambent
moon, eerily bright, rushing toward them....

Sandy said, "Some people screamed, and some started to run, we were so
scared, all of us.  And the powerful shaking and roaring got louder, you
could feel it in your bones, a sound like kettledrums and shotgun blasts
all mixed up with the greatest wind you ever heard, though there was no
wind. But there was the other sound, too, the queer whistling, warbling,
fluty sort of sound under the thunder, getting louder by the second....
The moon got very bright all of a sudden. These beams came down from it,
lit up the parking lot with a frosty sort of glow ...  and then changed.
The moon turned red, blood-red!  Then we all knew it wasn't the moon,
not the moon, but something else."

Jorja saw, in memory, the lunar form turning from frostwhite to scarlet.
With that recollection, barriers implanted by the mind-control
specialists began to crumble like sand castles under the assault of a
high tide.  She wondered how she could have looked so often at Marcie's
album of moons and not have been nudged toward understanding.  Now
understanding came in a flood, and she began to tremble with fear of the
unknown and with an indescribable exultation.

"Then it came over the diner," Sandy said, with such awe in her voice
that she might have been seeing the starship descend right now, not in
memory but in reality and for the first time.  "It came in as low as the
jet that had gone before it, but it wasn't moving nearly as fast as the
jet .  .  .  slow .  .  .  slow .  .  .  hardly faster than the Goodyear
blimp.  Which seemed impossible because you could tell it was heavy, not
like a blimp.  Ever-so-heavy.  Yet it drifted across us so slow, so
beautiful and slow, and in that instant we all knew what it was, what it
had to be, because it was nothing that had ever been made on this
world.........

Jorja's tremors grew as the memory returned with greater vividness.  She
recalled standing in the parking lot of the Tranquility Grille, with
Marcie in her arms, looking up at the craft.  It glided through the warm
July night above and would have looked almost serene except for the
thunderous sounds and base vibrations that accompanied it.  As Sandy had
saidonce the misapprehension of a falling moon was dispelled, they knew
instantly what they were seeing.  Yet the ship looked nothing like the
flying saucers and rockets seen in a thousand movies and television
shows.  There was nothing dazzling about it-other than the very fact of
its existence!-no coruscating bands of multicolored lights, no weirdly
extruding spines and nodules, no inexplicable excrescences in its
design, no unearthly sheen of unknown metal or peculiarly positioned
viewports or blazing exhausts or strange wicked-looking armaments. The
enveloping scarlet glow was apparently an energy field by which it
remained aloft and propelled itself.  Otherwise, it was quite plain: a
cylinder of considerable size, though not even as large as, say, the
fuselage of an old DC-3, perhaps only fifty feet long and twelve or
fifteen feet in diameter; it was rounded at each end, rather like two
well-worn tubes of lipstick welded together at their bases; through the
shining energy field, a hull was visible, though it was singularly
unimpressive, with few features and none of them dramatic, somewhat
mottled as if by time and great tribulation.  In memory, Jorja watched
it descend again, across the diner, toward I-80, while the jet escorts
wheeled and barrel-rolled and swooped and zoomed in the sky above and to
the east and west.  Now, as on that wondrous night, her breath caught,
her heart pounded, her breast swelled with turbulently mixed emotions,
and she felt as if she were standing before a door beyond which lay the
meaning of life, a door to which she had suddenly been given the key.

Sandy said, "It came down in the barrens beyond I-80, at that place some
of us knew was special, though we didn't know why.  The jets were
buzzing it.  Everyone at the motel and diner just had to get down there,
couldn't hold us back, my God, nothing could've held us back!  So we
piled in cars and trucks and took off-"

"Faye and I went in the motel van," Ernie said out of the darkness in
the troop transport, no longer breathing hard, his nyctophobia burned
away in the heat of memory.  "Dom and Ginger went with us.  That pro
gambler, too.  Lomack. Zebediah Lomack from Reno. That's why he wrote
our names on the moon posters in his house, the ones Dom told us about.
Some dim but urgent memory of riding with us in the van, down to the
ship, must have almost busted through his memory block."

"And Jorja," Sandy said, "you and your husband and Marcie and a couple
other people rode in the back of our pickup. Brendan, Jack, and others
went in cars, strangers piling in with strangers, but in some way none
of us were strangers any more.  When we got there we parked on the berm,
and a couple other cars pulled up coming west from Elko, people were
running across the divider, cars driving in from the west just stopped
right on the highway, and we all gathered on the shoulder of the road
for a minute, looking out there at the ship.  The glow around it had
faded, though there was still a ...  a luminous quality to it, amber now
instead of red.  It set some clumps of sagebrush and bunch-grass on fire
when it first touched down, but those burnt out almost entirely by the
time we got there.  It was funny ...  how we all gathered along the edge
of the road, not shouting or talking or noisy in any way, you know, but
quiet, all of us so quiet at first.  Hesitating.  Knowing we were
standing on ...  a cliff, but that jumping off the cliff wasn't going to
be a fall, it was going to be like .  .  .  like jumping off and up.  I
can't explain that feeling too well, but you know.  You know."

Jorja knew.  She felt it now, as she had then, the
almost-too-wonderful-to-bear feeling that humankind had been living in a
dark box and that the lid had just been torn off at last.  The feeling
that the night would never again seem as dark and foreboding or the
future as frightening as it had been in the past.

"And as I stood there," Sandy said, "looking out at that luminous ship,
so beautiful, so impossible there on the plains, everything that had
happened to me when I was a little girl, all the abuse and pain and
terror .  .  .  didn't matter as much any more.  Just like that-" She
snapped her fingers in the dark.  "Just like that my father didn't
terrify me any more."

Her voice cracked with emotion.  "I mean, I hadn't seen him since I was
fourteen, more than a decade, but I still lived with the fear that some
day he'd walk in again, you know, and he'd take me again, make me go
with him.  That was ...  that was silly ...  but I still lived with the
fear, 'cause life was a nightmare for me, and in bad dreams those things
happen. But as I stood there watching the ship, with everyone silent and
the night so big, the jets overhead, I knew my father could never scare
me again even if he did show up some day. Because he's nothing, nothing,
just a sick little man, a speck, one tiny grain of sand on the biggest
beach you can ever imagine.  .  .  ."

Yes, Jorja thought, filled with the joy of Sandy's discovery. Yes, that
was what this ship from beyond meant-freedom from our worst and most
inhibiting fears.  Although the vessel's occupants might bring no
answers to the-problems that beset humanity, their mere presence was in
a way an answer in itself.

Her voice thickening even further with emotion, beginning to cry now,
not with sadness but with happiness, Sandy said, "And looking at the
ship out there, I felt all of a sudden as if I could put all the pain
behind me forever .  .  .  and as if I was somebody.  All my life, see,
I'd felt I was nothing, less than nothing, filthy and worthless, just a
thing that had its uses maybe, but nothing with ...  dignity.  And then
I realized we're all just grains of sand on that beach, none of us so
very much more important than any of the rest of us, but more than that
.  She gave a small cry of frustration.  "Oh, I wish I had words, I wish
I had words and knew how to use them better."

"You're doing all right," Faye said quietly.  "By God, girl, you're
doing all right."

And Sandy said, "But even though we're just grains of sand, we're also .
.  .  also part of a race that might some day go up there, out there
into all that darkness, out where the creatures in that ship came from,
so even as grains of sand we have a place and purpose.  Do you see?  We
just got to be kind to one another and keep going.  And one day all of
usall the billions of us who were and are-we'll be out there with those
who'll come after us .  .  .  out there on top of all the darkness, and
anything we ever endured will have been worth it, somehow, because it'll
have been a part of our getting there.  All of that hit me in a flash
while we stood there along the interstate.  And suddenly that night,
right there, I started crying and laughing both .  .  .  ."

"I remember!" Ned said from his part of the darkness. "Oh, God, now I
remember, I do, it's all coming back.  We were standing there on the
side of the road, and you grabbed hold of me and hugged me.  It was the
first time you ever told me you loved me, the first time, though I'd
known you did. You hugged me, you told me you loved me, it was crazy,
right there with a spaceship come down!  And you know what?

For a few minutes, you holding me and telling me you loved me .  .  .
the spaceship didn't matter.  All that mattered was you telling me,
telling me after so long." His voice filled with emotion, too, and Jorja
sensed that he was putting his arms around Sandy, in the gloom on the
other side of the truck. "And they took that away from me," he said.
"They came with their damn drugs and their mind control, and they took
away from me the first time you told me you loved me.  But I got it back
now, Sandy, and they're never taking it away from me again.  Never
again."

Faye said plaintively, "I still can't remember anything.  I want to
remember, too.  I want to be a part of it."

Everyone was silent as the transport rumbled through the night.

Jorja knew the others must be pondering some of the same thoughts that
were rushing through her mind.  The mere existence of another-and
superior-intelligence put human strife in a different context. Mankind's
endless, violent struggles to dominate and enslave, to impress one
philosophy or another upon the entire race at any cost in blood and
painthat seemed so hopelessly petty and fruitless now.  All narrow,
power-centered philosophies would surely collapse.  Religions that
preached the oneness of all men would probably thrive, but those that
encouraged violent conversion would not.  In some way impossible to
explain but easy to feel, just as Sandy had felt it, Jorja was aware
that extraterrestrial contact had the potential to make one nation of
all mankind, one vast family; for the first time in history, every
individual could have the respect that only a good, loving family-no
king, no government-could bestow.

Something had come down from the sky.

And all humankind could be lifted up.

"Moon," Marcie murmured against Jorja's neck.  "Moon, moon."

Jorja wanted to say: Everything'll be fine, honey; we'll help you
remember now that we know what it is you've forgotten, and when you do
recall it, you'll realize it's nothing to be scared about; you'll
realize it's wonderful, honey, and you'll laugh.  But she did not say
any of that, for she did not know what Falkirk intended to do with them.
As long as they were in the colonel's custody, she did not hold out much
prospect for a happy ending.

Brendan Cronin said, "I remember more.  I remember descending the
embankment from the interstate.  Moving out toward the ship.  It lay
like shimmering amber quartz.  I walked slowly toward it with the jets
swooping overhead, other people coming with me ...  including you, Faye
...  and you, Ernie ...  and Dom and Ginger.  But only Dom and Ginger
came all the way to the ship with me, and when we got there we found a
door .  .  .  a round portal ...  open.  .  .  ."

Jorja remembered standing on the shoulder of I-80, afraid to go closer
to the ship and blaming her reluctance on the need to keep Marcie safe.
Wanting to call out a warning and at the same time wanting to urge them
on, she had watched Brendan, Dom, and Ginger approach the golden craft.
The three had begun to move out of sight along the side of the ship, and
everyone still on the shoulder of the highway had rushed eastward a
hundred feet or so to keep them in view. Jorja had seen the portal, too,
a round circle of blazing light on the side of the glimmering hull.

