'Maybe they'll never find the buckets,' he said. 'If they do, maybe the fingerprints will all be burnt of. I don't know. But if Doyle takes any of 'em in, I'm heading for California. You do what you want.'
   'Would you take me with you?' she asked. She looked at him from the floor, her lip puffed to negroid size, her eyes pleading.
   He smiled. 'Maybe.' But he wouldn't. Not any more. 'Come on. We're going to town.'
   They went downstairs and through the empty dance hall, where chairs were still pushed back and beers were standing flat on the tables.
   As they went out through the fire door Billy said: 'This place sucks, anyway.'
   They got into his car, and he started it up. When he popped on the headlights, Chris began to scream, hands in fists up to her cheeks.
   Billy felt it at the same time: Something in his mind.
   (came came came came)
   a presence.
   Carrie was standing in front of them, perhaps seventy feet away.
   The high beams picked her out in ghastly horror-movie blacks and whites, dripping and clotted with blood. Now much of it was her own. The hilt of the butcher knife still protruded from her shoulder, and her gown was covered with dirt and grass stain. She had crawled much of the distance from Carlin Street, half fainting, to destroy this roadhouse – perhaps the very one where the doom of her creation had begun.
   She stood swaying, her arms thrown out like the arms of a stage hypnotist, and she began to totter toward them.
   It happened in the blink of a second. Chris had not had time to expend her first scream. Billy's reflexes were good and his reaction was instantaneous. He shifted into low, popped the clutch, and floored it.
   The Chevrolet's tyres screamed against the asphalt, and the car sprang forward like some old and terrible mancater. The figure swelled in the windshield and as it did the presence became louder
   (CARRIE CARRIE CARRIE)
   and louder
   (CARRIE CARRIE CARRIE)
   like a radio being turned up to full volume. Time seemed to close around them in a frame and for a moment they were frozen even in motion: Billy
   (CARRIE just like the dogs CARRIE jut like the goddam dogs CARRIE brucie i wish i could CARRIE be CARRIE you)
   and Chris
   (CARRIE Jesus not to kill her CARRIE didn't mean to kill her CARRIE billy i dont CARRIE want to CARRIE see it CA)
   and Carrie herself
   (see the wheel car wheel gas pedal i see the WHEEL o god my heart my heart my heart)
   And Billy suddenly felt his car turn traitor, come alive, slither in his hands, The Chevvy dug around in a smoking half-circle, straight pipes racketing, and suddenly the clapboard side of The Cavalier was swelling, swelling, swelling and
   (this is)
   they slammed into it at forty, still accelerating, and wood sprayed up in a neon-tinted detonation. Billy was thrown forward and the steering column speared him. Chris was thrown into the dashboard.
   The gas tank split open, and fuel began to puddle around the rear of the car. Part of one straight pipe fell into it, and the gas bloomed into flame.
   Carrie lay on her side, eyes closed, panting thickly. Her chest was on fire.
   She began to drag herself across the parking lot, going nowhere.
   (momma i'm sorry it all went wrong o momma o please o please i hurt so bad momma what do i do)
   And suddenly it didn't seem to matter any more, nothing would matter if she could turn over, turn over and see the stars, turn over and look once and die.
   And that was how Sue found her at two o'clock.

   When Sheriff Doyle left her, Sue walked down the Street and sat on the steps of the Chamberlain U-Wash-It. She stared at the burning sky without swing it. Tommy was dead. She knew it was true and accepted it with an case that was dreadful.
   And Carrie had done it.
   She had no idea how she knew it, but the conviction was as pure and right as arithmetic.
   Time passed. It didn't matter. Macbeth, hath murdered sleep and Carrie hath murdered time. Pretty good. A bon mot Sue smiled dolefully. Can this be the end of our heroine, Miss Sweet Little Sixteen? No worries about the country club and Kleen Korners now. Not ever. Gone. Burned out. Someone ran past, blabbering that Carlin Street was on fire. Good for Carlin Street. Tommy was gone. And Carrie had gone home to murder her mother.
   (???)
   She sat bolt upright, staring into the darkness.
   (???)
   She didn't know how she knew. It bore no relationship to anything she had ever read about telepathy. There were no pictures in her head, no great white flashes of revelation, only prosaic knowledge; the way you know summer follows spring, that cancer can kill you, that Carrie's mother was dead already, that
   (!!!!!)
   Her heart row thickly in her chest. Dead? She examined in her knowledge of the incident, trying to disregard the insistent weirdness of knowing from nothing.
   Yes, Margaret White was dead, something to do with her heart. But she had stabbed Carrie. Carrie was badly hurt. She was
   There was nothing more.
   She got up and ran back to her mother's car. Ten minutes later she parked on the corner of Branch and Carlin Street, which was on fire. No trucks were available to fight the blaze yet, but saw-horses had been put across both ends of the street, and greasily smoking roads pots lit a sign which said;
   DANGER! LIVE WIRES!
   Sue cut through two back yards and forced her way through a budding hedge that scraped at her, white short, stiff bristles. She came out one yard from the White's house and crossed over.
   The house was in flames, the roof blazing. It was impossible to even think about getting close enough to look in. But in the strong firelight she saw something better, the splashed trail of Carrie's blood. She followed it with her head down, past the larger spots where Carrie had rested, through another hedge, across a Willow Street back yard, and then through an undeveloped tangle of scrub pine and oak. Beyond that, a short, unpaved spur – little more than a footpath – wound up the rise of land to the right, angling away from Route 6.
   She stopped suddenly as doubt struck her with vicious and corrosive force. Suppose she could find her? What then? Heart failure? Set on fire? Controlled and forced to walk in front of an oncoming car or fire engine? Her peculiar knowledge told her Carrie would be capable of all things.
   (find a policeman)
   She giggled a little at that one and sat down in the grass, which was silked with dew. She had already found a policeman. And even supposing Otis Doyle had believed her, what then? A mental picture came to her of a hundred desperate manhunters surrounding Carrie, demanding her to hand over her weapons and give up. Carrie obediently raises her hands and plucks her head from her shoulders. Hands it to Sheriff Doyle, who solemnly puts it in a wicker basket marked People's Exhibit A.
   (and tommy's dead)
   Well, well. She began to cry. She put her hands over her face and sobbed into them. A soft breeze snuffled through the juniper bushes on top of the hill. More fire engines screamed by on Route 6 like huge red hounds in the night.
   (the town's burning down o well)
   She had no idea how long she sat there, crying in a grainy half-doze. She was not even aware that she was following Carrie's progress toward The Cavalier, no more than she was aware of the process of respiration unless she thought about it. Carrie was hurt very badly, was going on brute determination alone at this point. It was three miles out to The Cavalier, even across-country, as Carrie was going. Sue
   (watched? thought? doesn't matter)
   as Carrie fell in a brook and dragged herself out, icy and shivering. It was really amazing that she kept going. But of course it was for Momma. Momma wanted her to be the Angel's Fiery Sword, to destroy-
   (she's going to destroy that too)
   She got up and began to run clumsily, not bothering to follow the trail of blood. She didn't need to follow it any more.


   From The Shadow Exploded (pp. 164-165):
   Whatever any of us may think of the Carrie White affair, it is over. It's time to turn to the future. As Dean McGuffin points out, in his excellent Science Yearbook article, if we refuse to do this, we will almost certainly have to pay the piper – and the price is apt to be a high one.
   A thorny moral question is raised here. Progress is already being made toward complete isolation of the TK gene. It is more or less assumed in the scientific community (see, for instance, Bourke and Hannegan's 'A View Toward Isolation of the TK Gene with Specific Recommendations for Control Parameters' in Mocrobiology Annual, Berkeley: 1982) that when a testing procedure is established, all school-age children will undergo the test as routinely as they now undergo the TB skin-patch. Yet TK is not a germ; it is as much a part of the afflicted person as the colour of his eyes.
   If overt TK ability occurs as a part of puberty, and if this hypothetical TK test is performed on children entering the first grade, we shall certainly be forewarned. But in this case, is forewarned forearmed? If the TB test shows positive a child can be treated or isolated. If the TK test shows positive, we have no treatment except a bullet in the head. And how is it possible to isolate a person who will eventually have the power to knock down all walls?
   And even if isolation could be made successful, would the American people allow a small, pretty girl-child to be ripped away from her parents at the first sign of puberty to be locked in a bank vault for the rest of her life? I doubt it. Especially when The White Commission has worked so hard to convince the public that the nightmare in Chamberlain was a complete fluke.
   Indeed, we seem to have returned to Square One.



   From the sworn testimony of Susan Snell, taken before The State Investigatory Board of Maine (from The White Commission Report), pp. 306-472:
   Q. Now, Miss Snell, the Board would like to go through your testimony concerning your alleged meeting with Carrie White in The Cavalier parking lot
   A. Why do you keep asking the same questions over and over? I've told you twice already.
   Q. We want to make sure the record is correct in every
   A. You want to catch me in a lie, isn't that what you really mean? You don't think I'm telling the truth, do YOU?
   Q. You say you came upon Carrie at
   A. Will you answer me?
   Q. -at 2:00 on the morning of May 28th. Is that correct?
   A I'm not going to answer any more questions until you answer the one I just asked.
   Q. Miss Snell, this body is empowered to cite you for contempt if you refuse to answer on any other grounds than Constitutional ones.
   A. I don't care what you're empowered to do. I've lost someone I love. Go and throw me in jail. I don't care. I – go to hell. All of you, go to hell. You're trying to … to … I don't know, crucify me or something. Just lay off me!
   (A short recess)
   Q. Miss Snell, are you willing to continue your testimony at this time?
   A. Yes. But I won't be badgered. Mr Chairman.
   Q. Of course not, young lady. No one wants to badger you. Now you claim to have come upon Carrie in the parking lot of this tavern at 2:00. Is that correct?
   A. Yes.
   Q. You knew it was 2:00?
   A. I was wearing the watch you see on my wrist right now.
   Q. To be sure. Isn't The Cavalier better than six miles from where you left your mother's car?
   A. It is by the road. It's close to three as the crow flies.
   Q. You walked this distance?
   A. Yes.
   Q. Now you testified earlier that you 'knew' you were getting close to Carrie. Can you explain this?
   A. No.
   Q. Could you smell her?
   A. What?
   Q. Did you follow your nose?
   (Laughter in the galleries)
   A. Are you playing games with me?
   Q. Answer the question, please.
   A. No. I didn't follow my nose.
   Q. Could you see her?
   A. No.
   Q. Hear her?
   A. No.
   Q. Then how could you possibly know she was there?
   A. How did Tom Quillan know? Or Cora Simard? Or poor Vic Mooney? How did any of them know?
   Q. Answer the question, miss. This is hardly the place or the time for impertinence.
   A. But they did say they 'just knew,' didn't they? I read Mrs Simard's testimony in the paper! And what about the fire hydrants that opened themselves? And the gas pumps that broke their own locks and turned themselves on? The power lines that climbed down off their poles! And
   Q. Miss Snell, please
   A. Those things are in the record of this Commission's proceedings!
   Q. This is not an issue here.
   A. Then what is? Are you looking for the truth or just a scapegoat?
   Q. You deny you had prior knowledge of Carrie White's whereabouts?
   A. Of course I do. It's an absurd idea.
   Q. Oh? And why is it absurd?
   A. Well, if you're suggesting some kind of conspiracy, it's absurd because Carrie was dying when I found her. It could not have been an easy way to die.
   Q. If you had no prior knowledge of her whereabouts, how could you go directly to her location?
   A. Oh, you stupid man! Have you listened to anything that's been said here? Everybody knew it was Carrie! Anyone could have found her if they had put their minds to it.
   Q. But not just anyone found her. You did. Can you tell us why people did not show up from all over, like iron filings drawn to a magnet?
   A. She was weakening rapidly. I think that perhaps the … the zone of her influence was shrinking.
   Q. I think you will agree that that is a relatively uninformed supposition.
   A. Of course it is. On the subject of Carrie White, we're all relatively uninformed.
   Q. Have it your way, Miss Snell. Now if we could turn to …

