My defenses were down. She reached out and took my hand.

Memory flooded me. It was her first date with Charlie. He was an electrician.Her next-door neighbor was having the place rehabbed. She'd been working in theback yard and he struck up a conversation. Then he asked her out. They went to adisco in the Adam's Mark over on City Line Avenue.

She wasn't eager to get involved with somebody just then. She was stillrecovering from a hellish affair with a married man who'd thought that since hewasn't available for anything permanent, that made her his property. But whenCharlie suggested they go out to the car for some coke--it was theSeventies--she'd said sure. He was going to put the moves on her sooner orlater. Might as welt get it settled early so they'd have more time for dancing.

But after they'd done up the lines, Charlie had shocked her by taking her handsin his and kissing them. She worked for a Bucks County pottery in those days andher hands were rough and red. She was very sensitive about them.

"Beautiful hands," he murmured. "Such beautiful, beautiful hands."

"You're making fun of me," she protested, hurt.

"No! These are hands that do things, and they've been shaped by the thingsthey've done. The way stones in a stream are shaped by the water that passesover them. The way tools are shaped by their work. A hammer is beautiful, ifit's a good hammer, and your hands are, too."

He could have been scamming her. But something in his voice, his manner, saidno, he really meant it. She squeezed his hands and saw that they were beautiful,too. Suddenly she was glad she hadn't gone off the pill when she broke up withDaniel. She started to cry. Her date looked alarmed and baffled. But shecouldn't stop. All the tears she hadn't cried in the past two years came pouringout of her, unstoppable.

Charlie-boy, she thought, you just got lucky.

All this in an instant. I snatched my hands away, breaking contact. "Don't dothat!" I cried. "Don't you ever touch me again!"

With flat disdain, the Widow said, "It wasn't pleasant for me either. But I hadto see how much of your life you remember."

It was naive of me, but I was shocked to realize that the passage of memorieshad gone both ways. But before I could voice my outrage, she said, "There's notmuch left of you. You're only a fragment of a man, shreds and tatters, hardlyanything. No wonder you're so frightened. You've got what Charlie calls a lowsignal-to-noise ratio. What happened in New York City almost destroyed you."

"That doesn't give you the right to--"

"Oh be still. You need to know this. Living is simple, you just keep going. Butdeath is complex. It's so hard to hang on and so easy to let go. The temptationis always there. Believe me, I know. There used to be five of us in Roxborough,and where are the others now? Two came through Manayunk last spring and campedout under the El for a season and they're gone, too. Holding it together is hardwork. One day the stars start singing to you, and the next you begin to listento them. A week later they start to make sense. You're just reacting toevents--that's not good enough. If you mean to hold on, you've got to know whyyou're doing it."

"So why are you?"

"I'm waiting for Charlie," she said simply.

It occurred to me to wonder exactly how many years she had been waiting. Three?Fifteen? Just how long was it possible to hold on? Even in my confused andemotional state, though, I knew better than to ask. Deep inside she must'veknown as well as I did that Charlie wasn't coming. "My name's Cobb," I said."What's yours?"

She hesitated and then, with an odd sidelong look, said, "I'm Charlie's widow.That's all that matters." It was all the name she ever gave, and Charlie's Widowshe was to me from then onward.

I rolled onto my back on the tin ceiling and spread out my arms and legs, aphantom starfish among the bats. A fragment, she had called me, shreds andtatters. No wonder you're so frightened! In all the months since I'd been washedinto this backwater of the power grid, she'd never treated me with anything buta condescension bordering on contempt.

So I went out into the storm after all.

The rain was nothing. It passed right through me. But there were ion-heavy gustsof wind that threatened to knock me off the lines, and the transformer outsidethe Widow's house was burning a fierce actinic blue. It was a gusher of energy,a flare star brought to earth, dazzling. A bolt of lightning un-zipped me,turned me inside out, and restored me before I had a chance to react.

The Corpsegrinder was visible from the Roxy, but between the burning transformerand the creature's metamorphosis, I was within a block of the monster before Iunderstood exactly what it was I was seeing.

It was feeding off the dying transformer, sucking in energy so greedily that itpulsed like a mosquito engorged with blood. Enormous plasma wings warped toeither side, hot blue and transparent. They curved entirely around the Widow'shouse in an unbroken and circular wall. At the resonance points they extrudedless detailed versions of the Corpsegrinder itself, like sentinels, all facingthe Widow.

Surrounding her with a prickly ring of electricity and malice.

I retreated a block, though the transformer fire apparently hid me from theCorpsegrinder, for it stayed where it was, eyelessly staring inward. Three timesI circled the house from a distance, looking for a way in. An unguarded cable, awrought-iron fence, any unbroken stretch of metal too high or too low for theCorpsegrinder to reach.

Nothing.

Finally, because there was no alternative, I entered the house across the streetfrom the Widow's, the one that was best shielded from the spouting andstuttering transformer. A power line took me into the attic crawlspace. Fromthere I scaled the electrical system down through the second and first floorsand so to the basement. I had a brief glimpse of a man asleep on a couch beforethe television. The set was off but it still held a residual charge. It satquiescent, Smug, bloated with stolen energies. If the poor bastard on the couchcould have seen what I saw, he'd've never turned on the TV again. In thebasement I hand-over-handed myself from the washing machine to the main waterinlet. Straddling the pipe, I summoned all my courage and plunged my headunderground.

It was black as pitch. I inched forward on the pipe in a kind of panic. I couldsee nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing. All I could feel wasthe iron pipe beneath my hands. Just beyond the wall the pipe ended in a T-jointwhere it hooked into a branch line under the drive. I followed it to the street.

It was awful: like suffocation infinitely prolonged. Like being wrapped in blackcloth. Like being drowned in ink. Like strangling noiselessly in the voidbetween the stars. To distract myself, I thought about my old man.

When my father was young, he navigated between cities by radio. Driving dark andusually empty highways, he'd twist the dial back and forth, back and forth,until he'd hit a station. Then he'd withdraw his hand and wait for the stationID. That would give him his rough location--that he was somewhere outside ofAlbany, say. A sudden signal coming in strong and then abruptly dissolving ingroans and eerie whistles was a fluke of the ionosphere, impossibly distant andeasily disregarded. One that faded in and immediately out meant he had grazedthe edge of a station's range. But then a signal would grow and strengthen as hepenetrated its field, crescendo, fade, and collapse into static and silence.That left him north of Troy, let's say, and making good time. He would begin thesearch for the next station.

You could drive across the continent in this way, passed from hand to hand bylocal radio, and tuned in to the geography of the night.