"The three of us gathered in front of the door." Brendan spoke softly,
yet his voice carried above the rumble of the truck.  "Dom and Ginger
and me.  We thought ...  something would come out.  But nothing did.
Instead, there was a quality about the light inside ...  the wonderful
golden light I've seen in my dreams ...  a comforting and compelling
warmth that drew us somehow.  We were scared, dear God, we were scared!
But we heard helicopters coming, and we sensed government people would
take over the second they arrived on the scene, take over and push us
back, and we were determined to be part of it.  And that light!  So .
.."

"So you went inside," Jorja said.

"Yes," Brendan said.

"I remember," Sandy said.  "Yes.  You went inside.  All three of you
went inside."

The immensity of the memory was overwhelming.  The moment when the first
representatives of the human race had set foot for the first time into a
place built neither by nature nor by human hands.  The moment that
forever divided history into Before and After.  Remembering, their
memory blocks having entirely crumbled, no one could speak for a while.

The truck rumbled toward its unguessable destination.

The darkness within the vehicle seemed vast.  Yet the eight of them were
as close as any people had ever been since the dawn of time.

At last Parker said, "What happened, Brendan?  What happened to the
three of you when you went inside?"

Using the rope bridge, they crossed the pressure-sensitive alarm grid.
Pausing several times to employ other clever devices in Jack's bag of
tricks, they passed through the finely woven web of electronic security
that guarded the grounds of Thunder Hill, coming at last to the main
entrance.

Ginger looked up at the immense blast doors.  The blowing snow had stuck
and frozen to the burnished steel in cryptic patterns that looked as if
they ought to have some meaning.

A two-lane blacktop led away from the doors.  Heating coils were
evidently embedded in it, for not a speck of snow lay on the pavement,
and steam rose from its surface.  The road curved down and west across
the meadow, into the forest, where the lights of the main gate glowed
softly in the distance. She could not see the guardhouse past which they
had crept in the pickup, but she knew it was out there.

If visitors were admitted during the next few minutes, or if the guards
changed shifts and returned to the Depository, the jig was up.  She and
Dom and Jack could scurry off, lie in the snow, hide.  However,
obviously little traffic passed through here, for the snow around the
smaller door was smooth and undisturbed when they arrived; therefore,
the fresh tracks they left would guarantee apprehension as surely as a
tripped alarm.  They had to get inside quickly-if they had any hope of
getting inside at all.

The smaller single door to the right of the blast doors looked no less
formidable than those giant portals, but Jack was unperturbed.  He had
brought along an attachs-sized computer called SLICKS, and although
Ginger had forgotten exactly what the acronym stood for, she knew from
Jack that it was a device for penetrating electronic locks of various
types and that it was not for sale to members of the general public. She
did not ask where he had gotten it.

They worked in silence.  Ginger kept a lookout for incoming headlights
from the main gate and surveyed the snowy expanse of the meadow for a
foot patrol, though they were confident no guards were on prowl.  Dom
held a flashlight on the ten-digit codeboard that was the equivalent of
a keyhole in an ordinary door, while Jack employed the probes of the
SLICKS in search of the sequence of numbers that would gain entrance.

Crouching on one knee in the snow, alert for trouble, Ginger felt
exposed-and much farther than twenty-four hundred miles from her life in
Boston.  The wind stung her face.  The snow melted in her lashes and
trickled into her eyes.  What a cockamamy situation.  Meshugge.  That an
innocent person could be driven to such a state as they'd been.  Who did
this damn Colonel Falkirk think he was?  The people who gave him his
orders-who did they think they were?  Not true Americans.  Real
momzers-that's what they were, all of them. She remembered the picture
of Falkirk in the newspaper: She had known at once that he was a
treyfnyak, a person not to be trusted, not an inch, never.  And she knew
something else, too: Whenever she began to pepper her thoughts or her
speech with this much Yiddish, she must be in deep trouble or very much
afraid.

Less than four minutes after Jack set to work, Ginger was startled by a
whoosh of compressed air behind her.  She turned and saw the door had
already slid into its recess.  Dom stumbled back in surprise.  Jack fell
on his butt.  When Ginger went to help him up, he showed her that the
door had slid open so suddenly and with such force that he had not had
time to withdraw the SLICKS probe from the mechanism; it had torn the
probe right out of the computer.

But the door was open, and no alarms were ringing.  Beyond was a
twelve-foot-long concrete tunnel, about eight or nine feet in diameter.
It was lit by fluorescent bulbs.  It angled to the left, where it ended
at another steel door.

"Stay here," Jack said, stepping into the tunnel to look around.

Ginger stood at Dom's side, and though she knew part of the plan was to
give themselves up as hostages, she also knew that, on instinct, she
would bolt and run at the first sign of trouble.  Dom apparently sensed
her thoughts, for he put an arm around her as much to restrain her as to
reassure her that she was not alone.

After a minute or so, when still no alarm bells or sirens had split the
night, Jack stepped back out into the storm and joined them where they
stood six or eight feet from the door. "Two surveillance cameras on the
ceiling of the tunnel-"

"They saw you?" Dom asked.

"I don't believe so, no.  Because they didn't track my movements.  I
suspect you have to close the outer door before there's any hope of
getting the inner door open, and as soon as you do close the outer door,
the cameras are activated.  I also noticed some gas jets concealed along
the lighting fixtures.  Way I see it-you close the outer door, and the
cameras look you over, and if they don't like what they see, they can
hit you with either a knockout gas or something deadly."

Dom said, "We're ready to be captured, but not gassed like moles."

"We aren't going to close the outer door unless we've already got the
inner one open," Jack said.

"But you told us that wasn't-"

"There may be a way," Jack said, winking his cast eye.

The first step was to pile their rucksacks out of the way and cover them
with snow.  Jack did not think they would have any further need of his
high-tech devices and would only be slowed down by the weight.  The
second step, after they entered the tunnel, was for Dom to lift Ginger
so, instructed by Jack, she could use a knife to saw through the wires
on the surveillance cameras, putting them out of commission. Again, she
expected an alarm to go off, but none did.

Leaving the outer door open, Jack led them to the inner barrier.  "This
one has no keyboard to disengage the lock, so it doesn't matter that the
SLICKS was damaged."

"Should we be talking in here?" Ginger asked nervously.

"Aren't there liable to be microphones?"

"Yes, but I doubt anyone's monitoring until that outer door closes,
because that's probably what engages the computer's

attention and starts the clearance program for anyone trying to enter.
And even if there's a guard beyond this door, he's not going to hear our
voices through all this steel.  Not even if we shout," Jack said, though
he spoke barely above a whisper.  He pointed to a panel of glass set in
the tunnel wall to the right of the door.  "That's the only way to
unlock it. They were just starting to install locks like this in
high-security installations when I left the service eight years ago. You
put your palm against the glass, the security computer scans your
prints, and if you're authorized to enter, the door opens."

"And if you're not authorized to enter?" Dom asked in a whisper.

"The gas jets."

"So how can you open it?" Ginger asked.

"I can't," Jack said.

"But you said-"

"I said there might be a way," Jack told her.  "And there might." He
looked at Dom and smiled.  "You can probably open it."

Dom stared at Jack as if the ex-thief had lost his mind. "Me?  You
serious?  What would I know about sophisticated security systems?"

"Nothing," Jack said.  "But you have the power to peel thousands of
paper moons off walls and send them dancing through the air all at once,
and you can levitate a score of chairs and perform other nitty tricks,
so I don't see why you can't .  .  .  reach into the mechanism of that
door and cause it to slide open."

"But I can't.  I don't know how."

"Think about it, concentrate, do whatever you did to move the salt
shaker last night."

Dom shook his head vigorously.  "I can't control the power. You saw how
it got out of hand.  What if it runs wild here?

I could hurt you or Ginger.  I might inadvertently activate the gas jets
and kill us all.  No, no.  Too risky."

They stood in silence for a moment, with the wind huffing and whistling
eerily at the open outer door.

Jack said, "Dom, if you don't try, then the only way we'll get inside is
as captives."

Dom remained adamant.

Jack walked back to the outer door.  Ginger started to follow him
because she thought he was leaving: But he stopped just inside the mouth
of the tunnel and raised his hand over a button on the wall.  He said,
"This is a heat-sensitive switch, Dom.  If you won't try to open that
inner door, then I'll touch this switch and close the outer door,
trapping us here.  That'll start the computer's entry-clearance program,
and when the computer discovers the surveillance cameras have been put
out of commission, it'll sound an alarm that'll alert the security men."

"One of the reasons we came here was to be caught," Dom said.

"We came to have a look around and then get caught, if possible."

"Well," Dom said, "we'll have to settle for just getting caught."

The tunnel's heat had escaped into the night.  Their breath plumed from
them again.  Those smoking exhalations heightened the impression that
the two men were engaged in a battle, though it was a battle of wills
rather than one of physical strength.

Standing between them, Ginger had no doubt who would win.  She liked and
admired Dom Corvaisis more than any man she had met in a long time,
partly because he seemed to embody both the drive and determination of
Anna Weiss and the modest shyness of Jacob.  He was good-hearted and, in
his own way, wise.  She would have trusted him with her life.  In fact,
she had already trusted him with it.  But she knew Jack Twist would win,
for he was used to winning, while Dom, by his own admission, had been a
winner only since the summer before last.

Jack said, "If they can't see us, they'll gas us for sure. Maybe they'll
just sedate us.  But maybe, to be safe, they'll use cyanide gas or some
deadly nerve gas that'll penetrate our clothes because, after all, they
can't be sure we're not wearing gas masks."

"You're bluffing," Dom said.

"Am I?" Jack said.

"You wouldn't kill us."

"You're dealing with a professional criminal, remember?"

"You were.  No more."

"Still got a black heart," Jack said, grinning, and this time there was
a disconcertingly maniacal note to his humor and a cold glint in his
misaligned eye that made Ginger wonder

if he actually might risk killing them all if he didn't get his way.

"Our dying isn't part of the plan," Dom said.  "It'll screw up
everything."

"And your refusal to help-that's not part of the plan, either," Jack
said.  "For God's sake, Dom, do it!"

Dom hesitated.  He glanced at Ginger.  "Step as far out of the way as
you can."

She moved back beside Jack Twist.

"Dom, if it does come open," Jack said, still keeping one hand raised
over the heat-sensitive switch that would close the outer door, "go
through fast.  There's a guard in there somewhere.  He'll be real
surprised when the door opens because the entry-clearance program hasn't
been run.  If you can knock him down quickly, I'll be right behind you
to silence him.  That'll improve our chances of getting deeper into the
installation and seeing what's to see before they nail our asses."

Dom nodded, faced the inner door again.  He looked over the frame, put
one hand to the steel, moved his fingertips back and forth in the manner
of an old-time safecracker feeling for the telltale vibration of falling
tumblers.  Then he turned to study the glass panel that read palmprints
and fingerprints.

