4

   That night a high, mild wind arose and Anderson went out on her front porch to smoke and listen to the wind walk and talk. At one time – even a year earlier -Peter would have come out with her, but now he remained in the parlor, curled up on his small hooked rug by the stove, nose to tail.
   Anderson found her mind replaying that last look back at the plate sticking out of the earth, and she later came to believe that there was a moment perhaps when she flicked the cigarette into the gravel drive – when she decided she would have to dig it up and see what it was … although she didn't consciously recognize the decision then.
   Her mind worried restlessly at what it might be, and this time she allowed it to run – she had learned that if your mind insisted on returning to a topic no matter how you tried to divert it, it was best to let it return. Only obsessives worried about obsession.
   Part of some building, her mind hazarded, a pre-fab. But no one built Quonset huts out in the woods – why drag all that metal in when three men could throw up a cutter's lean-to with saws, axs, and a two-handed buck-saw in six hours? Not a car, either, or the protruding metal would have been flaked with rust. An engine-block seemed slightly more likely, but why?
   And now, with dark drawing down, that memory of vibration returned with unarguable certainty. It must have been a psychic vibration, if she had felt it at all. It
   Suddenly a cold and terrible certainty rose in her: someone was buried there. Maybe she had uncovered the leading edge of a car or an old refrigerator or even some sort of steel trunk, but whatever it had been in its aboveground life, it was now a coffin. A murder victim? Who else would be buried in such a way, in such a box? Guys who happened to wander into the woods during hunting season and got lost there and died there didn't carry along metal caskets to pop themselves into when they died … and even given such an idiotic idea, who would shovel the dirt back in? Cut me a break, folks, as we used to say back in the glorious days of our youth.
   The vibration. It had been the call of human bones.
   Come on, Bobbi – don't be so fucking stupid.
   A shudder worked through her nevertheless. The idea had a certain weird persuasiveness, like a Victorian ghost story that had no business working as the world hurtled down Microchip Alley toward the unknown wonders and horrors of the twenty-first century – but somehow produced the gooseflesh just the same. She could hear Anne laughing and saying You're getting as funny in the head as Uncle Frank, Bobbi, and it's just what you deserve, living out there alone with your smelly dog. Sure. Cabin fever. The hermit complex. Call the doctor, call the nurse, Bobbi's bad … and getting worse.
   All the same, she suddenly wanted to talk to Jim Gardener – needed to talk to him. She went in to call his place up the road in Unity. She had dialed four numbers when she remembered he was off doing readings – those and the poetry workshops were the way he supported himself. For itinerant artists summer was prime time. All those stupid menopausal matrons have to do something with their summers, she could hear Jim saying ironically, and I have to eat in the winter. One hand washes the other. You ought to thank God you're saved the reading circuit, anyway, Bobbi.
   Yes, she was saved that – although she thought Jim liked it more than he let on. Certainly did get laid enough.
   Anderson put the phone back in the cradle and looked at the bookcase to the left of the stove. It wasn't a handsome bookcase – she was no one's carpenter, nor ever would be – but it served the purpose. The bottom two shelves were taken up by the Time-Life series of volumes on the old west. The two shelves above were filled with a mixture of fiction and fact on that same subject; Brian Garfield's early westerns jostled for place with Hubert Hampton's massive Western Territories Examined. Louis L'Amour's Sackett saga lay cheek by jowl with Richard Marius's wonderful two novels, The Coming of Rain and Bound for the Promised Land. Jay R. Nash's Bloodletters and Badmen and Richard F. K. Mudgett's Westward Expansion bracketed a riot of paperback westerns by Ray Hogan, Archie Joceylen, Max Brand, Ernest Haycox, and, of course, Zane Grey – Anderson's copy of Riders of the Purple Sage had been read nearly to tatters.
   On the top shelf were her own books, thirteen of them. Twelve were westerns, beginning with Hangtown, published in 1975, and ending with The Long Ride Back, published in '87. Massacre Canyon, the new one, would be published in September, as all of her westerns had been since the beginning. It occurred to her now that she had been here, in Haven, when she had received her first copy of Hangtown, although she'd begun the novel in the room of a scuzzy Cleaves Mills apartment, on a thirties-vintage Underwood dying of old age. Still, she'd finished here, and it was here that she'd held the first actual copy of the book in her hands.
   Here, in Haven. Her entire career as a publishing writer was here … except for the first book.
   She took that down now and looked at it curiously, realizing it had been perhaps five years since she had last held this slim volume in her hands. It was not only depressing to realize how fast time got by; it was depressing to think of how often she thought about that lately.
   This volume was a total contrast to the others, with their jackets showing mesas and buttes, riders and cows and dusty trail-drive towns. This jacket was a nineteenth-century woodcut of a clipper-ship quartering toward land. Its uncompromising blacks and whites were startling, almost shocking. Boxing the Compass was the title printed above the woodcut. And below it: Poems
   by Roberta Anderson.
   She opened the book, paging past the title, musing for a moment over the copyright date, 1968, then pausing at the dedication page. It was as stark as the woodcut. This book is for James Gardener. The man she had been trying to call. The second of the only three men she had ever had sex with, and the only one who had ever been able to bring her to orgasm. Not that she attached any special importance to that. Or not much, anyway. Or so she thought. Or thought she thought. Or something. And it didn't matter anyway; those days were also old days.
   She sighed and put the book back on the shelf without looking at the poems. Only one of them was much good. That one had been written in March of 1967, a month after her grandfather died of cancer. The rest of them were crap – the casual reader might have been fooled, because she was a talented writer … but the heart of her talent had been somewhere else. When she had published Hangtown, the circle of writers she had known had all denied her. All except Jim, who had published Boxing the Compass in the first place.
   She had dropped Sherry Fenderson a long chatty letter not long after coming to Haven, and had received a curt postcard in return: Please don't write me anymore. I don't know you. Signed with a single slashed S. as curt as the message. She had been sitting on the porch, crying over that card, when Jim showed up. Why are you crying over what that silly woman thinks? he had asked her. Do you really want to trust the judgment of a woman who goes around yelling 'Power to the people' and smelling of Chanel Number Five?
   She just happens to be a very good poet, she had sniffed.