   At first, when she climbed up the enbankment between Henry Drain's meadow and the parking lot of The Cavalier, she thought Carrie was dead. Her figure was halfway across the parking lot, and she looked oddly shrunken and crumpled. Sue was reminded of dead animals she had seen on 495 – woodchucks, groundhogs, skunks – that had been crushed by speeding trucks and station wagons.
   But the presence was still in her mind, vibrating stubbornly, repeating the call letters of Carrie White's personality over and over. An essence of Carrie, a gestalt. Muted now, not strident, not announcing itself with a clarion, but waxing and waning in steady oscillations.
   Unconscious.
   Sue climbed over the guard rail that bordered the parking lot, feeling the heat of the fire against her face.
   The Cavalier was a wooden frame building, and it was burning briskly. The charred remains of a car were limned in flame to the right of the back door. Carrie had done that. She did not go to look and see if anyone had been in it. It didn't matter, not now.
   She walked over to where Carrie lay on her side, unable to hear her own footsteps under the hungry crackle of the fire. She looked down at the curled-up figure with a bemused and bitter pity. The knife hilt protruded cruelly from her shoulder, and she was lying in a small pool of blood – some of it was trickling from her mouth. She looked as if she had been trying to turn herself over when unconsciousness had taken her. Able to start fires, pull down electric cables, able to kill almost by thought alone; lying here unable to turn herself over.
   Sue knelt, took her by one arm and the unhurt shoulder, and gently turned her on to her back.
   Carrie moaned thickly, and her eyes fluttered. The perception of her in Sue's mind sharpened, as if a mental picture was coming into focus.
   (who's there)
   And Sue, without thought, spoke in the same fashion:
   (me sue snell)
   Only there was no need to think of her name. The thought of herself as herself was neither words nor pictures. The realization suddenly brought everything up close, made it real, and compassion for Carrie broke through the dullness of her shock.
   And Carrie with faraway, dumb reproach:
   (you tricked me you all tricked me)
   (carrie i don't even know what happened is tommy)
   (you tricked me that happened trick trick trick o dirty trick)
   The mixture of image and emotion was staggering, indescribable. Blood. Sadness. Fear. The latest dirty trick in a long series of dirty tricks: they flashed by in a dizzying shuffle that made Sue's mind reel helplessly, hopelessly. They shared the awful totality of perfect knowledge.
   (carrie don't don't don't hurts me)
   Now girls throwing sanitary napkins, chanting, laughing, Sue's face mirrored in her own mind: ugly, caricatured all mouth, cruelly beautiful.
   (see the dirty tricks see my whole life one long dirty trick)
   (look carrie look inside me)
   And Carrie looked.
   The sensation was terrifying. Her mind and nervous system had become a library. Someone in desperate need ran through her, fingers trailing lightly over shelves of books, lifting some out, scanning them, putting them back, letting some fall, leaving the pages to flutter wildly
   (glimpses that's me as a kid hate him daddy o mommy wide lips o teeth bobby pushed me o my knee car want to ride in the car we're going to see aunt cecily mommy come quick i made pee)
   in the wind of memory; and still on and on, finally reaching a shelf marked TOMMY, subheaded PROM. Books thrown open, flashes of experience, marginal notations in all the hiergglyphs of emotion, more complex than the Rosetta Stone.
   Looking. Finding more than Sue herself had suspected – love for Tommy, jealousy, selfishness, a need to subjugate him to her will on the matter of taking Carrie, disgust for Carrie herself,
   (she could take better care of herself she does look just like a GODDAM TOAD)
   hate for Miss Desjardin, hate for herself.
   But no ill will for Carrie personally, no plan to get her in front of everyone and undo her.
   The feverish feeling of being raped in her most secret corridors began to fade. She felt Carrie puffing back, weak and exhausted.
   (why didn't you just leave me alone)
   (carrie i)
   (momma would be alive i killed my momma i want her o it hurts my chest my shoulder o o o i want my momma)
   (carrie i)
   And there was no way to finish that thought, nothing there to complete it with. Sue was suddenly overwhelmed with terror, the worse because she could put no name to it: The bleeding freak on this oil-stained asphalt suddenly seemed meaningless and awful in its pain and dying.
   (o momma i'm scared momma MOMMA)
   Sue tried to pull away, to disengage her mind, to allow Carrie at least the privacy of her dying, and was unable to. She felt that she was dying herself and did not want to see this preview of her own eventual end.
   (carrie let me GO)
   (Momma Momma Momma oooooooooooo 0000000)
   The mental scream reached a flaring, unbelievable crescendo and then suddenly faded. For a moment Sue felt as if she were watching a candle flame disappear down a long, black tunnel at a tremendous speed.
   (she's dying o my god i'm feeling her die)
   And then the fight was gone, and the last conscious thought had been
   (momma i'm sorry where)
   and it broke up and Sue was tuned in only on the blank, idiot frequency of the physical nerve endings that would take hours to die.
   She stumbled away from it, holding her arms out in front of her like a blind woman, toward the edge of the parking lot. She tripped over the knee-high guard rail and tumbled down the embankment. She got to her feet and stumbled into the field, which was filling with mystic white pockets of ground mist. Crickets chirruped mindlessly and a whippoorwill
   (whippoorwill somebody's dying)
   called in the great stillness of morning.
   She began to run, breathing deep in her chest, running from Tommy, from the fires and explosions, from Carrie, but mostly from the final horror-that last lighted thought carried swiftly down into the black tunnel of eternity, followed by the blank, idiot hum of prosaic electricity.
   The after-image began to fade reluctantly, leaving a blessed, cooling darkness in her mind that knew nothing. She slowed, halted, and became aware that something had begun to happen. She stood in the middle of the great and misty field, waiting for realization.
   Her rapid breathing slowed, slowed, caught suddenly as if on a thorn
   And suddenly vented itself in one howling, cheated scream.
   As she felt the slow course of dark menstrual blood down her thighs.

Part Three
Wreckage

   From the national AP ticker, Friday, June 5, 1979:
   CHAMBERLAIN, MAINE (AP)
   STATE OFFICIALS SAY THAT THE DEATH TOLL IN CHAMBERLAIN STANDS AT 409, WITH 49 STILL LISTED AS MISSING. INVESTIGATION CONCERNING CARIETTA WHITE AND THE SO-CALLED 'TK' PHENOMENA CONTINUES AMID PERSISTENT RUMOURS THAT AN AUTOPSY ON THE WHITE GIRL HAS UNCOVERED CERTAIN UNUSUAL FORMATIONS IN THE CEREBRUM AND CEREBELLUM OF THE BRAIN. THIS STATES GOVERNOR HAS APPOINTED A BLUE-RIBBON COMMITTEE TO STUDY THE ENTIRE TRAGEDY. ENDS. FINAL JUNE 5 030 N AP



   From The Lewiston Daily Sun, Sunday, September 7 (p. 3):
   The Legacy of TK
   Scorched Earth and Scorched Hearts
   CHAMBERLAIN – Prom Night is history now. Pundits have been saying for centuries that time heals all wounds, but the hurt of this small Western Maine town may be mortal. The residential streets are still there on the town's East Side, guarded by graceful Oaks that have stood for two hundred years, the trim saltboxes and ranch styles on Morin Street and Brickyard Hill are still neat and undamaged. But this New England pastoral lies on the rim of a blackened and shattered hub, and many of the neat houses have FOR SALE signs on their front lawns. Those still occupied are marked by black wreaths on front doors. Bright-yellow Allied vans and orange U-Hauls of varying sizes are a common sight on Chamberlain's streets these days.
   The town's major industry, Chamberlain Mills and Weaving, still stands, untouched by the fire that raged over much of the town on those two days in May. But it has only been running one shift since July 4th, and according to mill president William A. Chamblis, further lay-offs are a strong possibility. 'We have the orders,' Chamblis said, 'but you can't run a mill without people to punch the time clock. We don't have them. I've gotten notice from thirty-four men since August 15th. The only thing we can see to do now is close up the dye house and job our work out. We'd hate to let the men go, but this thing is getting down to a matter of financial survival.'
   Roger Fearon has lived in Chamberlain for twenty-two years, and has been with the mill for eighteen of those years. He has risen during that time from a third-floor bagger making seventy-three cents an hour to dye-house foreman; yet he seems strangely unmoved by the possibility of losing his job. 'I'd lose a damned good wage,' Fearon said. 'It's not something you take lightly. The wife and I have talked it over. We could sell the house – it's worth $20,000 easy – and although we probably won't realize half of that, we'll probably go ahead and put it up. Doesn't matter. We don't really want to five in Chamberlain any more. Call it what you want but Chamberlain has gone bad for us.'
   Fearon is not alone. Henry Kelly, proprietor of a tobacco shop and soda fountain called the Kelly Fruit until Prom Night levelled it, has no plans to rebuild. 'The kids are gone,' he shrugs. 'If I opened up again, there'd be too many ghosts in too many corners. I'm going to take the insurance money and retire to St Petersburg.'
   A week after the tornado of '54 had cut its path of death and destruction through Worcester, the air was filled with the sound of hammers, the smell of new timber, and a feeling of optimism and human resilience. There is none of that in Chamberlain this fall. The main road has been cleared of rubble and that is about the extent of it. The faces that you meet are full of dull hopelessness. Men drink beer without talking in Frank's Bar on the corner of Sullivan Street, and women exchange tales of grief and loss in back yards. Chamberlain has been declared a disaster area, and money is available to help put the town back on its feet and begin rebuilding the business district.
   But the main business of Chamberlain in the last four months has been funerals.
   Four hundred and forty are now known dead, eighteen more still unaccounted for. And sixty-seven of the dead were Ewen High School Seniors on the verge of graduation. It is this, perhaps, more than anything else, that has taken the guts out of Chamberlain.
   They were buried on June 1 and 2 in three mass ceremonies. A memorial service was held on June 3 in the town square. It was the most moving ceremony that this reporter has ever witnessed. Attendance was in the thousands, and the entire assemblage was still as the school band, stripped from fifty-six to a bare forty, played the school song and taps.
   There was a sombre graduation ceremony the following week at neighbouring Motton Academy, but there were only fifty-two Seniors left to graduate. The valedictorian, Henry Stampel, broke into tears halfway through his speech and could not continue. There were no Graduation Night parties following the ceremony; the Seniors merely took their diplomas and went home.
   And still, as the summer progressed, the hearses continued to roll as more bodies were discovered. To some residents it seemed that each day the scab was ripped 69 again, so that the wound could bleed afresh.
   If you are one of the many curiosity-seekers who have been through Chamberlain in the last week, you have seen a town that may be suffering from terminal cancer of the spirit. A few people, looking lost, wander through the aisles of the A&P. The Congregational Church on Carlin Street is gone, swept away by fire, but the brick Catholic Church still stands on Elm Street, and the trim Methodist Church on outer Main Street although singed by fire, is unhurt. Yet attendance has been poor. The old men still sit on the benches in Courthouse Square, but there is little interest in the checkerboards or even in conversation.
   The over-all impression is one of a town that is waiting to die. It is not enough, these days, to say that Chamberlain will never be the same. It may be closer to the truth to say that Chamberlain will simply never again be.



   Excerpt from a letter dated June ninth from principal Henry Grayle to Peter Philpott, Superintendent of Schools.
   … and so I feel I can no longer continue in my present position, feeling, as I do, that such a tragedy might have been averted if I had only had more foresight. I would like you to accept my resignation effective as of July 1, if this is agreeable to you and your staff. . .



   Excerpt from a letter dated June eleventh from Rita Desjardin, instructor of Physical Education, to Principal Henry Grayle:
   … am returning my contract to you at this time. I feet that I would kill myself before ever teaching again. Late at night I keep thinking: If I had only reached out to that girl, if only, if only …



   Found painted on the lawn of the house tot where the White bungalow had been located:
   CARRIE WHITE IS BURNING FOR HER SINS JESUS NEVER FAILS



   From 'Telekinesis: Analysis and Aftermath' (Science Yearbook, 1981), by Dean D. L McGuffin:
   In conclusion, I would like to point out the grave risk authorities are taking by burying the Carrie White affair under the bureaucratic mat-and I am speaking specifically of the so-called White Commission. The desire among politicians to regard TK as a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon seems very strong, and while this may be understandable it is not acceptable. The possibility of a recurrence, genetically speaking, is 99 per cent. Ifs time we planned now for what may be …



   From Slang Terms Explained.. A Parents' Guide, by John R. Coombs (New York: The Lighthouse Press, 1985), p. 73:
   to rip off a Carrie. To cause either violence or destruction; mayhem. confusion; (2) to commit arson (from Carrie White, 1963-1979)



   From The Shadow Exploded (p. 201):
   Elsewhere in this book mention is made of a page in one of Carrie White's school notebooks where a line from a famous rock poet of the '60s, Bob Dylan, was written repeatedly, as if in desperation.
   It might not be amiss to close this book with a few lines from another Bob Dylan song, lines that might serve as Carrie's epitaph:


I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That would save you, dear lady, from going Insane
That would ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge…




   From My Name Is Susan Snell (p. 98):
   This little book is done now. I hope it sells well so I can go someplace where nobody knows me. I want to think things over, decide what I'm going to do between now and the time when my light is carried down that long tunnel into blackness …



   From the conclusion of The State Investigatory Board of Maine in connection with the events of May 27-28 in Chamberlain, Maine:
   … and so we must conclude that, while an autopsy performed on the subject indicates some cellular changes which may indicate the presence of some paranormal power, we find no reason to believe that a recurrence is possible or even likely …



   Excerpt from a letter dated May 3, 1988, from Amelia Jenks, Royal Knob, Tennessee, to Sandra Jens, Maiken, Georgia:
   …and your little neece is growin like a weed, awfull big for only 2. She has blue eyes like her daddy and my blond hair but that will porubly go dark. Still she is awfull pretty & I think sometimes when she is asleep how she looks like our momma.
   The other day wile she was playin in the dirt beside the house I sneeked around and saw the funnyest thing. Annie was playin with her brothers marbles only they was mooving around all by themselfs. Annie was giggeling and laffing but I was a little skared. Some of them marbles was going right up & down. It reminded me of gramma, do you remember when the law came up that time after Pete and there guns flew out of there hands and grammie just laffed and laffed. And she use to be able to make her rocker go even when she wasen in it. I gave me a reel bad turn to think on it. I shure hope she don't get heartspels like grammie did, remember?
   Well I must go & do a wash so give my best to Rich and take care to send us some pitchers when you can. Still our Annie is awfull pretty & her eyes are as brite as buttons. I bet she'll be a worldbeeter someday.
   All my love,
   Melia

