Read the confessions, the priest said abruptly, the confessions extracted from witches. The data we have is enormous, overwhelming: peasants cavorting in the woods with their breeches down, mocking the village priest; cynics using the apparatus of witchcraft to indulge their own depravity. Torture, too, you have to make allowances for that when you study the confessions. You will find terrifying consistency, a hard nugget of truth beneath it all. Sometimes these creatures are entirely human in appearance. Sometimes they are without physical form at all, but are able to take over the bodies of lower animals. Under certain conditions, these creatures can have sexual intercourse with human beings. Offspring can be produced-and have been produced ...
CHAPTER ONE
It was a long walk from the phone booth out on the highway, and the sun had gone down before the old man got home. That didn't bother him. He knew the pines far better than most men know their own backyards. If anything scared him, it was not going home through the woods: it was being home in his lonely house.
He paused at the creek to drink, using his cupped hand. The water was stained by submerged cedars, and by daylight it would have been the color of weak tea. The old man believed that drinking this water all his life had enabled him to reach the age of seventy-five in such good shape. He liked to ask strangers to guess his age. They always fell short of the mark, often by as many as twenty years.
He removed his boots to wade the creek, lacing them together and draping them around his neck. He didn't bother to put them on again when he had gained the opposite bank. He had been bitten by rattlesnakes four times, but never in this part of the woods; and the snakes had never bitten him without excellent reason. Their venom was one of the many unlikely products of the pines that he could sell for cash.
He sensed that it was going to rain tonight. That was good. It didn't seem to like the rain. Once when it was making a determined effort to get into his house, a sudden shower had apparently discouraged it.
The old man liked to drink more than water, but he had made a point of staying cold sober at night since the thing had taken notice of him. Maybe, with rain coming, he could treat himself to a good old-fashioned drunk. He needed one.
A light breeze was carrying his scent to the house before him, but he wasn't getting the expected welcome. He stopped to listen for a minute. He realized with annoyance that he was being timid about calling out loud in what he considered his own woods, so he filled his lungs with air and yelled lustily. "Pete! Sammy! Hey, boys, I'm home!"
Nothing. His heart sank. Too smart to fight the thing, as King and Zeke had on the first night, but too brave to run off, as the other dogs had done during the past two weeks, Pete and Sammy had been the last ones left. He hoped that they'd run away, but he doubted it.
He wished now that he had carried his gun out to the highway with him. Buckshot seemed to frighten it, although not enough to keep it from coming back.
The old man didn't like guns. He carried one only when it was needed for a specific purpose. His two boys had been crazy about guns. They'd met some German boys, who had probably been equally crazy about them, at a place in Italy called Cassino, and the result had done nobody any good. Him, least of all. He'd advised them to stay home, but they'd rejected his advice with harsh words, because it had been a universally popular war.
"Crazy old man!" he snarled at himself, because he considered it a symptom of senility to think about the past. When he drank, he sometimes couldn't help thinking about Gregory and Michael, and about Caroline, who had died bringing Michael into the world. Then he had to drink more.
Maybe he was crazy. Maybe the sights he'd seen and the things he'd heard were products of his imagination. Maybe the dogs had run off because he'd beaten them in a drunken rage, or forgotten to feed them. After all, he hadn't seen much. The thing had a way of finding corners to sneak around where no corners existed, shortcuts to take where there were no shortcuts. His best look at it had been confusing. He hadn't realized how confusing until he'd tried to describe it to his friend, who had laughingly compared it to a giant weasel. It hadn't been like that at all.
No. It wasn't his imagination. He'd found what was left of King and Zeke, and he sure as hell hadn't done that to them, drunk or sober. He blacked out sometimes, yes; he sometimes got confused; but he knew himself well enough to be certain he hadn't done that.
The newspaper fellow he'd called on the telephone made him doubt himself. He'd listened politely, he'd said he would send somebody out to talk about it-but the old man knew what it sounded like when somebody was humoring a loony.
Paradoxically, the renewed conviction that he was sane and that there really was something dangerous and unfamiliar in his native pines gave him courage. He walked forward into the clearing and toward the dim bulk of his low, rambling house.
"I'm home, you black devil," he called. "I don't know why you're making such a fuss over some smelly old bone and gristle, but here it is. Maybe it was just the dogs you wanted all along, huh? They had some meat on them. Not much, but some."
He went inside and lit a kerosene lamp, filling the cluttered room with a steady, orange glow. He was careful to tie up the rawhide thong that served as his lock. The one encouraging thing about the intruder was its ignorance: it didn't seem to understand how doors or windows worked. But it was very curious about them, and that was not encouraging.
He thought about lighting the wood stove, but he decided not to. It was late for him. He normally had supper and went to bed at sundown. He drew the pot of stew from the rear of the stove and lifted the lid to sniff it. It still smelled good. He pushed aside the protective layer of congealed grease and spooned himself a bowlful, then brought it back to the table with the last of the bread.
He chewed slowly, wary of buckshot. He still had all of his own teeth, and he didn't want to lose any of them through a stupid accident. He would pull a broken tooth rather than go to a dentist in town who might save it.
He heard a plane roar overhead, most probably a fighter heading for Lakehurst. He was aware of the ironic contrast between the pilot's way of life and his own, between the technology of the plane and that of his house. Thinking about it pleased him. He had chosen his way of life deliberately. There was nothing in it that he didn't understand, nothing his hand touched that he couldn't repair or rebuild from scratch. He was sure that the pilot couldn't say the same. If any one of a million little wires got crossed, he was just a helpless kid, headed for the ground in a very expensive piece of junk.
He smiled as he acknowledged a flaw in his comparison. The fabric covering his table had come from the hull of an airship more than twenty years ago, and there was no way he could replace it. He had been sorry to see the airships go, because the fabric was more durable than anything he could buy or make. He remembered ...
"The past again," he snorted.
He cleaned the bowl efficiently with a chunk of bread and put it away.
He gnawed on the bread, the last of a batch baked by his friend's wife, and listened for the rain. It didn't come. It would, though. He could safely have a drink. He washed down the bread with clear whiskey from a jar.
He hadn't been concerned about rain in a long time. For-how long?-forty years he'd merely accepted it. When it rained he would get wet, secure in the knowledge that he would eventually be dry, and that was all there was to think about it. But he used to worry about it. At Caroline's insistence he had tried farming, but there was altogether too much hard work and worry involved. Living off the pines was like having the key to a supermarket, provided you knew what you were doing. It never ceased to amaze him how little most people knew.
"Oh, Christ," he groaned aloud. "You're back, are you?"
He heard an obscenely eager snuffling. It reminded him of a dog after a groundhog, magnified a hundred times. But he was the groundhog, and this flimsy house wasn't nearly as secure as a deep burrow.
He extinguished the lamp and took his loaded shotgun from its place beside the door. Heavy though it was, it felt inadequate. Anything capable of making such a noise had the bulk of an elephant.
He went on tiptoe to the window, but low clouds made it very dark outside. Something scraped clumsily against the side of the house.
He wasn't terribly afraid. He had lived for a long time with the foreknowledge of a lonely death, and he had pictured it in all of its forms. Worst of all would be a wasting illness, his body stuck full of tubes and needles in some charity ward while bright young nurses cheerily treated him like a retarded child. Best of all would be a fall on a slippery rock, a bite from a particularly venomous rattler, a misstep in a forest fire. If those accidents proved less than fatal, or if he noted the first signs of a wasting illness, he had made up his mind to turn the shotgun on himself. He had already lived four times longer than either of his children.
He thought of turning the gun on himself now. But what a fool he would be if he were misinterpreting what he heard! Perhaps these noises were being caused somehow by malicious youngsters. He had seen many strange-looking kids lately, and-
The house trembled under the impact of a heavy body.
This was intolerable. He had worked hard at making up the rules for his life, and he had stuck to them. Now, suddenly and unjustly, a wild card had been put into play, a force that was inaccessible to his experience or his intelligence or even his senses. He howled with rage.
"Stop it! Stop it, you bastard! Come in here and get me if you want, but show yourself! Let me see what you are!"
Driven nearly mad by the injustice, frustrated by an enemy he couldn't cut or shoot or even see, the old man threw aside his gun and struggled to open the window. He had time for only one scream as the frame and the glass burst inward around him.
CHAPTER TWO
If you didn't mind disorder, the city room of the Riveredge Banner normally looked like a good place to take a nap. On a typical workday, a few reporters lounged around the untidy office, but they seldom found the energy to attack their typewriters unless Jack Higgins, the managing editor, was present to goad them.
On Wednesday nights, that changed. The paper went to bed on Thursday mornings. Late-breaking stories were covered energetically for the pages that hadn't been locked up in order to give the weekly a look of up-to-the-minute timeliness.
And whenever she had to work on that night, Marcia Creighton found it easy to pretend that she was working for a real newspaper, one that thrived on life-or-death deadline pressures.
It was Wednesday night, but it was still early for the kind of pandemonium that often developed. The real activity wouldn't start until eleven, when the staff would begin drifting in from scattered meetings of municipal governments. By that time, Marcia hoped, she would have completed her story about the township Planning Board and be on her way home.
She might not make it, though. Her efforts to finish her story had been interrupted five or six times by telephone calls: obituaries she had to transcribe, circulation problems she couldn't solve, belated ads she couldn't take. Her conscience wouldn't permit her to ignore a ringing telephone and Ron Green, the only other person in the city room, was busy with his own calls.
Ron was another one who liked to pretend that he was a real newspaperman; although with Ron, it was less a game to make work more interesting than it was an obsessive delusion. He habitually talked and acted like something out of an amateur production of Front Page. She had never actually heard him say "Stop the presses!" but she believed he could have said it with a straight face.
She knew it was unkind to laugh at Ron Green. She could take her job lightly, as a kind of footnote to her existence as a suburban housewife, but Ron's job was his whole life. Now in his mid-thirties, he had worked on a dozen progressively less prestigious newspapers across the country. He had nothing to go home to but a furnished room, a six pack, and a police radio.
He was always talking about "getting a break" or "making the right connections" to land a job on the New York Daily News, but Marcia knew that he didn't stand a chance. With his loud checked jackets and string neckties, they wouldn't have let him through the front door. Even if they did, he would have soon revealed himself as a lousy reporter. He couldn't spell; he couldn't put a sentence together. These faults might have been overlooked if he'd had a flair for gathering news, but he didn't. Even when he got a good story, he managed to screw up the facts. Add to that his age, his beer-belly, his post-adolescent acne, and it was difficult for Marcia to imagine how he'd even managed to get a job on the Banner.
The phone rang. Marcia glanced at Ron's back, emblazoned with blue and yellow checks. He made no move to answer it. She sighed. The call would probably prove to be a funeral director with an obituary, in which case Ron if he did answer it, would ask her to take it from the eminence of his seniority.
"Banner, Mrs. Creighton."
"This is Joe Reilly," the voice on the telephone said. "I have an obit."
"Just a minute, Mr. Reilly," Marcia said, taking her Planning Board story out of her typewriter and rolling in a fresh piece of copy paper.
Unexpectedly, Ron Green heaved his bulk around in his chair. "Hey, is that Joe Reilly?" he demanded. "I been trying to get that son of a bitch all day."
Before Marcia could react, he picked up the phone and started talking. She hung up her extension and waited, not patiently. He could have let her take the obit before crashing in like that; but good manners didn't go with his Front Page act.
"Yeah, I been trying to reach you, Reilly. Yeah, Ron Green. Listen ... I know ... I know ... of course. No, of course not. Yeah, well, news, what news is, it's sometimes embarrassing, that's the name of the game, you know? No ... no ... now, wait a minute ... wait just one minute. Look, Reilly, if a stiff gets up and walks around in your joint, that's news, I don't give a shit whose stiff it is ... What's that supposed to mean? Hey, wait a minute!"
"My God," Marcia said into the silence that followed. "What was that all about?"
"The son of a bitch hung up on me," Ron said. He seemed amazed and aggrieved, even though people were always hanging up on him. "Listen, if he calls back, give him to me, will you?"
"All right, but what's it all about?"
"What it's all about is a lot of crap, if you ask me," Ron said, turning his plaid back to her once more and dialing the phone with the receiver cradled between his cheek and his shoulder. "But you never can tell."
Marcia seethed with a mixture of annoyance and curiosity, but she knew Ron well enough not to show either. If she criticized his bad manners, they would get worse. If she accused him of teasing her with mysterious hints, he would positively torture her with them. He refused to take her seriously as a person, much less as a newspaperwoman. She suspected he acted this way because he felt uncomfortable with women, especially with pretty ones.
In describing herself as a pretty woman, Marcia believed she was merely acknowledging a fact of her existence, no more or less important than the fact that she had two feet. She felt no special tingle of vanity. She had grown accustomed to living with the knowledge.
She did little to enhance her good looks. She disdained makeup. Her black hair was long and straight, parted simply in the middle, and she wore whatever seemed comfortable. Nora Curtis, who could always be counted on to pass along any unflattering remark, said that Marcia's neighbors slightingly referred to her as "that rich hippie."
It didn't matter. After all she'd been through in her thirty-one years, the opinions of her neighbors didn't mean much to her. Security was the only thing that really mattered: security for herself and her children.
The telephone interrupted her thoughts.
"Banner, Mrs. Creighton."
"This is Joe Reilly again. Can I give you that obit, please, without talking to that other guy?"
If she kept her unthinking promise to Ron, she would only prolong her stay. She lowered her voice and said, "Sure, I guess. Only ... well, I'm kind of curious about it myself now."
"Being a funeral director isn't easy, Mrs. Creighton. Some people don't realize there are some things you just don't make jokes about. Not that I mind; nothing bothers me, I've heard it all. I got all that nonsense out of my system when I was studying for my profession. But to the people, the bereaved relatives, nothing could be crueler than having fun at their expense. Do you follow me? I've got to protect their feelings and maintain what you might call the proper image of my profession. A story like that, you put it in the newspaper, it might be good for a laugh to some sick people, but it's going to cause grief elsewhere, and minimizing grief, well, that's what my life's work is all about. Do you follow me?"
"Well, yes, but I don't know what the ... ah ... incident was that you're referring to."
"There wasn't any incident. One of my assistants, a young fellow just out of school ... maybe he was drinking, I don't know. I hope not. I'm a fair man; I've given him another chance. What bothers me is he told somebody about it and it got back to your friend there. This is all off the record, isn't it?"
Marcia restrained her exasperation. He hadn't told her a thing, on or off the record. Maybe Ron Green would get around to telling her. It didn't matter. Time was passing, and she wanted to finish up and go home.
"Of course," she said. "I'll take the obit now."
It was after ten when Marcia had finished her story about the Planning Board. She put her copy in Higgins's IN-basket and returned to her desk to straighten it up. Ron Green was sitting on the edge of her desk. He was apparently in a mood to talk now.
"Let's go have a drink," he said.
She was mildly surprised, and that made her delay a refusal that should have been automatic. "Thanks, but I have to get home. I'm late already."
"Don't you ever relax?"
It was an odd question, since she had so recently been wondering the same thing about him. "Of course," she said a little stiffly. "But I don't drink."
"And you don't smoke and you don't swear. That's what fascinates me about you. Did anybody ever tell you that you look like a witch?"
"No."
"I don't mean the Wicked Witch of the West, with the crooked nose and all, I mean a cute Hollywood version of a witch. Black hair and high cheekbones and hollow eyes. And a widow's peak. You could bewitch me anytime."
"I just want to go home to my husband and my kiddies, Ron. You'll have to find somebody else to bewitch you."
"That's always the story," he sighed.
He was flustering her. She didn't find him at all attractive, but it had been a long time since any man had turned such determined, concentrated attention on her. Coming from Ron Green, it was doubly surprising, as if the water cooler had made a pass at her.
She tried to change the subject. "What were you bugging Joe Reilly about? That sounded kind of interesting, what I heard of it"
"I figured a witch would be interested. Maybe you've got some competition in town. Unless you're responsible. Have you been going around raising the dead lately?"
"Are you going to answer my question, or are you just going to keep being silly?" she said firmly. She slung her bag to her shoulder, making it clear she planned to leave.
"I couldn't check it out. What we'd be doing if we printed it, we'd just be making this guy at the funeral home look like an asshole, that's all."
She tried not to betray her feelings at his choice of words. If she did, his language would get even worse.
"Anyway," he continued, "the way I heard it, this assistant was working alone there last night, at Reilly's. He had drained all the blood out of a stiff and was getting set to pump it full of formaldehyde when it got up to take a stroll. It was a guy who'd been in an auto accident, and he wasn't much to look at, so I guess it was what you would call unnerving. So the stiff gets to the door-maybe ten feet-and then collapses. The guy who saw it, just a kid actually, he shit his pants and went running for a cop. The cop saw the corpse lying by the door, but of course he didn't see how it got there, and what's he going to do, arrest it? So he helps the kid dump it on the table and stays there holding his hand while he finishes the work. That's all there is to it."
Fascinated against her will, Marcia had sat down at her desk again. "Are they sure he was dead?" she asked.
"Oh, hell, yes. If he wasn't dead from the accident, he was dead by the time the undertaker pumped him out. But there was no question about it, because the M.E. said the steering column got him right in the heart. I was just talking to the Medical Examiner and he said he's heard of some pretty bizarre muscular spasms-even some time after death-but this takes the cake. He didn't come right out and say it was impossible, though. I think it's a cute story. But now the assistant won't talk, and the cop don't know anything, and Reilly says he'll sue us if we print it. Fuck it. Tomorrow a man will bite a dog, mark my words. How about that drink?"
"Thanks again, but no again. I have to get home."
"Listen, kiddo," he called after her as she walked to the door. "Someday Robert Redford is going to play me in the movies, and if he asked you for a drink, you'd go. So why not grab the real thing while you've got the chance?"
CHAPTER THREE
As Marcia walked across the darkened parking lot behind the Banner, she was annoyed to discover that Ron Green's story had done unpleasant things to her nerves. She found herself listening for footsteps and straining her eyes to penetrate the more suspicious-looking shadows.
She told herself firmly that she was too old to be scared by silly ghost stories. Besides, she'd once had a real ghost in her own house, and she'd lived through that ordeal without becoming demoralized. Compared to that, Ron's story was insignificant, a mere medical anomaly. It was more disgusting than scary, when she analyzed it.
But her fingers trembled shamelessly when she tried to unlock the door of her car. Once it was open, she slid in hastily and locked it behind her without wasting a motion. She sternly resisted the urge to look behind the front seat.
The next time she drew a night assignment, it might be a good idea to bring Lucifer with her. He wouldn't be a bit of help in an emergency, of course. If danger threatened, he would probably run for his life. But even though Lucifer was an untypical Doberman, the reputation of his breed ought to be enough to discourage muggers.
She was being illogical. A tale of the walking dead had frightened her, not an account of a mugging; and she didn't believe that the dead could walk. What, then, was she scared of? She had to admit that she didn't really know.
She started the engine, but first she yielded to the temptation to check the back seat thoroughly. It was empty.
She couldn't bring Lucy-as he had been so aptly nicknamed-to her night assignments. Ken would make an issue of it, an interminable issue: If you're afraid to go out alone at night, you're showing some good sense at last, and you ought to give up this foolish idea of working when you don't have to, when you have children to take care of, etc., etc., etc.
She had lied to Ron Green. She did take a drink now and then. She felt an urge to have one now; a nice, icy martini, savored somewhere in peace before she went home to face Ken. She considered going back to accept Ron's offer, but she decided against it. She felt like having the drink in solitude. That sounded suspiciously like the first step toward alcoholism, so she put the idea aside entirely.
Once under way, she opened the window to let the warm, damp air of the April night blow in around her. The wind brought something indefinable with it, a memory of youthful restlessness and unfulfilled longings. For a moment the emotion was so strong that her eyes misted.
This was ridiculous. She was heading for a breakdown: first terrified by nothing, then crying at the touch of an April night. She was a happily married woman of thirty-one, the mother of three wonderful children, holder of an interesting job to absorb any excess energies. She recited these facts to herself like the comforting, unexamined litany of a childhood religion. But with a sinking heart she sensed that it was a faith she had outgrown.
Her foot faltered on the accelerator as she saw the ruddy neon of a wayside bar, but she pressed it down firmly. That would be asking for trouble. Asking for company, anyway. She wanted neither. But she might not be able to get that drink when she got home. If she suggested a martini and Ken was sober, he would take it as an invitation to have three; if he was drunk, to have five.
Darkness swallowed the island of neon behind her. The feeble probe of the headlights showed woods on either side of the two-lane highway. The township was booming, as Ken's income testified, and yet there still existed vast chunks that the developers hadn't yet chewed up.
She didn't like the woods. Even this scraggy, suburban forest in the long-tamed East held an echo of the menace she remembered in the Black Hills. There the stars didn't just twinkle, as they did in New Jersey: they flared. She had been aware of them as self-consuming fires, flaming red and blue and green. Nothing she had seen before had prepared her for the sound that a coyote made. No recording could suggest that maniacal, shrieking cackle, echoing in immensity. A second coyote would answer, and they would be like two damned souls at opposite ends of a pervasive galaxy that began at a point just beyond her fingertips and went on forever.
She didn't want to think about the Black Hills. Most of the memories from that period of her life were hidden, as if by a curtain. She feared what lay behind it, but sometimes she was horrified to find herself picking and probing absent-mindedly at its edges. The woods had reminded her of that time. She hoped that they would soon be leveled and replaced by the neat little boxes that Ken designed for the omnivorous developers.
She braked suddenly; and now she could see the hitchhiker running up in the glow of her tail lights. It wasn't too late to retract her impulsive act and step on the gas. He would think that she had played a dirty trick on him, but what did that matter? He was at the door before she could make up her mind. She reached out and unlocked it
"Thanks," he said. He pushed a shapeless bundle into the back seat, then slid in beside her.
He was emaciated. He might have been forty, but he was more probably nineteen. His long hair and beard looked soft against the craggy lines of his face. None of the usual touches of whimsy relieved the almost puritanical simplicity of his faded denim outfit.
"Where are you headed?" she asked.
"Blackwood's Corners." His voice was resonant. His accent suggested the Far West
.
"I can take you most of the way."
"I'm obliged."
Why had she picked him up? Because nobody else would have, certainly; and because she couldn't have stood another minute alone with her thoughts. Neither reason seemed good. But he stared ahead, relaxed, his hands easily at rest on his knees.
"What's going on out there?"
"Ma'am?"
"I've seen a lot of young people in the area lately, strangers in town." She had been choosing her words with care, but she could only end lamely. "I wondered ... a rock concert or something?"
"I wouldn't know, ma'am. I have friends there."
His answer was a masterly piece of evasion. It didn't reveal whether his friends were long-time residents or if they were among the strangers she had observed, but it discouraged further questioning. Marcia wasn't easily discouraged.
"My name's Marcia Creighton, by the way."
Her passenger didn't answer. She found that he was staring at her. Flustered, she returned her full attention to the road. Maybe he had mistaken her friendly overture for an invitation. No, it wasn't that. She had read something quite different in his expression: curiosity and surprise, as if she'd just revealed herself to be a celebrity.
She decided that she was imagining things. He was shy, that was all, and unskilled in polite conversation. She prompted. "And yours is ... ?"
"Saul," he said, and he looked away without acknowledging the smile she intended to be encouraging. She wondered if he had been christened thus, or if the Biblical name was part of his act. The newcomers to the area might be Jesus freaks.
"Maybe I know some of your friends," she suggested.
He didn't respond immediately. From the corner of her eye, she saw that he was again staring at her. At last, with obvious reluctance, he said "Sarah Goodwin? Abel Hopkins?"
She hesitated before shaking her head. For a moment the names had seemed familiar. Dim faces to match them had wavered elusively at the edges of her consciousness. She came to the dissatisfying conclusion that she didn't know the people, that she was familiar merely with the type of name, fusing Hebrew and Anglo-Saxon elements, from history books. The names suggested lean figures in black, trudging through the Massachusetts snow to sit painfully erect through a six-hour sermon on the torments of hell by Jonathan Edwards.
She wanted to know more about Saul and his friends. She told herself that her interest was professional, although he probably would have viewed it as frivolous. She was reluctant to identify herself as a representative of the Press. She wanted Saul to accept her as an equal, as someone who had also looked for the truth in strange places: she had done plenty of hitchhiking in her time; she had lived in communes; she had listened intently to people who claimed to know the one, true path to ... salvation? No, salvation was for individual souls. The person she was trying to remember now had wanted to change the world, to prepare it for a momentous event: a birth; was that it, someone's birth? But-no. She couldn't remember. She'd come close, that time. Frighteningly close.
Covertly, she cast an uneasy glance at Saul. Something about him had almost resurrected her long-buried memories. Maybe it was merely his long hair or the way he was dressed, but she suspected that one of the names he had mentioned had done it. Whatever the reason, the memories seemed inaccessible now.
The fact remained that she had more in common with Saul than he probably suspected. She felt vaguely ashamed of her expensive car, more ashamed of her ulterior motive: to get a story.
She slowed, but she didn't stop, at the turn that would have taken her home.
"You-"
He had started to say something, but then he had cut himself short. How odd: did he know where she lived?
"What were you going to say?" she asked.
"Nothing."
"I'll take you to Blackwood's Corners," she announced. "It's a good fifteen miles, and you won't get another lift at this hour."
"I'm obliged." He couldn't be accused of obsequiousness.
It was Nora Curtis, the neighborhood gossip and self-styled astrologer, who had first called attention to all the "hippies" lately to be seen in the township. Marcia had winced at that word, a slur against many members of a misunderstood generation: her own. Whatever validity the word might once have had was gone-a victim of Charles Manson and Altamont. At fifteen, Marcia had run away from home, confident that love could solve all problems. She had been wrong.
Catchwords aside, Nora's observation was true. A lot of eccentric-looking people, many of them young, many of them bedraggled refugees from the Sixties, had drifted into the area. What had drawn them here? She had been toying with the idea of finding out for a story. She had hesitated to mention the idea to Higgins, however, afraid that her motivation was not entirely professional. Maybe she was seeking the answer to the riddle of her own blacked out past.
Saul was the first one she had questioned, and she was dismayed by her lack of progress. She was further dismayed to notice that her State Police vehicle permit, boldly lettered "PRESS," was attached in plain view to the sun visor of her car. His curiosity and his refusal to engage in conversation became understandable. He was just a kid, after all, a kid in a strange part of the country, and she was a member of the local establishment.
Maybe she could relax him by making small talk, but she couldn't think of any. As the miles rolled by, the only thing that came to her mind was Ron Green's unpleasant story. Well, it might prove to be a good ice-breaker. Most people liked to talk about the occult. It might be just the right subject to open up a religiously oriented young man.
"We had something odd happen in town last night," she said. "I work there, in Riveredge, as a reporter. They were preparing a body in one of the local funeral homes when it got up and tried to walk out the door. Did you ever hear of-"
She stopped short, shocked by his reaction. His face twisted momentarily into a grimace that might have been anguish. He muttered something aloud.
"Are you all right?" she asked nervously.
Saul had recovered completely. He looked calm.
"I was in Vietnam, and I saw some funny things there," he said. "But you don't want to hear about all that."
She was jolted. Without committing a breach of good manners, he had put her down deftly and firmly.
"I didn't mean to upset you," she said. "I was just trying to start a conversation. I'm curious about all the hitchhikers and strangers I've seen around lately. I thought you might be able to tell me something."
He considered her words for a while. Then he said, "I can't speak for anybody else. I came to town to see some old friends, to have a get-together, that's all. You can let me off here."
Marcia awoke to tier surroundings. They had arrived at Blackwood's Corners, a confluence of three country roads marked by a general store, a church, and a few darkened houses. She pulled to a stop near the gas pumps in front of the store.
"As long as I've taken you this far-"
"This is fine," he interrupted, already wrestling his bag from the back seat. "Thanks very much."
She sat and watched as he walked through the glare of the headlights. Long-legged and purposeful, without a backward look, he crossed the main road and strode away down one of the country lanes. He was soon gone from sight.
She thought back to the moment when he had interrupted her obviously ill-chosen story about the reanimated corpse. What had he muttered? Too soon. That's what it had sounded like. What was that supposed to mean? Nothing, of course. Vietnam had left a lot of scars. Saul was just another casualty of the war.
If she tried to share her story with Ken, he would tell her she was crazy for picking up a hitchhiker. Maybe she was. She would have arrived home late anyway, and now it would be nearly midnight before she got there.
Perhaps they would all have gone to bed, and she could have that quiet drink in solitude after all.
CHAPTER FOUR
Ken had designed their home as an advertisement for his professional ability, to show what kind of house he could build when given a free hand and plenty of money. Glass and redwood predominated. Its canted roofs suggested wings, as if it were an ungainly creature straining to take flight from the hill where it had been bound.
Marcia had never really liked it. It was a California house, designed to take advantage of an environment perpetually bright and sunny. Here, it's open, glassy style made the often dismal weather a more intimate and unavoidable part of their lives. No part of it could be called cozy. In their most bitter argument, Marcia had called it a futuristic henhouse. It had taken Ken a long time to forgive her for that.
Now, surprisingly, light flooded from the glass walls of the living room. As Marcia came up the long drive, she saw that lights were on everywhere. Ken's car wasn't in the carport. She felt a chill. Had something happened to one of the children while she'd been dawdling at the office or taking the hitchhiker out of her way?
She ran from her car, not bothering to close the door. Her fears multiplied when Lucifer didn't appear, barking and dancing in circles to celebrate her homecoming. Something was very wrong.
The front door wasn't locked, but that wasn't unusual. She raced up the front stairs and through the brick-walled atrium, another feature inappropriate to the climate: the plastic bubbles that roofed it always leaked when it rained or snowed. She hurried into the immense living room, where Melody sat listening to the stereo.
The spotlights running on two tracks in the high ceiling had been turned to illuminate the Japanese garden outside. One of them was arranged dramatically to spotlight Melody's gold hair. She looked unperturbed-but then, she always did. Even so, her quiet, relaxed pose had a calming effect on Marcia. She paused to catch her breath.
Analyze Melody feature by feature, and you would have said she was a weird-looking girl; but the totality of her face transcended the sum of its parts to produce something that was striking and original and almost alarmingly attractive. Her blue eyes were narrow and slanted over very high and prominent cheekbones. Her nose was short, and tilted up at an angle that might have made it seem ugly on another face. Her mouth was wide, her lips firm and full above a squarish chin that was cleft in the middle. She wore her hair in two gold braids encircling her small, regal head. Her expression was habitually one of total impassivity, but it nevertheless gave to strangers an impression of contemptuous arrogance, even cruelty: with her slanted eyes and lithe, compact body, she might have been a princess of the Huns.
At fifteen, Melody was Marcia's oldest child-her child, not Ken's. She had been conceived at the time of Marcia's nervous breakdown at the commune in the Black Hills, and Marcia didn't know who her father was.
Marcia found the courage necessary to walk into the living room and determine what was going on. Melody turned her expressionless face toward her mother. She could light up a room when she smiled, but she seldom did.
"Lucy's gone," Melody said gravely.
"Oh, God," Marcia groaned, half in relief. "Turn the music down, won't you?"
Melody got up to comply as her mother sank into a chair. Melody had highbrow taste that ran to the more obscure baroque composers. Marcia preferred rock and roll. Sometimes she had the odd feeling that her daughter was more mature than she was.
"What happened?" Marcia asked, when the music had been muted to a silvery whisper.
Melody shrugged. "He just didn't show up for his dinner. The kids carried on something awful. They wouldn't go to bed until Ken promised to drive around and look for him."
"He's probably in love again."
Melody studied her for a long moment, then said: "Maybe. He's been wandering off at night a lot. But I think this is the first time in his life he ever missed his dinner. I think the dognappers got him this time."
"Oh, I don't think so. Who'd steal a Doberman?"
"That's the kind they want. I read in this article. Because everybody is scared and wants to have a killer dog."
"Well. If that's the case, they'll give him back when they find out what they've stolen."
Marcia's relief that her children were safe didn't last long. A sudden pang of grief hit her at the thought of Lucifer's possible theft. His personality was unique among his breed. He would make playful but timid overtures to cats and rabbits. He had always reminded her of Ferdinand the Bull, who would rather smell flowers than face matadors. The idea of his theft by men who would try to train him to viciousness was almost unbearable.
Nor was that her only worry. "How did Ken take all this? I mean, what kind of mood was he in?"
"You mean, was he drunk?" Melody asked.
Marcia was often disconcerted by her daughter's talent for discerning her unspoken thoughts.
"Not really," Melody went on, as if answering herself. "He was sort of harassed and fretful, you know, with the kids acting up. And he thinks Lucifer is a royal pain in the ass anyway. I guess mostly he was happy for an excuse to get out of the house."
Melody had resisted early efforts to make her call Ken "daddy," and she had always felt free to speak her mind about him. In many ways, she was more like a younger sister to Marcia than a daughter. For babysitting wages, she took much of the burden of the younger children-Roger, ten, and Karen, eight-from Marcia's shoulders. Marcia wasn't sure whether this arrangement was the healthiest one for her and Melody or not, but it seemed to work smoothly; and it permitted her to keep her job at the Banner.
It was awkward, therefore, to assume a parental manner as she asked, "And why aren't you in bed?"
Melody shrugged. Marcia thought she caught a flicker of emotion on her daughter's face, an emotion that might have been anxiety.
"You have school tomorrow, don't you?"
"School sucks."
"Oh, Melody. I wish you wouldn't talk that way."
"Well, it does. When I get interested in something, it always turns out to be so easy that it bores me. And the other stuff just bores me, period. Plus all the kids act like they're still twelve years old."
Marcia stared out at the well-swept carpet of pebbles, dominated by a grotesque stone god, that was the Japanese garden. Melody was a precocious girl, mentally and physically mature beyond her fifteen years. Because she was so intelligent and self-sufficient, because she looked and talked so much like a self-possessed young adult, it was easy to put aside her problems until more pressing matters had been settled. But she did have problems. She couldn't relate to her contemporaries, she had no close female friends, and she habitually chilled suitors with her incisive wit. It must have taken great emotional effort for her to maintain her cool facade at all times, and maybe that effort would eventually prove too much of a strain for someone who was really still a child.
But, as always seemed to be the case, this wasn't the time to hold a serious talk with Melody. She ought to be in bed. Marcia herself was tired, and she had to look in on the other children.
"School bored me, too," Marcia said, rising. "But you have to put up with it so you can go on to college, where it gets interesting."
"You didn't go to college," Melody stated.
"No, but I regret it. Get ready for bed, OK?"
Marcia left the room, fully aware that her argument had been unconvincing; but it had been the best she could offer at this hour, in this state of mind. Ken had once told her that the motto which had sustained him through the army had been "Grit your teeth and put in your time." Had this become the motto of her own life, and was she trying to pass on this wisdom to her daughter? It was an arid philosophy, but it worked from day to day.
She gently opened the door of the room that the two younger children shared, an arrangement that Roger was growing to resent. He had reached the age when he preferred snakes and turtles to girls, and he regarded his little sister as the worst of a bad lot.