   Jim gestured impatiently. That doesn't make her any older, he had said, or any more able to recant the cant she's been taught and then taught herself. Get your mind right, Bobbi. If you want to go on doing what you like, get your fucking mind right and stop that fucking crying. That fucking crying makes me sick. That fucking crying makes me want to puke. You're not weak. I know weak when I'm with it. Why do you want to be something you're not? Your sister? Is that why? She's not here, and she's not you, and you don't have to let her in if you don't want to. Don't whine to me about your sister any more. Grow up. Stop bitching.
   She'd looked at him, she remembered now, amazed.
   There's a big difference between being good at what YOU Do and being smart about what you KNOW, he said. Give Sherry some time to grow up. Give yourself some time to grow up. And stop being your own jury. It's boring. I don't want to listen to you snivel. Snivelling is for jerks. Quit being a jerk.
   She had felt herself hating him, loving him, wanting all of him and none of him. Did he say he knew weak when he was with it? Boy, he ought to. He was bent. She knew it even then.
   Now, he had said, you want to lay an ex-publisher or do you want to cry all over that stupid postcard?
   She had laid him. She didn't know now and hadn't known then if she wanted to lay him, but she had. And screamed when she came.
   That had been near the end.
   She remembered that, too – how it had been near the end. He had gotten married not long after, but it would have been near the end anyway. He was weak, and he was bent.
   Doesn't matter anyway, she thought, and gave herself the old, good advice: Let it go.
   Advice easier given than followed. It was a long time before Anderson got over into sleep that night. Old ghosts had stirred when she moved her book of undergraduate poems … or perhaps it was that high, mild wind, hooting the eaves and whistling the trees.
   She had almost made it when Peter woke her up. Peter was howling in his sleep.
   Anderson got up in a hurry, scared – Peter had made a lot of noises in his sleep before this (not to mention some unbelievably noxious dogfarts), but he had never howled. It was like waking to the sound of a child screaming in the grip of a nightmare.
   She went into the living room naked except for her socks and knelt by Peter, who was still on the rug by the stove.
   'Pete,' she muttered. 'Hey, Pete, cool it.'
   She stroked the dog. Peter was shivering and jerked away when Anderson touched him, baring the eroded remains of his teeth. Then his eyes opened – the bad one and the good one – and he seemed to come back to himself. He whined weakly and thumped his tail against the floor.
   'You all right?' Anderson asked.
   Peter licked her hand.
   'Then lie down again. Stop whining. It's boring. Stop fucking off.'
   Peter lay down and closed his eyes. Anderson knelt, looking at him, troubled.
   He's dreaming of that thing.
   Her rational mind rejected that, but the night insisted on its own imperative – it was true, and she knew it.
   She went to bed at last, and sleep came sometime after two in the morning. She had a peculiar dream. In it she was groping in the dark … not trying to find something but to get away from something. She was in the woods. Branches whipped into her face and poked her arms. Sometimes she stumbled over roots and fallen trees. And then, ahead of her, a terrible green light shone out in a single pencil-like ray. In her dream she thought of Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart,' the mad narrator's lantern, muffled up except for one tiny hole, which he used to direct a beam of light onto the evil eye he fancied his elderly benefactor possessed.
   Bobbi Anderson felt her teeth fall out.
   They went painlessly, all of them. The bottom ones tumbled, some outward, some back into her mouth where they lay on her tongue or under it in hard little lumps. The top ones simply dropped down the front of her blouse. She felt one catch in her bra, which clasped in front, poking her skin.
   The light. The green light. The light was wrong.
   It wasn't just that it was gray and pearly, that light; it was expected that such a wind as had blown up the night before would bring a change in the weather. But Anderson knew there was something more than that wrong even before she looked at the clock on the nightstand. She picked it up in both hands and drew it close to her face, although her vision was a perfect 20/20. It was quarter past three in the afternoon. She had gone to sleep late, given. But no matter how late she slept, either habit or the need to urinate always woke her up by nine o'clock, ten at the latest. But she had slept a full twelve hours … and she was ravenous.
   She shuffled out into the living room, still wearing only her socks, and saw that Peter was lying limply on his side, head back, yellow stubs of teeth showing, legs splayed out.
   Dead, she thought with a cold and absolute certainty. Peter's dead. Died in the night.
   She went to her dog, already anticipating the feel of cold flesh and lifeless fur. Then Peter uttered a muzzy, lip-flapping sound – a blurry dog-snore. Anderson felt huge relief course through her. She spoke the dog's name aloud and Peter started up, almost guiltily, as if he was also aware of oversleeping. Anderson supposed he was – dogs seemed to have an acutely developed sense of time.
   'We slept late, fella,' she said.
   Peter got up and stretched first one hind leg and then the other. He looked around, almost comically perplexed, and then went to the door. Anderson opened it. Peter stood there for a moment, not liking the rain. Then he went out to do his business.
   Anderson stood in the living room a moment longer, still marveling over her certainty that Peter had been dead. Just what in hell was wrong with her lately? Everything was doom and gloom. Then she headed for the kitchen to fix a meal … whatever you called breakfast at three in the afternoon.
   On the way she diverted into the bathroom to do her own business. Then she paused in front of her reflection in the toothpaste-spotted mirror. A woman pushing forty. Graying hair, otherwise not too bad – she didn't drink much, didn't smoke much, spent most of her time outside when she wasn't writing. Irish black hair – no romance-novel blaze of red for her – rather too long. Gray-blue eyes. Abruptly, she bared her teeth, expecting for just a moment to see only smooth pink gums.
   But her teeth were there – all of them. Thank the fluoridated water in Utica, New York, for that. She touched them, let her fingers prove their bony reality to her brain.
   But something wasn't right.
   Wetness.
   There was wetness on her upper thighs.
   Oh no, oh shit, this is almost a week early, I just put clean sheets on the bed yesterday
   But after she had showered, put a pad in a fresh pair of cotton panties and pulled the whole works snug, she checked the sheets and saw them unmarked. Her period was early, but it had at least had the consideration to wait until she was almost awake. And there was no cause for alarm; she was fairly regular, but she had been both early and late from time to time; maybe diet, maybe subconscious stress, maybe some internal clock slipping a cog or two. She had no urge to grow old fast, but she often thought that having the whole inconvenient business of menstruation behind her would be a relief.
   The last of her nightmare slipped away. and Bobbi Anderson went in to fix herself a very late breakfast.

