“Harold and I did pretty well,” he corrected. “Anyway, Lucy said, ‘Quick, Larry, ask the question.’ So I did. There was a windmill on the place that ran water up to the barn. It was turning pretty good, but there wasn’t any water coming out of the barn faucets either. So I opened the big case at the foot of the windmill, where all the machinery was, and I saw that the main driveshaft had popped out of its hole. I got it back in and bingo! All the water you could want. Cold and tasty. Thanks to Harold.”
   “Thanks to you. Harold wasn’t really there, Larry.”
   “Well, he was in my head. And now I’m here and I brought him the wine and the candy bars.” He looked at her sideways. “You know, I kind of thought he might be your man.”
   She shook her head and looked down at her clasped fingers. “No. He… not Harold.”
   He didn’t say anything for a long time, but she felt him looking at her. At last he said, “Okay, how have I got it wrong? About Harold?”
   She stood up. “I ought to go in now. It’s been nice to meet you, Larry. Come by tomorrow and meet Stu. Bring your Lucy, if she’s not busy.”
   “What is it about him?” he insisted, standing with her.
   “Oh, I don’t know,” she said thickly. Suddenly the tears were very close. “You make me feel as if… as if I’ve treated Harold very shabbily and I don’t know… why or how I did it… can I be blamed for not loving him the way I do Stu? Is that supposed to be my fault?”
   “No, of course not.” Larry looked taken aback. “Listen, I’m sorry. I barged in on you. I’ll go.”
   “He’s changed!” Frannie burst out. “I don’t know how or why, and sometimes I think it might be for the better… but I don’t… don’t really know. And sometimes I’m afraid.”
   “Afraid of Harold?”
   She didn’t answer; only looked down at her feet. She thought she had already said too much.
   “You were going to tell me how I could get there?” he asked gently.
   “It’s easy. Just go straight out Arapahoe until you come to the little park… the Eben G. Fine Park, I think it is. The park’s on the right. Harold’s little house is on the left, just across from it.”
   “All right, thanks. Meeting you was a pleasure, Fran, busted vase and all.”
   She smiled, but it was perfunctory. All of the dizzy good humor had gone out of the evening.
   Larry raised the bottle of wine and offered his slanted little smile. “And if you see him before I do… keep a secret, huh?”
   “Sure.”
   “Night, Frannie.”
   He walked back the way he had come. She watched him out of sight, then went upstairs and slipped into bed next to Stu, who was still out like a light.
   Harold, she thought, pulling the covers up to her chin. How was she supposed to tell this Larry, who seemed so nice in his strangely lost way (but weren’t they all lost now?), that Harold Lauder was fat and juvenile and lost himself? Was she supposed to tell him that one day not so long ago she had happened upon wise Harold, resourceful Harold, what-would-Jesus-do Harold, mowing the back lawn in his bathing suit and weeping? Was she supposed to tell him that the sometimes sulky, often frightened Harold that had come to Boulder from Ogunquit had turned into a stout politician, a backslapper, a hail-fellow-well-met type of guy who nonetheless looked at you with the flat and unsmiling eyes of a gila monster?
   She thought her wait for sleep might be very long tonight. Harold had fallen hopelessly in love with her and she had fallen hopelessly in love with Stu Redman, and it certainly was a tough old world. And now every time I see Harold I get such a case of the creeps. Even though he looks like he’s lost ten pounds or so and he doesn’t have quite so many pimples, I get the—
   Her breath caught audibly in her throat and she sat up on her elbows, eyes wide in the dark.
   Something had moved inside her.
   Her hands went to the slight swelling of her middle. Surely it was too early. It had only been her imagination. Except—
   Except it hadn’t been.
   She lay back down slowly, her heart beating hard. She almost woke Stu up and then didn’t. If only he had put the baby inside her, instead of Jess. If he had, she would have awakened him and shared the moment with him. The next baby she would. If there was a next baby, of course.
   And then the movement came again, so slight it might only have been gas. Except she knew better. It was the baby. And the baby was alive.
   “Oh glory,” she murmured to herself, and lay back. Larry Underwood and Harold Lauder were forgotten. Everything that had happened to her since her mother had fallen ill was forgotten. She waited for it to move again, listening for that presence inside herself and fell asleep listening. Her baby was alive.
   Harold sat in a chair on the lawn of the little house he had picked out for himself, looking up at the sky and thinking of an old rock and roll song. He hated rock, but he could remember this one almost line-for-line and even the name of the group that had sung it: Kathy Young and the Innocents. The lead singer, songstress, whatever, had a high, yearning, reedy voice that had somehow caught his full attention. A golden goody, the DJs called it. A Blast from the Past. A Platter that Matters. The girl singing lead sounded sixteen years old, pallid, blond, and plain. She sounded as if she might be singing to a picture that spent most of its time buried in a dresser drawer, a picture that was taken out only late at night when everyone else in the house was asleep. She sounded hopeless. The picture she sang to had perhaps been clipped from her big sister’s yearbook, a picture of the local Big Jock—captain of the football team and president of the Student Council. The Big Jock would be slipping it to the head cheerleader on some deserted lovers’ lane while far away in suburbia this plain girl with no breasts and a pimple in the corner of her mouth sang:
   “A thousand stars in the sky… make me realize… you are the one love that I’ll adore… tell me you love me… tell me you’re mine, all mine… ”
   There were a lot more than a thousand stars in his sky tonight, but they weren’t lovers’ stars. No soft caul of Milky Way here. Here, a mile above sea-level they were as sharp and cruel as a billion holes in black velvet, stabs from God’s icepick. They were haters’ stars, and because they were, Harold felt well qualified to wish on them. Wish-I-may, wish-I-might, have-the-wish-I-wish-tonight. Drop dead, folks.
   He sat silently with his head cocked back, a brooding astronomer. Harold’s hair was longer than ever, but it was no longer dirty and clotted and tangled. He no longer smelled like a shootoff in a haymow. Even his blemishes were clearing up, now that he had laid off the candy. And with the hard work and all the walking, he was losing some weight. He was starting to look pretty good. There had been times in the last few weeks when he had strode past some reflective surface only to glance back over his shoulder, startled, as if he had caught a glimpse of a total stranger.
   He shifted in his chair. There was a book in his lap, a tall volume with a marbled blue binding and imitation leather covers. He kept it hidden under a loose hearthstone in the house when he was away. If anyone found the book, that would be the end of him in Boulder. There was one word stamped in gold leaf on the book’s cover, and the word was LEDGER. It was the journal he had started after reading Fran’s diary. Already he had filled the first sixty pages with his close, margin-to-margin handwriting. There were no paragraphs, only a solid block of writing, an outpouring of hate like pus from a skin abscess. He hadn’t thought he had so much hate in him. It seemed he should have exhausted the flow by now, yet it seemed he had only tapped it. It was like that old joke. Why was the ground all white after Custer’s Last Stand? Because the Indians kept coming and coming and…
   And why did he hate?
   He sat up straight, as if the question had come from the outside. It was a hard question to answer, except maybe to a few, a chosen few. Hadn’t Einstein said there were only six people in the world who understood all the implications of E=mc 2 ? What about the equation inside his own skull? The relativity of Harold. The speed of blight. Oh, he could fill twice as many pages as he had already written about that, becoming more obscure, more arcane, until he finally became lost in the clockwork of himself and still nowhere near the mainspring at all. He was perhaps… raping himself. Was that it? It was close, anyway. An obscene and ongoing act of buggery. The Indians just kept on coming and coming.
   He would be leaving Boulder soon. A month or two, no more. When he finally settled on a method of settling his scores. Then he would head out west. And when he got there he would open his mouth and spill his guts about this place. He would tell them what went on at the public meetings, and much more important, what went on at the private meetings. He was sure to be on the Free Zone Committee. He would be welcomed, and he would be well rewarded by the fellow in charge over there… not by an end to hate but by the perfect vehicle for it, a Hate Cadillac, a Fearderado, long and darkly shining. He would climb into it and it would bear him and his hate down on them. He and Flagg would kick this miserable settlement apart like an anthill. But first he would settle with Redman, who had lied to him and stolen his woman.
   Yes, Harold, but why do you hate?
   No; there was no satisfactory answer to that, only a kind of… of endorsement for the hate itself. Was it even a fair question? He thought not. You might as well ask a woman why she gave birth to a defective baby.
   There had been a time, an hour or an instant, when he had contemplated jettisoning the hate. That had been after he had finished reading Fran’s diary and had discovered she was irrevocably committed to Stu Redman. That sudden knowledge had acted upon him the way a dash of cold water acts on a slug, causing it to contract into a tight little ball instead of a spread-out, loosely questing organism. In that hour or instant, he became aware that he could simply accept what was, and that knowledge had both exhilarated and terrified him. For that space of time he knew he could turn himself into a new person, a fresh Harold Lauder cloned from the old one by the sharp intervening knife of the superflu epidemic. He sensed, more clearly than any of the others, that that was what the Boulder Free Zone was all about. People were not the same as they had been. This small-town society was like no other in American pre-plague society. They didn’t see it because they didn’t stand outside the boundaries as he did. Men and women were living together with no apparent desire to reinstitute the ceremony of marriage. Whole groups of people were living together in small subcommunities like communes. There wasn’t much fighting. People seemed to be getting along. And strangest of all, none of them seemed to be questioning the profound theological implications of the dreams… and of the plague itself. Boulder itself was a cloned society, a tabula so rasa that it could not sense its own novel beauty.
   Harold sensed it, and hated it.
   Far away over the mountains was another cloned creature. A cutting from the dark malignancy, a single wild cell taken from the dying corpus of the old body politic, a lone representative of the carcinoma that had been eating the old society alive. One single cell, but it had already begun to reproduce itself and spawn other wild cells. For society it would be the old struggle, the effort of healthy tissue to reject the malignant incursion. But for each individual cell there was the old, old question, the one that went back to the Garden—did you eat the apple or leave it alone? Over there, in the West, they were already eating them a mess of apple pie and apple cobbler. The assassins of Eden were there, the dark fusiliers.
   And he himself, when faced with the knowledge that he was free to accept what was, had rejected the new opportunity. To seize it would have been to murder himself. The ghost of every humiliation he had ever suffered cried out against it. His murdered dreams and ambitions came back to eldritch life and asked if he could forget them so easily. In the new Free Zone society he could only be Harold Lauder. Over there he could be a prince.
   The malignancy drew him. It was a dark carnival—Ferris wheels with their lights out revolving above a black landscape, a never-ending sideshow filled with freaks like himself, and in the main tent the lions ate the spectators. What called to him was this discordant music of chaos.
   He opened his journal and by starlight wrote firmly:


   August 12, 1990 (early morning).
   It is said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To embrace them, to vent them, is more noble; that is to say that the world must change for the good of you. I am on a great adventure.
   HAROLD EMERY LAUDER
   He closed the book. He went into the house, put the book in its hole in the hearth, and carefully replaced the hearthstone. He went into the bathroom, set his Coleman lamp on the sink so that it illuminated the mirror, and for the next fifteen minutes he practiced smiling. He was getting very good at it.

Chapter 51
 
Ralph’s posters announcing the August 18 meeting went up all over Boulder. There was a great deal of excited conversation, most of it having to do with the good and bad qualities of the seven-person ad hoc committee.
   Mother Abagail went to bed exhausted before the light was even gone from the sky. The day had been a steady stream of callers, all of them wanting to know what her opinion was. She allowed as how she thought most of the choices for the committee were pretty good. The people were anxious to know if she would serve on a more permanent committee, if one should be formed at the big meeting. She replied that that would be a spot too tiring, but she sure would give a committee of elected representatives whatever help she could, if people wanted her to help out. She was assured again and again that any permanent committee that refused her help would be turned out en masse, and that right early. Mother Abagail went to bed tired but satisfied.
   So did Nick Andros that night. In one day, by virtue of a single poster turned out on a hand-crank mimeograph machine, the Free Zone had been transformed from a loose group of refugees into potential voters. They liked it; it gave them the sense of a place to stand after a long period of free fall.
   That afternoon Ralph drove him out to the power plant. He, Ralph, and Stu agreed to hold a preliminary meeting at Stu and Frannie’s place the day after next. It would give all seven of them another two days to listen to what people were saying.
   Nick smiled and cupped his own useless ears.
   “Lip-reading’s even better,” Stu said. “You know, Nick, I’m starting to think we’re really going to get somewhere with those blown motors. That Brad Kitchner’s a regular bear for work. If we had ten like him, we’d have this whole town running perfect by the first of September.”
   Nick gave him a thumb-and-forefinger circle and they walked inside together.
   That afternoon Larry Underwood and Leo Rockway walked west on Arapahoe Street toward Harold’s house. Larry was wearing the knapsack he had worn all the way across the country, but all that was in it now was the bottle of wine and a half dozen Paydays.
   Lucy was out with a party of half a dozen people who had taken two wrecking trucks and were beginning to clear the streets and roads in and around Boulder of stalled vehicles. Trouble was, they were working on their own—it was a sporadic operation that only ran when a few people felt like getting together and doing it. A wrecking bee instead of a quilting bee, Larry thought, and his eye caught one of the posters headed MASS MEETING, this one nailed to a telephone pole. Maybe that would be the answer. Hell, people around here wanted to work; what they needed was somebody to coordinate things and tell them what to do. He thought that, most of all, they wanted to wipe away the evidence of what had happened here this early summer (and could it be late summer already?) the way you would use an eraser to wipe dirty words off a blackboard. Maybe we can’t do it from one end of America to the other, Larry thought, but we should be able to do it here in Boulder before snow flies, if Mother Nature cooperates.
   A tinkle of glass made him turn. Leo had lobbed a large stone from someone’s rock garden through the rear window of an old Ford. A bumper sticker on the back deck of the Ford’s trunk read: GET YO ASS UP THE PASS– COLD CREEK CANYON .
   “Don’t do that, Joe.”
   “I’m Leo.”
   “Leo,” he corrected. “Don’t do that.”
   “Why not?” Leo asked complacently, and for a long time Larry couldn’t think of a satisfactory answer.
   “Because it makes an ugly sound,” he said finally.
   “Oh. Okay.”
   They walked on. Larry put his hands in his pockets. Leo did likewise. Larry kicked a beer can. Leo swerved out of his way to kick a stone. Larry began to whistle a tune. Leo made a whispering chuffling sound in accompaniment. Larry ruffled the kid’s hair and Leo looked up at him with those odd Chinese eyes and grinned. And Larry thought: For Christ’s sake, I’m falling in love with him. Pretty far out.
   They came to the park Frannie had mentioned, and across from it was a green house with white shutters. There was a wheelbarrow full of bricks on the cement path leading up to the front door, and next to it was a garbage can lid filled with that do-it-yourself mortar-mix to which you just add water. Squatting beside it, his back to the street, was a broad-shouldered dude with his shirt off and the peeling remnants of a bad sunburn. He had a trowel in one hand. He was building a low and curving brick wall around a flower bed.
   Larry thought of Fran saying: He’s changed… I don’t know how or why or even if its for the best… and sometimes I’m afraid.
   Then he stepped forward, saying it just the way he had planned on his long days crossing the country: “Harold Lauder, I presume?”
   Harold jerked with surprise, then turned with a brick in one hand and his mortar-dripping trowel in the other, half-raised, like a weapon. Out of the corner of his eye, Larry thought he saw Leo flinch backward. His first thought was, sure enough, Harold didn’t look at all as he had imagined. His second thought had to do with the trowel: My God, is he going to let me have it with that thing? Harold’s face was grimly set, his eyes narrow and dark. His hair fell in a lank wave across his sweaty forehead. His lips were pressed together and almost white.
   And then there was a transformation so sudden and complete that Larry was never quite able to believe afterward that he had seen that tense, unsmiling Harold, the face of a man more apt to use a trowel to wall someone up in a basement niche than to construct a garden wall around a flower bed.
   He smiled, a broad and harmless grin that made deep dimples at the corners of his mouth. His eyes lost their menacing cast (they were bottle-green, and how could such clear and feckless eyes have seemed menacing, or even dark?). He stuck the trowel blade-down into the mortar—chunk! —wiped his hands on the hips of his jeans, and advanced with his hand out. Larry thought: My God, he’s just a kid, younger than I am. If he’s eighteen yet I’ll eat the candles on his last birthday cake.
   “Don’t think I know you,” Harold said, grinning, as they shook. He had a firm grip. Larry’s hand was pumped up and down exactly three times and let go. It reminded Larry of the time he had shaken hands with George Bush back when the old bushwhacker had been running for President. It had been at a political rally, which he had attended on the advice of his mother, given many years ago. If you can’t afford a movie, go to the zoo. If you can’t afford the zoo, go see a politician.
   But Harold’s grin was contagious, and Larry grinned back. Kid or not, politician’s handshake or not, the grin impressed him as completely genuine, and after all this time, after all those candy wrappers, here was Harold Lauder, in the flesh.
   “No, you don’t,” Larry said. “But I’m acquainted with you.”
   “Is that so!” Harold exclaimed, and his grin escalated. If it got any broader, Larry thought with amusement, the ends would meet around at the back of his skull and the top two thirds of his head would just topple off.
   “I followed you across the country from Maine,” Larry said.
   “No fooling! You did, really?”
   “Really did.” He unslung his packsack. “Here, I’ve got some stuff for you.” He took out the bottle of Bordeaux and put it in Harold’s hand.
   “Say, you shouldn’t have,” Harold said, looking at the bottle with some astonishment. “Nineteen forty-seven?”
   “A good year,” Larry said. “And these.”
   He put nearly half a dozen Paydays in Harold’s other hand. One of them slipped through his fingers and onto the grass. Harold bent to pick it up, and as he did, Larry caught a glimpse of that earlier expression.
   Then Harold bobbed back up, smiling. “How did you know?”
   “I followed your signs… and your candy wrappers.”
   “Well I be go to hell. Come on in the house. We ought to have a jaw, as my dad was fond of saying. Would your boy drink a Coke?”
   “Sure. Wouldn’t you, L—”
   He looked around, but Leo was no longer beside him. He was all the way back on the sidewalk and looking down at some cracks in the pavement as if they were of great interest to him.
   “Hey, Leo! Want a Coke?”
   Leo muttered something Larry couldn’t hear.
   “Talk up!” he said, irritated. “What did God give you a voice for? I asked you if you wanted a Coke.”
   Barely audible, Leo said: “I think I’ll go see if Nadine-mom’s back.”
   “What the hell? We just got here!”
   “I want to go back!” Leo said, looking up from the cement. The sun flashed too strongly back from his eyes and Larry thought, What in God’s name is this? He’s almost crying.
   “Just a sec,” he said to Harold.
   “Sure,” Harold said, grinning. “Sometimes kids’re shy. I was.”
   Larry walked over to Leo and hunkered down, so they would be at eye-level. “What’s the matter, kiddo?”
   “I just want to go back,” Leo said, not meeting his gaze. “I want Nadine-mom.”
   “Well, you…” He paused helplessly.
   “Want to go back.” He looked up briefly at Larry. His eyes flickered over Larry’s shoulder toward where Harold stood in the middle of his lawn. Then down at the cement again. “Please.”
   “You don’t like Harold?”
   “I don’t know… he’s all right… I just want to go back.”
   Larry sighed. “Can you find your way?”
   “Sure.”
   “Okay. But I sure wish you’d come in and have a Coke with us. I’ve been waiting to meet Harold a long time. You know that, don’t you?”
   “Ye-es…”
   “And we could walk back together.”
   “I’m not going in that house,” Leo hissed, and for a moment he was Joe again, the eyes going blank and savage.
   “Okay,” Larry said hastily. He stood up. “Go straight home. I’ll check to see if you did. And stay out of the street.”
   “I will.” And suddenly Leo blurted in that small, hissing whisper: “Why don’t you come back with me? Right now? We’ll go together. Please, Larry? Okay?”