Thinner

Stephen King

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three. Mohonk
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven. Bird Dream
Chapter Eight. Billy's Pants
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven. The Scales of Justice
Chapter Twelve. Duncan Hopley
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter 14. Linda was gone.
Chapter Fifteen. Two Phone Conversations
Chapter Sixteen. Billy's Letter
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen. The Search
Chapter Nineteen. In the Camp of the Gypsies
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one. Ginelli
Chapter Twenty-two. Ginelli's Story
Chapter Twenty-three. The Transcript
Chapter Twenty-four. Purpurfargade Ansiktet
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven. Gypsy Pie

Stephen King
Thinner

Chapter One

   'Thinner,' the old Gypsy man with the rotting nose whispers to William Halleck as Halleck and his wife, Heidi, come out of the courthouse. Just that one word, sent on the wafting, cloying sweetness of his breath. 'Thinner.' And before Halleck can jerk away, the old Gypsy reaches out and caresses his cheek with one twisted finger. His lips spread open like a wound, showing a few tombstone stumps poking out of his gums. They are black and green. His tongue squirms between them and then slides out to slick his grinning, bitter lips.
   Thinner.
   This memory came back to Billy Halleck, fittingly enough, as he stood on the scales at seven in the morning with a towel wrapped around his middle. The good smells of bacon and eggs came up from downstairs. He had to crane forward slightly to read the numbers on the scale. Well … actually, he had to crane forward more than slightly. Actually he had to crane forward quite a lot. He was a big man. Too big, as Dr Houston delighted in telling him. In case no one ever told you, let me pass you the information, Houston had told him after his last checkup. A man your age, income, and habits enters heart-attack country a roughly age thirty-eight, Billy. You ought to take off some weight.
   But this morning there was good news. He was down three pounds, from 249 to 246.
   Well … the scale had actually read 251 the last time he'd had the courage to stand on it and take a good look but he'd had his pants on, and there had been some change in his pockets, not to mention his keyring and his Swiss army knife. And the upstairs bathroom scale weighed heavy. He was morally sure of it.
   As a kid growing up in New York he'd heard Gypsies had the gift of prophecy. Maybe this was the proof. He tried to laugh and could only raise a small and not very successful smile; it was still too early to laugh about Gypsies. Time would pass and things would come into perspective; he was old enough to know that. But for now he still felt sick to his too-large stomach at the thought of Gypsies, and hoped heartily he would never see another in his life. From now on he would pass on the palm-reading at parties and stick to the Ouija board. If that.
   'Billy?' From downstairs.
   'Coming!'
   He dressed, noting with an almost subliminal distress that in spite of the three-pound drop the waist of his pants was getting tight again. His waist size was forty-two now. He had quit smoking at exactly 12:01 on New Year's Day, but he had paid. Oh, boy, had he paid. He went downstairs with his collar open and his tie lying around his neck. Linda, his fourteen-year-old daughter, was just going out the door in a flirt of skirt and a flip of her pony-tail, tied this morning with a sexy velvet ribbon. Her books were under one arm. Two gaudy cheerleader's pom-poms, purple and white, rustled busily in her other hand.
   "Bye, Dad!'
   'Have a good day, Lin.'
   He sat down at the table, grabbed The Wall Street Journal.
   'Lover,' Heidi said.
   'My dear,' he said grandly, and turned the Journal facedown beside the lazy Susan.
   She put breakfast in front of him: a steaming mound of scrambled eggs, an English muffin with raisins, five strips of crisp country-style bacon. Good eats. She slipped into the seat opposite him in the breakfast nook and lit a Vantage 100. January and February had been tense – too many 'discussions' that were only disguised arguments, too many nights they had finished sleeping back to back.
   But they had reached a modus vivendi: she had stopped dunning him about his weight and he had stopped yapping at her about her pack-and-a-half-a-day butt habit. It had made for a decent-enough spring. And beyond their own private balance, other good things had happened. Halleck had been promoted, for one. Greely, Penschley, and Kinder was now Greely, Penschley, Kinder and Halleck. Heidi's mother had finally made good on her long-standing threat to move back to Virginia. Linda had at last made J.V. cheerleaders and to Billy this was a great blessing; there had been times when he had been sure Lin's histrionics would drive him into a nervous breakdown. Everything had been going just great.
   Then the Gypsies had come to town.
   'Thinner,' the old gypsy man had said, and what the hell was it with his nose? Syphilis? Cancer? Or something even more terrible, like leprosy? And by the way, why can't you just quit it? Why can't you just let it alone?
   'You can't get it off your mind, can you?' Heidi said suddenly – so suddenly that Halleck started in his seat. 'Billy, it was not your fault. The judge said so.'
   'I wasn't thinking about that.'
   'Then what were you thinking about?'
   'The Journal,' he said. 'It says housing starts are down again this quarter.'
   Not his fault, right; the judge had said so. Judge Rossington. Cary, to his friends.
   Friends like me, Halleck thought. Played many a round of golf with old Cary Rossington, Heidi, as you well know. At our New Year's Eve party two years ago, the year I thought about giving up smoking and didn't do it, who grabbed your oh-so-grabbable tit during the traditional happy-new-year kiss? Guess who? Why, my stars! It was good old Cary Rossington, as I live and breathe!
   Yes. Good old Cary Rossington, before whom Billy had argued more than a dozen municipal cases. Good old Cary Rossington with whom Billy sometimes played poker down at the club. Good old Cary Rossington who hadn't disqualified himself when his good old golfing-and-poker buddy Billy Halleck (Cary would sometimes clap him on the back and yell, 'How they hangin', Big Bill?') came before him in court, not to argue some point of municipal law, but on a charge of vehicular-manslaughter.
   And when Cary Rossington did not disqualify himself, who said boo, children? Who in this whole fair town of Fairview was the boo-sayer? Why, nobody, that's who! Nobody said boo! After all, what were they? Nothing but a bunch of filthy Gypsies. The sooner they were out of Fairview and headed up the road in their old station wagons with the NRA stickers on the back bumpers, the sooner we saw the rear ends of their home-carpentered trailers and camper caps, the better. The sooner the – – thinner.
   Heidi snuffed her cigarette and said, 'Shit on your housing starts. I know you better.'
   Billy supposed so. And he supposed she had been thinking about it, too. Her face was too pale. She looked her age – thirty-five – and that was rare. They had married very, very young, and he still remembered the traveling salesman who had come to the door selling vacuum cleaners one day after they had been married three years. He had looked at the twenty-two-year-old Heidi Halleck and had asked politely, 'Is your mother home, hon?'
   'Not hurting my appetite any,' he said, and that was certainly true. Angst or no angst, he had lain waste to the scrambled eggs, and of the bacon there was now no sign. He drank half his orange juice and gave her a big old Billy Halleck grin. She tried to smile back and it didn't quite happen. He imagined her wearing a sign: MY SMILER IS TEMPORARILY OUT OF ORDER.
   He reached across the table and took her hand. 'Heidi, it's all right. And even if it's not, it's all over.'
   'I know it is. I know.'
   'Is Linda -?'
   'No. Not anymore. She says … she says her girlfriends are being very supportive.'
   For about a week after it had happened, their daughter had had a bad time of it. She had come home from school either in tears or close to them. She had stopped eating. Her complexion had flared up. Halleck, determined not to overreact, had gone in to see her homeroom teacher, the assistant principal, and Linda's beloved Miss Nearing, who taught phys ed and cheerleading. He ascertained (ah, there was a good lawyerly word) that it was teasing, mostly as rough and unfunny as most junior-high-school teasing is apt to be, and tasteless to be sure, considering the circumstances, but what could you expect of an age group that thought dead-baby jokes were the height of wit?
   He had gotten Linda to take a walk with him up the street. Lantern Drive was lined with tasteful set-back-from-the-road homes, homes which began at roughly $75,000 and worked up into the $200,000 indoor-pool-and-sauna range by the time you got to the country-club end of the street.
   Linda had been wearing her old madras shorts, which were now torn along one seam … and, Halleck observed, her legs had now grown so long and coltish that the leg bands of her yellow cotton panties showed. He felt a pang of mingled regret and terror. She was growing up. He supposed she knew the old madras shorts were too small, worn out in the bargain, but he guessed she had put them on because they, made a link with a more comforting childhood, a childhood where daddies did not have to go to court and stand trial (no matter how cut-and-dried that trial might be, with your old golf buddy and that drunken grabber of your wife's tit, Cary Rossington, driving the gavel), a childhood where kids did not rush up to you on the soccer field during period four while you were eating your lunch to ask you how many points your dad had gotten for bagging the old lady.
   You understand it was an accident, don't you, Linda?
   She nods, not looking at him. Yes, Daddy.
   She came out between two cars without looking either way. There was no time for me to stop. Absolutely no time.
   Daddy, I don't want to hear about it.
   I know you don't. And I don't want to talk about it. But you are hearing about it. At school.
   She looks at him fearfully. Daddy! You didn't
   Go to your school? Yeah. I did. But not until three-thirty yesterday afternoon. There were no kids there at all, at least that I could see. No one's going to know.
   She relaxes. A little.
   I heard you've been getting some pretty rough handling from the other kids. I'm sorry about that.
   It hasn't been so bad, she says, taking his hand. Her face – the fresh scatter of angry-looking pimples on her forehead – tells a different story. The pimples say the handling has been rough indeed. Having a parent arrested is not a situation even Judy Blume covers (although someday she probably will).
   I also hear you've been handling it pretty well, Billy Halleck says. Not making a big thing out of it. Because if they ever see they're getting under your skin …
   Yeah, I know, she says glumly.
   Miss Nearing said she was especially proud of you, he says. It's a small lie. Miss Nearing hadn't said precisely that, but she had certainly spoken well of Linda, and that meant almost as much to Halleck as it did to his daughter. And it does the job. Her eyes brighten and she looks at Halleck for the first time.
   She did?
   She did, Halleck confirms. The lie comes easily and convincingly. Why not? He has told a lot of lies just lately.
   She squeezes his hand and smiles at him gratefully.
   They'll let it go pretty soon, Lin. They'll find some other bone to chew. Some girl will get pregnant or a teacher will have a nervous breakdown or some boy will get busted for selling pot or cocaine. And you'll be off the hook. Get it?
   She throws her arms around him suddenly and hugs him tight. He decides she isn't growing up so fast after all, and that not all lies are bad. I love YOU, Daddy, she says.
   I love you too, Lin.
   He hugs her back and suddenly someone turns on a big stereo amplifier in the front of his brain and he hears the double-thud again.. the first as the Ninety-Eight's front bumper strikes the old Gypsy woman with the bright red cloth kerchief over her scraggly hair, the second as the big front wheels pass over her body.
   Heidi screams.
   And her hand leaves Halleck's lap.
   Halleck hugs his daughter tighter, feeling goose flesh break all over his body.
   'More eggs?' Heidi asked, breaking into his reverie.
   'No. No, thanks.' He looked at his clean plate with some guilt: no matter how bad things got, they had never gotten bad enough to cause him to lose either sleep or his appetite.
   'Are you sure you're … ?'
   'Okay?' He smiled. 'I'm okay, you're okay, Linda's okay. As they say on the soap operas, the nightmare is over – can we please get back to our lives?'
   'That's a lovely idea.' This time she returned his smile with a real one of her own – she was suddenly under thirty again, and radiant. 'Want the rest of the bacon? There's two slices left.'
   'No,' he said, thinking of the way his pants nipped at his soft waist (what waist, ha-ha? a small and unfunny Don Rickles spoke up in his mind – the last time you had a waist was around 1978, you hockey puck), the way he had to suck in his gut to hook the catch. Then he thought of the scale and said, 'I'll have one of them. I've lost three pounds.'
   She had gone to the stove in spite of his original no sometimes she knows me so well it gets to be depressing, he thought. Now she glanced back. 'You are still thinking about it, then.'
   'I'm not,' he said, exasperated. 'Can't a man lose three pounds in peace? You keep saying you'd like me a little . . .'
   thinner
   '. . . a little less beefy.' Now she had gotten him thinking about the Gypsy again. Dammit! The Gypsy's eaten nose and the scaly feel of that one finger sliding along his cheek in the moment before he had reacted and jerked away the way you would jerk away from a spider or from a clittering bundle of beetles fuming in a knot under a rotted log.
   She brought him the bacon and kissed his temple. 'I'm sorry. You go right ahead and lose some weight. But if you don't, remember what Mr Rogers says -'
   *– I like you just the way you are,' they finished in unison.
   He prodded at the overturned Journal by the lazy Susan, but that was just too depressing. He got up, went outside, and found the New York Times in the flowerbed. The kid always threw it in the flowerbed, never had his numbers right at the end of the week, could never remember Bill's last name. Billy had wondered on more than one occasion if it was possible for a twelve-year-old kid to become a victim of Alzheimer's disease.
   He took the paper back inside, opened it to the sports, and ate the bacon. He was deep in the box scores when Heidi brought him another half of English muffin, golden with melting butter.
   Halleck ate it almost without being aware he was doing so.