Jack lowered his hand from the switch that he'd threatened to hit, and
glanced at the stormy night beyond the outer door. He whispered so
softly to Ginger that Dom, at the far end of the tunnel, could not have
heard: "I get a creepy feeling that, any minute now, the giant's going
to come down the beanstalk and stomp us all flat."

She knew then that he would not have risked their destruction, that he
would probably just have led them out to the guardhouse at the main gate
and asked to be arrested.  But with his murderous glower, he had been
thoroughly convincing.

Abruptly, the inner door whooshed open.  Even though Dom was the agent
of its movement, he was so startled that he jumped back a step instead
of rushing through immediately, as Jack had told him to do.  He realized
his error as he made it, and he leapt across the threshold, into the
subterranean world beyond.

Jack hit the button to close the outer door even before Dom was across
the inner threshold, then ran after the writer.

Ginger followed.  She expected the sounds of struggle or gunfire, but
heard neither.  When she stepped out of the concrete tunnel, she found
herself in another, huge tunnel with natural rock walls, where lights
were suspended from scaffolding overhead.  The passage was about sixty
feet across, at least a hundred yards long, beginning inside the massive
steel blast doors, and ending far away at what appeared to be banks of
elevators.  Three yards in from the door, a guard's table was cemented
to the concrete floor.  A watchman's log was chained to the table.  A
few issues of recent magazines were stacked beside the log.  There was a
computer terminal as well.  But no guards were in sight.

In fact, the entire tunnel was deserted.  The place was as still and
silent as a mausoleum.  Not even the drip of water from a stalactite or
the rustle of batwings in the vault above. But Ginger supposed that a
multibillion-dollar facility designed to weather World War III would not
be plagued by either condensation or flying rodents.

"Should be guards," Jack murmured.  His voice echoed sibilantly off the
rock walls.

"What now?" Dom asked shakily.  Clearly, he had been surprised by his
ability to focus his power so soon after the near-catastrophe in the
diner last night.

"Something's wrong," Jack said.  "I don't know what.  But no guard .  .
.  something's wrong." He skinned back the hood of his ski suit and
pulled the zipper down a few inches, and the others did the same.  Jack
said softly, "This is just the cargo-receiving area.  Trucks come in and
unload.  The main part of the installation must be below us.  So .  .  .
I don't like this emptiness .  .  .  but I guess we go down."

"If we've got to go, then let's stop shmoozing and get a move on,"
Ginger said, heading toward the far end of the tunnel.

She heard the inner door swish as Jack closed it.

They went farther into Thunder Hill.

2.

Fear

They made hardly more noise than three mice easing past a dozing cat,
yet their footsteps echoed in the rock-walled vault.

Not loudly.  The echoes did not sound like footsteps but rather like the
whispers and murmurs of conspirators hidden within the shadowed niches
on all sides.

Dom's uneasiness grew.

They crept past a couple of enormous elevators.  Each of them was
seventy feet wide and nearly as deep, open platforms that were raised
and lowered by synchronized hydraulic shafts at each corner, more than
big enough to move fighter aircraft in and out of the bowels of the
mountain.  They passed smaller cargo lifts, too, and finally came to a
pair of standardsize elevators.

Before Jack could press the call button for the lift, Dom was hit by
another flash of memory.  As before, it was sufficiently vivid to
displace current reality.  This time, he recalled the crucial event of
July 6: the white-to-scarlet metamorphosis of the moon, which suddenly
proved not to be the moon at all but a head-on view of the rounded bow
of a descending ship.  It was a plain cylinder with few features, none
remarkable, almost homely in a way, yet he sensed immediately that its
journey, ending here, had not begun anywhere on this world.

When the initial power of the memory faded enough to allow reality to
impinge upon him once more, Dom found himself leaning against the closed
doors of the lift with both hands, his head hanging down between his
arms.  He felt a hand on his shoulder, turned, and saw Ginger.  Jack was
standing behind her.

She said, "What's wrong?"

"I remembered .  .  .  more.

"What?" Jack asked.

Dom told them.

He didn't need to convince them that contact with an extraterrestrial
craft had been made that summer night.  The moment he reminded them of
what they'd seen, their own memory blocks crumbled as quickly as his. In
their faces, he saw the singularly unique blend of awe, terror, joy, and
hope that the event aroused.

"We went inside," Ginger said wonderingly.

'Yes," Jack said.  "You, Dom, and Brendan."

"But," Ginger said, "I can't ...  can't quite remember what happened to
us in there."

"Me neither," Dom said.  "That part hasn't come back to me yet.  I
recall everything up to the minute we went through the hatch, into that
golden light .  .  .  then nothing."

For a moment they were oblivious of their perilous surroundings.

Ginger's lovely, delicate face was bone-white.  Partly, it was the
bloodless look of fear.  But not fear alone.

Dom now understood, as Ginger did, why they had responded to each other
so powerfully the instant that she had gotten off the plane at the Elko
County Airport on Sunday. That summer night, they went into the ship
together and shared something that had forever bonded them.

"The ship's here, inside Thunder Hill," she said.  "It must be."

Dom agreed.  "That's why the government took the land away from those
ranchers.  They enlarged the grounds of the Depository to make it more
difficult for anyone to spot the truck that brought the ship in."

Jack said, "It would've been a hell of a big load."

"Like those huge trucks they haul the space shuttle on," Dom said.

Jack said, "Yeah, but why would they hide what happened?"

"I don't know," Dom said.  He tapped the button that would summon the
elevator.  "But maybe we can find out."

The elevator arrived with a quiet hum, and they rode down to the second
level.  Judging from the length of the ride, the top two floors of the
installation were separated by several stories of solid rock.

The doors opened at last, and they stepped into an immense circular
cavern three hundred feet in diameter.  From far above, the scaffolded
lights shed wintry beams on an odd collection of sheet-metal buildings
that hugged the walls most of the way around the chamber.  Warmer light
shone at small windows in two of those structures; otherwise, they were
dark and appeared untenanted.  Dom thought it looked a little like a
film crew on location, a bunch of dressing-room trailers. Four large
caverns branched from the main chamber, one of which was closed off by
huge wooden doors that were curiously primitive for an otherwise highly
modern facility.  In the three adjacent open caverns, lights glowed, and
Dom saw stored equipment-Jeeps, troop carriers, trucks, helicopters, and
even jet aircraft-in addition to other trailer-like buildings with more
lights at the windows than those in the main chamber.  Thunder Hill was
an enormous arsenal and a selfsustaining subterranean city, which Dom
had known, but he had not guessed at the immensity of it.

More mystifying than the Depository's many wonders was its air of
abandonment.  The second level was as deserted and silent as the first.
No guards, no busy personnel, no voices or sounds of labor.  True, the
caverns were slightly cool; and at this time of the evening, most of the
staff would probably keep to the heated living quarters.  But a few
should have been in sight.  And if most were off duty, there should have
been music, T-V, voluble poker-game conversations, and other muted
recreational sounds waiting from the farther reaches of the facility.

In a whisper so thin it was little more than a subvocalization, Ginger
said, "Are they all dead?"

"I told you," Jack said in an equally quiet voice, "something's wrong.
..  ."

Dom felt drawn toward the huge wooden doors-almost three stories high,
at least sixty feet wide-that sealed the entrance to the fourth cavern,
so he allowed his feelings to guide him.  Followed by Ginger and Jack,
he walked as quietly as he could toward a smaller, man-sized door set in
the bottom of one of those giant wooden portals.  It was ajar, and a
wedge of light, brighter than that in the main cavern, fell out onto the
stone floor.  He put one hand upon the door to pull it open, then
stopped when he heard low voices inside.  He listened until he
ascertained there were only two of them, both men.  They were speaking
too softly for him to follow their conversation.  Dom considered turning
back, but he had a hunch that if he had an opportunity to look into any
one room before being apprehended, he could do no better than this one.
He pulled open the small door in the huge door and walked through.

The ship was there.

Ginger stood with one hand on her breast, as if to restrain her heart
from hammering loose.

The cavern beyond the wooden doors was enormous, fully two hundred feet
long and varying between eighty and a hundred-twenty feet in width, with
a high domed ceiling.  The rock floor had been chiseled, planed, and
abraded to form a level surface from wall to wall; all the deep holes
and crevices had been filled with concrete.  Judging from scattered oil
and grease stains, and from recessed ringbolts in the floor, the chamber
had once been used for storing or servicing vehicles. To the right of
the entrance, along the wall, were more trailerlike buildings with small
windows and metal dbors, a dozen stretching almost to the end of the
chamber.  Though probably used as offices or living quarters at one
time, they'd been converted to research facilities. Hand-lettered signs
were fixed to some doors: CHEM LAB, CHEM LIBRARY, PATHOLOGY, BIO LAB,
BIO LIBRARY, PHYSICS I, PHYSICS 2, ANTHROPOLOGY, and others too far away
to read.  In addition, work tables and large machines-a conventional
X-ray unit, a large sound spectrograph of exactly the kind in use at
Boston Memorial Hospital, and many other pieces of equipment Ginger did
not recognize-stood in rows or clusters in the open area immediately in
front of the metal buildings, as if someone were conducting a sidewalk
sale of high-tech laboratory equipment.  The amount of research to be
done had outstripped the available quarters, which was no surprise,
considering the object of the inquiry.

The ship from another world lay to the left of the entrance. It looked
exactly as Ginger had recollected minutes ago, when the forbidden memory
had at last pushed through the block and returned to her: a cylinder
between fifty and sixty feet long, fifteen feet in diameter, rounded at
both ends.  It had been set upon a series of five-foot-high steel
trestles to keep it off the floor, rather like a submarine in dry dock
for repairs. The only thing different from its appearance on the night
of July 6 was the absence of the eerie glow that had changed from
moon-white to scarlet to amber.  It possessed no visible propulsion
system, no rockets.  The hull was nearly as featureless as she recalled:
here, a ten-foot-long row of shallow depressions in the metal, each big
enough for her to insert her fist, but without evident purpose; there,
four protruding hemispheres like halves of cantaloupes, also without
apparent function; here and there, half a dozen circular elevations,
some as large as the lid of a trash can, some no bigger than the mouth
of a mayonnaise jar, none higher than three inches, all quite
mysterious.  Otherwise, but for the marks of wear and age, the long
curving hull was smooth over ninety-eight percent of its surface.  Yet
its unspectacular design did not prevent it from being by far the most
spectacular thing Ginger had ever seen.  She was simultaneously
terrified and joyous, overcome with a dread of the unknown yet exultant.

Two men were sitting at a table at the foot of portable stairs that led
up to an open hatch in the flank of the elevated spacecraft.  The most
imposing was a lanky man in his forties, with curly black hair and
beard, wearing dark trousers, dark shirt, and white lab coat.  The other
was in an Army uniform with the jacket unbuttoned, a somewhat portly man
ten years older than his bearded companion.  Now, seeing their three
visitors, they fell silent, rose from their chairs, but did not shout
for guards or rush to trip an alarm switch.  The two merely watched Dom,
Jack, and Ginger with interest, gauging their first reactions to the
trestled craft that loomed over them.