   “Jeez, Leo, what—”
   “Never mind,” Leo said. And before Larry could say anything more, Leo was hurrying away. Larry stood watching him until he was out of sight. Then he turned back to Harold with a troubled frown.
   “Say, that’s all right,” Harold said. “Kids are funny.”
   “Well, that one sure is, but I guess he’s got a right. He’s been through a lot.”
   “I’ll bet he has,” Harold replied, and just for an instant Larry felt distrust, felt that Harold’s quick sympathy for a boy he had never met was as ersatz as powdered eggs.
   “Well, come in,” Harold said. “You know, you’re just about my first company. Frannie and Stu have been out a few times, but they hardly count.” His grin became a smile, a slightly sad smile, and Larry felt sudden pity for this boy—because a boy was all he was, really. He was lonely and here stood Larry, same old Larry, never a good word for anyone, judging him on vapors. It wasn’t fair. It was time for him to stop being so goddam mistrustful.
   “Glad to,” he answered.
   The living room was small but comfortable. “I’m going to put in some new furniture when I get around to it,” Harold said. “Modern. Chrome and leather. As the commercial says, ‘Fuck the budget. I’ve got MasterCard.’”

Larry laughed heartily.
   “There are some good glasses in the basement, I’ll just get them. I think I’ll pass on the candy bars, if that’s all right with you—I’m off the sweets, trying to lose weight, but we’ve got to try the wine, this is a special occasion. You came all the way across the country from Maine behind us, huh, and following my—our—signs. That’s really something. You’ll have to tell me all about it. Meanwhile, try that green chair. It’s the best of a bad lot.”
   Larry had one final doubtful thought during this outpouring: He even talks like a politician—smooth and quick and glib.
   Harold left, and Larry sat down in the green chair. He heard a door open and then Harold’s heavy tread descending a flight of stairs. He looked around. Nope, not one of the world’s great living rooms, but with a shag rug and some nice modern furniture, it might be fine. The best feature was the stone fireplace and chimney. Lovely work, carefully done by hand. But there was one loose stone on the hearth. It looked to Larry as if it had come out and had been put back a little carelessly. Leaving it like that would be like leaving one piece out of the jigsaw puzzle or a picture hanging crooked on the wall.
   He got up and picked the stone out of the hearth. Harold was still rummaging around downstairs. Larry was about to put it back in when he saw there was a book down in the hole, its front now lightly powdered with rockdust, not enough to obscure the single word stamped there in gold leaf: LEDGER.
   Feeling slightly ashamed, as if he had been prying intentionally, he put the rock back in place just as Harold’s footfalls began to ascend the stairs again. This time the fit was perfect, and when Harold came back into the living room with a balloon glass in each hand, Larry was seated in the green chair again.
   “I took a minute to rinse them out in the downstairs sink,” Harold said. “They were a bit dusty.”
   “They look fine,” Larry said. “Look, I can’t swear that Bordeaux hasn’t gone over. We might be helping ourselves to vinegar.”
   “Nothing ventured,” Harold said, grinning, “nothing gained.”
   That grin made him feel uncomfortable, and Larry suddenly found himself thinking about the ledger—was it Harold’s, or had it belonged to the house’s previous owner? And if it was Harold’s, what in the world might be written in there?
   They cracked the bottle of Bordeaux and found, to their mutual pleasure, that it was just fine. Half an hour later they were both pleasantly squiffed, Harold a little more so than Larry. Even so, Harold’s grin remained; broadened, in fact.
   His tongue loosened a bit by wine, Larry said: “Those posters. The big meeting on the eighteenth. How come you didn’t get on that committee, Harold? I would have thought a guy like you would have been a natural.”
   Harold’s smile became large, beatific. “Well, I’m awfully young. I suppose they thought I didn’t have experience enough.”
   “I think it’s a goddam shame.” But did he? The grin. The dark, barely glimpsed expression of suspicion. Did he? He didn’t know.
   “Well, who knows what lies in the future?” Harold said, grinning broadly. “Every dog has its day.”
   Larry left around five o’clock. His parting from Harold was friendly; Harold shook his hand, grinned, told him to come back often. But Larry had somehow gotten the feeling that Harold could give a shit if he never came back.
   He walked slowly down the cement path to the sidewalk and turned to wave, but Harold had already gone back inside. The door was shut. It had been very cool in the house because the venetian blinds were drawn, and inside that had seemed all right, but standing outside it occurred to him suddenly that it was the only house he’d been inside in Boulder where the blinds and curtains were drawn. But of course, he thought, there were still plenty of houses in Boulder where the shades were drawn. They were the houses of the dead. When they got sick, they had drawn their curtains against the world. They had drawn them and died in privacy, like any animal in its last extremity prefers to do. The living—maybe in subconscious acknowledgment of that fact of death—threw their shutters and their curtains wide.
   He had a slight headache from the wine, and he tried to tell himself that the chill he felt came from that, part of a little hangover, righteous punishment administered for guzzling good wine as if it was cheap muscatel. But that wouldn’t quite get it—no, it wouldn’t. He stared up and down the street and thought: Thank God for tunnel vision. Thank God for selective perception. Because without it, we might as well all be in a Lovecraft story.
   His thoughts became confused. He became suddenly convinced that Harold was peeping at him from between the slats of his blinds, his hands opening and closing in a strangler’s grip, his grin turned into a leer of hatred… Every dog has its day. At the same time he was remembering the night in Bennington, sleeping on the stage of the bandshell, waking up to the horrible feeling that someone was there… and then hearing (or only dreaming it?) the dusty sound of bootheels moving off to the west.
   Stop it. Stop freaking yourself out.
   Boot Hill, his mind free-associated. Chrissake, just stop it, wish I’d never thought about the dead people, the dead people behind all those closed blinds and pulled drapes and shut curtains, in the dark, like in the tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, Christ, what if they all started to move, to stir around, Holy God, cut it out —
   And suddenly he found himself thinking of a trip to the Bronx Zoo with his mother when he had been small. They had gone into the monkey-house and the smell in there had hit him like a physical thing, a fist driven not just at his nose but into it. He had turned to bolt out of there, but his mother had stopped him.
   Just breathe normal, Larry, she had said. In five minutes you won’t notice that nasty smell at all.
   So he had stayed, not believing her, just fighting not to puke (even at the age of seven, he had hated to puke worse than anything), and it turned out she was right. When he looked down at his watch the next time, he saw that they had been in the monkey-house for half an hour, and he couldn’t understand why the ladies who came in the door were suddenly clapping their hands over their noses and looking disgusted. He said as much to his mother, and Alice Underwood had laughed.
   Oh, it still smells bad, all right. Just not to you.
   How come, Mommy?
   I don’t know. Everybody can do it. Now just say to yourself, “I’m going to smell how the monkey-house REALLY is again,” and take a deep breath.
   So he did, and the stink was there, the stink was even bigger and badder than it had been when they first came in, and his hotdogs and cherry pie started to come up on him again in one big sickening whipped bubble, and he had charged for the door and the fresh air beyond it and managed—barely—to hold everything down.
   That’s selective perception, he thought now, and she knew what it was even if she didn’t know what it’s called. This thought had no more than completed itself in his mind before he heard his mother’s voice saying, Just say to your self, “I’m going to smell how Boulder REALLY smells again.” And he was smelling it—just like that, he was smelling it. He was smelling what was behind all the closed doors and drawn shades and pulled blinds, he was smelling the slow corruption that was going on even in this place which had died almost empty.
   He walked faster, not running but getting closer and closer to it, smelling that fruity, rich reek which he—and everyone else—had stopped consciously smelling because it was everywhere, it was everything, it was coloring their thoughts, and you didn’t pull your shades even if you were making love because the dead lie behind drawn shades and the living still want to look out on the world.
   It wanted to come up on him, not hotdogs and cherry pie now but wine and a Payday candy bar. Because this was one monkey-house he was never going to be able to get out of, not unless he moved to an island where no one had ever lived, and even though he still hated to puke worse than anything, he was going to now—
   “Larry? Are you okay?”
   He was so startled that a little noise—“Yike! ” squeaked out of his throat and he jumped. It was Leo, sitting on the curb about three blocks down from Harold’s. He had a Ping-Pong ball and was bouncing it up and down on the pavement.
   “What are you doing here?” Larry asked. His heartbeat was slowly returning to normal.
   “I wanted to walk home with you,” Leo said diffidently, “but I didn’t want to go into that guy’s house.”
   “Why not?” Larry asked. He sat down on the curb beside Leo.
   Leo shrugged and turned his eyes back to the Ping-Pong ball. It made a small whock! whock! sound as it struck the pavement and bounced back up to his hand.
   “I don’t know.”
   “What.”
   “This is very important to me. Because I like Harold… and don’t like him. I feel two ways about him. Have you ever felt two ways about a person?”
   “I only feel one way about him.” Whock! Whock!
   “How?”
   “Scared,” Leo said simply. “Can we go home and see my Nadine-mom and my Lucy-mom?”
   “Sure.”
   They continued down Arapahoe for a while without speaking, Leo still bouncing the Ping-Pong ball and catching it deftly.
   “Sorry you had to wait so long,” Larry said.
   “Aw, that’s okay.”
   “No, really, if I’d known I would have hurried up.”
   “I had something to do. I found this on a guy’s lawn. It’s a Pong-Ping ball.”
   “Ping-Pong,” Larry corrected absently. “Why do you think Harold would keep his shades down?”
   “So nobody can see in, I guess,” Leo said. “So he can do secret things. It’s like the dead people, isn’t it?” Whock! Whock!
   They walked on, reached the corner of Broadway, and turned south. They saw other people on the streets now; women looking in windows at dresses, a man with a pickaxe returning from somewhere, another man casually sorting through fishing tackle in the broken display window of a sporting goods store. Larry saw Dick Vollman from his party biking in the other direction. He waved at Larry and Leo. They waved back.
   “Secret things,” Larry mused aloud, not really trying to draw the boy out anymore.
   “Maybe he’s praying to the dark man,” Leo said casually, and Larry jerked as if brushed by a live wire. Leo didn’t notice. He was double-bouncing his Ping-Pong ball, first off the sidewalk and then catching it on the rebound from the brick wall they were passing… whock-whap!
   “Do you really think so?” Larry asked, making an effort to sound casual.
   “I don’t know. But he’s not like us. He smiles a lot. But I think there might be worms inside him, making him smile. Big white worms eating up his brain. Like maggots.”
   “Joe… Leo, I mean…”
   Leo’s eyes—dark, remote, and Chinese—suddenly cleared. He smiled. “Look, there’s Dayna. I like her. Hey, Dayna!” he yelled, waving. “Got any gum?”
   Dayna, who had been oiling the sprocket of a spidery-thin ten-speed bike, turned and smiled. She reached into her shirt pocket and spread out five sticks of Juicy Fruit like a poker hand. With a happy laugh, Leo ran toward her, his long hair flying, Ping-Pong ball clutched in one hand, leaving Larry to stare after him. That idea of white worms behind Harold’s smile… where had Joe (no, Leo, he’s Leo, at least I think he is) gotten an idea as sophisticated—and as horrible—as that? The boy had been in a semi-trance. And he wasn’t the only one; how many times in the few days he had been here had Larry seen someone just stop dead on the street, looking blankly at nothing for a moment, and then go on? Things had changed. The whole range of human perception seemed to have stepped up a notch.
   It was scary as hell.
   Larry got his feet moving and walked over to where Leo and Dayna were sharing out the chewing gum.
   That afternoon Stu found Frannie washing clothes in the small yard behind their building. She had filled a low washtub with water, had shaken in nearly half a box of Tide, and had stirred everything with a mop-handle until a sickly suds had resulted. She doubted if she was going about this in the right way, but she was damned if she was going to go to Mother Abagail and expose her ignorance. She dumped their clothes in the water, which was stone-cold, then grimly jumped in and began to stomp and slosh around, like a Sicilian mashing grapes. Your new model Maytag 5000, she thought. The Double-Foot Agitation Method, perfect for all your bright colors, fragile underthings, and —
   She turned around and beheld her man, standing just inside the backyard gate and watching with an expression of amusement. Frannie stopped, a little out of breath.
   “Ha-ha, very funny. How long have you been there, smartypants?”
   “Couple of minutes. What do you call that, anyway? The mating dance of the wild wood duck?”
   “Again, ha-ha.” She looked coolly at him. “One more crack like that and you can spend the night on the couch, or up on Flagstaff with your friend Glen Bateman.”
   “Say, I didn’t mean—”
   “They’re your clothes too, Mr. Stuart Redman. You may be a Founding Father and all that, but you still leave an occasional skidmark in your underdrawers.”
   Stu grinned, the grin broadened, and finally he had to laugh. “That’s crude, darlin.”
   “Right now I don’t feel particularly delicate.”
   “Well, pop out for a minute. I need to talk to you.”
   She was glad to, even though she would have to wash her feet before getting back in. Her heart was hurrying along, not happily but rather dolefully, like a faithful piece of machinery being misused by someone with a marked lack of good sense. If this was the way my great-great-great-grandmother had to do it, Fran thought, then maybe she was entitled to the room which eventually became my mother’s precious parlor. Maybe she thought of it as hazard pay, or something like that.
   She looked down at her feet and lower legs with some discouragement. There was still a thin sheath of gray soapsuds clinging to them. She brushed at it distastefully.
   “When my wife handwashed,” Stu said, “she used a… what do you call it? Scrub-board, I think. My mother had about three, I remember.”
   “I know that,” Frannie said, irritated. “June Brinkmeyer and I walked over half of Boulder looking for one. We couldn’t find a single one. Technology strikes again.”
   He was smiling again.
   Frannie put her hands on her hips. “Are you trying to piss me off, Stuart Redman?”
   “No’m. I was just thinking I know where I can get you a scrub-board, I think. Juney too, if she wants one.”
   “Where?”
   “You let me look and see first.” His smile disappeared, and he put his arms around her and his forehead on hers. “You know I appreciate you washing my clothes,” he said, “and I know that a woman who is pregnant knows better than her man what she should and shouldn’t be doing. But, Frannie, why bother?”
   “Why? ” She looked at him, perplexed. “Well, what are you going to wear? Do you want to go around in dirty clothes?”
   “Frannie, the stores are full of clothes. And I’m an easy size.”
   “What, throw out old ones just because they’re dirty?”
   He shrugged a little uneasily.
   “No way, uh-uh,” she said. “That’s the old way, Stu. Like the boxes they used to put your Big Mac in or the no-deposit-no-return bottles. That’s no way to start over.”
   He gave her a little kiss. “All right. Only next washday it’s my turn, you hear?”
   “Sure.” She smiled a little slyly. “And how long does that last? Until I deliver?”
   “Until we get the power back on,” Stu said. “Then I’m going to bring you the biggest, shiniest washer you ever saw, and hook it up myself.”
   “Offer accepted.” She kissed him firmly and he kissed back, his strong hands moving restlessly in her hair. The result was a spreading warmth (hotness, let’s not be coy, I’m hot and he always gets me hot when he does that) that first peaked her nipples, then spread down into her lower belly.
   “You better stop,” she said rather breathlessly, “unless you plan to do more than talk.”
   “Maybe we’ll talk later.”
   “The clothes—”
   “Soaking’s good for that grimed-in dirt,” he said seriously. She started to laugh and he stopped her mouth with a kiss. As he lifted her, set her on her feet, and led her inside, she was struck by the warmth of the sun on her shoulders and wondered, Was it ever so hot before? So strong? It’s cleared up every last blemish on my back… could it be the ultraviolet, I wonder, or the altitude? Is it this way every summer? Is it this hot?
   And then he was doing things to her, even on the stairs he was doing things to her, making her naked, making her hot, making her love him.
   “No, you sit down,” he said.
   “But—”
   “I mean it, Frannie.”
   “Stuart, they’ll congeal or something. I put half a box of Tide in there—”
   “Don’t worry.”
   So she sat down in the lawn chair in the building’s shady overhang. He had set up two of them when they came back down. Stu took off his shoes and socks and rolled up his pants past the knee. As he stepped into the washtub and began gravely to stomp up and down on the clothes, she began to giggle helplessly.
   Stu looked over and said, “You want to spend the night on the couch?”
   “No, Stuart,” she said with grave repentance, and then began to giggle again… until tears ran down her cheeks and the little muscles in her stomach felt rubbery and weak. When she had some control again she said, “For the third and last time, what did you come back to talk about?”
   “Oh yeah.” He marched back and forth, and by now he had worked up quite a bed of lather. A pair of bluejeans floated to the surface and he stomped them back down, sending a creamy squirt of soapsuds onto the lawn. Frannie thought: It looks a little like… oh no, away with that, away with that unless you want to laugh yourself into a miscarriage.
   “We’ve got that first ad hoc meeting tonight,” Stu said.
   “I’ve got two cases of beer, cheese crackers, cheese spread, some pepperoni that should still be—”
   “That’s not it, Frannie. Dick Ellis came by today and said he wanted off the committee.”
   “He did?” She was surprised. Dick had not impressed her as the sort of man who would back away from responsibility.
   “He said he’d be glad to serve in any capacity as soon as we get ourselves a real doctor, but just now he can’t. We had another twenty-five come in today, and one of them had a gangrenous leg. Came from a scratch she got crawling under a rusty bobwire fence, apparently.”

“Oh, that’s bad.”
   “Dick saved her… Dick and that nurse that came in with Underwood. Tall, pretty girl. Laurie Constable, her name is. Dick said he just would have lost the woman without her. Anyway, they took her leg off at the knee, and they’re both exhausted. It took em three hours. Plus they’ve got a little boy with convulsive fits, and Dick’s driving himself crazy trying to figure out if it’s epilepsy or cranial pressure of some kind or maybe diabetes. They’ve had several cases of food poisoning from people eating stuff that’s gone over, and he says some people are going to die of it if we don’t get out a flier real soon telling people how to pick their supplies. Let’s see, where was I? Two broken arms, one case of the flu—”
   “My God! Did you say flu?”
   “Ease up. It’s the regular flu. Aspirin knocks down the fever no sweat… and it doesn’t come back up. No black patches on the neck, either. But Dick isn’t sure which antibiotics to use, if any, and he’s burning the midnight oil trying to find out. Also, he’s scared the flu will spread and people will panic.”
   “Who is it?”
   “A lady named Rona Hewett. She walked most of the way here from Laramie, Wyoming, and Dick says she was ripe for a bug.”
   Fran nodded.
   “Lucky for us, this Laurie Constable seems sort of stuck on Dick, even though he’s about twice her age. I guess that’s all right.”
   “How big of you to give them your seal of approval, Stuart.”
   He smiled. “Anyhow, Dick’s forty-eight and he’s got a minor heart condition. Right now he feels that he can’t spread himself too thin… he’s practically studying to be a doctor, for the Lord’s sake.” He looked soberly at Fran. “I can understand why that Laurie fell for him. He’s the closest thing to a hero we’ve got around here. He’s just a country, vet and he’s scared shitless he’s going to kill someone. And he knows there are more people coming in every day, and some of them have been banged around.”
   “So we need one more for the committee.”
   “Yeah. Ralph Brentner’s gung-ho for this Larry Underwood guy, and from what you say, he struck you as being pretty handy.”
   “Yes. He did. I think he’d be fine. And I met his lady today downtown. Lucy Swann, her name is. She’s awfully sweet, and she thinks the world of Larry.”
   “I guess every good woman feels that way. But, Frannie, I got to be honest with you—I don’t like the way he spilled his life’s story to someone he just met.”
   “I think it was just because I was with Harold from the start. I don’t think he understood why I was with you instead of him.”
   “I wonder what he made of Harold?”
   “Ask him and see.”
   “I guess I will.”
   “Are you going to invite him onto the committee?”