Chapter 2. Anderson Digs

1

   It rained steadily for the next three days. Anderson wandered restlessly around the house, made a trip with Peter into Augusta in the pickup for supplies she didn't really need, drank beer, and listened to old Beach Boys tunes while she made repairs around the house. Trouble was, there weren't really that many repairs that needed to be done. By the third day she was circling the typewriter, thinking maybe she would start the new book. She knew what it was supposed to be about: a young schoolmarm and a buffalo-hunter caught up in a range-war in Kansas during the early 1850s – a period when everyone in the midsection of the country seemed to be tuning up for the Civil War, whether they knew it or not. It would be a good book, she thought, but she didn't think it was quite 'ready' yet, whatever that meant (a sardonic mimic awoke in her mind, doing an Orson Welles voice: We will write no oater before its time). Still, her restlessness dug at her, and the signs were all there: an impatience with books, with the music, with herself. A tendency to drift off … and then she would be looking at the typewriter, wanting to wake it into some dream.
   Peter also seemed restless, scratching at the door to go out and then scratching at it to come back in five minutes later, wandering around the place, lying down, then getting up again.
   Low barometer, Anderson thought. That's all it is. Makes us both restless, cranky.
   And her damned period. Usually she flowed heavy and then just stopped. Like turning off a faucet. This time she just went on leaking. Bad washer, ha-ha, she thought with no humor at all. She found herself sitting in front of the typewriter just after dark on the second rainy day, a blank sheet rolled into the carriage. She started to type and what came out was a bunch of X's and O's, like a kid's tic-tac-toe game, and then something that looked like a mathematical equation … which was stupid, since the last math she'd taken was Algebra II in high school. These days, x was for crossing out the wrong word, and that was all. She pulled the blank sheet out and tossed it away.
   After lunch on the third rainy day, she called the English Department at the university. Jim no longer taught there, not for eight years, but he still had friends on the faculty and kept in touch. Muriel in the office usually knew where he was.
   And did this time. Jim Gardener, she told Anderson, was doing a reading in Fall River that night, June 24th, followed by two in Boston over the next three nights, followed by readings and lectures in Providence and New Haven – all part of something called The New England Poetry Caravan. Must be Patricia McCardle, Anderson thought, smiling a little.
   'So he'd be back … when? Fourth of July?'
   'Gee, I don't know when he'll be back, Bobbi,' Muriel said. 'You know Jim. His last reading's June 30th. That's all I can say for sure.'
   Anderson thanked her and hung up. She looked at the phone thoughtfully, calling up Muriel fully in her mind – another Irish colleen (but Muriel had the expected red hair) just now reaching the far edge of her prime, round-faced, green-eyed, full-breasted. Had she slept with Jim? Probably. Anderson felt a spark of jealousy – but not much of a spark. Muriel was okay. Just speaking to Muriel made her feel better – someone who knew who she was, who could think of her as a real person, not just as a customer on the other side of the counter in an Augusta hardware store or as someone to say how-do to over the mailbox. She was solitary by nature, but not monastic … and sometimes simple human contact had a way of fulfilling her when she didn't even know she needed to be fulfilled.
   And she supposed she knew now why she had wanted to get in contact with Jim – talking with Muriel had done that, at least. The thing in the woods had stayed on her mind, and the idea that it was some sort of clandestine coffin had grown to a certainty. It wasn't writing she was restless to do; it was digging. She just hadn't wanted to do it on her own.
   'Looks like I'll have to, though, Pete,' she said, sitting down in her rocker by the east window – her reading chair. Peter glanced at her briefly, as if to say Whatever you want, babe. Anderson sat forward, suddenly looking at Pete – really looking at him. Peter looked back cheerfully enough, tail thumping on the floor. For a moment it seemed there was something different about Peter … something so obvious she should be seeing it.
   If so, she wasn't.
   She settled back, opening her book – a master's thesis from the University of Nebraska, the most exciting thing about it the title: Range War and Civil War. She remembered thinking a couple of nights ago as her sister Anne would think: You're getting as funny in the head as Uncle Frank, Bobbi. Well … maybe.
   Shortly she was deep into the thesis, making an occasional note on the legal pad she kept near. Outside, the rain continued to fall.

2

   The following day dawned clear and bright and flawless: a postcard summer day with just enough breeze to make the bugs keep their distance. Anderson pottered around the house until almost ten o'clock, conscious of the growing pressure her mind was putting on her to get out there and dig it up, already. She could feel herself consciously pushing back against that urge (Orson Welles again We will dig up no body before its … oh, shut up, Orson). Her days of simply following the urge of the moment, a lifestyle that had once been catechized by the bald motto 'If it feels good, do it,' were over. It had never worked well for her, that philosophy – in fact, almost every bad thing that had happened to her had its roots in some impulsive action. She attached no moral stigma to people who did live their lives according to impulse; maybe her intuitions just hadn't been that good.
   She ate a big breakfast, added a scrambled egg to Peter's Gravy Train (Peter ate with more appetite than usual, and Anderson put it down to the end of the rainy spell), and then did the washing-up.
   If her dribbles would just stop, everything would be fine. Forget it; we will stop no period before its time. Right, Orson? You're fucking-A.
   Bobbi went outside, clapped an old straw cowboy hat on her head, and spent the next hour in the garden. Things out there were looking better than they had any right to, given the rain. The peas were coming on and the corn was rearing up good, as Uncle Frank would have said.
   She quit at eleven. Fuck it. She went around the house to the barn, got the spade and shovel, paused, and added a crowbar. She started out of the shed, went back, and took a screwdriver and an adjustable wrench from the toolbox.
   Peter started out with her as he always did, but this time Anderson said, 'No, Peter,' and pointed back at the house. Peter stopped, looking wounded. He whined and took a tentative step toward Anderson.
   'No, Peter.'
   Peter gave in and headed back, head down, tail drooping dispiritedly. Anderson was sorry to see him go that way, but Peter's previous reaction to the plate in the ground had been bad. She stood a moment longer on the path which would lead her to the woods road, spade in one hand, shovel and crowbar in the other, watching as Peter mounted the back steps, nosed open the back door, and went into the house.
   She thought: Something was different about him … is different about him. What is it? She didn't know. But for a moment, almost subliminally, her dream flickered back to her – that arrow of poisonous green light … and her teeth all falling painlessly out of her gums.
   Then it was gone and she set off toward the place where it was, that odd thing in the ground, listening to the crickets make their steady ree-ree-ree sounds in this small back field which would soon be ready for its first cutting.