They were expecting us, Ginger thought.

That realization should have concerned her, but it did not. She had no
interest in anything but the ship.

With Dom close by her right side and Jack on her left, she moved with
them in silence to the nearest end of the cylindrical vessel.  Although
her heart had begun beating hard and fast the moment she had entered the
chamber and seen the ship, its previous pounding was mild compared to
its current furious hammering.  They stopped within an arm's length of
the hull and studied it with an attitude of wonder bordering on
veneration.

Random swirling patterns of fine-grain abrasion swept across the entire
curving bulk of it, as if it had persevered through clouds of cosmic
dust or particles of a type and origin as yet unknown to man.  Random
nicks and small dents were scattered across the surface, clearly not
part of the design but inflicted by elements far more hostile than the
winds and storms that battered the ships of earth's seas and skies.  The
hull was mottled gray-black-amber-brown as if bathed in a hundred
different acids and scorched in a thousand fires.

Aside from its intrinsic and powerful alienness, the strongest
impression Ginger got from the ship was a sense of great age.  For all
she knew, it could have been built only a few years ago and could have
journeyed to Elko County at fasterthan-light speeds, arriving on the
night of July 6, just a few months or a year after being launched.  But
she did not think that was the case.  She could not ascertain the source
of her conviction-call it intuition-but she was certain that she was
standing in the shadow of an ancient vessel.  And when she reached out
and touched the cool metal, letting her fingertips move lightly over its
scarred and finely abraded surface, she felt even more strongly that she
was in the presence of a venerable relic.

They had come such a long way.  Such a very long way.

Following her lead, Dom and Jack had touched the hull, too.  Dom took a
deep quaverous breath.  His, "Ahhhhhhh," was more eloquent than any
words could have been.

"Oh, how I wish my father could have lived for this," Ginger said,
remembering dear Jacob the dreamer, Jacob the lufunentsch, who had
always loved tales of other worlds and distant times.

Jack said, "I wish Jenny'd lived longer ...  just a little
longer.........

Ginger suddenly realized that Jack did not mean the same thing she
meant, that he was not saying he wished his Jenny had lived to see this
vessel.  He was wishing she had lived through these events because, as a
result of this extraterrestrial contact, Brendan and Dom had acquired
the power to heal her.  If she had not succumbed on Christmas Day, they
might have been able to go back to her-assuming they got out of Thunder
Hill alive-and might have knit up her damaged brain, bringing her out of
her coma, returning her to the arms of her devoted husband.  That
jolting moment of comprehension made Ginger aware that she had hardly
begun to grasp the implications of this incredible event.

The portly man in the military uniform and the bearded man in the lab
coat had walked over from the table near the ship's portal.  The
civilian put his hand to the hull, which Ginger and Dom and Jack were
still exploring.  He said, "An alloy of some kind.  Harder than any
steel produced on this world.  Harder than diamond, yet extremely light
and with surprising flexibility.  You're Dom Corvaisis."

"Yes," Dom said, offering his hand to the stranger, a courtesy that
would have surprised Ginger if she had not also sensed that this
mild-spoken scientist and the military man with him were not their
enemies.

"I'm Miles Bennell, director of the team studying this .  .  . wonderful
event.  And this is General Alvarado, commanding officer of Thunder
Hill.  I can't tell you how deeply I regret what's been done to you.
This shouldn't be a secret possessed by a few.  It belongs to the world.
And if I had my way, the world would hear about it tomorrow."

Bennell shook Jack's and Ginger's hands, too.

Ginger said, "We have questions......

"And you deserve answers," Bennell said.  "I'll tell you everything
we've been able to learn.  But we might as well wait until everyone's
assembled.  Where are the others?"

"What others?" Dom asked.

And Ginger said, "You mean from the motel?  They're not with us."

Bennell blinked in surprise.  "You mean most of them managed to slip
through Colonel Falkirk's hands?"

"Falkirk?" Jack said.  "Do you think he brought us here?"

Bennell said, "If not Falkirk-who?"

"We came in ourselves," Dom said.

Ginger saw the shock of that news register with both Bennell and General
Alvarado.  They looked at each other in surprise, and then a light of
hope lit both their faces.

Alvarado said, "You're not telling us you found a way through the
Depository's security?  But that's not possible!"

"Have you read the file on Jack?" Bennell asked his friend. "Yes?  Well,
just remember his Ranger training and what he's been doing for a living
these past eight years or so."

Jack shook his head.  "I can't take all the credit.  Yeah, I got us
through the perimeter, across the grounds, and past the first door, but
it was Dom who actually got us inside."

"Dom?" Bennell said, turning in surprise to the writer. "But what do you
know about security systems?  Unless .  .  .

of course!  This strange damn power of yours!  Since that experience in
Lomack's house and since the light you generated when Cronin first
arrived at the Tranquility, you must've discovered the power wasn't
external.  You must know now that it's actually in you."

Ginger realized that Bennell's statement had revealed that their
conversations at the Tranquility had, indeed, been monitored.  But it
also revealed that their discussions and strategy sessions in the diner,
after Jack's arrival, had not been penetrated.  Otherwise Bennell would
have known about the experiment last night in which both Dom and Brendan
had learned that their apparently mystical experiences were, in fact,
events of their own creation.

"Yes," Dom said.  "We know the power's in us-me and Brendan.  But where
does it come from Doctor Bennell?"

"You don't know?"

"I think it has something to do with what happened to us when we went in
the ship, but I can't remember.  Can't you tell me?"

"No," Miles Bennell said.  "Not really.  It was known that three of you
went into the vessel, but we didn't know that anything ...  peculiar had
happened to you in there.  You'd come out just as the helicopters with
DERO troops and scientific observers began to arrive on the site, and no
one figured you'd been in there more than a couple minutes.  When you
were taken into custody, you didn't tell anyone that something important
had happened while you'd been aboard.  I believe you said you'd just
looked around.  And for ease of handling, you were all sedated
immediately after being arrested and conveyed back to the Tranquility.
So even if you'd changed your mind and decided to tell us what happened,
you didn't have a chance." Excited, the lanky scientist absentmindedly
began to comb his long fingers through his curly black beard as he
talked.  "When the decision was made to put a lid on the event, to
brainwash every civilian who'd seen it, there wasn't time for a thorough
debriefing of all the witnesses.  In fact, you were never brought out of
sedation; you were moved directly onto the drug program that was part of
your memory-wipe.  That's one reason I was opposed to the cover-up.  I
felt that by brainwashing you without giving us plenty of time to
debrief .  .  .  well, it was not only unfair and cruel to you but a
really stupid waste of potential sources of data."

Ginger looked toward the open portal farther along the flank of the
vessel, at the top of the portable stairs.  "If we go back inside now,
maybe the last of the memory block will crumble."

"That might help," Bennell agreed.

Looking up at the starship again, Jack said, "How'd you know it was
coming down out there along I-80?"

"Yeah," Dom said.  "And why'd they think it should be covered up?"

"And the creatures who came in it," Jack said.

"God, yes," Ginger said, "where are they?  What's happened to them?"

Interrupting, General Alvarado said, "Like Niles said, you'll get the
answers because you deserve them.  But first, there's more urgent
business." He turned to Dom.  "I suppose if you can levitate things and
create light out of thin air, there's no problem getting through an
electronic security system.  And if you can get in, you ought to be able
to use your power to keep other people out.  You think you could?  Keep
both the blast doors and the smaller entrance from opening until we're
ready to open them?"

Dom was clearly as baffled by these questions as Ginger was.  He said,
"Well, maybe.  I don't know."

Bennell looked at the general.  "Bob, if you keep the colonel out,
that'll be like lighting the fuse.  He knows no one can control VIGILANT
but him.  If he can't get in .  .  .  it'll look like voodoo to him.
He'll be sure we're all infected."

"Infected?" Ginger said uneasily.

Alvarado said, "The colonel is convinced that we-you, me, Miles, all of
us-have been somehow possessed by alien beings, taken over like a bunch
of puppets, and that we're not human any more."

"That's insane," Jack said.

But with greater uneasiness, Ginger said, "Of course, we know we haven't
been.  But is there reason to believe it could've happened?"

"Initially, yes, some small reason," Miles Bennell said, "but it didn't
happen.  It's not true.  And we understand now that it was never a
possibility.  Just typical black-minded human nature .  .  .  putting
the worst interpretation on everything.  I'll explain later."

Ginger was about to demand an immediate explanation, but General
Alvarado said, "Please, hold the questions.  We don't have much time.
Right now, we believe Falkirk is returning here, having taken your
friends into custody-"

"No," Dom said, "they got away before we did.  They're gone."

"Never underestimate the colonel," Alvarado said.  "But see, the thing
is-if Dom could use his power to shut down the entrances and keep
Falkirk out, maybe we'd have the time to find a way to blow this whole
story wide open.  Because

if he gets in here .  .  .  I'm afraid there's going to be bloodshed one
way or another."

Movement at the front of the chamber caught Ginger's attention, and she
gasped in dismay when she saw Jorja, Marcie, Brendan, and then all the
others coming in through the small door in the big door.

"Too late," Miles Bennell said.  "Too late."

At the entrance to Thunder Hill Depository, the seven witnesses and
Parker Faine were taken out of the transport and grouped in the snow in
front of the smaller steel door.  Lieutenant Horner's machine gun
discouraged flight and resistance.

Leland ordered the other DERO men back to Shenkfield, where they were to
bury Stefan Wycazik in an unmarked grave and await further orders.  But
no orders would be forthcoming from Leland, for he would not be alive to
give them. It was not necessary to sacrifice the entire company, for
just he and one other man could control the prisoners and destroy the
entire Depository, and it was Lieutenant Horner's bad luck to be
second-in-command and have that responsibility fall upon his shoulders.

In the entrance tunnel, Leland was alarmed to see that the video cameras
were not working.  But then he realized that the new emergency program
under which VIGILANT was operating did not require visual ID for
admittance, for it would respond only to one key: the prints of the palm
and all the fingers on Leland's left hand.  When he put his palm to the
glass panel beside the inner door, VIGILANT admitted him at once.

He and Horner took the eight prisoners down to the second level and
across The Hub to the cavern where Alvarado and Bennell waited.  As
Leland stood back and watched them file through the man-sized door in
the huge wooden wall, he looked beyond them and saw the other
witnesses-Corvaisis, Weiss, and Twist-and although he did not know how
they had gotten here, he was exhilarated by the realization that,
contrary to expectations, he had the whole group exactly where he wanted
them.

He left Horner to follow the prisoners, while he hurried back to the
elevators.  He could never trust poor Tom again,

not now that the lieutenant had been alone with people who might be
contaminated.