Chapter Two

   In the city, a damage suit that had dragged on for over three years – a suit he had expected to drag on in one shape or another for the next three or four years – came to an unexpected and gratifying end at midmorning, with the plaintiff agreeing during a court recess to settle for an amount that was nothing short of stupefying. Halleck lost no time getting said plaintiff, a paint manufacturer from Schenectady, and his client to sign a letter of good intent in the judge's chambers. The plaintiffs lawyer had looked on with palpable dismay and disbelief while his client, president of the Good Luck Paint Company, scratched his name on six copies of the letter and as the court clerk notarized copy after copy, his bald head gleaming mellowly. Billy sat quietly, hands folded in his lap, feeling as if he had won the New York lottery. By lunch hour it was all over but the shouting.
   Billy took himself and the client to O'Lunney's, ordered Chivas in a water glass for the client and a martini for himself, and then called Heidi at home.
   'Mohonk,' he said when she picked up the phone. It was a rambling upstate New York resort where they had spent their honeymoon – a gift from Heidi's parents – a long, long time ago. Both of them had fallen in love with the place, and they had spent two vacations there since.
   'What?'
   "Mohonk,' he repeated. 'If you don't want to go, I'll ask Jillian from the office.'
   'No, you won't! Billy, what is this?'
   'Do you want to go or not?'
   'Of Course I do! This weekend?'
   'Tomorrow, if you can get Mrs Bean to come in and check on Linda and make sure the wash gets done and that there aren't any orgies going on in front of the TV in the family room. And if -'
   But Heidi's squeal temporarily drowned him out. 'Your case, Billy! The paint fumes and the nervous breakdown and the psychotic episode and -'
   'Canley is going to settle. In fact, Canley has settled. After about fourteen years of boardroom bullshit and long legal opinions meaning exactly nothing, your husband has finally won one for the good guys. Clearly, decisively, and without a doubt. Canley's settled, and I'm on top of the world.'
   'Billy! God!' She squealed again, this time so loud the phone distorted. Billy held it away from his ear, grinning. 'How much is your guy getting?'
   Billy named the figure and this time he had to hold the phone away from his ear for almost five seconds.
   'Will Linda mind us taking five days off, do you think?'
   'When she can stay up until one watching HBO latenight and have Georgia Deever over and both of them can talk about boys while they gorge themselves on my chocolates? Are you kidding? Will it be cold up there this time of year, Billy? Do you want me to pack your green cardigan? Do you want your parka or your denim jacket? Or both? Do you -?'
   He told her to use her judgment and went back to his client. The client was already halfway through his huge glass of Chivas and wanted to tell Polish jokes. The client looked as if he had been hit with a hammer. Halleck drank his martini and listened to standard witticisms about Polish carpenters and Polish restaurants with half an ear, his mind clicking cheerily away on other matters. The case could have far-reaching implications; it was too soon to say it was going to change the course of his career, but it might. It very well might. Not bad for the sort of case big firms take on as charity work. It could mean that *
   –the first thud jolts Heidi forward and for a moment she squeezes him; he is faintly aware of pain in his groin. The jolt is hard enough to make her seat belt lock. Blood flies up – three dime size drops – and splatters on the windshield like red rain. She hasn't even had time to begin to scream; she will scream later. He hasn't had time to even begin to realize. The beginning of realization comes with the second thud. And he
   –swallowed the rest of his martini in a gulp. Tears came to his eyes.
   'You okay?' the client, David Duganfield by name, asked.
   'I'm so okay you wouldn't believe it,' Billy said, and reached across the table to his client. 'Congratulations, David.' He would not think about the accident, he would not think about the Gypsy with the rotting nose. He was one of the good guys; that fact was apparent in Duganfield's strong grip and his tired, slightly sappy smile.
   'Thank you, man,' Duganfield said. 'Thank you so much.' He suddenly leaned over the table and clumsily embraced Billy Halleck. Billy hugged him back. But as David Duganfield's arms went around his neck, one palm slipped up the angle of his cheek and he thought again of the old Gypsy man's weird caress.
   He touched me, Halleck thought, and even as he hugged his client, he shivered.
   He tried to think about David Duganfield on the way home – Duganfield was a good thing to think about – but instead of Duganfield he found himself thinking about Ginelli by the time he was on the Triborough Bridge.
   He and Duganfield had spent most of the afternoon in O'Lunney's, but Billy's first impulse had been to take his client to Three Brothers, the restaurant in which Richard Ginelli held an informal silent partnership. It had been years now since he had actually been in the Brothers with Ginelli's reputation it would not have been wise – but it was the Brothers he always thought of first, still. Billy had had some good meals and good times there, although Heidi had never cared much for the place or for Ginelli. Ginelli frightened her, Billy thought.
   He was passing the Gun Hill Road exit on the New York Thruway when his thoughts led back to the old Gypsy of that was Heidi's doing – she had developed into a world-class nag when it came to Ginelli – but part of it had also been Ginelli's.
   'You better stop coming around for a while,' he had told Billy.
   'What? Why?' Billy had asked innocently, just as if he and Heidi had not argued over this very thing the night before.
   'Because as far as the world is concerned, I am a gangster,' Ginelli had replied. 'Young lawyers who associate with gangsters do not get ahead, William, and that's what it's really all about – keeping your nose clean and getting ahead.'
   'That's what it's all about, huh?'
   Ginelli had smiled strangely. 'Well . other things.'
   'Such as?'
   'William, I hope you never have to find out. And come around for espresso once in a while. We'll have some talk and some laughs. Keep in touch, is what I'm saying.'
   And so he had kept in touch, and had dropped in from time to time (although, he admitted to himself as he swung up the Fairview exit ramp, the intervals had grown longer and longer), and when he had found himself faced with what might be a charge of negligent vehicular manslaughter, it had been Ginelli he thought of first.
   But good old tit-grabbing Cary Rossington took care of that, his mind whispered. So why are you thinking about Ginelli now? Mohonk – that's what you ought to be thinking of. And David Duganfield, who proves that nice guys don't always finish last. And taking off a few more pounds.
   But as he turned into the driveway, what he found himself thinking about was something Ginelli had said: William, I hope you never have to find out.
   Find out what? Billy wondered, and then Heidi was flying out the front door to kiss him, and Billy forgot everything for a while.
   . there are a few

Chapter Three. Mohonk

   It was their third night at Mohonk and they had just finished making love. it was the sixth time in three days, a giddy change from their usual sedate twice-a-week pace. Billy lay beside her, liking the feel of her heat, liking the smell of her perfume – Anais Anais – mixed with her clean sweat and the smell of their sex. For a moment the thought made a hideous cross-connection and he was seeing the Gypsy woman in the moment before the Olds struck her. For a moment he heard a bottle of Perrier shattering. Then the vision was gone.
   He rolled toward his wife and hugged her tight.
   She hugged him back one-armed and slipped her free hand up his thigh. 'You know,' she said, 'if I come my brains out one more time, I'm not going to have any brains left.'
   'It's a myth,' Billy said, grinning.
   'That you can come your brains out?'
   'Nah. That's the truth. The myth is that you lose those brain cells forever. The ones you come out always grow back.'
   'Yeah, you say, you say.'
   She snuggled more comfortably against him. Her hand wandered up from his thigh, touched his penis lightly and lovingly, toyed with the thatch of his pubic hair (last year he'd been sadly astounded to see the first threads of gray down there in what his father had called Adam's thicket), and then slid up the foothill of his lower belly.
   She sat up suddenly on her elbows, startling him a little. He hadn't been asleep, but he had been drifting toward it.
   'You really have lost weight!'
   'Huh!'
   'Billy Halleck, you're skinnier!'
   He slapped his belly, which he sometimes called the House That Budweiser Built, and laughed. 'Not much. I still look like the world's only seven-months-pregnant man.'
   'You're still big, but not as big as you were. I know. I can tell. When did you weigh yourself last?'
   He cast his mind back. It had been the morning Canley had settled. He had been down to 246. 'I told you I'd lost three pounds, remember?'
   'Well, you weigh yourself again first thing in the morning,' she said:
   'No scales in the bathroom,' Halleck said comfortably.
   'You're kidding.'
   'Nope. Mohonk's a civilized place.'
   'We'll find one.'
   He was beginning to drift again. 'If you want, sure.'
   'I want.'
   She had been a good wife, he thought. At odd times over the last five years, since the steady weight gain had really started to show, he had announced diets and/or physical-fitness programs. The diets had been marked by a lot of cheating. A hot dog or two in the early afternoon to supplement the yogurt lunch, or maybe a hastily gobbled hamburger or two on a Saturday afternoon, while Heidi was out at an auction or a yard sale. Once or twice he had even stooped to the hideous hot sandwiches available at the little convenience store a mile down the road – the meat in these sandwiches usually looked like toasted skin grafts once the microwave had had its way with them, and yet he could never remember throwing away a portion uneaten. He liked his beer, all right, that was a given, but even more than that, he liked to eat. Dover sole in one of New York's finer restaurants was great, but if he was sitting up and watching the Mets on TV, a bag of Doritos with some clam dip on the side would do.
   The physical-fitness programs would last maybe a week, and then his work schedule would interfere, or he would simply lose interest. In the basement a set of weights sat brooding in a corner, gathering cobwebs and rust. They seemed to reproach him every time he went down. He tried not to look at them.
   So he would suck in his gut even more than usual and announce boldly to Heidi that he had lost twelve pounds and was down to 236. And she would nod and tell him that she was very glad, of course she could see the difference, and all the time she would know, because she saw the empty Doritos bag (or bags) in the trash. And since Connecticut had adopted a returnable bottle-and-can law, the empties in the pantry had become a source of guilt almost as; great as the unused weights.
   She saw him when he was sleeping; even worse, she saw him when he was peeing. You couldn't suck in your gut when you were taking a piss. He had tried and it just wasn't possible. She knew he had lost three pounds, four at most. You could fool your wife about another woman – at least for a while – but not about your weight. A woman who bore that weight from time to time in the night knew what you weighed. But she smiled and said Of course you look better, dear. Part of it was maybe not so admirable it kept him quiet about her cigarettes – but he was not fooled into believing that was all of it, or even most of it. It was a way of letting him keep his self-respect.
   'Billy?'
   'What?' Jerked back from sleep a second time, he glanced over at her, a little amused, a little irritated.
   'Do you feel quite well?'
   'I feel fine. What's this “do-you-feel-quite-well” stuff?'
   'Well … sometimes … they say an unplanned weight loss can be a sign of something.'
   'I feel great. And if you don't let me go to sleep, I'll prove it by jumping your bones again.'
   'Go ahead.'
   He groaned. She laughed. Soon enough they slept. And in his dream, he and Heidi were coming back from the Shop 'n Save, only he knew it was a dream this time, he knew what was going to happen and he wanted to tell her to stop what she was doing, that he had to concentrate all his attention on his driving because pretty soon an old Gypsy woman was going to dart out from between two parked cars – from between a yellow Subaru and a dark green Firebird, to be exact – and this old woman was going to have a child's five-and-dime plastic barrettes in her graying grizzled hair and she was not going to be looking anywhere but straight ahead. He wanted to tell Heidi that this was his chance to take it all back, to change it, to make it right.
   But he couldn't speak. The pleasure woke again at the touch of her fingers, playful at first, then more serious (his penis stiffened as he slept and he turned his head slightly at the metallic clicking sound of his zipper going down notch by notch); the pleasure mixed uneasily with a feeling of terrible inevitability. Now he saw the yellow Subaru ahead, parked behind the green Firebird with the white racing stripe. And from between them a flash of pagan color brighter and more vital than any paint job sprayed on in Detroit or the Toyota Village. He tried to scream Quit it, Heidi. It's her. – I'm going to kill her again if you don't quit it! Please, God, no! Please, good Christ, no!
   But the figure stepped out between the two cars. Halleck was trying to get his foot off the gas pedal and put it on the brake, but it seemed to be stuck right where it was, held down with a dreadful, irrevocable firmness. The Krazy Glue of inevitability, he thought wildly, trying to turn the wheel, but the wheel wouldn't turn, either. The wheel was locked and blocked. So he tried to brace himself for the crash and then the Gypsy's head turned and it wasn't the old woman, oh no, huh-uh, it was the Gypsy man with the rotted nose. Only now his eyes were gone. In the instant before the Olds struck him and bore him under, Halleck saw the empty, staring sockets. The old Gypsy man's lips spread in an obscene grin – an ancient crescent below the rotted horror of his nose.
   Then: Thud/thud.
   One hand flailing limply above the Olds's hood, heavily wrinkled, dressed in pagan rings of beaten metal. Three drops of blood splattered the windshield. Halleck was vaguely aware that Heidi's hand had clenched agonizingly on his erection, retaining the orgasm that shock had brought on, creating a sudden dreadful pleasure-pain … And he heard the Gypsy's whisper from somewhere underneath him, drifting up through the carpeted floor of the expensive car, muffled but clear enough: 'Thinner.'
   He came awake with a jerk, turned toward the window, and almost screamed. The moon was a brilliant crescent above the Adirondacks, and for a moment he thought it was the old. Gypsy man, his head cocked slightly to the side, peering into their window, his eyes two brilliant stars in the blackness of the sky over upstate New York, his grin lit somehow from within, the light spilling out cold like the fight from a mason jar filled with August fireflies, cold like the swamp-fellas he had sometimes seen as a boy in North Carolina – old, cold light, a moon in the shape of an ancient grin, one which contemplates revenge.
   Billy drew in a shaky breath, closed his eyes tight, then opened them again. The moon was just the moon again. He lay down and was asleep three minutes later.
   The new day was bright and clear, and Halleck finally gave in and agreed to climb the Labyrinth Trail with his wife. Mohonk's grounds were laced with hiking trails, rated from easy to extremely difficult. Labyrinth was rated 'moderate,' and on their honeymoon he and Heidi had climbed it twice. He remembered how much pleasure that had given him – working his way up the steep defiles with Heidi right behind him, laughing and telling him to hurry up, slowpoke. He remembered worming through one of the narrow, cavelike passages in the rock, and whispering ominously to his new wife, 'Do you feel the ground shaking?' when they were in the narrowest part. It had been narrow, but she had still managed to give his butt a pretty good swat.
   Halleck would admit to himself (but never, never to Heidi) that it was those narrow passages through the rock that worried him now. On their honeymoon he had been slim and trim, only a kid, still in good shape from summers spent on a logging crew in western Massachusetts. Now he was sixteen years older and a lot heavier. And, as jolly old Dr Houston had so kindly informed him, he was entering heart-attack country. The idea of having a heart attack halfway up the mountain was uncomfortable but still fairly remote; what seemed more possible to him was getting stuck in one of those narrow stone throats through which the trail snaked on its way to the top. He could remember that they'd had to crawl in at least four places.
   He didn't want to get stuck in one of those places.
   Or … how's this, gang? Ole Billy Halleck gets stuck in one of those dark crawly places and then has a heart attack! Heyyyy! Two for the price of one!
   But he finally agreed to give it a try, if she would agree to go on by herself if he was simply not in good enough shape to make it to the top. And if they could go down to New Paltz first so he could buy some sneakers. Heidi agreed willingly to both stipulations.
   In town, Halleck found that 'sneakers' had become declasse. No one would even admit to remembering the word. He bought a pair of dandy green-and-silver Nike walking-and-climbing shoes and was quietly delighted at how good they felt on his feet. That led to the realization that he hadn't owned a pair of canvas shoes in … Five years? Six? It seemed impossible, but there it was.
   Heidi admired them and told him again that he certainly did look as if he had lost weight. Outside the shoe store was a penny weighing machine, one of those that advertises *YOUR WATE AND FATE.' Halleck hadn't seen one since he was a kid.
   'Hop up, hero,' Heidi said. 'I've got a penny.'
   Halleck held back for a moment, obscurely nervous.
   'Come on, hurry up. I want to see how much you've lost.'
   'Heidi, those things don't weigh true, you know that.'
   'A ballpark figure's all I want. Come on, Billy – don't be a poop.'
   He reluctantly gave her the package containing his new shoes and stepped up on the scale. She put a penny in. There was a clunk and then two curved silvery metal panels drew back. Behind the top one was his wate; behind the lower one, the machine's idea of his fate. Halleck drew in a harsh, surprised breath.
   'I knew it!' Heidi was saying beside him. There was a kind of doubtful wonder in her voice, as if she was not sure if she should feel happiness or fear or wonder. 'I knew you were thinner!'
   If she had heard his own harsh gasp, Halleck thought later, she no doubt thought it was because of the number at which the scale had red-lined – even with all his clothes on, and his Swiss army knife in the pocket of his corduroy pants, even with a hearty Mohonk breakfast in his belly, that line was centered neatly at 232. He had lost fourteen pounds since the day Canley had settled out of court.
   But it wasn't his wate that had made him gasp; it was his fate. The lower panel had not slid aside to reveal
   FINANCIAL MATTERS WILL SOON IMPROVE or OLD FRIENDS WILL VISIT or DO NOT MAKE IMPORTANT DECISION HASTILY.
   It had revealed a single black word: 'THINNER.'

