“For me.”

“Sorry, yes. I'm afraid you'll have to start thinking of your life in a new way, Clyde. As... well... a pair of shoes, let's say. You're stepping out and I'm stepping in. And once I've got the laces tied, I'm going to walk away.”

Of course. Of course he was. And I suddenly knew what I had to do... the only thing I could do.

Get rid of him.

I let a big smile spread across my face. A tell-me-more smile. At the same time I coiled my legs under me, getting them ready to launch me across the desk at him. Only one of us could leave this office, that much was clear. I intended to be the one.

“Oh, really?” I said. “How fascinating. And what happens to me, Sammy? What happens to the shoeless private eye? What happens to Clyde…”

Umney, the last word was supposed to be my last name, the last word this interloping, invading thief would ever hear in his life. The minute it was out of my mouth I intended to leap. The trouble was, that telepathy business seemed to work both ways. I saw an expression of alarm dawn in his eyes, and then they slipped shut and his mouth tightened with concentration. He didn't bother with the Buck Rogers machine; I suppose he knew there was no time for it.

“ `His revelations hit me like some kind of debilitating drug,”” he said, speaking in the low but carrying tone of one who recites rather than simply speaking. “ `All the strength went out of my muscles, my legs felt like a couple of strands of al dente spaghetti, and all I could do was flop back in my chair and look at him. “”

I flopped back in my chair, my legs uncoiling beneath me, unable to do anything but look at him.

“Not very good,” he said apologetically, “but rapid composition has never been a strong point of mine.”

“You bastard,” I rasped weakly. “You son of a bitch.”

“Yes,” he agreed. “I suppose I am.”

“Why are you doing this? Why are you stealing my life?”

His eyes flickered with anger at that. “Your life? You know better than that, Clyde, even if you don't want to admit it. It isn't your life at all. I made you up, starting on one rainy day in January of 1977 and continuing right up to the present time. I gave you your life, and it's mine to take away.”

“Very noble,” I sneered, “but if God came down here right now and started yanking your life apart like bad stitches in a scarf, you might find it a little easier to appreciate my point of view.”

“All right,” he said, “I suppose you've got a point. But why argue it? Arguing with one's self is like playing solitaire chess – a fair game results in a stalemate every time. Let's just say I'm doing it because I can.”

I felt a little calmer, all of a sudden. I had been down this street before. When they got the drop on you, you had to get them talking and keep them talking. It had worked with Mavis Weld and it would work here. They said stuff like Well, I suppose it won't hurt you to know now or What harm can it do?

Mavis's version had been downright elegant: I want you to know, Umney – I want you to take the truth to hell with you. You can pass it on to the devil over cake and coffee. It really didn't matter what they said, but if they were talking, they weren't shooting.

Always keep em talking, that was the thing. Keep em talking and just hope the cavalry would show up from somewhere.

“The question is, why do you want to?” I asked. “It's hardly the usual thing, is it? I mean, aren't you writer types usually content to cash the checks when they come, and go about your business?”

“You're trying to keep me talking, Clyde. Aren't you?”

That hit me like a sucker-punch to the gut, but playing it down to the last card was the only choice I had. I grinned and shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, I really do want to know.” And there was no lie in that.

He looked unsure for a moment longer, bent over and touched the keys inside that strange plastic case (I felt cramps in my legs and gut and chest as he stroked them), then straightened up again.

“I suppose it won't hurt you to know now,” he said finally. “After all, what harm can it do?”

“Not a bit.”

“You're a clever boy, Clyde,” he said, “and you're perfectly right – writers very rarely plunge all the way into the worlds they've created, and when they do I think they end up doing it strictly in their heads, while their bodies vegetate in some mental asylum. Most of us are content simply to be tourists in the country of our imaginations. Certainly that was the case with me. I'm not a fast writer – composition has always been torture for me, I think I told you that – but I managed five Clyde Umney books in ten years, each more successful than the last. In 1983 I left my job as regional manager for a big insurance company and started to write full-time. I had a wife I loved, a little boy that kicked the sun out of bed every morning and put it to bed every night – that's how it seemed to me, anyway – and I didn't think life could get any better.”

He shifted in the overstuffed client's chair, moved his hand, and I saw the cigarette burn Ardis McGill had put in the over-stuffed arm was also gone. He voiced a bitterly cold laugh.

“And I was right,” he said. “It couldn't get any better, but it could get a whole hell of a lot worse. And did. About three months after I started How Like a Fallen Angel, Danny – our little boy – fell out of a swing in the park and bashed his head. Cold-conked himself, in your parlance.”

A brief smile, every bit as cold and bitter as the laugh had been, crossed his face. It came and went at the speed of grief.

“He bled a lot – you've seen enough head-wounds in your time to know how they are – and it scared the crap out of Linda, but the doctors were good and it did turn out to be only a concussion; they got him stabilized and gave him a pint of blood to make up for what he'd lost. Maybe they didn't have to – and that haunts me – but they did. The real problem wasn't with his head, you see; it was with that pint of blood. It was infected with AIDS.”

“Come again?”

“It's something you can thank your God you don't know about,” Landry said. “It doesn't exist in your time, Clyde. It won't show up until the mid-seventies. Like Aramis cologne.”

“What does it do?”

“Eats away at your immune system until the whole thing collapses like the wonderful one-hoss shay. Then every bug circling around out there, from cancer to chicken pox, rushes in and has a party.”

“Good Christ!”

His smile came and went like a cramp. “If you say so. AIDS is primarily a sexually transmitted disease, but every now and then it pops up in the blood supply. I suppose you could say my kid won big in a very unlucky version of la loteria.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, and although I was scared to death of this thin man with the tired face, I meant it. Losing a kid to something like that... what could be worse? Probably something, yeah – there's always something – but you'd have to sit down and think about it, wouldn't you?

“Thanks,” he said. “Thanks, Clyde. It went fast for him, at least. He fell out of the swing in May. The first purple blotches – Kaposi's sarcoma – showed up in time for his birthday in September. He died on March 18, 1991. And maybe he didn't suffer as much as some of them do, but he suffered. Oh yes, he suffered.”

I didn't have the slightest idea what Kaposi's sarcoma was, either, and decided I didn't want to ask. I knew more than I wanted to already.

“You can maybe understand why it slowed me down a little on your book,” he said. “Can't you, Clyde?”

I nodded.

“I pushed on, though. Mostly because I think make-believe is a great healer. Maybe I have to believe that. I tried to get on with my life, too, but things kept going wrong with it – it was as if How Like a Fallen Angel was some kind of weird bad-luck charm that had turned me into Job. My wife went into a deep depression following Danny's death, and I was so concerned with her that I hardly noticed the red patches that had started breaking out on my legs and stomach and chest. And the itching. I knew it wasn't AIDS, and at first that was all I was concerned with. But as time went on and things got worse... have you ever had shingles, Clyde?”