Marcia was surprised, even so, to find them sleeping in their own beds. In far less traumatic crises than the present one, Karen would wait for Roger to drop off, then sneak into his bed and cuddle up beside him. That never failed to provoke a bellow of rage from Roger when he woke up in the morning.
They had inherited her coloring: raven-black hair, dark eyes, rosy-white complexions. She watched them sleeping for a while by the dim illumination of their night-light, then stepped forward quietly to fuss with Karen's covers. The act was unnecessary, but she wanted to do something to express the sudden upsurge of warmth she felt at the sight of her sleeping children.
She was forced to admit that life was more than an exercise in meaningless stoicism. Quiet moments like this gave meaning to all of it
"Mommy?"
Karen's sleep had apparently not been sound. Eyes that seemed bottomless in their night-adapted darkness gazed up at Marcia.
"Shh. Sleep now."
"Mommy, are the doctors going to cut Lucy up into pieces for experiments?"
"Good God. Of course not! Who told you that?"
"Roger said."
She shot a vexed glance at Roger's bed. He slept like a log.
"That's not true, honey. He was telling you a story. Daddy will find Lucy. Go to sleep now, and he'll be here in the morning when you wake up."
"Why is Roger so mean to me?"
"Hush. He feels bad about Lucy himself, and so he imagined the worst possible thing he could think of. But Lucy will be all right. You'll see."
The little speech was wasted, because Karen had already drifted back to sleep. Marcia made a final adjustment to her covers and stole from the room, closing the door quietly behind her. She had resisted telling Karen a truth that seemed obvious to her: no one would waste a dog as valuable as Lucifer on medical experiments. Growing up in this ostentatious house, the children could easily fall into the trap of believing that money was omnipotent
She rapped lightly at Melody's door.
"Come in."
Her eldest daughter sat on the edge of her bed in a white nightdress, giving her hair its customary hundred, brush-strokes. It was as long as Marcia's own, even fuller, and it gleamed like shimmery metal. Melody looked younger, and uncharacteristically vulnerable when her hair was unbound like this.
"What's wrong, Mom?"
"I ... " She had entered with the vague idea of giving Melody some comfort, perhaps adding something to her earlier, inadequate words. But Melody had detected her uneasiness. "Nothing. What time did Ken go out?"
"I don't know. Eight, eight-thirty."
Marcia was startled. It was now well past midnight He couldn't have spent all this time looking for the dog. He wasn't even especially fond of the dog. Her earlier anxieties, still without clear focus, began to return. Maybe Ken had picked up the wrong hitchhiker-nonsense: Ken wouldn't stop for a hitchhiker.
"You really ought to be in bed."
"I'm getting there," Melody said with a shrug. "Sometimes ..."
"What?"
"Sometimes I just don't feel like sleeping," she said, but the statement had overtones of evasion.
"Do you feel like talking about it?"
Melody managed a laugh. "There's nothing to say about it I'm just not sleepy, that's all."
"Good night, dear."
"Night."
Marcia remembered the quiet drink she had wanted earlier. She went to the kitchen and mixed it. She was just pouring it from the pitcher into one of the glasses Ken kept chilled in the freezer when headlights swept across the windows.
"Damn," she breathed, but she went to the freezer and got a second glass. There was enough left in the pitcher to fill it She put an olive in each, and she was just carrying the drinks into the living room when Ken entered through the atrium.
"Wow," he said. "That's what I call service."
She smiled as she set the drinks on a table before the unlighted fire place, but she was bitterly disappointed. "You didn't find Lucifer," she said.
Ken was a big man, heavier than he ought to be, with a ruddy complexion. He was handsome, and he knew that his grin could be charming. People who didn't know the situation sometimes remarked that Melody had inherited her blue eyes and blonde hair from her father, but Ken would always set them straight. In his fawn leisure suit, colorful sport shirt, and Gucci loafers, he seemed overdressed for hunting a stray dog.
He shrugged. "I went around to the neighbors. Told the police. It's too late for an ad in your paper, isn't it?"
Marcia disliked the way he always said "your" paper, as if referring to something that existed solely for her amusement. But maybe he didn't mean it that way. She said "Yes."
"Then I popped into the office to finish up some specs. Took a roundabout way home, still looking. No dice. I wouldn't get my hopes up, honey. Thieves put a premium on Dobies, and Lucy would be easy to steal."
Ken knocked back his drink in two swallows, then went to the kitchen to mix some more. Marcia took a sip of hers and shivered. She wondered why the drink had seemed so desirable in anticipation and now she didn't like the taste of the martini at all.
She felt very tired.
CHAPTER FIVE
A piercing scream wrenched Marcia into awareness.
"Whuzz?" Ken grunted. She hadn't heard him come to bed.
"Go back to sleep," she snapped as she sat upright, listening hard, and the bed sagged beside her as Ken complied.
In the darkness, her feet found the slippers beside the bed. A light rain pattered against the windows. The glowing green dial of the bedside clock said four. Ken snored softly, scenting the air with gin.
"No no no!"
That had been Melody, and Marcia was on her feet and through the door before the scream reached its hysterical peak. She assumed it was merely a nightmare, because she hadn't heard Lucifer bark. She was halfway to her daughter's door before she remembered that Lucifer was gone, that a flesh-and-blood menace might await her. The thought didn't slow her down.
But the blast of light as Marcia flipped the switch revealed Melody alone, crouching in a corner of her room, staring wide-eyed and frightened at her wildly tangled bed.
"Melody!"
"No, don't touch me-no!"
Marcia didn't know what to do, but she followed her instinct without question and tried to shake her daughter into full consciousness. Melody fought against her for only an instant, then sagged limply into her arms.
"It was a dream, honey. It was only a dream. Come lie down."
"No!" Melody almost screamed. Her whole body tensed like a steel spring at the breaking-point as she thrust Marcia from her. "Sleep ... it's worse than dying. It's like there's nobody home, it's like going out and leaving a door unlocked, and anything can come in and take you over ... "
Marcia's neck prickled at this morbid fantasy, at the conviction in Melody's tone as she spoke.
"Honey, it's all right. You're safe. Those things don't happen, except in dreams. You were having a bad dream. It wasn't real."
Melody was wide awake now and well on her way toward composing the inscrutable, cat-like mask that she presented to the waking world. But Marcia could see that even now, wide awake, her daughter was still terrified.
"It was a nightmare," Marcia insisted. "It's what you get for watching all those horror flicks on TV. Nothing can take over your body while you sleep. It just doesn't happen."
Melody smiled shyly as she apparently came to realize the foolishness of her fantasy.
"It was one hell of a dream," she said softly. "I can remember it now as if I'd really been there."
"Sit up and tell me about it, if you want to," Marcia urged, drawing her to her feet. "I'll make your bed for you."
Marcia was momentarily shocked by the condition of the sheets. They were soaking wet. As a child, Melody had never wet the bed. Then she realized that they must be soaked with sweat. Melody's nightgown was wet, too, and her hair hung dark and limp with perspiration. She went to feel the girl's forehead, but she had no fever. Her skin was cool, even clammy.
Marcia stripped the bed and wrestled the damp mattress over to present its dry side. She thought of suggesting that Melody take a shower, but that was ridiculous. The important thing was to get her settled down for sleep again quickly. Maybe it would be a good idea to keep her home from school in the morning. Well, that decision could be postponed. She wanted to get some more sleep herself before morning.
"Change your nightgown, dear," she said, handing her a fresh one from the dresser. "I'll get clean sheets."
In the hallway, Marcia paused at the door of the linen closet and listened to the rain. She was drawn to the window at the end of the hall. It was raining much harder. She peered into the blackness. Would the rain wash out scents that might help Lucifer find his way home?
She returned to find Melody nude, in the act of reaching for her clean nightgown. Embarrassed, she delayed her entrance, but she couldn't help watching, touched by a confusing mixture of motherly admiration and-could it be envy? Melody had passed beyond the trembling brink of adolescence to full womanhood. Her breasts and buttocks were taut with youthful musculature. She was fitted as snugly as possible into her healthily glowing skin. Probably this newly acquired nubility was the cause of her late-night hysterics. Marcia's emotion changed to sadness at the passing of Melody's childhood, not untinged with sadness at the passing of her own youth.
"Tell me about your dream, sweetheart," she said, entering briskly with the crisp sheets.
"I had this brother," Melody began thoughtfully, smoothing her nightdress as she perched on the arm of the easy chair by the window. "Only not exactly a brother. I can't explain that very Well, but I understood it in the dream. And he lived in, like, another world. Another planet, maybe, because everything was different-in a crazy way that I can't really find the words for."
Marcia only half heard her. The details of the dream were unimportant; the important thing was to encourage Melody to talk. Meanwhile, her mind was chewing on a question she had put aside earlier: why had Ken dressed with such casual elegance to go looking for a stray dog?
" ... like in this world, we just take for granted that angles are put together in a certain way, as they taught us in Geometry. Only in that other world, the angles are all fucked up-"
"Melody!"
"Sorry. The angles are all different, you know? Like you turn a corner, and instead of being where you expect to be, you wind up in the middle of the next block. My brother understood all this; he was used to it, and he tried to calm me down and explain it. And I said walking, I think, but that's wrong, too, because we got from one place to another by ... a different way. I can't explain that."
Ken was forty-two years old, further than she was from youth; perhaps foolish enough to try to recapture it by pretense. Marcia made the sheet crack vigorously as she floated it above the bed, then slid it to rest in position.
"There were mountains that went up so high you had to bend your head way back, to see the tops of them, like jagged black fangs against an icy-green sky. And there was a lake of cold fire, only when I scooped it up, it wasn't fire, or water, either, it was some stuff that broke apart in a million little diamonds and clung to my arms."
"What did this brother of yours look like?" Marcia asked, when Melody had remained silent for a time.
"He ... he didn't like for me to see him. That business with the angles had something to do with it He was very clever about standing in just the right place so that I could never look at him directly. Like someone who stands right behind your shoulder, only it was more complicated than that. I got a glimpse, though, when I got used to the way things were set up. It was ... well, he was pretty awful. Kind of stretched out in a funny way, all long legs and skinny arms. Hairy, all covered with fur, like an animal."
"Sounds pretty disgusting."
"No. That was the funny part. He was disgusting by our standards, sure, but that didn't bother me. I could sense that he was really very fond of me, that he knew me from way back, that we'd always been-well, brother and sister. And in the dream, I just accepted the way he was; I didn't even question it."
Marcia stepped back from the bed. "You ought to lie down now."
Melody shook her head quickly. "Not yet. The really awful part of the dream ... see, I was in this crazy world, this dream world; only, all the time I was in it, I knew that the real world existed, that my bedroom was here, that I was actually lying asleep in my bed. Did you ever know things like that when you were dreaming?"
Marcia considered. "I don't know. I don't think so."
"It was the first time I ever had a dream like that, knowing those things, and it scared me. Then-in the dream still-I was lying in my bed, and my brother was trying to get into this world-through me, sort of. He was trying to get inside my head and take me over, so that he could be in this world."
Marcia was satisfied that her earlier guess had been correct. Melody's dream had been blatantly, outrageously sexual. The elongated arms and legs, the tall mountains, the lake, the fear of penetration-it was a virgin's nightmare. She smiled softly to herself.
Melody startled her by abruptly changing the subject and asking, "What do you suppose ever happened to the ghost?"
Marcia shook her head in mock exasperation. "Do you realize that it's five o'clock in the morning, miss? The ghost didn't have anything to do with your nightmare, so let's not start setting you up for another one."
Melody walked listlessly to the bed, apparently ready for sleep again. "This brother I had in the dream-something about the way I felt reminded me of the way I used to feel when the ghost was around. I can't pin it down any better than that, but it was the same kind of feeling."
"The unknown, that's all," Marcia suggested. "The unfamiliar. That's all they have in common. Both scary in the same way."
"Maybe," Melody said dubiously, slipping between the sheets.
"No more nightmares, OK?" Marcia kissed her on the forehead. "Shall I leave a light on?"
"I'm not a baby," Melody said with a touch of vexation. More softly, she said, "I'm sorry I woke you, Mom."
Marcia wanted to run back and hug her, hard. Instead, she said lightly, "Don't mention it. That's what mothers are for."
After determining that the other children were sleeping soundly-with Karen now in Roger's bed-Marcia went down to the kitchen. She turned on no lights at first, but gazed through the sliding doors at the pale glow in the sky and wondered if it were the dawn, or the glow of reflected lights on low clouds. She wanted to step out onto the wet grass and feel the rain touching her face, but some impulse toward matronly propriety restrained her.
The ghost. She had been thinking about that earlier this evening. They had all called it the ghost, although it had apparently been a much more academically respectable and well-documented phenomenon: a poltergeist.
Whatever it was, it had driven Ken right up the wall. Here was this showpiece he had built, this testimonial to his skill as an architect-and it had a ghost in it. He had denied its existence. He had accused Melody-bitterly, at times-of faking its manifestations. He had tried to suppress publicity with paranoid zeal.
The ghost had stayed with them for six months, approximately two years ago. Windows had shattered spontaneously. Objects had been hurled across rooms with explosive force-in one instance, a desk that Melody couldn't possibly have lifted, much less thrown across a room. Monstrous footfalls had been heard. Everyone had taken it rather well except Lucifer, who had been totally demoralized; and of course Ken, who had seen it as an obscure practical joke reflecting on his professional ability.
The story had leaked out. A team of researchers from a prestigious university had worn down Ken's opposition and turned the house into an electronics laboratory for a week or so. The ghost had disappointed them, not stirring a finger while they were here. Once they were gone, it indulged in a final orgy of china-smashing and table-toppling. Then it had disappeared, apparently for good.
Melody had been absolved early of any direct responsibility; but one of the researchers had told Marcia that a young adolescent, usually a girl, was often to be found in the neighborhood of such phenomena. He had theorized-with many qualifications-that an unconscious, uncontrolled outburst of psychic energy from such an adolescent was at the root of the trouble.
While standing at the kitchen door, Marcia had been aware of a strange noise for some time, and now it began to register on her consciousness. It was a kind of whistle, so high-pitched as to be almost inaudible, coming and going with a predictable regularity. She took an involuntary step back from the glass door as a shadow fell on it. The noise became ever so slightly louder and deeper. It was unmistakably a whimper: the anguished sound of a creature that desperately wanted to call for help without drawing too much attention to itself.
"Lucy?" she cried, struggling with the catch of the door. "Lucy!"
The door and the screen slid open, and almost simultaneously, a hard wet body bolted, in, nearly knocking her off her feet. She heard a frenzied scrabble of claws as Lucifer dove under the kitchen table, a thud as his head hit the wall.
"For God's sake, Lucy!" she cried, snapping on the kitchen light. "You scared us all half to death. Where on earth have you been?"
Under the table, Lucifer's huge black body shuddered in uncontrollable spasms. He was soaked and muddy. His dark, liquid eyes seemed to plead for mercy.
"What happened, Lucy? You're a good boy. There's a good doggie. You're safe ... "
She reached under the table.
A deep growl rumbled in Lucifer's massive chest.
CHAPTER SIX
Having covered the Planning Board the previous night, Marcia didn't have to be at the Banner office until noon. After seeing Ken and the kids off, she was thinking about going back to bed for an hour or so when the phone rang.
"Damn it!" She had almost tripped over Lucy, who always raced her for the phone when it rang.
"What?" asked the voice on the phone.
"I'm sorry. Hello."
"Marcia? This is Jack." It was Jack Higgins, the managing editor. "What've you got cooking today?"
"Well ... " Marcia wasn't good at coming up with fast answers to questions like that, and Higgins knew it. He had trapped her into more than one dismal assignment by taking advantage of this failing.
"Good. There's this old screwball out at Blackwood's Corners who's been seeing things. Called me up yesterday afternoon as I was leaving the office. His name is ... dum dum dum ... Peachtree, believe it or not, and they know where to find him at the general store. Do it now, before he has second thoughts about spilling his guts. You can sell it to the wires if you want to, but save something for us."
"Wait a minute," she said hastily. She was familiar with Higgins penchant for hanging up on a mystifying note. "What's he been seeing? What's this all about?"
"He didn't want to say much over the phone. He's crazy, probably. But we haven't had a good Jersey Devil story in five years or so, and I figure it's about time. If you really think this guy is off in outer space, if he doesn't know what day it is, then forget it. Otherwise, keep it light."
"Don't hang up, Jack. What's the Jersey Devil?"
"Jeez, kid, where've you been? That's what keeps the presses rolling when nothing else is going on. We got clips up the kazoo. Look them over. According to one version, a halfwit got herself raped by the Devil back in colonial times, and the offspring has been running around loose in the pines ever since. It's supposed to be like a giant kangaroo with bat wings, no kidding, plus other embellishments that slip my mind at the moment."
Marcia groaned. "This sounds like a job for Ron Green."
"The very name that came first to my mind, but he's out chasing hippies. Our fair township is being overrun by them, Ron says."
"Oh, no. I wanted to do that story. I was going to talk to you about it."
"Well, you got to speak up, sweetie, not just sit around looking cute. Ron got here first."
"But he isn't ... right for it Those people won't talk to him," she said without thinking; and then she began to regret her words.
"Well ... " Higgins seemed to be thinking. "Well, I'm inclined to agree with you. But he thought of it, so I let him do it. But wait. He won't take his own pictures, claims that's not how they do things on the Daily News. You know Ron. A story like this, the pictures are the whole thing, and I can't spare him a photographer. So you hook up with him sometime this week and get head shots of the crazoids he's talking to. Also the dumps they're living in, or whatever. And try to talk to them yourself. If you get stuff that he doesn't, you file it, and we'll pull it together here. It will piss him off, but I'm at the point with him where I don't care whether he's pissed off or not. Take your camera today, too, and get a shot of Peachtree. If you get a picture of the Jersey Devil, I'll personally see to it that you get a five dollar raise."
"Goodbye, yourself," she said into the dead phone, then scratched Lucy's ear reassuringly when he seemed upset by her tone of voice. "Not you, lamb."
She realized that she'd made a bad mistake in disparaging Ron Green to Jack Higgins, a smiling assassin. Now he was using her to manipulate Ron into an untenable position. When her material was combined with Ron's-or, worse yet, used in preference to his-he would object loudly. He might even issue an ultimatum, which Higgins would gladly accept. Ron would be out of a job again, and he would be lucky to find another one on a shopping throw away.
She went upstairs, with Lucifer following, and changed her nightgown for jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers. Mr. Peachtree probably wouldn't approve of her outfit, but she didn't plan to waste much time on him. She was dressing with the young people in mind, knowing that she could relate to them better than any balding, beer-bellied cynic in a cheap suit. She wanted that story. It was hers. If her efforts hurt Ron by showing him up-well, that was his own fault.
She sat down on the edge of her bed for a moment, dismayed by her own hard-heartedness. This wasn't like her. She'd never before looked on her job as a struggle for the survival of the fittest. But she was upset. She had a daughter who might be headed for the kind of breakdown she'd once had; she had a husband who was probably sneaking around with another-and no doubt younger-woman. There: she'd stated both facts bluntly, facts she hadn't wanted to face last night.
"And on top of it all, I've got you," she said, thumping Lucifer's resonant rib cage. "Where were you last night, baby? My theory is that the dognappers caught you and you escaped, the way you looked and acted. Growling at mama. Shame on you!"
Lucifer looked suitably ashamed, but he kept wagging his stump at all the attention. Literally dozens of people, even strangers in the street, had cautioned her about the nasty reputation that Dobermans' had for turning on their masters, but she'd always laughed in their faces. They didn't know Lucy. The dog's uncharacteristic performance last night had shaken her profoundly, reviving memories of all those warnings. He must have had a truly harrowing scare, but he was himself today. She wished he could talk.
She got her Nikon and gadget bag from the closet. She used her own equipment in preference to the twin-lens reflexes that the paper would have provided. Higgins had grumbled about it at first, as he would grumble about any deviation from time-honored routine, but even he had been forced to give grudging praise to some of her pictures. She believed that she was a better photographer than she was a reporter. Maybe she could make a living by photography if Ken ...
"No, you're staying home, baby," she told Lucy as he flung himself excitedly against the front door. "You're staying indoors, as a matter of fact. I know, I know. But we can't have you getting stolen again. Try to pretend that you're a good boy, OK?"
She walked out to her car, steeling herself against the whimpers she heard behind the closed door. He might show his displeasure by pulling all the covers off the beds and all the towels from the bathroom racks, but he had been cured long ago of worse habits. The kids would be home by four to let him out, and he would probably stick close to them.
The man at the general store in Blackwood's Corners seemed more interested in her T-shirt, worn without a bra, than he did in her questions.
"Some camera you got there," he said, ostensibly studying the Nikon slung around her neck.
"Thanks. But do you know a man named Peachtree?"
"Oh, sure. Peachy, everybody calls him, and he pretends to get mad about that, but he likes the attention. Self-reliant old coot. Won't even apply for Social Security; says he never put a penny into it Still goes out at his age and jacks deer."
"Does what?"
"Takes his old pickup down a fire lane where the deer feed, turns on his spotlight, the deer freeze, and blam! Peachy's got meat on the table for the next month or so. Only don't put that in the paper, you'll just get him in trouble with the wardens."
"I don't want to make trouble for him. I'm only interested in this thing he says he saw."
"Hoo boy." The storekeeper laughed for what seemed a long time, then took his glasses off to dry his eyes on his sleeve. "What is it, flying saucers again?"
Marcia's suspicions were verified, and she smiled wryly. She couldn't answer the question. She didn't know what Peachtree had seen." The Jersey Devil had been Higgins's idea, and her knowledge of that subject was too sketchy for her to suggest it.
"Has he seen flying saucers?" she asked.
"To hear him tell it, you'd think there was a regular scheduled flight out there. Noises. Lights in the sky."
"You talking about Peachy?" The speaker had entered the store unnoticed by Marcia. He was a lanky old man in loose overalls.
"This here young lady is from the paper up to Riveredge, Alvin. She wants to interview Peachy."
When the man smiled, his face showed deep creases suggesting kindliness. "It ain't flying saucers this time. Is that what you been telling her, George?"
"I don't know what to tell her, Alvin. I ain't seen Peachy in weeks."
"Well, ma'am, you got to understand that Peachy is an odd sort of person."
"I told her that," the storekeeper said.
"He lives like a hermit," Alvin continued, ignoring the interruption, "but at the same time, every so often he gets the yen to have people listen to him and make a fuss over him. So he comes out of the woods with some crazy story and tells whoever will listen. Anybody who stays out there for six months on end, even if he don't drink bootleg whiskey or applejack, he's going to start seeing things. When was it, fifteen-twenty years ago? He called up the papers about a flying saucer he seen; they come and took his picture and made a big fuss over him. I guess he figures hell repeat his former triumph with this snake thing."
"He told you about it?" Marcia asked.
"Sure, he's all excited about it. Scared, too, though he don't want to let on. I drop in on Peachy every once in a while. He's an old man, you see-" Alvin was pushing seventy himself, she guessed-"and I just look in to see he's OK. This thing's come snuffling around his house two, three times in the past couple weeks. Claims it killed two of his dogs, but I think he's got them confused with a couple dogs he lost ten years ago. Says this thing sounds like a consumptive steam engine, nosing and poking around his doors and windows. He seen it once. A big, black thing, he says, like a snake with long legs. It whipped around a tree so fast that his eye couldn't follow it, then it was gone. Sort of like a weasel, I guess, only a hundred times bigger. You can't say we don't make good applejack around here."
"You figure Peachy's monster, that's what's bothering your livestock?" the storekeeper asked.
Alvin's face lost its good-humored set. His calloused fingers drummed for a moment on the counter top. Marcia sensed that the storekeeper had joked about an inappropriate subject.
"That's a dog," Alvin said. "That's some goddamned no-good dog I'm going to drill right through his black bastard heart. I beg your pardon, young lady."
Marcia had winced at the idea of shooting a dog, not at Alvin's language. Suppose he shot a straying Lucy by mistake? But this was too far for Lucy to stray.
"Maybe the hippies are doing it," the storekeeper suggested.
"Hippies," Alvin snorted. "They just want to sit around in a circle and chant all night and smoke their funny cigarettes. I watched them close; closer than they ever dreamed, and they ain't up to no harm. Dumb, maybe. But they're just wasting their own time and hurting themselves, not other folks. The ones out to Falls Road, they got this goat there, and they take better care of it than you'd take of your favorite dog. I figure they like animals."
"Some dog is killing your animals?" Marcia asked.
Alvin sighed. "Not just mine. And killing them, that would be better than leaving them to bellow and bleed to death. Some son of a bitch dog, pardon me, just wants the choice parts, so he comes along and snaps them off, neat as a razor cut"
Marcia's stomach felt queasy, and she didn't want to hear winch parts the dog preferred.
"No human being, least of all hippies who spend all day combing a good-for-nothing goat, would be that mean," Alvin said. "I come in here for another box of them 30-30 hollow points, George. I'll take them and be on my way."
"I think old Alvin's fighting a war," the storekeeper said after the tall man had left with his purchase. "Either that or his eyesight's gone completely. That's the second box of bullets in two weeks."
"Who was that?"
"Alvin Walker. Got a big dairy farm two, three miles out; two hundred acres or so. He could sell it this afternoon to a developer for half a million dollars, but he says Florida's too hot for him and he'd rather milk cows than watch TV. Sees less money in a year than I do in a month. Some folks are just plain nuts. Him and Peachy, they speak the same language."
Marcia made a mental note of the name. She had instinctively liked the old man, and she believed he would be an excellent source of information on the hippies-as to her distress she found herself thinking of them now.
Alvin Walker had convinced her that Peachy was, as Higgins had so aptly put it, "off in outer space," and she was fairly sure that he would have no printable story for her. But she felt obliged to see for herself, and she wrote down the complicated directions that the storekeeper gave her.
She turned from the blacktop to a gravel road, from the gravel to a dirt road, from the dirt road to something that was less than a pair of ancient wheel-ruts through the piney woods. She drove slowly for a long time, and then the track ended in a bare dirt yard.
She sat in the car for a while, drinking in the scene. It suggested a way of life that she had never experienced, not even through books or movies. Half a dozen junk cars in varying stages of dismemberment stood around the yard, presumably cannibalized to keep one vehicle running. The house itself had a log cabin as its nucleus. From there, frame additions had been made at random, covered with tar paper or galvanized iron. The work had been done by someone who may have heard that there was such an art as carpentry, and who had tried to reinvent that art in total isolation.
Maybe there was a story here-not a story about a monster, but a story about Peachy himself. She fitted a wide-angle lens to her camera and began to take pictures before she got out of the car.
Going closer, she saw an impressive set of antlers over the door. Reddish hides, foxes on closer inspection, were nailed to the door of an attached shed. There were some raccoon hides, too. The shed was full of burlap bags containing-she paused to check-pine cones. She had heard that some people collected these for sale to manufacturers of Christmas decorations.
The atmosphere was warm and drowsy. Except for the excited scolding of a blue jay, it was silent. That was odd. Alvin Walker had mentioned dogs. Perhaps they were all off on a romp with their master.
She knocked timidly at the door.
"Mr. Peachtree?"
The blue jay squawked more raucously. She wondered what it was like in these silent woods at night, in this jerry-built house without electricity. She could imagine it. She could even imagine something that came snuffling around the doors and windows "like a consumptive steam engine."
"Mr. Peachtree!"
She knocked so forcefully that the door drifted open. The wood near its makeshift fastening had been broken. She peered into the dark, cool, cluttered room. Overriding the sour odors of a careless hermit's lair was a smell at once familiar and ominous. It was only much later that she connected it in her mind with the odor of a butcher shop.
It took her a while to realize just what she was looking at, because she had never seen anything even remotely like it before. Her eyes scanned the room once, twice. She was looking at Mr. Peachtree.
Something had torn him apart.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ken Creighton quietly locked the bathroom door behind him before turning on the taps at the sink. Merely closing a door meant nothing to Judy. She felt no need for privacy, and she couldn't comprehend anyone else's need for it. Until he'd spoken to her, she'd never bothered to close the door of the bathroom when she relieved herself. Even now, she sometimes forgot.
Ken avoided looking at his reflection as he removed his bridge, rinsed it, and dusted it with white adhesive powder from a small flask in his pocket. Not until it had been fitted firmly in place did he confront his mirror image and try on a wry smile. He told himself that the crinkles at the corners of his eyes were becoming, but he remained unconvinced. He looked tired.
Judy's lack of self-consciousness had once seemed one of her most appealing traits. He remembered vividly their first afternoon in a motel, when she had shucked the clothes from her sun-browned body so quickly and efficiently. The act of disrobing and the fact of being naked held no special meaning for her. Taking off her clothes was just a necessity for making love, not a preliminary part of the lovemaking ritual.
Ken had found her attitude refreshing. What he liked to think of as her freedom from false modesty suggested that she might be free from all the other little hangups that made life so much more complicated than it had to be. She might, by her example, lead him back to innocence and honesty. Back to youth, perhaps. His smile in the mirror became slightly sardonic.
As if cued by his thoughts, the doorknob rattled.
"Just a minute," he called, trying not to sound annoyed.
She didn't answer. She probably didn't need to use the bathroom, but was just bored with being alone. She was easily bored, but he was always able to divert or entertain her. He found himself, as he so often did, contrasting her with Marcia, who never seemed to need diversion or entertainment. Marcia was always happiest when wandering inside the complexities of her own head. Being with Judy, even with a bored and impatient Judy, was preferable to being with someone who, he often suspected, would rather be alone.
Perhaps he ought to try harder to emulate Judy's style and abandon all secretiveness. She wouldn't care, most likely, whether he wore a bridge or not. Even the sight of it might not arouse her disgust. Worse, it might arouse her childlike curiosity. She would pick it up, inspect it like a new toy for a moment, then forget about it.
No, he couldn't forsake his fastidious ways, not entirely. He was too acutely aware of the fine line between eroticism and revulsion. Stroking Marcia's long, black hair with his lips was not the same thing as finding a strand of it on his toothbrush. Had his love for his wife died a natural death, or had the necessity of living with her killed it? He didn't know.
He had no reason to remain in the bathroom. Now he was indulging a whim to be alone and exclude Judy from his life while he sorted out his feelings. He would have found such an indulgence exasperating in Marcia. Had he become like her? He would have to try harder to improve himself. For Judy's sake, he added.
Resisting the inclination to wrap a motel towel around his waist, he opened the door and stepped into the bedroom. Judy stood naked at the window, staring through the Venetian blinds at the intermittent flow of traffic on the dark highway. For a moment he studied the glow of lamplight on her beige skin, banded at her buttocks and breasts by the pale ghost of her swim suit. He contemplated the smooth length of her legs, the perky uptilt of her tits, the taut tuck of her ass. Then propriety reasserted itself.
"Christ," he breathed, moving forward quickly to shut the blinds. "Anybody could see you."
She shrugged. Her breasts quivered delightfully. "There's nobody out there."
She looked up at him. Her face was smooth and ingenuous. The shortness of her curly hair and its bleached blondeness accentuated her large, dark eyes. Her mouth was wide. The thick protuberance of her lower lip almost caricatured sensuality. She wasn't especially pretty, but she looked like what she was: a damned good lay. His irritation faded. Standing close enough to feel her radiant body-warmth, he sensed a sluggish stirring in his prick that he wouldn't have believed possible. He'd screwed her twice this afternoon-this evening, as it had unexpectedly become. Judy's eyes lowered. She saw that his cock was beginning to rise.
"Tiger," she murmured, slipping easily into his arms. "Let's fuck some more, O.K.?"
"I ought to go home," he said. He knew that he wouldn't.
"You ain't leaving here with that hard-on, man. I got it up for you, and I don't want you taking it home to stick in your wife," she said.
Her words might have made him wince if she hadn't chosen that moment to reach down and tickle his prick with her fingertips. She raised its swelling head against her dark bush. She massaged it against her cunt lips, greasy with the blend of their sexual juices.
He slipped his fingers into the close-fitting cap of her yellow curls, toying with them, stroking down to her neck and her slim shoulders. He lowered his head to take one of her nipples into his mouth, licking it in slow circles until it thrust forth like the tip of a little finger. He eased her toward the disordered bed. Her fingers delicately skinned his cock as it continued to rise.
The television set she had switched on during his absence was a peripheral nuisance, but he didn't want to break their contact long enough to squelch it. He was made dimly aware, as he stroked the youthful tautness of her skin, that politicians were denouncing corruption, that activists were protesting inaction, that a hermit had been devoured by his faithful dogs. He slipped his finger into the slithery depths of her cunt and rotated it slowly.
"Would you suck me off?" Without waiting for her answer, he pushed her head down his belly.
"You got to promise not to come in my mouth." The moist warmth of her breath was an excruciating tickle on the tight skin of his fully swollen prick.
"Sure, sure, of course."
Marcia would never suck his cock. She never suggested refinements, she resisted experiments. She seemed merely to tolerate sex. Did she pretend, on those occasions when she permitted him to fuck her, that he was someone else, someone she would have greatly preferred-Melody's lather, for instance? He had never believed her crazy story that she'd forgotten who he had been. How could a woman forget a thing like that? He had been some scruffy, indolent hippie whose only ambition had been to lie around all day and fuck. He had no doubt given her everything she'd wanted-except a name for her child, a fine house, the money she needed to indulge her eccentricities. When she had felt the need for those things, she had taken her bastard child back into the real world and deliberately sought a man who could provide them: himself.
Judy knelt on the bed beside his supine body. She lowered her face and slipped the moist red ring of her lips over the swollen head of his cock. He gasped with pleasure as he felt her quick little tongue flickering around his cockhead. She slipped downward, taking more and more of his quivering flesh inside her mouth. Her wet tongue was in constant motion.
Her eyes met his for a moment. He saw a flicker of amusement touch her busy lips. She enjoyed doing this. With touching and uncharacteristic shyness, she had actually asked his permission to blow him, the first time, as if asking for a special treat. He shifted his hips, pushing his cock deeper into the firm compression of her pouting lips. Her tongue swirled and slithered.
Marcia had probably denied nobody what he wanted at that swinish commune. All those hippie orgies, cramming a lifetime of degeneracy into a few months, had made her weary of sex by the time she'd met him. Maybe he disgusted her, as a square. She had made a few snotty comments about the compromises he had to make to earn a living, comments he could still recall word for word.
Goddamnit, why did he have to think of her at a time like this!? She was like a chilling ghost in the bed with them. He slid his hand down the taut curve of Judy's rump and slid two fingers into the slippery softness of her cunt, spreading them as he pumped them slowly in and out. She squirmed with pleasure when he slid a third finger down to massage the rubbery little nubbin of her clitoris.
Judy sucked his prick steadily deeper, until her rather long nose was touching the curls of his pubic hair. Her dainty fingertips jerked steadily at that part of the root she couldn't fit inside her mouth, setting up a syncopated rhythm with the pumping of her lips and the steady washing of her rolling tongue.
Just when it seemed that the simmering load of sperm that was boiling up in his balls was about to burst free and flood her mouth, she made him gasp again by pulling her lips away.
"Please-suck it some more," he groaned. "I love it when you do that. You're terrific.''
"You were going to come in my mouth, you dirty old man," she said, pouting lasciviously. "And you promised."