   “More likely than not.” He stood up. “I’d like to have that old fellow they call the Judge. But he’s seventy, and that’s too damn old.”
   “Have you talked to him about Larry?”
   “No, but Nick did. Nick Andros is one sharp guy, Fran. He changed a few things around on Glen and I. Glen was a little bent out of shape about it, but even he had to admit Nick’s ideas were good ones. Anyway, the Judge told Nick that Larry’s just the kind of person we’re looking for. He said Larry was just getting around to finding out he was good for something, and that he was going to get a lot better.”
   “I’d call that a pretty strong recommendation.”
   “Yes,” Stu said. “But I’m going to find out what he thought of Harold before I invite him along for the ride.”
   “What is it about Harold?” she asked restlessly.
   “Might as well ask what it is about you, Fran. You still feel responsible for him.”
   “Do I? I don’t know. But when I think about him, I still feel a little guilty—I can tell you that.”
   “Why? Because I cut in on him? Fran, did you ever want him?”
   “No. God, no.” She almost shuddered.
   “I lied to him once,” Stu said. “Well… it wasn’t actually a lie. It was the day the three of us met. July Fourth. I think he might have sensed what was coming even then. I said I didn’t want you. How was I to know right then if I wanted you or not? There may be such a thing as love at first sight in books, but in real life…”
   He stopped, and a slow grin spread across his face.
   “What are you grinning about, Stuart Redman?”
   “I was just thinkin,” he said, “that in real life it took me at least…” He rubbed his chin consideringly. “Oh, I’m gonna say four hours.”
   She kissed his cheek. “That’s very sweet.”
   “It’s the truth. Anyway, I think he still holds what I said against me.”
   “He never says a mean word against you, Stu… or anybody.”
   “No,” Stu agreed. “He smiles. That’s what I don’t like.”
   “You don’t think he’s… plotting revenge, or anything?”
   Stu smiled and stood up. “No, not Harold. Glen thinks the Opposition Party may just end up coming together around Harold. That’s okay. I just hope he doesn’t try to fuck up what we’re doing now.”
   “Just remember that he’s scared and lonely.”
   “And jealous.”
   “Jealous?” She considered it, then shook her head. “I don’t think so—I really don’t. I’ve talked to him, and I think I’d know. He may be feeling rejected, though. I think he expected to be on the ad hoc committee—”
   “That was one of Nick’s unilateral—is that the word?—decisions that we all went along with. What it came down to was that none of us quite trusted him.”
   “In Ogunquit,” she said, “he was the most insufferable kid you could imagine. A lot of it was compensation for his family situation, I guess… to them it must have seemed like he had hatched from a cowbird egg or something… but after the flu, he seemed to change. At least to me, he did. He seemed to be trying to be, well… a man. Then he changed again. Like all at once. He started to smile all the time. You couldn’t really talk to him anymore. He was… in himself. The way people get when they convert to religion or read—” She stopped suddenly, and her eyes took on a momentary startled look that seemed very like fear.
   “Read what?” Stu asked.
   “Something that changes their lives,” she said. “Das Kapital. Mein Kampf. Or maybe just intercepted love letters.”
   “What are you talking about?”
   “Hmm?” She looked around at him, as if startled out of a deep daydream. Then she smiled. “Nothing. Weren’t you going to go see Larry Underwood?”
   “Sure… if you’re okay.”
   “I’m better than okay—I’m ultimately fine. Go on. Shoo. Meeting’s at seven. If you hurry, you’ve got just enough time to get back here for some supper before.”
   “All right.”
   He was at the gate which separated the front yard from the back when she called after him: “Don’t forget to ask him what he thought of Harold.”
   “Don’t worry,” Stu said, “I won’t.”
   “And watch his eyes when he answers, Stuart.”
   When Stu asked casually about his impression of Harold (at this point Stu had not mentioned the vacancy on the ad hoc committee at all), Larry Underwood’s eyes grew both wary and puzzled.
   “Fran told you about my fixation on Harold, huh?”
   “Yep.”
   Larry and Stu were in the living room of a small Table Mesa tract house. Out in the kitchen Lucy was rattling dinner together, heating canned stuff on a brazier grill Larry had rigged for her. It ran off bottled gas. She was singing snatches of “Honky Tonk Women” as she worked, and she sounded very happy.
   Stu lit a cigarette. He was down to no more than five or six a day; he didn’t fancy having Dick Ellis operating on him for lung cancer.
   “Well, all the time I was following Harold I kept telling myself he probably wouldn’t be like I pictured him. And he wasn’t, but I’m still trying to figure out what it is about him. He was pleasant as hell. A good host. He cracked the bottle of wine I brought him and we toasted each other’s good health. I had a good time. But…”
   “But?”
   “We came up behind him. Leo and me. He was putting a brick wall around this flower garden and he whirled around… didn’t hear us coming until I spoke up, I guess… and for a minute there I’m saying to myself, ‘Holy God, this dude is gonna kill me.’”
   Lucy came into the doorway. “Stu, can you stay for dinner? There’s plenty.”
   “Thanks, but Frannie expects me back. I can only stay fifteen minutes or so.”
   “Sure?”
   “Next time, Lucy, thanks.”
   “Okay.” She went back into the kitchen.
   “Did you come just to ask about Harold?” Larry asked.
   “No,” Stu said, coming to a decision. “I came to ask if you’d serve on our little ad hoc committee. One of the other guys, Dick Ellis, had to say no.”
   “Like that, is it?” Larry went to the window and looked out on the silent street. “I thought I could go back to being a private again.”
   “Your decision, of course. We need one more. You were recommended.”
   “By who, if you don’t mind me—”
   “We asked around. Frannie seems to think you’re pretty level. And Nick Andros talked—well, he doesn’t talk, but you know—to one of the men that came in with you. Judge Farris.”
   Larry looked pleased. “The Judge gave me a recommendation, huh? That’s great. You know, you ought to have him. He’s smart as the devil.”
   “That’s what Nick said. But he’s also seventy, and our medical facilities are pretty primitive.”
   Larry turned to look at Stu, half smiling. “This committee isn’t quite as temporary as it looks on the face of it, is it?”
   Stu smiled and relaxed a little. He still hadn’t really decided how he felt about Larry Underwood, but it was clear enough the man hadn’t fallen off a hayrick yesterday. “We-ell, let’s put it this way. We’d like to see our committee stand for election to a full term.”
   “Preferably unopposed,” Larry said. His eyes on Stu were friendly but sharp—very sharp. “Can I get you a beer?”
   “I better not. Had a few too many with Glen Bateman a couple nights ago. Fran’s a patient girl, but her patience only stretches so far. What do you say, Larry? Want to ride along?”
   “I guess… oh hell, I say yes. I thought nothing in the world would make me happier than to get here and dump my people and let somebody else take over for a change. Instead, pardon my French, I’ve been just about bored out of my tits.”
   “We’re having a little meeting tonight at my place to talk over the big meeting on the eighteenth. Think you could come?”
   “Sure. Can I bring Lucy?”
   Stu shook his head slowly. “Nor talk to her about it. We want to keep some of this stuff close for a while.”
   Larry’s smile evaporated. “I’m not much on cloak-and-dagger, Stu. I better get that up front because it might save a hassle later. I think what happened in June happened because too many people were playing it a little too close. That wasn’t any act of God. That was an act of pure human fuckery.”
   “That’s one you don’t want to get into with Mother,” Stu said. He was still smiling, relaxed. “As it happens, I agree with you. But would you feel the same way if it was wartime?”
   “I don’t follow you.”
   “That man we dreamed about. I doubt if he’s just gone away.”
   Larry looked startled, considering.
   “Glen says he can understand why nobody’s talking about that,” Stu went on, “even though we’ve all been warned. The people here are still shellshocked. They feel like they’ve been through hell to get here. All they want to do is lick their wounds and bury their dead. But if Mother Abagail’s here, then he’s there.” Stu jerked his head toward the window, which gave on a view of the Flatirons rising in the high summer haze. “And most of the people here may not be thinking about him, but I’d bet my bottom dollar that he’s thinking about us.”
   Larry glanced at the doorway to the kitchen, but Lucy had gone outside to talk to Jane Hovington from next door.
   “You think he’s after us,” he said in a low voice. “That’s a nice thought to have just before dinner. Good for the appetite.”
   “Larry, I’m not sure of anything, myself. But Mother Abagail says it won’t be over, one way or the other, until he’s got us or we’ve got him.”
   “I hope she’s not saying that around. These people would be headed for fucking Australia.”
   “Thought you didn’t hold much with secrets.”
   “Yeah, but this—” Larry stopped. Stu was smiling kindly, and Larry smiled back, rather sourly. “Okay. Your point. We talk it out and keep our mouths shut.”
   “Fine. See you at seven.”
   “Sure thing.”
   They walked to the door together. “Thank Lucy for the invite again,” Stu said. “Frannie and I’ll take her up on it before long.”
   “Okay.” As Stu reached the door, Larry said, “Hey.”
   Stu turned back, questioning.
   “There’s a boy,” Larry said slowly, “that came across from Maine with us. His name is Leo Rockway. He’s had his problems. Lucy and I sort of share him with a woman named Nadine Cross. Nadine’s a little out of the ordinary herself, you know?”
   Stu nodded. There had been some talk about a peculiar little scene between Mother Abagail and the Cross woman when Larry brought his party in.
   “Nadine was taking care of Leo before I ran across them. Leo kind of sees into people. He’s not the only one, either. Maybe there were always people like that, but there seems to be a little bit more of it around since the flu. And Leo… he wouldn’t go into Harold’s house. Wouldn’t even stay on the lawn. That’s… sort of funny, isn’t it?”
   “It is,” Stu agreed.
   They looked at each other thoughtfully for a moment and then Stu left to go home and get his supper. Fran seemed preoccupied herself during the meal, and didn’t talk much. And while she was doing the last of the dishes in a plastic bucket full of warm water, people began arriving for the first meeting of the Free Zone Ad Hoc Committee.
   After Stu had gone over to Larry’s, Frannie rushed upstairs to the bedroom. In the corner of the closet was the sleeping bag she had carried across the country strapped to the back of her motorcycle. She had kept her personal belongings in a small zipper bag. Most of these belongings were now distributed through the apartment she and Stu shared, but a few still hadn’t found a home and rested at the foot of the sleeping bag. There were several bottles of cleansing cream—she had suffered a sudden rash of skin outbreaks after the deaths of her mother and father, but that had now subsided—a box of Stayfree Mini Pads in case she started spotting (she had heard that pregnant women sometimes did), two boxes of cheap cigars, one marked IT’S A BOY! and the other marked IT’S A GIRL! The last item was her diary.
   She drew it out and looked at it speculatively. She had entered in it only eight or nine times since their arrival in Boulder, and most of the entries had been short, almost elliptical. The great outpouring had come and gone while they were still on the road… like afterbirth, she thought a little ruefully. She hadn’t entered at all in the last four days, and suspected that the diary might eventually have slipped her mind altogether, although she had firmly intended to keep it more fully when things settled down a little. For the baby. Now, however, it was very much on her mind once more.
   The way people get when they convert to religion… or read something that changes their lives… like intercepted love letters…
   Suddenly it seemed to her that the book had gained weight, and that the very act of turning back the pasteboard cover would cause sweat to pop out on her brow and… and…
   She suddenly looked back over her shoulder, her heart beating wildly. Had something moved in here?
   A mouse, scuttering behind the wall, maybe. Surely no more than that. More likely just her imagination. There was no reason, no reason at all, for her to suddenly be thinking of the man in the black robe, the man with the coathanger. Her baby was alive and safe and this was just a book and anyhow there was no way to tell if a book had been read, and even if there was a way, there would be no way to tell if the person who had read it had been Harold Lauder.
   Still, she opened the book and began to turn slowly through its pages, getting shutterclicks of the recent past like black-and-white photographs taken by an amateur. Home movie of the mind.
   Tonight we were admiring them and Harold was going on about color & texture & tone and Stu gave me a very sober wink. Evil me, I winked back…
   Harold will object on general principles, of course. Damn you, Harold, grow up!
   … and I could see him getting ready with one of his Patented Harold Lauder Smartass Comments…
   (my God, Fran, why did you ever say all those things about him? to what purpose?)
   Well, you know Harold… his swagger… all those pompous words & pronouncements… an insecure little boy…
   That was July 12. Wincing, she turned past it rapidly, fluttering through the pages now, in a hurry to get to the end. Phrases still leaped up, seeming to slap at her: Anyway, Harold smelled pretty clean for a change… Harold’s breath would have driven away a dragon tonight… And another, seeming almost prophetic: He stores up rebuffs like pirate treasure. But to what purpose? To feed his own feelings of secret superiority and persecution? Or was it a matter of retribution?
   Oh, he’s making a list… and checking it twice… he’s gonna find out… who’s naughty and nice…
   Then, on August 1, only two weeks ago. The entry started at the bottom of a page. No entry last night, I was too happy. Have I ever been this happy? I don’t think so. Stu and I are together. We
   End of the page. She turned to the next one. The first words at the top of the page were made love twice. But they barely caught her eye before her glance dropped halfway down the page. There, beside some blathering about the maternal instinct, was something that caught her eyes and froze her almost solid.
   It was a dark, smeary thumbprint.
   She thought wildly: I was riding on a motorcycle all day long, every day. Sure, I took care to clean up every chance I got, but your hands get dirty and…
   She put out her hand, not at all surprised to see that it was shaking badly. She put her thumb on the smudge. The smudge was a lot bigger.
   Well, of course it is, she told herself. When you smear something around, it naturally gets bigger. That’s why, that’s all that is…
   But this thumbprint wasn’t that smeared. The little lines and loops and whorls were still clear, for the most part.
   And it wasn’t grease or oil, there was no use even kidding herself that it was.
   It was dried chocolate.
   Paydays, Fran thought sickly. Chocolate-covered Payday candy bars.
   For a moment she was afraid to do so much as turn around—afraid that she might see Harold’s grin hanging over her shoulder like the grin of the Cheshire cat in Alice. Harold’s thick lips moving as he said solemnly: Every dog has his day, Frannie. Every dog has his day.
   But even if Harold had sneaked a glance into her diary, did it have to mean he was contemplating some secret vendetta against her or Stu or any of the others? Of course not.
   But Harold’s changed, an interior voice whispered.
   “Goddammit, he hasn’t changed that much!” she cried to the empty room. She flinched a little at the sound of her own voice, then laughed shakily. She went downstairs and began to get supper. They would be eating early because of the meeting… but suddenly the meeting didn’t seem as important as it had earlier.
   Excerpts from the Minutes of the Ad Hoc Committee Meeting
   August 13, 1990
   The meeting was held in the apartment of Stu Redman and Frances Goldsmith. All members of the ad hoc committee were present, those being: Stuart Redman, Frances Goldsmith, Nick Andros, Glen Bateman, Ralph Brentner, Susan Stern, and Larry Underwood…
   Stu Redman was elected moderator of the meeting. Frances Goldsmith was elected recording secretary…
   These notes (plus complete coverage of every burp, gurgle, and aside, all recorded on Memorex cassettes for anyone crazy enough to want to listen to them) will be placed in a safe-deposit box of the First Bank of Boulder…
   Stu Redman presented a broadside on the subject of food poisoning written by Dick Ellis and Laurie Constable (eyecatchingly titled IF YOU EAT YOU SHOULD READ THIS!). He said Dick wanted to see it printed and nailed up all over Boulder before the big meeting on August 18, because there have already been fifteen cases of food poisoning in Boulder, two of them quite serious. The committee voted 7–0 that Ralph should duplicate a thousand copies of Dick’s poster and get ten people to help him put them up all over town…
   Susan Stern then presented another item that Dick and Laurie wanted to put before the meeting (we all wished one or the other of them could have been here). They both feel that there must be a Burial Committee; Dick’s idea was that it should be put on the agenda of the public meeting and that it be presented not as a health hazard—because of the possibility it might cause panic—but as “the decent thing to do.” We all know there are surprisingly few corpses in Boulder in proportion to its pre-plague population, but we don’t know why… not that it matters much now. But there are still thousands of dead bodies and they must be gotten rid of if we intend to stay here.
   Stu asked how serious the problem was at present and Sue said she thought it would not become really serious until fall, when the dry, hot weather usually turns damp.
   Larry made a motion that we add Dick’s suggestion that a Burial Committee be formed to the agenda of the August 18 meeting. A motion was carried, 7–0.
   Nick Andros was then recognized, and Ralph Brentner read his prepared comments, which I am here quoting verbatim:
   “One of the most important questions this committee must deal with is whether or not it will agree to take Mother Abagail into its complete confidence, and shall she be told about everything that goes on at our meetings, both open and closed? The question can also be put the other way: ‘Shall Mother Abagail agree to take this committee—and the permanent committee that will follow it—into her complete confidence, and shall the committee be told about all that goes on in her meetings with God or Whoever… particularly the closed ones?’
   “That may sound like gibberish, but let me explain, be cause it’s really a pragmatic question. We have to settle Mother Abagail’s place in the community right away, be cause our problem is not just one of ‘getting on our feet again.’ If that was all, we wouldn’t really need her in the first place. As we all know there is another problem, that of the man we sometimes call the dark man, or as Glen puts it, the Adversary. My proof for his existence is very simple, and I think most people in Boulder would agree with my reasoning—if they wanted to think of it at all. Here it is: ‘I dreamed of Mother Abagail and she was; I dreamed of the dark man and therefore he must be, although I have never seen him.’ The people here love Mother Abagail, and I love her myself. But we won’t get far—in fact, we won’t get anywhere—if we don’t start off with her approval of what we’re doing.
   “So this early afternoon I went to see the lady and put the question to her directly, with all the bark on it: Will you go along? She said that she would—but not without conditions. She was perfectly blunt. She said we should be perfectly free to guide the community in all ‘worldly matters’—her phrase. Clearing the streets, allocating housing, getting the power back on.
   “But she was also very clear about wanting to be consulted on all matters that have to do with the dark man. She believes we are all a part of a chess game between God and Satan; that Satan’s chief agent in this game is the Adversary, whose name she says is Randall Flagg (‘the name he’s using this time,’ is how she puts it); that for reasons best known to Himself, God has chosen her as His agent in this matter. She believes, and in this I happen to agree with her, that a struggle is coming and it’s going to be us or him. She thinks this struggle is the most important thing, and she’s adamant about being consulted when our deliberations touch on it… and on him.
   “Now I don’t want to get into the religious implications of all—this, or argue whether she’s right or wrong, but it should be obvious that all implications aside, we have a situation we must cope with. So I have a series of motions.”
   There was some discussion of Nick’s statement.
   Nick made this motion: Can we, as a committee, agree not to discuss the theological, religious, or supernatural implications of the Adversary matter during our meetings? By a 7–0 vote, the committee agreed to bar discussion on those matters, at least while we’re “in session.”
   Nick then made this motion: Can we agree that the main private, secret business of the committee is the question of how to deal with this force known as the dark man, the Adversary, or Randall Flagg? Glen Bateman seconded the motion, adding that from time to time there might be other business—such as the real reason for the Burial Committee—that we should keep close to the vest. The motion carried, 7–0.
   Nick then made his original motion, that we keep Mother Abagail informed of all public and private business transacted by the committee.
   That motion was passed, 7–0.
   Having disposed of the Mother Abagail business for the time being, the committee then moved on to the question of the dark man himself at Nick’s request. He proposed that we send three volunteers west to join the dark man’s people, the purpose being to gain intelligence about what’s really going on over there.
   Sue Stern immediately volunteered. After some hot discussion of that, Glen Bateman was recognized by Stu and put this motion on the floor: Resolved, that no one from our ad hoc committee or from the permanent committee be eligible to volunteer for this reconnaissance. Sue Stern wanted to know why not.