Carrying his submachine gun at the ready, Leland took a smaller elevator
down to the third level.  He intended to kill anyone who moved toward
him.  And if they rushed him in great numbers, he would turn the gun on
himself.  He wouldn't let- himself be changed.  Through childhood and
adolescence, his parents had striven to change him into one of them: a
shouter-and-wailer-in-churches, a self-flagellator, a God-terrorized
speaker of tongues.  He had resisted the changes his parents would have
wrought in him, and he would not be changed now.  They had been after
him all his life, in one guise or another, and they would not get him
after he had come this far with his identity and dignity intact.

The bottom level of Thunder Hill Depository was given over entirely to
the storage of supplies, munitions, and explosives.  Staff members all
lived on the second level and most worked there as well.  However, at
any hour of the day, a few workers and a guard were usually on duty on
the third and lowest floor.  When Leland stepped out of the elevator,
into the central cavern off which other chambers openedan arrangement
much like that on the second floor-he was pleased to see the basement
was deserted tonight.  General Alvarado had obeyed Leland's orders and
had sent all of his people to their quarters.

Alvarado probably thought that, by cooperating, he could convince Leland
that he and all his people were unquestionably human.  But Leland was
not naive enough to be taken in by such a ruse.  His own parents had
been capable of behaving like normal human beings, too-oh, yes, smiles
and plenty of sweet-talk, oaths of love and affection-and )*ust when you
started to think they actually cared about you and wanted the best for
you, they'd suddenly reveal ' themselves for what they really were. They
would get out the leather strap or the Ping-Pong paddle in which the old
man had drilled holes, and the beatings would be administered in the
name of God.  Leland Falkirk couldn't be easily deceived by a masquerade
of humanity, for at an early age he had learned to look for-in fact, to
expect-an inhuman presence below the skin of normality.

Crossing the main cavern to the massive steel blast door that sealed off
the munitions room, Leland looked nervously left and right and up into
the darkness between the lights. One of his punishments, as a child, had
been long imprisonments in a windowless coal cellar.

Leland pressed his left hand to the glass panel beside the door, which
rolled open.  Banks of lights flickered on automatically down the length
of a room piled twenty feet high with anchored crates and drums and
racks that contained live ammunition, mortar shells, grenades, mines,
and other instruments of destruction.

At the end of the long chamber was a twenty-foot-square vault that also
required a palm ID to be opened.  The weapons within were of such deadly
magnitude that only eight people out of the hundreds in Thunder Hill
were authorized to enter, and no one of them alone could open the vault.
The system required three of the eight to apply their palms to the glass
panel, one after another, within one minute, before access would be
granted.  But this also was overseen by VIGILANT, and the computer's new
program, designed by Leland, made him the sole keeper of the
Depository's tactical nuclear arsenal.  He put his palm to the cool
glass, and fifteen seconds later the many-layered, steel MacGruder vault
door swung slowly open with a hum of electric motors.

To the right of the vault door, twenty backpack nukes hung on wall pegs,
missing only their primary detonators and their binary packages of
explosive material.  The detonators were stored in drawers along the
back wall.  To the left of the door, in lead-lined cabinets, the binary
packages lay waiting for Armageddon.

DERO training included familiarization with a variety of nuclear devices
that terrorists might conceivably plant in American cities, so Leland
knew how to assemble, arm, and disarm The Bomb in virtually all of its
design permutations. He got the components from the cabinets, took two
backpackbomb frames down from the wall pegs, and put together both
weapons in only eight minutes, glancing nervously at the door as he
worked.  He breathed easier only when he had set the timers on both
detonators for fifteen minutes and had started the clocks.

He slung his submachine gun over his shoulder, slipped each arm into the
straps of a backpack nuke.  Each device weighed sixty-nine pounds.  He
heaved both off the floor and lurched out of the vault, bent like a
hunchback and grunting under that apocalyptic weight.

Another man might have had to stop two or three times during the journey
back through the immense munitions room. Any other man might have been
forced to pause, put the bombs down, catch his breath, and stretch his
muscles before going on.  But not Leland Falkirk.  That dead weight
wrenched his back and pulled at his shoulders and made his arms ache,
but he grew happier as the pain intensified.

In the main cavern into which the elevators opened, he put one of the
backpack nukes on the center of the floor.  He looked around at the
solid rock walls and up at the granite ceiling with a feeling of
satisfaction.  If there were any faults at all in the rock strata-and
surely there were-the place would cave in, bringing everything above
down with it.  But even if the mighty stone chambers could contain and
withstand the blast, no one who tried to take refuge on this level would
survive.  Not even an alien lifeform of great adaptability could
reconstitute itself after being vapotized in a nuclear heat and reduced
to random atoms.

Nuclear pain.

He would not be able to survive it, but he would prove that he had the
nerve to contemplate and endure it.  Only a fraction of a second of
blinding agony.  Not bad, actually.  In fact, not as bad as vigorous and
drawn-out beatings with a leather strap or with a Ping-Pong paddle that
had been drilled full of holes to increase the sting.

Still holding the second nuke by its straps, Leland smiled down at the
changing numbers on the first bomb's digitaldisplay clock, which was
already counting toward Ragnarok. The nicest thing about backpack nukes
was that, once armed, they could not be disarmed.  He did not have to
worry that someone could undo his work.

He entered the elevator and rode up to the second level.

Carrying Marcie, Jorja crossed directly to Jack Twist and stood beside
him, looking up at the ship cradled on trestles. Although the collapse
of her memory block and the inrushing recollections had more or less
prepared her for this sight, she was overcome with an awe as powerful as
that which had seized her in the troop transport, when the astounding
truth had first been revealed.  She reached out to touch the mottled
hull, and a shiver-part fear, part wonder, part delightcoursed through
her when her fingertips made contact with the scorched and abraded
metal.

Whether following her mother's lead or acting on an impulse of her own,
Marcie reached forward, too.  When her small tentative hand pressed
against the hull, she said, "The moon.  The moon."

"Yes," Jorja said immediately.  "Yes, honey.  This is what you saw come
down.  Remember?  It wasn't the moon falling. It was this, glowing white
like the moon, then red, then amber."

"Moon," the child said softly, sliding her tiny hand back and forth
across the flank of the vessel, as if she were trying to clean off the
mottled film of age and tribulation and, thereby, also clean off the
clouded surface of her own memory.  "Moon fell down."

"Not the moon, honey.  A ship.  A very special ship.  A spaceship like
in the movies, baby."

Marcie turned and looked at Jorja, actually looked at her, with eyes
that were no longer out of focus or turned inward. "Like Captain Kirk
and Mr.  Spock?"

Jorja smiled and hugged her tighter.  "Yes, honey, like Captain Kirk and
Mr.  Spock."

"Like Luke Skywalker," Jack said, leaning forward and pushing a lock of
hair out of the girl's eyes.

"Luke," Marcie said.

"And Han Solo," Jack said.

The child's eyes blurred out of focus.  She had returned to her private
place to contemplate the news she had just received.

Jack smiled at Jorja and said, "She's going to be all right. It may take
time, but she'll be all right because her whole obsession was a struggle
to remember.  Now, she's begun to remember, and she doesn't need to
struggle any more."

As usual, Jorja was reassured merely by his presence, by his aura of
calm competence.  "She'll be all right-if we can get out of here alive
and with our memories intact."

"We will," Jack said.  "Somehow."

A rush of warm emotion filled Dom when he saw Parker.  He embraced the
stocky artist and said, "How in God's name did you wind up here, my
friend?"

"It's a long story," Parker said.  A sorrow in his face and eyes said,
better than words, that at least part of the story was bleak.

"I didn't mean to get you so deep in this trouble," Dom said.

Looking up at the starship, Parker said, "I wouldn't have missed it for
the world."

"What happened to your beard?"

"When this kind of company's coming," Parker said, gesturing at the
ship, "they're worth shaving for."

Ernie moved along the side of the starship, staring, touching.

Faye stayed with Brendan, for she was concerned about him.  Months ago,
he had lost his faith-or had thought he'd lost it, which was just as bad
for him.  And tonight he had lost Father Wycazik, a blow that had left
him hollow-eyed and shaky.

"Faye," he said, looking up at the ship, "it's truly wonderful, isn't
it?"

"Yes," she said.  "I never was one for stories about other worlds, never
gave much thought to what it would mean.  .  .  .

But it's the end of everything and the start of something new. Wonderful
and new."

"But it's not God," he said, "and in my heart, that's what I'd hoped it
would be."

She took his hand.  "Remember the message that Parker brought you from
Father Wycazik?  What he told you in the truck?  Father Wycazik knew
what had happened, what had come down that night, and for him it was a
reaffirmation of his faith."

Brendan smiled forlornly.  "For him, everything was a reaffirmation of
his faith."

"Then it'll also be a reaffirmation for you," she told him. "You just
need time, a little time to think about it.  Then you'll see it the same
way Father Wycazik did because, though you aren't aware of it, you are a
lot like him."

He looked at her, surprised.  "Not me.  You didn't know him.  I'm not
half the priest .  not half the man that he was."

Faye smiled and pinched his cheek affectionately.  "Brendan, when you
told us all about your rector, it was clear how much you admired him.
And within one day, it was also clear that you were more like him than
you realized.  You're young, Brendan. You've still got things to learn.
But when you're Father Wycazik's age, you're going to be the man and the
priest that he was.  And every day of your life is going to be a living
testament to him."

A fragile hopefulness replaced his despair.  His mouth trembled and his
voice cracked.  "You ...  you really think so?"

"I know it," Faye said.

He put his arms around her, and she hugged him.

Ned and Sandy stood with their arms around each other's waists, looking
up at the ship.  Neither spoke because nothing more needed to be said.
At least, that's the way it seemed to him.

Then Sandy said something that did need to be said.  "Ned, if we get out
of this alive .  .  .  I want to go see a doctor.  You know -one of
those fertility experts.  I want to do whatever I can to bring a baby
into the world."

"But .  .  .  you've always .  .  .  you never .

"I never liked the world enough before," she said softly. "But now .  .
.  I want a part of us to be there when our kind go out to ride on top
of all the darkness, to other worlds, maybe to meet the strangers-the
wonderful strangers-who came in this.  I'll be a real good mother, Ned."

"I know you will."

When Miles Bennell saw the last of the witnesses and Parker Faine filing
into the chamber, he gave up hope of employing Dom Corvaisis' new powers
to freeze Falkirk out of Thunder Hill.  He would have to rely, instead,
on the .357 Magnum that was tucked into his belt.  It pressed hard
against his stomach, hidden beneath his loose white lab coat.

Miles thought Leland would come with at least twenty men, probably twice
that number.  He expected the colonel, Horner, and half a dozen soldiers
to enter the chamber behind the last of the witnesses.  But only Horner
appeared, toting a submachine gun and prepared to use it.

As the Blocks, the Servers, Brendan Cronin, and the others were drawn
instantly and irresistibly to the starship, Horner said, "General
Alvarado, Dr.  Bennell-Colonel Falkirk will be along in a moment."