Her eyes were slightly glazed, her cheeks were flushed. He continued to work expertly with his hand, rhythmically rubbing her bone-hard clitoris while her pussy leaked its sticky juices over his hand and wrist.
"What do you care?" he asked. "You like to eat it. You told me it was good for your complexion. Come on."
"Bastard," she whispered, but she began to work on him with her tongue again. She licked her way all around the bulging knob at the end of his cock, lapping off the sticky ooze that was already seeping out in eager anticipation. He was just barely able to stand this teasing-he wouldn't have been able to stand another instant of her talented cocksucking.
She moved down, her hot breath caressing his prick as she traced every blue vein in the hard, white shaft with the tip of her tongue. He nudged his cock against her soft cheek, trying to force her to take it between her sweet lips, but she evaded his efforts. She seemed intent on teasing him to the absolute limits of his endurance.
She moved ever lower. She pushed his thighs apart to admit her head. Her tongue slipped through his hair to lick his balls. The skin contracted under her touch. She seemed determined to cover every inch of them with her tongue. He reached down with his free hand to cup the silky weight of one of her tits. Gently, he tried to guide her back up to suck him off at last.
Giggling at the torture she knew she was inflicting, she relented. She slipped her lips once more over the head of his throbbing cock and sucked it deep into her mouth. She was a wet vortex of sexual delight. She sucked hard, hollowing her cheeks and completely immersing his prick with the feel of her soft, moist flesh. Her lips, pushed out to enclose as much of his tingling meat as they could, kept up a steady, pumping suction. Her tongue slipped and slid around the head in a dizzying swirl.
He wished he could summon the self-control needed to hold still and relish this dazzling display of her talent, but it was impossible to hold still. The urge to shove his cock deeper into her lips and fuck her in the mouth was overpowering. He did it slowly, though, as slowly as he could possibly bear to do it, and he restrained himself from thrusting it deeper than she wanted to take it. He continued to work on her gash with his fingers, even though he suspected that he'd already made her come.
She sucked harder, sensing that the cock thrust deep in her mouth was about to explode. She slid her hands beneath him and dug her clawed fingers into his ass, restraining him from shoving his prick deeper into her mouth.
He wanted it to go on forever, but the hot surges cresting upward from his balls could no longer be contained. He groaned and shuddered as his cock gave a hard, hammering pulse and then another, spurting jets of come into her delicious mouth. The sinuous muscles of her throat moved as she swallowed it, gobbling the hot load down and sucking for more.
He sank down on the bed, breathing hard, while Judy continued to suck until the hot spurts had faded to tiny dribbles. She pulled at his softening, excruciatingly sensitive prick until she was thoroughly satisfied that she had sucked out every last drop of semen. Then she sat back, licking a trickle of the excess from her lower lip before she smiled down at him.
"You broke your promise, you prick," she said.
"You liked it," he stated, sitting up slowly and gazing into her dark eyes. She wanted him. She needed him. He loved her for that.
* * *
That damned dog began barking its head off the moment Ken's headlights touched the house; Lucifer wasn't being protective or threatening: he was just scared out of his wits by potential danger. Ken wouldn't have believed it possible for a Doberman pinscher to be a sissy, but Lucifer was, and Ken felt for him the same disgust he felt for homosexuals. He sometimes wondered if some castrating quality of Marcia's love were not responsible for this, and what that portended for Roger-or for himself, if he stayed with her for many more years.
He tried to suppress his hatred for the dog and blot its infernal yelping out of his ears in order to enjoy the sight of his house: his house, the only one he'd ever built that was truly his. He hadn't watched the clock when he'd been planning it, he hadn't counted the cost of materials when he'd built it-as he'd had to do with every other project that had come his way. He had seen it as a true creation, a new statement that the world had never heard before.
And that brat, that little bastard, had nearly screwed it up. Breaking dishes. Moving furniture around. Convincing her own crazy mother, who was off on a cloud most of the time and couldn't tell reality from fantasy, that there was actually a ghost in the place.
Some of the things hadn't been explained, of course, not even by the screwball "scientists" who'd turned the place upside down for a week. Ken knew the explanation, but he hadn't volunteered it. Quite simply, he'd failed. He'd miscalculated some of the stresses, putting such tension on one of the walls that it had sprung out when subjected to the right combination of temperature and humidity and had catapulted a desk across a room. The "footsteps" they'd heard could be similarly explained. After the house had pulled a few tricks like that, Melody had tried a few of her own, with the malicious intent of showing him up as a failure.
Nevertheless, the house had calmed down, and he foresaw no recurrence of such embarrassing incidents. Now he could afford to feel almost mellow about that episode. It was as if his creation were indeed a living thing, a high-strung and spirited creature that had to be tamed for the mundane uses of life. He felt less forgiving about Melody's part in the affair.
She hadn't learned her lesson, either. She was always thinking up new ways to throw him off balance. Whenever he called home, her latest trick was to answer the phone by saying "Hello, Ken," before he could identify himself, before he even spoke. He refused to let her know that this flustered him as much as it did.
"Daddy! Daddy's home!" Karen shrieked, colliding with him at a dead run, laughing wildly when he swung her up into the air and settled her astride his neck.
"Watch your head," he cautioned as he went carefully through the entrance, up the stairway guarded by a bust of Leonardo. "What did you do today?"
"Lucy came home," she reported excitedly.
"So I see," he said, as the Doberman gave one last bark-unquestionably directed at him personally this time and pussyfooted away across the brick floor of the atrium.
"And Mama got thrown in jail by the police, so Mrs. Curtis-"
"Hey, hold on a minute. What-?"
He was interrupted by the entrance of Nora Curtis. She never just came into a room; she always made an entrance, and she exploited the theatrical potential of the Creighton house to the fullest whenever she was here. As usual, she was gotten up like the Queen of the Gypsies, in a floor-sweeping dress of black and red and yellow, sandals, and a lot of junk jewelry.
"She isn't in jail, Ken. But she discovered a body, and apparently there's all sorts of red tape connected with that sort of thing. And she has to stay with the story, she said-"
"Where, for God's sake?"
"Out in the woods somewhere, I don't know exactly."
He began to breathe more easily. He had instantly assumed that Marcia had found the body somewhere on their property, that his house was due for some more unpleasant publicity.
"That damned newspaper."
He wanted to add that it was no sort of job for a woman, at least not for a decent one, with its seedy characters and its ungodly hours, but he didn't know how Nora would take such an observation. He didn't want to become entangled in a fruitless and exasperating argument about women's liberation. Nevertheless, he thought he detected sympathy in her green eyes.
Nora Curtis was a trim little woman in her late twenties. The way she wore her thick, tawny hair suggested a miniature lion, and her perfect posture called attention to her exquisitely molded little breasts. Ken had entertained more than one sexual fantasy about her, but prudence had deterred him from trying to live them out with such a close neighbor, a friend of Marcia's. She was a widow. She had been married for less than a year when her husband-an energetic and apparently healthy man, younger than Ken was now-had gotten up from watching a ball game on TV to fix himself a sandwich and had dropped dead on the way to the refrigerator. The doctors had called it a cerebral hemorrhage.
"I just popped in to see Marcia, and I found a couple of starving kiddies, so I threw something together and fed them. I keep telling her not to leave an Aquarian in charge of anything, but she just won't listen to me."
"A what?"
"An Aquarian. Melody. Absent-minded professors. She's the perfect type, except for her stand-offishness. But what can you expect, with a moon in Scorpio?"
Ken smiled pleasantly, as if agreeing with her, while he lowered Karen from his shoulders; but Nora's astrological patter never failed to irk him. It was impossible to hold a reasonable discussion with someone who believed your words and actions were actually motivated by a system of superstitious absurdities. Perhaps her husband had died of apoplexy having been told that he was complaining about the coffee only because Saturn was in his Fifth House.
"But Melody has a really crazy chart, with all her strong planets in Gemini, her rising sign-but you must be hungry, too, aren't you?"
"No, don't trouble yourself, I-"
"It's no trouble at all. Really. I threw together a casserole from some leftovers and things I found in the cupboard. All I have to do is dish it out."
"Roger said it was disgusting because it had mushrooms in it, but I liked it," Karen said.
"Yes, I am hungry, thanks. I'll go and wash up."
"And I'll mix you a martini, which you look like you're dying for. Rinse the ice with vermouth, then throw it out, right?"
"Right," he said, laughing.
She swept out of the room, jewelry clunking, with Karen tagging along.
No question about it, she was a damned attractive woman. He wondered idly why she had waited so long to marry, why she had never remarried.
He was in a good mood. Marcia's unexpected absence relieved him of the need to make some lame excuse for his lateness. He had been making too many such excuses lately. Marcia wasn't stupid. She would become suspicious. And he didn't want her to suspect him until he had sorted out his feelings, until he had decided what he really wanted to do. He didn't want to have a decision forced on him in the course of a stormy, emotional scene.
But he was in too good a mood to think of such things now. Maybe Nora had put him in this mood. It was pleasant to come home and find things in some semblance of order, to find someone besides Karen who was glad to see him. Even Nora's empty-headed chatter about astrology was a relief from Marcia's abstracted silences.
He hesitated at the door of his study. He didn't use it very often, and never for the work he was paid to do. That work had become mechanical drudgery. Here he sometimes went-less often than he used to-to fiddle with the plans of buildings he would never be asked to design. On his work board now was his half-finished rendering of an Olympic stadium.
He entered and switched on the light. "Jesus Christ," he breathed, as his initial shock gave way almost immediately to rage.
The room had been ransacked. Pictures had been smashed, the drapes torn down. Someone had destroyed his rendering by writing across it, leaning so heavily on the pencil that it had torn through the thick paper and left it hanging in shreds.
He stepped closer. The formation of the letters and their spacing were wildly erratic. Sometimes the writer had failed to space the letters at all, piling one on top of the other to produce a spidery blotch. Toward the end of the message, if that's what it was intended to be, the pencil had broken. Ken believed he might have produced writing like this if he'd first gotten so drunk he couldn't see, then gripped the pencil like a dagger in his left fist.
He studied it carefully. Only a few words and syllables could be deciphered: "my sist," "let in," "dog no god," and "Maeve."
He didn't recognize the handwriting, but no one's handwriting would have been recognizable if the pencil had been held as he'd imagined it had, if the writer had been impelled by insane rage.
He had no doubt at all that Melody was up to her old tricks.
CHAPTER EIGHT
After finding the dismembered body of Matthew Peachtree, Marcia had managed to do all the necessary things with efficiency and speed. She had driven back to the general store and phoned the police, the wire services, and Jack Higgins. Then, interminably, she had answered police questions, asked questions of her own, interviewed those who had known the dead man, and fed information to the wires.
Now, driving home, she was alone with the memory of the horror, and her hands were beginning to shake.
She pulled to the side of the road, closed her eyes, and took several deep breaths. That seemed to help. She fumbled a cigarette out of her bag and, after four tries, managed to get it lighted.
She made an effort to analyze her feelings. She didn't endorse the view, loudly maintained by one of the state troopers, that Peachtree was a crazy old man who was probably better off dead, who would have died, one way or another, within the next year or so anyway. Everything Marcia had heard about the old hermit, before and after discovering his body, had convinced her that humanity had been diminished by his death: it was now minus one rugged individualist. But that didn't explain her feelings. People she had liked and admired had died before this, and their passing hadn't given her shaking fits.
She'd seen dead bodies before, too. The image of her own father, wax-like in his casket, came unbidden to her mind. He had seemed to be asleep: shortly he would rise to tell her that her dress was immodest, that she should go and wash the lipstick from her face, that she couldn't go to the Saturday night dance. The point was that the agony of her father's death had been cleverly erased. But she had never before seen a human body torn to pieces, like a rag doll by a willful child, and strewn around a room. The sight had made her realize for the first time how fragile her own, seemingly solid body was, how easily her own bones and entrails could be laid bare by a malicious force. What she really felt was fear.
She looked down at her hand. The glowing end of the cigarette was steady. She was a little disappointed with herself. Fear wasn't a very noble emotion; it was the purest form of selfishness.
She released the emergency brake and pulled out onto the road again. She scanned the roadway very carefully before she did it. The police at the scene had been anxious to outdo each other with stories of even more horrible sights they'd witnessed, and most of their stories had involved auto wrecks. She was proud of herself for not having been sick, either at the sight of Matthew Peachtree or at the stories the police had told. She felt like a veteran newspaperwoman.
She had been bombarded with random facts and speculations all day, and now she tried to sort them all out. Peachtree, through poverty or carelessness, hadn't fed his large pack of dogs. They had gone forth to forage on their own, attacking farm animals. Finally, driven mad by hunger or mistreatment, they had attacked their master. She couldn't recall who had first advanced that theory, but it had been immediately accepted as fact by the police and the wire services.
It was the only possible explanation. She hadn't examined the remains closely, but the police had assured her that Peachtree had been torn by fangs and claws. There were no wild animals in the area, or within five thousand miles of the area, capable of inflicting such damage. It had to be a pack of dogs.
A flaw underlay their logic, and Marcia saw it now: if they'd killed him out of hunger, why hadn't they eaten him?
She took a few more deep breaths as she realized that she'd been premature in congratulating herself on her strong stomach. But the wave of cold dizziness passed.
So, the dogs must have killed him in anger. Then, stricken with guilt and remorse, they'd all run away. Dogs wouldn't act like that. They wouldn't act like that under any circumstances. The theory that everyone had swallowed without question was absurd, just as absurd as those warnings that people were always giving her about Lucifer "turning on her."
If the dogs hadn't killed him, what had? The nearest zoos were in New York or Philadelphia, miles away, beyond dismal barriers of highways and housing developments; and the escape of a lion or a bear from either place wouldn't have gone unnoticed. To the best of her knowledge no circuses had passed through recently-and again, the escape of a large animal would have been publicized.
If it had been a wild animal, it might have been someone's pet. That seemed unlikely. If anyone around here had such a pet, the Banner would have done a feature about it; the police would have known of it, and one of the dozens of curiosity-seekers who had come to the scene would have suggested it as a possible culprit. The owner, unless he was a madman, would have reported that it had gotten loose.
Unless she was prepared to believe in Higgins's Jersey Devil, and she wasn't, that left only one possibility: Peachtree had been murdered by a human being.
But the fangs, the claws? Tools of some kind, or weapons-perhaps even artificial fangs and claws. That presupposed a very weird murderer. She tried to fill out the image of one of Peachtree's fellow Pineys, harboring a grudge against the old man as he hammered out his strange armaments at a lonesome forge in the deep woods, and she found that the picture strained her credulity. A local enemy would have blasted him from ambush with a shotgun.
The hippies?
She had come a long way from the beliefs of her youth, she reflected sadly: but so had the world around her. Long hair and freaky clothes no longer meant peace and love. They could mean nothing at all. Or they could mean crazed preachers of Armageddon, who took their text from the ambiguous frustrations of rock music, from the speeches of Hitler and the writings of Aleister Crowley.
She didn't have to accuse the ... the young people. But it was her duty to express her doubts as strongly as she could to the police. She didn't expect to be believed. The police would dismiss her deductions as the fantasies of a soft-hearted dog-lover while they continued to hunt down and shoot all the strays they could. But when it came time to write her story for the Banner next week, she could write it in such a way as to highlight the flaws in the official theory. Higgins might even be persuaded to write an editorial-although that was a faint hope. The paper maintained a policy of not rocking official boats.
In addition, by simply doing the job she had been assigned-going with Ron Green on his round of interviews-she might find out something. She harbored no illusions about playing detective, hoping to find a set of bloodstained metal claws or some outlandish costume that would explain Peachtree's "giant weasel." But she believed that close attention to words and nuances might reveal someone capable of such a crime.
She had made all the proper turns automatically, and she was slightly startled to find that she was home already. Lucifer-Ken must have let him out, despite yesterday's incident-danced and grinned in the headlights.
"Get down, you big ninny! Down! Where're your manners?" She had been nearly knocked off her feet by his friendly assault when she got out of the car. "Here I've been racking my brains, trying to think of a way to redeem the good name of dogs, and this is the thanks I get. I bet nobody fed you, that's your problem. Dog food?"
Lucy knew what those last words meant, and he headed for the front door in a series of furious dashes, interrupted by pauses to make sure she was following. He scrabbled up the open staircase with a noisy clatter of claws as soon as she let him in.
"Marcia? I want to talk to you."
That was Ken's voice, issuing from the living room, gaining booming reverberation in the atrium. Infused with chilly formality to start with, it ended up sounding like Hollywood's idea of the voice of God, and she had to work hard not to giggle at the effect. She had to admit that her nerves weren't as steady as she'd believed.
She trudged up the stairs, her bag heavy over her shoulder. A glance at her watch told her that it was past nine o'clock. She supposed the younger children were already in bed. Ken never wasted time in packing them off to bed when he found himself unavoidably alone with them.
He was sitting at the far end of the brightly lighted living room with a martini in his hand and a suspiciously unfocused look in his blue eyes. A stranger, even a casual acquaintance, might not have remarked the slight drift of his left eye, but Marcia knew it as a warning signal of one of his nastier drunks.
"Is something wrong, darling?"
"You bet your sweet ass there's something wrong. Go take a look in my study, and see what your daughter's been up to now."
Marcia realized that she was too tired to humor him. Resentment suddenly boiled up, resentment at the injustice of facing this scene after a harrowing day. "Spare me the theatrics. Just tell me what the matter is, all right? And spare me that 'your daughter' bullshit while you're at it. You adopted her."
Ken's face, already red, flushed darker. "I sure as hell didn't know what I was adopting. The little bitch-the little bastard, let me get my terms right-has been in there wrecking the place. Go take a look. Go take a look at the mess in there, and then tell me she's not crazy. Go and look."
Ken got to his feet. He didn't stagger, his words hadn't been slurred, and he didn't spill a drop when he refilled his glass from the pitcher, but she estimated his intake at five, at least. If she were lucky, he would pass out before long.
She realized that she had to follow his stage directions if she wanted to know what they were arguing about. He wouldn't tell her. She unslung her bag and went to his study. Lucifer followed, now maintaining a low profile.
She looked over the destruction calmly. It didn't look like the ghost's work: he had specialized in throwing things. Most of the damage consisted of objects torn from the wall, as if a tall drunk had staggered through, clutching at whatever was available for support. Roger, on stilts? But the handwriting on the work board wasn't his. It definitely wasn't Melody's, either. It looked masculine, forceful beyond the point of insanity, the work of a severely disturbed adult.
She noticed that Ken was behind her, filling the door.
"What do you suppose it means?" she asked, not turning to face him. "Mojave?"
"Maeve," he corrected. "A girl's name, an Irish name. But what fucking difference does it make what it means? It means you're crazy daughter needs to see a shrink, that's what it means."
"Oh, Ken." It was a weary groan. He seemed a far likelier suspect than Melody. Drunk out of his mind one night, he had defaced the work that symbolized the failure of his youthful ambitions. She didn't say so. Her own experiences with psychiatrists had made her wary of hurling accusations of irrationality. Besides, he was now too drunk for a serious discussion.
She stepped forward and touched the torn paper, dissatisfied with his interpretation. There was" a vicious slash between the "ma" and the "eve."
"Maybe if her mother was around once in a while to talk to her, to tell her what's right and what's wrong, she wouldn't go into my private study and tear up my stuff. I'm going to get a lock for the door, Marcia. God! In my own house, I need a lock on the door of my study."
"Where is she?"
"In bed. Said she was tired. It's hard work, you know, thinking up new ways to screw your stepfather. She has to get her rest, so she can get up bright and early to pour sugar into my gas tank. Only that kind of thing would be childish. Maybe she wants to get up real early so she can cut my throat while I'm still asleep."
"Come off it, Ken. Did you accuse her of this?"
"No, I didn't accuse her of this," he simpered, mocking her. "What's the use? Why give her the satisfaction of knowing she hit the target? What I'm going to do is, I'm going to send her to a shrink. And I'm going to see that you quit your job. What kind of effect does it have on the kids, having a neighbor feed them supper because their own mother is off somewhere fussing over a dead bum? Or maybe fussing over a live one, one of your sleazy co-workers. Huh?"
"Ken!" She tried to control the rage that was pumping like ice water from her heart to her extremities, but she couldn't. "I suppose it does them a world of good to see their father so drunk that he tears up his only attempt at being a real architect, then accuses them of doing it."
"A real architect?" Ken's head twisted, his face contorted, as if he were taking the impact of a physical blow. "You stinking hippie whore! What do you know about it? What do you know about anything? All you ought to know is that I put a roof over your head, over your bastard daughter's head, when you got tired of taking dope and gang-banging every weirdo west of the Mississippi, and it's damn well time you showed a little gratitude for it."
"You sanctimonious son of a-"
Marcia was shocked in mid-sentence by the cold martini as it splashed against her cheek and stunk her eyes.
"-son of a bitch!" she shrieked after him as he blundered away from her, staggering now. "Where do you think you're going? You'll kill yourself. Not that I care."
"Out!" he roared, and the front door slammed like a thunderclap, shaking the windows in the study behind her.
She was glad he was gone, and she refused to accept any guilt for feeling that way. At last, after all these years, his true feelings had bubbled to the surface: his dirty little fantasies about her life in the commune, his jealousy, his resentment of Melody as a living reminder of that time. She hoped he wouldn't come back tonight She hoped he would seek solace in the arms of his sleek, young mistress, whoever she was; let her see what it was to give comfort to a middle-aged man drowning in gin and self-pity.
"Lucy! Dog food, Lucy!"
She got a glass from the freezer and poured a drink from the pitcher Ken had mixed. The vermouth could not be detected.
"Doggie food, Lucifer!"
She kicked off her sneakers and padded barefoot down the stairs, sipping the drink. Ken must have let the dog out when he'd left, the thoughtless prick.
"Lucifer!" she shouted against the chirping chorus of the starless, spring night. "Dog food!"
"Shit," she muttered as she went back up the stairs. She hesitated at the bust of Leonardo, then turned and padded up to the top floor. Maybe Ken hadn't spoken to Melody about the destruction in the study, but maybe he had made some cryptic wisecrack, or unleashed a bitter sneer that needed to be explained away and smoothed over.
She scratched lightly at Melody's door, heard no response, and eased it silently open. The room was dark and quiet, a damp breeze fluttered the curtains. She went to the bed. It was disarranged, and it was empty.
She snapped on the light and surveyed the room, the neglected array of stuffed animals, the records, the books, the poster of W.C. Fields. No treasures seemed to be missing. Behind the sliding door of the closet, Melody's clothes were all in order. Her favorite jeans, her denim battle-jacket, and her suede sneakers were gone.
She refused to let herself panic. Melody had not been kidnapped. Disturbed by the noisy quarrel-stung unquestionably by Ken's vicious words-she had gone for a walk, taking Lucy with her. That was nothing to be alarmed about. It was a safe neighborhood, and any cruising carload of punks would think twice about molesting a girl with a Doberman. As a young girl, Marcia had gone for more than one lonely walk at night.
She sat on her daughter's bed and sipped her drink. No question about it, she had to make the time to have a long, frank talk with Melody. They had to keep their channels of communication open, especially now that Ken was coming apart at the seams.
She got up and checked on her younger children. They were sound asleep-both in Roger's bed. They hadn't even heard the argument. Maybe she ought to talk to a lawyer, just to find out what her options were, just to make sure Ken wouldn't try to gain custody-no, things hadn't gone that sour yet. Had they?
She went down to the living room and put a Rolling Stones record on the phonograph, turning the volume up high. The record said something to her undirected energy, her frayed nerves. Maybe she ought to start up an affair, just to show the son of a bitch. With Ron Green. She laughed aloud.
She went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. The remains of a casserole confronted her in one of Nora Curtis's arty clay dishes. It was just too preciously homemakerish for words, and she felt like heaving it, dish and all, into the garbage.
On the way back to the living room, where she planned to pour herself another drink, she paused at the open door of Ken's study. She still couldn't read all of the writing, but she was surprised that neither of them had hit on the obvious meaning of the last word-the last two words, actually. Now, observing from just the right distance, with the light hitting the paper just the right way, she saw that the last two words were May Eve.
CHAPTER NINE
"What's happening, man?" Ron Green asked, and Marcia wished she could melt into the ground.
The man on the front stoop of the dilapidated farmhouse eyed Ron, sweating in his baggy suit, for a long moment. Then he turned his attention to Marcia, noting her camera. He took a sip from the can of beer in his Big, knobby-knuckled hand.
"What are you, the CIA?"
Ron laughed. "Hell, no. We're from the Banner. I'm doing a story on hippies."
The man was tall and thin. He was dressed in a dashiki, from which the colors had almost entirely faded, tattered jeans, and a homemade necklace of unusual design. Marcia had sensed something familiar about him at first, but she had come to the conclusion that it was his correspondence to a type that made him seem familiar: with his drooping mustache, furrowed face, and stringy hair, he could easily have filled the role of a consumptive old gun fighter in a western film. She guessed that he was about her age, but he looked as if he'd led a rougher life.
"I ain't seen any," he said, with just a suggestion of a smile.
"Well." Ron seemed at a loss. He scanned the littered yard and made an abortive gesture at the former school bus, brightly decorated with metal-flake designs, that dominated the scene. "I mean, what do you do for a living?"
"I make jewelry. Maybe you'd like to buy some, huh?"
Ron ignored the question. "And you're living here with a bunch of other people, right, like in a commune?"
"Got to scrape up the rent somehow."
"Well, that's what I'm talking about," Ron said, showing a touch of exasperation. "A lot of people like you have moved in lately, and I wondered why. What's the big attraction?"
Marcia expected that they would be kicked off the property shortly. She had focused her camera by estimate, and now, without raising it to her eye, she took a shot of the man on the stoop. He noted the clunk of the shutter and looked at her with amusement.
"You want a beer?" he asked her, and she shook her head. "You would," he stated to Ron; then, raising his voice, "Alice! Bring a couple beers."
"Yeah, that would be all right," Ron said. "Kind of hot, isn't it?"
The man studied the tree tops across the road as if giving serious consideration to the question. A very well-developed blonde girl of fifteen or so who looked as if she had just crawled out of bed, shuffled out with two cans of beer. Marcia got her picture, too.
"This your old lady?" Ron asked.
"This is my daughter. Alice, this gentleman wants to make your father famous."
"How do you do?" Ron said.
Alice gave him a blank look and turned back into the house, letting the torn screen door slam behind her.
Ron popped the tab of his can and drank thirstily. "How many people you got living here?" he finally asked.
"It varies."
Marcia believed that Ron's method wasn't going to lead anywhere, so she interrupted. "I wonder if I could get some pictures of you with the jewelry you've designed, Mr.-?"
"Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton. Call me Alex."
She was unable to suppress a nervous giggle. He smiled at her, not unkindly. "You want to see my driver's license?"
"No, I-it surprised me, that's all. I'm Marcia Creighton. This is Ron Green."
He nodded, unwinding himself from the stoop. He towered over Ron. "Come on inside," he said, leading the way.
Marcia followed after Ron, unlimbering the electronic flash from her bag. She hoped Ron would take her cue and get Hamilton to talk about his work. It seemed the only way they could gain any information. Otherwise, he would just continue to spar with Ron and make fun of his questions.
The interior of the house suggested more a campsite than a home. The sparse, threadbare furniture that had probably been included in the rental was outnumbered by assorted packs, sleeping bags, and miscellaneous luggage. Numerous beer and soft-drink cans, fast-food cartons, and overflowing ashtrays lay on or near the coffee table in the living room.
"I hope you'll excuse the condition of the house," Hamilton said with grave politeness, noting Marcia's automatic survey. "We weren't expecting company."
"Where is everybody?" Ron asked.
"They come and go."
Marcia kept her mouth shut. Ron's ineptitude made her want to scream, and Hamilton's sarcastic apology-typing her, as it did as a suburban, middle-class housewife-had stung. She fought the impulse to turn and walk out to the car. She had started the day off badly, that was the real problem.
She'd awakened on the couch, with Lucy crowding her off it. Melody had verified her guess that she'd taken the dog for a walk last night, but Marcia hadn't heard them return. Ken hadn't returned at all. She made an effort to forget the disorders of her private life.
Hamilton led them into the dining room, which was surprisingly uncluttered. On a mahogany table in the center of the room lay an array of crude, barbaric jewelry. Hamilton didn't believe in prettiness. Wood and iron and leather predominated as his basic materials. Nora Curtis would have liked his work.
"How did you get started doing this stuff?" Ron asked.
Hamilton shrugged. "I learned it from the Indians, out on the Rosebud Reservation."
Marcia was jolted. Hamilton-was pulling Ron's leg, because the work bore no resemblance to any American Indian crafts she'd ever seen; and the Sioux didn't make trinkets for tourists. But why had he chosen the name of a reservation not far from the commune where she had once lived? She studied his face hard, trying to pin down the elusive hint of familiarity she thought she had seen. She couldn't. She was flustered when his eyes met hers.
Trying to cover her confusion, she picked up a piece from the table. It was a spectacularly ugly thing, a thick cylinder of coarse leather attached to an iron chain.
"What's this?" she asked.
"A bull-pizzle," Hamilton said.
"What-oh!" She put it down hastily.
"Huh?" Ron asked.
"The penis of a bull," Hamilton explained.
Ron laughed. "Christ. Who'd wear a thing like that?"
"You'd be surprised. Among the Delaware Indians, who lived where this house now stands, a stone phallus was a common ornament. It had religious significance for them. The early colonists, of course, were quite put off by that sort of thing. They saw the natives not only as heathens, but as downright devil-worshippers, and that made their extermination a Christian duty."
Hamilton had momentarily sounded like an anthropology professor lecturing a backward student, and Marcia realized that he had been duping both of them with his slow-witted act. Maybe he hadn't been making an idle wisecrack when he'd said he'd learned his craft from the Indians; she was, after all, no expert on primitive art.
Ron didn't seem impressed. "You sell much of this stuff?" he asked.
"I make a living."
Hamilton had apparently tired of his flirtation with responsive answers, and Marcia ignored the two of them as she gave the jewelry a closer examination. One piece intrigued her, although she couldn't say exactly why. It was composed of simple triangles of polished black stone, each about the size and weight of a quarter.
"You like that?" Hamilton asked.
She hesitated, made wary by her gaffe.
"You can have it," he said, before she could think of an appropriate reply.
"Why, thanks, that's kind of you. Maybe I could buy something from you, for my daughter-"
"One for her, too," he said, smiling, producing a necklace that seemed identical to the one she held.
She didn't know what to say. Hamilton seemed as poor as a rat, and she had intended the purchase as an act of charity. She glanced at Ron Green in the vain hope that he might do or say something to ease her embarrassment, but he seemed merely annoyed that he wasn't getting any presents.
"Does it have any ... particular significance?" she asked, still wary.
Ron snickered at her discomfiture, but Hamilton overlooked it.
"Everything has some significance," Hamilton said. "Or none, depending on how you look at it."
She wasn't satisfied with the answer, but she decided not to pursue the question. She put on one of the heck-laces and went to the window to inspect the other in a better light.
The window gave her a view of the wide yard, backed by outbuildings that were in even greater disrepair than the house itself. She saw Alice, who was combing the long, glossy black hair of a goat. This must be the commune that Alvin Walker, the dairy farmer, had spoken about. He had remarked that people who took such extravagantly good care of a goat couldn't have mutilated his cattle.
A horrible thought struck her, and she interrupted Ron's limping interview. "Where did you get the material for that phallic necklace?" she blurted.
"A slaughterhouse," Hamilton answered easily. "Where else?"
He could field her questions as deftly as Ron's. But what had she expected-that he would turn white and confess? She didn't believe his casual answer. Finding that item in an area where cattle were being mutilated was too great a coincidence. In addition, everything about Alexander Hamilton was as implausible as his name. He was too old, too sophisticated, to be merely an itinerant maker of trinkets. She began to suspect that he was being so hospitable only because he really had something to hide. An innocent person would have taken offense at Ron Green's approach and sent them packing long ago.
She kept her suspicions to herself, but took some pictures of Hamilton with his work.
"Could we go out into the back yard? I'd like to get a shot of your daughter with that goat," Marcia suggested, at last.
"Goat?" Ron was bewildered.
"She's a pet, really," Hamilton said, taking them to the back door. "Alice was allergic to cow's milk, when she was a baby. The goat has been a member of the family ever since."
As they walked across the yard, Marcia could believe him. She had seldom seen an animal more clearly pampered. The blonde girl appeared to be talking to it as she lovingly brushed its radiant coat. Alice's own hair, Marcia reflected, could have benefited greatly from half as much attention. The goat wore a necklace that seemed to be Hamilton's work, but more elaborate in design and skillful in execution than anything she had seen inside. She could believe that it was, as it appeared to be, made of gold.
"Look at the goat," Marcia directed Alice, when the girl persisted in staring sullenly at the camera. "And try to smile."
"I'm a mess," Alice protested, quite accurately.
Hamilton laughed. "That's just what they want, honey. Pictures of the dirty hippies. Wouldn't it look better for your paper if we took the goat into the living room?"
Marcia hesitated, because that was precisely the kind of picture Higgins would have wanted. Before she could sort out her feelings and answer the question, Ron Green unexpectedly blew up.
"Look, buddy, I've had just about enough of your goddamned sarcastic bullshit. If you don't want to talk to us, fine, just say so. But I gave you plenty of opportunity to explain your lifestyle, to convince me and the people who read my paper that you're not a bunch of weirdos and dopefiends, and all I get for my trouble is a lot of sarcastic crap. Let's get the hell out of here, Marcia."
"Drop in again, anytime," Hamilton called after them, still laughing. "If you want a story, why don't you ask your mayor to explain his lifestyle? Or the president of your bank? Or your photographer?"
"Wise-ass son of a bitch," Ron snarled as he slammed the door of his car.
Marcia was annoyed with herself for having followed Ron so docilely. She didn't agree with Ron, not entirely, and Hamilton's parting shot had struck home, filling her with guilt and embarrassment. She was ashamed of herself for coming here as a representative of the establishment press, ashamed of her own lifestyle-even though Hamilton couldn't have known anything about it. The fact that she was still in possession of the two necklaces made her feel even more guilty. She didn't look back as Ron stomped on the accelerator of his battered old car and took them off like fleeing bank robbers.
"How did you like that bastard?" he asked, after they had driven awhile in uncomfortable silence.
"I thought you were a little bit rough on him. After all, he did invite us into his house-"
"Yeah, he must've thought we were more fun than television. Did you ever try milking a he-goat?"
CHAPTER TEN
Ken sipped his martini and studied the cluttered room sourly. The room was small to start with, part of a Victorian mansion that had been divided into cramped apartments. The furnishings, mismatched, overstuffed, and worn out, filled it to the point of suffocation. With Judy around, he had never really noticed what a gloomy place it could be. Now he noticed.
He got up to refresh his drink. The bottle of Beefeater's was the only touch of color in the room. It was also the only thing here that belonged to him. He had nothing to relax with, nothing to distract his mind from unpleasant thoughts. He had no desire to turn on the television set, Judy's constant companion. Nor did he want to listen to her records, for her taste was similar to Marcia's. And there were no books.
