“I’m not sure,” Billingsley replied. “But I think we d do well to kind of gather ‘round young Master Carver He hesitated, then added: “The oldtimers say that any campfire does on a cold night.”

It picked the dead coyote up and examined it. “Soma dies; pneuma departs; only sarx remains,” it said in a voice that was a paradox: both sonorous and entirely without tone.

“So it has always been; so shall it always be; life sucks, then you die.”

It carried the animal downstairs, paws and shattered head dangling, body swaying like a bloody fur stole. The creature holding it stood for a moment inside the main doors of the Municipal Building, looking out into the blowy dark, listening to the wind. “So cah set!”

it exclaimed, then turned away and took the animal into the Town Office. It looked at the coathooks to the right of the door and saw immediately that the girl-Pie, to her brother—had been taken down and wrapped in a drape.

Its pale face twisted in anger as it looked at the child s covered form.

“Took her down!” it told the dead coyote in its arms “Rotten boy took her down! Stupid, troublemaking boy’ Yes. Feckless boy. Rude boy. Foolish boy. In some ways that last was the best, wasn’t it.

The truest. Foolish prayboy trying to make at least some part of it come right as if any part of a thing like this ever could be, as if death were an obscenity that could be scrubbed off life’s wall by a strong arm. As if the closed book could be reopened and read again, with a different ending.

Yet its anger was twisted through with fear, like a yellow stitch through red cloth, because the boy was not giving up, and so the rest of them were not giving up. They should not have dared to run from (Entragian her it them) even if their cell doors had been standing wide open. Yet they had. Because of the boy, the wretched over-blown prideful praying boy, who had had the insolence to take down his little cunt of a sister and try to give her something approximating a decent burial—A kind of dull warmth on its fingers and palms. It looked down and saw that it had plunged Ellen’s hands into the coyote’s belly all the way to the wrists.

It had intended to hang the coyote on one of the hooks, simply because that was what it had done with some of the others, but now another idea occurred. It carried the coyote across to the green bundle on the floor, knelt, and pulled the drape open. It looked down with a silent snarling mouth at the dead girl who had grown inside this present body.

That he should have covered her!

It pulled Ellen’s hands, now dressed in lukewarm blood-gloves, out of the coyote and laid the animal down on top of Kirsten. It opened the coyote’s jaws and placed them around the child’s neck. There was something both grisly and fantastic about this tableau de Ia mort; it was like a woodcut illustration from a black fairy-tale.

“Tak,” it whispered, and grinned. Ellen Carver’s lower lip split open when it did. Blood ran down her chin in an unnoticed rill. The rotten, presumptuous little boy would probably never view this revision of his revision, but how nice it was to imagine his reaction to it if he did! If he saw how little his efforts had come to, how easily respect could be snatched back, how naturally zero reasserted itself in the artificially concocted integers of men.

It pulled the drape up to the coyote’s neck. Now the child and the beast almost seemed to be lovers. How it wished the boy were here! The father, too, but especially the boy.

Because it was the boy who so badly needed instruction.

It was the boy who was the dangerous one.

There was scuttering from behind it, a sound too low to be heard… but it heard it anyway. It pivoted on Ellen’s knees and saw the recluse spiders returning. They came through the Town Office door, turned left, then streamed up the wall, over posters announcing forthcoming town business and soliciting volunteers for this fall’s Pioneer Days extravaganza. Above the one announcing an infor-mational meeting at which Desperation Mining Corpora-tion officials would discuss the resumption of copper mining at the so-called China Pit, the spiders re-formed their circle.

The tall woman in the coverall and the Sam Browne belt got up and approached them.

The circle on the wall trembled, as if expressing fear or ecstasy or perhaps both. The woman put bloody hands together, then opened them to the wall, palms out. “Ah lah.”

The circle dissolved. The spiders scurried into a new shape, moving with the precision of a drill-team put-ting on a halftime show. I, they made, then broke up, scurried, and made an H. An E followed, an A, another T, another E—It waved them off while they were still scrambling around up there, deciding how to fall in and make an R.

“En tow,” it said. “Ras.”

The spiders gave up on their R and resumed their faintly trembling circle.

“Ten ah.” it asked after a moment, and the spiders formed a new figure. It was a circle, the shape of the mi. The woman with Ellen Carver’s fingerprints looked at it for several moments, tapping Ellen’s fingers against Ellen’s collarbones, then waved Ellen’s hand at the wall. The figure broke up. The spiders began to stream down to the floor.

It walked back out into the hall, not looking at the spi-ders streaming about its feet. The spiders would be avail-able if it needed them, and that was all that mattered.

It stood at the double doors, once more looking out into the night. It couldn’t see the old movie house, but that was all right; it knew where The American West was, about an eighth of a mile north of here, just past the town’s only intersection. And, thanks to the fiddlebacks, she now knew where they were, as well.

Where he was. The shitting little prayboy.

Johnny Marinville told his story again-all of it, this time. For the first time in a good many years he tried to keep it short-there were critics all over America who would have applauded, partly in disbelief. He told them about stopping to take a leak, and how Entragian had planted the pot in his saddlebag while he was doing it. He told them about the coyotes-the one Entragian had seemed to talk to and the others, posted along the road at intervals like a weird honor guard-and about how the big cop had beaten him up. He recounted the murder of Billy Rancourt, and then, with no appreciable change in his voice, about how the buzzard had attacked him, seem-ingly at Collie Entragian’s command.

There was an expression of frank disbelief on Audrey Wyler’s face at this, but Johnny saw Steve and the skinny little girl he’d picked up somewhere along the way ex-change a look of sick understanding. Johnny didn’t glance around to see how the others were taking it, but instead looked down at his hands on his knees, concentrating as he did when he was trying to work through a tough patch of composition.

“He wanted me to suck his cock. I think that was sup-posed to start me gibbering and begging for mercy, but I didn’t find the idea as shocking as Entragian maybe expected.

Cocksucking’s a pretty standard sexual demand in situations where authority’s exceeded its normal bounds and restrictions, but it’s not what it looks like. On the surface, rape is about dominance and aggression. Underneath, though, it’s about fear-driven anger.”

“Thank you, Dr. Ruth,” Audrey said. “Next ye vill be discussink ze imberdence.”

Johnny looked at her without rancor. “I did a novel on the subject of homosexual rape.

Tiburon. Not a big critical success, but I talked to a lot of people and got the basics down pretty well, I think. The point is, he made me mad instead of scaring me. By then I’d decided I didn’t have a lot to lose, anyway. I told him that.I’d take his cock, all right, but once it was in my mouth I’d bite it off. Then… then…