"How dare you come in here with an automatic weapon at the ready," Bob
said with an aplomb Miles admired.  "Good God, man!  Don't you realize
if your finger slipped and you let off a burst, the slugs would keep
ricocheting off these rock walls, killing all of us-you included!"

"My finger never slips, sir," Horner said in such a way that he was
virtually challenging Bob to make an issue of it.

Instead, Bob said sharply, "Where's Falkirk?"

"Sir, the colonel had some things to attend to," Horner said.  "He
apologizes for keeping you waiting.  He'll join us shortly."

"What things?" Bob Alvarado asked.

"Sir, the colonel doesn't always consult me about his every move."

Miles was half-afraid Falkirk had already taken squads of DERO troops to
liquidate the staff.  But that grim possibility seemed less likely with
every second that passed unmarred by the rattle of gunfire.

He was a heavily armed man looking for a chance to turn the tables on
his enemies, but he did not want to appear that way to Horner, so Miles
decided the most natural thing to do would be to talk with the witnesses
and begin to answer some of the many questions they had.  He discovered
that most of them had already heard about the CISG, so he quickly
summarized the findings of that committee for the others, by way of
explaining why the cover-up had initially been ordered.

The ship before them, Miles explained, had first been spotted by deeply
positioned defense satellites orbiting the earth at a distance of more
than 22,000 miles.  They had seen it coming in past the moon.  (The
Soviets, whose defense satellites were cruder, did not spot the visitor
until much laterand never accurately identified it.)

Initially, observers thought the alien craft was a large meteorite or
small asteroid on a collision course with Earth.  If it was a soft,
porous material, it might burn up during descent. And even if Earth were
unlucky, if the incoming debris was made of more solid stuff, it still
might fragment into a host of small and relatively harmless meteorites.
However, if Earth were very unlucky, if the wandering rock had a high
nickeliron content, which might eliminate the possibility of extensive
fragmentation, it was definitely a menace.  Of course, it was almost
certain to hit water, since oceans covered seventy percent of the
planet's surface.  Water impact would result in little damage, unless it
hit close enough to shore for its tsunami to devastate a port.  The
worst-case possibility was a land strike in a heavily populated area.

"Imagine a lump of nickel and iron the size of a bus hurtling into the
heart of Manhattan at a couple of thousand miles an hour," Miles told
them.  "That picture was horrifying enough to make us consider measures
to destroy or deflect it."

Less than six months earlier, the first satellites in the nation's
Strategic Defense Shield had been placed secretly in orbit.  They had
comprised less than ten percent of the system as it would be ultimately
constituted, and on their own they could not have done much to prevent
nuclear war.  But thanks to several forward-thinking designers, every
satellite had been given high maneuverability that would allow it to
turn its armaments outward and double as a planetary defense against
just such a threat as that hurtling piece of space junk.  Recent theory
proposed that impacting comets or asteroids had wiped out the dinosaurs,
and prudent planners had decided it might be wise to use the Strategic
Defense Shield to knock down not only Soviet missiles but the fate-flung
missiles of the universe itself.  Therefore, one of the satellites was
repositioned while the meteorite streaked nearer Earth, and plans were
laid to fire all of its antimissile missiles at the intruder.  Although
none of those projectiles was nuclear, their explosive warheads, in
combination, were believed sufficient to fragment the meteorite into
enough pieces to ensure that none would be large enough to reach the
surface of Earth with destructive potential.

"Then," Miles said, "hours before the scheduled attack on the intruder,
an analysis of the latest photographs indicated a shockingly symmetrical
shape.  And spectrographic readings, forwarded by the satellite, began
to confirm that it might be something stranger than a meteorite.  Its
analysis did not match any of the standard profiles for meteorites." He
had walked among the witnesses as he talked, and now he put one hand
upon the flank of the ship, still capable of being awed by it even after
eighteen months.  "New photos were ordered every ten minutes.  During
the following hour, the approaching shape grew ever more distinct, until
the likeli hood of it being a ship was so great that no one would risk
ordering its destruction.  We hadn't informed the Soviets of the object
or of our intention to destroy it, for that would have given them
information about our defense satellite capabilities.  Now, we
purposefully began random jamming of Soviet high-atmosphere radar,
dropping bogeys and electronic shadows on them, to cover the ship's
advance and thus keep the secret of its visit.  At first, we thought it
would take up orbit around Earth.  But very late in the game, we
realized it was going to come straight in, following the very path an
unpowered meteorite would have followed, though in a controlled fashion.
Defense computers were able to give a thirtyeight-minute warning that
point of impact would be here in Elko County."

"Just enough time to close I-80," Ernie Block said, "and call Falkirk
and his DERO men in from wherever they were."

"Idaho," Miles said.  "They were on training maneuvers in southern
Idaho, fortunately quite close.  Or unfortunately, depending on your
point of view."

"Of course, Dr.  Bennell, I know your point of view," said Leland
Falkirk from the door where he had, at last, appeared.

The .357 Magnum felt as big as a cannon against Miles Bennell's belly,
but suddenly it seemed as useless as a peashooter.

Upon seeing Leland Falkirk for the first time, Ginger realized how
little justice the newspaper photograph had done him. He was handsomer,
more imposing-and more frightening than he'd appeared in the Sentinel.
He didn't carry his submachine gun in the stern attitude of readiness
that Horner affected, nonchalantly dangling it in one hand.  However,
his apparent laxity was more threatening than Horner's posturing. Ginger
had the feeling that, by seeming to be careless, he was taunting them to
try something.  As Falkirk drew nearer the group, Ginger thought that he
brought with him a palpable aura-and almost a stench-of hatred and
madness.

Dr.  Bennell said, "Where are all your men, Colonel?"

"No men," Falkirk said mildly.  "Just Lieutenant Horner and me.  No need
for a display of force, really.  I'm quite sure that when we've had time
to discuss the situation rationally, we'll reach a solution to the
problem that will satisfy everyone."

Ginger had an even stronger feeling that the colonel was taunting them.
He tad the air of a child who, in possession of a secret, not only takes
enormous pleasure in his special knowledge but is especially tickled by
the ignorance of others. She saw that Dr.  Bennell seemed baffled by
Falkirk's behavior and wary of him.

"Go on with your discussion," the colonel said, checking his watch. "For
heaven's sake, don't let me interrupt.  You must have a thousand
questions you'd like Doctor Bennell to answer."

"I have one," Sandy said.  "Doctor, where are the ...  the people who
came in this ship?"

"Dead," Bennell said.  "There were eight of them, but they were all dead
before they got here."

A pang of regret pierced Ginger's heart, and from their expressions she
saw that the others were equally shocked and disappointed.  Parker and
Jorja even groaned softly, as if they had just been given news of a
friend's death.

"How did they die?" Ned asked.  "Of what?"

Glancing repeatedly at Colonel Falkirk, Bennell said, "Well, first,
you've got to know a little about them, about why they came in the first
place.  In their ship, we found a virtual encyclopedia of their
species-a crash course in their culture, biology, psychology-recorded on
something like our own videodisks.  We required a couple of weeks to
even identify the player and a month to learn how to operate it.  But
once we figured it out, we found the machine still operable, astonishing
when you consider ...  well, better not jump ahead. Suffice to say we're
still going through the trove of material on those disks.  It's superbly
visual, explaining so much in spite of the language barrier-though it
also slowly teaches their language.  Those of us on the project almost
feel .  .  .  a brotherhood with the people who built this ship."

Colonel Falkirk laughed sourly.  Mockingly, he said, "Brotherhood."

Dr.  Bennell glared at him, then continued: "I'd need weeks to tell you
what we know of them now.  Suffice to say they're an unimaginably
ancient spacegoing species which had, at the time this ship departed its
home port, searched out and located five other intelligent species in
other solar systems than their own."

"Five!" Ginger said in amazement.  "But-even if the galaxy is positively
packed with life, that's incredible.  Considering the vast distances to
be traveled, the endless places to search."

Dr.  Bennell nodded.  "But you see, from the time they achieved the
means of traveling from star to star, they apparently decided it was
their sacred duty to seek out other intelligences.  In fact, it seems to
have become a religion to them." He shook his head and sighed.  "It's
difficult to be sure we understand this, because even their excellent
visual encyclopedia more readily describes physical things than it does
philosophies.  But we think they see themselves as servants of some
supreme force that created the universe-"

" God?" Brendan interrupted.  "Are you saying they see themselves as
servants of God?"

"Something like that," Bennell said.  "However, they aren't spreading
any religious message.  They simply feel they have a sacred obligation
to help intelligent species find one another, to bind intelligences
across the vast emptiness of space."

"Bind," Falkirk said ominously, and he looked at his watch.

General Alvarado had been moving slowly to his right, putting himself at
the periphery of the colonel's vision.  He took another step.

Ginger was increasingly uneasy about the undercurrent of antagonism
between Falkirk and Bennell and Alvarado, which she did not entirely
understand.  She moved closer to Dom and put an arm around him.

"And they bring another gift," Bennell said, frowning toward the
colonel.  "They're such an ancient species that they've evolved certain
abilities we think of as psychic.  The ability to heal.  Telekinesis.
Other things.  Not only have they evolved those talents, but they've
learned to .  .  .  to infuse the same abilities in other intelligent
species that lack them."

"Infuse?" Dom said.  "How?"

"We don't entirely understand," Bennell said.  "But they can pass these
powers along.  That is evidently what was done with you, and now you
have the ability to pass the power to others."

"Pass the power?" Jack said, astonished.  "You mean Dom and Brendan
could give us ...  or anyone ...  what they have?"

"I've already given it," Brendan said.  "Ginger, Dom, Jackyou didn't
hear the news Parker brought from Father Wycazik.  Those two I healed in
Chicago-Emmy and Wintonthey've both got the power now."

:'New sources of infection," Falkirk said somberly.

' And evidently," Parker said, "since Brendan healed me, I'll have it
too, sooner or later."

"Although I don't think it's passed only in healing," Brendan said.
"It's just that the healing is such an intimate contact. Along with
knitting up the tissues of the person you're healing, you somehow pass
the power to them."

Ginger's mind reeled.  This news was every bit as earthshaking as the
existence of the starship.  "You mean ...  my God .  .  .  you mean they
came to help us evolve to a new level as a species?  And that evolution
is now already under way?"

"It would seem to be, yes," Bennell said.

Looking at his wristwatch again, Leland Falkirk said, "Please, this
masquerade is getting boring."

"What masquerade?" Faye Block asked.  "What are you talking about,
Colonel?  We were told you believe we've all been somehow possessed,
some nonsense like that.  How can you have gotten such a crazy idea?"

"Spare me this charade," Falkirk said sharply.  "You all pretend to know
nothing.  In reality, you know everything. Not one of you is human any
longer.  You're all ...  possessed, and this innocence is play-acting to
convince me to spare you. But it won't work.  It's too late."

Repelled by Falkirk's air of madness, Ginger turned again to Bennell.
"What is all this stuff about infection and possession?"