   Glen: “Everyone respects your honest desire to help, Susan, but the fact is, we simply don’t know if the people we send will ever come back, or when, or in what shape. In the meantime, we have the not-so-inconsiderable job of getting things in Boulder back on a paying basis, if you’ll pardon the slang. If you go, we’ll have to fill your seat with someone new who would have to be briefed on the ground we’ve already covered. I just don’t think we can afford all that lost time.”
   Sue: “I suppose you’re right… or at least being sensible… but I do wonder sometimes if those two things are always the same. Or even usually the same. What you’re really saying is that we can’t send anyone from the committee because we’re all so fucking inexpendable. So we just… just… I don’t know…”
   Stu: “Lay back in the buckwheat?”
   Sue: “Yes. Thank you. That’s just what I mean. We lay back in the buckwheat and send somebody over there, maybe to get crucified on a telephone pole, maybe something even worse.”
   Ralph: “What the hell could be worse?”
   Sue: “I don’t know, but if anyone does know, it will be Flagg. I just hate it.”
   Glen: “You may hate it, but you’ve stated our position very succinctly. We’re politicians here. The first politicians of the new age. We just have to hope that our cause is more just than some of the causes for which politicians have sent people into life-or-death situations before this.”
   Sue: “I never thought I’d be a politician.”
   Larry: “Welcome to the club.”
   Glen’s motion that no one from the ad hoc committee should be one of the scouts was carried—gloomily—by a 7–0 vote. Fran Goldsmith then asked Nick what sort of qualifications we should look for in prospective undercover agents, and what we should expect them to find out.
   Nick: “We won’t know what there is to be learned until they come back. If they do come back. The point is, we have absolutely no idea what he’s up to over there. We’re more or less like fishermen using human bait.”
   Stu said he thought the committee should pick the people it wanted to ask, and there was general agreement on this. By committee vote, most of the discussion from this point on has been transcribed into these excerpts verbatim from the audio tapes. It seemed important to have a permanent record of our deliberations on the matter of the scouts (or spies), because it turned out to be so delicate and so troubling.
   Larry: “I’ve got a name I’d like to put into nomination, if I could. I suppose it’ll sound off the wall to those of you who don’t know him, but it might be a really good idea. I’d like to send Judge Farris.”
   Sue: “What, that old man? Larry, you must be nuts!”
   Larry: “He’s the sharpest old guy I’ve ever met. He’s only seventy, for the record. Ronald Reagan was serving as President at an older age than that.”
   Fran: “That’s not what I’d call a very strong recommendation.”
   Larry: “But he’s hale and hearty. And I think the dark man might not suspect we’d send an old crock like Farris to spy on him… and we have to take his suspicions into account, you know. He’s got to, be looking for a move like this, and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he had border guards checking people coming in over there against a potential ‘spy profile.’ And—this will sound brutal, I know, especially to Fran—but if we lose him, we haven’t lost somebody with fifty good years in front of him.”
   Fran: “You’re right. It sounds brutal.”
   Larry: “All I want to add is that I know the Judge would say okay. He really wants to help. And I really think he could carry it off.”
   Glen: “A point well taken. What does anybody else think?”
   Ralph: “I’ll go either way, because I don’t know the gentleman. But I don’t think we should throw the guy out just because he’s old. After all, look who’s in charge of this place—an old lady who’s well over a hundred.”
   Glen: “Another point well taken.”
   Stu: “You sound like a tennis ref, baldy.”
   Sue: “Listen, Larry. What if he fools the dark man and then drops dead of a heart attack while he’s busting his hump to get back here?”
   Stu: “That could happen to just about anyone. Or an accident.”
   Sue: “I agree… but with an old man, the odds go way up.”
   Larry: “That’s true, but you don’t know the Judge, Sue. If you did, you’d see that the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. He’s really smart. Defense rests.”
   Stu: “I think Larry’s right. It’s the sort of thing Flagg might not expect. I second the motion. Those in favor?”
   Committee voted aye, 7–0.
   Sue: “Well, I went along with yours, Larry—maybe you’ll go along with mine.”
   Larry: “Yeah, this is politics, all right. note 8 Who is it?”
   Sue: “Dayna.”
   Ralph: “Dayna who?”
   Sue: “Dayna Jurgens. She’s got more guts than any woman I ever knew. Of course, I know she isn’t seventy, but I think if we put the idea to her, she’d go along.”
   Fran: “Yes—if we really have to do this, I think she’d be good. I second the nomination.”
   Stu: “Okay—it’s been moved and seconded that we ask Dayna Jurgens along for the ride. Those in favor?”
   Committee voted aye, 7–0.
   Glen: “Okay—who’s number three?”
   Nick (read by Ralph): “If Fran disliked Larry’s, I’m afraid she’s really going to dislike mine. I nominate—”
   Ralph: “Nick, you’re crazy! You don’t mean it!”
   Stu: “Come on, Ralph, just read it.”
   Ralph: “Well… it says here he wants to nominate… Tom Cullen.”
   Uproar from the committee.
   Stu: “Okay. Nick has the floor. He’s been writin like a bastard, so you better read it, Ralph.”
   Nick: “First of all, I know Tom just as well as Larry knows the Judge, and probably better. He loves Mother Abagail. He’d do anything for her, including roasting over a slow fire. I really mean that—no hype. He’d set himself on fire for her, if she asked him to.”
   Fran: “Oh, Nick, nobody’s arguing that, but Tom is—”
   Stu: “Let it go, Fran—Nick’s got the floor.”
   Nick: “My second point is the same one Larry made about the Judge. The Adversary is not going to expect us to send a retarded person as a spy. Your combined reactions to the idea are maybe the best argument in favor of the idea.
   “My third—and last—point is that, while Tom may be retarded, he is not a halfwit. He saved my life once when a tornado came, and he reacted much faster than anyone else I know would have done. Tom is childish, but even a child can learn to do certain things if he is drilled and taught and then drilled some more. I see no problem at all in giving Tom a very simple story to memorize. In the end, they’ll likely assume that we sent him away because—”
   Sue: “Because we didn’t want him polluting our gene-pool? Say, that’s good.”
   Nick: “—because he is retarded. He can even say he’s mad at the people who sent him away and would like to get back at them. The one imperative which would have to be drilled into him would be to never change his story, no matter what.”
   Fran: “Oh, no, I can’t believe—”
   Stu: “Come on, Nick has the floor. Let’s keep it orderly.”
   Fran: “Yes—I’m sorry.”
   Nick: “Some of you may feel that, because Tom is retarded, it would be easier to shake him from his story than it would be someone with a wider intelligence, but—”
   Larry: “Yeah.”
   Nick: “—but actually, the reverse is true. If I tell Tom he simply must stick to the story I give him, stick to it no matter what, he will. A so-called normal person could only stand up to so many hours of water torture or so many electric shocks or splinters under the fingernails—”
   Fran: “It wouldn’t come to that, would it? Would it? I mean, nobody really thinks it would come to that, do they?”
   Nick: “—before saying, ‘Okay, I give up. I’ll tell you what I know.’ Tom simply won’t do that. If he goes over his story enough times, he won’t just have it by heart; he’ll come to almost believe it is true. Nobody will be able to shake him on it. I just want to make it clear that I think, in a number of ways, Tom’s retardation is actually a plus in a mission like this. ‘Mission’ sounds like a pretentious word, but that’s just what it is.”
   Stu: “Is that it, Ralph?”
   Ralph: “There’s a little more.”
   Sue: “If he actually starts to live his cover story, Nick, how in the hell will he know when it’s time to come back?”
   Ralph: “Pardon me, ma’am, but it looks like that’s what some of this is about.”
   Sue: “Oh.”
   Nick (read by Ralph): “Tom can be given a post-hypnotic suggestion before we send him out. Again, this is not just blue-skying; when I had this idea, I asked Stan Nogotny if he would try to hypnotize Tom. Stan used to do it as a parlor trick at parties sometimes, I heard him say. Well, Stan didn’t think it would work… but Tom went under in about six seconds.”

Stu: “I’ll be. Ole Stan knows how to do that, huh?”
   Nick: “The reason I thought Tom might be ultra-susceptible dates back to when I met him in Oklahoma. He’s apparently developed the knack, over a long period of years, of hypnotizing himself to a degree. It helps him make connections. He couldn’t understand what I was up to on the day I met him—why I didn’t talk to him or answer any of his questions. I kept putting my hand on my mouth and then my throat to show I was mute, but he didn’t get it at all. Then, all at once, he just turned off. I can’t explain it any better than that. He became perfectly still. His eyes went far away. Then he came out of it, exactly the way a subject comes out of it when the hypnotist tells him it’s time to wake up. And he knew. Just like that. He went into himself and came up with the answer.”
   Glen: “That’s really amazing.”
   Stu: “It sure is.”
   Nick: “I had Stan give him a post-hypnotic suggestion when we tried this, about five days ago now. The suggestion was that when Stan said, ‘I sure would like to see an elephant,’ Tom would feel a great urge to go into the corner and stand on his head. Stan sprang it on him about half an hour after he woke Tom up, and Tom hustled right over into the corner and stood on his head. All the toys and marbles fell out of his pants pockets. Then he sat down and grinned at us and said, ‘Now I wonder why Tom Cullen went and did that?’”
   Glen: “I can just hear him, too.”
   Nick: “Anyway, all this elaborate hypnosis stuff is just an introduction to two very simple points. One, we can plant a post-hypnotic suggestion that Tom return at a certain time. The obvious way would be to do this by the moon. The full moon. Two, by putting him into deep hypnosis when he gets back, we’d get almost perfect recall of everything he saw.”
   Ralph: “That’s the end of what Nick’s got written down. Wow.”
   Larry: “It sounds like that old movie The Manchurian Candidate to me.”
   Stu: “What?”
   Larry: “Nothing.”
   Sue: “I have a question, Nick. Would you also program Tom—I guess that’s the right word—not to give out any information about what we’re doing?”
   Glen: “Nick, let me answer that, and if your reasoning is different, just shake your head. I would say that Tom doesn’t need to be programmed at all. Let him spill anything and everything he knows about us. We’re keeping our business as it relates to Flagg in camera anyway, and we’re not doing much else that he couldn’t guess on his own… even if his crystal ball is on the blink.”
   Nick: “Exactly.”
   Glen: “Okay—I’m going to second Nick’s motion right on the spot. I think we have everything to win and nothing to lose. It’s a tremendously daring and original idea.”
   Stu: “It’s been moved and seconded. We can have a little further discussion if you want, but only a little. We’ll be here all night, if we don’t look lively. Is there any further discussion?”
   Fran: “You bet there is. You said we have everything to win and nothing to lose, Glen. Well, what about Tom? What about our own goddam souls? Maybe it doesn’t bother you guys to think about people sticking… things… under Tom’s fingernails and giving him electric shocks, but it bothers me. How can you be so cold-blooded? And Nick, hypnotizing him so he’d behave like a… a chicken with its head stuck in a bag! You ought to be ashamed! I thought he was your friend!”
   Stu: “Fran—”
   Fran: “No, I’m going to have my say. I won’t wash my hands of the committee or even walk off in a huff if I’m voted down, but I’m going to have my say. Do you really want to take that sweet, foggy boy and turn him into a human U-2 plane? Don’t any of you understand that’s the same as starting all the old shit over again? Can’t you see that? What do we do if they kill him, Nick? What do we do if they kill all of them? Breed up some new bugs? An improved version of Captain Trips?”
   There was a pause here while Nick wrote out a response.
   Nick (read by Ralph): “The things Fran has, brought up have affected me pretty deeply, but I stand by my nomination. No, I don’t feel good about standing Tom on his head, and I don’t feel good about sending him into a situation where he might be tortured and then killed. I’ll only point out again that he would be doing it for Mother Abagail, and her ideas, and her God, not for us. I also truly believe that we have to use any means at our disposal to end the threat this being poses. He’s crucifying people over there. I’m sure of that from my dreams, and I know some of you others have had that dream, too. Mother Abagail has had it herself. And I know that Flagg is evil. If anyone works up a new strain of Captain Trips, Frannie, it will be him, to use on us. I’d like to stop him while we still can.”
   Fran: “Those things are all true, Nick. I can’t argue them. I know he’s bad. For all I know, he may be Satan’s Imp, as Mother Abagail says. But we’re putting our hand to the same switch in order to stop him. Remember Animal Farm? ‘They looked from the pigs to the men, and could not tell the difference.’ I guess what I really want to hear you say—even if it’s Ralph who reads it—is that if we do have to pull that switch in order to stop him… if we do … that we’ll be able to let go once it’s over. Can you say that?”
   Nick: “Not for sure, I guess. Not for sure.”
   Fran: “Then I vote no. If we must send people into the West, let’s at least send people who know what they are in for.”
   Stu: “Anyone else?”
   Sue: “I’m against it, too, but for more practical reasons. If we go on the way we’re headed, we’re going to end up with an old man and a feeb. Pardon the expression, I like him too, but that’s what he is. I’m against it, and now I’ll shut up.”
   Glen: “Call the question, Stu.”
   Stu: “Okay. Let’s go around the table. I vote aye. Frannie?”
   Fran: “Nay.”
   Stu: “Glen?”
   Glen: “Aye.”
   Stu: “Suze?”
   Sue: “Nay.”
   Stu: “Nick?”
   Nick: “Aye.”
   Stu: “Ralph?”
   Ralph: “Well—I don’t like it that much either, but if Nick’s for it, I got to go along. Aye.”
   Stu: “Larry?”
   Larry: “Want me to be frank? I think the idea sucks so bad I feel like a pay toilet. This is the kind of stuff you get when you’re at the top, I guess. Neat fucking place to be. I vote aye.”
   Stu: “Motion’s carried, 5–2.”
   Fran: “Stu?”
   Stu: “Yes?”
   Fran: “I’d like to change my vote. If we’re really going to put Tom into it, we better do it together. I’m sorry I made such a fuss, Nick. I know it hurts you—I can see it on your face. It’s so crazy! Why did any of this have to happen? It sure isn’t like being on the sorority prom committee, I’ll tell you that. Frannie votes aye.”
   Sue: “Me too, then. United front. Nixon Stands Firm, Says I Am Not a Crook. Aye.”
   Stu: “Amended vote is 7–0. Here’s a hanky, Fran. And I’d like the record to show that I love you.”
   Larry: “On that note, I think we should adjourn.”
   Sue: “I second that emotion.”
   Stu: “It has been moved and seconded by Zippy and Zippy’s mom that we adjourn. Those in favor, raise your hands. Those opposed, be prepared to get a can of beer dumped on your head.”
   The vote to adjourn was 7–0.
   “Coming to bed, Stu?”
   “Yeah. Is it late?”
   “Almost midnight. Late enough.”
   Stu came in from the balcony. He was wearing jockey shorts and nothing else; their whiteness was nearly dazzling against his tanned skin. Frannie, propped up in bed with a Coleman gas lantern on the night table next to her, found herself amazed again by the confident depth of her love for him.
   “Thinking about the meeting?”
   “Yes. I was.” He poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on the night table and grimaced at the flat, boiled taste.
   “I thought you made a wonderful moderator. Glen asked you if you’d do it at the public meeting, didn’t he? Is it bothering you? Did you decline?”
   “No, I said I would. I guess I can do that. I was thinking about sending those three across the mountains. It’s a dirty business, sending out spies. You were right, Frannie. Only trouble is, Nick was right, too. In a case like that, what you gonna do?”
   “Vote your conscience and then get the best night’s sleep you can, I guess.” She reached out to touch the Coleman lamp switch. “Ready for the light?”
   “Yeah.” She put it out and he swung into bed beside her. “Good night, Frannie,” he said. “I love you.”
   She lay looking at the ceiling. She had made her peace with Tom Cullen… but that smudged chocolate thumbprint stayed on her mind.
   Every dog has its day, Fran.
   Maybe I ought to tell Stu right now, she thought. But if there was a problem, it was her problem. She would just have to wait… watch… and see if anything happened.
   It was a long time before she slept.

Chapter 52
 
In the early hours of the morning, Mother Abagail lay sleepless in her bed. She was trying to pray.
   She got up without making a light and knelt down in her white cotton nightgown. She pressed her forehead to her Bible, which was open to the Acts of the Apostles. The conversion of dour old Saul on the Damascus road. He had been blinded by the light, and on the Damascus road the scales had fallen from his eyes. Acts was the last book in the Bible where doctrine was backed up by miracles, and what were miracles but the divine hand of God at work upon the earth?
   And oh, there were scales on her eyes and would they ever be shaken free?
   The only sounds in the room were the faint hiss of the oil lamp, the tick of her windup Westclox, and her low, muttering voice.
   “Show me my sin, Lord. I don’t know. I know I’ve gone and missed something You meant for me to see. I can’t sleep, I can’t take a crap, and I don’t feel You, Lord. I feel like I’m prayin into a dead phone, and this is a bad time for that to happen. How have I offended Thee? I’m listenin, Lord. Listenin for the still, small voice in my heart.”
   And she did listen. She put her arthritis-bunched fingers over her eyes and leaned forward even farther and tried to clear her mind. But all was dark there, dark like her skin, dark like the fallow earth that waits for the good seed.
   Please my Lord, my Lord, please my Lord —
   But the image that rose was of a lonely stretch of dirt road in a sea of corn. There was a woman with a gunnysack full of freshly killed chickens. And the weasels came. They darted forward and made snatches at the bag. They could smell the blood—the old blood of sin and the fresh blood of sacrifice. She heard the old woman raise her voice to God, but her tone was weak and whining, a petulant voice, not begging humbly that God’s will be done, whatever her place in that will’s scheme of things might be, but demanding that God save her so she could finish the work… her work… as if she knew the Mind of God and could suborn His will to hers. The weasels grew bolder still; the croker sack began to fray as they twitched and pulled it. Her fingers were too old, too weak. And when the chickens were gone the weasels would still be hungry and they would come for her. Yes. They would—
   And then the weasels were scattering, they had run squeaking into the night, leaving the contents of the sack half-devoured, and she thought exultantly: God has saved me after all! Praise His Name! God has saved His good and faithful servant.
   Not God, old woman. Me.
   In her vision, she turned, fear leaping hotly into her throat with a taste like fresh copper. And there, shouldering its way out of the corn like a ragged silver ghost, was a huge Rocky Mountain timberwolf, its jaws hanging open in a sardonic grin, its eyes burning. There was a beaten silver collar around its thick neck, a thing of handsome, barbarous beauty, and from it dangled a small stone of blackest jet… and in the center was a small red flaw, like an eye. Or a key.
   She crossed herself and forked the sign of the evil eye at this dreadful apparition, but its jaws only grinned wider, and between them lolled the naked pink muscle of its tongue.
   I’m coming for you, Mother. Not now, but soon. We’ll run you like dogs run deer, I am all the things you think, but I’m more. I’m the magic man. I’m the man who speaks for the latter age. Your own people know me best, Mother. They call me John the Conqueror.
   Go! Lave me in the name of the Lord God Almighty!
   But she was so terrified! Not for the people around her, which were represented in her dream by the chickens in the sack, but for herself. She was afraid in her soul, afraid for her soul.
   Your God has no power over me, Mother. His vessel is weak.
   No! Not true! My strength is the strength of ten, I shall mount up with wings as eagles —
   But the wolf only grinned and drew closer. She shrank from its breath, which was heavy and savage. This was the terror at noonday and the terror which flieth at midnight, and she was afraid. She was in her extremity of fear. And the wolf, still grinning, began to speak in two voices, asking and then answering itself.
   “Who brought water from the rock when we were thirsty? ”
   “I did,” the wolf answered in a petulant, half-crowing, half-cowering voice.
   “Who saved us when we did faint? ” asked the grinning wolf, its muzzle now only bare inches from her, its breath that of a living abattoir.