3

   At three that afternoon it was Peter who raised her from the semi-daze in which she had been working, making her aware she was two damn-nears: damn-near starving and damn-near exhausted.
   Peter was howling.
   The sound raised gooseflesh on Anderson's back and arms. She dropped the shovel she had been using and backed away from the thing in the earth – the thing that was no plate, no box, not anything she could understand. All she knew for sure was that she knew she had fallen into a strange, thoughtless state she didn't like at all. This time she had done more than lose track of time; she felt as if she had lost track of herself as well. It was as if someone else had stepped into her head the way a man would step into a bulldozer or a payloader, simply firing her up and starting to yank the right levers.
   Peter howled, nose pointing toward the sky – long, chilling, mournful sounds.
   'Stop it, Peter!' Anderson yelled, and thankfully, Peter did. Any more of that and she might simply have turned and run.
   Instead, she fought for control and got it. She backed up another step and cried out when something flapped loosely against her back. At her cry, Peter uttered one more short, yipping sound and fell silent again.
   Anderson grabbed for whatever had touched her, thinking it might be – well, she didn't know what she thought it might be, but even before her hand closed on it, she remembered what it was. She had a hazy memory of stopping just long enough to hang her blouse on a bush; here it was.
   She took it and put it on, getting the buttons wrong on the first try so that one tail hung down below the other. She rebuttoned it, looking at the dig she had begun – and now that archaeological word seemed to fit what she was doing exactly. Her memories of the four hours she'd spent digging were like her memory of hanging her blouse on the bush – hazy and fragmented. They were not memories; they were fragments.
   But now, looking at what she had done, she felt awe as well as fear . . . and a mounting sense of excitement.
   Whatever it was, it was huge. Not just big, but huge.
   The spade, shovel, and crowbar lay at intervals along a fifteen-foot trench in the forest floor. She had made neat piles of black earth and chunks of rock at regular intervals. Sticking up from this trench, which was about four feet deep at the point where Anderson had originally stumbled over three inches of protruding gray metal, was the leading edge of some titanic object. Gray metal … some object …
   You'd ordinarily have a right to expect something better, more specific, from a writer, she thought, arming sweat from her forehead, but she was no longer sure the metal was steel. She thought now it might be a more exotic alloy, beryllium, magnesium, perhaps – and composition aside, she had absolutely no idea what it was.
   She began to unbutton her jeans so she could tuck in her blouse, then paused.
   The crotch of the faded Levis was soaked with blood.
   Jesus. Jesus Christ. This isn't a period. This is Niagara Falls.
   She was momentarily frightened, really frightened, then told herself to quit being a ninny. She had gone into some sort of daze and done digging a crew of four husky men could have been proud of . . . her, a woman who went one-twenty-five, maybe one-thirty, tops. Of course she was flowing heavily. She was fine – in fact, should be grateful she wasn't cramping as well as gushing.
   My, how poetic we are today, Bobbi, she thought, and uttered a harsh little laugh.
   All she really needed was to clean herself up: a shower and a change would do fine. The jeans had been ready for either the trash or the rag-bag anyway. Now there was one less choice in a troubled, confusing world, right? Right. No big deal.
   She buttoned her pants again, not tucking the blouse in – no sense ruining that as well, although God knew it wasn't exactly a Dior original. The feel of the sticky wetness down there when she moved made her grimace. God, she wanted to get cleaned up. In a hurry.
   But instead of starting up the slope to the path, she walked back toward the thing in the earth again, drawn to it. Peter howled, and the gooseflesh reappeared again. 'Peter, will you for Christ's sake shut up!' She hardly ever shouted at Pete really shouted at him – but the goddam mutt was starting to make her feel like a behavioral psychology subject. Gooseflesh when the dog howled instead of saliva at the sound of the bell, but the same principle.
   Standing close to her find, she forgot about Peter and only stared wonderingly at it. After some moments she reached out and gripped it. Again she felt that curious sense of vibration – it sank into her hand and then disappeared. This time she thought of touching a hull beneath which very heavy machinery is hard at work. The metal itself was so smooth that it had an almost greasy texture – you expected some of it to come off on your hands.
   She made a fist and rapped her knuckles on it. It made a dull sound, like a fist rapping on a thick chunk of mahogany. She stood a moment longer, then took the screwdriver from her back pocket, held it indecisively for a moment, and then, feeling oddly guilty – feeling like a vandal – she drew the screwdriver blade down the exposed metal. It wouldn't scratch.
   Her eyes suggested two further things, but either or both could have been an optical illusion. The first was that the metal seemed to grow slightly thicker as it went from its edge to the point where it disappeared into the earth. The second was that the edge was slightly curved. These two things – if true – suggested an idea that was at once exciting, ludicrous, frightening, impossible … and possessed of a certain mad logic.
   She ran her palm over the smooth metal, then stepped away. What the hell was she doing, petting this goddam thing while the blood was running down her legs? And her period was the least of her concerns if what she was starting to think just might turn out to be the truth.
   You better call somebody, Bobbi. Right now.
   I'll call Jim. When he gets back.
   Sure. Call a poet. Great idea. Then you can call the Reverend Moon. Maybe Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson to draw pictures. Then you can hire a few rock bands and have fucking Woodstock 1988 out here. Get serious, Bobbi. Call the state police.
   No. I want to talk to Jim first. Want him to see it. Want to talk to him about it. Meantime, I'll dig around it some more.
   It could be dangerous.
   Yes. Not only could be, probably was – hadn't she felt that? Hadn't Peter felt it? There was something else, too. Coming down the slope from the path this morning, she had found a dead woodchuck – had almost stepped on it. Although the smell when she bent over the animal told her it had been dead two days at least, there had been no buzz of flies to warn her. There were no flies at all around ole Chuck, and Anderson could not remember ever having seen such a thing. There was no obvious sign of what had killed it, either, but believing that thing in the ground had had anything to do with it was boolsheet of the purest ray serene. Ole Chuck had probably gotten some farmer's poison bait and stumbled out here to die.
   Go home. Change your pants. You're bloody and you stink.
   She backed away from the thing, then turned and climbed the slope to the path, where Peter jumped clumsily on her and began to lick her hand with an eagerness that was a little pathetic. Even a year ago he would have been trying to nose at her crotch, attracted by the smell there, but not now. Now all he could do was shiver.
   'Your own damn fault,' Anderson said. 'I told you to stay home.' All the same, she was glad Peter had come. If he hadn't, Anderson might have worked right through until nightfall … and the idea of coming to in the dark, with that thing bulking close by … that idea didn't fetch her.
   She looked back from the path. The height gave her a more complete view of the thing. It jutted from the ground at a slight angle, she saw. Her impression that the leading edge had a slight curve recurred.
   A plate, that's what I thought when I first dug around it with my fingers. A steel plate, not a dinner-plate, I thought, but maybe even then, with so little of it sticking out of the ground, it was really a dinner-plate I was thinking of. Or a saucer.
   A flying fucking saucer.