Chapter Four

   They rode back to Fairview mostly in silence, Heidi driving until they were within fifteen miles of New York City and the traffic got heavy. Then she pulled into a service plaza and let Billy take them the rest of the way home. No reason why he should not be driving; the old woman had been killed, true enough, one arm almost torn from her body, her pelvis pulverized, her skull shattered like a Ming vase hurled onto a marble floor, but Billy Halleck had not lost a single point from his Connecticut driver's license. Good old tit-grabbing Cary Rossington had seen to that.
   'Did you hear me, Billy?'
   He glanced at her for only a second, then returned his eyes to the road. He was driving better these days, and although he didn't use his horn any more than he used to, or shout and wave his arms any more than he used to, he was more aware of other drivers' errors and his own than he ever had been before, and was less forgiving of both.
   Killing an old woman did wonders for your concentration. It didn't do shit for your self-respect, and it produced some really hideous dreams, but it certainly did juice up the old concentration levels.
   'I was woolgathering. Sorry.'
   'I just said thank you for a wonderful time.'
   She smiled at him and touched his arm briefly. It had been a wonderful time – for Heidi, at least. Heidi had indubitably Put It Behind Her – the Gypsy woman, the preliminary hearing at which the state's case had been dismissed, the old Gypsy man with the rotted nose. For Heidi it was now just an unpleasantness in the past, like Billy's friendship with that wop hoodlum from New York.
   But something else was on her mind; a second quick side glance confirmed it. The smile had faded and she was looking at him and tiny wrinkles around her eyes showed.
   'You're welcome,' he said. 'You're always welcome, babe.'
   'And when we get home'
   'I'll jump your bones again!' he cried with bogus enthusiasm, and manufactured a leer. Actually, he didn't think he could get it up if the Dallas Cowgirls paraded past him in lingerie designed by Frederick's of Hollywood. It had nothing to do with how often they had made it up at Mohonk; it was that damned fortune. THINNER. Surely it had said no such thing – it had been his imagination. But it hadn't seemed like his imagination, dammit; it had seemed as real as a New York Times headline. And that very reality was the terrible part of it, because THINNER wasn't anybody's idea of a fortune. Even YOUR FATE IS TO SOON LOSE WATE didn't really make it. Fortune writers were into things like long journeys and meeting old friends.
   Ergo, he had hallucinated it.
   Yep, that's right.
   Ergo, he was probably losing his marbles.
   Oh, come on, now, is that fair?
   Fair enough. When your imagination got out of control, it wasn't good news.
   'You can jump me if you want to,' Heidi said, 'but what I really want is for you to jump on our bathroom scales'
   'Come on, Heidi! I lost some weight, no big deal!'
   'I'm very proud of you for losing some weight, Billy, but we've been together almost constantly for the last five days, and I'll be darned if I know how you're losing it.'
   He gave her a longer look this time, but she wouldn't look back at him; she only stared through the windshield, her arms folded across her bosom.
   'Heidi . . .'
   'You're eating as much as you ever did. Maybe more. The mountain air must have really gotten your motor revving.'
   'Why gild the lily?' he asked, slowing down to slam forty cents into the basket of the Rye tollbooth. His lips were pressed together into a thin white line, his heart was beating too fast, and he was suddenly furious with her. 'What you mean is, I'm a great big hog. Say it right out if you want, Heidi. What the hell. I can take it.'
   'I didn't mean anything like that!' she cried. 'Why do you want to hurt me, Billy? Why do you want to do that after we had such a good time?'
   He didn't have to glance over this time to know she was near tears. Her wavering voice told him that. He was sorry, but being sorry didn't kill the anger. And the fear that was just under it.
   'I don't want to hurt you,' he said, gripping the Olds's steering wheel so hard his knuckles showed white. 'I never do. But losing weight is a good thing, Heidi, so why do you want to keep hitting on me about it?'
   'It is not always a good thing!' she shouted, startling him making the car swerve slightly. 'It is not always a good thing and you know it!'
   Now she was crying, crying and rooting through her purse in search of a Kleenex in that half-annoying, half-endearing way she had. He handed her his handkerchief and she used it to wipe her eyes.
   'You can say what you want, you can be mean, you can cross-examine me if you want, Billy, you can even spoil the time we just had. But I love you and I'm going to say what I have to say. When people start to lose weight even though they're not on a diet, it can mean they're sick. It's one of the seven warning signs of cancer.' She thrust his handkerchief back at him. His fingers touched hers as he took it. Her hand was very cold.
   Well, the word was out. Cancer. Rhymes with dancer and You just shit your pants, sir. God knew the word had bobbed up in his own mind more than once since getting on the penny scale in front of the shoe store. It had bobbed up like some evil clown's dirty balloon and he had turned away from it. He had turned away from it the way you turned away from the bag ladies who sat rocking back and forth in their strange, sooty little nooks outside the Grand Central Station … or the way you turned away from the capering Gypsy children who had come with the rest of the Gypsy band. The Gypsy children sang in voices that somehow managed to be both monotonous and strangely sweet at the same time. The Gypsy children walked on their hands with tambourines outstretched, held somehow by their bare dirty toes. The Gypsy children juggled. The Gypsy children put the local Frisbee jocks to shame by spinning two, sometimes three of the plastic disks at the same time – on fingers, on thumbs, sometimes on noses. They laughed while they did all those things, and they all seemed to have skin diseases or crossed eyes or harelips. When you suddenly found such a weird combination of agility and ugliness thrust in front of you, what else was there to do but turn away? Bag ladies, Gypsy children, and cancer. Even the skittery run of his thoughts frightened him.
   Still, it was maybe better to have the word out.
   'I've felt fine,' he repeated, for maybe the sixth time since the night Heidi had asked him if he felt quite well. And, dammit, it was true! 'Also, I've been exercising.'
   That was also true … of the last five days, anyway. They had made it up the Labyrinth Trail together, and although he'd had to exhale all the way and suck in his gut to get through a couple of the tightest places, he'd never come even close to getting stuck. In fact, it had been Heidi, puffing and out of breath, who'd needed to ask for a rest twice. Billy had diplomatically not mentioned her cigarette jones.
   'I'm sure you've felt fine,' she said, 'and that's great. But a checkup would be great, too. You haven't had one in over eighteen months, and I bet Dr Houston misses you -'
   'I think he's a little dope freak,' Halleck muttered.
   'A little what?'
   'Nothing.'
   'But I'm telling you, Billy, you can't lose almost twenty pounds in two weeks just by exercising.'
   'I am not sick!'
   'Then just humor me.'
   They rode the rest of the way to Fairview in silence. Halleck wanted to pull her to him and tell her sure, okay, he would do what she wanted. Except a thought had come to him. An utterly absurd thought. Absurd but nevertheless chilling.
   Maybe there's a new style in old Gypsy curses, friends and neighbors – how about that possibility? They used to change you into a werewolf or send a demon to pull Off your head in the middle of the night, something like that, but everything changes, doesn't it? What if that old man touched me and gave me cancer? She's right, it's one of the tattletales – losing twenty pounds just like that is like when the miners' canary drops dead in his cage. Lung cancer.
   leukemia … melanoma …
   It was crazy, but the craziness didn't keep the thought away: What if he touched me and gave me cancer?
   Linda greeted them with extravagant kisses and, to their mutual amazement, produced a very creditable lasagna from the oven and served it on paper plates bearing the face of that lasagna-lover extraordinaire, Garfield the cat. She asked them how their second honeymoon had been ('A phrase that belongs right up there with second childhood,' Halleck observed dryly to Heidi that evening, after the dishes had been done and Linda had gone flying off with two of her girlfriends to continue a Dungeons and Dragons game that had been going on for nearly a year), and before they could do more than begin to tell her about the trip, she had cried, 'Oh, that reminds me!' and spent the rest of the meal regaling them with Tales of Wonder and Horror from Fairview Junior High – a continuing story which held more fascination for her than it did for either Halleck or his wife, although both tried to listen with attention. They had been gone for almost a week, after all.
   As she rushed out, she kissed Halleck's cheek loudly and cried, "Bye, skinny!'
   Halleck watched her mount her bike and pedal down the front walk, ponytail flying, and then turned to Heidi. He was dumbfounded.
   'Now,' she said, 'will you please listen to me?'
   'You told her. You called ahead and told her to say that. Female conspiracy.'
   'No.'
   He scanned her face and then nodded tiredly. 'No, I guess not.'
   Heidi nagged him upstairs, where he finally ended up in the bathroom, naked except for the towel around his waist. He was struck by a strong sense of deja vu – the temporal dislocation was so complete that he felt a mild physical nausea. It was an almost exact replay of the day he had stood on this same scale with a towel from this same powder-blue set wrapped around his waist. All that was lacking was the good smell of frying bacon coming up from downstairs. Everything else was exactly the same.
   No. No, it wasn't. One other thing was remarkably different.
   That other day he had craned over in order to read the bad news on the dial. He had to do that because his bay window was in the way.
   The bay window was there, but it was smaller. There could be no question about it, because now he could look straight down and still read the numbers.
   The digital readout said 229.
   'That settles it,' Heidi said flatly. 'I'm making you an appointment with Dr Houston.'
   'This scale weighs light,' Halleck said weakly. 'It always has. That's why I like it.'
   She looked at him coldly. 'Enough bullshit is enough bullshit, my friend. You've spent the last five years bitching about how it weighs heavy, and we both know it.' In the harsh white bathroom light he could see how honestly anxious she was. The skin was drawn shinily tight across her cheekbones.
   'Stay right there,' she said at last, and left the bathroom.
   'Heidi?'
   'Don't move!' she called back as she went downstairs.
   She returned a minute later with an unopened bag of sugar. 'Net wt., 10 lbs.,' the bag announced. She plonked it on the scale. The scale considered for a moment and then printed a big red digital readout: 012.
   'That's what I thought,' Heidi said grimly. 'I weigh myself, too, Billy. It doesn't weigh light, and it never has.
   It weighs heavy, just like you always said. It wasn't just bitching, and we both knew it. Someone who's overweight likes an inaccurate scale. It makes the actual facts easier to dismiss. If'
   'Heidi -'
   'If this scale says you weigh two-twenty-nine, that means you're really down to two-twenty-seven. Now, let me
   'Heidi -'
   'Let me make you an appointment.'
   He paused, looking down at his bare feet, and then shook his head.
   'Billy!'
   'I'll make it myself,' he said.
   'When?'
   'Wednesday. I'll make it Wednesday. Houston goes out to the country club every Wednesday afternoon and plays nine holes.' Sometimes he plays with the inimitable titgrabbing, wife-kissing Cary Rossington. 'I'll speak to him in person.'
   'Why don't you call him tonight? Right now?'
   'Heidi,' he said, 'no more.' And something in his face must have convinced her not to push it any further, because she didn't mention it again that night.