He went to the bedroom, a journey of three paces, and studied the unmade bed. Judy had been sleeping here when he'd left for his office this morning. She'd had to be at work at four. That should have given her plenty of time to make the bed. But she hadn't expected him to return here-she'd had no reason to tidy up the place. He hadn't discussed his domestic problems with her last night.
He turned back to the shabby little living room. He wondered what he was doing here, and he could come up with no sensible reason. He could be at home now, working in his study ... That random thought brought back all the bitterness of last night's argument, and Ms hand tightened convulsively on his glass. His study was a mess, nearly demolished by Marcia's crazy daughter.
He began to realize how illogical his own actions were. He wasn't at fault in any way. There was no reason on earth why he should be forced to flee the comfort of his own home. The fault was all Melody's and, by extension, Marcia's. Perhaps he had succeeded in teaching Marcia a lesson by staying away all night. She might now be in a more receptive mood to listen to his thoroughly reasonable demand that Melody receive psychiatric treatment. There was no point in punishing her by withholding his presence any longer.
Having made his decision, he felt better; even Judy's apartment no longer seemed so drab and cheerless. He had convinced himself that everything he'd done had been right. He would return home now. Marcia would agree to his plan for Melody. Everything would work out all right. He finished his drink in one gulp.
He rinsed out his glass and replaced it in the kitchenette. He put the bottle he had brought with him back into its bag and took it with him as he locked the door. There was no point in leaving evidence for Judy that he had returned to her place from his office this evening. She might worry about it. She might even take it into her head to call him at home when she returned from work. That would never do.
He went down the rickety stairway and out the front door, glad that he was able to do so without meeting any of the denizens of this crumbling pile. His age, his haircut, and his expensive suit made him conspicuous here. Anyone encountering him would know exactly why he was here, and they would probably have a good laugh over it. That was why he usually insisted on taking Judy to a motel, even though she preferred to go to her apartment and had even given him a key to the place. Last night had been the first time he'd made use of it. She'd been delighted-overjoyed even-when he'd slipped into bed and awakened her with his caresses. Home was never like that.
Driving home, he rehearsed his arguments carefully. He would avoid mention of the fact that he hadn't returned last night. He had succeeded in absolving himself from any sense of guilt for that, and he would refuse to let Marcia make him assume any. If she brought up the subject, he would brush it aside. It was irrelevant to the real issue, the issue of Melody's-well-her insanity: that was the proper name for it He began to feel a glow of pride at the selflessness of his own thoughts. He was concerned only with his stepdaughter's welfare, her mental health. He knew what was best for her; he had to convince Marcia, quietly and reasonably, that this was so.
Approaching the road where he lived, he noted a small cluster of unsavory characters at the corner. At first he thought they were kids, dressed in the raggedy-assed style that had been more popular a few years ago. When he slowed to give them a closer inspection, he saw that two or three of them were undeniably adults, even middle-aged adults.
Before he could give this scruffy bunch a more thorough inspection, he saw a familiar face: Lucifer's. The dog was sitting patiently at the edge of the group. In the next instant he spotted Melody. Her unbound hair, her jeans and her sandals and her Mexican wedding-shirt had allowed her to blend into the group.
He stopped, planning to investigate, but she hailed him and started across the road with the dog before he could get out of the car. He stared hard at the loiterers. Some of them returned his stare with neither hostility nor much interest
"Hey, how about a lift?" Melody said, opening the door and letting the dog into the back seat before he could reply.
"Who the hell are those people?" Ken demanded.
"Oh, I don't know. Just people."
He continued to stare at the ragged company, trying to project moral indignation and territorial outrage. The men and women were singularly unkempt, even unwashed, and their clothing was bizarre. They looked like extras from an unromanticized film about the Middle Ages, refugees from the Black Death. They ignored him as they drifted on down the road in the twilight heading in the direction of his home.
"What did they want?"
"They didn't want anything," Melody said.
"Then why the hell were you talking to them?" he demanded, unable to keep rage out of his voice as he turned on her.
"Jeez!" she exclaimed, exaggerating her surprise to parody. "You mean, I should've waited to be properly introduced?"
"Don't-" he cut off his angry words and paused before permitting himself to speak. "They don't belong around here, obviously. They look like a bunch of cutthroats. I think you should have more sense about talking to strangers."
"They just wanted to pet the dog," Melody grumbled. "For Christ's sake. Are you giving me a lift home, or do I have to get out and walk?"
"Yeah, well," he said, turning his attention back to the car and starting up again. "Did they ask you any questions-pump you for information about who might be at home now, stuff like that?"
"No," she answered thoughtfully, apparently seeing that there might be a grain of sense in his attitude. "They just liked Lucy. They asked me if I lived around here, but that was all. They talked funny."
"How?"
"Well, calling me 'sister,' and all like that. Like religious nuts, you know. One of the women asked me if I was ready to be the path, but the others sort of shut her up. She acted a little bit like she was stoned."
Ken slowed down as he passed the strangers again. There were two men and three women, he saw now, and that sexual distribution made the group seem a little less intimidating. They avoided looking at him as they ambled along.
He slowed the car, then impulsively jammed on the brakes. He leaned out the window. "You people looking for something?" he called in a hard voice.
He regretted his act as one of the men, a bearded, wild-eyed scarecrow in a hat suggestive of Simple Simon, loped across the road at a poorly coordinated gait and thrust his face so close that Ken was forced to recoil into the car. Several of his front teeth were missing.
"We are looking for the way, brother. Can you show it to us?" he asked in a tense whisper.
"Oh, for God's sake," Ken growled, accelerating so hastily that the man was forced to spring back.
"I think he was putting you on," Melody said. "He wasn't talking that crazy before."
"Well, let's see how he talks to the police. I plan to call them when we get home."
"Oh, Ken," she sighed, sounding annoyingly like her mother. "They're just taking a walk."
He sped up the winding driveway. As Melody and Lucifer went into the house, he stayed to look back the way they had come. Not much of the road was visible from the top of the drive. He waited for what seemed the proper length of time, but the strangers didn't appear. Maybe his no-nonsense manner had persuaded them to turn back. He decided that was so.
He went slowly into the house, trying to recapture the sense of reasonableness and detachment from his problems that he had achieved before. Melody and those hippies had blown it completely away. He'd told her a million times that he didn't want that damned hound in his car, slobbering all over the upholstery, but she'd smuggled him in under cover of the distraction. He found it hard to control his anger over that transgression, even though he told himself that it was relatively unimportant.
"Hi, Dad," Roger said, regarding him with Marcia's dark eyes from the top of the stairs. "Can we go to the movies?"
"What?"
"Mom says it's OK, if you say it's OK."
He rumpled Roger's hair as he passed, unable to adjust his mind to deal with that question. What had made Marcia so damned certain he would come home at all? And why was she shunting onto him the burden of saying no? His anger was so close to the surface that he hesitated for a moment, on the verge of leaving. He didn't want his irritation to erupt over some trifle.
"It's probably too late. You have to go to school in the morning."
"Tomorrow's Saturday," Roger said, "and we can go to the nine o'clock show."
"We'll see," Ken said, hoping that would hold the question in abeyance.
At the phone in the living room, Ken talked to a desk sergeant who made an elaborate project of taking down his name and address, and who then questioned him closely about his observations. He began to feel that his worries were foolish, as the sergeant so obviously did; but a visit by a patrol car was promised.
He was just hanging up as Marcia entered. "We'd better eat now, if we're going to the movies," she said.
"I didn't say we were going to the movies."
"Roger thinks you did. Anyway, it's all ready."
"I'm not especially hungry," he said, taking the bottle of gin he had brought home into the kitchen.
"I didn't suppose you would be. Are you going with us, or what?"
Her tone was cool, uninterested. She wouldn't ask him where he'd been last night. But, for the next couple of days, she would treat him with the aloof politeness of a stranger on a train, forced by circumstances to communicate with him.
"I'll go," he said, trying to disconcert her; but not succeeding. "What's playing?"
"Some sci-fi flick the kids want to see. Except Melody."
He took a glass from the freezer and filled it with warm gin. Maybe he ought to suggest that Melody couldn't be trusted alone in the house; maybe that would be a way of bringing up the subject and ventilating their grievances. But while he was still considering the remark, Marcia left the room. He didn't know how, but he had been maneuvered into a disagreeable position. Maybe this was his punishment for staying out all night: sitting through a science-fiction film designed to appeal to children, stewing in a brew of unspoken arguments beside a chilly, uncommunicative wife. He topped off his drink and went out to meet the police.
Darkness had fallen, and he couldn't see the road at all now. He went down the driveway, walking less surely than he believed he was capable of doing. He stopped a moment, making an effort to bring himself under more careful control. Lucifer dashed past, barking.
"Shut up! Shut up, you damned dog! Come here!"
Lucifer ignored him.
He cursed under his breath as he continued down the driveway, his steps steadier. If he poisoned the dog, who would suspect him?
He stopped at the gate in the rustic fence that surrounded his property. It wasn't too dark to see that the road was empty. The hippies had turned back or passed on; or else they were lurking in the shrubbery. The latter seemed unlikely, because Lucifer no longer barked. He sat placidly by the mailbox, occasionally snapping at an invisible bug.
"Poison you, and divorce your mother," he said, addressing the dog in a pleasantly conversational tone, "and send your sister to the booby hatch. And then what? Marry my girlfriend, the teen-age carhop, and live happily ever after. Shit!"
None of his plans seemed realistic, but he couldn't put his finger on their exact faults. Perhaps he was unwilling to do so. He paced back and forth at the margin of the road, kicking at occasional bits of discarded rubbish. His eye fell on something hanging at his gate.
He thought at first that it was a child's purse, perhaps one of Karen's possessions, and he went to retrieve it. Then he saw that it was fastened to the gate by a firm and elaborate knot in its rawhide drawstring. He wouldn't have noticed it at all, if he hadn't trampled some weeds by the gate in his pacing.
There was something in the purse; he could feel that. But it couldn't be opened without untying the knot. He finished his drink, set the glass aside, and began to fumble with the thong. The knot was too tight, and his fingernails were too closely trimmed. He took the normally useless little penknife that had come with his key ring and began to saw the thong.
Lucifer came over to supervise the operation. He unexpectedly began barking, as if at the bag.
"Shut up, you moron!" Ken snarled at the dog, who was barking savagely while backing steadily away.
The thong came free. Ken didn't recognize the bag as one of Karen's toys. It was made of soft leather, dyed in a faded red and yellow design. It seemed too well made and expensive for a child's plaything. He pulled it open and dumped the contents into his hand, convulsively dropping everything as the dead body of a toad tumbled into his upturned palm.
"For Christ's sake," he muttered, fumbling for his key ring in the weeds.
He found his keys. He studied the ground nearby. It was quite dark now. He flicked on his lighter. The stony eye of the toad glittered. Its body had been nailed to a tiny wooden cross. Some odd-looking pebbles lay near it, but Ken couldn't tell whether or not they had been among the contents of the bag. He picked up the bag and shook it, but it was now empty. It had a pleasant odor of vaguely familiar spices. He picked up the crucified toad with distaste and flung it into the woods.
Lucifer was barking on the other side of the road. Ken turned, glimpsed a flurry of motion.
"Hold it, you! What are you doing here?"
A slim little figure in a peasant skirt stepped out of the shadows. He recognized Nora Curtis.
"Taking a walk. And what are you doing, playing mumbletypeg?"
He straightened up, brushing the knees of his trousers, grinning foolishly.
"Some damned hippies came by here and left a hex-sign on my gate."
"A what?"
"Some kind of nonsense. A dead toad in a bag. I talked to them before. They were crazy. Religious nuts of some kind."
"What did you do with it?" she asked, inspecting the bag with no more than polite curiosity.
"Threw it away. What else?"
"Maybe that's bad luck."
"Don't be silly. I called the police, but they haven't showed up yet. Did you see anyone on your walk?"
She shook her head.
A thought struck him, that perhaps this had nothing to do with the oddballs he'd seen: this might be another manifestation of Melody's craziness. He must have revealed some of his anger and despair on his face, because Nora was looking up at him with intense interest, even concern. He found himself becoming acutely aware, not for the first time, that her eyes were lovely. In daylight, they were a fascinating shade of green. In darkness, they appeared black and fathomless. Her face was smooth, the features cleanly molded, like an ivory mask. He took a reflexive step backward, and she smiled.
"What are you afraid of?" she murmured. "I hardly ever bite."
"I'm afraid I'm a little drunk." His voice sounded hoarse.
"I thought that was supposed to release inhibitions," she said, moving even closer than she had been before, "not create them."
The invitation in her voice and her manner seemed obvious, even blatant, but Ken still hesitated. He knew he had drunk too much this afternoon, and he was afraid that he might be totally misinterpreting her signals. But there seemed to be no room for misinterpretation. He realized that the moment had come; if he waited any longer it would be gone. He reached out for her, and she seemed to flow into his arms. Their mouths locked in a kiss as he caressed her trim body. She squirmed, avidly molding herself against him.
He drew back abruptly as, from the corner of his eye, he saw the flashing red light of an approaching police car. Confusion and embarrassment almost prevented him from looking her in the eye. When he did, he saw that she was gazing at him calmly, with subdued amusement. Her smile seemed to promise a lot.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ron Green slowed his car almost automatically. He had no intention of stopping and trying to pick the girl up. He had neither the time nor the inclination to complicate his life that way. But she did have a nice ass, and he wanted to get a better look at her.
She turned her head as he drew close, her eyes flicking over the approaching car, dismissing it from her attention. The glimpse he got of her face made him almost ashamed of himself. She was pretty, yes, but she was young enough to be his daughter.
He wondered why she was walking her dog at this hour, in this Godforsaken place. Maybe he ought to stop and pick her up before some unscrupulous character did. If she were running away from home, he might persuade her to go back where she belonged.
His mind made a connection it should have made earlier. Of course she was running away from home. More correctly, she had already done so. She was one of the hippies he was investigating. That explained her presence here.
He stopped the car and looked back. A lonely little light burned on the utility pole at the crossroads several hundred yards behind him. Anyone walking in the road would have been outlined against the light, but now he couldn't see the girl or her dog. She must have turned to cut across the fields just after he'd passed her, or else she was lying low, fearing contact with strangers.
He fit a cigarette and continued to scan the shadowy road. Why was he concerned about her? He grew suspicious of his motives. She had certainly been pretty, and maybe his impulse to pick her up and give her a fatherly talking-to wasn't altruistic.
Whatever his motive might have been, he was merely wasting time now. He turned back to the wheel, making an effort to dismiss the girl from his mind, and put his old Mustang in motion again. Soon, boring his way through the cricket-loud darkness, he had forgotten her.
He thought about Marcia Creighton instead, and his hands tightened on the wheel as a complicated mixture of violent emotions washed over him. Thinking of her lately never failed to produce that effect. Tonight it was worse than ever.
Long ago, he had made a resolution never to get emotionally involved with his co-workers. It was a good, sensible resolution. You couldn't do your job well if you were having an affair with someone you met in the line of duty every day.
It was an excellent resolution, and Ron had never lost faith in its excellence, but he had never kept it, either. For one thing, he seldom had the opportunity to meet girls outside his work. For another, he liked newspaperwomen: as a class, they were reasonably intelligent, they shared his interests, they sympathized with his irreverence for authority and institutions. Nearly all the girls he'd slept with since Linda his ex-wife had walked out on him, had been co-workers.
Marcia couldn't be fitted comfortably into that category. Regardless of what she thought about it, she was no newspaperwoman. He didn't think of her as someone he might want for a one-night stand or even for an affair of a few weeks duration, either. Whenever he thought of her-which was often-he imagined her sharing his life, waiting for him at the airport when he jetted in from some foreign assignment. With the incentive and encouragement a woman like Marcia could give him, that kind of job wouldn't be out of his reach.
Nor did he believe that Marcia was out of his reach. He knew she was dissatisfied with her home life. She always looked a little distressed when it came time for her to go home. She always managed to find some excuse to hang around the city room and postpone her return.
Most important of all, he knew that she was interested in him. Just talking, exchanging a casual word about some trivial incident, they generated electricity between them. Only her innate decency, her respect for the marriage contract, kept her chained to her clod of a husband-whom Ron had met, and characterized as a clod, long before he'd met Marcia. He wouldn't have loved her-yes, loved her, he was forced to acknowledge it-if she hadn't been so decent and loyal.
It was trying, though. She always rejected his offers to meet him for a drink after work. She maintained a firmly aloof manner when they were on an assignment together. Still, there was no denying that electricity. He could feel it, and he couldn't remember when he'd ever been wrong about it.
But now, more forcefully than ever, his resolution was being proved correct. He was in love with Marcia, and she was actively screwing up his job.
Of course, she didn't realize it. A person as sweet and guileless as Marcia couldn't realize what a bastard Jack Higgins really was. Higgins resented the fact that Ron was too talented, too experienced, to be working on a small-time rag like the Banner. They'd had a few run-ins already, and now Higgins was looking for an excuse to fire him.
Just last week, the managing editor had accused him of not generating enough ideas for human interest features. That was true enough. Ron wasn't the kind of reporter who could waste his time on hundred-year-old ladies, cute animals, or screwball hobbyists. But if Higgins wanted feature stories, that's what Higgins would get, and Ron had promptly come up with an idea that would fit the editor's requirements without compromising his own professional standards: a story about the sudden influx of hippies into Riveredge Township would have plenty of human interest, but it would also be timely, it would say something meaningful about society-it would be, in the best sense, a news story.
Higgins, of course, hadn't seen it that way. "Jesus Christ, Ron," he'd fumed, "this isn't 1965. Who the fuck wants to read about hippies anymore?"
But Higgins had given his grudging consent to the assignment, and Ron had vowed to give him the kind of story that would make him eat his words-or failing that, the kind of story that would look good among his clippings when he sought another job.
Higgins hadn't been content merely to sneer at his idea, though; he'd actively tried to sabotage it by sending along an inept cub who would cramp his style and get tangled in his footwork.
The strategy was working brilliantly. Marcia couldn't have done a better job of screwing him up today if she'd been trying. Clicking her damned camera at the wrong moment-asking dumb questions-making a fool out of herself and flustering him with her clumsy inexperience-most of all, inhibiting him from talking to that wise-ass faggot who called himself Alexander Hamilton in a straight-from-the-shoulder way that would have elicited some information, if only by rattling him and making him lose his cool control.
The interview hadn't been a total loss, however. Hamilton had revealed a lot more than he'd intended. Principally, he'd revealed that he had something to cover up; and Ron strongly suspected what it was. Hamilton's jewelry wasn't intended for women. It was the paraphernalia of sado-masochistic homosexuals. Ron was familiar with their activities from some of the more sensational journals that came his way. After all, no woman in her right mind was going to wear a bull's prick around her neck. But it would be just the right touch on some freak in a nail-studded leather jacket and stamper boots, bellying up to one of the weird bars that catered to his sort.
Whether the newly arrived hippies contained a large contingent of such people or not, Ron didn't know. They well might, because he believed they were capable of any perversion. The tip-off had been the goat. He had watched enough old-time horror movies to know a pentagram when he saw one, and that's what the goat had been wearing around its neck.
It all fitted neatly together. The hippies were members of a Satanist cult, no doubt the followers of some charismatic leader who wasn't playing with a full deck. On his orders, they were gathering here for some big event of their liturgical year. Ron had spent the evening in the library, reading up on witchcraft and Satanism, and he believed he could name the night of their big bash: April 30, known as May Eve or Walpurgis Night, one of the four or five such nights of the year when self-styled witches assemble to worship the Devil at an obscene convocation known as the Sabbat.
Such people would routinely practice all forms of degeneracy with the fervor of religious acts. The S-and-M paraphernalia that Hamilton made was to be expected. So were the cattle mutilations that had been reported in the neighborhood. So was the murder-as Marcia had astutely recognized it to be-of the old hermit.
She hadn't followed up her hunch about that story, though, which only served to prove his contention that she was no newspaperwoman. Ron had followed it up by talking to the Medical Examiner. When the M.E. had autopsied the corpse, he'd discovered that Peach-tree's heart was missing. The cops weren't officially calling it murder yet, but none of them seriously believed that a pack of starving dogs would be so selective. The heart had been taken, Ron believed, for use in some blasphemous ritual. Before the old man's death, the Satanists had terrorized him to give rise to the rumor that some supernatural creature was responsible.
But the goat had been the tip-off. During the Sabbat, the Devil himself was supposed to appear: sometimes as a man, sometimes as an animal, sometimes as a combination of the two. The goat, so carefully curried and groomed, would no doubt play a part in that scene. The pentagram, the five-pointed star Ron had identified on the goat's necklace, was the symbol traditionally used by witches to control demons they had summoned.
Of course it was all nonsense, but these people believed it, and that belief made it dangerous nonsense. One man had died already. Animals had been tortured. Ron couldn't even imagine what kind of perversions and obscenities some of the young, starry-eyed followers of the crazy cult were being subjected to-like that pretty young girl he'd passed on the road a few minutes ago-but he planned to find out.
Unexpectedly, this "human interest feature" for Higgins might turn out to be the biggest story of his life, the springboard that would catapult him into the belated beginning of a real career. The story had everything-murder, sex, a kinky religious angle-and Ron planned to hold onto it and milk it for all it was worth. It was going to be his story, his alone.
That was why he was driving down this lonely country road tonight, dressed in old clothes, armed with a flashlight, a hunting knife, and-quite illegally-a .357 Magnum Colt Python. He'd bought it in a state with liberal gun laws, back in the days when the ghetto riots were making news. He'd never before carried it on a story. No one had ever assigned him to cover a riot.
He slowed at Blackwood's Corners and made the turn into Falls Road, where he and Marcia had interviewed Hamilton that afternoon. He soon found a boarded-up produce stand that looked like a good place to pull the car out of sight. He drove behind the stand, cut the lights and the engine, and sat listening for a moment. He heard nothing but crickets and frogs, and the bark of a dog in the distance. He could dimly discern the bulk of a farmhouse at the end of a long drive leading from the stand, but it was dark.
He got out of the car, shaking himself to unglue his sweaty clothes from his body. He was embarrassed by the theatricality of the gesture, even though he was alone, but he took out his pistol and checked the cylinder to make sure it was fully loaded. Then he slipped it into his belt beneath his shirt and started off down the road on foot.
Once his eyes had adapted to the starlight, he could make out the road and the shoulder clearly enough. He was sure he could fade into the bushes if a car should approach.
He caught himself humming aloud, and he put a stop to it. He smiled ruefully as he realized how buoyant, how exhilarated he felt. He had been a stranger to such feelings for a long time, ever since Linda had left him. He had just lost a job then. He'd been drinking too much. She'd found someone she liked better. Things had never gone right for him since then.
Now they were going right again at last. This was one big story that nobody would ignore. Even Jack Higgins wouldn't be able to play it down or steal the credit from him. What if some enterprising reporter had nipped Charles Manson in the bud by exposing his crazy philosophy and his plan for mass murder? Ron began toying with the idea of a Pulitzer Prize. Marcia would certainly rethink her attitude toward him if he got one.
He glimpsed lights through the trees. They had to be coming from Hamilton's place. He slowed his pace slightly. He was right: lights blazed in every window of the ramshackle farmhouse.
He stopped, cupping his hands to hide the flame as he lit a cigarette. He had worked out no plan for approaching the house, and he realized now that he should have done so. He should have driven past a couple of times in daylight to familiarize himself with the terrain. But it was too late to worry about that now.
He started forward again. He might be able to approach the house from the road, taking cover behind what he found, like say, the parked bus and the miscellaneous junk that littered the front yard.
Just as he got within sight of the house, the screen door opened and some people started coming out. He fell flat instantly, stifling a grunt, and slid down into the ditch by the roadside. A strong odor of mint assailed him from plants he crushed on his way down.
He lay still for a moment, breathing heavily, then slowly raised his head above the rim of the ditch. Eight or ten people had left the house and were now walking toward the road in an orderly file that resembled some kind of religious procession. They all wore long, white garments. The sight unnerved him, even though his suspicion should have prepared him for something like this.
They passed close by his hiding place, turning away from him as they reached the road. It was too dark to make out their faces. That encouraged him to believe that his own presence had gone undetected. They passed in perfect silence, except for the occasional whisper of a robe brushing the grass. Ron believed they must be barefoot
He rose from the ditch and waited until the last figure in the file was only a pale blur in his sight. He cast a quick glance at the farmhouse. Seeing no one, he climbed back onto the road and passed the lighted house, following them.
He couldn't imagine what they were up to. Perhaps they planned to hold a small service in preparation for the big event. His readings had told him that such gatherings were frequent. Perhaps they were going in search of another victim, or to mutilate some more of their neighbors cattle. Whatever they did, he planned to have a ringside seat.
He hadn't gone far before it occurred to him that the lights of the farmhouse were now at his back. If anyone in the file looked over his shoulder, he would be clearly visible. Cursing his thoughtlessness, he moved off the road. He tripped and fell into the ditch he'd just left.
He twisted his ankle beneath him as he fell. He was sure it wasn't broken, but it hurt when he put all his weight on it. He'd landed in a puddle, and the wetness of his clothes was even more annoying than the pain in his ankle.
He waited a moment, making an effort to calm his jangled nerves. He was off to a rotten start. It was obvious that he should have prepared himself more carefully. This was no ordinary job, either, and the next mistake he made might cost him his life.
It was hard for him to make an emotional connection with that fact. He had been a reporter for fifteen years, and he'd seen the results of violence in all its ugly forms, but always as a disinterested observer. Tonight for the first time, he was risking his life in the line of duty.
Perversely, the thought cheered him up. Once again he rejected the idea of turning back and making more careful preparations for another night. The hippies were up to something now, that was certain, and they might be inactive tomorrow or the next night.
He scrambled up the far bank of the ditch and limped hastily forward through the underbrush. Branches snatched at his clothes and scratched his face, but he didn't slow down. He was out of breath, his vision blurred by trickles of sweat, when he caught sight of the column again. It was proceeding sedately, in perfect order. He slowed, dragging air into his burning lungs as quietly as he could. He began to pick his way more carefully, trying to move without a sound.
A dog barked nearby. He hesitated. His recollection of the road was hazy, but he was almost certain that no other houses stood for several miles beyond Hamilton's. The dog was running loose. What if the police had been right in their first guess, and Peachtree had been killed by dogs? He refused to take that line of thought any further.
He saw that he was gaining on the white-robed hippies, and it took him a moment to realize that the file had halted. He saw a glimmer of dim garments as they rearranged their formation into a circle.
The bank he was following had risen considerably above the level of the road. When he inched closer, he had as good a view as the darkness would permit. The hippies had stopped and formed a circle where a graveled road crossed the blacktop. He knew that he had read something this evening about the significance that a crossroads had for witches, but he couldn't recall now what it was. It didn't matter really, because their crazy beliefs had no objective reality. Whatever it was, he could go back to the library tomorrow and look it up.
The hippies were chanting now. He had studied Latin and French in high school, and he believed he could identify five or six other languages, but the tongue they used was unfamiliar. Perhaps it was some kind of gibberish made up to confuse unbelievers. A word that sounded like "yog-zoth" was repeated many times, and more than once he heard the name "Hecate." He was on more familiar ground there. Hecate was the goddess of witches, going back to ancient Greece. That seemed to prove he was on the right track, that he had indeed stumbled upon practitioners of witchcraft and Devil-worship.
The chant had begun as a whispery sigh, but now it was warming up. It had developed a driving, rhythmic beat as it rose in volume. The lead was taken by a woman, slim and small and fair-haired, who virtually screamed her part as the others grunted and bellowed in unison.
As if in response to the chant, a piece of noisy machinery, perhaps an irrigation pump, started up in the near distance. Ron smiled wryly as he recalled a snatch of an old song about the peace and quiet to be found in the country. Between these screaming lunatics and the chugging pump, or whatever it was, the lonely crossroads sounded like a rock concert in a boiler factory.
The small woman, the leader of the chant, was moving around inside the circle, holding out something in her hands to each of the others. They each took something-no, that wasn't it-each of them added something to whatever it was she held. They kept up the chant all the while, the responses overlapping her screams as the volume and the frenzy still escalated. Even the noise of the machinery seemed to be getting louder, through some quirk of the night's acoustics.
The woman placed the object in the center of the crossroads and withdrew to a position in the circle. The emotional intensity of the chanting diminished. The volume died. Soon it faded and stopped, leaving the night to the insects, the frogs, and the whippoorwills, all of them sounding so homey and prosaic that Ron could almost believe he'd imagined the hellish cacophony. Even the pump, probably controlled by an automatic timer, had stopped as if on cue.
The hippies now moved off, no longer in orderly file, but straggling in clusters, talking in subdued tones. Despite the melodramatic timing and setting of their ceremony, they now seemed like a group of churchgoers heading home on a Sunday morning.
He breathed more easily when they'd left. He waited for a full five minutes by his watch before he dared to stir, and even then he made his way down to the crossroads with extreme caution. He looked back the way the hippies had gone. He could see nothing, not a hint of a white robe. The night seemed to have grown unaccountably darker. The sky had been filled with stars only a half hour before, but now he couldn't make out one.
He was momentarily distracted by the random glimmer of fireflies. It was a sight he hadn't noticed since he was a child, and he permitted himself a moment to savor the nostalgia the silent show evoked. He smiled indulgently at his foolishness.
He stepped confidently onto the road, drawing out his flashlight. Whatever the woman had set down in the crossroads still lay there, a gray blob in the darkness. He drew closer and flicked on his light. The light was surprisingly dim, even though he had made a point of checking it before setting out. He shook it, but that had no effect. It was bright enough to reveal the object before him as an earthenware pot.
The machinery wheezed back to life again. He straightened up and listened. The noise seemed much louder now. The chanting must have partially shrouded it before, and now it had no competition. He tried to pinpoint its source, but it seemed to come from all directions at once.
He ignored the sound and returned his attention to the bowl. He flashed his exasperatingly feeble light on it directly. It was quite large, perhaps two feet in diameter. It was filled to overflowing with raw, bloody meat.
He flicked off the light, remembering what he'd read about the significance of a crossroads in witchcraft legends. It went back to the earliest times. Offerings to Hecate, goddess of night, who roamed the darkness with a troop of beasts, were placed at a crossroads. He laughed. This "offering" would be consumed by raccoons and stray cats and dogs by morning, and the leader of the "witches" would point to its disappearance as proof of his ravings. Or her ravings. He wondered if the slim, fair-haired woman was responsible for this resurgence of ancient superstition.
In a field beyond the crossroads, something at the edge of Ron's vision moved with alarming speed. He turned and looked, but it was no longer there. It may have been a gust of wind flattening the tall grass, except that there was no wind. It had undoubtedly been an optical illusion, an aberration caused by overwrought nerves and unaccustomed exertion.
He could do no more here. The show was over. He wished he had brought a camera instead of a gun. A picture of the bowl, taken with a flash attachment, would have been desirable, but that was just another instance of his imperfect preparation. He would plan more carefully, next time.
He started back the way he had come, but then he was struck by sudden inspiration. Why bother with a picture? He returned to the bowl and dumped its messy contents in the road, then took it along with him. An expert on such matters might be able to interpret the curious designs he had seen on it. The cultists would assume that some random passer-by had taken it, or perhaps they would even believe that their night-roaming goddess had taken it to enjoy her snack elsewhere.
He started to hum again, but he checked himself. He wasn't out of danger yet. He still had to pass by Hamilton's house unseen.
Unquestionably, the noise of the pump was getting louder as he walked. He could remember seeing no cultivated fields in this direction, nothing that would require irrigation. The only other possible interpretation was that the source of the sound was approaching him.
He stopped. In calling it a pump, he'd been making an offhanded guess. The sound had that sort of rhythmic regularity to it, but now it seemed much too loud for any irrigation pump. The noise had a wheezing, chugging quality, like air or steam escaping from a high-pressure container. Now the sound suggested nothing so much as a steam locomotive.
He laughed uneasily. The hippies were responsible. They were producing the sound with electronic equipment, perhaps to frighten or impress the neophytes in their group. It was supposed to represent ... what? An animal, perhaps. Yes, that was it, an animal of prehistoric dimensions, a predatory beast sniffing out its prey.
"Crazy assholes," he muttered, thinking of the expense and ingenuity required to produce the silly effect.
He quickened his pace. If the loudspeakers were hidden nearby, perhaps one of the cultists was also nearby, tending them. Perhaps he had already been observed. But it made more sense to get out quickly, by way of the road, than to blunder into the woods. He touched the butt of the gun in his belt for reassurance.
He recalled now what Marcia had told him: that Peachtree had heard something "snuffling" around his house, something that sounded like a steam engine. This was the wrong time and place to remember such details. He walked a little faster, even while telling himself that this effect wasn't being created for his benefit. The hippies didn't know he was here.
He stopped cold. A white figure barred the road.
"God-no!" he screamed.
He switched on the flashlight in his hand. It was the girl he had seen earlier. Now she was stark naked, and her dog was no longer with her. Her eyes were glassy, unfeeling, perhaps even unseeing. She was drugged-that was it-and the weird sound-show was being put on for her benefit, to assist in her conversion.
"You scared the shit out of me, kid," he laughed.
He moved closer, not turning off the flashlight, trying to think of a way to talk himself out of this situation. He might not need to. She might be alone. His fright over, he became aware that she had one hell of a body. Again he cursed the inefficiency of the flashlight as he slid it lower.
He stopped again as she raised one arm slowly, theatrically, to point at him. Her eyes were glacial.
"You could catch cold-" he began, but he got no chance to complete his thought. The noise around him rose suddenly to a roar as something gripped him around the middle, pressing him until his ribs cracked and he felt lances of intolerable pain. A hot blast of air surrounded him, stifled him, made him retch with its odor of corruption. When he tried to draw in his breath to scream, he found that he couldn't.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Ken walked down a long corridor and through the empty reception room of Creighton and Fulham, Architects. He went to the door of his private office and opened it. The room was a shambles. The desk was overturned, the drapes torn from the windows. Someone had destroyed his rendering and written across it: "The dog is no good. I must be let in by my sister on May Eve."
A woman with black hair that hung below her waist approached him with a swaying, seductive walk. Her smile frightened him. Her incisors were like the fangs of a dog.
"I'm Marcia Wilson, your new secretary," she breathed in a voice that oozed sexuality.
She came close, intolerably close. He tried to step back, but he was powerless to move a muscle as she draped her hands on his shoulders and smiled up at him.
"What do you want?"
"You must marry me. You will be my child's father."
"Father," another voice echoed.
He found that he could turn his head. Another woman, scarcely more than a girl, stood there. Her slanted blue eyes burned with a hellish glow.
"Father," she repeated.
The women looked at each other and cackled with obscene glee.
The girl came closer, unbearably close. She leaned toward him as if to offer her mouth in a kiss. She opened her mouth. She had the jaws of an animal. She no longer smiled. She snarled.
"No!" he screamed.
Tangled in bedclothes, streaming with sweat, he sat upright in darkness. His heart pounded. He was awake, but he was scared, more scared than he had ever been. He fought the impulse to turn to the door, where he imagined that Melody actually stood, grinning fiendishly. That was foolish. He turned. No one stood at the door.