"A mistake," Bennell said, moving a few steps to his left.

Ginger realized he was trying to pull the colonel's attention in that
direction, away from General Alvarado, in order to give the general a
better chance of slipping entirely out of Falkirk's notice.

"A mistake," Bennell repeated.  "Or rather .  .  .  an example of the
human race's typical xenophobia-hatred and suspicion of strangers, of
anyone that's different.  When we first viewed some of the videodisks I
mentioned, when we first learned about the extraterrestrials' desire to
pass these powers to other species, we apparently misinterpreted what we
were seeing. Initially, we thought they were taking possession of those
they changed, inserting an alien consciousness into a host body.  I
guess it's an understandable paranoia, after all the horror novels and
movies.  We thought perhaps we had a parasitical race on our hands.  But
that misapprehension was quickly dispelled when we'd seen more of their
disks and had time to puzzle out some of the finer points. Now we know
we were wrong."

"I don't know it," Falkirk said.  "I think you were all infected and
then, under the control of these creatures, you began to downplay the
danger.  Or ...  or the disks are merely propaganda.  Lies."

"No," Bennell said.  "For one thing, I don't think these creatures would
be capable of lying.  Besides, if they could so easily take us over,
they wouldn't require propaganda. And they sure as hell wouldn't bring
us this encyclopedia that tells us they're going to change us."

Ginger had noticed Brendan Cronin following the discussion even more
avidly than everyone else, and now he said, "I know the religious
metaphor may not be entirely appropriate here.  But if they feel they
come to us as the servants of God .  .  .  and if they come to hand down
to us these miraculous gifts, then you could almost say they were
angels, archangels bestowing special blessings."

Falkirk laughed harshly.  "Oh, that's rich, Cronin!  Do you really think
you can get to me from a religious angle?  Me?

Even if I were a religious fanatic, like my dead and rotting parents, I
wouldn't buy these creatures as angels.  Angels with faces like buckets
of worms?"

"Worms?  What's he talking about?" Brendan asked Bennell.

The scientist said, "They look very different from us.  Bipeds with
forearms rather like us, yes.  Six digits instead of five. But that's
about all we have in common in the way of looks. Initially, they seem
repulsive.  In fact, repulsive is a mild word. But in time .  .  .  you
begin to see they have a certain beauty of their own."

"Beauty of their own," Falkirk said scornfully.  "Monsters is what they
are, and they'd only have beauty in the eyes of other monsters, so
you've just proven my point, Bennell."

Ginger's anger with Falkirk drove her to take a couple of steps toward
him in spite of his submachine gun.  "You damn fool," she said.  "What
does it matter what they look like?

The important thing is what they are.  And evidently they're creatures
with a deep sense of purpose, noble purpose.  No matter how different
they look, the things we have in common with them are greater than our
differences.  My father always said that, as much as intelligence, the
things that separated us from the beasts were courage, love, friendship,
compassion, and empathy.  Do you realize what courage it took for them
to set out on this journey across God knows how many thousands of
millions of miles?  So that's one big thing we share with them-courage.
And love, friendship?  They must have those too.  Otherwise how would
they have built a civilization that could reach to the stars?  You need
love and friendship to have a reason to build.  Compassion?  They've got
a mission to bring other intelligent species to a higher rung on the
evolutionary ladder.  Surely, that takes compassion.  And empathy? Isn't
that obvious?  They empathize with our fear and loneliness, with our
dread that we're adrift in a meaningless universe.  They empathize so
much that they commit themselves to these incredible journeys on the
mere hope of encountering us and bringing us the news that we are not
alone." Suddenly she knew her anger wasn't directed so much at Falkirk
as at this horrid blindness in the human species that led it frequently
into spirals of self-destruction. "Look at me," she told the colonel.
"I'm a Jew.  And there are those who'd say I'm not the same as they are,
not as good, even dangerous.  Stories of Jews drinking the blood of
gentile babies-there are the ignorant who believe that garbage.  Is
there any difference between that sick antisemitism and your stubborn
insistence, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that these
creatures come to drink our blood?  Let us go, for God's sake.  Stop the
endless hatred here.  Stop it now.  We have a destiny that leaves no
room for hatred."

"Bravo," Falkirk said acidly.  "A very nice speech." Even as he spoke,
the colonel swung his machine gun toward General Alvarado and said,
"Don't go for your gun, General.  I assume you're carrying one.  I won't
be shot.  I want to die in the glorious fire."

"Fire?" Bennell said.

Falkirk grinned.  "That's right, Doctor.  The glorious fire

that will consume us all and save the world from this infection."

"Christ!" Bennell said.  "That's why you didn't bring more men with you.
You didn't want to sacrifice more than necessary.  " He turned to
Alvarado.  "Bob, the crazy bastard's gotten into the tactical nukes."

Ginger knew that Alvarado was feeling precisely what she felt at this
news, for his face twisted and went instantly gray.

"Two backpack nukes," Falkirk said.  "One right outside that door.  The
other in the main chamber downstairs." He checked his watch.  "Less than
three minutes, and we'll all be vapor.  Not even time left for you to
change me, I'll bet.  How long does it take to change one of us to one
of you?  Longer than three minutes, I suppose."

Abruptly, the machine gun tore out of Falkirk's hands as if it had
acquired life and taken flight, wrenching loose of his grasp with such
force that it cut his fingers and tore off a couple of his nails.  At
the same instant, Lieutenant Horner screamed as his machine gun erupted
from his grasp with equal suddenness and force.  Ginger saw both weapons
spin through the air and drop with a clatter, one at the feet of Ernie
Block and the other at Jack Twist's side, both of whom jubilantly took
up the guns and covered Falkirk and Horner.

"You?" Ginger said wonderingly, turning to Dom.

"Me, yeah, I think," he said breathlessly.  "I ...  I didn't know I
could do it until I had to.  Sort of the way Brendan heals people."

Stunned, Dr.  Bennell said, "But it doesn't matter.  Falkirk said three
minutes."

"Two," Falkirk said, cradling one bleeding hand in the other and
grinning happily.  "Two minutes now."

"And backpack nukes can't be disarmed," Alvarado said. Running, Dom
shouted: "Brendan, you take the one outside this door.  I'll get the one
downstairs."

"They can't be disarmed!" Alvarado repeated.

Brendan knelt beside the nuclear device and winced when he saw the time
remaining on the clock.  One minute, thirtythree seconds.

He didn't know what to do.  He had healed three people, yes, and he had
caused some pepper shakers to whirl through

the air, and he had even generated light out of nothingness. But he
remembered how the pepper shakers had gotten out of control and how the
chairs had leapt off the diner floor and smashed against the ceiling.
And he knew if he made one false move with the detonator in this bomb,
he would not be saved by all his superhuman power.

One minute, twenty-six seconds.

The others had come out of the cavern where the ship rested and had
gathered around.  Even Falkirk and Horner remained under guard, though
there was no reason for them to try to get their guns.  They trusted in
the efficacy of the bomb.

One minute, eleven seconds.

"If I smash the detonator," Brendan said to Alvarado, "pulverize it,
would that-"

"No," the general said.  "Once armed, the detonator will trigger the
bomb automatically if you try to wreck it."

One-oh-three.

Faye knelt beside him.  "Just make it pop right up out of the damn bomb,
Brendan.  The way Dom tore those guns out of their hands."

Brendan stared at the rapidly changing numerals on the detonator's clock
and tried to imagine that entire device popping free of the rest of the
bomb.

Nothing happened.

Fifty-four seconds.

Cursing the slowness of the elevator, Dom virtually flew out of the
doors when they opened, with Ginger close behind him, and dashed to the
backpack nuke standing in the center of the main cavern on the bottom
level of Thunder Hill.  Heart pounding even faster than his stomach was
churning, he crouched beside the bomb and said, "Jesus," when he saw the
digital clock.

Fifty seconds.

"You can do it," Ginger said, stooping at the other side of the hateful
device.  "You've got a destiny."

"Here goes."

"Love you," she said.

"Love you," he said, as surprised as she was by that statement.

Forty-two seconds.

He raised his hands over the nuclear device, and he felt the rings
appearing immediately in his palms.

Forty seconds.

Brendan had broken out in a sweat.

Thirty-nine seconds.

He strained, trying to work the magic that he knew was in him.  But
though the stigmata burned on his palms, and in spite of the fact that
he could feel the power surging in him, he could not focus on the ur ent
task.  He kept thinking about what could go wrong, and that in some way
he would be responsible if it did go wrong, and the more he thought the
less he could direct the miraculous energy within him.

Thirty-four seconds.

Parker Faine pushed between two onlookers and dropped to his knees
beside Brendan.  "No offense, Father, but maybe the problem is that you,
being a Jesuit, are just too damn prone to intellectualize.  Maybe this
requires going with your gut.  Maybe what this needs is the wild-ass,
go-foreit, tryanything, gonzo, berserker commitment of an artist." He
thrust his own large hands toward the detonator and shouted: "Come out
of there you fucker!"

With a snap of wires, the detonator leapt out of its niche in the bomb
package and straight into Parker's hands.

There were cries of relief and congratulations, but Brendan said, "The
clock's still counting down."

Eleven seconds.

"Yeah, but it's not connected to the bomb any more," Parker said,
grinning broadly.

Alvarado said, "But there's a conventional explosive charge in the damn
detonator."

The detonator erupted out of the bomb, into Dom's hands. He saw the
clock still counting, and he sensed it had to be stopped even though
there was no longer a chance of a nuclear explosion.  So he simply
willed it to stop, and the lighted numerals froze at 0:03.

0:03.

Parker, unaccustomed to the role of magician, panicked at this secondary
crisis.  Certain his power was depleted, he chose a course of action
perfectly in character.  With a war cry to rival John Wayne in one of
the Duke's old movies, Parker turned and threw the detonator toward the
far wall of the cavern, as if lobbing a grenade. He knew he could not
cast it clear to the other side of the chamber, but he hoped he could
pitch it far enough.  Even as it left his hand, he flung himself to the
floor, as the others had already done.

Dom was kissing Ginger when the explosion sounded overhead, and they
both jumped.  For an instant he thought Brendan had failed to disarm the
other device, then realized a nuclear explosion would have brought the
ceiling down on them.

"The detonator," she said.

"Come on," he said.  "Let's see if anyone's hurt."

The lift crawled upward.  When they arrived at the second level, the
main chamber was filled with scores of Depository staff members, all
carrying guns and responding to the sound of battle.

Holding Ginger's hand, Dom pushed through the crowd, toward the place
where he had left Brendan with the first backpack nuke.  He saw Faye,
Sandy, and Ned.  Then Brendan-alive, unhurt.  Jorja, Marcie. Parker
loomed on his right and gave both him and Ginger a bear hug. "You
shoulda seen me, kids.  If they'd had both me and Audie Murphy, World
War 11 would've been over in about six months."