Chapter Five

   Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.
   Billy purposely kept off the scale upstairs. He ate heartily at meals even though, for one of the few times in his adult life, he was not terribly hungry. He stopped hiding his munchies behind the packages of Lipton Cup o' Soup in the pantry. He ate pepperoni slices and Muenster cheese on Ritz crackers during the Yankees-Red Sox doubleheader on Sunday. A bag of caramel corn at work Monday morning, and a bag of Cheez-Doodles on Monday afternoon – one of them or possibly the combination brought on a rather embarrassing farting spell that lasted from four o'clock until about nine that night. Linda marched out of the TV room halfway through the news, announcing that she would be back if someone passed out gas masks. Billy grinned guiltily, but didn't move. His experience with farts had taught him that leaving the room to pass that sort of gas did very little good. It was as if the rotten things were attached to you with invisible rubber bands. They followed you around.
   But later, watching And Justice for All on Home Box Office, he and Heidi ate up most of a Sara Lee cheesecake.
   During his commute home on Tuesday, he pulled off the Connecticut Turnpike at Norwalk and picked up a couple of Whoppers with cheese at the Burger King there. He began eating them the way he always ate when he was driving, just working his way through them, mashing them up, swallowing them down bite by bite …
   He came to his senses outside of Westport.
   For a moment his mind seemed to separate from his physical self – it was not thinking, not reflection; it was separation. He was reminded of the physical sense of nausea he had felt on the bathroom scale the night he and Heidi had returned from Mohonk, and it occurred to him that he had entered a completely new realm of mentation. He felt almost as if he had gained a kind of astral presence – a cognitive hitchhiker who was studying him closely.' And what was that hitchhiker seeing? Something more ludicrous than horrible, most likely. Here was a man of almost thirty-seven with Bally shoes on his feet and Bausch & Lomb soft contact lenses on his eyes, a man in a three-piece suit that had cost six hundred dollars. A thirtysix-year-old overweight American male, Caucasian, sitting behind the wheel of a 1981 Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight, scarfing a huge hamburger while mayonnaise and shredded bits of lettuce dripped onto his charcoal-gray vest. You could laugh until you cried. Or screamed.
   He threw the remains of the second Whopper out the window and then looked at the mixed slime of juices and sauce on his hand with a desperate kind of horror. And then he did the only sane thing possible under the circumstances: he laughed. And promised himself: No more. The binge would end.
   That night, as he sat in front of the fireplace reading The Wall Street Journal, Linda came in to bestow a good-night kiss on him, drew back a little, and said: 'You're starting to look like Sylvester Stallone, Daddy.'
   'Oh, Christ,' Halleck said, rolling his eyes, and then they both laughed.
   Billy Halleck discovered that a crude sort of ritual had attached itself to his procedure for weighing himself. When had it happened? He didn't know. As a kid he had simply jumped on once in a while, taken a cursory glance at his weight, and then jumped off again. But at some point during the period when he had drifted up from 190 to a weight that was, as impossible as it seemed, an eighth of a ton, that ritual had begun.
   Ritual, hell, he told himself. Habit. That's all it is, just a habit.
   Ritual, his deeper mind whispered inarguably back. He was an agnostic and he hadn't been through the doors of any church since age nineteen, but he recognized a ritual when he saw it, and this weigh-in procedure was almost a genuflection. See, God, I do it the same every time, so keep this here white, upwardly mobile lawyer safe from the heart attack or stroke that every actuarial table in the world says I can expect right around the age of forty-seven. In the name of cholesterol and saturated fats we pray. Amen.
   The ritual begins in the bedroom. Take off the clothes. Put on the dark green velour robe. Chuck all the dirty clothes down the laundry chute. If this is the first or second wearing of the suit, and if there are no egregious stains on. it, hang it neatly in the closet.
   Move down the hall to the bathroom. Enter with reverence, awe, reluctance. Here is the confessional where one must face one's wate, and, consequently, one's fate. Doff the robe. Hang it on the hook by the tub. Void the bladder. If a bowel movement seems a possibility – even a remote possibility – go for it. He had absolutely no idea how much the average bowel movement might weigh, but the principle was logical, unshakable: throw all the ballast overboard that you could.
   Heidi had observed this ritual, and she had once sarcastically asked him if he wouldn't like an ostrich feather for his birthday. Then, she said, he could stick it down his throat and vomit once or twice before weighing himself. Billy told her not to be a wise-ass … and later that night had found himself musing that the idea actually had its attractions.
   One Wednesday morning, Halleck threw this ritual overboard for the first time in years. On Wednesday morning Halleck became a heretic. He had perhaps become something even blacker, because, like a devil-worshiper who deliberately perverts a religious ceremony by hanging crosses upside down and reciting the Lord's Prayer backward, Halleck entirely reversed his field.
   He dressed, filled his pockets with all the change he could find (plus his Swiss army knife, of course), put on his clunkiest, heaviest shoes, and then ate a gigantic breakfast, grimly ignoring his throbbing bladder. He downed two fried eggs, four s trips of bacon, toast, and hash browns. He drank orange juice and a cup of coffee (three sugars).
   With all that sloshing around inside of him, Halleck grimly made his way up the stairs to the bathroom. He paused for a moment, looking at the scale. Looking at it had been no treat before, but it was even less pleasant now.
   He steeled himself and got on.
   221.
   That can't be right! His heart, speeding up in his chest. Hell, no! Something's out of whack! Something
   'Stop it,' Halleck whispered in a low, husky voice. He backed away from the scale as a man might back away from a dog he knew meant to bite. He put the back of his hand up to his mouth and rubbed it slowly back and forth.
   'Billy?', Heidi called up the stairs.
   Halleck looked to the left and saw his own white face staring back at him from the mirror. There were purple pouches under his eyes that had never been there before, and the ladder of lines in his forehead seemed deeper.
   Cancer, he thought again, and mixing with the word, he heard the Gypsy whispering again.
   'Billy? Are you upstairs?'
   Cancer, sure, you bet, that's it. He cursed me somehow. The old woman was his wife … or maybe his sister … and he cursed me. Is that possible? Could such a thing be? Could cancer be eating into my guts right now, eating me inside, the way his nose … ?
   A small, terrified sound escaped his throat. The face of the man in the mirror was sickly horrified, the hag-face of a long-term invalid. In that moment Halleck almost believed it: that he had cancer, that he was riddled with it.
   'Bil-lee!'
   'Yeah, I'm here.' His voice was steady. Almost.
   'God, I've been Yelling forever!'
   'Sorry.' Just don't come up here, Heidi, don't see me looking like this or you'll have me in the fucking Mayo Clinic before the noon whistle blows. Just stay down there where you belong. Please.
   'You won't forget to make an appointment with Michael Houston, will you?'
   'No,' he said. 'I'll make one.'
   'Thank you, dear,' Heidi called up softly, and mercifully retreated.
   Halleck urinated, then washed his hands and face. When he thought he had begun to look like himself again – more or less – he went downstairs, trying to whistle.
   He had never been so afraid in his life.

