What a wonderful experience Times Square is when you're dead! There is ten timesthe light a living being sees. All metal things vibrate with inner life.Electric wires are thin scratches in the air. Neon sings. The world is filledwith strange sights and cries. Everything shifts from beauty to beauty.

Something that looked like a cross between a dragon and a wisp of smoke wasfeeding in the Square. But it was lost among so many wonders that I gave it noparticular thought.

Night again. I awoke with Led Zeppelin playing in the back of my head. Stairwayto Heaven. Again. It can be a long wait between Dead Milkmen cuts.

"Wakey-risey, little man," crooned one of the Sisters. It was funny howsometimes they took a close personal interest in our doings, and other timesignored us completely. "This is Euphrosyne with the red-eye weather report. Theoutlook is moody with a chance of existential despair. You won't be goingoutside tonight if you know what's good for you. There'll be lightning withinthe hour."

"It's too late in the year for lightning," I said.

"Oh dear. Should I inform the weather?"

By now I was beginning to realize that what I had taken on awakening to be theCorpsegrinder's dark aura was actually the high-pressure front of an approachingstorm. The first drops of rain pattered on the roof. Wind skirled and the raingrew stronger. Thunder growled in the distance. "Why don't you just go fuckyour--"

A light laugh that trilled up into the supersonic, and she was gone.

I was listening to the rain underfoot when a lightning bolt screamed intoexistence, turning me inside-out for the briefest instant then cartwheelinggleefully into oblivion. In the instant of restoration following the bolt, thewalls were transparent and all the world made of glass, its secrets available tobe snooped out. But before comprehension was possible, the walls opaqued againand the lightning's malevolent aftermath faded like a madman's smile in thenight.

Through it all the Seven Sisters were laughing and singing, screaming with joywhenever a lightning bolt flashed, and making up nonsense poems from howls,whistles, and static. During a momentary lull, the flat hum of a carrier wavefilled my head. Phaenna, by the feel of her. But instead of her voice, I heardonly the sound of fearful sobs.

"Widow?" I said. "Is that you?"

"She can't hear you," Phaenna purred. "You're lucky I'm here to bring you up tospeed. A lightning bolt hit the transformer outside her house. It was bound tohappen sooner or later. Your Nemesis--the one you call the Corpsegrinder, such acute nickname, by the way--has her trapped."

This was making no sense at all. "Why would the Corpsegrinder be after her?"

"Why why why why?" Phaenna sang, a snatch of some pop ballad or other.

"You didn't get answers when you were alive, what makes you think you'd get anynow?" The sobbing went on and on. "She can sit it out," I said. "TheCorpsegrinder can't--hey, wait. Didn't they just wire her house for cable? I'mtrying to picture it. Phone lines on one side, electric on the other, cable. Shecan slip out on his blind side."

The sobs lessened and then rose in a most un-Widow like wail of despair.

"Typical," Phaenna said. "You haven't the slightest notion of what you'retalking about. The lightning stroke has altered your little pet. Go out and seefor yourself." My hackles rose. "You know damned good and well that I can't--"

Phaenna's attention shifted and the carrier beam died. The Seven Sisters arefickle that way. This time, though, it was just as well. No way was I going outthere to face that monstrosity. I couldn't. And I was grateful not to have toadmit it.

For a long while I sat thinking about the Corpsegrinder. Even here, protected bythe strong walls of the Roxy, the mere thought of it was paralyzing. I tried toimagine what Charlie's Widow was going through, separated from this monster byonly a thin curtain of brick and stucco. Feeling the hard radiation of itsmalice and need ... It was beyond my powers of visualization. Eventually Igave up and thought instead about my first meeting with the Widow.

She was coming down the hill from Roxborough with her arms out, the invertedimage of a child playing a tightrope walker. Placing one foot ahead of the otherwith deliberate concentration, scanning the wire before her so cautiously thatshe was less than a block away when she saw me.

She screamed.

Then she was running straight at me. My back was to the transformerstation--there was no place to flee. I shrank away as she stumbled to a halt.

"It's you!" she cried. "Oh God, Charlie, I knew you'd come back for me, I waitedso long but I never doubted you, never, we can--" She lunged forward as if tohug me. Our eyes met. All the joy in her died.

"Oh," she said. "It's not you." I was fresh off the high-tension lines, stillvibrating with energy and fear. My mind was a blaze of contradictions. I couldremember almost nothing of my post-death existence. Fragments, bits of advicefrom the old dead, a horrifying confrontation with ... something, somecreature or phenomenon that had driven me to flee Manhattan. Whether it was thisevent or the fearsome voltage of that radiant highway that had scoured me ofexperience, I did not know. "It's me," I protested.

"No, it's not." Her gaze was unflatteringly frank. "You're not Charlie and younever were. You're--just the sad remnant of what once was a man, and not a verygood one at that." She turned away. She was leaving me! In my confusion, I feltsuch a despair as I had never known before.

"Please ... " I said.

She stopped.

A long silence. Then what in a livingwoman would have been a sigh. "You'd thinkthat I--well, never mind." She offered her hand, and when I would not take it,said, "This way."

I followed her down Main Street, through the shallow canyon of the businessdistrict to a diner at the edge of town. It was across from Hubcap Heaven and anautomotive junkyard bordered it on two sides. The diner was closed. We settleddown on the ceiling.

"That's where the car ended up after I died," she said, gesturing toward thejunkyard. "It Was right after I got the call about Charlie. I stayed up drinkingand after a while it occurred to me that maybe they were wrong, they'd made somesort of horrible mistake and he wasn't really dead, you know?

Like maybe he was in a coma or something, some horrible kind of misdiagnosis,they'd gotten him confused with somebody else, who knows? Terrible things happenin hospitals. They make mistakes.

"I decided I had to go and straighten things out. There wasn't time to makecoffee so I went to the medicine cabinet and gulped down a bunch of pills atrandom, figuring something among them would keep me awake. Then I jumped intothe car and started off for Colorado."

"My God."

"I have no idea how fast I was going--everything was a blur when I crashed. Atleast I didn't take anybody with me, thank the Lord. There was this one horriblemoment of confusion and pain and rage and then I found myself lying on the floorof the car with my corpse just inches beneath me on the underside of the roof."She was silent for a moment. "My first impulse was to crawl out the window.Lucky for me I didn't." Another pause. "It took me most of a night to work myway out of the yard. I had to go from wreck to wreck. There were these gaps tojump. It was a nightmare."

"I'm amazed you had the presence of mind to stay in the car."

"Dying sobers you up fast."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. And without the slightest hesitation, she joinedright in with me. It was a fine warm moment, the first I'd had since I didn'tknow when. The two of us set each other off, laughing louder and louder, ourmerriment heterodyning until it filled every television screen for a mile aroundwith snow.