4

   Back at the house, she showered and changed, using one of the Maxi-Pads even though the heavy menstrual flow already appeared to be lessening. Then she fixed herself a huge supper of canned baked beans and knockwurst. But she found herself too tired to do much more than pick at it. She put the remains – more than half – down for Peter and went over to her rocker by the window. The thesis she had been reading was still on the floor beside the chair, her place marked with a torn-off matchbook cover. Her notepad was beside it. She picked it up, turned to a fresh page and began to sketch the thing in the woods as she had seen it when she took that last look back.
   She was no great shakes with a pen unless it was words she was making, but she had some small sketching talent. This sketch went very slowly, however, not just because she wanted it to be as exact as she could make it but because she was so tired. To make matters worse, Peter came over and nuzzled her hand, wanting to be patted.
   She stroked Peter's head absently, erasing a jag his nose had put into the horizon-line of her sketch. 'Yeah, you're a good dog, great dog, go check the mail, why don't you?'
   Peter trotted across the living room and nosed the screen door open. Anderson went back to work on her sketch, glancing up once to see Peter do his world-famous canine mail-retrieval trick. He put his left forepaw up on the mailbox post and then began to swipe at the door of the box. Joe Paulson, the postman, knew about Peter and always left it ajar. He got the door down, then lost his balance before he could hook the mail out with his paw. Anderson winced a little – until this year, Peter had never lost his balance. Getting the mail had been his piece de resistance, better than playing dead Viet Cong and much better than anything mundane like sitting up or 'speaking' for a dog biscuit. It wowed everyone who saw him do it, and Peter knew it … but these days it was a painful ritual to watch. It made Anderson feel the way she imagined she would feel if she saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers on TV, trying to do one of their old dance routines.
   The dog managed to get up on the post again, and this time Peter hooked the mail – a catalogue and a letter (or a bill – yes, with the end of the month coming it was more likely a bill) – out of the box with the first swipe of his paw. It fluttered to the road, and as Peter picked it up, Anderson dropped her eyes back to her sketch, telling herself to stop banging the goddam funeral bell for Peter every two minutes. The dog actually looked half-alive tonight; there had been nights recently when he'd had to totter up on his hind legs three or four times before he was able to get his mail – which usually came to no more than a free sample from Procter&Gamble or an advertising circular from K-mart.
   Anderson stared at her sketch closely, absently shading in the trunk of the big pine tree with the split top. It wasn't a hundred per cent accurate … but it was pretty close. She'd gotten the angle of the thing right, anyway.
   She drew a box around it, then turned the box into a cube … as if to isolate the thing. The curve was obvious enough in her sketch, but had it really been there?
   Yes. And what she was calling a metal plate – it was really a hull, wasn't it? A glassy-smooth, rivetless hull.
   You're losing your mind, Bobbi … you know that, don't you?
   Peter scratched on the screen to be let in. Anderson went to the door, still looking at her sketch. Peter came in and dropped the mail on a chair in the hallway. Then he walked slowly down to the kitchen, presumably to see if there was anything he had overlooked on Anderson's plate.
   Anderson picked up the two pieces of mail and wiped them on the leg of her jeans with a little grimace of disgust. It was a good trick, granted, but dog-spit on the mail was never going to be one of her favorite things. The catalogue was from Radio Shack – they wanted to sell her a word processor. The bill was from Central Maine Power. That made her think briefly of Jim Gardener again. She tossed both on the table in the hall, went back to her chair, sat down again, flipped to a fresh page, and quickly copied her original sketch.
   She frowned at the mild arc, which was probably a bit of extrapolation – as if she had dug down maybe twelve or fourteen feet instead of just four. Well, so what? A little extrapolation didn't bother her; hell, that was part of a fiction writer's business, and people who thought it belonged solely to science-fiction or fantasy writers had never looked through the other end of the telescope, had never been faced with the problem of filling in white spaces that no history could provide – things, for example, like what had happened to the people who had colonized Roanoke Island, off the North Carolina coast, and then simply disappeared, leaving no mark but the inexplicable word CROATOAN carved on a tree, or the Easter Island monoliths, or why the citizens of a little town in Utah called Blessing had all suddenly gone crazy – or so it seemed – on the same day in the summer of 1884. If you didn't know for sure, it was okay to imagine – until and unless you found out different.
   There was a formula by which circumference could be determined from an arc, she was quite sure of it. She had forgotten what the damned thing was, that was the only problem. But she could maybe get a rough idea – always assuming her impression of just how much the thing's edge curved was accurate – by estimating the thing's center point …
   Bobbi went back to the hall table and opened its middle drawer, which was a sort of catch-all. She rooted past untidy bundles of canceled checks, dead C, D, and 9-volt batteries (for some reason she had never been able to shitcan old batteries what you did with old batteries was throw them in a drawer, God knew why, it was just the Battery Graveyard instead of the one the elephants were supposed to have), bunches of rubber bands and wide red canning-rubbers, unanswered fan letters (she could no more throw out an unanswered fan letter than a dead battery), and recipes jotted on file-cards. At the very bottom of the drawer was a litter of small tools, and among them she found what she was looking for – a compass with a yellow stub of pencil sleeved into the armature.
   Sitting in the rocker again, Anderson turned to a fresh sheet and drew the leading edge of the thing in the earth for the third time. She tried to keep it in scale, but drew it a little bigger this time, not bothering with the surrounding trees and only suggesting the trench for the sake of perspective.
   'Okay, guesswork,' she said, and dug the point of the compass into the yellow legal pad below the curved edge. She adjusted the compass's arc so it traced that edge fairly accurately – and then she swept the compass around in a complete circle. She looked at it, then wiped her mouth with the heel of her hand. Her lips suddenly felt too loose and too wet.
   'Boolsheet,' she whispered.
   But it wasn't boolsheet. Unless her estimate of the edge's curvature and of midpoint were both wildly off the beam, she had unearthed the edge of an object which was at least three hundred yards in circumference.
   Anderson dropped the compass and the pad on the floor and looked out the window. Her heart was beating too hard.