Chapter Six

   'How much weight?' Dr Houston asked. Halleck, determined to be honest now that he was actually facing the man, told him he had lost about thirty pounds in three weeks. 'Wow!' Houston said.
   'Heidi's a little worried. You know how wives can be.
   'She's right to be worried,' Houston said.
   Michael Houston was a Fairview archetype: the Handsome Doctor with White Hair and a Malibu Tan. When you glimpsed him sitting at one of the parasol-equipped tables which surrounded the country club's outdoor bar, he looked like a younger version of Marcus Welby, MD. The poolside bar, which was called the Watering Hole, was where he and Halleck were now. Houston was wearing red golfing pants held up with a shiny white belt. His feet were dressed in white golfing shoes. His shirt was Lacoste, his watch a Rolex. He was drinking a pina colada. One of his standard witticisms was referring to them as 'penis coladas.' He and his wife had two eerily beautiful children and lived in one of the larger houses on Lantern Drive they were in walking distance of the country club, a fact of which Jenny Houston boasted when she was drunk. It meant that their house had cost well over a hundred and fifty K. Houston drove a brown Mercedes four-door. She drove a Cadillac Cimarron that looked like a Rolls-Royce with hemorrhoids. Their kids went to a private school in Westport. Fairview gossip – which was true more often than not – suggested that Michael and Jenny Houston had reached a modus vivendi: he was an obsessive philanderer and she started in on the whiskey sours around three in the afternoon. Just a typical Fairview family, Halleck thought, and suddenly felt tired as well as scared. He either knew these people too well or thought he did, and either way it came to the same.
   He looked down at his own shiny white shoes and thought: Who are you kidding? You wear the tribal feather.
   'I want to see you in my office tomorrow,' Houston said.
   'I've got a case'
   'Never mind your case. This is more important. In the meantime, tell me this. Have you had any bleeding? Rectal? Mouth?'
   'No.*
   'Notice any bleeding from the scalp when you comb your hair?'
   'No. '
   'How about sores that don't want to heal? Or scabs that fall off and just reform?'
   'No.'
   'Great,' Houston said. 'By the way, I carded an eightyfour today. What do you think?'
   'I think it'll still be a couple of years before you make the Masters,' Billy said.
   Houston laughed. The waiter came. Houston ordered another penis colada. Halleck ordered a Miller. Miller Lite, he almost told the waiter – force of habit – and then held his tongue. He needed a light beer like he needed … well, like he needed some rectal bleeding.
   Michael Houston leaned forward. His eyes were grave and Halleck felt that fear again, like a smooth steel needle, very thin, probing at the lining of his stomach. He realized miserably that something had changed in his life, and not for the better. Not for the better at all. He was scared a lot now. Gypsy's revenge.
   Houston's grave eyes were fixed on Billy's and Billy heard him say: The chances that you have cancer are five in six, Billy. I don't even need an X ray to tell you that. Is your will up-to-date? Are Heidi and Linda provided for adequately? When you're a relatively young man you don't think it can happen to you, but it can. It can.
   In the quiet tone of a man imparting great information, Houston asked: 'How many pallbearers does it take to bury a nigger from Harlem?'
   Billy shook his head, smiling a counterfeit smile.
   'Six,' Houston said. 'Four to carry the coffin and two to carry the radio.'
   He laughed, and Billy Halleck went through the motions. In his mind, clearly, he saw the Gypsy man who had been waiting for him outside the Fairview courthouse. Behind the Gypsy, at the curb, in a no-parking zone, stood a huge old pickup truck with a homemade camper cap. The cap was covered with strange designs around a central painting – a not-very-good rendering of a unicorn on its knees, head bowed, before a Gypsy woman with a garland of flowers in her hands. The Gypsy man had been wearing a green twill vest, with buttons made out of silver coins. Now. watching Houston laugh at his own joke, the alligator on his shirt riding the swells of his mirth, Billy thought: You remember much more about that guy than you thought. You thought you only remembered his nose, but that's not true at all. You remember damn near everything.
   Children. There had been children in the cab of the old van, looking at him with depthless brown eyes, eyes that were almost black. 'Thinner,' the old man had said, and in spite of his callused flesh, his caress had been the caress of a lover.
   Delaware plates, Billy thought suddenly. His rig had Delaware plates. And a bumper sticker, something …
   Billy's arms dimpled out in goose flesh and for one moment he thought he might scream, as he had once heard a woman scream right here when she thought her child was drowning in the pool.
   Billy Halleck remembered how they had seen the Gypsies for the first time; the day they had come to Fairview.
   They had parked along one side of the Fairview town common, and a flock of their kids had run out onto the greensward to play. The Gypsy women stood gossiping and watching them. They were brightly dressed, but not in the peasant garb an older person might have associated with the Hollywood version of Gypsies in the thirties and forties. There were women in colorful sundresses, women in calf-length clamdigger pants, younger women in Jordache or Calvin Klein jeans. They looked bright, alive, somehow dangerous.
   A young man jumped out of a VW microbus and began to juggle oversized bowling pins. EVERYONE NEEDS SOMETHING TO BELIEVE IN, the young man's T-shirt read, AND RIGHT NOW I BELIEVE I'LL HAVE ANOTHER BEER. Fairview children ran toward him as if drawn by a magnet, yelling excitedly. Muscles rippled under the young man's shirt, and a giant crucifix bounded up and down on his chest. Fairview mothers gathered some of the kids up and bore them away. Other mothers were not as fast. Older town children approached the Gypsy children, who stopped their play to watch them come. Townies, their dark eyes said. We see townie children everywhere the roads go. We know your eyes, and your haircuts; we know how the braces on your teeth will flash in the sun. We don't know where we'll be tomorrow, but we know where you will be. Don't these same places and these same faces bore you? We think they do. We think that's why you always come to hate us.
   Billy, Heidi, and Linda Halleck had been there that day, two days before Halleck would strike and kill the old Gypsy woman less than a quarter of a mile from here. They had been having a picnic lunch and waiting for the first band concert of the spring to begin. Most of the others abroad on the common that day had been there for the same reason, a fact the Gypsies undoubtedly knew.
   Linda had gotten up, brushing at the seat of her Levi's as if in a dream, and started toward the young man juggling the bowling pins.
   'Linda, stay here!' Heidi said sharply. Her hand had gone to the collar of her sweater and was fiddling there, as it often did when she was upset. Halleck didn't think she was even aware of it.
   'Why, Mom? It's a carnival, at least, I think it is.'
   'They're Gypsies,' Heidi said. 'Keep your distance. They're all crooks.'
   Linda looked at her mother, then at her dad. Billy shrugged. She stood there looking, as unaware of her wistful expression, Billy thought, as Heidi was of her hand at her collar fiddling it uneasily up against her throat and then back down again.
   The young man tossed his bowling pins back into the open side door of the microbus one by one, and a smiling dark-haired girl whose beauty was almost ethereal tossed him five Indian clubs, one after another. The young man now began to juggle these, grinning, sometimes tossing one up under his arm and yelling 'Hoy!' each time he did it.
   An elderly man wearing Oshkosh bib overalls and a checked shirt began handing out fliers. The lovely young woman who had caught the bowling pins and tossed out the Indian clubs now jumped lightly down from the van's doorway with an easel. She set it up and Halleck thought: She is going to exhibit bad seascapes and perhaps some pictures of President Kennedy. But instead of a painting, she propped a bull's eye target on the easel. Someone from inside the van tossed her a slingshot.
   'Gina!' the boy juggling the Indian clubs yelled. He grinned broadly, revealing the absence of several front teeth. Linda sat down abruptly. Her concept of masculine beauty had been formed by a lifetime of network TV, and the young man's handsomeness had been spoiled for her. Heidi stopped fiddling with the collar of her cardigan.
   The girl flipped the slingshot to the boy. He dropped one of the clubs and began to juggle the slingshot in its place. Halleck remembered thinking That must be almost impossible. The boy did it two or three times, then flipped the slingshot back to her and somehow managed to pick up the club he had dropped while keeping the others in the air. There was scattered applause. Some of the locals were smiling – Billy himself was – but most of them looked wary.
   The girl stepped away from the target on the easel, produced some ball bearings from her breast pocket, and shot three quick bull's-eyes – plop, plop, plop. Soon she was surrounded by boys (and a few girls) clamoring for a turn. She lined them up, organizing them as quickly and efficiently as a nursery-school teacher prepares pupils for the 10:15 bathroom break. Two teenage Gypsy boys of approximately Linda's age popped out of an old LTD station wagon and began to scruff the spent ammunition out of the grass. They were alike as two peas m a pod, obviously identical twins. One wore a gold hoop in his left ear; his brother wore the mate in his right. Is that how their mother tells them apart? Billy thought.
   No one was selling anything. Quite carefully, quite obviously, no one was selling anything. There was no Madame Azonka telling the tarot.
   Nevertheless, a Fairview police car arrived soon enough, and two cops stepped out. One was Hopley, the chief of police, a roughly handsome man of about forty. Some of the action stopped, and more mothers took the opportunity the lull afforded to recapture their fascinated children and bear them away. Some of the older ones protested, and Halleck observed that some of the younger ones were in tears.
   Hopley began discussing the facts of life with the Gypsy who had been doing the juggling act (his Indian clubs, painted in jaunty red and blue stripes, were now scattered around his feet) and the older Gypsy in the Oshkosh biballs. Oshkosh said something. Hopley shook his head. Then the juggler said something and began to gesticulate. As the juggler spoke, he moved closer to the patrolman who had accompanied Hopley. Now the tableau began to remind Halleck of something, and after a moment it came. It was like watching baseball players argue with the umps over a close call in a game.
   Oshkosh put a hand on Juggler's arm, pulling him back a step or two, and that enhanced the impression – the manager trying to keep the young hothead from getting the boot. The young man said something more. Hopley shook his head again. The young man began to shout, but the wind was wrong and Billy got only sounds, no words.
   'What's happening, Mom?' Linda asked, frankly fascinated.
   'Nothing, dear,' Heidi said. Suddenly she was busy wrapping things. 'Are you done eating?'
   'Yes, please. Daddy, what's going on?'
   For a moment it was on the tip of his tongue to say, You're watching a classic scene, Linda. It's right up there with the Rape of the Sabine Women. This one is called the Rousting of the Undesirables. But Heidi's eyes were on his face, her mouth was tight, and she obviously felt this was not a time for misplaced levity. 'Not much,' he said. 'A little difference of opinion.'
   In truth, not much was the truth – no dogs were unleashed, there were no Swinging billy clubs, no Black Maria pulled up to the edge of the common. In an almost theatrical act of defiance, Juggler shook off Oshkosh's grip, picked up his Indian clubs, and began to juggle them again. Anger had screwed up his reflexes, however, and now it was a poor show. Two of them fell to the ground almost at once. One struck his foot and some kid laughed.
   Hopley's partner moved forward impatiently. Hopley, not put out of countenance at all, restrained him much as Oshkosh had restrained Juggler. Hopley leaned back against an elm tree with his thumbs hooked into his wide belt, looking at nothing in particular. He said something to the other cop, and the patrolman produced a notebook from his hip pocket. He wet the ball of his thumb, opened the book, and strolled to the nearest car, a converted Cadillac hearse of early-sixties vintage. He began writing it up. He did this with great ostentation. When he had finished, he moved on to the VW microbus.
   Oshkosh approached Hopley and began to speak urgently. Hopley shrugged and looked away. The patrolman moved on to an old Ford sedan. Oshkosh left Hopley and went to the young man. He spoke earnestly, his hands moving in the warm spring air. For Billy Halleck the scene was losing whatever small interest it had held for him. He was beginning not to see the Gypsies, who had made the mistake of stopping in Fairview on their way from Hoot to Holler.
   Juggler abruptly turned and went back to the microbus, simply allowing his remaining Indian clubs to drop onto the grass (the microbus had been parked behind the pickup with the woman and the unicorn painted on the homemade camper cap). Oshkosh bent to retrieve them speaking anxiously to Hopley as he did so. Hopley shrugged again, and although Billy Halleck was in no way telepathic, he knew Hopley was enjoying this as well as he knew that he and Heidi and Linda would be having leftovers for supper.
   The young woman who had been shooting ball bearings at the target tried to speak to Juggler, but he brushed by her angrily and stepped into the microbus. She stood for a moment looking at Oshkosh, whose arms were full of Indian clubs, and then she also went into the bus. Halleck could erase the others from his field of perception, but for a moment she was impossible not to see. Her hair was long and naturally wavy, not bound in any way. It fell to below her shoulder blades in a black, almost barbarous flood. Her print blouse and modestly kick-pleated skirt might have come from Sears or J. C. Penney's, but her body was exotic as that of some rare cat – a panther, a cheetah, a snow leopard. As she stepped into the van the pleat at the back of her skirt shifted for a moment and he saw the lovely line of her inner thigh. In that moment he wanted her utterly, and he saw himself on top of her in the blackest hour of the night. And that want felt very old. He looked back at Heidi and now her lips were pressed together so tightly they were white. Her eyes like dull coins. She had not seen his look, but she had seen the shift in the kick pleat, what it revealed, and understood it perfectly.
   The cop with the notebook stood watching until the girl was gone. Then he closed his notebook, put it back in his pocket, and rejoined Hopley. The Gypsy women were shooing their children back to the caravan. Oshkosh, his arms full of Indian clubs, approached Hopley again and said something. Hopley shook his head with finality.
   And that was it.
   A second Fairview police cruiser pulled up, its flashers turning lazily. Oshkosh glanced at it, then glanced around at the Fairview town common with its expensive safetytested playground equipment and its band shell. Streamers of crepe still fluttered gaily from some of the budding trees; leftovers from the Easter-egg hunt the Sunday before.
   Oshkosh went back to his own car, which was at the head of the line. As its motor roared into life, all the other motors did likewise. Most were loud and choppy; Halleck heard a lot of missing pistons and saw a lot of blue exhaust. Oshkosh's station wagon pulled out, bellowing and farting. The others fell into line, heedless of the local traffic bound past the common and toward downtown.
   'They've all got their lights on!' Linda exclaimed. 'Gorry, it's like a funeral!'
   'There's two Ring-Dings left,' Heidi said briskly. 'Have one.'
   'I don't want one. I'm full Daddy, are those people -?'
   'You'll never have a thirty-eight-inch bust if you don't eat,' Heidi told her.
   'I've decided I don't want a thirty-eight-inch bust,' Linda said, doing one of her Great Lady bits. They always knocked Halleck out. 'Asses are in these days.'
   'Linda Joan Halleck!'
   'I'll have a Ring-Ding,' Halleck said.
   Heidi looked at him briefly, coolly – Oh … is that what you'll have? – and then tossed it to him. She lit a Vantage 100. Billy ended up eating both of the Ring-Dings. Heidi smoked half a pack of cigarettes before the band concert was over, and ignored Billy's clumsy efforts to cheer her up. But she warmed up on the way home and the Gypsies were forgotten. At least, until that night.
   When he went into Linda's room to kiss her good night, she asked him: 'Were the police running those guys out of town, Dad?'
   Billy remembered looking at her carefully, feeling both annoyed and absurdly flattered by her question. She went to Heidi when she wanted to know how many calories were in a piece of German chocolate cake; she came to Billy for harder truths, and he sometimes felt this was not fair.
   He sat on her bed, thinking that she was still very young and very sure she was on that side of the line where the good guys unquestionably stood. She could be hurt. A lie could avoid that hurt. But lies about the sort of thing that had happened that day on the Fairview common had a way of coming back to haunt the parents – Billy could very clearly remember his father telling him that masturbation would make him stutter. His father had been a good man in almost all ways, but Billy had never forgiven him that lie. Yet Linda had already run him a hard course – they had been through gays, oral sex, venereal disease, and the possibility that there was no God. It had taken having a child to teach him just how tiring honesty could be.
   Suddenly he thought of Ginelli. What would Ginelli tell his daughter if he was here now? You got to keep the undesirables out of town, sweetness. Because that is really what it's all about – just keeping the undesirables out of town.
   But that was more truth than he could muster.