He fumbled for a cigarette and made out the mound of Marcia's hip, the pool of her hair on the pillow, by the flare of the match. The flame shook. He inhaled and suppressed a fit of coughing, not wanting to wake her.
He peered at the clock. It was one. It had been a quarter after twelve when he'd last looked, despairing of ever being able to get to sleep. Now he had slept and it had been far worse than lying awake and thinking of-here he made a supreme effort to blot out the subject that had obsessed him, tortured him, kept him from sleep, but it was no use-thinking of Nora Curtis.
He groaned aloud. Just by letting her name form in his mind, he had opened the door for the twisted, cloying images of sexuality that had been prancing and slithering through his mind all night. His fantasies had acquired the force of hallucinations. She was in the bedroom, as real as the dresser or the night stand, but she was no longer the Nora Curtis he knew. Her hair was disordered, her bare body glowed with sweat, her eyes were hungry. She postured lewdly, caressing her sex, twisting to offer her lithe buttocks, urging him with her puckered lips. He felt a resurgence of the excitement that had passed beyond desire to become an excruciating pain.
He hadn't been able to purge Nora from his mind since he'd kissed her, but at first he hadn't thought that unusual. After all, he was bored. His wife was barely speaking to him. He was enduring a movie that interested him not at all. Why not occupy his mind with Nora and the exciting new possibilities she had brought into his life?
That was when the strangeness had begun: during the movie.
He had nudged Marcia. "Looks like Nora, doesn't it?" he had said.
Marcia had feigned irritation, as if the preposterous film were too gripping to admit interruptions. "What?"
"That actress. Looks like Nora Curtis, doesn't she?"
Marcia had studied him for a moment. "You have a vivid imagination," she'd said, turning back to the screen.
Stupid bitch. It was Nora Curtis, down to the tips of her fingers. He was tempted to enlist the support of his children in asserting the likeness, the identity of the actress with their neighbor, but they were sitting beyond Marcia. He didn't want to create a disturbance over an unimportant point. Surely Marcia saw the resemblance as clearly as he did. She was just being difficult.
He hadn't been paying much attention to the movie. The actress who looked like Nora didn't have a major role, but she made an appearance in almost every scene. She never said anything. Often she would gaze right at the camera-right at Ken-for no understandable reason. The director of the film was known for his offbeat, obscure touches. This must be one of them.
Two of the principal characters were chatting at the side of a pool. In the background, the trim little woman with tawny hair swam, then emerged to preen herself at pool side. She began to peel off her bathing suit. The movie was rated "R." Perhaps this was why.
The actors in the foreground went out of focus as the camera concentrated on the blonde actress. Her breasts were bare, beaded with diamonds of water. They swayed as she rolled her bikini down from her hips to reveal a sparse patch of pubic hair that didn't hide the plump lips of her sex.
"I'll give you the kind of fucking you never even dreamed of," she said.
Appalled, Ken turned to Marcia. She watched the movie, her face impassive. The kids were absorbed in the screen. No one in the audience had giggled, no rowdies had hooted at the blatant invitation. No one seemed to have noticed it. He turned back to the screen. The girl was gone.
He had drunk a lot before coming to the movie. Could it be that he'd dropped off to sleep momentarily and dreamed that sequence? It seemed the only plausible explanation, even though he felt sober and alert.
The movie continued. He could make little sense out of it, even when he tried to concentrate. A man from outer space was visiting the earth incognito, doing enigmatic things for obscure reasons. Marcia and the kids followed it all with apparent interest.
The hero was climbing a fire escape. The camera followed, then lingered on a lighted window and entered through the billowing curtains. The blonde woman lay nude on a bed. She gazed at Ken with sex-dragged eyes. Her glistening fingers toyed unashamed with the exposed flesh between her legs.
"I want you" she said. "Now. Please. Come to me. I'll do anything for you, anything at all."
Ken looked around him. He was touched by panic. No one else in the audience was reacting to the scene. No one else seemed able to see it. He gripped Marcia's arm.
"What is it?" she demanded.
"What the hell kind of movie is this? Are you just going to sit there and let the kids watch this filth?"
"For God's sake, Ken," she sighed. "Why don't you go next door and have a drink?"
He was scared. She hadn't seen it. No one had. It was a product of his imagination. Overwork? Hardly. The D.T.'s? That only happened to Skid Row bums. He'd had four or five drinks, that was all, and their effect was wearing off.
He forced himself to concentrate on the screen, on what was really there. But Nora Curtis was really there. Head bowed, she was caressing a man's phallus with her moist tongue.
"I'd prefer to have you, Ken. It's you I really want."
He stumbled out of his seat and fled the theater with Nora's amplified voice booming lascivious suggestions in his ears.
In the bar next to the movie house, after two gins on the rocks, he had been able to chuckle at his overwrought imagination. The chrome and glass gleamed with unquestionable reality. The bartender, ruddy and solid, was undeniably himself. Men talked of bets and politics and women. Warily, he studied the murky mirror behind the bar, but no trim little woman with a leonine mane appeared in it.
Marcia, wearily patient, collected him when the movie was over.
Now he sat awake in bed and wondered if he were going mad. If so, he was mad on only one subject, the victim of only one obsession. Lust. What a silly, old-fashioned word! Perhaps it still appeared in children's catechisms, perhaps writers of pornography still squeezed some mileage out of it, but the word was unknown to common speech, the concept was alien to the modern consciousness. Yet that was what he felt for Nora Curtis: he lusted for her. His body ached for her, his brain seethed with visions of her.
Marcia turned in her sleep and rolled against him. He looked down at her. Only the basic elements of her pallid face showed in the darkness, giving it the stylized appearance of a primitive mask. He couldn't tell if her eyes were closed or open, or if her lips were parted in a wolfish grin-he wrenched his mind away from that fantasy. She could be anyone. She could be Nora.
She was Nora.
He snuffed his cigarette and quietly put the ashtray back on the bedside stand. He hadn't touched his wife in-he couldn't remember how long. It seemed that they always arranged to go to bed at different hours. Only habit, and the reluctance to make a symbolically significant change, kept them together in the same bedroom.
He lifted strands of her hair from the pillow. They were light in color. Her face was Nora's face. Her eyes were open.
"Yes, Ken," she whispered.
He slipped his hand under her nightdress, up the cool column of her thigh to hair that was much finer and fluffier than Marcia's. Petals opened to his probing fingers, moisture trickled as he rolled above her, guiding himself eagerly and clumsily with his free hand.
An elbow banged his chest, a knee speared his thigh as she shoved him and twisted away.
"God damn it, Ken!" It was Marcia's sleep-scratchy voice. "Go away."
"Frigid cunt!" he snarled, heaving himself out of bed.
He looked down. Beyond question, the hair on the pillow was black. It was Marcia. She was already asleep again. He heard the soft, familiar purr of her snore. He wished he hadn't touched her. His hand felt dirty. He wiped it on his robe as he belted it about his body. Touching any woman but Nora was wrong.
On his way downstairs, where he planned to drink himself into insensibility, he paused at Melody's door. It had never before occurred to him how much he disliked his stepdaughter, but his strange dream had somehow focused his emotions. Perhaps it was the fact that the dream had emphasized the conspiratorial relationship that existed between the mother and daughter, a conspiracy directed against him.
Melody had never been able to conceal her contempt for him, and her mother had never done anything to discourage it. Melody often amused herself by playing a cheap little trick: answering a question before he asked it, or finishing a sentence he had only started. Then she would permit a hint of a smirk to touch her inscrutable mask. She was observant, that was all, and she'd been around him a long time. She couldn't read his thoughts, even though she tried to give that impression in order to disconcert him. And that telephone trick-maybe she always answered the phone when he was out by saying "Hello, Ken," hoping to catch him with that exasperating prank.
But his dislike-no, why mince words, his loathing-for his stepdaughter had a deeper source than the long accumulation of practical jokes and sneers and slights. Sometimes-and it was now happening more frequently-his flesh crawled when they chanced to touch, as if he had accidentally brushed against a snake. He sensed something inhuman about her. The texture of her skin, the look in her eyes, the way she walked-everything about her was subtly, indefinably wrong. It was as if a clever, but not quite perfect, counterfeit of a human being had been palmed off on her gullible mother. The dream, in which he had pictured Melody with the muzzle of a beast, had underlined that impression and made it clear to him.
He sighed, turning from her door. Perhaps he really was cracking up, and this was further proof of the fact. He had reason enough to crack up. He was intelligent, talented, and personable. He had worked hard all his life. He had achieved material success, he was married to a beautiful and intelligent woman, he had a young and attractive mistress-and yet none of his trophies was worth anything, none of them meant what he had thought it would mean. His wife was cold and hostile, his success was the result of compromise and concession. His stepdaughter was insane. His mistress was crude and stupid. He drank too much, and he was getting older by the minute.
Nora was the answer. Nora would set everything right for him. He had married the wrong woman, that was the source of all his problems. Not only would she be able to satisfy the hunger that gripped him now, she would also tell him what to do to satisfy all his other unfulfilled needs. He remembered now that he had once thought her scatterbrained. He was forced to laugh at himself. How could he have been so wrong about someone? Nora was the missing half of his mangled soul.
He passed through the living room without looking at the bar. The wet pebbles of the Japanese garden gouged his bare feet. Only then did he realize that he had left the house, that he was striding purposefully toward Nora's. He paused for a moment, wondering what he would say and do when he arrived on her doorstep in his bathrobe at this ungodly hour. It didn't matter. He would go to her, that was all that mattered, and the details would sort themselves out.
He could have walked more easily by way of the road, but he was impelled to march on a straight line through the patch of woods that separated their properties. No lights showed ahead of him. He couldn't see where he was going. But he knew that he couldn't go wrong. An invisible thread tied him to his goal. His desire grew with each step, for he knew that each step took him closer to Nora.
He found himself repeating her name aloud as he went forward. He stumbled over logs, collided with trees, tangled with bushes. Having fallen for the third time, he no longer troubled to get up. He went forward on hands and knees, speaking her name with each ragged exhalation of breath. The wheezing of his abused lungs sounded abnormally loud in his ears.
His robe snagged on a thorny bush. He fumbled to free it, but he saw that he was wasting precious time. He wrenched it from his body and continued to scramble forward.
The rough ground beneath him gave way to a smooth lawn. He crawled on for awhile before looking up. The tall chimney at the end of Nora's darkened house towered above him, blotting out the stars. He got to his feet and ran to the front of the house. He scanned the upstairs windows, wondering which ones gave onto her bedroom. They were all dark.
"Nora," he called. "Nora!"
He rang the doorbell, holding it down under the steady pressure of his thumb for a full minute while he rattled the knob. He stepped back. The upstairs windows were still dark. He rang the bell again, then plunged into the plantings at the front of the house, trying each of the windows. They were all locked.
He worked his way around to the back of the house, tugging at locked windows. Some shred of sense remained, holding him from smashing his fist through a window to gain entry. He knew that what he was doing was irrational, that he ought to return home; but he couldn't.
He pounded on the back door, loud enough to drown the thunder of his heartbeat and the rasp of his breath. The door was locked. He looked around for a tool to force it. He saw that the garage door was open. Her car was missing. He sank to his knees, striking the earth with his fist, screwing his face against the tears that still managed to seep out.
"Nora!" he roared. "Nora!"
He lay on the wet grass for a long time, gasping and sobbing. He had made her wait too long. She had gone off with someone else, perhaps with her lover from the movie. He no longer thought of that as a movie, nor as a hallucination, but as an event he had witnessed. She had offered herself. She had begged him to come to her. He had failed. He ripped at the grass and earth under his fingers.
He would break into the house. He would go to her bedroom. He would lie between the same sheets that touched her. He would clutch the pillow, inhaling her scent, and pretend that he held her naked body. The fantasy excited him. He writhed against the ground, rubbing his erection on the grass. He rolled over on his back and began to stroke it with his hand.
Light dazzled him. He lay still, unable to interpret the burst of light. Gravel crunched under tires. Sanity crashed back, filling him with shame and horror. He saw himself as anyone else would see him: a wretched degenerate, exposing himself and masturbating on a suburban lawn.
He got to his feet and started to run. He staggered. For the first time he felt the pain that his progress through the woods had cost him. His legs had been scraped, his feet cut and bruised.
"Ken!"
He stopped cold, He forgot the pain. He turned. It was her voice, Nora's voice. He stumbled toward the glare of the headlights, no more able to resist than the phototropic bugs that were flitting in the same direction.
Nora got out of the car. She wore a plain white gown, a startling contrast to her normally flashy outfits. Her tiny feet were bare. She held one of her earthenware bowls, a large one, in her hand. She was obviously returning from dinner, for which she had brought one of the courses, with perfectly normal friends; and she had come home to find a naked man masturbating on her lawn. The incongruity shamed him, but it didn't, deter him. He felt a hollow longing for her in the pit of his stomach that almost transcended the burning urgency in hi? out-thrust prick. Now he knew that he had been hallucinating earlier, because none of his visions could match the impact of her reality.
"I thought you'd be here," she said.
He was unable to speak. He reached out to her. She threw back her head and laughed at him. Her laughter held a bold challenge, and it seemed to unlock a whole new cage full of insane desires. He wanted to bite the white throat exposed to him. He wanted to rip off her breasts with his teeth. He wanted to drive her to her knees with his fists and kick her to death. Sex alone couldn't calm the frenzy within him, or the passion she provoked.
He grabbed her and wrenched her forward to a bone-jarring collision with his body. He clutched a handful of her thick hair to tilt her face up while his free hand tore her gown from her body. Laughing, she trapped his thigh between her legs and rubbed her cunt against it in a lewd, humping motion. Then she sliced his face with her nails, hurting him with cool deliberation, exulting in her absolute power. He hated her for making him want her so much. She offered her lips. She squirmed and writhed, rubbing her firm little tits against his chest, massaging his thigh with her moist cunt. She kissed him as if trying to suck out his soul. Then her teeth pierced his lip.
He flung her down on the grass. She smiled up at him, slowly licking his blood from her lip as she let her thighs drift wide apart. Her cunt was just as he had seen it in that insane movie: the hair too sparse-the lips so plump and perfect-that it was like a child's. He even remembered a mole high on her inner thigh. Her green eyes glinted with desire and malice.
"Can't you wait till we get to the bedroom?" she asked, her tone a ghastly parody of girlish coyness.
He shook his head. She laughed again as she sprawled back on the grass in the stark illumination of her headlights.
"Eat my cunt, you worthless piece of shit," she said. "I'll bet that's all you're good for. If you do it nicely, maybe I'll let you stop before sunrise."
He dropped to his knees in the angle of her white thighs. She corresponded in every particular to the Nora Curtis of his feverish visions. Her pubic hair was only slightly darker than the hair on her head. Her cunt was long and leaf-shaped, her anus a prim, red berry. Her belly was concave, her navel a depressed slit. Her nipples were large and dark, the aureoles the size of half dollars. Under his stroking hands, her skin felt as he'd known it would-soft as a baby's, but overlaying firm muscularity.
He wiped the blood from his lip and snuggled his face between her legs. Her hands tangled in his hair and pulled his head forward and down, hard. He pressed his mouth against the nearly hairless lips, prodding and probing with his tongue until they opened like the red wings of a butterfly.
He slipped his hands beneath her sleek rump and lifted her as a thirsty man might lift a brimming bowl. Her thighs locked his head in place. She clawed his shoulders, laughing wildly. She scrubbed his lips, his nose, his eyes with her sopping cunt. He loved it. All thoughts of violence had vanished. He breathed the fishy odor deep into his lungs, he drank the sticky ooze as it seeped out under his eager tonguing. He couldn't breathe. He didn't care. He was lost, wandering eternally in a hot cavern whose red walls sweated and clutched.
"Lower," she ordered. "Put your tongue in my asshole."
He did what she told him. He forgot about hating her. He forgot his name, his status, his pride. He became a simple organism, a lamprey or a leech, joyously fulfilling its sole function in the universal system. He made a stiff rapier of his tongue and thrust it deep into the hot, dry hole, vibrating it inside the squirmy tightness while she spread her legs wider. He clutched her buttocks with clawed fingers, dreading separation from her crotch.
The hand clutching his hair jerked him upward. He caught a ragged breath and pressed his mouth again to her cunt. It was a soft, slushy pudding now, all except for the hard little button that made her squirm whenever his tongue flicked it. He drew it lightly between his lips and began lashing it with his flickering tongue. His heart leaped as she began to moan. He couldn't believe that he was actually pleasing her, that he could exert a kind of power over her.
He pulled his hands out from under her wiggling ass and slid them up on her sweat-slick flesh until they were cupping her tits. He felt a fresh thrill of excitement, a new surge in his aching cock as he kneaded the firm globes with his hands. He pinched the hard, darkened cones of her nipples between thumbs and forefingers, rolling them lightly, making them even harder, and an electrified quiver ran through her body. She stiffened suddenly, then went limp, then began twisting her hips to mash her cunt against his sucking mouth even more violently than before.
Spitting inarticulate, feline noises, she dragged him higher. He needed to draw breath. Even more than that, he needed to kiss her belly and lick her breasts. She shivered. She battered her jutting pelvis against his chest and belly in repeated hammer blows.
"Now," she ordered. "Now!"
His rigid cock sank like a stone into a viscous sea. Her cunt sheathed it to the hilt in a second skin made of fire and mercury and oil. She writhed like a captive serpent as she threw herself into the rhythm he set-her hips twisting, her belly strumming, her spine arching. He clutched her harder, trying to break the cages of their bones and flesh in order to blend their souls.
She whimpered with impatience, urging him to move faster, but he took his own time. As she shifted and squirmed and squeezed, he felt that he had somehow gained control, that he was now in charge. She was at last reacting to what he did. He was touching her, controlling her pleasure.
She twined her legs around his back, shifting her ass to take as much of his thrusting prick as she possibly could, and he pulled her buttocks up in his cupped hands to jam the last inch of the tingling meat into her. He fucked her in hard, staccato bursts, his prick shuttling in and out of her like a red-hot piston, making the juice fly and spatter against his legs from the churning cauldron of her molten cunt.
She stretched her legs up higher, until her knees were pressing up into his armpits and her cunt was wide open to his hammering thrusts. He couldn't remember when he'd been in so deep, when every last inch of his prick had been bathed so thoroughly in scalding juice.
Nothing in his life, nothing he had experienced or imagined, had prepared him for Nora Curtis's cunt. He had thought of them as conveniently placed holes, uniquely wet and warm, but essentially primitive and uncomplicated in nature. He was shocked to find his prick sliding inside an organ that seemed as complex and sophisticated as his eye or his heart or his hand, but totally unfamiliar and defying comparison with anything else.
It could squeeze-as a unit or in sections-the pressure starting at one end and rippling to the other like falling dominoes. It could slither around him like a wet tentacle. It could disappear altogether, ballooning away from his buried pillar of flesh to become an echoing, empty vault
It was as if fucking had been invented for this woman alone, and all the others who tried it were only giving a pale imitation. He wanted to slow down and savor this fuck, to relish every inch of the slide into the fleshy flower between her squirming legs, but she wouldn't let him. She battered her hipbones against him and clawed his back to urge him in and out, even faster and harder.
Clutching and groping, they wrestled against each other through a jungle of wet grass and gravel. He clawed at her sweat-slimed body; she raked him with her nails; her teeth clamped his shoulder; she pounded his kidneys with her dainty heels. He was both rider and mount, spurred and spurring, as they galloped ever faster toward an overwhelmingly important goal: heaven or hell (he couldn't say which, nor did he care).
Then he discovered that the goal was within himself. It was an inward glimmer, something similar to the soul he had pictured as a child; but he wasn't merely picturing it, he was feeling it. It expanded to fill the universe he had become-tingling at the edges like a billion stars, like a billion tiny needles pricking his skin from the outside-and he felt earthquakes shake the world of her body beneath him.
Dimly, he heard a high-pitched noise like the whine of a mosquito, even louder, diving closer. He realized that she was making the noise, way back in her throat, and then it burst from her mouth as a yell that he instantly stifled with a bruising kiss as the pump of his cock dragged fire up from his balls and showered it into her. He groaned like a wretch on the rack; but it wasn't pain or death that gripped him, it was ecstasy that fragmented like a flock of glass butterflies, fluttering and clattering, fading and blending to a dull glow.
"Now that we've broken the ice," she murmured, "let's go upstairs and do some serious fucking."
He braced himself on locked elbows and smiled down at her. In the ghastly radiance of the headlights he experienced one last hallucination as she smiled back. For an instant it seemed that he gazed down into gelatinous eyes bulging from the sockets of a grinning skull-a skull only partly covered by rotting, yellow skin-and that bare bone gleamed through its patchy growth of dead-white hair.
But this last hallucination was gone in the blinking of an eye, and he looked down into the smooth, white face of Nora Curtis, who smiled with temporary satisfaction.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A loud buzzing roused Marcia from a fearful dream.
The doorbell. She came fully awake with the echo of her own scream in her ears. She couldn't remember now what she had been dreaming about, but she felt used and defiled. Shakily, she lit a cigarette. She saw that the bed beside her was rumpled but empty.
The doorbell rang again. She waited irritably for Ken to answer it. But it kept ringing, and she heard no sound of movement downstairs. Lucifer should have been barking.
She got out of bed, pushing sweaty hair back from her face, and slipped a robe over her nightgown. She hurried down to the front door, expecting to hear Ken open it before she arrived. But he didn't. Apparently he had gone out. Maybe he had forgotten his key, or was too drunk to find it.
She snapped on the outside light. "Who is it?" she called.
"Police," said a firm, businesslike voice. "Open up."
This was it, she thought, fumbling with the door: Ken had gone out while she'd slept and killed himself in an auto accident He's gone to bed half-loaded. Maybe he'd had a few more before leaving. Maybe his girlfriend, whoever she was, had poured a few more into him.
She pulled open the door and glimpsed an intimidating array of belts and badges and guns before her eyes fell on the principal figure of the tableau: Melody. She stood between two township policemen.
"I know you," said the younger cop, carrot-haired, hardly more than a boy. "You're the Mrs. Creighton from the Banner."
"Yes, I-"
The other cop interrupted the reunion. He was older, dark and sour-looking. "I'm Officer Davies. This is Officer Peterson. Is this your daughter, Mrs. Creighton?"
"Of course. What's all this about?"
She asked the question of Melody, but Melody looked too scared to speak. Marcia had never seen her in this condition. Her normal composure had been destroyed. She was death-white. Her lips trembled wordlessly. She flung herself into Marcia's arms, hugging her so tight that Marcia had difficulty breathing.
"May we come in?" Davies, the older cop, asked.
"What's all this about?" Marcia repeated, but this time she asked the question of Peterson, the young policeman she remembered meeting at headquarters while covering some routine story.
"Well, there's nothing to worry about really, it's-"
"When did your daughter go out, Mrs. Creighton?" Davies interrupted.
"I didn't know she was out," Marcia said as she led them up the stairs to the living room, half supporting Melody. "I mean, she was in bed when I came home ..."
That wasn't true, she realized. She had merely assumed that Melody was asleep when she and Ken and the younger children had come home from the movie, sometime before midnight. She had been too tired to check on her oldest daughter. She had been emotionally exhausted from the strain of sitting next to a moody, fidgeting Ken through the film.
Had Melody been raped? Was that what this was all about?
"What the hell is going on here?" she very nearly screamed, halting the procession halfway up the stairs and turning on the startled cops. "You come busting in here at God knows what hour of the morning, asking me questions-my daughter is obviously upset-what do you want? What's happened? Has something happened to my daughter?"
"Your daughter's OK. We think she's had a bad scare, that's all." Surprisingly, it was Peterson who took it upon himself to give that information, and this time his senior partner didn't interrupt him.
"Mostly she's upset about losing a dog," Davies said. He looked at Marcia suspiciously. "Did she have a dog, a Doberman, with her?"
"My dog!" Marcia cried. "Where is he?"
"Has he ever bitten anyone before?" Davies demanded.
"Before what?" she snapped, still blocking their path halfway up the stairs.
"Let's go in and sit down," Peterson suggested. "We don't know where the dog is."
"But he must have been with Melody. Where did you find her? Won't you go back and look for him?"
"We'll talk about that," Davies said. "But let's go in and sit down, first."
Marcia at last resumed her ascent, snapping on the living room lights when she reached the head of the stairs. "Nice place you got here," Davies said. Marcia didn't bother to acknowledge that inappropriate observation. She hurried toward the couch with Melody and sat her down. The girl didn't seem to want to let her go.
"What's the matter, honey?" Marcia asked softly.
"I guess ... I guess I was sleepwalking." She managed a thin laugh, but it wasn't convincing. "I took Lucy for a walk, just in the neighborhood, but then I-I woke up, and I didn't know where I was."
"But what did you do with him-"
Davies interrupted. "Do you know a man named Ronald Green?"
It took Marcia a moment to recognize the name. Even though "Ronald" was the form used in his byline, she'd never called him that.
"Yes, he works with me."
When neither of the policemen said anything, she continued. "We were on an assignment together today. Has he ... ?"
Her voice trailed off. She had intended to ask if he were in some kind of trouble, but she decided that it would have been disloyal to ask such a question. Nevertheless, she could easily picture him running afoul of some irascible desk-sergeant while in hot pursuit of a story; or bouncing a check; driving with a delinquent auto inspection sticker; committing some similar lapse through his characteristic laziness and disorganization.
"He's dead, Mrs. Creighton," Davies said, after an uncomfortable pause.
"How-?"
"The same way the hermit was killed. Dogs, maybe. Or a dog."
She couldn't absorb the shock. She found herself wanting to insist that this was all wrong: Ken was dead, killed in a drunken accident, not Ron Green. She found it hard to believe that she wasn't still dreaming.
She recalled a question posed earlier by Davies, and indignation boiled up again. "And you think my dog did it? Are you crazy?"
Davies looked more sour than ever. "We found the girl near the scene of the attack. She couldn't give a good account of herself. She was carrying on about her dog."
She looked at Melody. In the dim light and the confusion at the door, she hadn't noticed her daughter's condition. Her shoes and the legs of her jeans were plastered with mud. Her face bore the marks of many scratches and insect bites. She looked as if she'd been wandering through a swamp.
"And what do you suppose? That she sicked Lucy on Ron Green?" Marcia demanded. "He isn't attack-trained. He's never even nipped anyone, not even as a puppy. We used to have a pet rabbit-my son did-and the dog played with him on the lawn. He's a ... a pussycat?"
"He's a Doberman pinscher," Davies said dryly, "and you can't trust them, not one inch. I used to train dogs in the army. Shepherds. But I wouldn't mess around with one of those things for a million dollars."
"You don't know Lucy," Marcia said firmly. "Anyway, Peachtree wasn't killed by dogs-or a dog," she added with sarcastic emphasis. "That's just a story you're giving out for public consumption, isn't it?"
Davies looked uncomfortable.
"I was there," she continued, "I found the body, as a matter of fact, and-"
"We're aware of that, Mrs. Creighton."
"-and it was obvious ... What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing at all. It means I read the report, that's an."
"You don't think that Melody and I are roaming around the countryside with our savage Doberman, killing anyone who crosses our path?"
"I didn't say that, Mrs. Creighton."
"You haven't said much of anything, have you? Where and when did all this happen?"
"I guess we don't have to bother you anymore," Davies said, turning to go. Perhaps he was satisfied that his suspicions had been false. More likely, he was fed up with her attitude.
Peterson spoke. "Around midnight, the M.E. thinks, maybe later. A motorist found him near Blackwood's Corners, and it looked at first like he'd been hit by a car, but that didn't stand up. Did he normally carry a gun?"
Marcia shook her head. "I don't think so."
Davies had changed his mind about leaving. "What kind of story are you and he working on? Was it this Peachtree thing?" he asked.
"No, it was the-the people at the commune. We spoke to some of them."
"Did you talk to a guy who calls himself Alexander Hamilton?"
"Why, yes-"
"He gave Mom this necklace," Melody said unexpectedly, holding out the one she was wearing. The policemen looked at her uncomfortably for a moment, as if expecting her to do or say something irrational.
"That's right," Marcia said. "Why do you ask?"
"Green was found a few hundred yards from his house," Peterson said. "We've taken them all in for questioning."
Marcia felt considerably relieved. She was glad to hear that they had found more suitable suspects than Melody and Lucifer.
"And Melody was near there? That must be about fifteen miles away!"
"That's about right," Davies said. "We figure somebody gave her a lift. But she won't talk to us."
"I don't remember," Melody insisted, and a shrill note entered her voice. "I told you, I-"
"It's all right," Marcia said. "It's all right."
She wanted to hear more about Ron Green's death, but it was obvious that her duty lay elsewhere. It was essential to get rid of the police and quiet Melody down. Tomorrow she could devote all her time to this story-assuming Higgins would let her. He probably knew about Ron Green's death already and. had someone working on it. She fought the temptation to call him now. Melody should be her only concern.
She got up and moved toward the door, keeping an eye on her daughter. Melody sat huddled on the couch, staring down at the floor. For the first time it occurred to Marcia that she might be using drugs. That would explain a lot. Reluctantly, the policemen drifted along toward the door with her.
"I want to thank you for bringing her home," Marcia said, forcing herself to be polite.
"It's our job," Davies said. "Considering the address and all, we didn't want to take her to a hospital and put it on the book. But you ought to have her looked over."
She shuddered at the class-consciousness and injustice implicit in Ms remarks, but she tried not to reveal her feelings as she said docilely, "I will."
"And if you ever get your dog back, you ought to keep him in at night," Davies said. "The farmers have been shooting strays ever since this business started."
"My God," she said. "I forgot about him. I can't go out looking for him, not now. Please! Please look for him, won't you? He's harmless. He's probably scared out of his wits."
"We will," Peterson promised, cutting off the answer that Davies was about to give. He quickly changed the subject. "What do you suppose Green was doing out there?"
"I haven't the foggiest idea. He didn't say a word to me."
"Did he get into any kind of hassle with those hippies?" Davies asked.
"Yes, with Hamilton-but he was just blowing off steam," she said, and she went on to tell about Ron's exchange with the jewelry maker. They seemed so interested in the story that she felt obliged to add, "But he's always blowing up like that, then forgetting it five minutes later. He wouldn't have gone there with a gun-"
"But the fact is, he did go there. With a gun," Davies said.
She had no ready answer. It was just possible that Ron had been angrier than she'd thought, that he'd gone back to the commune with some childish notion of getting even by taking a pot shot at a window. If he had, he hadn't realized that he would be stirring up a hornets' nest, angering the same people who had murdered Matthew Peachtree.
"You ought to keep closer track of your daughter," Davies said, interrupting her thoughts. "Those people out there, they aren't the kind you want her mixed up with."
Next thing she knew, he would be telling her to brush her teeth after meals and be sure to eat all her spinach. She was tired of his advice. But she had to accept his judgment. Her communication with Melody had broken down, and she felt guilty about it. If it hadn't, the girl wouldn't have been wandering through the woods at this hour. Maybe Ken was right. Maybe she did need a psychiatrist.
"Please look for my dog!" she shouted after the policemen as they drove off. "He answers to the name of Lucy."
An arm waved from the window of the car in acknowledgement, but she knew they wouldn't look. They had more important things to do. Late though it was, she would have to get dressed and go looking herself, hoping to find him before someone picked him up. Or shot him.
She had something else to do, first. She could no longer avoid having a serious talk with her daughter. It was a bad time for it, but then it always was. She couldn't use that excuse anymore.
She was about to close the door when she heard claws scrambling in the gravel of the driveway. Lucifer came forward, favoring one of his paws. He was a muddy mess.
"Where the hell have you been?" she demanded, falling to her knees and hugging him. He squirmed happily and licked her face, obviously just as relieved as she was. He went through the entirety of his large repertoire of moans and groans-sounds that suggested desperate attempts to form words. No words were necessary, though: he was telling her he was happy to be back and scolding her for letting him wander.
Melody had curled up and gone to sleep on the couch by the time they got to the living room. Marcia looked at the clock over the mantel. It was five.
"Melody," she said; then, more loudly, "Melody!"
"I'm awake," she protested. "I'm tired, that's all. I want to go to bed."
"Not without a bath."
"A shower."
"All right, I'll put Lucy in the bathtub."
"Oh, hi, Lucy!" Melody cried; but Lucifer, who knew what "bathtub" meant, ignored her outstretched arms and retreated behind the couch. Marcia sat beside her daughter, restraining her when she tried to get up.
"Where were you?"
"I told you," Melody said, and she looked her straight in the eye. "I don't remember. I took Lucy for a walk, and then-then I was running through the woods ... holding my clothes. That's how the cops found me."
Marcia winced at that detail, omitted by the police. The steady gaze of Melody's slanted blue eyes began to unnerve her, as it sometimes did. She looked instead into the blackness of the hearth.
"You were running around naked in the woods, and you don't remember ... anything?"
"No, of course not Roger. I told you about my dream-brother. It was like the same dream again, only more confused. More confusing. Running, just running-being carried. Like he was leaping, sort of, and covering miles with each leap ... "
Marcia waited, but Melody had nothing more to say. She believed the time had come to tell her daughter a few things about her own past.
"When I was about your age," Marcia began hesitantly, "I ran away from home. My parents were very, very strict-fanatical, even. They wouldn't even let me wear lipstick."
"Big deal."
"In those days, it was. All the girls wore it to school. That's just an example of the way they were. I couldn't go out with boys. They never said that in so many words, but every time I wanted to go out, my father would launch a regular federal investigation into the boy's background, and it would turn out that he wasn't 'suitable.'"
"I would have run away, too."
"I never really regretted it, not that part of it. Later, we made up, sort of. They took care of me while you were being born. And they looked after you, later, while I was in the hospital." She was censoring the story. Perhaps she would never tell Melody that abortion or adoption, both strongly urged by psychiatrists, had been rejected by her own parents. They believed she should "live with the consequences of her sins."
"Why were you in the hospital?"
"I-well-after I ran away, I fell in with the wrong people. I thought they were great, compared to my parents. They didn't expect anything of me, except that I be myself. They talked about love, and peace, and doing your own thing. We smoked a lot of dope."
"What's it like?"
Marcia gave her a sharp glance. As far as she could tell, the total ingenuousness of Melody's question was sincere. But Melody's face seldom revealed her feelings.
"It fogs the edges of reality. It makes you feel happy. Time sort of floats by."
"It sounds great."
"It is, if you want to grow up to be a vegetable," Marcia said severely. "This is the only world you've got, and you have to come to grips with it, sooner or later. It isn't always pleasant."
She saw that she was getting off on a tangent, and she was surprised that her own views sounded so much like those of her puritanical parents.
"We took LSD, too, and-that was different. It scared me, and I never got over being scared. I thought the Devil was after me. Sometimes I could see him, and I'd scream-on a crowded street in the daytime, or at night, looking in a window-"
"What did he look like?"
Marcia really didn't hear the question. "We went out, way out in the country, to the Black Hills. The Center of the Universe, that's what the Indians used to call it. It was given to them by treaty-forever-it was such a sacred place, but then the white man found gold in it, and that was the end of the treaty. So we went there, to a sort of commune ... and something happened ... and I had to go home ... the drugs, you see, the drugs had driven me out of my mind ... "
"Mom!"
