“Pretty much. They knock me for a loop.”

“They’re fairly mild. You’re just so keyed up, it feels like they knock you out. Your body needs to rest. Wait here.”

Danny stood and looked down. “Will you promise… ”

“I’m not going to off myself with the table saw while you run upstairs,” Marshall said. Danny smiled crookedly.

The sound of his brother’s footsteps climbed into the air behind his head where the stairs corkscrewed up. Marshall loved this building. The rooms were full of light. There’d been so many windows and doors-front, back, balcony, and cellar doors-they’d made them all open with a single key so they wouldn’t be carrying key rings the size of janitors’.

Danny’s steps descended again, the thip, thip, thip of soft-soled shoes spiraling back down. For some reason it made Marshall think of Edward Gorey’s The Doubtful Guest.

“Here.” Danny poured half a dozen small white pills into Marshall ’s palm.

“What is it?”

“Valium. The same old thing in a new bottle. The drug reps give me so many samples, I could relax half the Third World. I can run back up and get the literature if you want.”

“Never mind. Thanks.”

“Take two-three won’t hurt you. Get some sleep.”

“Sure,” Marshall said. Danny squeezed his shoulder.

“Go to bed. That’s what I’m going to do. Good night, brother.” Danny’s footsteps corkscrewed upward. Marshall heard his kitchen door click shut.

He stared at the tablets.

You get, you share.

The thought made him smile.

Even in the bad times, there were good times. By virtue of their rarity, they were experienced more keenly, remembered more fondly. Maybe that was why men remembered their wars with such relish. Maybe that’s why he’d never had the tattoo removed.

He pushed up the sleeve on his left arm and looked at the old marks. Crude green slashes, once sharp but now blurred and faded with age, formed the numbers one and three and the fraction one-half. A classic prison tat. He’d been anesthetized with cheap bourbon one of the “girls” had gotten from a guard in trade for a blow job. The tattoo artist had been as drunk as the rest of them. Marshall remembered the sting, and the blood, and the laughter.

“Thirteen and a half,” Draco had said. “One judge, twelve jurors, half a chance.”

Marshall pushed the sleeve back down and looked again at the pills. He’d sworn off illegal drugs a long time ago. He didn’t trust doctors and he hated “mental health professionals” of any stripe. Now he was a prescription junkie, hunkered over in a basement with a fistful of unidentified pills, joking about suicide.

How the hell had that happened?

Tippity.

After he’d nearly frozen Elaine’s dog, the nightmares had come back-not as bad as when he was a kid but bad enough-and Danny had given him something to help him sleep. Danny got them as samples that came in small brown envelopes.

Marshall had taken them for a year or so after the Tippity debacle, then quit. When he married Polly, Danny worried he’d go into whatever the hell it was he went into when “emotionally charged”-Danny’s term for love-and suggested he start again. “Keep the monsters at bay,” Danny’d said.

Though Marshall hated to admit it, after so long alone, he didn’t sleep well with someone else in the bed. And he’d been more scared of the monsters than he’d wanted to admit. So he took the pills.

“Same old thing in a new package,” Danny’d said.

Same old Butcher Boy of Rochester in a new package?

Thirteen and a half.

The tattoo brought back memories Marshall hadn’t allowed out of his subconscious for twenty-five years at least. Not even the good memories; for Marshall, it had never been possible to pick and choose. The flood-gates were open or they weren’t. Tonight had opened them with such suddenness, the images carried him like a leaf on a tide rushing back. The past rose around him, as the waters had risen when the levees broke, and he watched with the same sense of helpless, frightened wonder.

Draco. Dr. Kowalski. That stupid Swede, Helman or Herman. Dr. Olson. Phil. Phil Maris, his math teacher, the guy who taught him to build in his mind, the guy he’d dropped acid with. They guy who’d abandoned him then saved him.

Marshall was not merely remembering; people from his past were with him. He could smell the perennial cigarette stink of Draco’s hair. Phil smiled, and Marshall was a proud teenager. Then Kowalski leaned back in his chair.

Marshall snapped out of the living memory and into his cellar.

God, he had hated Kowalski. Most of Ward C hated Kowalski. Dozens of punk criminals, including one mass murderer and two knife wielders, and yet nobody had killed the psychiatrist. What a waste of talent. After the acid trip gone awry he’d never seen the bastard again. The joke in the ward was that since he’d tried to kill Kowalski, that proved that he was innocent.

Tried was the key word. Draco started it, saying if he couldn’t off that spineless fuck, he was obviously a washout as a stone-cold killer, and somebody else must have done his family.

He had never seen Phil Maris again either. The morning he got out of the infirmary, his brain still scummed with LSD, the warden announced that Phil had taken a better job in St. Cloud. It was midterm; Phil hadn’t said anything about any job, and he hadn’t said good-bye to anybody.

The “better job” was as much bullshit as Kowalski’s “better job” had been.

For a while he looked for letters, waited on visitors’ day, but there’d been no contact. The warden refused to give him Phil’s new address so he could write. He’d tried to talk to Rich about it, but Rich had taken a dislike to the algebra teacher.

When he asked the staff about Phil they got cagey, like people used to get when a girl got pregnant in high school. “She transferred,” they’d say, or “she’s visiting her aunt in another state.” Then they’d look at each other in that certain way.

Phil had fucked up somehow and gotten thrown out. Not fired; if that had been the case, there wouldn’t have been the slitty-eyed smirks and knowing looks.

A year or so later, he’d heard that Phil really was teaching high school in St. Cloud, so maybe it wasn’t total bullshit.

After the initial weirdness of Phil’s disappearance wore off, he’d let it drop. In juvie, weird was a way of life. Questioning it was not only a waste of time but could get a kid in trouble. Looking back, Marshall wondered why the staff had done the “little pitchers have big ears” routine after Phil left. If he’d been canned for dropping acid, they’d have said so, used it as an object lesson against the evils of drugs.

And Dylan hadn’t been a “little pitcher.” At fifteen, he was five-ten, one hundred sixty pounds, and a convicted murderer. What could be so bad they wouldn’t want to sully his underage ears with it? If they thought they were protecting his innocence, they’d been three corpses too late.

Then out of the blue, two years later, Phil gets him out of Drummond. He didn’t see Phil and Phil never contacted him. It had been done behind the scenes. Since Dylan hadn’t been into looking gift horses in the mouth at that juncture, he’d let it slide. Marshall had let it slide as well. Working hard to put “Dylan, boy monster” behind him, he’d been relieved to move out of Minnesota, change his name.

Be a “real live boy” for a change.

Marshall laughed. The sound rang hollow in the hot damp of the cellar.

Dylan Raines was never going to be a real live boy. One day, the poor little bugger was going to remember the murders, and Marshall’s house of cards, complete with a cardboard marriage and borrowed family, was going to come crashing down.

With a rush of yearning startling in its intensity, Marshall wanted to see Phil again, show him how he’d turned out, and thank him for teaching him to build with his mind. He wanted to do it before the house fell. The need was so strong, it lifted him half off the step, as if he was going to run to the phone or the train station and look up his old teacher.