   “I did,” the wolf whined, drawing closer still, its grinning muzzle full of sharp death, its eyes red and haughty. “Oh fall down and praise my name, I am the bringer of water in the desert, praise my name, I am the good and faithful servant who brings water in the desert, and my name is also the name of my Master —”
   The mouth of the wolf opened wide to swallow her.
   “… my name,” she muttered. “Praise my name, praise God from whom all blessings flow, praise Him ye creatures here below…”
   She raised her head and looked around the room in a kind of stupor. Her Bible had fallen to the floor. There was dawnlight in the eastward-facing window.
   “O my Lord!” she cried in a great and quavering voice.
   Who brought water from the rock when we were thirsty?
   Was that it? Dear God, was that it? Was that why the scales had covered her eyes, making her blind to the things she should know?
   Bitter tears began to fall from her eyes and she got slowly and painfully to her feet and walked to the window. Arthritis jabbed blunt darning needles into the joints of her hips and knees.
   She looked out and knew what she had to do now.
   She went back to the closet and pulled the white cotton nightgown over her head. She dropped it on the floor. Now she stood naked, revealing a body so lapped with wrinkles that it might have been the bed of time’s great river.
   “Thy will be done,” she said, and began to dress.
   An hour later she was walking slowly west on Mapleton Avenue toward the wooded tangles and narrow-throated defiles beyond town.
   Stu was at the power plant with Nick when Glen burst in. Without preamble he said, “Mother Abagail. She’s gone.”
   Nick looked at him sharply.
   “What are you talking about?” Stu asked, at the same time drawing Glen away from the crew wrapping copper wire on one of the blown turbines.
   Glen nodded. He had ridden a bike the five miles out here, and he was still trying to catch his breath.
   “I went over to tell her a little about the meeting last night, and to play her the tape, if she wanted to hear it. I wanted her to know about Tom, because I was uneasy about the whole idea… what Frannie had to say kind of worked on me in the wee hours, I guess. I wanted to do it early because Ralph said there’s another two parties coming in today and you know she likes to greet them. I went over around eight-thirty. She didn’t answer my knock, so I went on in. I thought if she was asleep I’d just leave… but I wanted to make sure she wasn’t… wasn’t dead or anything… she’s so old.”
   Nick’s gaze never left Glen’s lips.
   “But she wasn’t there at all. And I found this on her pillow.” He handed them a paper towel. Written on it in large and trembling strokes was this message:
   I must be gone a bit now. I’ve sinned and presumed to know the Mind of God. My sin has been PRIDE, and He wants me to find my place in His work again.
   I will be with you again soon if it is God’s will.
   Abby Freemantle
   “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Stu said. “What do we do now? What do you think, Nick?”
   Nick took the note and read it again. He handed it back to Glen. The fierceness had died out of his face and he only looked sad.
   “I guess we’ll have to move up that meeting to tonight,” Glen said.
   Nick shook his head. He took out his pad, wrote, tore it off, and handed it to Glen. Stu read it over his shoulder.
   “Man proposes, God disposes. Mother A. was fond of that one, used to quote it frequently. Glen, you yourself said she was other-directed; God or her own mind or her delusions or whatever. What’s to coo? She’s gone. We can’t change it.”
   “But the uproar—” Stu began.
   “Sure, there’s going to be an uproar,” Glen said. “Nick, shouldn’t we at least have a meeting of the committee and discuss it?”
   Nick jotted, “What purpose? Why have a meeting that can’t accomplish anything?”
   “Well, we could get up a search-party. She can’t have gone far.”
   Nick double-circled the phrase Man proposes, God disposes. Below it he wrote, “If you found her, how would you bring her back? Chains?”
   “Jesus, no!” Stu exclaimed. “But we can’t just let her wander around, Nick! She’s got some crazy idea she’s offended God. What if she feels like she has to go off into the frigging wilderness, like some Old Testament guy?”
   Nick wrote, “I’m almost positive that’s just what she’s done.”
   “Well, there you go!”
   Glen put a hand on Stu’s arm. “Slow down a minute, East Texas. Let’s look at the implications of this.”
   “To hell with the implications! I don’t see no implications in leaving an old woman to wander around day n night until she dies of exposure!”
   “She is not just any old woman. She is Mother Abagail and around here she’s the Pope. If the Pope decides he has to walk to Jerusalem, do you argue with him if you’re a good Catholic?”
   “Goddammit, it’s not the same thing and you know it!”
   “Yes, it is the same thing. It is. At least, that’s how the people in the Free Zone are going to see it. Stu, are you prepared to say for sure that God didn’t tell her to go out into the bushes?”
   “No-oo… but…”
   Nick had been writing and now he showed the paper to Stu, who had to puzzle out some of the words. Nick’s handwriting was usually impeccable, but this was hurried, perhaps impatient.
   “Stu, this changes nothing, except that it will probably hurt the Free Zone’s morale. Not even sure that will happen. People aren’t going to scatter just because she’s gone. It does mean we won’t have to clear our plans with her right now. Maybe that’s best.”
   “I’m going crazy,” Stu said. “Sometimes we talk about her as an obstacle to get around, like she was a roadblock. Sometimes you talk about her like she was the Pope, and she couldn’t do anything wrong if she wanted to. And it just so happens that I like her. What do you want, Nicky? Someone stumbling over her body this fall in one of those box canyons west of town? You want us to leave her out there so she can make a… a holy meal for the crows?”
   “Stu,” Glen said gently. “It was her decision to go.”
   “Oh, god-damn, what a mess,” Stu said.
   By noon, the news of Mother Abagail’s disappearance had swept the community. As Nick had predicted, the general feeling was more one of unhappy resignation than alarm. The sense of the community was that she must have gone off to “pray for guidance,” so she could help them pick the right path to follow at the mass meeting on the eighteenth.
   “I don’t want to blaspheme by calling her God,” Glen said over a scratch lunch in the park, “but she is a sort of God-by-proxy. You can measure the strength of any society’s faith by seeing how much that faith weakens when its empiric object is removed.”
   “Run that one by me again.”
   “When Moses smashed the golden calf, the Israelites stopped worshipping it. When a flood inundated the temple of Baal, the Malachites decided Baal wasn’t such a hot god anyway. But Jesus has been out to lunch for two thousand years, and people not only still follow his teachings, they live and die believing he’ll come back eventually, and it will be business as usual when he does. That’s the way the Free Zone feels about Mother Abagail. These people are perfectly certain she is going to come back. Have you talked to them?”
   “Yeah,” Stu said. “I can’t believe it. There’s an old woman wandering around out there and everyone says ho-hum, I wonder if she’ll bring back the Ten Commandments on stone tablets in time for the meeting.”
   “Maybe she will,” Glen said somberly. “Anyway, not everyone is saying ho-hum. Ralph Brentner is practically tearing his hair out by the roots.”
   “Good for Ralph.” He looked at Glen closely. “What about you, baldy? Where are you in all of this?”
   “I wish you wouldn’t call me that. It’s not at all dignified. But I’ll tell you… it’s a little bit funny. Ole East Texas turns out to be a lot more immune from the Godspell she’s cast over this community than the agnostic old bear sociologist. I think she’ll be back. Somehow I just do. What does Frannie think?”
   “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her at all this morning. For all I know she’s out there eating locusts and wild honey with Mother Abagail.” He stared at the Flatirons, rising high in the blue haze of early afternoon. “Jesus, Glen, I hope that old lady is all right.”
   Fran didn’t even know Mother Abagail was gone. She had spent the morning at the library, reading up on gardening. Nor was she the only student. She saw two or three people with books on farming, a bespectacled young man of about twenty-five poring over a book called Seven Independent Power Sources for Your Home, and a pretty blond girl of about fourteen with a battered paperback titled 600 Simple Recipes.
   She left the library around noon and strolled down to Walnut Street. She was halfway home when she met Shirley Hammett, the older woman that had been traveling with Dayna, Susan, and Patty Kroger. Shirley had improved strikingly since then. Now she looked like a brisk and pretty matron-about-town.

She stopped and greeted Fran. “When do you think she’ll be back? I’ve been asking everybody. If this town had a newspaper, I’d write it up for the People Poll. Like, ‘What do you think of Senator Bunghole’s stand on oil depletion?’ That sort of thing.”
   “When will who be back?”
   “Mother Abagail, of course. Where have you been, girl, cold storage?”
   “What is all this?” Frannie asked, alarmed. “What’s happened?”
   “That’s just it. Nobody really knows.” And Shirley told Fran what had been going on while Fran had been at the library.
   “She just… left?” Frannie asked, frowning.
   “Yes. Of course she’ll be back,” Shirley added confidently. “The note said so.”
   “ ‘If it is God’s will?’”
   “That’s just a manner of speaking, I’m sure,” Shirley said, and looked at Fran with a touch of coldness.
   “Well… I hope so. Thanks for telling me, Shirley. Are you still having headaches?”
   “Oh no. They’re all gone now. I’ll be voting for you, Fran.”
   “Hmmm?” Her mind was far away, chasing this new information, and for a moment she hadn’t the slightest idea what Shirley could be talking about.
   “For the permanent committee!”
   “Oh. Well, thanks. I’m not even sure I want the job.”
   “You’ll do fine. You and Susy both. Got to get going, Fran. See you.”
   They parted. Fran hurried toward the apartment, wanting to see if Stu knew anything else. Coming so soon after their meeting last night, the old woman’s disappearance struck her around her heart with a kind of superstitious dread. She didn’t like not being able to pass on their major decisions—like the one to send people west—to Mother Abagail for judgment. With her gone, Fran felt too much of the responsibility on her own shoulders.
   When she got home the apartment was empty. She had missed Stu by about fifteen minutes. The note under the sugarbowl said simply: “Back by 9:30. I’m with Ralph and Harold. No worry. Stu.”
   Ralph and Harold? she thought, and felt a sudden twinge of dread that had nothing to do with Mother Abagail. Now why should I be afraid for Stu? My God, if Harold tried to do something… well, something funny… Stu would tear him apart. Unless… unless Harold sneaked up behind him or something and…
   She clutched at her elbows, feeling cold, wondering what Stu could be doing with Ralph and Harold.
   Back by 9:30.
   God, that seemed a long time away.
   She stood in the kitchen a moment longer, frowning down at her knapsack, which she had put on the counter.
   I’m with Ralph and Harold.
   So Harold’s little house on outer Arapahoe would be deserted until nine-thirty tonight. Unless, of course, they were there, and if they were, she could join them and satisfy her curiosity. She could bike out there in no time. If no one was there, she might find something that would set her mind at rest… or… but she wouldn’t let herself think about that.
   Set your mind at rest? the interior voice nagged. Or just make it crazier? Suppose you DO find something funny? What then? What will you do about it?
   She didn’t know. She didn’t, in fact, have the least tiny smidgen of an idea.
   No worry. Stu.
   But there was worry. That thumbprint in her diary meant there was worry. Because a man who would steal your diary and pilfer your thoughts was a man without much principle or scruple. A man like that might creep up behind someone he hated and give a push off a high place. Or use a rock. Or a knife. Or a gun.
   No worry. Stu.
   But if Harold did a thing like that, he would be through in Boulder. What could he do then?
   But Fran knew what then. She didn’t know if Harold was the sort of man she had hypothesized—not yet, not for sure—but she knew in her heart that there was a place for people like that now. Oh yes indeedy.
   She put her knapsack back on with quick little jerks and went out the door. Three minutes later she was biking up Broadway toward Arapahoe in the bright afternoon sunshine, thinking: They’ll be right in Harold’s living room, drinking coffee and talking about Mother Abagail and everybody will be fine. Just fine.
   But Harold’s small house was dark, deserted… and locked.
   That in itself was something of a freak in Boulder. In the old days you locked up when you went out so no one would steal your TV, stereo, your wife’s jewels. But now the stereos and TVs were free, much good they would do you with no juice to run them, and as for jewels, you could go to Denver and pick up a sackful any old time.
   Why do you lock your door, Harold, when everything’s free? Because nobody is as afraid of robbery as a thief? Could that be it?
   She was no lockpicker. She had resigned herself to leaving when it occurred to her to try the cellar windows. They were set just above ground level, opaque with dirt. The first one she tried slid open sideways on its track, giving way grudgingly and sifting dirt down onto the basement floor.
   Fran looked around, but the world was quiet. No one except Harold had settled in this far out on Arapahoe as yet. That was odd, too. Harold could grin until his face cracked and slap people on the back and pass the time of day with folks, he could and did gladly offer his help whenever it was asked for and sometimes when it wasn’t, he could and did make people like him—and it was a fact that he was highly regarded in Boulder. But where he had chosen to live… that was something else, now wasn’t it? That displayed a slightly different aspect of Harold’s view of society and his place in it… maybe. Or maybe he just liked the quiet.
   She wriggled in the window, getting her blouse dirty, and dropped to the floor. Now the cellar window was on a level with her eyes. She was no more a gymnast than she was a lockpicker, and she would have to stand on something to get back out.
   Fran looked around. The basement had been finished off into a playroom/rumpus room. The kind of thing her own dad had always talked about but never quite got around to doing, she thought with a little pang of sadness. The walls were knotty pine with quadraphonic speakers embedded in them, there was an Armstrong suspended ceiling overhead, a large case filled with jigsaw puzzles and books, an electric train set, a slotcar racing set. There was also an air-hockey game on which Harold had indifferently set a case of Coke. It had been the kids’ room, and posters dotted the walls—the biggest, now old and frayed, showed George Bush coming out of a church in Harlem, hands raised high, a big grin on his face. The caption, in huge red letters, said: YOU DON’T WANT TO LAY NO BOOGIE-WOOGIE ON THE KING OF ROCK AND ROLL!
   She suddenly felt sadder than she had since… well, since she couldn’t remember, to tell the truth. She had been through shocks, and fear, and outright terror, and a perfect numbing savagery of grief, but this deep and aching sadness was something new. With it came a sudden wave of homesickness for Ogunquit, for the ocean, for the good Maine hills and pines. For no reason at all she suddenly thought of Gus, the parking lot attendant at the Ogunquit public beach, and for a moment she thought her heart would break with loss and sorrow. What was she doing here, poised between the plains and the mountains that broke the country in two? It wasn’t her place. She didn’t belong here.
   One sob escaped her and it sounded so terrified and lonely that she clapped both hands over her mouth for the second time that day. No more, Frannie old kid old sock. You don’t get over anything this big so quickly. A little at a time. If you have to have a cry, have it later, not here in Harold Lauder’s basement. Business first.
   She walked past the poster on her way to the stairs, and a bitter little smile crossed her face as she passed George Bush’s grinning and tirelessly cheerful face. They sure laid some boogie-woogie on you, she thought. Someone did, anyhow.
   As she got to the top of the cellar stairs, she became certain that the door would be locked, but it opened easily. The kitchen was neat and shipshape, the luncheon dishes done up and drying in the drainer, the little Coleman gas stove washed off and sparkling… but a greasy smell of frying still hung in the air, like a ghost of Harold’s old self, the Harold who had introduced himself into this part of her life by motoring up to her house behind the wheel of Roy Brannigan’s Cadillac as she was burying her father.
   Sure would be in a fix if Harold picked right now to come back, she thought. The idea made her look suddenly over her shoulder. She half expected to see Harold standing by the door which led into the living room, grinning at her. There was no one there, but her heart had begun to knock unpleasantly against her ribcage.
   There was nothing in the kitchen, so she went into the living room.
   It was dark, so dark it made her uneasy. Harold not only kept his doors locked, he kept his shades pulled. Again she felt as if she were witnessing an unconscious outward manifestation of Harold’s personality. Why would anyone keep their shades pulled down in a small city where that was the way the living came to know and mark the houses of the dead?
   The living room, like the kitchen, was astringently neat, but the furniture was stodgy and a little seedy-looking. The room’s nicest feature was the fireplace, a huge stone job with a hearth wide enough to sit on. She did sit down for a moment, looking around thoughtfully. As she shifted, she felt a loose hearthstone under her fanny, and she was about to get up and look at it when someone knocked on the door.
   Fear drifted down on her like a smothering weight of feathers. She was paralyzed with sudden terror. Her breath stopped, and she would not be aware until later that she had wet herself a little.
   The knock came again, half a dozen quick, firm raps.
   My God, she thought. The shades are down at least, thank heaven for that.
   That thought was followed by a sudden cold certainty that she had left her bike out where anyone could see it. Had she? She tried desperately to think, but for a long moment she could summon nothing to mind except a babble of gibberish that was unsettlingly familiar: Before removing the mote from thy neighbor’s eye, remove the pie from thine own —
   The knock came again, and a woman’s voice: “Anybody home?”
   Fran sat stockstill. She suddenly remembered that she had parked her bike around back, under Harold’s clothesline. Not visible from the front of the house. But if Harold’s visitor decided to try the back door—
   The knob of the front door—Frannie could see it down the short length of hall—began to turn back and forth in frustrated half-circles.
   Whoever she is, I hope she’s no better at locks than I am, Frannie thought, and then had to squeeze both hands over her mouth to stop an insane bray of laughter. That was when she looked down at her cotton slacks and saw how badly she had been frightened. At least she didn’t scare the shit out of me, Fran thought. At least, not yet. The laughter bubbled up again, hysterical and frightened, just below the surface.
   Then, with an indescribable sense of relief, she heard footfalls clicking away from the door and down Harold’s concrete path.
   What Fran did next she did with no conscious decision at all. She ran quietly down the hall to the front door and put her eye to the small crack between the shade and the edge of the window. She saw a woman with long dark hair that was streaked with white. She climbed onto a small Vespa motorscooter that was parked at the curb. As the motor burped into life, she tossed her hair back and clipped it.
   It’s the Cross woman—the one who came over with Larry Underwood! Does she know Harold?
   Then Nadine had the scooter in gear. She started off with a little jerk and was soon out of sight. Fran uttered a huge sigh, and her legs turned to water. She opened her mouth to let out the laugh that had been bubbling below the surface, knowing already how it would sound—shaky and relieved. Instead, she burst into tears.
   Five minutes later, too nervous now to search any further, she was boosting herself back through the cellar window from the seat of a wicker chair she had pulled over. Once out, she was able to push the chair far enough so that it wouldn’t be obvious someone had used it to climb out. It was still out of position, but people rarely noticed things like that… and it didn’t look as if Harold used the basement at all, except to store his Coca-Cola.
   She reclosed the window and got her bike. She still felt weak and stunned and a little nauseated from her scare. At least my pants are drying, she thought. Next time you go housebreaking, Frances Rebecca, remember to wear your continence pants.
   She pedaled out of Harold’s yard and left Arapahoe as soon as she could, coming back to the downtown area on Canyon Boulevard. She was back in her own apartment fifteen minutes later.
   The place was utterly silent.
   She opened her diary and looked down at the muddy chocolate fingerprint and wondered where Stu was.
   She wondered if Harold was with him.
   Oh Stu please come home. I need you.
   After lunch, Stu had left Glen and had come home. He had been sitting blankly in the living room, wondering where Mother Abagail was and also wondering if Nick and Glen could possibly be right about just letting the matter be, when there was a knock.
   “Stu?” Ralph Brentner called. “Hello, Stu, you home?”
   Harold Lauder was with him. Harold’s smile was muted today but not entirely gone; he looked like a jolly mourner trying to be serious for the graveside service.
   Ralph, heartsick over Mother Abagail’s disappearance, had met Harold half an hour ago, Harold being on his way home after helping with a water-hauling party at Boulder Creek. Ralph liked Harold, who always seemed to have time to listen and commiserate with whoever had a sad tale to tell… and Harold never seemed to want anything in return. Ralph had poured out the whole story of Mother Abagail’s disappearance, including his fears that she might suffer a heart attack or break one of her brittle bones or die of exposure if she stayed out overnight.
   “And you know it showers just about every damn afternoon,” Ralph finished as Stu poured coffee. “If she gets soaked, she’d be sure to take a cold. Then what? Pneumonia, I guess.”