Marcia was shocked by Melody's cry. She stared at her daughter, still trying to struggle out of the past. The memory had been at her fingertips, the memory of what had actually happened at the commune: the memory of Melody's conception.
"Something terrible happened to me," Marcia said, holding her daughter tightly by the arm, "something I can't remember, not even now, because of those drugs. Because I couldn't talk to my parents, or make them see my point of view. I could have been killed, or worse. I could have spent the rest of my life in a mental hospital. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
"Sort of," Melody said. "But I never have any trouble talking to you. I don't want to run away from home, if that's what you're driving at, and I never took any drugs in my life."
Marcia entertained the frightening suspicion that her daughter was mocking her. The cat-like mask of Melody's face was unreadable. Her normal serenity, so recently shattered, had returned completely. But it was only a suspicion. Marcia decided that her daughter was speaking the truth.
"Those people out at Blackwood's Corners," Marcia began cautiously, "the ones in the commune-"
"I didn't see anybody. At least, I didn't see anybody I remember. Like I said, I think I was sleepwalking. Can I take a shower now?"
"Yes. But-please. Don't ever be shy about talking to me. About anything."
"I never have," Melody said, getting up and walking from the room.
Marcia watched her go in silence. The talk had accomplished nothing. For a long time she had wanted to tell Melody certain facts about her own past; but if she had thought about it, she would have known that those facts simply weren't in her possession. She hadn't established communication with her daughter. She had merely made herself feel tense and confused by her inarticulate groping. Perhaps she had even left Melody with the impression that her mother was still more than a little bit crazy.
Worse yet, she had gained no information at all about Melody's activities tonight. Her story about falling asleep while walking the dog, then waking up naked in the woods, fifteen miles away-it was a lie, obviously. But what was the truth?
And where the hell was Ken?
She got up and walked restlessly. Perhaps by subconscious design, she found herself at the door of Ken's study. She opened the door. She had cleaned it up, but the ruined rendering still stood in a corner, awaiting Ken's disposal. "My sist"-that phrase suggested the dream Melody had referred to tonight: my sister. She had suspected that Ken was to blame for the wreck of the study, but maybe it really had been Melody.
Was this destruction senseless, or was it revenge for something she didn't know about, something that neither Ken nor Melody could tell her? They had both been absent from the house tonight at the same time. Melody could have gone to Blackwood's Corners only by car. Then she had left the car and the driver-holding her clothes. Ken was still out. She veered her mind away from this assembly of facts before it could be completed, before she could reach a conclusion too vile to contemplate.
May Eve. Why had that phrase stuck in her mind all day?
She repeated the phrase under her breath as she walked back to the living room, and it seemed to have the effect of an incantation. She began to remember the dream that the ringing of the doorbell had interrupted. Clear fragments of it, like shards of a stained glass window celebrating the vilest obscenities, flashed in her mind. It was a loathsome dream, but parts of it were "clearer than reality."
She wore a simple white gown. She walked through a dark forest. Others preceded and followed her. She could smell rotting mold and wet wood. She was excited, sexually, more so than she could ever remember in her waking life. Her cunt tingled with electricity. Her belly and thighs glowed. Her breasts ached. Each step brushed the coarse material of her gown against her nipples, making them hard as pebbles.
She remembered a clearing lit by torches.
She lay on her back on a stone table. Her gown had now been discarded. The figures contorting themselves around her were also naked, but some of them wore grotesque headdresses or were loosely draped with the hides of animals. Some of the men had stiff pricks. She wanted one of them. She burned for it.
"Come and fuck me," she begged, spreading her legs wantonly wide.
They ignored her, or they didn't hear her. Their motions were rhythmic. She heard thin, insane piping, the sound of drums and tambourines. The men and women were teasing one another, touching genitals, flaunting their bodies shamelessly as they circled around and around her.
"Fuck me!" she screamed. "I want it! Anybody!"
Her cheeks burned as she remembered the dream, because it seemed too real. She must in fact be remembering something that had actually happened to her at the commune in South Dakota. Had she once actually felt that way, said such things? She hugged herself, wanting to melt into the floor and seep through the boards and never be seen again.
Then she remembered something that certified it as a dream.
A naked woman stood over the table beyond her widespread knees. Her body had been painted silver. It gleamed in the flickering torchlight. The silver horns of a ram curled at her head. It was Nora Curtis.
But she looked no younger than she did today. In the dream, Marcia was little more than a child. Therefore, this couldn't have happened in real life.
Nora's cunt had been shaven. She fingered it lasciviously with her silver fingers until its red interior showed the only slash of color on her metallic body. Her features were cold, immobile, contemptuous. But she leaned forward. Her pink tongue appeared between her silver lips.
Marcia writhed on the rough stone, spreading her legs until the tendons stood out like white ropes pointing to the black shrub of her cunt.
"Eat me, Mistress," she moaned, "please!"
Nora lowered her face between Marcia's thighs. She licked slowly up one lip of her cunt and down the other, tracing its outline with a feather-light touch. Marcia slid her hands down her nude body and spread the lips, begging her to probe more deeply. But Nora only tickled and teased, driving her crazy with frustration. She began to augment the tantalizing cunnilingus with finger strokes of her own. It was only then that she realized she was still a virgin, that her vagina was partly occluded by a tough membrane that prevented the entrance of her fingers.
Something hot and wet rubbed her cheek. She turned to see a man standing above her, holding his cock toward her face.
"I want it, I want it," she moaned, but he cut short her words by shoving it into her mouth.
She struggled to push it out, but he stayed with her, holding her by a handful of her hair.
"Suck him off," Nora ordered. "You have to do everything freely. Everything."
She did as she was told, because Nora had stopped licking her cunt. She couldn't stand the removal of that soft, wet touch, frustrating though it was. She slid her hands up the man's hairy legs and gripped the muscular cheeks of his ass, pulling him closer. Her lips firmed around the thick rod of flesh.
He climbed onto the table above her, his knees straddling her head. She shivered with anticipation as she realized that he and Nora were going to lick her cunt at the same time. Then his balls pressed down on her nose, and his cock slid so deep that she found herself gagging on its rubbery thickness.
He allowed her to push his hips up slightly, relieving the pressure of the bulging, plum-like head at the back of her throat. She began to stroke it with her tongue, coating it with her saliva and the slime that oozed fronts the tip. It was the first time she'd sucked a cock, but she knew instinctively what to do and how to please the anonymous stranger who was fucking her in the mouth.
She reached up to fondle his odorous balls and the root of his prick with her fingertips. He began to squirm above her, prodding her and pulling it in and out while she maintained a strong, pumping suction. She hoped he would come soon. She thirsted for his semen, and that of the next man, and the next ...
He and Nora managed to work on her cunt simultaneously. She wished she could watch them, but her vision was blocked by the man's hairy belly. She twisted to graze his skin with the ruby-hard tips of her nipples while he and Nora licked either side of her tingling clitoris.
The man's steady, shallow thrusts into her puckered lips became erratic. He shoved deeper, gagging her again, but she sensed that it would soon be over. She sucked harder, trying to milk his prick as it quivered on the edge of its eruption. It gave a sudden pulse and began to spatter sticky fluid into her mouth. She savored it as it slid down her throat as she sucked greedily for more.
She was no longer conscious of her body. Below the waist, she had become an incandescent cloud, shot through with red-hot lines of ecstasy that were the strokes of the two busy tongues. She whimpered and screamed around her hot mouthful of male flesh, unable to handle the overload of sensation that was dissolving and transforming her.
Even now, sitting in her living room, the memory made her glow with a pleasurable awareness of her body. She must have climaxed in her sleep. If so, it was the first time in a long time, awake or asleep. Ken had never succeeded. He was easily satisfied, and he'd never tried very hard to unthaw her.
She forgot about her shame as she strove to remember more. She knew that she had never made love to a woman. The idea of sex with Nora Curtis had never occurred to her, and even now it seemed slightly ludicrous. But she remembered how pleasant it had been in the dream. She complimented herself wryly on her vivid imagination.
She remembered wanting another man when she'd satisfied the first one, but it was Nora who took his place. She lay above Marcia on the stone table-could it have been an altar? That seemed to fit in with the weird music, the dancing, the ceremonial quality that permeated the orgy. Whatever it was, Nora lay above her on it, and she found herself staring up at the other woman's smoothly shaven cunt.
She hesitated to kiss it for reasons that now seemed frivolous: she was worried about whether the silver paint would come off, and what it might taste like. But Nora was offering it to her, right over her mouth. Nora's own mouth was still greedily slurping at Marcia's cunt, keeping her excitement at a feverish level. She couldn't deny the painted woman what she so obviously wanted.
She raised her face. According to the logic of the crazy dream, it was considered a great honor to do this to Nora. She sensed jealousy radiating from the pack of naked people now ringing the altar closely. The first touch of her tongue brought out scents and textures that reminded her of oysters. The warm radiations she felt against her lips grew steadily warmer. She hesitated no longer, plunging her tongue into Nora's cunt. Pushing inside was like piercing the skin of a swollen, ripe fruit. Sticky sap leaked out to smear her lips and chin. She stuck her tongue in deeper to scoop more of the salty-sweet juice from the hot hole.
In the dream, her emotions had been uncomplicated. She had wanted to do it. She had loved doing it. She shuddered now as she remembered her desire to lick the other woman's cunt.
She stuck her tongue out farther and rubbed it all around the slick inner walls. She pressed her lips hard against the yielding flesh. She was electrified by Nora's eager response. Everything she did to Nora was returned with redoubled energy as the silver-painted woman writhed above her and lapped thirstily between her legs.
Marcia pressed her tongue higher to lick the firm little nugget of flesh near the top of Nora's cunt. Nora screamed at the touch. A convulsion stiffened her stomach like an oak plank. Her spine arched like a bow. In her virginal innocence, Marcia had never suspected a woman might react like this. It took her a moment to realize that the reaction was one of pure pleasure.
Nora's hips quivered with uncontrollable vibrations. Spasms rippled through her taut belly. The more Marcia licked her clitoris, the wilder Nora got. She squeezed Mama's head with her thighs until her ears rang. She bucked her cunt down against her face as if she were actually fucking. She rubbed the sopping flesh all over her face.
In the dream, this neither alarmed nor disgusted her, much as it did now. Whatever happened had seemed right, desirable, even holy.
Now Marcia made a conscious effort to forget the dream. She lit a cigarette with a shaking hand and got up to walk to the wall of windows. She stared at her reflection. Her face was white in the black glass, the lines in her skin were cruelly etched. She had been fifteen years old when she'd gone to the commune in the Black Hills. Nora would have been twelve, approximately. Therefore, Nora couldn't have been there as a grown woman. This was a dream that she was recalling-a dream she'd had tonight. It had no basis in reality, none whatsoever. That was what she had to keep telling herself.
She tried to remember other details that would reassure her. The memories became entangled with the emerging recollection of being pawed and prodded tonight by Ken in a fit of drunken lechery. The bastard. He'd tried to fuck her in her sleep. The animal. Maybe she'd said something in her sleep, something connected with her erotic dream, to give him encouragement. Maybe her refusal had angered him into leaving.
Thinking of Ken brought back a new aspect of the dream. The hippie who called himself Alexander Hamilton lay above her on the stone table. In the dream, though, his name was Abel Hopkins. She began confusing him with Ken. But her husband was coarse and flabby; Hamilton had been smooth and young. That was nonsense. In real life, they were both about the same age. She hadn't known Hamilton when he was young.
A coarse animal hide lay over the youth's shoulders. She clutched it, drawing him down. Twisting her head from side to side beneath his bearded face, she saw others watching, waiting their turn. She wanted them ail-now.
She felt the hot hardness of his prick slipping up her inner thigh, clumsily nudging against the loose softness of her cunt. She was fully aroused again, even more excited than she'd been before Nora had touched her. She lifted her buttocks from the rough stone, eager to clutch and unsheathe his stiff prick. She forgot about the watchers. She could think only of the man who held her, whose cock was even now pushing deeper than anything had ever gone before, who was stretching her and hurting her with the piercing pressure of his hard flesh. But the pleasure outweighed the pain, and most important of all was the desire to have more and more of his swollen prick crammed inside her, no matter how much it hurt.
She encircled the shaggy hide on his back with her legs. Her arms wrapped around him. She felt his hands lifting her ass as he struggled to fill her completely. He didn't kiss her. She remembered no tenderness at all. He was screwing her, bluntly and simply-like an animal. That was what made it so exciting.
Even the sound of it was exciting: the liquescent squishing and squelching as his prick plunged in and out of her cunt. He raised himself slightly so he could look down at the juncture of their loins. She looked, too. Her cunt lips were spread wide, swollen and inflamed, to clutch the thick shaft that speared her. She knew that the dark smear on his cock in the flaring torchlight was her own blood.
He began once again to move inside her, back and forth. She felt as if she were riding a firehose driven mad by tons of pressure. She desperately clutched the animal skin cape, and her teeth chattered as he rammed his cock into her again and again, into her and out again, stabbing her with a giant sword.
He was pressing his prick into the very center of a storm unfolding throughout her body. She felt herself begin to achieve another release, one that was far greater than the first, one that was almost frightening. She was being swept away on a wave of pure pleasure, torn away forcibly from all contact with the material world except at the point where his cock was thrusting deep into her cunt. She felt her quivering vagina throbbing rhythmically, as if the heart of the whole universe were beating inside it.
She flung her hips against him to make sure the penetration was complete, wanting to imprison every last inch of his cock inside the sweating walls of her cunt, and then she began to wriggle and slide and squeeze with desperate energy. He knew what she wanted, and he hastened to give it to her. His cock plunged into her like a battering ram, again and again, making her scream and claw in a frenzy of pleasure as she felt the wave building up inside her for yet a third assault on her senses.
This was madness. She was doing more than recalling the dream, she was reliving it. It was only a dream, nothing more. She wrenched her mind away from it with an effort as she snuffed out her cigarette.
She dismissed it from her mind as she walked quickly to the upper level, snapping her fingers for Lucifer. He took his time about coming, remembering that she'd spoken the fearful word "bathtub." While she waited, she opened the door of Roger's and Karen's room. They slept in their separate beds. A tree outside the window glowed green with the first light.
Lucifer dawdled along to the bathroom. It was like a tropical swamp from Melody's recent shower, and she had left sopping towels on the floor, but Marcia was willing to overlook that in view of the hour and the circumstances. She half-filled the tub with lukewarm water, firmly gripping Lucy's collar when he tried to escape.
"You'll feel better, I guarantee it," she said. "You don't like being dirty, do you?"
Lucifer shivered and moaned.
"In you go, baby. It's good for you. Really."
Lucifer got into the tub. Ears laid back, eyes glistening with abject terror, the dog trembled in the belly-deep water while Marcia rubbed him with a soapy washcloth.
As the substance that she had believed to be mud came off his coat and dissolved, it stained the bathwater an even deeper shade of red.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Marcia woke up shortly after nine, with Ken snoring softly beside her. She hadn't heard him come in. Maybe he had never gone out. The events of the early morning hours, from the arrival of the police to the appearance of the blood in the bath-water, were still entangled in her mind with scenes from feverishly vivid dreams. Maybe it had all been a dream.
She got up reluctantly and went to the bathroom. It hadn't been a dream. The tile gleamed from the frenzied scrubbing she'd given it last night, a scrubbing that had removed every trace of blood. Some sophisticated test administered by the police might still reveal a residue-but that was nonsense, and she refused to consider it. The police weren't going to come here and test her house for bloodstains. The blood had come from Lucifer himself, from some cut she hadn't been able to find under his smooth coat; or else the scratches that Melody had received from thorns and brambles had bled more than she'd thought possible.
The explanation that had come so easily to her mind last night, that Lucy had killed Ron Green, seemed utterly ridiculous by the light of day. The police had said that Ron had been killed in the same way as Peach-tree; and putting the question of the dog's temperament aside, Lucy simply wasn't big enough or strong enough to tear a man to pieces. No dog was. Ron and Peach-tree had been murdered by human beings.
She went to Melody's room. Melody slept soundly. Marcia spoke her name, but the girl didn't stir. She looked much younger, even babyish, in sleep, and the scratches and discoloration on her pretty face somehow reinforced that suggestion. Marcia didn't have the heart to wake her, and she closed the door quietly.
Possibly an innocent-though still terrifying-explanation existed for the blood on Lucifer's coat. Melody and the dog had come upon the scene of the murder. Lucifer had stumbled into a pool of blood. The shock had blotted out Melody's recollection of the incident, or perhaps she was just too scared to admit it
It seemed a reasonable theory, but it left two questions unanswered: why had Melody gone to Blackwood's Corners at that hour, and how had she gotten there? Erratic behavior in a teen-age girl could usually be traced to a teen-age boy. Melody had never shown much interest in boys. She said she found most of them childish. Maybe she'd found one she didn't consider childish-maybe it was even an older man. That, plus the fact that he was associated with the strange people at the commune, might inhibit her from talking about him.
Marcia toyed with the theory while she prepared toast and coffee for herself. Melody was in love with an over-aged hippie. Taking Lucifer for protection, she had hitched a ride to Blackwood's Corners. There she had stumbled upon Ron's body. Perhaps she had even come upon the murderers in the act.
It all boiled down to the same old wearisome phrase: she would have to have a talk with Melody. She'd certainly made a hash of her attempt last night. But she would have to try again, choosing her time carefully, catching her daughter in just the right mood. If her theory was correct, if Melody was harboring such a scary secret, it might be easy to get her to talk.
She could do nothing now on the basis of her guesswork. She would have to keep her fears under control while she attended to other things.
She went to the telephone and dialed the city room of the Banner. It was Saturday morning, but Jack Higgins often came into the office on Saturdays. He would almost certainly be there today, considering what had happened last night.
The phone rang seven times before he answered, "Banner, Higgins."
"Jack, this is Marcia. What do you want me to do about Ron Green?"
"Send him flowers," Higgins snapped. "Blake's on the story."
She flung the dead phone back into its cradle. She was on the verge of dialing again when she changed her mind. She grabbed her bag and stormed out of the house.
Marcia had long ago come to the conclusion that Jack Higgins used bad manners and a short temper to mask a morbid fear of people. Knowing this didn't make his churlish behavior any easier for her to accept, but it did give her the satisfaction of being able to pity him even while he was treating her unfairly, even cruelly.
"I told you over the phone, Blake's on the story," he muttered, not even looking up as he slashed into a piece of copy with his blue pencil. In his red blazer and Windsor-knotted tie, with his prematurely silver hair in a mod coif, he looked more like a head-waiter than a newspaper editor.
"Jack, I've been on this story since it started. I found the first body, remember? And I was working with Ron yesterday when he interviewed the hippies, the same people who probably killed him."
"Blake's been up since three o'clock on this thing," Higgins said, still reading and making corrections. "It happened on his beat. What do I tell him, Her Ladyship has finally consented to drag her ass out of bed and take over you can forget it? Go home."
"No, I won't go home!" Marcia said, raising her voice. "It's my story, Jack. I covered the first murder, and I was working on the commune story. They all tie in with Ron's death."
Higgins flung the copy into his Out basket, then leaned back to glare at her.
"All right then, it was your story, but I've taken it away from you. You aren't right for it. If you don't like that, quit."
Marcia felt herself beginning to shake, but it was anger, not fear, that produced the reaction. She was so angry that she no longer even pitied Higgins for his insecurity. "What, because I'm a woman?" she shouted. "Do you really have the nerve, in this day and age, to sit there-"
"Don't give me that 'woman' crap!" Higgins barked. "I wouldn't let Richard Harding Davis cover the story if his own daughter was picked up by the police at the scene of the crime. The cops aren't going to talk to you. We'll be lucky if they open up with anybody on the paper while you're working for us. So get mad and quit, that'll save us all a lot of trouble."
"Goddamn it, Jack, she isn't a suspect! That was a coincidence. What I and my kids do on our own time has nothing to do with my work," she said, but she couldn't inject much force into her words. The surprising fact that Higgins knew about Melody's escapade had shaken her.
"Maybe that's true, in some ideal world where everybody understands all and forgives all, but you're stuck here in the shit with the rest of us. These hick cops aren't going to see you as a newspaperwoman. They're going to see you as the lady whose crazy daughter runs around naked in the woods at night. Suspect or not, they think she's some kind of loony. Since you're her mother, they think you're some kind of loony, too."
Marcia saw his point clearly. She knew the local police as well as he did. They would undoubtedly view her with distrust after last night's incident. But to admit the truth of this would be to admit that something was really wrong with her daughter, and that her own professional status had been compromised.
"The police aren't the only source for this story, Jack," she said, much more subdued. "I was able to develop a certain rapport yesterday with the people-"
"Yeah, Ron told me how crazy you are about hippies," Higgins sneered, "and that we don't need, either. You ain't working for the underground press, kiddo. This is a respectable, middle-class newspaper, and our readers couldn't care less about the viewpoint of a bunch of dope-fiends and sex-freaks. So forget about murders and communes and go interview this guy. He sounds nutty enough to interest you, but there's an even chance he won't chop you up in little pieces and spread you around the countryside, which is what the hippies would probably do to you, rapport and all."
She didn't know which irked her more, his sneering dismissal of her reasonable suggestion or his callous attitude toward Ron's fate. But she took the piece of paper he handed her and looked at the name without really reading it.
"What's this all about?"
"Some priest who says the end of the world is coming because they don't say the mass in Latin anymore," he said in a milder tone. "Or at least he says he's a priest, or used to be. You better get that point straight before you do the story. Anyway, he's opened up a store-front church, or mission, where he's preaching the one, true religion as revealed to him personally. Keep it kind of objective, you know, don't make fun of him too obviously."
She looked again at the paper in her hand. Father Jerome Collins, with an address on Richmond Street, a blighted section of town not far from the office. Perhaps this was the Higginsian version of an apology, changing the subject before she could deal directly with his invitation to quit. She supposed she could take it that way. If she returned to the other matter, she was sure he would repeat his ultimatum.
"All right," she said, "but-"
"The other story is Blake's. Period."
She decided to keep her mouth shut and do as she was told. Later, she would volunteer her services as a photographer for Blake and get a foot in the door that way. Blake was a dull, unimaginative man who had been covering police news for the Banner for the past twenty years. He was out of his depth with a story like this, and Higgins would eventually have to admit it.
"Do you want pictures of this Father Collins?"
"Yeah, what the hell. Whether we use them or not, that depends on what kind of story you get."
She left the office and got her camera from the trunk of her car. It was supposed to be her day off, and there was nothing urgent about the assignment, but she had to do something-something besides go home and face the unpleasant prospect of a confrontation with her husband. She was surprised to discover that she didn't particularly care where he'd been last night. She was glad that he hadn't been around to witness Melody's arrival in the police car. With luck, he might not find out about it.
Some people who might have been friends of Hopkins-no, his name was Hamilton, of course; that was an odd slip-were strolling by as she walked out into the street. They stared at her. She ignored them. They grinned, as if they knew far more about her than they possibly could.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Marcia walked briskly to Richmond Street. Vacant stores alternated with marginal businesses and rundown saloons. Weeds grew from the cracks in the sidewalk. The marquee of a vacant movie theater said "REOPENING SOON," but it had said that for the past five years.
She consulted the slip of paper Higgins had given her and found that she'd passed the number. She retraced her steps to a store-front tucked back from the others, lying between a headshop-closed-and a luncheonette so dingy and uninviting that it hadn't even attracted a knot of teen-age loiterers.
The windows of the store were covered, from edge to edge, in script so tiny that she had to stand quite close in order to read it. It had been written on the inside of the window in white paint; the writer had done it all backwards, from his viewpoint. She was impressed by the amount of work that must have gone into the job, even though she had doubts about the sanity of anyone who would undertake it.
She began to read at eye-level, more than halfway down the inscription: "Hear, therefore, and shudder, O Satan, enemy of the Faith, foe of mankind, cause of death, thief of life, destroyer of justice, source of evils, root of vice, seducer of men, betrayer of nations, source of jealousy, origin of avarice, cause of discord, procurer of sorrows-why do you remain and resist when you know that Jesus Christ blocks your plans?"
She had read enough to get the flavor of the thing-an involved rigmarole addressed to the Devil. It went on and on in that vein. It was continued on the next window. The narrow margins were decorated with crosses, fish, doves, lambs, and smiling angel faces. They looked like the drawings of a very young child. She suspected that they were the work of Father Collins himself. Crazy or not, the window decorations had a certain naivete that appealed to her, perhaps to the all-but-forgotten faith of her childhood.
The door itself said "Enter! Welcome! Find Peace!" in several different languages. It was unlocked. She entered the dusty store. Mismatched folding chairs filled most of the interior. A cloth-covered table with a large cross lay at the end of the central aisle. Behind it, a partition hid the rear of the room.
"Anybody home?" she called.
She heard a creak, like someone stirring on the rusty springs of an old bed. A hoarse voice said "Just a minute, please," then lapsed into a severe fit of coughing. She heard the clink of glass.
She was surprised by what she saw when the inmate of this shabby hutch finally appeared. Ten years ago he might have been considered extremely handsome, but his looks weren't the sort that aged well. The boyishness of his bright eyes and frank grin didn't suit a face that was-she judged-about forty-five years old. His suit, worn with a Roman collar, was stained and baggy, but the body beneath it seemed trim and fit. His salt-and-pepper hair was disheveled, and he needed a shave. He seemed to be composed of contrasts: his unctuous charm wasn't consistent with religious eccentricity, and his athletic body didn't go with his slovenly appearance.
"How nice of you to drop in!" he said, as if he had invited her and had been hopefully awaiting her arrival. "I'm Father Collins, and this ... "
His voice and his smile faded. At first she thought he was taking exception to her snugly fitting sweater, or perhaps he objected to the camera slung around her neck, because his eyes had lowered. When he looked up again, he was plainly angry.
"What do you want here?" he demanded.
"I'm Marcia Creighton. I work for the Riveredge Banner, and I thought we might do a story-"
He cut her off with a bark of laughter that held no humor. "Don't you realize that you are standing on consecrated ground? Don't you know that I am a priest of God, with the power to blast the demons that guard you, to drive out the evil spirits that animate you? Go back and tell them, witch, go back and tell the others in your coven that Jerome Collins has not been stopped by ridicule, nor by physical violence, nor by spells and charms. Nor will I succumb to the temptations of the flesh, if that's your purpose in coming to me with your sleek body and beguiling face. I see you for what you are: a whited sepulchre!"
She wasn't frightened, even though he was lashing himself into a frenzy of righteous wrath. He was using what must have been his best pulpit voice for this bombast, but it just wasn't forceful enough to breathe life into his denunciation. The only quality he could project with any conviction was the charm with which he'd initially greeted her. It was as if any deeper qualities in his personality had been burned out, or had never existed. Now she got a whiff of liquor from his breath, and she wondered if that explained him. She was annoyed with Higgins for having steered her to this drunken fake. Perhaps he really did want her to quit and would continue to harass her with assignments like this one.
Collins was still raving about witchcraft. She interrupted him. "I don't know what you're talking about If you don't want to be interviewed, that's fine with me."
"Oh, no, you wouldn't know what I'm talking about, would you?" he said softly, his face twitching disconcertingly as he came closer. "Coming to me in the form of an angel-but I know you for a harlot from hell!"
She hadn't been expecting a physical assault, and she screamed with sudden fright when he grabbed her necklace and wrenched it from her neck. It clattered to the floor as she jumped back, rubbing the stinging nape of her neck.
"You're nuts!" she exclaimed.
He ground one of the tiny black triangles under his heel, then snarled at her. "You want everyone to think that, don't you? Oh, yes, poor old Father Collins believes in the Devil, there must be something wrong with him. There really aren't people in this enlightened day and age who worship Satan, who are actively paving the way for him to take over the earth. All that sort of nonsense was fine for nitwits like St. Thomas Aquinas, but we know better now. It all has to be interpreted symbolically, psychologically, right?"
"You're putting words in my mouth," she said coolly. "If you were sober, you might realize that I haven't said anything at all, except hello. Now if you'll get out of the way and let me pick that up, I'll say goodbye, and you can go back to your bottle."
He stepped back, looking momentarily abashed. Maybe her cold rage had impressed him enough to convince him that he'd made a mistake. Maybe her reference to his drinking had embarrassed him.
He seemed to be on the verge of making an apology before she stooped to retrieve her necklace, so it unnerved her completely when he screamed "Don't touch that!"
"Oh, for God's sake!" she cried, jumping back. "I've had a rotten day, father, mister, whatever you are. I've had a rotten week, as a matter of fact. I don't need your problems. I don't want to know about them. I just want to pick up my property and get out of here, without having to call the police. Is that too much to ask?"
"Wait a minute," he muttered. "Please. Please don't touch that. I've been a little abrupt, perhaps, but I've been under a strain, too, this week. These years."
Poised to flee, she watched him closely. Some of his charm had returned. It stemmed, she realized, from weakness and vulnerability, traits she normally disliked in men; but somehow she found herself disposed to make an exception for him. She was willing to let him explain that erratic behavior, although she doubted that he could,
"I don't know what you think that is-was," she said, gesturing toward the necklace. "It's just a piece of junk jewelry that was given to me by someone who makes that sort of thing."
"Sit down a moment," he said, adding, "please."
She sat on the very edge of one of the folding chairs. He dropped to one knee, studying the necklace with the total attention and respect of a naturalist who has come upon a fascinating species of poisonous snake.
"Why does it upset you?" she asked.
He looked at her for a moment "It has no significance for you?"
"No. The man who gave it to me didn't tell me what it was supposed to mean. I assumed it didn't mean anything, that it was just a random design."
"Stay away from that man," he said, "if you value your immortal soul. To say nothing of your body and your mind, which are also in grave danger."
He was partly right. Her mind was in danger. The erratic behavior of Ken and Melody, and even of Lucifer; the shock of Ron Green's death; Higgins's nastiness: it was too much pressure from too many sources. Forces that she couldn't see or comprehend seemed to be in ominous motion around her. The necklace-of course, it was nothing, just wood and stone and wire; but its designer may have murdered Ron Green. Perhaps Father Collins knew what it meant to that man.
"Why do you say that? What is it?"
"These triangles symbolize the wafers dispensed a the blasphemous Mass of St. Secaire-the Black Mass."
"They're just ... triangles."
"Look," he said, and he held up one of the stones at just the right angle to the light, revealing a mark she hadn't noticed before, a serpentine hieroglyph. All the stones, she now realized, bore a similar mark.
"Well, even so-"
"A coincidence? A pretty design culled from some book of symbols? Perhaps. Perhaps the craftsman was ignorant of what he was duplicating. But if he knew what he was doing, then he believes himself to be a witch. By giving you this trinket, he was trying to gain power over you. Even if you are a sensible, modern woman who doesn't believe in witchcraft and Satanism, you can still admit that there are people who do believe in such things, can't you? And if you can grant that much, then you have to entertain the possibility that the gift was a hostile act, that the giver meant you harm."
Despite the annoying touch of condescension in his tone, she was forced to admit that his reasoning made sense.
"So if I can appeal to nothing else," he continued, "let me appeal to your self-interest in urging you to stay away from someone who secretly wishes you evil, to your self-respect, in urging you not to wear such a deceitful gift."
She refrained from pointing out that she now had no choice. The necklace, ripped from her throat and stamped upon, was no longer in any condition to be worn. "I see your point," she said.
He smiled again, somewhat nervously. "Please try to excuse my abrupt behavior. This-" he let the necklace fall from his fingers to the floor-"this sort of thing has become an obsession with me. That was the word they used, obsession ... Never mind. The fact is, the people I've been tracking down for many years are worried by me at last. The hound is in danger of becoming the fox, but the fox may have more tricks than they bargained for. They've already tried to silence me, they succeeded in duping my superiors into believing I was crazy. An embarrassment to the Church, they said. Not many people want to hear the truth, even good people, honest people. I see you're looking at me a bit oddly now, and you seem a reasonable woman, an impartial observer who hasn't heard all the lies spoken about me. The Father of Lies, you know, that name wasn't just made up out of thin air. Maybe I am crazy, recognizing a danger, an evil that no one else wants to hear about; concentrating on one thing long enough. But this thing is so important, you see, that nothing else is even worth thinking about. If they succeed, that's all there is to it, that's the end of everything. Not just civilization, but humanity-the qualities that make us human-right down the drain. Right down into the Pit."
She grew progressively more alarmed. Father Collins spoke with great intensity, as if from a passionate need to be understood and believed, and yet wariness-paranoia was probably the better word-kept him from more than hinting at his meaning.
"I've been watching them. I'm on their trail, as I've said. Now they're on mine, so that's why I thought you were one of them. They've been alarmingly active here during the past month or so."
"The hippies-" she began.
"Oh, the hippies. Peace. Love. Do your own thing. Did you know that their peace sign is a Satanic emblem, too? You look skeptical You think I'm some kind of right wing crackpot, but I have no interest in politics. There are more important things, far more important things. Yes, the hippies; certainly, their presence is obvious-but there are others, people whose names would shock you. Respectable people, lots of them, who've come here-for what? May Eve is coming up, you know, and I think that's the reason. Murders. They say a dead man walked. That should give you an indication of the sort of forces at work in this unhappy town."
"Father ... what on earth are you talking about? Can you be more specific? Who knows? Maybe I'll believe you."
"What on earth, indeed? In hell, you mean. Not the kind of hell the good sisters scare you with in grammar school, but one whose existence is being suggested on the furthest frontiers of modern science. 'Cast into hell-Satan and all the other evil spirits roam through the world seeking the ruin and destruction of souls.' Into a hell that exists here and now, but on a different level of perception that can sometimes be glimpsed by men in dreams, or with drugs, or with certain heathenish mental disciplines. Cast out, these beings now seek to return because the constellations have turned after many millions of years to just the right position. They'll return when the stars are right-that prophecy can be found in a book that should have been burned long ago, a book not to be read by anyone who values his soul or his sanity. Oh, they've tried to come back before. The stars must have seemed right, back in the sixteenth century, and that spawned a plague of witchcraft that festered for two hundred years. They weren't successful, of course; maybe their timing was wrong, maybe they failed because men still had the faith and the will required to stamp it out utterly. But now-God help us, what can a liberal democracy do against witchcraft? They have the full protection of the law, this time; they have the freedom of their blasphemous religion-even if their object is to unleash hell on earth."
"Are you suggesting that we ought to burn people at the stake?"
"Yes," he said, "or crush them with stones, or hang them. All those methods were effectively used the last time. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,' you know, that's one commandment that seems to have fallen out of fashion lately, although it's just as direct and to the point as the others. Now it's the most important of all. So many of them, though. Thousands. Who knows? It may be too late."
Father Collins stared gloomily through the crazy writing on his window, no doubt wishing that he had all the resources of the Inquisition at his command.
"Let me get this straight," Marcia said. "You believe there are-devils, whatever-that have somehow been exiled to another world, to the Fourth Dimension. Now they're trying to get back, and there are people, witches, who are actively trying to help them. Have I got it right so far?"