   'Yes, I suppose they were. They were Gypsies, hon. Vagabonds.'
   'Mom said they were crooks.'
   'A lot of them run crooked games and tell fake fortunes. When they come to a town like Fairview, the police ask them to move on. Usually they put up a show of being mad, but they really don't mind.'
   Bang! A little flag went up inside his head. Lie # 1.
   'They hand out posters or fliers saying where they'll be – usually they make a cash deal with a farmer or with someone who owns a field outside of town. After a few days they leave.'
   'Why do they come at all? What do they do?'
   'Well … there are always people who want their fortunes read. And there are games of chance. Gambling. Usually they are crooked.'
   Or maybe a fast, exotic lay, Halleck thought. He saw the kick pleat of the girl's skirt shift again as she stepped into the van. How would she move? His mind answered: Like the ocean getting ready to storm, that's how.
   'Do people buy drugs from them?'
   These days you don't need to buy drugs from Gypsies, dear; you can buy those in the schoolyard.
   'Hashish, maybe,' he said, 'or opium.'
   He had come to this part of Connecticut as a teenager, and had been here ever since – in Fairview and neighboring Northport. He hadn't seen any Gypsies in almost twentyfive years .. not since he had been a kid growing up in North Carolina, when he had lost five dollars – an allowance saved up carefully over almost three months to buy his mother a birthday present – playing the wheel of fortune. They weren't supposed to allow anyone under sixteen to play, but of course if you had the coin or the long green, you could step up and put it down. Some things never changed, he reckoned, and chief among them was the old adage that when money talks, nobody walks. If asked before today, he would have shrugged and guessed that there were no more traveling Gypsy caravans. But of course the wandering breed never died out. They came in rootless and left the same way, human tumbleweeds who cut whatever deals they could and then blew out of town with dollars in their greasy wallets that had been earned on the time clocks they themselves spurned. They survived. Hitler had tried to exterminate them along with the Jews and the homosexuals, but they would outlive a thousand Hitlers, he supposed.
   'I thought the common was public property,' Linda said. 'That's what we learned in school.'
   'Well, in a way it is,' Halleck said. – '"Common" means commonly owned by the townspeople. The taxpayers.'
   Bong! Lie #2. Taxation had nothing at all to do with common land in New England, ownership of or use of. See Richards vs. Jerram, New Hampshire, or Baker vs. Olins (that one went back to 1835), or …
   'The taxpayers.' she said in a musing voice.
   'You need a permit to use the common.'
   Clang! Lie #3. That idea had been overturned in 1931, when a bunch of poor potato farmers set up a Hooverville in the heart of Lewiston, Maine. The city had appealed to Roosevelt's Supreme Court and hadn't even gotten a hearing. That was because the Hooverites had picked Pettingill Park to camp in, and Pettingill Park happened to be common land.
   'Like when the Shrine Circus comes,' he amplified.
   'Why didn't the Gypsies get a permit, Dad?' She sounded sleepy now. Thank God.
   'Well, maybe they forgot.'
   Not a snowball's chance in hell, Lin. Not in Fairview. Not when you see the common from Lantern Drive and the country club, not when that view is part of what you paid for, along with the private schools which teach computer programming on banks of brand-new Apples and TRS-80's, and the relatively clean air, and the quiet at night. The Shrine Circus is okay. The Easter-egg hunt is even better. But Gypsies? Here's your hat, what's your hurry. We know dirt when we see it. Not that we touch it, Christ, no! We have maids and housekeepers to get rid of dirt in our houses. When it shows up on the town common, we've got Hopley.
   But those truths are not for a girl in junior high, Halleck thought. Those are truths that you learn in high school and in college. Maybe you get it from your sorority sisters, or maybe it just comes, like a shortwave transmission from outer space. Not our kind, dear. Stay away.
   'Good night, Daddy.'
   'Good night, Lin.'
   He had kissed her again, and left.
   Rain, driven by a sudden strong gust of wind, slatted against his study window, and Halleck awoke as if from a doze. Not our kind, dear, he thought again, and actually laughed in the silence. The sound made him afraid, because only loonies laughed in an empty room. Loonies did that all the time; it was what made them loony.
   Not our kind.
   If he had never believed it before, he believed it now.
   Now that he was thinner.
   Halleck watched as Houston's nurse drew one-two-three ampoules of blood from his left arm and put them into a earner like eggs in a carton. Earlier, Houston had given him three stool cards and told him to mail them in. Halleck pocketed them glumly and then bent over for the proctological, dreading the humiliation of it, as always, more than the minor discomfort. That feeling of being invaded. Fullness.
   'Relax,' Houston said, snapping on the thin rubber glove. 'As long as you can't feel both of my hands on your shoulders, you're all right.'
   He laughed heartily.
   Halleck closed his eyes.
   Houston saw him two days later – he had, he said, seen to it that his bloodwork was given priority. Halleck sat down in the denlike room (pictures of clipper ships on the walls, deep leather chairs, deep-pile gray rug) where Houston did his consulting. His heart was hammering hard, and he felt droplets of cold sweat nestled at each temple. I'm not going to cry in front of a man that tells nigger jokes, he told himself with fierce grimness, and not for the first time. If I have to cry, I'll drive out of town and park the car and do it.
   'Everything looks fine,' Houston said mildly.
   Halleck blinked. The fear had by now rooted deep enough so that he was positive he had misheard Houston. 'What?'
   'Everything looks fine,' Houston repeated. 'We can do some more tests if you want, Billy, but I don't see the point right now. Your blood looks better than it has at your last two physicals, as a matter of fact. Cholesterol is down, same with the triglycerides. You've lost some more weight – the nurse got you at two-seventeen this morning – but what can I say? You're still almost thirty pounds over your optimum weight, and I don't want you to lose sight of that, but . He grinned. 'I'd sure like to know your secret.'
   'I don't have one,' Halleck said. He felt both confused and tremendously relieved – the way he had felt on a couple of occasions in college when he had passed tests for which he was unprepared.
   'We'll hold judgment in abeyance until we get the results on your Hayman-Reichling Series.'
   'My what?'
   'The shit cards,' Houston said, and then laughed heartily. 'Something might show up there, but really, Billy, the lab ran twenty-three different tests on your blood, and they all look good. That's persuasive.'
   Halleck let out a long, shaky sigh. 'I was scared,' he said.
   'It's the people who aren't who die young,' Houston replied. He opened his desk drawer and took out a bottle with a small spoon dangling from the cap by a chain. The spoon's handle, Halleck saw, was in the shape of the Statue of Liberty. 'Tootsweet?'
   Halleck shook his head. He was content, however, to sit where he was, with his hands faced together on his belly – on his diminished belly – and watch as Fairview's most successful family practitioner snorted coke first up one nostril and then up the other. He put the little bottle back in his desk and took out another bottle and package of Q-tips. He dipped a Q-tip in the bottle and then rammed it up his nose.
   'Distilled water,' he said. 'Got to protect the sinuses.'
   And he tipped Halleck a wink.
   He's probably treated babies for pneumonia with that shit running around in his head, Halleck thought, but the thought had no real power. Right now he couldn't help liking Houston a little, because Houston had given him good news. Right now all he wanted in the world was to sit here with his hands laced across his diminished belly and explore the depth of his shaky relief, to try it out like a new bicycle, or test-drive it like a new car. It occurred to him that when he walked out of Houston's office he was probably going to feel almost newborn. A director filming the scene might well want to put Thus Spake Zarathustra on the soundtrack. This thought made Halleck first grin, hen laugh aloud.
   'Share the funny,' Houston said. 'In this sad world we need all the funnies we can get, Billy-boy.' He sniffed loudly and then lubricated his nostrils with a fresh Q-tip.
   'Nothing,' Halleck said. 'It's just … I was scared, you know. I was already dealing with the big C. Trying to.'
   'Well, you may have to, 'Houston said, 'but not this year. I don't need to see the lab results on the Hayman-Reichling cards to tell you that. Cancer's got a look. At least when it's already gobbled up thirty pounds, it does.'
   'But I've been eating as much as ever. I told Heidi I'd been exercising more, and I have, a little, but she said you couldn't lose thirty pounds just by beefing up your exercise regimen. She said you'd just make hard fat.'
   'That's not true at all. The most recent tests have showed exercise is much more important than diet. But for a guy who is -who was – as overweight as you were, she's got a point. You take a fatty who radically increases his level of exercise, and what the guy usually gets is the booby prize – a good solid class-two thrombosis. Not enough to kill you, just enough to make sure you're never going to walk around all eighteen holes again or ride the big roller coaster at Seven Flags Over Georgia.'
   Billy thought the cocaine was making Houston talkative.
   'You don't understand it,' he said. 'I don't understand it, either. But in this business I see a lot of things I don't understand. A friend of mine who's a neurosurgeon in the city called me in to look at some extraordinary cranial X rays about three years ago. A male student at George Washington University came in to see him because he was having blinding headaches. They sounded like typical migraines to my colleague – the kid fit the personality type to a tee – but you don't want to screw around with that sort of thing because headaches like that are symptomatic of cranial brain tumors even if the patient isn't having phantom olfactory referents -smells like shit, or rotten fruit, or old popcorn, or whatever. So my buddy took a full X-ray series, gave the kid an EEG, sent him to the hospital to have a cerebral axial tomography. Know what they found out?'
   Halleck shook his head.
   'They found out that the kid, who had stood third in his high-school class and who had been on the dean's list every semester at George Washington University, had almost no brain at all. There was a single twist of cortical tissue running up through the center of his skull – on the X rays my colleague showed me, it looked for all the world like a macrame drape-pull – and that was all. That drape-pull was probably running all of his involuntary functions, everything from breathing and heart rate to orgasm. Just that one rope of brain tissue. The rest of the kid's head was filled with nothing but cerebrospinal fluid. In some way we don't understand, that fluid was doing his thinking. Anyway, he's still excelling in school, still having migraines, and still fitting the migraine personality type. If he doesn't have a heart attack in his twenties or thirties that kills him, they'll start to taper off in his forties.'
   Houston pulled the drawer open, took out the cocaine, and took some. He offered it to Halleck. Halleck shook his head.
   'Then,' Houston resumed, 'about five years ago I had an old lady come into the office with a lot of pain in her gums. She's died since. If I mentioned the old bitch's name, you'd know it. I took a look in there and Christ Almighty, I couldn't believe it. She'd lost the last of her adult teeth almost ten years before – I mean, this babe was pushing ninety – and here was a bunch of new ones coming up … five of them in all. No wonder she was having gum pain, Billy! She was growing a third set of teeth. She was teething at eighty-eight years of age.'
   'What did you do?' Halleck asked. He was hearing all of this with only a very limited part of his mind – it flowed over him, soothing, like white noise, like Muzak floating down from the ceiling in a discount department store. Most of his mind was still dealing with relief – surely Houston's cocaine must be a poor drug indeed compared to the relief he was feeling. Halleck thought briefly of the old Gypsy with the rotten nose, but the image had lost its darkish, oblique power.
   'What did I do?' Houston was asking. 'Christ, what could I do? I wrote her a prescription for a drug that's really nothing more than a high-powered form of Num-Zit, that stuff you put on a baby's gums when it starts to teethe. Before she died, she got three more in – two molars and a canine.
   'I've seen other stuff, too, a lot of it. Every doctor sees weird shit he can't explain. But enough of Ripley's Believe It Or Not. The fact is, we don't understand very goddamn much about the human metabolism. There are guys like Duncan Hopley … You know Dunc?'
   Halleck nodded. Fairview's chief of police, rouster of Gypsies, who looked like a bush-league Clint Eastwood.
   'He eats like every meal was his last one,' Houston said. 'Holy Moses, I never seen such a bear for chow. But his weight sticks right around one-seventy, and because he's six feet tall, that makes him just about right. He's got a souped-up metabolism; he's burning the calories off at twice the pace of, let's say, Yard Stevens.'
   Halleck nodded. Yard Stevens owned and operated Heads Up, Fairview's only barber shop. He went maybe three hundred pounds. You looked at him and wondered if his wife tied his shoelaces.
   'Yard is roughly the same height as Duncan Hopley,' Houston said, 'but the times I've seen him at lunch, he's just picking at his food. Maybe he's a big closet eater. Could be. But I'd guess not. He's got a hungry face, you know what I mean?'
   Billy smiled a little and nodded. He knew. Yard Stevens looked, in his mother's phrase, 'like his food wasn't doing him any good.'
   'I'll tell you something else, too – although I s'pose it's tales out of school. Both of those men smoke. Yard Stevens claims a pack of Marlboro Lights a day, which means he probably smokes a pack and a half, maybe two. Duncan claims he smokes two packs of Camels a day, which could mean he's doing three, three and a half. I mean, did you ever see Duncan Hopley without a cigarette in his mouth or in his hand?'
   Billy thought about it and shook his head. Meanwhile; Houston had helped himself to another blast. 'Gah, that's enough of that,' he said, and slammed the drawer shut with authority.
   'Anyway, there's Yard doing a pack and a half of low-tar cigarettes a day, and there's Duncan doing three packs of black lungers every day – maybe more. But the one who's really inviting lung cancer to come in and eat him up is Yard Stevens. Why? Because his metabolism sucks, and metabolic rate is somehow linked to cancer.
   'You have doctors who claim that we can cure cancer when we crack the genetic code. Some kinds of cancer, maybe. But it's never going to be cured completely until we understand metabolism. Which brings us back to Billy Halleck, the Incredible Shrinking Man. Or maybe the Incredible Mass-Reducing Man would be better. Not Mass-Producing; Mass-Reducing.' Houston laughed a strange and rather stupid whinnying laugh, and Billy thought: If that's what coke does to you, maybe I'll stick to Ring-Dings.
   'You don't know why I'm losing weight.'
   'Nope.' Houston seemed pleased by the fact. 'But my guess is that you may actually be thinking yourself thin. It can be done, you know. We see it fairly often. Someone comes in who really wants to lose weight. Usually they've had some kind of scare -heart palpitations, a fainting spell while playing tennis or badminton or volleyball, something like that. So I give them a nice, soothing diet that should enable them to lose two to five pounds a week for a couple of months. You can lose sixteen to forty pounds with no pain or strain that way. Fine. Except most people lose a lot more than that. They follow the diet, but they lose more weight than the diet alone can explain. It's as if some mental sentry who's been fast asleep for years wakes up and starts hollering the equivalent of “Fire!” The metabolism itself speeds up … because the sentry told it to evacuate a few pounds before the whole house burned down.'
   'Okay,' Halleck said. He was willing to be convinced. He had taken the day off from work, and suddenly what he wanted to do more than anything else was go home and tell Heidi he was okay and take her upstairs and make love to her while the afternoon sunlight shafted in through the windows of their bedroom, 'I'll buy that.'
   Houston got up to see him out: Halleck noticed with quiet amusement that there was a dusting of white powder under Houston's nose.
   'If you continue to lose weight, we'll run an entire metabolic series on you,' Houston said. 'I may have given you the idea that tests like that aren't very good, but sometimes they can show us a lot. Anyway, I doubt if we'll have to go to that. My guess is your weight loss will start to taper off – five pounds this week, three next week, one the week after that. Then you're going to get on the scales and see that you've put on a pound of two.'
   'You've eased my mind a lot,' Halleck said, and gripped Houston's hand hard.
   Houston smiled complacently, although he had really done no more than present Halleck with negatives – no, he didn't know what was wrong with Halleck, but no, it wasn't cancer. Whew. 'That's what we're here for, Billyboy.'
   Billy-boy went home to his wife.
   'He said you're okay?'
   Halleck nodded.
   She put her arms around him and hugged him hard. He could feel the tempting swell of her breasts against his chest.
   'Want to go upstairs?'
   She looked at him, her eyes dancing. 'My, you are okay, aren't you?'
   'You bet.'
   They went upstairs and had magnificent sex. For one of the last times.
   Afterward, Halleck fell asleep. And dreamed.
   The Gypsy had turned into a huge bird. A vulture with a rotting beak. It was cruising over Fairview and casting down a gritty, cindery dust like chimney soot that seemed to come fro beneath its dusky pinions … its wingpits?