   “What can we do about it?” Stu asked them. “We can’t force her to come back if she doesn’t want to.”
   “Well, no,” Ralph conceded. “But Harold had a real good idea.”
   Stu’s eyes shifted. “How you doing, Harold?”
   “Pretty good. You?”
   “Fine.”
   “And Fran? You watching out for her?” Harold’s eyes didn’t waver from Stu’s, and they kept their slightly humorous, pleasant light, but Stu had a momentary feeling that Harold’s smiling eyes were like sunshine on the water of Brakeman’s Quarry back home—the water looked so pleasant, but it went down and down to black depths where the sun had never reached, and four boys had lost their lives in pleasant-looking Brakeman’s Quarry over the years.
   “As best I can,” he said. “What’s your thought, Harold?”
   “Well, look. I see Nick’s point. Glen’s, too. They recognize that the Free Zone sees Mother Abagail as a theocratic symbol… and they’re pretty close to speaking for the Zone now, aren’t they?”
   Stu sipped his coffee. “What do you mean, ‘theocratic symbol’?”
   “I’d call it an earthly symbol of a covenant made with God,” Harold said, and his eyes veiled a little. “Like Holy Communion, or the Sacred Cows of India.”
   Stu kindled a little at that. “Yeah, pretty good. Those cows… they let em walk the streets and cause traffic jams, right? They can go in and out of the stores, or decide to leave town altogether.”
   “Yes,” Harold agreed. “But most of those cows are sick, Stu. They’re always near the point of starvation. Some are tubercular. And all because they’re an aggregate symbol. The people are convinced God will take care of them, just as our people are convinced God will take care of Mother Abagail. But I have my own doubts about a God that says it’s right to let a poor dumb cow wander around in pain.”
   Ralph looked momentarily uncomfortable, and Stu knew what he was feeling. He felt it himself, and it gave him a way to measure how he felt about Mother Abagail himself. He felt that Harold was edging into blasphemy.
   “Anyway,” Harold said briskly, dismissing the Sacred Cows of India, “we can’t change the way people feel about her—”
   “And wouldn’t want to,” Ralph added quickly.
   “Right!” Harold exclaimed. “After all, she brought us together, and not exactly by shortwave, either. My idea was that we mount our trusty cycles and spend the afternoon reconnoitering the west side of Boulder. If we stay fairly close, we can keep in touch with each other by walkie-talkie.”
   Stu was nodding. This was the sort of thing he had wanted to do all along. Sacred Cows or not, God or not, it just wasn’t right to leave her to wander around on her own. That didn’t have anything to do with religion; something like that was just callous disregard.
   “And if we find her,” Harold said, “we can ask her if she wants anything.”
   “Like a ride back to town,” Ralph chipped in.
   “At least we can keep tabs on her,” Harold said.
   “Okay,” Stu said. “I think it’s a helluva good idea, Harold. Just let me leave a note for Fran.”
   But as he scribbled the note, he kept feeling an urge to look back over his shoulder at Harold—to see what Harold was doing while Stu wasn’t looking, and what expression might be in Harold’s eyes.
   Harold had asked for and gotten the twisting stretch of road between Boulder and Nederland, because he considered it to be the least likely area. He didn’t think he could walk from Boulder to Nederland in one day, let alone that crazy old cunt. But it made a pleasant ride and gave him a chance to think.
   Now, at a quarter to seven, he was on his way back. His Honda was parked in a rest area and he was sitting at a picnic table, having a Coke and a few Slim Jims. The walkie-talkie that hung over the Honda’s handlebars with its antenna at full extension crackled faintly with Ralph Brentner’s voice. They were short-range radios only, and Ralph was somewhere up on Flagstaff Mountain.
   “… Sunrise Amphitheater… no sign of her… storm’s over up here.”
   Then Stu’s voice, stronger and closer. He was in Chautauqua Park, only four miles from Harold’s location. “Say again, Ralph.”
   Ralph’s voice came back, really bellowing. Maybe he would give himself a stroke. That would be a lovely way to end the day. “No sign of her up here! I’m going down before it gets dark! Over!”
   “Ten-four,” Stu said, sounding discouraged. “Harold, you there?” Harold got up, wiping Slim Jim grease on his jeans. “Harold? Calling Harold Lauder! You copy, Harold?”
   Harold pointed his middle finger—yer fuckfinger, as the high school Neanderthals back in Ogunquit had called it—at the walkie-talkie; then he depressed the talk button and said pleasantly, but with just the right note of discouragement: “I’m here. I was off to one side… thought I saw something down in the ditch. It was just an old jacket. Over.”
   “Yeah, okay. Why don’t you come down to Chautauqua, Harold? We’ll wait there for Ralph.”
   Love to give orders, don’t you, suckhole? I might have something for you. Yes, I just might.
   “Harold, you copy?”
   “Yes. Sorry, Stu, I was woolgathering. I can be there in fifteen minutes.”
   “You copying this, Ralph? ” Stu bellowed, making Harold wince. He gave Stu’s voice the finger again, grinning furtively as he did so. Copy this, you Wild West motherfucker.
   “Roger, you’ll be at Chautauqua Park,” Ralph’s voice came faintly through the roar of static. “I’m on my way. Over and out.”
   “I’m on my way, too,” Harold said. “Over and out.”
   He turned off the walkie-talkie, collapsed the antenna, and hung the radio on the handlebars again, but he sat astride the Honda for a moment without operating the kickstarter. He was wearing an army surplus flak jacket; the heavy padding was good when you were riding a cycle above six thousand feet, even in August. But the jacket served another purpose. It had a great many zippered pockets and in one of these was a Smith & Wesson .38. Harold took the pistol out and turned it over and over in his hands. It was fully loaded and it was heavy in his hands, as if it realized its purposes were grave ones: death, destruction, assassination.
   Tonight?
   Why not?
   He had initiated this expedition on the chance that he might be alone with Stu long enough to do it. Now it looked as though he was going to have that chance, at Chautauqua Park, in less than fifteen minutes. But the trip had served another purpose, as well.
   He hadn’t meant to go all the way to Nederland, a miserable little town nestled high above Boulder, a town whose only claim to fame was that Patty Hearst had once allegedly stayed there during her time as a fugitive. But as he drove up and up, the Honda purring smoothly between his legs, the air as cold as a blunt razorblade against his face, something had happened.

 If you put a magnet on one end of a table and a steel slug on the other, nothing happens. If you move the slug closer to the magnet in slow increments of distance (he held this image in his mind for a moment, savoring it, reminding himself to put it in his diary when he entered tonight), a time will come when the shove you give the slug seems to propel it farther than it should. The slug stops, but it seems to do so reluctantly, as if it has come alive, and part of its liveliness is a resentment of the physical law which deals with inertia. Another little push or two and you can almost—or perhaps even actually—see the slug trembling on the table, seeming to jitter and vibrate slightly, like one of those Mexican jumping beans you can buy in novelty shops, the ones which look like knuckle-sized knots of wood but which actually have a live worm inside. One more push and the balance between friction/inertia and the attraction of the magnet begins to tip the other way. The slug, wholly alive now, moves on its own, faster and faster, until it finally smacks into the magnet and sticks there.
   Horrible, fascinating process.
   When the world had ended this June, the force of magnetism had still not been understood, although Harold thought (his mind had never been of the rational-scientific bent) that the physicists who studied such things thought it was intimately entwined with the phenomenon of gravity, and that gravity was the keystone of the universe.
   On his way to Nederland, moving west, moving up, feeling the air grow chillier, seeing the thunderheads slowly piling up around the still-higher peaks far beyond Nederland, Harold had felt that process begin in himself. He was approaching the point of balance… and not far beyond that, he would reach the point of shift. He was the steel slug just that distance from the magnet where a little push sends it farther than the force imparted would do under more ordinary circumstances. He could feel the jittering in himself.
   It was the closest thing to a holy experience that he had ever had. The young reject the holy, because to accept it means to accept the eventual death of all empiric objects, and Harold also rejected it. The old woman was some sort of psychic, he had thought, and so was Flagg, the dark man. They were human radio stations, and no more. Their real power would lie in societies that coalesced around their signals, which were so different one from the other. So he had thought.
   But parked on his cycle at the end of Nederland’s cheesy main street with the Honda’s neutral light glowing like a cat’s eye, listening to the winterwhine of the wind in the pines and the aspens, he had felt something more than mere magnetic attraction. He had felt a stupendous, irrational power coming out of the West, an attraction so great that he felt to closely contemplate it now would be to go mad. He felt that, if he ventured much farther out on the arm of balance, any self-will would be lost. He would go just as he was, emptyhanded.
   And for that, although he could not be blamed, the dark man would kill him.
   So he had turned away feeling the cold relief of a presuicidal man coming away from a long period of regarding a long drop. But he could go tonight, if he liked. Yes, he could kill Redman with a single bullet fired at pointblank range. Then just stay put, stay cool until the Oklahoma sodbuster showed up. Another shot to the temple. No one would take alarm at the gunshots; game was plentiful, and lots of people had taken to banging away at the deer that wandered down into town.
   It was ten to seven now. He could waste them both by seven-thirty. Fran would not raise the alarm until ten-thirty or later, and by then he could be well away, working his way west on his Honda, with his ledger in his knapsack. But it wouldn’t happen if he just sat here on his bike, letting time pass.
   The Honda started on the second kick. It was a good bike. Harold smiled. Harold grinned. Harold positively radiated good cheer. He drove off toward Chautauqua Park.
   Dusk was starting to close down when Stu heard Harold’s bike coming into the park. A moment later he saw the Honda’s headlamp flashing in and out between the trees that lined the climbing sweep of the drive. Then he could see Harold’s helmeted head turning right and left, looking for him.
   Stu, who was sitting on the edge of a rock barbecue pit, waved and shouted. After a minute Harold saw him, waved back, and began to putt over in second gear.
   After the afternoon the three of them had put in, Stu felt considerably better about Harold… better than he ever had, in fact. Harold’s idea had been a damn good one even if it hadn’t panned out. And Harold had insisted on taking the Nederland road… must have been pretty cold in spite of his heavy jacket. As he pulled up, Stu saw that Harold’s perpetual grin looked more like a grimace; his face was strained and too white. Disappointed that things hadn’t worked out better, Stu guessed. He felt a sudden flush of guilt at the way he and Frannie had treated Harold, as if his constant grin and his overfriendly way with people was some kind of camouflage. Had they ever really considered the idea that the guy might just be trying to turn over a new leaf, that he might be going at it a little strangely just because he had never tried to do such a thing before? Stu didn’t guess they had.
   “Nothing at all, huh?” he asked Harold, jumping nimbly down from the top of the barbecue pit.
   “De nada,” Harold said. The grin reappeared, but it was automatic, without strength, like a rictus. His face still looked strange and deadly pale. His hands were stuffed in the pockets of his jacket.
   “Never mind. It was a good idea. For all we know, she’s back in her house right now. If not, we can look again tomorrow.”
   “That might be like looking for a body.”
   Stu sighed. “Maybe… yeah, maybe. Why don’t you come back to supper with me, Harold?”
   “What?” Harold seemed to flinch back in the gathering gloom under the trees. His grin looked more strained than ever.
   “Supper,” Stu said patiently. “Look, Frannie’d be glad to see you, too. That’s no shit. She really would.”
   “Well, maybe,” Harold said, still looking uncomfortable. “But I’m… well, I had a thing for her, you know. Maybe it’s best if we… just let it go for now. Nothing personal. The two of you go well together. I know that.” His smile shone forth with renewed sincerity. It was infectious; Stu answered it.
   “Your choice, Harold. But the door’s open, anytime.”
   “Thanks.”
   “No, I got to thank you,” Stu said seriously.
   Harold blinked. “Me?”
   “For helping us hunt when everybody else decided to let nature take her course. Even if it didn’t come to nothing. Will you shake with me?” Stu put his hand out. Harold stared at it blankly for a moment, and Stu didn’t think his gesture was going to be accepted. Then Harold took his right hand out of his jacket pocket—it seemed to catch on something, the zipper, maybe—and shook Stu’s hand briefly. Harold’s hand was warm and a little sweaty.
   Stu stepped in front of him, looking down the drive. “Ralph should be here by now. I hope he didn’t have an accident coming down that frigging mountain. He… there he is now.”
   Stu walked out to the side of the road; a second headlamp was now flashing up the drive and playing hide-and-seek through the screening trees.
   “Yes, that’s him,” Harold said in an odd flat voice behind Stu.
   “Someone with him, too.”
   “Wh-what?”
   “There.” Stu pointed to a second motorcycle headlamp behind the first.
   “Oh.” That queerly flat voice again. It caused Stu to turn around.
   “You okay, Harold?”
   “Just tired.”
   The second vehicle belonged to Glen Bateman; it was a low-power moped, the closest to a motorcycle that he would come, and it made Nadine’s Vespa look like a Harley. Behind Ralph, Nick Andros was riding pillion. Nick had an invitation for all of them to come back to the house he and Ralph shared to have coffee and/or brandy. Stu agreed but Harold begged off, still looking strained and tired.
   He’s so goddam disappointed, Stu thought, and reflected that it was not only the first sympathy he had probably ever felt for Harold, but also that it was long overdue. He renewed Nick’s invitation himself, but Harold only shook his head and told Stu he was shot for the day. He guessed he would go home and get some sleep.
   By the time he got home, Harold was shaking so badly he could barely get his key in the front door. When he did get the door open, he darted in as if he suspected a maniac might be creeping up the walk behind him. He slammed the door, turned the lock, shot the bolt. Then he leaned against the door for a moment with his head back and his eyes shut, feeling on the verge of hysterical tears. When he had a grip on himself again, he felt his way down the hall to the living room and lit all three gas lanterns. The room became bright, and bright was better.
   He sat down in his favorite chair and closed his eyes. When his heartbeat had slowed a little he went to the hearth, removed the loose stone, and removed his LEDGER. It soothed him. A ledger was where you kept track of debts owed, bills outstanding, accumulating interest. It was where you finally put paid to all accounts.
   He sat back down, flipped to the place where he had stopped, hesitated, then wrote: “August 14, 1990.” He wrote for nearly an hour and a half, his pen dashing back and forth line after line, page after page. His face as he wrote was by turns savagely amused and dully righteous, terrified and joyous, hurt and grinning. When he was finished, he read what he had written (“These are my letters to the world / which never wrote to me… ”) while he absently massaged his aching right hand.
   He replaced the ledger and the covering stone. He was calm; he had written it all out of him; he had translated his terror and his fury to the page and his resolve remained strong. That was good. Sometimes the act of writing things down made him feel more jittery, and those were the times he knew he had written falsely, or without the effort required to hone the dull edge of truth to an edge where it would cut—where it would bring blood. But tonight he could put the book back with a calm and serene mind. The rage and fear and frustration had been safely transferred into the book, with a rock to hold it down while he slept.
   Harold ran up one of his shades and looked out into the silent street. Looking up at the Flatirons he thought calmly about how close he had come to just going ahead anyway, just hauling out the .38 and trying to mow down all four of them. That would have fixed their reeking sanctimonious ad hoc committee. When he had finished with them they wouldn’t even have had a fucking quorum left.
   But at the last moment some fraying cord of sanity had held instead of giving way. He had been able to let go of the gun and shake the betraying cracker’s hand. How, he would never know, but thank God he had. The mark of genius is its ability to bide—and so he would.
   He was sleepy now; it had been a long and eventful day.
   Unbuttoning his shirt, Harold turned out two of the three gaslamps, and picked up the last to take into his bedroom. As he went through into the kitchen he stopped, frozen.
   The door to the basement was standing open.
   He went to it, holding the lamp aloft, and went down the first three steps. Fear came into his heart, driving the calmness out.
   “Who’s here?” he called. No answer. He could see the air-hockey table. The posters. In the far corner, a set of gaily striped croquet mallets sat in their rack.
   He went down another three steps. “Is someone here?”
   No; he felt there was not. But that did not allay his fear.
   He went the rest of the way down and held the lamp high above his head; across the room a monstrous shadow-Harold, as huge and black as the ape in the Rue Morgue, did likewise.
   Was there something on the floor over there? Yes. There was.
   He crossed behind the slotcar track to beneath the window where Fran had entered. On the floor was a spill of light brown grit. Harold set the light down beside the spill. In the center of it, as clear as a fingerprint, was the track of a sneaker or tennis shoe… not a waffle or zigzag pattern, but groups of circles and lines. He stared at it, burning it into his mind, and then kicked the dust into a light cloud, destroying the mark. His face was the face of a living waxwork in the light of the Coleman lamp.
   “You’ll pay!” Harold cried softly. “Whichever one of you it was, you’ll pay! Yes you will! Yes you will!”
   He climbed the stairs again and went through his house from end to end, looking for any other signs of defilation. He found none. He ended in the living room, not sleepy at all now. He was just concluding that someone—a kid, maybe—had broken in out of curiosity, when the thought of his LEDGER exploded in his mind like a flare in a midnight sky. The break-in motive was so clear, so awful, that he had nearly overlooked it completely.
   He ran to the hearth, pulled up the stone, and ripped the LEDGER from its place. For the first time it came completely home to him how dangerous the book was. If someone found it, everything was over. He of all people should know that; hadn’t all of this begun because of Fran’s diary?
   The LEDGER. The footprint. Did the latter mean the former had been discovered? Of course not. But how to be sure? There was no way, that was the pure and hellish truth of the matter.
   He replaced the hearthstone and took the LEDGER into his bedroom with him. He put it under his pillow along with his Smith & Wesson revolver, thinking he should burn it, knowing he never could. The best writing he had ever done in his life was between its covers, the only writing that had ever come as a result of belief and personal commitment.
   He lay down, resigned to a sleepless night, his mind running restlessly over possible hiding places. Under a loose board? In the back of a cupboard? Could he perhaps pull the old purloined letter trick, and leave it boldly on one of the bookshelves, a volume among many other volumes, flanked by a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book on one side and a copy of The Total Woman on the other? No—that was too bold; he would never be able to leave the house and have peace. What about a safety-deposit box at the bank? No, that wouldn’t do—he wanted it with him, where he could look at it.
   At last he did begin to drift off, and his mind, freed by oncoming sleep, drifted along with no conscious guidance, a pinball in slow motion. He thought: It’s got to be hidden, that’s the thing… if Frannie had hidden hers better… if I hadn’t read what she really thought of me… her hypocrisy… if she had…
   Harold sat bolt upright in bed, a little cry in his mouth, his eyes wide.
   He sat like that for a long time, and after a while he began to shiver. Did she know? Had it been Fran’s footprint? Diaries… journals… ledgers…
   At last he lay down again, but it was a long time before he slept. He kept wondering if Fran Goldsmith regularly wore a pair of tennis shoes or sneakers. And if she did, what did the pattern on their soles look like?
   Patterns of soles, patterns of souls. When he did sleep, his dreams were uneasy and more than once he cried out miserably in the dark, as if to ward off things that had already been let in forever.
   Stu let himself in at quarter past nine. Fran was curled up on the double bed, wearing one of his shirts—it came almost to her knees—and reading a book titled Fifty Friendly Plants. She got up when he came in.
   “Where have you been? I was worried!”
   Stu explained Harold’s idea that they hunt for Mother Abagail so they could at least keep an eye on her. He didn’t mention Sacred Cows. Unbuttoning his shirt, he finished: “We would have taken you along, kiddo, but you were nowhere to be found.”
   “I was at the library,” she said, watching as he took off his shirt and slipped it into the net laundry bag hanging from the back of the door. He was quite hairy, chest and back, and she found herself thinking that, until she met Stu, she had always found hairy men mildly repulsive. She supposed her relief at having him back was making her a little silly in the head.