"You aren't laughing at me," he stated. He seemed genuinely surprised.
"I'm trying to understand. It's not my business to laugh at you, or to agree with you, either. I'm a newspaperwoman."
A sneer twisted his mouth. "I see. And you'll stand aside and take notes when all hell breaks loose. 'Because thou art neither hot nor cold, but lukewarm, I shall spew thee from my mouth.' They must have had lady reporters in Biblical times."
Marcia overlooked this slur. "All right then, well assume that I've followed you up until now. How do they propose to do this? Bring back these devils, I mean?"
He seemed to be about to speak two or three times, but each time he lapsed back into an embarrassed silence. She supposed he had grown wary of ridicule. She composed her face in an attitude of polite attention. She wanted to hear more. She knew that she would never be able to write a story about this pathetic crank, but his theory would provide her with an amusing anecdote to tell back at the city room.
"Read the confessions," he said abruptly. "The confessions extracted from witches. The data we have from that source is enormous, overwhelming. Most of it is nonsense, of course: peasants cavorting in the woods with their breeches down, mocking the village priest; cynics using the apparatus of witchcraft to indulge their own depravity. Torture, too, you have to make allowance for that when you study the confessions. But even making all of these allowances, approaching the material with the utmost skepticism, you find a terrifying consistency, a hard nugget of truth beneath it all. Under certain conditions, these creatures can have sexual intercourse with human beings. Offspring can be produced-have been produced. Sometimes they are entirely human in appearance. Sometimes they are creatures without physical form at all, but able to take over the bodies of the lower animals. Witches are often associated with such possessed animals, known as familiars."
She supposed it was unavoidable that the priest's morbid fantasies should take an erotic twist, but she was unprepared for the enthusiasm that entered his voice as he spoke of sexual intercourse with devils. She became acutely aware of the fact that she was alone with him. He looked like a strong man, and he had started the interview by paying some left-handed compliments to her attractiveness.
"As an altar for their Black Mass," he continued with rising intensity, apparently not noting her uneasiness, "they traditionally use the body of a virgin-no longer a virgin when their obscene ceremony is over, but violated in every possible way, subjected to every perversion that depraved men and women can dredge up from the seething cesspools of their souls. Forced, squirming and screaming in her nakedness, to submit to men, to women, to animals, and ultimately, to some fiend crawling forth from a gap in the geometry of our universe. They take her singly, in succession, in groups, until their frenzy and the shame and pain of their victim sets up certain psychic vibrations, releases unknown sources of spiritual energy, creates the climate necessary for these creatures to reach out into our space and time. The writhing victim, degraded below the level of the beasts, becomes the vessel for demonic forces. Always these victims testified that the fiend's sperm was cold, colder than ice. How could that one detail be constant, if they were independent fabrications? These witches-their filth, their blasphemy-disgusting!"
The last word was a choked sob as he apparently succeeded in shocking himself with his own perverted and repressed visions. All this lunacy about devils from the Fourth Dimension sprang from Father Collins's pathological horror of sex, Marcia believed. She saw that he was a man struggling to contain unbearable pressure, and she didn't want to wait around for the explosion. She rose, trying to make her movements toward the door seem casual.
"Have you had much success here with your ... mission?" she asked, trying to divert his mind from her retreat.
He snorted gloomily. He seemed depleted, depressed. His manner reminded her so strongly of the detachment sometimes exhibited by her husband after an orgasm that she began to wonder if telling her of his hallucinations hadn't actually produced one.
"You're going," he stated.
"Yes, I have to ... work, you know, the paper-"
"Wait," he ordered, and he rose to stride briskly to the partition behind his makeshift altar, genuflecting on his way.
This, she reflected, might be the only chance she would get to make a break for it: maybe he was going to fetch some handcuffs and a whip. She had grown used to dealing with eccentrics in her work; but she'd never met one so unpredictable as Father Collins, nor one whose quirks were so blatantly sexual. She resolved that she would find some way to get out of it, the next time Higgins sent her to interview someone he offhandedly referred to as crazy. The last one had been Peachtree.
She had hesitated too long, and now he was coming back. He no longer looked quite so overwrought. Perhaps he'd sneaked a drink during his brief absence.
"Take this," he said, "and keep it with you always."
He held something out to her, and when she didn't immediately reach for it, a crafty look entered his eyes.
"A witch would refuse to accept it," he said, "and-"
She startled him by almost snatching it from his hand. She didn't want to give him another excuse to start raving. He seemed relieved when she took it.
She looked down at the object in her hand. It was a pendant in the form of a cross, ornate and surprisingly heavy. Unlikely though it seemed, she suspected that it was pure silver.
"What is it?"
"A medal of St. Benedict, traditionally effective in warding off evil spirits. You don't believe in such things, I know, but the time may come when you are forced to."
The medal looked old and valuable. She knew she ought to refuse it, but she didn't want to prolong the interview. She put it in her bag, thanked him, and once again began moving toward the door.
"Wear it always," he said, "and take no more gifts from the witch who gave you that necklace."
"No, I-"
Her voice faltered, and she went quickly out the door. She remembered that Melody had one of those necklaces, too. She'd been wearing it last night.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Ken watched the evening news with growing disbelief. His attention had been drawn to the television set by the mention of Riveredge Township. A New York station had actually sent a crew here to cover the death of Ron Green, described as a veteran journalist. The hippies who had been picked up for questioning in connection with his death had all been released, thanks to the inexplicable arrival on the scene of one of the country's most highly paid and publicity-conscious criminal lawyers. He spoke a few high-minded words about freedom of expression and freedom of religion for the TV cameras and declined to say who was paying him.
The hippies were shown riling out of the local jail. Happily chanting comrades waited for them on the steps of Township Hall. A small crowd of local people had gathered too, perhaps attracted by the television cameras. The reporter spoke of a "lynch mob atmosphere," and the individuals who were asked to say a few words confirmed that notion. Ken assumed that they didn't know what they were talking about, but then the cameras switched to a house rented by some of the suspects. It had been dynamited during the night. One man had been killed and two children injured.
A seedy-looking priest named Collins, whom Ken had never heard of, was interviewed. He said that the killing of Green and Peachtree had been ritual murders perpetrated by Devil-worshippers. A group of his supporters clustered around him, agreeing loudly with everything he said to the TV newsman. He fell just short of accusing the hippies and applauding the people who had bombed their home.
"Screwy, huh?" Judy asked when the newscast switched to another item.
He nodded and grunted something. She was naked, but he found it difficult to look at her or speak to her. He had made love to her earlier, but it had been no more enjoyable than masturbation.
He forced himself to look at her. Her knees were bony. Her feet were too big, her toes were crooked. Her legs needed shaving. Her nipples were too small. Her lips were too thick. Her nose was too long. Worst of all, she was impenetrably stupid, and she looked it. He couldn't begin to imagine why he had ever found her desirable.
She caught him looking at her, so he smiled.
"You want I should turn off the TV?" she asked with a coy, sidelong look.
The thought of making love to her again depressed him, and that reaction produced an acute pang of guilt. She was, as she rarely was, being considerate of his wishes: the bleating of the television set never distracted her when they made love. She didn't seem to notice it. Why did she have to be nice to him when he was trying to work up the courage to tell her that he no longer wanted her? It was exasperating.
He stood up and walked away from her, lighting a cigarette. "I'm hungry," he said. "Put your clothes on, we'll go to a restaurant."
"Take your clothes off," she giggled, "and I'll give you something."
He felt her wrapping her arms around him, pressing her naked breasts to his back, and he fought the impulse to thrust her away.
"I mean it, I want to eat."
"I'll give you something to eat," she whispered, moving her lips against the back of his neck, making his hair crawl, making him want to gag at the image her words evoked, an image that would have excited him just a few days ago.
"Get dressed," he said, his voice harsher than he had intended.
"No," she said, pulling away from him, pouting. "I don't want to get dressed. Go get us a pizza or something, huh?"
"Christ. Don't you eat anything but junk? I want to eat a regular meal. It's supper time."
"All right, so get us a regular meal. Go to McDonald's."
"Oh, Jesus."
"Fucking neighbors are at it again," she said, before he could begin a lecture on nutrition. "What the fuck are they doing?"
He listened only half-attentively to the loud wheezing, whistling noise she had complained of more than once this evening.
"I wish you wouldn't use that kind of language."
"Fuck you," she said, flinging herself down on the couch, making the springs protest loudly. "You're awful picky all of a sudden. Don't do this, don't do that. You don't even want to fuck. Go get your hamburgers, for Christ's sake. And I don't want any onions on mine."
Maybe he should take issue with her words, pick a quarrel and storm out. But she had spoken teasingly, without rancor, and now she suddenly smiled at him. He didn't have the heart to do anything but smile back as he put on his jacket. He averted his eyes hastily as she lay back on the couch, letting her thighs drift apart to reveal the darkly matted curls and pink flesh of her vulva.
"What do you want, french fries, Coke?"
"Sure, the works. But no onions. And hurry back, 'cause I'm starting to get horny as hell again."
Her frankness had once been one of her charms. Now he saw it as crudity, and it offended him. He left without saying anything more.
He hurried down the creaking staircase and out the door into the balmy night, where the wheezing noise seemed louder. It hadn't been the neighbors in her building after all. The noise was like the muted hissing of a steam locomotive at rest, but steam locomotives had gone out with his boyhood. Perhaps it was a truck, testing its airbrakes. He gave it no more thought as he went to his car.
He was strongly tempted to drive away and never return. She held no more attraction for him; no interest, nothing. He called her to mind and posed her in a variety of wanton postures, all clearly remembered from the past, but they had no effect on him at all. The mental snapshots of their former intimacies were no more erotic than animal crackers.
No, he couldn't just leave her like this. She would pester the life out of him, call him at home or at the office, demanding an explanation. He had to tell her bluntly, unequivocally. He should have done it the moment he'd walked into her apartment. That's what he'd planned to do, but she hadn't given him time for words. She had all but dragged him into bed, insistent, insatiable-dull.
Any woman would be dull, of course, after Nora Curtis. Making love to her on Friday night, he had felt like a virgin. It was as if sex were only a mildly diverting subject that he had studied from a book, a shadow of the reality that Nora revealed to him. High though his expectations of Nora had been, she had surpassed them. Her lithe body had wrenched his soul out of his loins. His bones and his muscles and his brain had dissolved and pumped forth to fill her again and again. His appetite fed upon its satisfaction, so that he wanted her more urgently and desperately each time.
It was more than physical desire that he felt for Nora, though; far more. He had believed that falling in love was an affliction of adolescence; over forty, it was a pathetic exercise in self-deception. But he knew now that he'd been wrong.
The morning after that first night he'd gone home to unreality, speaking in echoes to phantoms who had once been his wife and children. Nora. Nora. The name was his heartbeat, his breath, his life, and that life didn't resume again until he crept out of his bed the following night to join her. And the following night.
Now it was Monday, and some impulse toward honesty had driven him to Judy. He had written off Marcia long ago. He could leave for Tibet tomorrow and she wouldn't notice he was gone. But he'd always tried to be honest with Judy. She said she loved him, and he believed her. He would have to tell her. He would have to tell her fast, because he was now wasting time that could be spent with Nora.
At the parking lot of the hamburger stand, he went to a phone booth and dialed Nora's number.
"Hello?"
"Nora." He said it the way a man lost in the desert might say "water." Some detached, critical part of his mind not yet eroded by passion marveled at his abject foolishness.
"Where are you?"
"I have to see someone."
"No, you don't. Come home."
"Home?"
"My home. Our home. Come home, Ken."
"No-please. Not yet. I have to tell someone that it's all over."
"Ken, I know where you are. Don't go back there. There's nothing for you there."
The sharpness of the command startled him. The fragment of detachment in his mind gained strength, surprisingly achieved control. "I have to go. I love you."
"Ken!" The voice he cut off by hanging up the receiver was shrill.
He went slowly back to the counter to collect his order, praying that he hadn't offended her. He wouldn't have believed that he'd have the willpower to hang up on her. He ought to exercise it more. He was in danger of becoming a prisoner, a puppet. He would demonstrate to himself that he was still a free man by going back to Judy and telling her directly that he would see her no more.
Driving back, he thought about Marcia. He would have to get rid of her-divorce her, although it would have given him more satisfaction to strangle her. She was nothing but a whore. No, that was wrong; a whore practiced a certain selectivity. Marcia just dove straight for the gutter, where she wallowed.
Those stinking hippies he'd seen the other night, they hadn't been walking down his street by chance. They were Marcia's friends. They visited her often when he was away. Nora had told him all about it. Apparently Marcia had never lost contact with the scum she'd known in her youth. They had followed her here to renew their intimacies.
Surprisingly, it hadn't hurt at all. He had been mentally prepared for something like that, some evidence that Marcia had never given up the disgusting excesses of her past, that her sanity had never been completely restored. Nora had told him a weird story of drugs and Devil-worship. He'd been reluctant to believe that part of it, but the news on TV tonight had almost succeeded in convincing him that she knew exactly what she was talking about.
According to Nora's story, Marcia believed herself to be a witch. She had been initiated into a coven, a secret ring of witches, many years ago. Recently, she had called the other members together for some degenerate celebration that would soon be held. That bag of filth he had found at the gate had been a sign connected with their beliefs.
Marcia was training Melody to follow in her footsteps. That made sense. That was why the insolent girl always looked at him so coldly, trying to conceal the mockery he could read in her eyes. Her mother was better at disguising her contempt for him. Marcia and Melody, practicing their mumbo jumbo under the influence of psychedelic drugs, had been responsible for the so-called poltergeist, and for the more recent vandalism of his study.
Marcia had confided some of these things to Nora, wrongly supposing that her neighbor's interest in astrology would predispose her to an acceptance of her vile beliefs. Nora had tried to draw her out, but Marcia had discerned that Nora's interest wasn't sympathetic. Nora had subsequently watched her closely, keeping her feelings to herself, picking up hints and clues and piecing them together.
He found it hard to follow Nora to her ultimate conclusion: that Marcia had ordered, perhaps even participated in, the murders of the two men. But the fact that she had discovered the first body was suggestive. The fact that she had taken Ron Green to the very place where he had later been killed was almost damning.
Nora had told him more, much more, of her observations and deductions. A dozen little oddities and mysteries he'd noted in his wife's behavior could be explained by Nora's theory. Even seemingly innocent acts took on a new and sinister aspect when viewed in the light of Nora's explanations. For instance, a witch was always accompanied by a familiar, a devil in the form of an animal, usually a black animal. Marcia, convinced that those around her were totally blind or ignorant, had arrogantly named her familiar Lucifer.
More foul than anything else in this web of madness and superstition were Marcia's plans for her own daughter. The Satanists needed a virgin for their ceremony, and that was why Marcia had habitually discouraged Melody's interest in the opposite sex. She had planted the idea in Melody's head that she was superior to other youngsters, that she had nothing at all in common with them. She was saving her daughter for the Black Mass.
He could do nothing for Melody. She was lost, totally enslaved by her mother's evil influence. She wasn't his child anyway. Maybe the courts would arrange help for her, once the police connected Marcia with the people responsible for the murders. The most he could hope to do was save his own two children by getting them out of Marcia's clutches.
But it was difficult to make plans for the future while his mind was so totally absorbed in his wonderful new lover. She would make a good wife. She would make a good stepmother for Roger and Karen. No judge in the world would give custody of them to a woman obsessed by the delusion that she was a witch.
He paused before turning up the street where Judy lived. Maybe he ought to answer Nora's summons and go directly to her house. He rejected the idea. It was too easy. Nora would never respect him if he took the easy way out of a moral dilemma. He had to break off with Judy; he had to tell her to her face that it was over.
Light poured out of the big old house where she lived. People swarmed around the front porch. He cursed under his breath. He hated to be seen by the students and other young people who rented rooms in the building. But this would be the last time.
He took the bag of hamburgers and climbed out of his car. Something unusual was going on. Every light in the former Victorian mansion burned. People kept going in and out of the front door. He heard a tumult of voices, a girl sobbing.
"... thought the boiler blew up when I heard it, but ... "
"I didn't call the cops. Charlie, did you call the cops?"
" ... an ambulance ... "
" ... who could have ... "
"I was just talking to her not an hour ago, I was just talking to her, and now ... "
"Oh, my God, did you see her? Did you see her? She didn't have no head!"
"Hey, mister, you can't go up there! Hey, mister!"
The last sharp cry was directed at Ken, but he shouldered his way through the press and gained the front door. He went up the stairs two at a time, ignoring officious cries to come back. Nobody tried to stop him.
People crowded the first flight of stairs, but the second was almost empty. The third was deserted.
"I wouldn't go up there, if I was you, buddy," called a man on the second floor, but he kept climbing. "Some nut is loose up there."
Halfway up the last flight of stairs he was struck by a disgusting combination of odors: one that suggested burning hair, sulphur, and decaying meat, and another that he recognized as the raw smell of blood. He pressed his handkerchief to his face as he hurried down the corridor.
Judy's door had been splintered, burst out from within, and it lay on the opposite side of the corridor from her doorway. Smudges of blood that could have been the prints of huge hands covered it. Somehow he had known that her room would be the scene of the horror.
He hesitated only an instant. He was spurred on by the sound of a police siren dying to a growl outside. The police wouldn't let him see. He had to see.
He peered through her doorway. The window, and much of the wall around it, had been smashed in. Every piece of furniture had been torn to pieces, every stick smashed, as if the tiny apartment had lain in the path of a highly selective tornado.
In the center of the room lay a naked female torso, its ragged stumps still oozing sluggish blood. He told himself that it wasn't Judy, that it couldn't be Judy; but the nipples of her pear-like breasts, the ones he had earlier criticized for being too small, were far too familiar to his eyes.
He didn't realize that he was screaming until the police came and gently urged him to be quiet.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Marcia had never heard of Judy Barrett. She didn't even know anyone named Judy, not since high school, and it took her a while to figure out what the police were talking about. When she did, she was surprised at the way her heart sank. She'd suspected-known, actually-that Ken was seeing another woman, and it came as no special surprise to learn that the woman in question was an eighteen-year-old carhop.
Nevertheless, it hurt to have a name pinned on the other woman, an address, an occupation. For some reason it had been less painful without those gratuitous details.
She couldn't devote much attention to nursing her wounded feelings. Judy Barrett was dead, and the cops seemed to consider her a prime suspect. Why had she gone to Peachtree's house? Why had Ron Green gone to Blackwood's Comers, and what had Melody been doing in the woods? Where had she been last night, and where had Melody been?
She had reasonable answers for all the questions, but they sounded like flimsy lies in her own ears, and she didn't suppose that the police found them any more convincing. But they left. Marcia was sure they would be back.
Soon after they left, she happened to look at the calendar. A wry laugh was forced out of her, but she felt a chill at the same time. It was the thirtieth of April.
The visit by the police explained Ken's hysterical phone call last night. No-it didn't explain it, but it made it slightly less incomprehensible. She hadn't recognized the sobbing voice on the line, not at first. She'd been tempted to hang up. But then it had become apparent that it was her husband, that he was accusing her of all sorts of crazy things, that he was threatening to kill her.
She had believed him. She hadn't been able to get back to sleep, expecting him to burst in at any moment and carry out his threat. He hadn't come. The police had come, instead, at six in the morning, with their accusatory manner, their nightmarish questions about someone she'd never even heard of.
It was painful to think of all the things Ken had said. All these years his dirty mind had been wallowing in jealous fantasies about her past, a past that she couldn't even remember. He'd seen her life at the commune in South Dakota as one long, uninterrupted sex orgy. He'd accused her of continuing it behind his back with every man he could think of, with boyfriends from her youth dropping by while he was at work.
He'd called her a witch, too. He'd sounded suspiciously like Father Collins, twisting sexual fantasies and delusions about the Devil into a self-consistent web of paranoia. Maybe this madness was contagious, some kind of mass hysteria-like the Salem witch craze. Or maybe Ken had been talking to Father Collins and had been converted to his outrageous views.
Or maybe she really was a witch.
Some maternal instinct that she couldn't overcome by reason made her keep Melody home from school. The girl looked tired, run-down, but she wasn't sick. But Marcia felt that she had to keep her home for protection-for mutual protection. She felt no such apprehension about Roger and Karen. She sent them to school.
Then the phone calls began. She wouldn't have believed that there were so many sick, twisted people in Riveredge Township. Everybody in town seemed to have known that this Barrett person had been Ken's mistress. Worse yet, everybody seemed to know that Melody had been found wandering naked in the woods, and they all had constructed disgustingly explicit and elaborate explanations for her midnight excursion. Some of them suggested that she and her mother ought to be burned at the stake. Was that the influence of Father Collins at work?
A couple of newspapers and a television station called, but Marcia firmly declined to be interviewed. She felt like a traitor to her own profession, but it couldn't be helped. Her rumored involvement in these murders had spread too widely already. She didn't want national publicity about it.
She tried to look up May Eve in the dictionary, but found no such entry. The article under "Witchcraft" in the encyclopedia dealt more with the sociological implications of witch hunts than with the practice of witchcraft. The article suggested that it had never, in reality, been practiced, that it was a medieval delusion.
She lay on a platform in the center of a throng of people, a ring of chanting people. They were waiting for ... someone. It was night. Torches.
She shook herself back to reality. Where had that thought, so convincingly realistic, come from? Her mind was playing tricks on her.
Higgins called at ten to suggest that it would be better if she didn't come into the office for a few days. He sounded embarrassed by what he was saying, even when she agreed with him.
Another set of policemen dropped by with the same set of questions. She tried to find out where Ken was. Was he in custody? Uncomfortably, they told her that he was at his office, that he wasn't a suspect. They left, but they were apparently less satisfied with her answers than the first team had been.
In the early afternoon, someone threw a rock through one of the big living room windows, terrorizing Lucifer.
She thought about calling Ken. Maybe he was sober now, or more sane. Maybe he would explain what he'd been talking about last night. Maybe he would even condescend to tell her where he had been for the past three or four nights. To hell with him, she decided. He would come to his senses and apologize for the phone call. Or else he wouldn't. Either way, it didn't matter.
When she went down to the foot of the driveway to get the mail, she noticed an unusual number of cars parked in the road. People-frumpy-looking women in curlers and kerchiefs, a sprinkling of teen-agers who should have been in school, fat men in T-shirts-were loitering near her mailbox or pretending to be strolling by. They all stared at her as if she were a freak.
She called the police. The desk sergeant promised to have a prowl car cruise by regularly, but she knew that was something that would happen anyway, as an everyday matter of police routine. One of the detectives who had interviewed her earlier got on the line and suggested that she might feel more comfortable if she came down and stayed at headquarters for a while, with Melody. She declined the offer.
The people in the torchlight ring came forward to touch her, one by one, and kiss her, in her most secret places. The first one to take her wore a mask and a coarse animal-skin over his shoulders. It hurt, but she'd made up her mind not to feel the pain. After the third or fourth one had taken her ...
The doorbell shattered the vision. A television crew waited outside. She couldn't prevent them from taking her picture, from recording her hysterical refusal to be interviewed. The crowd in the road had grown. A police car was out there now. So was an ice cream truck, the vendor trying to cash in on the excitement. What on earth was the source of excitement? She hadn't done anything. She was involved in a fabric of coincidence, rumor, misinterpretation.
But if she wasn't involved, if she knew nothing of witchcraft, why did she keep remembering those suggestive, terrifying fragments from her past? Maybe the excitement and fear had jogged them loose, cracked the barrier in her mind that had protected her from them. But maybe they weren't memories at all, but hallucinations derived from Father Collins's sick fantasies, and from Ken's. Maybe she too was a victim of the mass hysteria.
Karen and Roger came home from school, looking overexcited and rather bewildered.
"The man took my picture," Karen bubbled. "He said it was going to be in the newspaper."
"Can we go back and talk to the people, Mom? What are they all doing out there?"
"Can I buy an ice cream cone?" Karen demanded.
"No, stay indoors. Those people are sick. Vultures. Rubbernecks."
They demanded an explanation of those words, but Marcia didn't feel up to giving one. She quieted them down with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and they went to their room, grumbling, to play. She hadn't been prepared for their return, and it had disconcerted her. She should have called the school and arranged to pick them up, so she could have shepherded them through the crowd of curiosity-seekers, and she berated herself for the lapse. But they had gotten home safely. That was all that mattered.
The phone rang. She should have taken it off the hook. Perhaps she could call the phone company and ask them to disconnect it temporarily. It was only another obscene call, another threat. It kept ringing. She couldn't stand it any longer.
"Hello!" she almost screamed.
"Marcia, this is Ken."
"Oh. What do you want?"
"I want to talk to you. I think it's important that we have a talk."
"You did a lot of talking last night. I should think that would hold you for a while."
"I ... I'm sorry. I was in a state of shock. You have to understand. I had just found-the body. I didn't know what I was saying. But this is important. I have to talk to you."
"So, talk."
"Don't make it more difficult for me than it has to be, Marcia. Please. We have to settle things. Arrange things. Not over the phone. I have to see you."
"All right. I suppose you could try coming home for a change. I'm right here most of the time, you know."
"No, I don't-we don't think it's right. We want you to come here. I'm at Nora's."
At first she couldn't imagine whom he was talking about. Perhaps the syrupy, unfamiliar inflection that he gave the name threw her off. The way he spoke that name revealed everything.
"Nora Curtis?" she demanded, unbelieving.
"Yes, I-"
"Apparently you didn't waste any time replacing your girlfriend," Marcia observed.
"Please come over here," he said, and he hung up.
Marcia told herself that she wouldn't answer his summons. If he wanted to talk to her, he could come home. But curiosity began to gnaw at her. Nora Curtis? When and where had that started? On the surface it seemed plausible enough, as plausible as a soap opera: the pretty young widow next door. But Nora Curtis was an empty-headed chatterbox, and she'd always assumed that Ken had shared her view. Ken had always found it hard to conceal his displeasure when he would return home to find Nora hanging around the house. Well, people do change their minds about one another. Maybe Ken had been putting on an act all along.
She detested the idea of going to Nora's house to have a talk with her own husband, but she couldn't resist the urge to find out what was going on. She went up to Melody's room and knocked lightly, then entered.
"I have to go next door for a few minutes. Would you watch the kids-make sure they don't go out?"
Melody looked up from her book without much interest. "Sure."
"I'm taking the phone off the hook. Leave it that way, OK?"
"I'm not expecting any calls."
Marcia hesitated. "You seem pretty cool about this."
"About what?"
"Well, the lynch mob hammering at the gate, for one thing." Marcia made her tone light.
Melody shrugged. "A bunch of creeps."
"Yes. Well. I thought Lucifer was in here with you."
"Haven't seen him."
"I'll be right back. I'll be at-Nora's." She choked on the name and turned quickly to leave before she could observe her daughter's reaction.
"Lucy?" she called as she went down the stairs, but she got no response. The dog was probably hiding somewhere, still shaken by the rock that had come through the window.
She went across the lawn and through a patch of woods to Nora's, not even going within sight of the road. Halfway there it occurred to her that she might meet some of the morbid curiosity seekers, or perhaps an outright pervert, lurking on the grounds, but she saw no one. Maybe the police were doing a better job than she was willing to give them credit for.
She knocked at the back door of the old Georgian house and waited. It suddenly occurred to her that if anybody around here was going to be accused of witchcraft, it ought to be Nora. Back in the sixteen century, her dabblings in astrology would have been enough to send her to the stake. On top of that there was the weird story of her husband. He'd been a wealthy man, a bachelor who'd devoted his life to building up an electronics business. Nora had suddenly appeared on the scene, married him, and he'd died within a year, leaving her everything. Maybe she'd cast a spell over Ken, or made him her slave with a love potion. If she was willing to go to all that trouble, she was welcome to the son of a bitch.
Nora answered the door. Dressed in black-sweater, tight slacks, boots, only a silver chain at her neck to relieve it-she looked the part of a witch.
"Nora, what the hell is going on?" she demanded.
"Come in, Marcia," she said quietly, giving her a steady, searching gaze. "Please."
Her green eyes were bright as prison searchlights. Her face was smooth, somehow regal. She had a neat little figure. She looked younger than she was. Maybe Ken had actually fallen for her, hard. But then what was that nonsense with Judy Barrett?
"All right," Marcia said, following her into the huge, expensively rustic-looking kitchen. Copper pans and kettles gleamed in an oaken twilight. Dried herbs hung above the stove. Nora fancied herself a gourmet cook, and she got some of her ingredients from rambles in the woods. Back in the good old days that Father Collins longed for, that would have weighed against her, too.
Ken entered the kitchen, looking concerned. He also looked cold sober, which was a surprise. Marcia couldn't remember when she'd last seen him at this time of day without an edge on. Maybe Nora was good for him.
"You have to understand, Marcia," he said, "that we don't always have control over these things. When a Taurus like myself meets a Leo who-"
"Am I actually hearing this?" Marcia demanded, more shocked by these words than by anything else he had done or said. "I mean, am I standing here in this kitchen and listening to you, Ken Creighton, spouting this astrological bullshit? What in God's name has this woman done to you?"
"Let's try to be reasonable," Nora said. "Let's not raise our voices. We're all grown-ups. We can talk sensibly about this, can't we?"
"I can be reasonable," Marcia said, bringing her voice under control and rapping out her words coldly. "If you want each other, that's fine with me. It seems kind of sudden, Ken, since you haven't even buried your last little playmate yet-or are you too busy casting horoscopes to go to the funeral?"
Ken looked stricken, as Marcia had hoped he would.
"Ken has explained all that to me," Nora said. "It was all over, even before he and I-"
"Then what is there to talk about? Ken's laundry? I'll bring it over for you, Nora."
"It's the children," Ken blurted, "I want them."
"You're not getting them," Marcia snapped back instantly.
"Listen to reason, Marcia. In your condition ... taking your beliefs into consideration ... the way you've brought up Melody-"
"What the hell are you talking about, Ken? What is my condition?"
Ken looked extremely uncomfortable. He glanced at Nora for support, and apparently he found it in her eyes. "You're overwrought. You've been working too hard, perhaps. The fact remains that you've been acting strange lately. Maybe not permanently, but it would give you a rest if I-if Nora and I-took the children off your hands for a while. Roger and Karen, I mean."
"I know what you mean, you bastard, and the answer is still no. I plan to get a lawyer. You ought to do the same. Then they can have nice, reasonable, grown-up chats with each other, and you can spare me the sight of you."
Marcia turned and stalked out the door, slamming it behind her, ignoring their pleas that she stay. It seemed as if the whole world around her had suddenly gone crazy. Maybe that feeling was proof that she herself had gone mad.
She walked slowly through the damp woods, trying to collect her thoughts. She hadn't done anything. Why did her own husband suddenly consider her a menace to her children? It must be Nora's doing. Nora had twisted him around her finger, had convinced him that her slanders were true. But she'd never done anything to earn such hatred from Nora.
She shivered. The western sky glowed red through budding branches. Evening was coming on.
May Eve.
They were already moving now toward the chosen place where the mass would be celebrated, where the way would be opened. He would come to the altar and fill it with his potency, the altar of living flesh ...
She shook her head violently. How did she know such things, and what did they mean? She leaned against a tree for a moment and closed her eyes. She heard noises: splintering wood, breaking glass, screams. God. The sounds were coming from her own house.
She ran blindly, stumbling more than once. It sounded as if the people she'd been laughing at had actually become a lynch mob, were even now tearing her house apart. She heard a scream that was unmistakably Karen's. She collided with a policeman in front of the house. He grabbed her, tried to hold her back, but she wrenched herself free, tearing her blouse.
"Mama!" Melody staggered from the front door. She had blood on her face, on her arms. "Mama-the kids!"
She heard a final crash inside the house as the policeman pushed his way violently past her, drawing his gun. But she knew it was already too late.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Marcia was surprised at how easy it had been to get her way. First they had wanted to take her to police headquarters for questioning. She had refused. They had insisted. She had asked if she were under arrest. Uncomfortably, they told her she wasn't. They had contented themselves with questioning her in her own living room.
Then, when the interrogation had ended as fruitlessly as the first two interrogations today, they had suggested that she come along with them to a hospital, where she could be "taken care of." Again she refused.
She could take care of herself, thank you.
She could see in their eyes that they thought she was some kind of monster. How could a woman bear to spend the night in the house where two of her children had just been murdered? And not just murdered, but butchered, by a person or creature that was still at large?
She could bear it. The house, Ken's damned plywood and glass henhouse, was all she had left. She had made it hers by living here, by suffering and laughing here, by watching and sharing the fumbling efforts of Karen and Roger to progress from infancy. The house was under siege now-by lunatics, by cultists, perhaps by the Devil himself. She belonged here.
She was thankful that no well-meaning neighbors had come forward with offers to take her under their wings. Maybe the police had sidetracked them, and she was actually under a kind of house arrest. They had at last made a determined and successful effort to get rid of the crowd in the road which had swelled to alarming proportions. No phone calls had come through, either.
Maybe she no longer had any well-meaning neighbors.
"I'm sorry, Mom."
She pulled herself part-way out of her thoughts to stare distractedly at Melody, who sat on the opposite side of the fireplace. She had been questioned too-almost brutally. The blood on her face and hands had belonged to her brother and sister, but she couldn't or wouldn't say what it was she had seen in their room. Nor could the police, no matter how much they wanted to, get around the fact that Melody and Marcia had been outside the house, in plain sight, while the ... the killing was still going on. A policeman, the first one to get up the stairs, was dead, too.
"Sorry for what?"
"That I couldn't stop it. That I didn't prevent it."
"Don't be stupid. What could you have done?"
"I ... I don't know. But I was supposed to be taking care of them."
Marcia studied her. She sensed a certain evasiveness in Melody; but they were both overwrought, exhausted, grief-stricken. She shouldn't try to read fine nuances into her daughter's words. Melody had only recently come down from her room, and the evidence of her grief was etched on her face.
"Was it Lucifer?" Marcia asked.
Ludicrously, the timorous Doberman was now the police department's prime suspect. He had compounded his appearance of guilt by running away.
"No," Melody said. "No, it wasn't."
"Then what was it?"
Melody hesitated a long time, chewing her lower lip. Then she looked up and met Marcia's bleak eyes.
"You'll think I'm crazy."
"Try me."
"It was my brother. From the dream."
"Oh, God," Marcia groaned, looking away. Her daughter really was crazy. At least she hadn't committed the murders herself, Marcia was sure of that. Armed with an axe-and no one had found an axe-Melody couldn't have inflicted the damage that had been done to all the victims. But that didn't alter the fact that she was out of her mind.
"I didn't see him," Melody said. "I felt him. He was the ghost, too, I know that now for sure. It was dark in the room, blacker than night, even though it was still daylight out. And I could hear him. Breathing. Panting. He has trouble breathing our air-"
"Shut up, for Christ's sake, shut up!" Marcia screamed.
Melody stared at her, hurt and sullen, and Marcia already regretted her outburst. In the rear of the house, furious barking broke out.
"Get him in, quick! Shut him up before the cops shoot him!" Marcia cried, but Melody was on her feet and dashing for the kitchen before she'd finished blurting out the words.