"I'm beginning to see why Dom admires you so," Ginger said.

Parker raised his eyebrows.  "But of course, my dear!  To know me is to
love me."

A sudden cry of alarm rose, which jolted Dom because he thought all
danger was past.  When he turned, he saw that Falkirk had dodged away
from Jack and Ernie in the turmoil and had wrenched a revolver from one
of the Thunder Hill staff.  Everyone fell back from him.

"For Christ's sake," Jack shouted, "it's over, Colonel.  It's over, damn
you."

But Falkirk had no intention of resuming his private war. His gray
translucent eyes shone with madness.  "Yes," he said. "It's over, and I
won't be changed like the rest of you.  You won't get me.  " Before
anyone could reach him, or before anyone could think to tear the weapon
from his hands with telekinetic power, he thrust the barrel of the
revolver into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

With a cry of horror, Ginger looked away from the falling corpse, and
Dom turned his head, too.  It was not the bloody death itself that
repelled but the stupid, pointless waste when, at last, humankind had
within its grasp the secret of immortality.

3.

Transcendence

As the staff of Thunder Hill filled the cavern, milling around the ship
that most had never seen before, Ginger and Dom and the other witnesses
followed Miles Bennell into the vessel.

The interior was not dramatic, but as plain as the exterior, with none
of the complex and powerful machinery that one expected in a craft
capable of such a journey.  Miles Bennell explained that the builders
had advanced beyond machinery as humankind understood it, perhaps even
beyond physics as humankind understood it.  There was one long chamber
within, and it was for the most part gray, drab, featureless.  The warm
golden luminosity which had filled the vessel on the night of July 6-and
which Brendan had remembered in his dreams was not visible now.  There
was only a line of ordinary work lights that the scientists had strung
for their convenience.

In spite of its plainness, the chamber had a warmth, appeal, and magic
that, strangely enough, reminded Ginger of her father's private office
at the back of his first jewelry store in Brooklyn, the one he always
used as his headquarters.  The walls of that sanctum sanctorum had been
decorated only with a calendar, and the furniture had been inexpensive,
old, and well used.  Plain.  Even drab.  But for Ginger, it had been a
fine and magical room, because Jacob had seldom worked there but had
squirreled away with one book or another, from which he'd often read to
her.  Sometimes it would be a mystery, or a fantasy about gnomes and
witches, a story of other worlds, or a thriller about spies.  And when
Jacob read, his voice acquired a resonant and mesmerizing timbre.  The
reality of the gray little office faded, and for hours Ginger could
believe herself to be investigating with Sherlock Holmes upon the misty
moors, celebrating with the Hobbit Mr.  Bilbo Baggins inside the Hill at
Bag End, or with Jim and Will as they explored the terrible carnival in
Mr.  Bradbury's lovely book. Jacob's office hadn't been only what it
seemed to be.  And although this ship bore no physical resemblance to
Jacob's office, it was similar in that it was more than it appeared;
under its drab skin, it harbored wondrous things, great mysteries.

Spaced along each long wall were four coffinlike containers of a
semitransparent, milky-blue substance that looked like carved quartz.
These were, Miles Bennell explained, the beds in which the travelers had
passed their long journey in a state of near-suspended animation, aging
only the equivalent of one earth-year for every fifty that passed.  As
they dreamed, the fully automated ship proceeded through the void,
reaching ahead with an array of sensors and probes for indications of
life in the hundreds of thousands of solar systems that it passed.

It did not escape Ginger's notice that the top of each container was
marked by two raised rings precisely the size of those that had appeared
in Dom's and Brendan's hands.

"You told us they were dead when they got here," Ned reminded Bennell.
"But you never answered my question. What did they die from?"

"Time," Bennell said.  "Although the ship and all its devices continued
to function well right through the descent and the landing there along
I-80, the occupants had perished of old age long before they ever got
here."

Faye said, "But .  .  .  you've told us they aged one year for every
fifty that passed."

"Yes," Bennell said.  "And from what we've learned about them, they're
long-lived by our standards.  Five hundred years seems to be their
average life-span."

Standing with Marcie in his arms, Jack Twist said, "But, my God, at one
year for fifty, they'd have to've been traveling twenty-five thousand
years to have died of old age!"

"Longer," Bennell said.  "In spite of their vast knowledge and
technology, they never found a way to exceed the speed of light-186,000
miles per second.  In fact, their ship cruises at ninety-eight percent
of that, something like 182,000 miles per second.  Fast, yes, but not
fast enough when you consider the distances involved.  Our own galaxy-in
which they're our neighbors-has a diameter of 80,000 lightyears, or
about 240,000 trillion miles.  They tried to pinpoint the location of
their home world for us through tridimensional galactic diagrams.  We
believe they come from a place more than 31,000 lightyears around the
perimeter of the galaxy from us.  And since they travel at just under
the speed of light, that means they left home a little less than 32,000
years ago.  Even with their lives extended by suspended animation, they
must have perished nearly 10,000 years ago."

Ginger found herself shaking again, as she had shaken upon first turning
her gaze upon the ancient ship.  She touched the nearest of the
milky-blue containers, which seemed to her to be a powerful testimony to
compassion and empathy beyond human understanding, the embodiment of a
sacrifice that staggered the mind and humbled the heart.  To have
willingly given up the comforts of home, to have left their world and
all their kind to travel such distances on the mere hope of being able
to help a struggling species at the far, far end.  .  .  .

Bennell's voice had grown lower as he spoke, and now it was as soft as
if he had been speaking in a church.  "They died twenty-five thousand
lightyears from home.  They were already dead when humankind still lived
in caves and was just beginning to learn the basics of agriculture. When
these .  .  .  incredible journeyers died, the entire population of our
world was only about five million, fewer people than now live in New
York alone.  During the past ten thousand years, while we've struggled
out of the dirt and broken our backs to build a shaky civilization
always teetering on the edge of destruction, those eight dead seekers
were coming steadily toward us across the vatness of the galactic rim."

Ginger saw Brendan touch the other corner of the coffin on which she'd
rested her own hands.  Tears glistened in his eyes.  She knew what he
was thinking.  As a priest, he had taken vows of poverty and celibacy
and had forsworn many of the pleasures of secular life as an offering to
God.  He knew the meaning of sacrifice, but none of his sacrifices
compared to what these beings had given up in the name of their cause.

Parker said, "But to have found five other intelligent species when the
distances are so great and the odds so small, they must send out a great
many of these ships."

"We think they dispatch hundreds a year, maybe even thousands-and had
been doing so for longer than 100,000 years before this vessel left
port.  As I said, it's their religion and their racial purpose combined.
All the other five species they discovered were within 15,000 lightyears
from their world. And remember, even when they locate an intelligence at
that distance, they don't know of it until 15,000 years after the
discovery, for it takes that long for the message of the contact to
reach home again.  Are you beginning to grasp the depth and scale of
their commitment?"

"Most ships," Ernie said, "must go out and never come back-and never
meet with any success.  Most of them just cruise on and on into endless
space while the crew perishes, as this crew perished."

"Yes," Bennell said.

"And yet they keep going," Dom said.

"And yet they keep going," Bennell said.

"We may never meet others of them face-to-face," Ned said.

"Give humanity a hundred years to learn to apply all the knowledge and
technology they brought us," Bennell said. "Then give us another .  .  .
oh, at least one thousand years more to mature to the point where we're
capable of making that same commitment.  Then a ship will be launched,
manned by a human crew in suspended animation.  And possibly we'll find
a way to improve the process, so that they don't age at all or age far
more slowly.  None of us will be alive to watch it take off, but it will
go.  I know in my heart it will. Then .  .  .  32,000 years after that,
our distant descendants will be there, returning the call, remaking the
contact these creatures don't even know they've established."

They stood in stunned silence, trying to grasp the immensity of what
Bennell envisioned.

Ginger felt a chill of the most delicious and indescribable nature.

Brendan said, "It's God's scale.  We're talking about ... thinking,
planning, and doing on God's scale rather than mankind's."

Parker said, "Sort of makes it a whole lot less important who's going to
win this year's World Series, doesn't it?"

Dom put his hands upon the rings that were featured on the top of that
particular suspended-animation chamber around which everyone was
gathered.  He said, "I believe only six of the crew were dead, fully
dead that night in July, Dr.  Bennell. I'm beginning to recall what
happened when we entered this ship, and I feel as if we were called to
two of these containers by something that still lived within them.
Barely lived but was not yet entirely dead."

"Yes," Brendan said, tears weaving down his cheeks now. "In fact, I
remember the golden light was coming from two of these boxes and that it
exerted not only an obvious but subliminal attraction.  I was compelled
to come and put my hands upon the rings.  And when I put them here ...
somehow I knew that, beneath the lid, something was desperately clinging
to life, not for its own sake but for the sake of passing on some gift.
And by putting its own hands against the inner surface of those
conductive rings .  .  .  it gave me what it had come so far to give.
Then it died at last.  I didn't know what was in me then, exactly.  I
suppose it would have taken some time to understand, to learn how to use
the power.  But before I ever had a chance, we were taken into custody."

"Alive," Bennell said-shocked, fascinated.  "Well, the condition of the
eight bodies .  .  .  two were virtually turned to dust .  .  .  two
more were badly decomposed .  .  .  apparently because their
suspended-animation boxes had shut down once they died.  Four were in
much better condition, and two seemed perfectly preserved.  But we never
dared imagine .  .  ."

"Yes," Dom said, clearly recalling more.  "Just barely alive, but
holding on to pass the gift.  Of course, I expected to be interrogated,
to have a chance to tell what had happened to me in the ship.  But the
government was so eager to protect society from the shock of contact,
and then so afraid of the unknown .  .  .  I never had the chance to
tell."

"Soon," Bennell said, "we can tell the world."

"And change the world," Brendan said.

Ginger looked at the faces of the Tranquility family, at Parker and
Bennell, and sensed the bond that would soon exist between all men and
women, an incredible closeness that would arise from their sudden shared
leap up the evolutionary ladder toward a better world.  No more would
people be strangers, one to another, not anywhere on earth.  All prior
human history had been lived in the dark, and now they stood at the
gates of a new dawn.  She looked at her two small hands, a surgeon's
hands, and she thought of the decade-long studies to which she had
diligently applied herself with the hope of saving lives.  Now, perhaps
all that training would be for nothing.  She didn't care.  She was
filled with joy at the prospect of a world that did not need medicine or
surgery. Soon, when Dom had passed the gift to her, as she would ask him
to, she'd be able to heal with her touch.  More important, with only her
touch, she would be able to pass unto others the power to heal
themselves.  The human life-span would increase dramatically
overnight-three hundred, four hundred, even five hundred years.  Except
for accidents, the specter of death would be banished to a distant
horizon.  No more would the Annas and Jacobs be wrenched away from the
children who loved them.  No more would husbands have to sit in mourning
at the deathbeds of young wives.  No more, Baruch ha-Shem, no more.