   Harold had read her diary, she knew that now. She had been terribly afraid that Harold might connive to get Stu alone and… well, do something to him. But why now, today, just when she had found out? If Harold had let the sleeping dog lie this long, wasn’t it more logical to assume that he didn’t want to wake the dog up at all? And wasn’t it just as possible that by reading her diary Harold had seen the futility of his constant chase after her? Coming on top of the news that Mother Abagail had disappeared, she had been in a ripe mood to see ill omens in chicken entrails, but the fact was, it had simply been her diary Harold had read, not a confession to the crimes of the world. And if she told Stu what she had found out, she would succeed only in looking silly and maybe getting him pissed at Harold… and probably at herself as well for being so silly in the first place.
   “No sign of her at all, Stu?”
   “Nope.”
   “How did Harold seem?”
   Stu was taking off his pants. “Pretty well racked. Sorry his idea didn’t pan out better. I invited him to supper whenever he wanted to come. I hope that’s okay by you. You know, I really think I could get to like that sucker. You never could have convinced me of that the day I met you two in New Hampshire. Was it wrong to invite him?”
   “No,” she said, after a considering pause. “No, I’d like to be on good terms with Harold.” I’m sitting home thinking that Harold might be planning to blow his head off, she thought, and Stu’s inviting him to dinner. Talk about your cases of the pregnant-woman vapors!
   Stu said, “If Mother Abagail doesn’t show up by daylight, I thought I’d ask Harold if he wanted to go out again with me.”
   “I’d like to go, too,” Fran said quickly. “And there are a few others around here who aren’t totally convinced that she’s being fed by the ravens. Dick Vollman’s one. Larry Underwood’s another.”
   “Okay, fine,” he said, and joined her on the bed. “Say, what are you wearing under that shirt?”
   “A big strong man like yourself should be able to find that out without my help,” Fran said primly.
   It turned out to be nothing.
   The next day’s search-party started out modestly at eight o’clock with half a dozen searchers—Stu, Fran, Harold, Dick Vollman, Larry Underwood, and Lucy Swann. By noon the party had swelled to twenty, and by dusk (accompanied by the usual brief spat of ram and lightning in the foothills) there were better than fifty people combing the brush west of Boulder, splashing through streams, hunting up and down canyons, and stepping all over each other’s CB transmissions.
   A strange mood of resigned dread had gradually replaced yesterday’s acceptance. Despite the powerful force of the dreams that accorded Mother Abagail a semidivine status in the Zone, most of the people had been through enough to be realists about survival: The old woman was well past a hundred, and she had been out all night on her own. And now a second night was coming on.
   The fellow who had struggled across the country from Louisiana to Boulder with a party of twelve summed it up perfectly. He had come in with his people at noon the day before. When told that Mother Abagail was gone, this man, Norman Kellogg by name, threw his Astros baseball cap on the ground and said, “Ain’t that my fucking luck… who you got hunting her up?”
   Charlie Impening, who had more or less become the Zone’s resident doomcrier (he had been the one to pass the cheerful news about snow in September), began to suggest to people that if Mother Abagail had bugged out, maybe that was a sign for all of them to bug out. After all, Boulder was just too damn close. Too close to what? Never mind, you know what it’s too close to, and New York or Boston would make Mavis Impening’s boy Charlie feel a whole hell of a lot safer. He had no takers. People were tired and ready to sit. If it got cold and there was no heat, they might move, but not before. They were healing. Impening was asked politely if he planned to go alone. Impening said he believed he would wait until a few more people had seen the daylight. Glen Bateman was heard to opine that Charlie Impening would make a hell of a poor Moses.
   “Resigned dread” was as far as the community’s feelings went, Glen Bateman believed, because they were still rationally minded people in spite of all the dreams, in spite of their deep-seated dread concerning whatever might be going on west of the Rockies. Superstition, like true love, needs time to grow and reflect upon itself. When you finish a barn, he told Nick and Stu and Fran after darkness had put an end to the search for the night, you hang a horseshoe ends up over the door to keep the luck in. But if one of the nails falls out and the horseshoe swings points down, you don’t abandon the barn.
   “The day may come when we or our children may abandon the barn if the horseshoe spills the luck out, but that’s years away. Right now all we feel is a little strange and lost. And that will pass, I think. If Mother Abagail is dead—and God knows I hope she isn’t—it probably couldn’t have come at a better time for the mental health of this community.”
   Nick wrote, “But if she was meant as a check for our Adversary, his opposite number, someone put here to keep the scales in balance…”
   “Yes, I know,” Glen said gloomily. “I know. The days when the horseshoe didn’t matter may really be passing… or already gone. Believe me, I know.”
   Frannie said: “You don’t really think our grandchildren are going to be superstitious natives, do you, Glen? Burning witches and spitting through their fingers for luck?”
   “I can’t read the future, Fran,” Glen said, and in the lamplight his face looked old and worn—the face, perhaps, of a failed magician. “I couldn’t even properly see the effect Mother Abagail was having on the community until Stu pointed it out to me that night on Flagstaff Mountain. But I do know this: We’re all in this town because of two events. The superflu we can charge off to the stupidity of the human race. It doesn’t matter if we did it or the Russians, or the Latvians. Who emptied the beaker loses importance beside the general truth: At the end of all rationalism, the mass grave. The laws of physics, the laws of biology, the axioms of mathematics, they’re all part of the deathtrip, because we are what we are. If it hadn’t been Captain Trips, it would have been something else. The fashion was to blame it on ‘technology,’ but ‘technology’ is the trunk of the tree, not the roots. The roots are rationalism, and I would define that word so: ‘Rationalism is the idea we can ever understand anything about the state of being.’ It’s a deathtrip. It always has been. So you can charge the superflu off to rationalism if you want. But the other reason we’re here is the dreams, and the dreams are irrational. We’ve agreed not to talk about that simple fact while we’re in committee, but we’re not in committee now. So I’ll say what we all know is true: We’re here under the fiat of powers we don’t understand. For me, that means we may be beginning to accept—only subconsciously now, and with plenty of slips backward due to culture lag—a different definition of existence. The idea that we can never understand anything about the state of being. And if rationalism is a deathtrip, then ir rationalism might very well be a lifetrip… at least unless it proves otherwise.”
   Speaking very slowly, Stu said: “Well, I got my superstitions. I been laughed at for it, but I got em. I know it don’t make any difference if a guy lights two cigarettes on a match or three, but two don’t make me nervous and three does. I don’t walk under ladders and I never care to see a black cat cross my path. But to live with no science… worshipping the sun, maybe… thinking monsters are rolling bowling balls across the sky when it thunders… I can’t say any of that turns me on very much, baldy. Why, it seems like a kind of slavery to me.”
   “But suppose those things were true?” Glen said quietly.
   “What?”
   “Assume that the age of rationalism has passed. I myself am almost positive that it has. It’s come and gone before, you know; it almost left us in the 1960s, the so-called Age of Aquarius, and it took a damn near permanent vacation during the Middle Ages. And suppose… suppose that when rationalism does go, it’s as if a bright dazzle has gone for a while and we could see…” He trailed off, his eyes looking inward.
   “See what?” Fran asked.
   He raised his eyes to hers; they were gray and strange, seeming to glow with their own inner light.
   “Dark magic,” he said softly. “A universe of marvels where water flows uphill and trolls live in the deepest woods and dragons live under the mountains. Bright wonders, white power. ‘Lazarus, come forth.’ Water into wine. And… and just maybe… the casting out of devils.”
   He paused, then smiled.
   “The lifetrip.”
   “And the dark man?” Fran asked quietly.
   Glen shrugged. “Mother Abagail calls him the Devil’s Imp. Maybe he’s just the last magician of rational thought, gathering the tools of technology against us. And maybe there’s something more, something much darker. I only know that he is, and I no longer think that sociology or psychology or any other ology will put an end to him. I think only white magic will do that… and our white magician is out there someplace, wandering and alone.” Glen’s voice nearly broke, and he looked down quickly.
   Outside there was only dark, and a breeze coming down from the mountains threw a fresh spatter of rain against the glass of Stu and Fran’s living room. Glen was lighting his pipe. Stu had taken a random handful of change from his pocket and was shaking the coins up and down, then opening his hands to see how many had come up heads, how many tails. Nick was making elaborate doodles on the top sheet of his pad, and in his mind he saw the empty streets of Shoyo and heard—yes, heard—a voice whisper: He’s coming for you, mutie. He’s closer now.
   After a while Glen and Stu kindled a blaze in the fireplace and they all watched the flames without saying much.
   After they were gone, Fran felt low and unhappy. Stu was also in a brown study. He looks tired, she thought. We ought to stay home tomorrow, just stay home and talk to each other and have a nap in the afternoon. We ought to take it easy. She looked at the Coleman gaslamp and wished for electric light instead, bright electric light you got by just flicking a wall switch.
   She felt her eyes sting with tears. She told herself angrily not to start, not to add that to their problems, but the part of herself which controlled the waterworks did not seem inclined to listen.
   Then, suddenly, Stu brightened. “By golly! I damn near forgot, didn’t I?”
   “Forgot what?”
   “I’ll show you! Stay right here!” He went out the door and clattered down the hall stairs. She went to the doorway and in a moment she could hear him coming back up. He had something in his hand and it was a… a…
   “Stuart Redman, where did you get that?” she asked, happily surprised.
   “Folk Arts Music,” he said, grinning.
   She picked up the washboard and tilted it this way and that. The gleam of light spilled off its bluing. “Folk—?”
   “Down Walnut Street aways.”
   “A washboard in a music store?”
   “Yeah. There was a helluva good washtub, too, but somebody had already poked a hole through it and turned it into a bass.”
   She began to laugh. She put the washboard down on the sofa, came to him, and hugged him tight. His hands came up to her breasts and she hugged him tighter still. “The doctor said give him jug band music,” she whispered.
   “Huh?”
   She pressed her face against his neck. “It seems to make him feel just fine. That’s what the song says, anyway. Can you make me feel fine, Stu?”
   Smiling, he picked her up. “Well,” he said, “I guess I could give it a try.”
   At quarter past two the next afternoon, Glen Bateman burst straight into the apartment without knocking. Fran was at Lucy Swann’s house, where the two women were trying to get a sourdough sponge started. Stu was reading a Max Brand Western. He looked up and saw Glen, his face pale and shocked, his eyes wide, and tossed the book on the floor.
   “Stu,” Glen said. “Oh, man, Stu. I’m glad you’re here.”
   “What’s wrong?” he asked Glen sharply. “Is it… did someone find her?”
   “No,” Glen said. He sat down abruptly as if his legs had just given out. “It’s not bad news, it’s good news. But it’s very strange.”
   “What? What is?”
   “It’s Kojak. I took a nap after lunch and when I got up, Kojak was on the porch, fast asleep. He’s beat to shit, Stu, he looks like he’s been through a Mixmaster with a set of blunt blades, but it’s him.”
   “You mean the dog? That Kojak?”
   “That’s who I mean.”
   “Are you sure?”
   “Same dog-tag that says Woodsville, N.H. Same red collar. Same dog. He’s really scrawny, and he’s been fighting. Dick Ellis—Dick was overjoyed to have an animal to work on for a change—he says he’s lost one eye for good. Bad scratches on his sides and belly, some of them infected, but Dick took care of them. Gave him a sedative and taped up his belly. Dick said it looked like he’d tangled with a wolf, maybe more than one. No rabies, anyhow. He’s clean.” Glen shook his head slowly, and two tears spilled down his cheeks. “That damn dog came back to me. I wish to Christ I hadn’t left him behind to come on his own, Stu. That makes me feel so friggin bad.”
   “It couldn’t have been done, Glen. Not with the motorcycles.”
   “Yes, but… he followed me, Stu. That’s the kind of thing you read about in Star Weekly … Faithful Dog Follows Master Two Thousand Miles. How could he do a thing like that? How?”
   “Maybe the same way we did. Dogs dream, you know—sure they do. Didn’t you ever see one lying fast asleep on the kitchen floor, paws twitching away? There was an old guy in Arnette, Vic Palfrey, and he used to say dogs had two dreams, the good dream and the bad one. The good one’s when the paws twitch. The bad one’s the growling dream. Wake a dog up in the middle of the bad dream, the growling dream, and he’s apt to bite you, like as not.”
   Glen shook his head in a dazed way. “You’re saying he dreamed —”
   “I’m not sayin anything funnier than what you were talking last night,” Stu reproached him.
   Glen grinned and nodded. “Oh, I can talk that stuff for hours on end. I’m one of the great all-time bullshitters. It’s when something actually happens.”
   “Awake at the lectern and asleep at the switch.”
   “Fuck you, East Texas. Want to come over and see my dog?”
   “You bet.”
   Glen’s house was on Spruce Street, about two blocks from the Boulderado Hotel. The climbing ivy on the porch trellis was mostly dead, as were all the lawns and most of the flowers in Boulder—without daily watering from the city mains, the arid climate had triumphed.

On the porch was a small round table holding up a gin and tonic. (“Ain’t that pretty horrible stuff without ice?” Stu asked, and Glen answered, “You don’t notice much one way or the other after the third one.”) Beside the drink was an ashtray with five pipes in it, copies of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Ball Four, and My Gun Is Quick —all of them open to different places. There was also an open bag of Kraft Cheese Kisses.
   Kojak was lying on the porch, his tattered snout laid peacefully on his forepaws. The dog was rack-thin and pitifully chewed, but Stu recognized him, even on short acquaintance. He squatted and began to stroke Kojak’s head. Kojak woke up and looked happily at Stu. In the way that dogs have, he seemed to grin.
   “Say, that’s a good dog,” Stu said, feeling a ridiculous lump in his throat. Like a deck of cards swiftly dealt with the faces up, he seemed to see every dog he’d had since his mom had given him Old Spike, when Stu was only five years old. A lot of dogs. Maybe not one for every card in the deck, but still a lot of dogs. A dog was a good thing to have, and so far as he knew, Kojak was the only dog in Boulder. He glanced up at Glen and glanced down quickly. He guessed even old bald sociologists who read three books at a whack didn’t like to get caught leaking around the eyes.
   “Good dog,” he repeated, and Kojak thumped his tail against the porch boards, presumably agreeing that he was, indeed, a good dog.
   “Going inside for a minute,” Glen said thickly. “Got to use the bathroom.”
   “Yeah,” Stu said, not looking up. “Hey, good boy, say, ole Kojak, wasn’t you a good boy? Ain’t you a one?”
   Kojak’s tail thumped agreeably.
   “Can you roll over? Play dead, boy. Roll over.”
   Kojak obediently rolled over on his back, rear legs splayed out, front paws in the air. Stu’s face grew concerned as he ran his hand gently over the stiff white concertina of bandage Dick Ellis had put on. Farther up, he could see red and puffy-looking scratches that undoubtedly deepened to gores under the bandages. Something had been at him, all right, and it hadn’t been some other wandering dog. A dog would have gone for the muzzle or the throat. What had happened to Kojak was the work of something lower than a dog. More sneaking. Wolfpack, maybe, but Stu doubted if Kojak could have gotten away from a pack. Whatever, he had been lucky not to be disemboweled.
   The screen banged as Glen came back out on the porch.
   “Whatever it was got at him didn’t miss his vitals by much,” Stu said.
   “The wounds were deep and he lost a lot of blood,” Glen agreed. “I just can’t get over thinking that I was the one who let him in for that.”
   “And Dick said wolves.”
   “Wolves or maybe coyotes… but he thought it was unlikely coyotes would have done such a job, and I agree.”
   Stu patted Kojak on the rump and Kojak rolled back onto his belly. “How is it almost all the dogs are gone and there’s still enough wolves in one place—and east of the Rockies, at that—to set on a good dog like this?”
   “I guess we’ll never know,” Glen said. “Any more than we’ll know why the goddamned plague took the horses but not the cows and most of the people but not us. I’m not even going to think about it. I’m just going to lay in a big supply of Gainesburgers and keep him fed.”
   “Yeah.” Stu looked at Kojak, whose eyes had slipped closed. “He’s tore up, but his doings are still intact—I saw that when he rolled over. We could do worse than to keep our eye out for a bitch, you know it?”
   “Yes, that’s so,” Glen said thoughtfully. “Want a warm gin and tonic, East Texas?”
   “Hell, no. I may never have gone any further than one year of vocational-technical school, but I’m no fucking barbarian. Got a beer?”
   “Oh, I think I can scare up a can of Coors. Warm, though.”
   “Sold.” He started to follow Glen into the house, then paused with the screen door in his hand to look back at the sleeping dog. “You sleep good, ole boy,” he told the dog. “Good to have you here.”
   He and Glen went inside.
   But Kojak wasn’t asleep.
   He lay somewhere between, where most living things spend a good deal of time when they are hurt badly, but not badly enough to be in the mortal shadow. A deep itch lay in his belly like heat, the itch of healing. Glen would have to spend a good many hours trying to distract him from that itch so he wouldn’t scratch off the bandages, reopen the wounds, and reinfect them. But that was later. Just now Kojak (who still thought of himself occasionally as Big Steve, which had been his original name) was content to drift in the place in between. The wolves had come for him in Nebraska, while he was still sniffing dejectedly around the house on jacklifters in the little town of Hemingford Home. The scent of THE MAN—the feel of THE MAN—had led to this place and then stopped. Where had he gone? Kojak didn’t know. And then the wolves, four of them, had come out of the corn like ragged spirits of the dead. Their eyes blazed at Kojak, and their lips wrinkled back from their teeth to let out the low, ripping growls of their intent. Kojak had retreated before them, growling himself, his paws stiff-out and digging at the dirt of Mother Abagail’s dooryard. To the left hung the tire-swing, casting its depthless round shadow. The lead wolf had attacked just as Kojak’s hindquarters slipped into the shadow cast by the porch. It came in low, going for the belly, and the others followed. Kojak sprang up and over the leader’s snapping muzzle, giving the wolf his underbelly, and as the leader began to bite and scratch, Kojak fastened his own teeth in the wolf’s neck, his teeth sinking deep, letting blood, and the wolf howled and tried to struggle away, its courage suddenly gone. As it pulled away, Kojak’s jaws closed with lightning speed on the wolf’s tender muzzle, and the wolf uttered a howling, abject scream as its nose was laid open to the nostrils and pulled to strings and tatters. It fled yipping with agony, shaking its head crazily from side to side, spraying droplets of blood to the left and right, and in the crude telepathy that all animals of like kind share, Kojak could read its over-and-over thought clearly enough:
   (wasps in me o the wasps the wasps in my head wasps are up my head o)
   And then the others hit him, one from the left and another from the right like huge blunt bullets, the last of the trio submarining in low, grinning, snapping, ready to pull out his intestines. Kojak had broken to the right, baying hoarsely, wanting to deal with that one first so he could get under the porch. If he could get under the porch he could stand them off, maybe forever. Lying on the porch now he relived the battle in a kind of slow motion: the growls and howls, the strikes and withdrawals, the smell of blood that had gotten into his brain and gradually turned him into a kind of fighting machine, unaware of his own wounds until later. He sent the wolf that had been on his right the way of the first, one of its eyes dead and a huge, gouting, and probably mortal wound in the side of its throat. But the wolf had done its own damage in return; most of it was superficial, but two of the gores were extremely deep, wounds that would heal to hard and twisting scar-tissue like a scrawling lowercase t. Even when he was an old, old dog (and Kojak lived another sixteen years, long after Glen Bateman died), those scars would pain and throb on wet days. He had fought free, had scrambled under the porch, and when one of the two remaining wolves, overcome with bloodlust, tried to wriggle in after him, Kojak sprang on it, pinned it, and ripped its throat out. The other retreated almost to the edge of the corn, whining uneasily. If Kojak had come out to do battle, it would have fled with its tail between its legs. But Kojak didn’t come out, not then. He was done in. He could only lie on his side, panting rapidly and weakly, licking his wounds and growling deep in his chest whenever he saw the shadow of the remaining wolf draw near. Then it was dark, and a misty halfmoon rode the sky over Nebraska. And each time the last wolf heard Kojak alive and presumably still ready to fight, it shied away, whining. Sometime after midnight it left, leaving Kojak alone to see if he would live or die. In the early morning hours he had felt the presence of some other animal, something that terrified him into a series of soft whimpers. It was a thing in the corn, a thing walking in the corn, hunting for him, perhaps. Kojak lay shivering, waiting to see if this thing would find him, this horrible thing that felt like a Man and a Wolf and an Eye, some dark thing like an ancient crocodile in the corn. Some unknown time later, after the moon went down, Kojak felt that it was gone. He fell asleep. He had lain up under the porch for three days, coming out only when hunger and thirst drove him out. There was always a puddle of water gathered below the lip of the handpump in the yard, and in the house there were all sorts of rich scraps, many of them from the meal Mother Abagail had cooked for Nick’s party. When Kojak felt he could go on, he knew where to go. It was not a scent that told him; it was a deep sense of heat that had come out of his own deep and mortal time, a glowing pocket of heat to the west of him. And so he came, limping most of the last five hundred miles on three legs, the pain always gnawing at his belly. From time to time he was able to smell THE MAN, and thus knew he was on the right track. And at last he was here. THE MAN was here. There were no wolves here. Food was here. There was no sense of that dark Thing… the Man with the stink of a wolf and the feel of an Eye that could see you over long miles if it happened to turn your way. For now, things were fine. And so thinking (so far as dogs can think in their careful relating to a world seen almost wholly through feelings), Kojak drifted down deeper, now into real sleep, now into a dream, a good dream of chasing rabbits through the clover and timothy grass that was belly-high and wet with soothing dew. His name was Big Steve. This was the north forty. And oh the rabbits are everywhere this gray and endless morning—
   As he dreamed, his paws twitched.