5

   As the sun went down, Anderson sat on her back porch, staring across her garden toward the woods, and listened to the voices in her head.
   In her junior year at college she had taken a Psychology Department seminar on creativity. She had been amazed – and a little relieved – to discover that she was not concealing some private neurosis; almost all imaginative people heard voices. Not just thoughts but actual voices inside their heads, different personae, each as clearly defined as voices on an old-time radio show. They came from the right side of the brain, the teacher explained – the side which is most commonly associated with visions and telepathy and that striking human ability to make images by drawing comparisons and making metaphors.
   There are no such things as flying saucers.
   Oh yeah? Who says so?
   The Air Force, for one. They closed the books on flying saucers twenty years ago. The), were able to explain all but three per cent of all verified sightings, and they said those last three were almost certainly caused by ephemeral atmospheric conditions – stuff like sun-dogs, clear-air turbulence, pockets of clear-air electricity. Hell, the Lubbock Lights were front-page news, and all they turned out to be was … well, there were these packs of traveling packs of moths, see? And the Lubbock streetlights hit their wings and reflected big light-colored moving shapes onto the low cloud masses that a stagnant weather pattern kept over the town for a week. Most of the country spent that week thinking someone dressed like Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still was going to come walking up Lubbock's main drag with his pet robot Gort clanking along beside him, demanding to be taken to our leader. And they were moths. Do you like it? Don't you have to like it?
   This voice was so clear it was amusing – it was that of Dr Klingerman, who had taught the seminar. It lectured her with good old Klingy's unfailing – if rather shrill enthusiasm. Anderson smiled and lit a cigarette. Smoking a little too much tonight, but the damned things were going stale, anyway.
   In 1947 an Air Force captain named Mantell flew too high while he was chasing a flying saucer – what he thought was a flying saucer. He blacked out.
   His plane crashed. Mantell was killed. He died chasing a reflection of Venus on a high scud of clouds – a sun-dog, in other words. So there are reflections of moths, reflections of Venus, and probably reflections in a golden eye as well, Bobbi, but there are no flying saucers.
   Then what is that in the ground?
   The voice of the lecturer fell still. It didn't know. So in its place came Anne's voice, saying the same thing for the third time, telling her she was getting funny in the head, getting weird like Uncle Frank, telling her they would be measuring her for one of those canvas coats you wear backwards soon enough; they would cart her up to the asylum in Bangor or the one in Juniper Hill, and she could rave about flying saucers buried in the woods while she wove baskets. It was Sissy's voice, all right; she could call her on the phone right now, tell her what had happened, and get that scripture by chapter and by verse. She knew it.
   But was it right?
   No. It wasn't. Anne would equate her sister's mostly solitary life with madness no matter what Anderson did or said. And yes, the idea that the thing in the earth was some sort of spaceship certainly was mad … but was playing with the possibility, at least until it was disproven, mad? Anne would think so, but Anderson did not. Nothing wrong with keeping an open mind.
   Yet the speed with which the possibility had occurred to her …
   She got up and went inside. Last time she had fooled with that thing in the woods, she had slept for twelve hours. She wondered if she could expect a similar sleep-marathon tonight. She felt almost tired enough to sleep twelve hours, God knew.
   Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.
   But she wouldn't, she thought, pulling off her OPUS FOR PRESIDENT T-shirt. Not just yet.
   The trouble with living alone, she had discovered – and the reason why most people she knew didn't like to be alone even for a little while – was those voices from the right side of the brain. The longer you lived alone, the louder and more clearly they spoke. As the yardsticks of rationality began to shrink in the silence, those right-brain voices did not Just request attention but demanded it. It was easy to become frightened of them, to think they meant madness after all.
   Anne would sure think they did, Bobbi thought, climbing into bed. The lamp cast a clean and comforting circle of light on the counterpane, but she left the thesis she'd been reading on the floor. She kept expecting the doleful cramps that usually accompanied her occasional early and heavy menstrual flow to begin, but so far they hadn't. Not that she was anxious for them to put in an appearance, you should understand.
   She crossed her hands behind her head and looked at the ceiling.
   No, you're not crazy at all, Bobbi, she thought. You think Gard's getting wiggy but you're perfectly all right – isn't that also a sign that you're wobbling?
   There's even a name for it … denial and substitution. 'I'm all right, it's the world that's crazy.'
   All true. But she still felt firmly in control of herself, and sure of one thing: she was saner in Haven than she had been in Cleaves Mills, and much saner than she had been in Utica. A few more years in Utica, a few more years around sister Anne, and she would have been as mad as a hatter. Anderson believed Anne actually saw driving her close relatives crazy as part of her – her job? No, nothing so mundane. As part of her sacred mission in life.
   She knew what was really troubling her, and it wasn't the speed with which the possibility of what the thing might be had occurred to her. It was the feeling of certainty. She would keep an open mind, but the struggle would be to keep it open in favor of what Anne would call 'sanity.' Because she knew what she had found, and it filled her with fear and awe and a restless, moving excitement.
   See, Anne, ole Bobbi didn't move up to Sticksville and go crazy; ole Bobbi moved up here and went sane. Insanity is limiting possibilities, Anne, can you dig it? Insanity is refusing to go down certain paths of speculation even though the logic is there … like a token for the turnstile. See what I mean? No? Of course you don't. You don't and you never did. Then go away, Anne. Stay in Utica and grind your teeth in your sleep until there's nothing left of them, make whoever is mad enough to stay within range of your voice crazy, be my guest, but stay out of my head.
   The thing in the earth was a ship from space.
   There. It was out. No more bullshit. Never mind Anne, never mind the Lubbock Lights or how the Air Force had closed its file on flying saucers. Never mind the chariots of the gods, or the Bermuda Triangle, or how Elijah was drawn up to heaven in a wheel of fire. Never mind any of it – her heart knew what her heart knew. It was a ship, and it had either landed or crash-landed a long time ago maybe millions of years ago.
   God!
   She lay in bed, hands behind her head. She was calm enough, but her heart was beating fast, fast, fast.
   Then another voice, and this was the voice of her dead grandfather, repeating something Anne's voice had said earlier.
   Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.
   That momentary vibration. Her earlier premonition, suffocating and positive, that she had found the edge of some weird steel coffin. Peter's reaction. Starting her period early, only spotting here at the farm but bleeding like a stuck pig when she was close to it. Losing track of time, sleeping the clock all the way around. And don't forget ole Chuck the Woodchuck. Chuck had smelled gassy and decomposed, but there were no flies. No flies on Chuck, you might say.
   None of that shit adds up to Shinola. I'll buy the possibility of a ship in the earth because no matter how crazy it sounds at first, the logic's still there. But there's no logic to the rest of this stuff. they're loose beads rolling around on
   the table. Thread them onto a string and maybe I'll buy it – I'll think about it, anyway. Okay?
   Her grandfather's voice again, that slow, authoritative voice, the only one in the house that had always been able to strike Anne silent as a kid.
   Those things all happened after you found it, Bobbi. That's your string.
   No. Not enough.
   Easy enough to talk back to her grandfather now; the man was sixteen years in his grave. But it was her grandfather's voice that followed her down to sleep, nevertheless.
   Leave it alone, Bobbi. It's dangerous.
   – and you know that, too.

Chapter 3. Peter Sees the Light

1

   She thought she had seen something different about Peter, but hadn't been able to tell exactly what it was. When Anderson woke up the next morning (at a perfectly normal nine o'clock) she saw it almost at once.
   She stood at the counter, pouring Gravy Train into Peter's old red dish. As always, Peter came strolling in at the sound. The Gravy Train was fairly new; up until this year the deal had always been Gaines Meal in the morning, half a can of Rival canned dogfood at night, and everything Pete could catch in the woods in between. Then Peter had stopped eating the Gaines Meal and it had taken Anderson almost a month to catch on – Peter wasn't bored; what remained of his teeth simply couldn't manage to crunch up the nuggets anymore. So now he got Gravy Train … the equivalent, she supposed, of an old man's poached egg for breakfast.
   She ran warm water over the Gravy Train nuggets, then stirred them with the old battered spoon she kept for the purpose. Soon the softening nuggets floated in a muddy liquid that actually did look like gravy … either that, Anderson thought, or something out of a backed-up septic tank.
   'Here you go,' she said, turning away from the sink. Peter was now in his accustomed spot on the linoleum – a polite distance away so Anderson wouldn't trip over him when she turned around – and thumping his tail. 'Hope you enjoy it. Myself, I think I'd ralph my g – '
   That was where she stopped, bent over with Peter's red dish in her right hand, her hair falling over one eye. She brushed it away.
   'Pete?' she heard herself say.
   Peter looked at her quizzically for a moment, and then padded forward to get his morning kip. A moment later he was slurping it up enthusiastically.
   Anderson straightened, looking at her dog, rather glad she could no longer see Peter's face. In her head her grandfather's voice told her again to leave it alone, it was dangerous, and did she need any more string for her beads?
   There are about a million people in this country alone who would come running if they got wind of this kind of dangerous, Anderson thought. God knows how many in the rest of the world. And is that all it does? How is it on cancer, do you suppose?
   All the strength suddenly ran out of her legs. She felt her way backward until she touched one of the kitchen chairs. She sat down and watched Peter eat.
   The milky cataract which had covered his left eye was now half gone.