The barking subsided. Marcia listened intently, then went to the front door and opened it. She heard the muted squawk of a police radio from the car at the foot of the drive, but no other activity. Apparently the officers on guard hadn't associated the noise with their prime suspect.
A full moon hung over the black tree tops. May Eve. Marcia shut the door and locked it.
Lucifer greeted her in the living room, panting and prancing. She ignored him for the moment, her attention seized by the disheveled man standing nervously near the door of the kitchen: Father Collins. She thought of asking him if he'd burned any good books lately, but she just couldn't find the energy to make the quip.
"What do you want?" she asked.
"I came to express my sympathy," he said. "And I came to help you."
"Thank you, but I don't need any help. Why didn't the cops stop you?"
"I came to the back of the house, through the woods, after I was turned back at the road. Anyone can come that way. Your back door isn't guarded. And they are coming."
"Who?"
He looked even more nervous. "I have to admit it-some of my own flock. Many of them. They ... got out of hand. Misinterpreted what I said, jumped to their own conclusions. And your husband. He, even more than the others, believes that you are a witch."
"Oh ... balls! This is the twentieth century, Father, in case you haven't noticed."
"A century noted for its lynch mobs," he said smoothly. "You've got one coming. It may be too late now. They're going to kill you, and your daughter. They have guns. Dynamite. One of them had a change of heart and told me what was going to happen."
"All right, thank you," Marcia said, walking to the telephone. "I'll call the police. I don't know why you didn't."
"The police know about it," he said. "They aren't going to intervene until it's too late."
Marcia picked up the phone and dialed the police. She said to Collins, "I don't believe it."
"The police think you and your daughter are responsible for the murders. For the murders of your own children, too. They don't know how. They can't prove anything. But they are morally certain that you are guilty. The only way they can stop the murders is to let this mob have its way. At least that's one way of viewing their inaction. You wouldn't believe me if I reminded you of what I told you before, that influential people, solid citizens, are involved in this hellish business."
Marcia struggled to hear what he was saying and conduct a conversation with the desk sergeant at the same time. He assured her that her house was being watched. She told him that one man had already slipped through, that she had been given warning of a mob on its way. He said he, would advise the officers on duty in front of her house. He didn't seem the least bit alarmed.
She hung up and stared at Father Collins, not knowing what to believe. It was Melody who broke the silence.
"We have to go, Mom."
"Don't be silly. This is our house. The police are watching it."
"The police were watching it this afternoon, too," Melody said. "I don't want to be blown up or shot. Neither does Lucifer. Let's get out of here. Now."
She didn't know what to say or do. She had Melody's safety to think of-Lucifer's, too, as Melody had reminded her. She was responsible for them, and she couldn't be led astray by her own stubbornness, her desire to prove something to herself. But Father Collins was crazy, she knew that; and so, she had decided this evening, was Melody. She couldn't go flying out into the night on their advice. He-they might be leading her into some kind of trap. She couldn't trust anyone.
Without announcing her intention, she crossed quickly to the tall cabinet near the fireplace where Ken kept his guns. He never used them, but he had bought himself a fine shotgun and a high-powered rifle. He also kept a couple of pistols there. Marcia knew how to use them. She took the key from its place on top of the cabinet and opened the door. It was empty.
Maybe Ken had taken them. Maybe the police had confiscated them. At one point in the day-was it before the horror or after?-they had shown her a search warrant. She couldn't even keep the events of the day straight in her mind. Her hand began to ache, and she realized it was because she was clutching the knob of the cabinet door with mindless force.
"We have to go, Mom," Melody repeated.
"But why? My house ... my children ... my husband ..." Fool, she told herself, this was no time to break down. But it felt good to sob against Melody's neck, to scream against it, while her daughter guided her, stumbling.
"I'll take you ... a car ... through the woods ... another town, ... " Father Collins's words reached her as if through a thick wall. She could grasp his general meaning, but she couldn't follow his sentences.
She saw the house sitting on its hill, an ungainly bird struggling to take flight, light pouring from all its windows. Not a cozy place in it, no warmth, no love, but she struggled to return to it. Melody took her arm and led her deeper into the damp woods, where someone who could be spoken of only as the Dark Man or the Black Goat was to take her fanatically guarded virginity. Fanatically, yes: they had castrated and blinded a boy who had only been kissing her, made her watch the execution of the sentence. But when the time came, it was Abel Hopkins, who now sarcastically called himself Alexander Hamilton, dressed in a hideous mask and a coarse animal-skin, who had rammed into her with all the delicacy and tenderness of a sledgehammer. Then the others, dozens of them, using her mouth and her rectum, too, until the pain and the shame were so great that she couldn't even scream, but only wish to die on the crude altar in the woods, choking on her own vomit. But that wasn't the worst of it.
"Here's the car," said Father Collins.
She got into the front seat between them. Father Collins turned on the headlights and revealed a gravel road known to her from daytime walks. They had come a long way through the woods. She was wet. She shivered. Melody put her arm around her. Father Collins smelled of alcohol and tobacco and wet wool, strangely reassuring odors. Rocking in the soft cradle of the car, illuminated by the dim green lights of the dashboard, she recalled nighttime drives with her father, who would sometimes sing songs like The Big Rock Candy Mountain or The Streets of Laredo while they drove. She felt safe.
She glanced down and saw that Melody still wore the necklace, the one-her father?-had given her. But she couldn't say that Hopkins was her father. It could have been any of them. Women, too, had caressed her, done filthy things ... with her. She couldn't remember half their names. And then the chant-"Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth!"-rising to a thunder that couldn't have come from human throats alone, even reverberating back against the craggy cliffs at the Center of the Universe; the chant that was augmented by labored, ear-splitting breathing as the torchlit circle was blacked out, as the stars were blacked out, as something huge and shaggy gripped her and tore into her once, twice, three times, before shocking her with an ejaculation that was colder than ice water.
She knew what the necklace represented. She knew the black, triangular wafers of the Mass of St. Secaire. Why hadn't Father Collins protested her daughter's wearing it? Had he just been putting on a show of sanctity back at his sleazy church? A priest was needed to celebrate the Black Mass, an ordained priest. No matter what Father Collins had done, no matter what sanctions had been imposed upon him by the Church, no one could rescind his ordination. Perhaps he was to be the celebrant tonight, when Melody-
"No! No, you have to take us back-"
"Shh, Mom, it's all right. We can't go back."
"But Lucifer-"
"He's in the back seat," Melody said-superfluously, because the mention of his name had caused Lucy to thrust his head forward and begin licking Marcia's cheek.
She felt more secure. She sat up and began to take notice of their surroundings, although they were traveling back roads unfamiliar to her. She had cried herself out; she was sure that her emotions would not betray her again. She felt calm, even strong.
"And my purse?" she asked, trying to make the question seem casual.
"I have it," Melody said.
She knew that the medal Father Collins had given her was still in it. She had inspected it, and it was what he had told her it was. If he were on the side of the Satanists, would he have given her a useful charm? She didn't know. Perhaps there were no useful charms. Perhaps evil held sway over the world, and there were no forces of good. But it was all she had. She would have preferred one of Ken's guns.
"Where are we going?" she asked Father Collins.
"I have a brother in Pennsylvania who'll put you up for a day, a week, however long you like. You'll be safe, after tonight. But it may be better for you to wait until tempers have cooled down, until the madness has passed. Spreading hysteria, discord-that's one of their principal weapons. People in a mob will follow anyone, believe anything. By tomorrow, they'll wonder whatever possessed them-I use the word in its fullest meaning-to go out into the night with guns. By next week, they won't believe that they did."
He sounded uncharacteristically calm too, and sure of himself. Perhaps he could afford to be, now that his intended victims were in his power.
The car slowed and pulled toward an island of light, a store. Before Marcia could ask, Collins said "We have to get gas."
As he pulled up by the pumps, Marcia recognized the place as the general store at Blackwood's Corners. Perhaps it was mere coincidence that had brought them here, but her flesh crawled as if some deep instinct sensed danger. Matthew Peachtree and Ron Green had been killed not far from here. It seemed as if Father Collins had led her back to the source of the evil.
When he took the keys and got out to unlock his gas tank, Melody whispered urgently, "I don't trust that man. Who is he?"
"He-" Marcia faltered. She didn't really know. She looked searchingly at Melody, who looked scared but purposeful: not at all hysterical, not even weak.
"Then let's ditch him," Melody said.
"Go back to the house?"
"No, of course not. He may be right about that. The first thing to do is ditch him, then worry about the rest of it."
Now that her own suspicions about Father Collins had been articulated by Melody, she no longer doubted them. She wondered how she could have been so foolish as to come this far with him. They had to get away from him immediately.
"How?"
"Follow me," Melody said.
She got out of the car, made an elaborate show of stretching, yawning, all the while drifting to the edge of the circle of light around the pumps. Marcia followed, clutching the shoulder-bag that should have held the medal, urging Lucifer to follow. He needed no urging.
"Mrs. Creighton!" Father Collins called.
"Just stretching my legs," Marcia said.
He looked as if he was about to follow, but at that moment the proprietor of the store, the same one she had talked to before she'd found Peachtree's body, asked him a question that apparently required his attention. He turned to answer. Melody started sprinting. Marcia raced after her.
"Mrs. Creighton! Stop! For God's sake, stop!"
The darkness swallowed Melody. Marcia was guided by the sound of her feet. She was far ahead, and Marcia couldn't catch her, but she didn't dare cry out. She heard Father Collins yelling, but his cries were becoming steadily more distant. He was taking the wrong road in his pursuit. He would never find them now.
She eased her pace slightly. A pain was developing in her side. She had to struggle to gulp down the air her lungs ached for. Lucifer ran far ahead, occasionally loping back to check on her progress. He probably thought this was a wonderful new game being played for his amusement.
Her eyes grew accustomed to the moonlight. The center of the road seemed bright as day, but the shadows were impenetrable. She stopped, gasping. She could no longer hear Melody, no matter how she strained to listen.
She risked a call. "Melody?"
Lucifer came back to dance around her. She started walking. Her feet hurt. She could barely lift her bag. She was getting old. Melody was impossibly young, as young as she had been on the night Melody had been conceived. That thing-that last, horrible thing, that couldn't be reasoned away as a man in a mask or a costume-had that been Melody's father? Or had it been a hallucination, brought on by drags and pain and revulsion and utter exhaustion?
Abel Hopkins, who now called himself Alexander Hamilton, had told her that they were going to bring back earth's Golden Age, restore man to his condition before the Fall, by certain spells and incantations, by certain rites and observances that would be explained to her as they went along.
No one had said a word about witchcraft or the Devil. She would have laughed in their faces, from the security of her teen-age skepticism, if they had. They had spoken about the Older Gods, locked away from access to the physical universe for too long. Their return to their rightful place would herald peace, plenty, and brotherhood. War would end. So would poverty and disease and death itself. Even when they'd blinded and castrated a boy for kissing her-with her tacit consent-she'd agreed that such sacrifices were justified by the importance of the goal.
One of Them would father a child on her. He could reach into the physical world only through the medium of an intense discharge of psychic energy by a mass of his believers: an energy released by pain, drugs, repetitive chanting, and sexual excesses. They had made it sound almost scientific-no nonsense about the Black Mass, or Satanism; no black cats or cauldrons or broomsticks. Abel Hopkins had spoken with the rational, detached air of an experimental psychologist explaining the reactions of his subjects to a scrupulously controlled test.
Only by imperceptible degrees, each following logically and smoothly from the last, had she been dragged down into the Pit.
"Where's Melody, Lucy? Find Melody!"
The dog dashed off. He returned shortly, unsuccessful, looking up alertly for his next assignment.
"Come on, baby, find Melody," she pleaded. She raised her voice. "Melody!"
The frantic click of the dog's claws faded away on the blacktop road. Marcia stopped cold. Even in the moonlight, she recognized this road. It was the one they had taken to the commune. It was the road where Ron Green had been killed.
Lucifer returned shortly, holding something in his mouth. She took it from him while he panted happily: Melody's jeans.
Years ago, the Satanists had failed in their mad scheme. She had given birth not to a devil, but to a human child: Melody. They were going to try again. Now it was Melody's turn. She herself wasn't needed at this Sabbat. She was old, used, superfluous. They needed another virgin. They needed her daughter. They had convinced Melody with the same pernicious arguments, played upon her innocent longing for justice and beauty and truth in the world, and tonight they would debauch her.
"Melody!" she screamed, but her voice sounded thin over empty fields.
She came upon the rest of her daughter's clothing by the roadside: everything but the damned necklace.
Melody had been converted by them.
It followed then that Father Collins wasn't one of them, that he was indeed what he had claimed to be, and that was why Melody had found it necessary to elude him. In the excitement and confusion of his arrival at the house and their flight from it, he simply hadn't noticed the necklace that Melody had been wearing.
So, she had one proven ally: but where was he? She had run a long way, walked a long way. It would be a waste of time to retrace her steps and hope to meet him at the general store. She was, presumably, on Melody's trail. It was unlikely, but not inconceivable, that Lucifer might pick up that trail and find her.
If Father Collins was thinking clearly-a big assumption-he would abandon his pursuit on foot and begin to search the available roads systematically with his car. He would eventually find her. Meanwhile, she should continue walking with Lucifer, hoping that the dog would realize what was required of him.
"We have to find Melody, lamb. Find her!"
Lucifer went off on a zigzag course, running up and down the banks and into the ditches that flanked the road. He looked as if he knew what he was doing, but Marcia doubted it.
Lucifer showed considerable interest in a roadside stand, apparently abandoned. Marcia followed him.
"Melody?" she called softly.
Lucifer went to each of the building's corners and diligently urinated. That had apparently been the only reason for his interest.
She saw a mailbox by the stand. Even in the moonlight she could make out the name. A. Walker. It took her a moment, but she made the connection. She had met him at the general store. He had been Peachtree's friend. He had spoken of spying on the hippies, and presumably he knew his way around in the woods. On top of that, he had seemed kindly; his lanky body and seamed face had reminded her of Gary Cooper-she had trusted him instinctively.
She looked beyond the stand, where a light shone in a downstairs window of the farmhouse. He had suffered on account of the Satanists, too. If he hadn't discovered it for himself, perhaps she could convince him that they were responsible for the mutilation of his cattle.
She couldn't find Melody on her own. Lucifer was hopeless. She had to trust somebody. She thought out these arguments while she was walking the long road to his house.
He answered the door almost immediately. "Is it-oh."
"Maybe you don't remember me, but-"
"Sure, I remember you. I ain't that old. You're the lady from the newspaper."
"Marcia Creighton. I ... my daughter is lost. Around here, someplace. I think ... "
"Come on in. You look kind of worn out. Don't you have a car? Bring your dog in, too. I like dogs. Had to get rid of mine, though, they was acting so strange. Hi there, fella."
Lucifer allowed his side to be thumped, then went on to inspect the house. The living room was furnished in Victorian style, complete with antimacassars and an ormolu clock on the mantel. It was scrupulously clean.
Looking at Alvin Walker in the light, she was struck by the odd thought that she must have made some mistake. This man was ruddier and healthier-looking than she remembered. He appeared to be no more than fifty. He could easily have been the son of the old farmer she'd met in the general store. But he'd recognized her.
"You're looking well," she said uncertainly.
"Well, that's good to hear. Wife passed on last week, God rest her, and I ain't been feeling all that good."
"I-" Marcia choked. Her own children. Was it only today? She looked away.
"Here, you better sit down. What've you been doing, running around in the woods?"
"My daughter is missing," Marcia repeated, sitting down where he indicated. "The hippies have her, I think, the ones you spied on. With the goat. You know where they go at night, where they'd be. Please! You've got to take me there."
She caught sight of her reflection in a black window pane: black hair disarranged, face white as chalk, eyes hollow. If anyone looked like a witch wandering in the night, she did. She looked down at her hands, looking more sickeningly veined and gnarled than she remembered. They shook violently.
Walker had turned his back for a moment, seemed to be doing something with his shirt. When he turned, it was buttoned up higher. She saw a bulge under it. She noted these details without really considering them.
"They ain't such bad people," he said. "Keeps an old fella like me young, talking to young folks with different ideas. A little weird, some of their ideas, but they ain't out to hurt anybody."
"I can't argue about that. I don't know what's right anymore. Maybe they are. But my daughter is only fifteen. She doesn't know anything. They're going to hurt her, I know it, believe me. They were the ones who hurt your cattle, I know that, and they killed your friend Peachtree."
"Crazy old fool. He didn't need to get himself killed. Should have asked what it was all about, learned the right things to do, the words to say. Those young girls ... didn't even think I could do it anymore, they showed me different. How old a man would you say I was?"
"My God," Marcia groaned, staring at him. She saw now that he wore a chain around his neck, a chain she recognized as the work of Hamilton-Hopkins. The thing he had concealed under his shirt was the bull-pizzle, taken perhaps from one of his own animals. "You're one of them."
"Damn right," he said, grinning down at her. "I figure I know who your daughter is, too, and I aim to get a piece of that before the night is over. Two or three others, too. You wouldn't believe it of an old coot like me, would you? But I'm telling you the truth. Maybe I'll have some steam left for you when I get back in the morning. You're a bit older than what I'm used to lately, but you ain't bad at all."
She believed she would get only one chance. She composed her mind carefully for it, willed energy back into her tired body. When she was sure that she would never be more ready, she sprang out of the chair and headed for the door.
Walker laughed. His arm encircled her waist easily, and it felt like iron.
"Lucy, help! Kill him! Get him, Lucifer!"
She twisted her neck to see the Doberman cringing in the corner, shivering, a front paw raised in submission. All the fight went out of her then.
"Some dog you got," Walker chuckled, sliding his free hand up to fondle her breast roughly. "Maybe I won't shoot him, if you promise to be real nice to me. I mean, real nice."
"Please. No. You don't understand. These people worship the Devil. Murder, torture, anything-mean nothing to them. Do you want to burn in hell forever?"
Walker laughed so hard at that, that he nearly lost his grip on her, but not quite. "I'll worry about that when I get to it," he sputtered through his laughter, "and that won't be for a long time yet, if what they tell me is true. They ain't never lied to me yet, and they made me like a randy young buck again; they got rid of the old woman for me with no one the wiser. If that's the Devil's doing, it's a damned sight more than I ever got from going to some fool church. Come on now, honey, I got to put you somewhere safe and sound while I go off to the party. I'll give that pretty daughter of yours a kiss for you-while I'm screwing the stuffing out of her."
Marcia lost all control. She knew it was useless to fight, but she did. She knew he might hurt her, even kill her, but that didn't matter. She kicked. She jabbed with her elbows. She tried to bite. It was all useless. He only laughed. Even worse, she could feel his prick hardening against her squirming body.
"Shit, I can't wait for no sabbat," he gasped, pushing her roughly forward. She thrust her arms out in time to catch the back of a chair. He shoved her legs wider apart with his foot, almost making her fall again, and at the same time he yanked her dress up over her hips. "Seems like I'm horny all the time now. Guess I can take some of the edge off with you, then give your precious little daughter a nice, long fuck."
He tore her panties away. She screamed. He hit the back of her head with the heel of his hand, jarring her teeth. The blow knocked her off balance, making her lean over the back of the chair and unwillingly present herself for penetration. She shuddered as she felt his hard cock pressing against her naked ass. She tried hard to hold back her tears of anger and shame and frustration, but they came anyway.
"Damn you," she sobbed. "God damn you!"
"Compliments ain't gonna get you nowhere," he snickered. "You're gonna take it now-just the way I want it."
She screamed again. He was pressing the head of his prick against her anus. She threw all of her remaining strength into the effort to free herself, but he was too strong for her. He pushed harder against her asshole.
"No! It hurts! Stop!" she cried as she began to feel the searing pain of the intrusion.
"Just you stick your ass right up and enjoy it, honey," he chuckled, shoving her head down firmly with his iron-hard hand.
She squeezed her buttocks together, resisting every inch of the way, trying to force his stiff cock out of her rectum. Not since that terrible May Eve had anyone done this to her. She had wanted it then, even though it had hurt. She had wanted them to do everything to her. Perhaps she had brought everything on herself. Perhaps it was all a punishment for her girlhood transgressions. But if that was so, the God who could dispense punishment in that way was worse than the Devil she had once worshipped.
She began to believe that her resistance was succeeding. She hadn't squeezed him out, but she'd stopped his inward progress. Just as she was preparing herself for a supreme effort to drive him all the way out, he gripped her wrist and twisted her arm up. The shock and the pain were so great that she forgot about keeping herself tight. In that unguarded moment he managed to ram more of his thick shaft into her aching rectum. He twisted her arm again as he increased the pressure of his inward thrust.
"Relax, honey," he hissed between clenched teeth. "Ease it up and let me in there, or I'll break your arm off."
She had to cooperate. She knew it would hurt less if she did. She struggled desperately to lift her buttocks higher, to ease the involuntary muscular constriction of her sphincter and admit his hard cock. She was willing to do anything now-to ease the pain.
"Give, you fancy bitch, give!" he snarled, shifting his weight to drive even more of his cock into her asshole. She groaned as a new spasm of pain hit her, as he seared some nerve that hadn't yet been touched by his cruel efforts to sodomize her.
Now he began to rock back and forth, grunting and wheezing, grinding his stiff flesh in and out of the dry, aching passage. She shut her eyes and snatched breath irregularly through her open mouth. Everything had to end; this would, too. She tried to think of something else, anything else, but the only options she could think of were even worse than this.
"You love it, don't you," he gasped, his breath ragged as he pumped his hips against her. "I know you do, you filthy bitch."
She was silent. It wasn't as bad as it had been. His inward strokes seemed to fill her like a stuffed fowl, pushing her insides up from the bottom and filling her throat with bile.
"Tell me, tell me how much you love it," he whispered, accelerating his plunging tempo and pulling her ass up with both his unnaturally powerful hands, pulling her loins up to meet him so he could drive the spike even deeper.
"Aren't you finished yet?" she asked coldly.
"Ah, you cunt, you bitch, you whore, you pig," he grunted in rhythm to his powerful strokes. "You'll know when I'm finished. You'll be screaming with pleasure long before then-you'll be begging for more, just like your darling little daughter will be begging for it later."
On and on he babbled, until she wanted to scream just to drown his words from her ears. Her teeth rattled from his insistent, hammering rhythm. His fingernails dug into her breasts through her dress, biting the soft flesh. His words became inarticulate curses and slobbering grunts. She felt his prick pulsing inside her rectum as he clutched her tighter and rubbed his belly against her.
He lay silent on her for a long time, until she began to wonder if he were asleep or dead. The pressure in her ass gradually dwindled. The once powerful, brutal prong slid out of her. She shivered as the semen that smeared her began to grow cold and clammy.
"Now you're through," she said dully. "Get off."
"Through with you, maybe," he laughed, pulling her back on her feet and forcing her forward again. "But I'll be good as new in no time at all. Them people deliver what they promise."
He forced her to a door near the rear of the house, opened it, and thrust her through. She stumbled and nearly fell down a flight of steps. He stood back from the door and Lucifer slid through, growling at Walker. It was a pitifully small gesture, but she loved him for it. The door slammed and the lock shot home, leaving them in darkness.
She sat on the steps for a long time. Lucifer licked her face. She heard Walker go out. There was a cricket in the cellar with them.
At last she pulled herself together and got to her feet. She returned to the head of the stairs and groped until she found a light switch. It worked, although the dim bulb illuminated only a small section of the extensive, cluttered basement.
She descended to the circle of light and sat on a dusty packing case. She tried to analyze her situation. Her only hope for Melody lay with Father Collins. In other words, there was no hope for Melody. Perhaps she could save herself. At any rate, she didn't plan to sit here until morning, waiting for Alvin Walker to return.
A noisy boiler came on in a dark recess of the basement. She put that fact aside. If there was gas or oil, she might set off an explosion or a fire, but she would examine less drastic measures first.
She opened her purse and inventoried the contents. Father Collins's medal: a worthless piece of junk. Kleenex, cosmetics, innumerable keys, a mirror, stubs of pencils, a notebook, film cans-just more junk. She looked at it hopelessly, trying to think of clever things that might be done with hairpins or a nail file.
She slung the bag over her shoulder and began a tour of the basement. Walker hadn't planned in advance to confine her here and he might have left tools, a crowbar, a hatchet. But she found no such items. She found that the windows were tightly boarded up.
"Lucy! Where have you gone off to, baby? Mama still loves you, more or less."
She had to shout to make herself heard over the boiler, or whatever it was. She hadn't found it yet in her tour. She overcame her fears about the darker reaches of the basement and began to explore them. All that she had to fear lay outside her prison, and they were all ... busy at the moment.
Lucy didn't respond. She called sporadically, striking matches from time to time to peer at cob webbed beams and brick walls. She wondered how Walker ever managed to sleep, with the racket that went on down here.
She turned back to the light bulb. It was dimmer than she remembered. It was getting dimmer still. It was as if a shadow were rising between herself and the bulb, as if a mist were congealing and stifling the light. The noise was intolerable. And there was now a smell, a frightful odor like burning hair.
"Lucy!"
A monstrous piece of the darkness detached itself from the other shadows and came forward. It was Lucifer, and yet it wasn't. She recognized the general configuration of his face, the narrow muzzle and slanted eyes, the rust markings on sable; but it was swollen, bloated, distorted out of all proportion. It had black claws-but they were attached to hands of a sort.
It was her dog. It was a devil from a picture book. It was darkness made solid. Its footfalls shook the house as it came closer, sniffing, chugging like a steam engine, seeming to grow larger, its odor becoming a solid fog that hurt her lungs when she breathed. It came closer, driving her back against the brick wall.
And then it spoke.
She was frightened-terrified-by the sight of it and the smell of it and, most of all, by the dreadful implications of its appearance. But what filled her with utter loathing and hatred, what made her swing her bag at it, the only weapon she had, was neither its appearance nor even the sound of its voice--a hoarse, agonized croaking, as if a throat never meant for the purpose were being twisted and tortured into some fantastic shape to permit vocalization. What brought on the burst of hatred, what made her swing the bag and shower its contents against the monster's shaggy hide, was the single, frightful word that it spoke:
"Mama."
CHAPTER NINETEEN
"I hope you're coming to the Hallowe'en party, Mrs. Creighton."
Marcia jerked around, horrified, staring. It took her a moment to sort out her thoughts and recognize the nurse, Miss Durkin; another moment to ascertain that Miss Durkin had asked that singularly tactless question in innocence. At least she looked innocent, with hazel eyes that seemed frank, a smile that held no malice. But you could never tell. She had once trusted her neighbor, what's-her-name, and that farmer who looked like Gary Cooper. They had both betrayed her. They had hurt her dog.
"When can I see my dog?"
Miss Durkin's smile lost its spontaneity, and some of the luster left her eyes.
"Now, you've talked to Doctor about that. You know that your dog is dead. You can have another one when you go home, perhaps."
"I don't want another one," she said, but she could put no force into her petulance. She turned away from the nurse and looked out across the sun-dappled lawn, its greenness shading to brown at the trees, like multicolored lollipops. "I don't want to go home, either."
"Well, you have a visitor who wants you to come home, m send her out. And I do hope you'll come to the party."
"I don't want any visitors," Marcia shouted after her, "and the last thing I need is a fucking Hallowe'en party!"
Miss Durkin's back stiffened, but her step didn't falter as she went off like a pigeon on parade in her starched white uniform.
Marcia sank back in her chair and shaded her eyes from the bright sun. Lucifer was dead, of course. She kept forgetting certain details, but an effort never failed to restore them to her mind. She had been found in a field near Alvin Walker's farmhouse, which had been struck by lightning-a highly discriminating bolt that had wrecked the basement and killed her dog. She had no idea how so much time had elapsed unnoted since then, but she accepted the fact that it was October. It looked like October.
"Hi, Mom."
She started. She twisted in her chair to look at Melody. She studied her daughter coldly for a long moment, then turned and shut her eyes. "Oh, God," she said.
"I sort of thought you'd be happy to see me," she said, and Marcia could hear her drawing up a chair.
Melody was outrageously pregnant. It made her look even younger than she was.
"The nurse just invited me to a Hallowe'en party," Marcia said.
Melody laughed.
"I thought you'd get a kick out of that," Marcia said dryly. "Why haven't you been to see me?"
"I thought you might be ... well, mad at me."
"And Ken? I haven't seen him, either."
"He's pretty badly messed up. He still wants Nora, but she never really wanted him at all. She just wanted him out of the way, that one night."
"She was one of them?"
Melody nodded. "One of us."
Marcia looked across the lawn, watched people moving in slow groups, patients and their visitors. Most of those patients were genuinely insane. She wasn't. She had glimpsed the chaos that lay beneath the physical universe, that was struggling even now to enter it, but it hadn't driven her mad. She was certain of that.
"I don't really understand all of it," Marcia said at last. "Lucifer-what was he?"
"He was just a dog. But my brother-your son-needed a body. My dream was right, you see, it wasn't a dream at all. He tried to get inside my head, to merge with me, but he wasn't strong enough. He couldn't overcome my natural defenses. And I was scared, of course, so I resisted."
"My son." Marcia shuddered.
"Yes. I was a twin, only my twin brother had no physical form. He could control energy, though, sometimes-like when we had the ghost? Then, when he got older and smarter, he tried to force his way into the material world in other ways. He tried to take over the body of a dead man, but that didn't work. Then he tried with Lucifer, and that was better, but the mixture of personalities did crazy things-the dog's instinct to kill was brought out by all the strength and size."
"Who told you all this?"
"Nora, mostly."
"I hope you'll explain it all to my doctor on your way out. He thinks I'm nuts."
Melody laughed. "I wouldn't say a word to anyone who didn't understand. You already know a lot about it"
"And you're telling me because no one will ever believe me, if I tell them what you've said."
Melody smiled. "That's true, too."
"What happened to-your brother?"
"You really screwed that up. That was what the Sabbat was going to be for. Once it was all explained to me, I agreed to let my brother merge his personality with mine, to create one perfect being. We should have been born that way in the first place, as one individual, but something went wrong. So the Sabbat was supposed to generate the psychic energy we needed to merge, to become one."
"How did I screw it up?"
"My brother-that word isn't exactly right, you know. He was more like a big chunk of me that couldn't get a foothold in this world. But it's handy, so I'll keep calling him that-my brother went and took over the dog again. He knew you were in trouble, and he wanted to help you. But you hit him with that motherfucking medal, and it destroyed him. The shock of it all killed the dog, too."
"I'm sorry about Lucifer."
"It doesn't matter," Melody said, patting her swollen belly. "We held the Sabbat anyway, and I was the altar. My father came to me, as he once came to you. It was ... glorious. This time nothing will go wrong. This time it's going to be one perfect child. Not twins. I know."
Marcia pretended to shade her eyes from the sun once more, but she was trying to hide her face from Melody's searching, intelligent gaze. Her daughter was lying. Marcia had known Lucifer inside out, and his nature hadn't been responsible for the evil, the savagery. After Ron Green and Peachtree, who had been in the wrong places at the wrong times, the killings had a sickening logic. Melody had subconsciously wished her stepfather's mistress dead, her own siblings dead. That "big chunk of her" had granted her wish. It was pure evil. As Father Collins had said, its triumph would mean the end of humanity in human beings.
She carefully calculated some odds. She had no weapon. She could try to kick her daughter in the belly with all her strength, but she would get only one chance: nurses and attendants, working hard at being unobtrusive, were everywhere, and they were prepared for just that sort of emergency. Wearing soft slippers as she was, it might not work. She decided to pursue a different strategy.
"Maybe I've been wrong about all this, honey," she said, looking earnestly into her daughter's inscrutable, cold eyes. "I don't know. There's a lot I don't understand, but I'm willing to learn, to be taught. You see, no one ever took the trouble to explain it all to me. I guess I've made some terrible mistakes."
"You have," Melody said quietly.
"But the fact remains that you're still my daughter, that you need my help at a time like this. I'm going to make a real effort to pull myself together, to agree with the doctor's version of the truth and try to get out of this place. I want to be with you and help you take care of ... your child."
"I'm sorry, Mom." Melody rose from her chair and began drifting backward, away from her. "I should have told you, I guess. But-well, I inherited certain abilities from my father. Nora and the others have been coaching me, showing me how to use them. I always knew I was a remarkable person, a truly superior person, and now I know why."
"Abilities? What do you mean?"
"Well, for one thing, the ability to read minds. I'm sorry that your mind is so sick and twisted that you can't begin to grasp the glory and the wonder of all this. You'd better get used to the idea that you're going to be in this place for a long time, at least until my child can take care of himself. And by that time-can't you see? There won't be any more prisons, any more madhouses, because there won't be any more crime or madness. We'll all join together at last as brothers and sisters, singing the praises of the Older Gods, opening the path for them as they come triumphantly into their inheritance at long last!"
"You little witch!" Marcia cried, rising, but Melody was already running at an ungainly but highly efficient gait that took her far out of reach across the parched October lawn. She flung one laughing glance over her shoulder, her gold hair catching sunlight that now seemed oddly dimmed. Marcia sank back into her chair as the scene before her wavered in a lens of tears.
"Mrs. Creighton! I had no idea you were here."
She rubbed her eyes briskly and looked up. For a moment she failed to recognize him. He was thinner than she remembered, and he now wore his salt-and-pepper hair in a crew cut that compounded the rather ghastly suggestion he gave of a middle-aged boy. He wore a baggy gray sweatsuit, too, instead of a clerical collar, but it was Father Collins.
"Why are you here?" she asked.
"Visiting the sick is one of my principal duties," he said, smiling.
"You saw-?"
"Your daughter? Yes," he said, his smile fading. "They've pinned all their hopes on her. They guard her closely. I have no doubt that some of the people you see near us, engaged in apparently innocent pursuits, are members of her hand-picked bodyguard. It was wise that you made no move to ... rectify the evil."
"But what can we do? She told me that I'm never getting out of here, not until it's too late. You have to do something. You're the only person who can, the only one who believes."
"Calm yourself, Mrs. Creighton. They've tried then-worst with me, and I still draw breath. I still fight them. I told you, the old fox has more than one trick."
"Then why haven't you done something before-"
He made a quick, surreptitious gesture to silence her. "Here comes one of them now," he said, barely moving his lips. "Be careful. Don't seem alarmed by anything I may say or do."
Marcia looked beyond him to see Miss Durkin bustling toward them. Her professional smile couldn't mask her obviously deep concern. Perhaps he was right, and the nurse was one of the cultists, planted here to make sure she achieved no contact with possible allies in the outside world.
"So here we are!" Miss Durkin said in a tone of genial reproof. "And how did we get out of our room this time, I'd like to know?"
"One of my little secrets," Father Collins said with a chuckle.
"But you know you're not supposed to be out here, Your Holiness-"
"Please!" he interrupted. "Be more careful. This good lady, Mrs. Creighton-an old friend, by the way-she has no knowledge of my true position in the Church. I've been traveling incognito, you see. I guess the cat's out of the bag now, though." He chuckled again. "You won't tell anyone, will you, Mrs. Creighton?"
Marcia shook her head slowly, unable to speak.
Miss Durkin gently but firmly led Father Collins across the lawn to the big gray building beyond it. He turned once, smiling benignly, and made the sign of the cross at her.