Larry joined the singing too, and when it was done and the applause rolled out once more, he was crying a bit himself. Rita was gone. Alice Underwood was gone. New York was gone. America was gone. Even if they could defeat Randall Flagg, whatever they might make would never be the same as that world of dark streets and bright dreams.
   Sweating freely under the bright emergency lights, Stu called the first items: reading and ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The singing of the anthem had also affected him deeply, and he wasn’t alone. Half the audience, more, was in tears.
   No one asked for an actual reading of either document—which would have been their right under the parliamentary process—for which Stu was profoundly grateful. He wasn’t much of a reader. The “reading” section of each item was approved by the Free Zone citizens. Glen Bateman rose and moved that they accept both documents as governing Free Zone law.
   A voice in the back said, “Second that!”
   “Moved and seconded,” Stu said. “Those in favor say aye.”
   “AYE! ” to the rooftops. Kojak, who had been sleeping by Glen’s chair, looked up, blinked, and then laid his muzzle on his paws again. A moment later he looked up again as the crowd gave themselves a thunderous round of applause. They like voting, Stu thought. It makes them feel like they’re finally in control of something again. God knows they need that feeling. We all need it.
   That preliminary taken care of, Stu felt tension worm into his muscles. Now, he thought, we’ll see if there are any nasty surprises waiting for us.
   “The third item on your agenda reads,” he began, and then he had to clear his throat again. Feedback whined at him, making him sweat even more. Fran was looking calmly up at him, nodding for him to go on. “It reads, ‘To see if the Free Zone will nominate and elect a slate of seven Free Zone representatives.’ That means—”
   “Mr. Chairman? Mr. Chairman!”
   Stu looked up from his jotted notes and felt a real jolt of fear, accompanied by something like a premonition. It was Harold Lauder. Harold was dressed in a suit and a tie, his hair was neatly combed, and he was standing halfway up the middle aisle. Once Glen had said he thought the opposition might coalesce around Harold. But so soon? He hoped not. For just a moment he thought wildly of not recognizing Harold—but both Nick and Glen had warned him of the dangers inherent in making any part of this look like a railroad job. He wondered if he had been wrong about Harold turning over a new leaf. It looked as if he was going to find out right here.
   “Chair recognizes Harold Lauder.”
   Heads turned, necks craned to see Harold better.
   “I’d like to move that we accept the slate of ad hoc committee members in toto as the Permanent Committee. If they’ll serve, that is.” Harold sat down.
   There was a moment of silence. Stu thought crazily: Toto? Toto? Wasn’t that the dog in The Wizard of Oz?
   Then the applause swelled out again, filling the room, and dozens of cries of “I second!” rang out. Harold was sitting placidly in his seat again, smiling and talking to the people who were thumping him on the back.
   Stu brought his gavel doyen half a dozen times for order.
   He planned this, Stu thought. These people are going to elect us, but it’s Harold they’ll remember. Still, he got to the root of the thing in a way none of us thought of, not even Glen. It was pretty damn near a stroke of genius. So why should he be so upset? Was he jealous, maybe? Were his good resolutions about Harold, made only the day before yesterday, already going by the boards?
   “There’s a motion on the floor,” he blared into the mike, ignoring the feedback whine this time. “Motion on the floor, folks!” He pounded the gavel and they quieted to a low babble. “It’s been moved and seconded that we accept the ad hoc committee just as it stands as the Permanent Free Zone Committee. Before we go to a discussion of the motion or to a vote, I ought to ask if anyone now serving on the committee has an objection or would like to step down.”
   Silence from the floor.
   “Very well,” Stu said. “Discussion of the motion?”
   “I don’t think we need any, Stu,” Dick Ellis said. “It’s a grand idea. Let’s vote!”
   Applause greeted this, and Stu needed no further urging. Charlie Impening was waving his hand to be recognized, but Stu ignored him—a good case of selective perception, Glen Bateman would have said—and called the question.
   “Those in favor of Harold Lauder’s motion please signify by saying aye.”
   “Aye!! ” they bellowed, sending the barnswallows into another frenzy.
   “Opposed?”
   But no one was, not even Charlie Impening—at least, vocally. There was not a nay in the chamber. So Stu pushed on to the next item of business, feeling slightly dazed, as if someone—namely, Harold Lauder—had crept up behind him and clopped him one on the head with a large sledgehammer made out of Silly Putty.
   “Let’s get off and push them awhile, want to?” Fran asked. She sounded tired.
   “Sure.” He got off his bike and walked along beside her. “You okay, Fran? The baby bothering?”
   “No. I’m just tired. It’s quarter of one in the morning, or hadn’t you noticed?”
   “Yeah, it’s late,” Stu agreed, and they pushed their bikes side by side in companionable silence. The meeting had gone on until an hour ago, most of the discussion centering on the search-party for Mother Abagail. The other items had all passed with a minimum of discussion, although Judge Farris had provided a fascinating piece of information that explained why there were so relatively few bodies in Boulder. According to the last four issues of the Camera, Boulder’s daily newspaper, a wild rumor had swept the community, a rumor that the superflu had originated in the Boulder Air Testing facility on Broadway. Spokesmen for the center—the few still on their feet—protested that it was utter nonsense, and anyone who doubted it was free to tour the facility, where they would find nothing more dangerous than air pollution indicators and wind-vectoring devices. In spite of this, the rumor persisted, probably fed by the hysterical temper of those terrible days in late June. The Air Testing Center had been either bombed or burned, and much of Boulder’s population had fled.
   Both the Burial Committee and the Power Committee had been passed with an amendment from Harold Lauder—who had seemed almost awesomely prepared for the meeting—to the effect that each committee be increased by two for each increase of one hundred in the total Free Zone population.
   The Search Committee was also voted with no opposition, but the discussion of Mother Abagail’s disappearance had been a protracted one. Glen had advised Stu before the meeting not to limit discussion on this topic unless absolutely necessary; it was worrying all of them, especially the idea that their spiritual leader believed she had committed some sort of sin. Best to let them get it off their chests.
   On the back of her note, the old woman had scrawled two biblical references: Proverbs II: 1–3, and Proverbs 21:28-31. Judge Farris had searched these out with the careful diligence of a lawyer preparing a brief, and at the beginning of the discussion, he rose and read them in his cracked and apocalyptic old man’s voice. The verses in the eleventh chapter of Proverbs stated, “A false balance is an abomination of the Lord: but a just weight is his delight. When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom. The integrity of the upright shall guide them: but the perverseness of transgressors shall destroy them.” The quotation from the twenty-first chapter was in a similar vein: “A false witness shall perish, but the man that heareth speaketh constantly. A wicked man hardeneth his face, but as for the upright, he directeth his way. There is no wisdom nor understanding nor counsel against the Lord. The horse is prepared against the day of battle: but safety is of the Lord.”
   The talk following the Judge’s oration (it could be called nothing else) of these two Scriptural tidbits had ranged over far-reaching—and often comical—ground. One man stated ominously that if the chapter numbers were added, you came out with thirty-one, the number of chapters in the Book of Revelations. Judge Farris rose again to say that the Book of Revelations had only twenty-two chapters, at least in his Bible, and that, in any case, twenty-one and eleven added up to thirty-two, not thirty-one. The aspiring numerologist muttered but said no more.
   Another fellow stated that he had seen lights in the sky the night before Mother Abagail’s disappearance and that the Prophet Isaiah had confirmed the existence of flying saucers… so they’d better put that in their collective pipe and smoke it, hadn’t they? Judge Farris rose once more, this time to point out that the previous gentleman had mistaken Isaiah for Ezekiel, that the exact reference was not to flying saucers but to “a wheel within a wheel,” and that the Judge himself was of the opinion that the only flying saucers yet proven were those that sometimes flew during marital spats.
   Much of the other discussion was a rehash of the dreams, which had ceased altogether, as far as anyone knew, and now seemed rather dreamlike themselves. Person after person rose to protest the charge that Mother Abagail had laid upon herself, that of pride. They spoke of her courtesy and her ability to put a person at ease with just a word or a sentence. Ralph Brentner, who looked awed by the size of the crowd and was nearly tongue-tied—but determined to speak his piece—rose and spoke in that vein for nearly five minutes, adding at the end that he had not known a finer woman since his mother had died. When he sat down, he seemed very near tears.
   When taken together, the discussion reminded Stu uncomfortably of a wake. It told him that in their hearts, they had already come halfway to giving her up. If she did return now, Abby Freemantle would find herself welcomed, still sought after, still listened to… but she would also find, Stu thought, that her position was subtly changed. If a showdown between her and the Free Zone Committee came, it was no longer a foregone conclusion that she would win, veto power or not. She had gone away and the community had continued to exist. The community would not forget that, as they had already half forgotten the power the dreams had once briefly held over their lives.
   After the meeting, more than two dozen people had sat for a while on the lawn behind Chautauqua Hall; the rain had stopped, the clouds were tattering, and the evening was pleasantly cool. Stu and Frannie had sat with Larry, Lucy, Leo, and Harold.
   “You darn near knocked us out of the ballpark this evening,” Larry told Harold. He nudged Frannie with an elbow. “I told you he was ace high, didn’t I?”
   Harold had merely smiled and shrugged modestly. “A couple of ideas, that’s all. You seven have started things moving again. You should at least have the privilege of seeing it through to the end of the beginning.”
   Now, fifteen minutes after the two of them had left that impromptu gathering and still ten minutes from home, Stu repeated: “You sure you’re feeling okay?”
   “Yes. My legs are a little tired, that’s all.”
   “You want to take it easy, Frances.”
   “Don’t call me that, you know I hate it.”
   “I’m sorry. I won’t do it again. Frances.”
   “All men are bastards.”
   “I’m going to try and improve my act, Frances—honest I am.”
   She showed him her tongue, which came to an interesting point, but he could tell her heart wasn’t in the banter, and he dropped it. She looked pale and rather listless, a startling contrast to the Frannie who had sung the National Anthem with such heart a few hours earlier.
   “Something giving you the blues, honey?”
   She shook her head no, but he thought he saw tears in her eyes.
   “What is it? Tell me.”
   “It’s nothing. That’s what’s the matter. Nothing is what’s bothering me. It’s over, and I finally realized it, that’s all. Less than six hundred people singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’ It just kind of hit me all at once. No hotdog stands. The Ferris wheel isn’t going around and around at Coney Island tonight. No one’s having a nightcap at the Space Needle in Seattle. Someone finally found a way to clean up the dope in Boston’s Combat Zone and the chicken-ranch business in Times Square. Those were terrible things, but I think the cure was a lot worse than the disease. Know what I mean?”
   “Yeah, I do.”
   “In my diary I had a little section called ‘Things to Remember.’ So the baby would know… oh, all the things he never will. And it gives me the blues, thinking of that. I should have called it ‘Things That Are Gone.’” She did sob a little, stopping her bike so she could put the back of her hand to her mouth and try to keep it in.
   “It got everybody the same way,” Stu said, putting an arm around her. “Lot of people are going to cry themselves to sleep tonight. You better believe it.”
   “I don’t see how you can grieve for a whole country,” she said, crying harder, “but I guess you can. These… these little things keep shooting through my mind. Car salesmen. Frank Sinatra. Old Orchard Beach in July, all crowded with people, most of them from Quebec. That stupid guy on MTV—Randy, I think his name was. The times… oh God, I sound like a fuh-fuh-frigging Rod Muh-McKuen poem!”
   He held her, patting her back, remembering one time when his Aunt Betty had gotten a crying fit over some bread that didn’t rise—she was big with his little cousin Laddie then, seven months or so—and Stu could remember her wiping her eyes with the corner of a dishtowel and telling him to never mind, any pregnant woman was just two doors down from the mental ward because the juices their glands put out were always scrambled up into a stew.
   After a while Frannie said, “Okay. Okay. Better. Let’s go.”
   “Frannie, I love you,” he said. They resumed pushing their bikes.
   She asked him, “What do you remember best? What’s the one thing?”
   “Well, you know—” he said, and then stopped with a little laugh.
   “No, I don’t know, Stuart.”
   “It’s crazy.”
   “Tell me.”
   “I don’t know if I want to. You’ll start looking for the guys with the butterfly nets.”
   “Tell me!” She had seen Stu in many moods, but this curious, embarrassed uneasiness was new to her.
   “I never told anybody,” he said, “but I have been thinking on it the last couple of weeks. Something happened to me back in 1982, I was pumping gas at Bill Hapscomb’s gas station then. He used to hire me on, if he could, when I was laid off at the calculator plant in town. He had me on part-time, eleven P.M. to closing, which was three in the morning back in those days. There wasn’t much business after the people getting off the three-to-eleven shift at the Dixie Paper factory stopped to get their gas… lots of nights there wasn’t a single car stopped between twelve and three. I’d sit there and read a book or a magazine, and lots of night I’d doze off. You know?”
   “Yes.” She did know. In her mind’s eye she could see him, the man who would become her man in the fullness of time and the peculiarity of events, a broad-shouldered man sleeping in a plastic Woolco chair with a book open and facedown on his lap. She saw him sleeping in an island of white light, an island surrounded by a great inland sea of Texas night. She loved him in this picture, as she loved him in all the pictures her mind drew.
   “Well, this one night it was about quarter past two, and I was sitting behind Hap’s desk with my feet up, reading some Western—Louis L’Amour, Elmore Leonard, someone like that, and in pulls this big old Pontiac with all the windows rolled down and the tape-player going like mad, playing Hank Williams. I even remember the song—it was ‘Movin’ On.’ This guy, not young and not old, is all by himself. He was a good-lookin man, but in a way that was a little scary—I mean, he looked like he might do scary things without thinkin very hard about em. He had bushy, curly dark hair. There was a bottle of wine snugged down between his legs and a pair of Styrofoam dice hanging from the rearview mirror. He says, ‘High test,’ and I said okay, but for a minute I just stood there and looked at him. Because he looked familiar. I was playin place the face.”
   They were on the corner now; their apartment building was across the street. They paused there. Frannie was looking at him closely.
   “So I said, ‘Don’t I know you? Ain’t you from up around Corbett or Maxin?’ But it didn’t really seem like I knew him from those two towns. And he says, ‘No, but I passed through Corbett once with my family, when I was just a kid. It seems like I passed through just about everyplace in America when I was a kid. My dad was in the Air Force.’
   “So I went back and filled up his car, and all the time I’m thinkin about him, playing place the face, and all at once it came to me. All at once I knew. And I damned near pissed myself, because the man behind the wheel of that Pontiac was supposed to be dead.”
   “Who was he, Stuart? Who was he?”
   “No, you let me tell it my way, Frannie. Not that it isn’t a crazy story no matter what way you tell it. I went back to the window and I says, ‘That’ll be six dollars and thirty cents.’ He gave me two five-dollar bills and told me I could keep the change. And I says, ‘I think I might have you placed now.’ And he says, ‘Well, maybe you do,’ and he gives me this weird, chilly smile, and all the time Hank Williams is singin about goin to town. I says, ‘If you are who I think you are, you’re supposed to be dead.’ He says, ‘You don’t want to believe everything you read, man.’ I says, ‘You like Hank Williams all right?’ It was all I could think of to say. Because I saw, Frannie, if I didn’t say something, he was just going to roll up that power window and go tooling on down the road… and I wanted him to go, but I also didn’t want him to go. Not yet. Not until I was sure. I didn’t know then that a person is never sure about a lot of things, no matter how much he wants to be.
   “He says, ‘Hank Williams is one of the best. I like roadhouse music.’ Then he says, ‘I’m going to New Orleans, going to drive all night, sleep all day tomorrow, then barrelhouse all night long. Is it the same? New Orleans?’ And I say, ‘As what?’ And he says, ‘Well, you know.’ And I say, ‘Well, it’s all the South, you know, although there are considerable more trees down that way.’ And that makes him laugh. He says, ‘Maybe I’ll see you again.’ But I didn’t want to see him again, Frannie. Because he had the eyes of a man who has been trying to look into the dark for a long time and has maybe begun to see what is there. I think, if I ever see that man Flagg, his eyes might look a little like that.”
   Stu shook his head as they pushed their bikes across the road and parked them. “I’ve been thinking of that. I thought about getting some of his records after that, but I didn’t want them. His voice… it’s a good voice, but it gives me the creeps.”
   “Stuart, who are you talking about?”
   “You remember a rock and roll group called The Doors? The man that stopped that night for gas in Arnette was Jim Morrison. I’m sure of it.”
   Her mouth dropped open. “But he died! He died in France! He—” And then she stopped. Because there had been something funny about Morrison’s death, hadn’t there? Something secret.
   “Did he?” Stu asked. “I wonder. Maybe he did, and the fellow I saw was just a guy who looked like him, but—”
   “Do you really think it was?” she asked.
   They were sitting on the steps of their building now, shoulders touching, like small children waiting for their mother to call them in to supper.
   “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I do. And until this summer, I thought that would always be the strangest thing that ever happened to me. Boy, was I wrong.”
   “And you never told anyone,” she marveled. “You saw Jim Morrison years after he supposedly died and you never told anyone. Stuart Redman, God should have given you a combination lock instead of a mouth when He sent you out into the world.”
   Stu smiled. “Well, the years rolled by, as they say in the books, and whenever I thought of that night—as I did, from time to time—I got surer and surer it wasn’t him after all. Just someone who looked a little bit like him, you know. I had my mind pretty well at rest on the subject. But in the last few weeks, I’ve found myself puzzling over it again. And I think more and more that it was. Hell, he might even still be alive now. That’d be a real laugh, wouldn’t it?”
   “If he is,” she said, “he’s not here.”
   “No,” Stu agreed, “I wouldn’t expect him to be here. I saw his eyes, you see.”
   She put her hand on his arm. “That’s some story.”
   “Yeah, and there’s probably twenty million people in this country with one just like it… only about Elvis Presley or Howard Hughes.”
   “Not anymore.”
   “No—not anymore. Harold was something tonight, wasn’t he?”
   “I believe that’s called changing the subject.”
   “I believe you’re right.”
   “Yes,” she said, “he was.”