2

   'I don't have the slightest idea,' the vet said that afternoon.
   Anderson sat in the examining room's only chair while Peter sat obediently on the examining table. Anderson found herself remembering how she had dreaded the possibility of having to bring Peter to the vet's this summer … only now it didn't look as if Peter would have to be put down after all.
   'But it isn't just my imagination?' Anderson asked, and she supposed that what she really wanted was for Dr Etheridge to either confirm or confute the Anne in her head: It's what you deserve, living out there alone with your smelly dog …
   'Nope,' Etheridge said, 'although I can understand why you feel flummoxed. I feel a little flummoxed myself. His cataract is in active remission. You can get down, Peter.' Peter climbed down from the table, going first to Etheridge's stool and then to the floor and then to Anderson.
   Anderson put her hand on Peter's head and looked closely at Etheridge, thinking: Did you see that? Not quite wanting to say it out loud. For a moment Etheridge met her eyes, and then he looked away. I saw it, yes, but I'm not going to admit that I saw it. Peter had gotten down carefully, in a descent that was miles from the devil-take-the-hindmost bounds of the puppy he had once been, but neither was it the trembling, tentative, wobbly descent Peter would have made even a week ago, cocking his head unnaturally to the right so he could see where he was going, his balance so vague that your heart stopped until he was down with no bones broken. Peter came down with the conservative yet solid confidence of the elder statesman he had been two or three years ago. Some of it, Anderson supposed, was the fact that the vision in his left eye was returning – Etheridge had confirmed that with a few simple perception tests. But the eye wasn't all of it. The rest was overall improved body coordination. Simple as that. Crazy, but simple.
   And the shrinking cataract hadn't caused Pete's muzzle to return to saltand-pepper from an almost solid white, had it? Anderson had noticed that in the pickup truck as they headed down to Augusta. She had almost driven off the road.
   How much of this was Etheridge seeing and not being prepared to admit he was seeing? Quite a bit, Anderson guessed, but part of it was just that Etheridge wasn't Doc Daggett.
   Daggett had seen Peter at least twice a year during the first ten years of Peter's life … and then there were the things that came up, like the time Pete had mixed in with a porcupine, for instance, and Daggett had removed the quills, one by one, whistling the theme music from The Bridge on the
   River Kwai as he did so, soothing the trembling year-old dog with one big, kindly hand. On another occasion Peter had come limping home with a backside full of birdshot – a cruel present from a hunter either too stupid to look before he shot or perhaps sadistic enough to inflict misery on a dog because he couldn't find a partridge or pheasant to inflict it on. Dr Daggett would have seen all the changes in Peter, and would not have been able to deny them even if he had wished to. Dr Daggett would have taken off his pink-rimmed glasses, polished them on his white coat, and said something like: We have to find out where he's been and what he's gotten into, Roberta. This is serious. Dogs don't just get younger, and that is what Peter appears to be doing. That would have forced Anderson to reply: I know where he's been, and I've got a pretty good idea of what did it. And that would have taken a lot of the pressure off, wouldn't it? But old Doc Daggett had sold the practice to Etheridge, who seemed nice enough, but who was still something of a stranger, and retired to Florida. Etheridge had seen Peter more often than Daggett had done – four times in the last year, as it happened – because as Peter grew older he had grown steadily more infirm. But he still hadn't seen him as often as his predecessor … and, she suspected, he didn't have his predecessor's clear-eyed perceptions, either. Or his guts.
   From the ward behind them, a German Shepherd suddenly exploded a string of heavy barks that sounded like a string of canine curses. Other dogs picked it up. Peter's ears cocked forward and he began to tremble under Anderson's hand. The Benjamin Button routine apparently hadn't done a thing for the beagle's equanimity, Anderson thought; once through his puppyhood storms, Peter had been so laid-back he was damn near paralytic. This high-strung trembling was brand-new.
   Etheridge was listening to the dogs with a slight frown now – almost all of them were barking.
   'Thanks for seeing us on such short notice,' Anderson said. She had to raise her voice to be heard. A dog in the waiting room also started to bark – the quick, nervous yappings of a very small animal … a Pom or a poodle, most likely. 'It was very – ' Her voice broke momentarily. She felt a vibration under her fingertips and her first thought
   (the ship)
   was of the thing in the woods. But she knew what this vibration was. Although she had felt it very, very seldom, there was no mystery about it.
   This vibration was coming from Peter. Peter was growling, very low and deep in his throat.
   ' – kind of you, but I think we ought to split. It sounds like you've got a mutiny on your hands.' She meant it as a joke, but it no longer sounded like a joke. Suddenly the entire small complex – the cinderblock square that was Etheridge's waiting room and treatment room, plus the attached cinderblock rectangle that was his ward and operating theater – was in an uproar. All the
   dogs out back were barking, and in the waiting room the Pom had been joined by a couple of other dogs … and a feminine, wavering tail that was unmistakably feline.
   Mrs Alden popped in, looking distressed. 'Dr Etheridge
   'All right,' he said, sounding cross. 'Excuse me, Ms Anderson.'
   He left in a hurry, heading for the ward first. When he opened the door, the noise of the dogs seemed to double – they're going bugshit, Anderson thought, and that was all she had time to think, because Peter almost lunged out from under her hand. That idling growl deep in his throat suddenly roughened into a snarl. Etheridge, already hurrying down the ward's central corridor, dogs barking all around him and the door swinging slowly shut on its pneumatic elbow behind him, didn't hear, but Anderson did, and if she hadn't been lucky in her grab for Peter's collar, the beagle would have been across the room like a shot and into the ward after the doctor. The trembling and the deep growl … those hadn't been fear, she realized. They had been rage – it was inexplicable, completely unlike Peter, but that's what it had been.
   Peter's snarl turned to a strangled sound – yark! – as Anderson pulled him back by the collar. He turned his head, and in Peter's rolling, red-rimmed right eye Anderson saw what she would later characterize only as fury at being turned from the course he wanted to follow. She could acknowledge the possibility that there was a flying saucer three hundred yards around its outer rim buried on her property; the possibility that some emanation or vibration from this ship had killed a woodchuck that had the bad luck to get a little too close, killed it so completely and unpleasantly that even the flies seemingly wanted no part of it; she could deal with an anomalous menstrual period, a canine cataract in remission, even with the seeming certainty that her dog was somehow growing younger.
   All this, yes.
   But the idea that she had seen an insane hate for her, for Bobbi Anderson, in her good old dog Peter's eyes … no.

3

   That moment was thankfully brief. The door to the ward shut, muffling the cacophony. Some of the tenseness seemed to go out of Peter. He was still trembling, but at least he sat down again.
   'Come on, Pete, we're getting out of here,' Anderson said. She was badly shaken much more so than she would later admit to Jim Gardener. For to admit that would have perhaps led back to that furious leer of rage she had seen in Peter's good eye.
   She fumbled for the unfamiliar leash which she had taken off Peter as soon as they got into the examination room (that dogs should be leashed when owners brought them in for examination was a requirement Anderson had always found annoying – until now), almost dropping it. At last she managed to attach it to Peter's collar.
   She led Peter to the door of the waiting room and pushed it open with her foot. The noise was worse than ever. The yapper was indeed a Pomeranian, the property of a fat woman wearing bright yellow slacks and a yellow top. Fatso was trying to hold the Pom, telling it to 'be a good boy, Eric, be a good boy for Mommy.' Very little save the dog's bright and somehow ratty eyes were visible between Mommy's large and flabby arms.
   'Ms Anderson – ' Mrs Alden began. She looked bewildered and a little frightened, a woman trying to conduct business as usual in a place that had suddenly become a madhouse. Anderson understood how she felt.
   The Pom spotted Peter – Anderson would later swear that was what set it off and seemed to go crazy. It certainly had no problem choosing a target. It sank its sharp teeth into one of Mommy's arms.
   'Cocksucker!' Mommy screamed, and dropped the Pomeranian on the floor. Blood began to run down her arm.
   At the same time, Peter lunged forward, barking and snarling, fetching up at the end of the short leash hard enough to jerk Anderson forward. Her right arm flagged out straight. With the clear eye of her writer's mind Anderson saw exactly what was going to happen next. Peter the beagle and Eric the Pom were going to meet in the middle of the room like David and Goliath. But the Pom had no brains, let alone a sling. Peter would tear its head off with one large chomp.
   This was averted by a girl of perhaps eleven, who was sitting to Mommy's left. The girl had a Porta-Carry on her lap. Inside was a large blacksnake, its scales glowing with luxuriant good health. The little girl shot out one jeans-clad leg with the unearthly reflexes of the very young and stamped on the trailing end of Eric's leash. Eric did one complete snap-roll. The little girl reeled the Pom in. She was by far the calmest person in the waiting room.
   'What if that little fucker gave me the rabies?' Mommy was screaming as she advanced across the room toward Mrs Alden. Blood twinkled between the fingers clapped to her arm. Peter's head turned toward her as she passed, and Anderson pulled him back, heading toward the door. Fuck the little sign in Mrs Alden's cubbyhole reading IT IS CUSTOMARY TO PAY CASH FOR PROFESSIONAL SERVICES UNLESS OTHER ARRANGEMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN ADVANCE. She wanted to get out of here and drive the speed limit all the way home and have a drink. Cutty. A double. On second thoughts, make that a triple.
   From her left came a long, low, virulent hissing sound. Anderson turned in that direction and saw a cat that might have stepped out of a Halloween decoration. Black except for a single dab of white at the end of its tail, it had backed up as far as its carrying cage would allow. Its back was humped up; its fur stood straight up in hackles; its green eyes, fixed unwaveringly on Peter, glowed fantastically. Its pink mouth was jointed wide, ringed with teeth.
   'Get your dog out, lady,' the woman with the cat said in a voice cold as a cocking trigger. 'Blacky don't like 'im.'
   Anderson wanted to tell her she didn't care if Blacky farted or blew a tin whistle, but she would not think of this obscure but somehow exquisitely apt expression until later – she rarely did in hot situations. Her characters always knew exactly the right things to say, and she rarely had to deliberate over them – they came easily and naturally. This was almost never the case in real life.
   'Hold your water,' was the best she could do, and she spoke in such a craven mutter that she doubted if Blacky's owner had the slightest idea what she had said, or maybe even that she had said anything at all. She really was pulling Peter now, using the leash to yank the dog along in a way she hated to see a dog pulled whenever she observed it being done on the street. Peter was making coughing noises in his throat and his tongue was a saliva-dripping runner hanging askew from one side of his mouth. He stared at a boxer whose right foreleg was in a cast. A big man in a blue mechanic's coverall was holding the boxer's rope leash with both hands; had, in fact, taken a double-twist of the hayrope around one big grease-stained fist and was still having trouble holding his dog, which could have killed Peter as quickly and efficiently as Peter himself could have the Pomeranian. The boxer was pulling mightily in spite of its broken leg, and Anderson had more faith in the mechanic's grip than she did the hayrope leash, which appeared to be fraying.
   It seemed to Anderson that she fumbled for the knob of the outer door with her free hand for a hundred years. It was like having a nightmare where your hands are full and your pants start, slowly and inexorably, to slip down.
   Peter did this. Somehow.
   She turned the knob, then took one final, hasty glance around the waiting room. It had become an absurd little no-man's-land. Mommy was demanding first aid of Mrs Alden (and apparently really did need some; blood was now coursing down her arm in freshets, spotting her yellow slacks and white institutional shoes); Blacky the cat was still hissing; Dr Etheridge's gerbils were going mad in the complicated maze of plastic tubes and towers on the far shelf that made up their home; Eric the Crazed Pomeranian stood at the end of his leash, barking at Peter in a strangled voice. Peter was snarling back.
   Anderson's eye fell on the little girl's blacksnake and saw that it had reared up like a cobra inside its Porta-Carry and was also looking at Peter, its fangless mouth yawning, its narrow pink tongue shuttling at the air in stiff little jabs.
   Blacksnakes don't do that. I never saw a blacksnake do that in my life.
   Now in something very close to real horror, Anderson fled, dragging Peter after her.

4
   Pete began to calm down almost as soon as the door sighed shut behind them. He stopped coughing and dragging on the leash and began to walk at Anderson's side, glancing at her occasionally in that way that said I don't like this leash and I'm never going to like it, but okay, okay, if it's what you want.
   By the time they were both in the cab of the pickup, Peter was entirely his old self again.
   Anderson was not.
   Her hands were shaking so badly that she had to try three times before she could get the ignition key into its slot. Then she popped the clutch and stalled the engine. The Chevy pickup gave a mighty jerk and Peter tumbled off the seat onto the floor. He gave Anderson a reproachful beagle look (although all dogs are capable of reproachful looks, only beagles seem to have mastered that long-suffering stare). Where did you say you got your license, Bobbi? that expression seemed to ask. Sears and Roebuck? Then he climbed up on the seat again. Anderson was already finding it hard to believe that only five minutes ago Peter had been growling and snarling, a bad-tempered dog she had never encountered before, apparently ready to bite anything that moved, and that expression, that … but her mind snapped shut on that before it could go any further.
   She got the engine going again and then headed out of the parking lot. As she passed the side of the building – AUGUSTA VETERINARY CLINIC, the neat sign read – she rolled her window down. A few barks and yaps. Nothing out of the ordinary.
   It had stopped.
   And that wasn't all that had stopped, she thought. Although she couldn't be completely sure, she thought her period was over, too. If so, good riddance to bad rubbish.
   To coin a phrase.