Busy with his mess of eggs, Chief Porter appeared to be no more aware of Fungus Man than he was of the observing bodach. Evidently, his intuition did not tell him that this new customer warranted special attention or concern.

I, however, found Fungus Man worrisome-in part but not entirely because the bodach remained fascinated by him.

Although, in a sense, I commune with the dead, I don't also have premonitions-except sometimes while fast asleep and dreaming. Awake, I am as vulnerable to mortal surprises as anyone is. My death might be delivered through the barrel of a terrorist's gun or by a falling stone cornice in an earthquake, and I would not suspect the danger until I heard the crack of the fatal shot or felt the earth leap violently beneath my feet.

My wariness of this man came from suspicion based not on reason, either, but on crude instinct. Anyone who smiled this relentlessly was a simpleton-or a deceiver with something to hide.

Those smoke-gray eyes appeared to be bemused and no more than half-focused, but I saw no stupidity in them. Indeed, I thought that I detected a cunningly veiled watchfulness, like that of a stone-still snake feigning prestrike indifference to a juicy mouse.

Clipping the ticket to the rail, Bertie Orbic relayed his order: "Two cows, make 'em cry, give 'em blankets, and mate 'em with pigs."

Two hamburgers with onions, cheese, and bacon.

In her sweet clear voice, which sounds like it belongs in a ten-year-old girl destined for a scholarship to Juilliard, she continued: "Double spuds twice in Hell."

Two orders of French fries made extra crispy

She said: "Burn two British, send ' em to Philly for fish."

Two English muffins with cream cheese and lox.

She wasn't finished: "Clean up the kitchen, plus midnight whistle-berries with zeppelins."

An order of hash, and an order of black beans with sausages.

I said, "Should I fire this or wait till his friends join him?"

"Fire it," Bertie replied. "This is for one. A skinny boy like you wouldn't understand."

"What's he want first?"

"Whatever you want to make."

Fungus Man smiled dreamily at a salt shaker, which he turned around and around on the counter in front of him, as if the white crystalline contents fascinated and mystified him.

Although the guy didn't have a buffed physique that would qualify him as a spokesman for a health club, he wasn't fat, just gently rounded in his mushroom way. If his every meal was this elaborate, he must have the metabolism of a Tasmanian devil on methamphetamine.

I toasted and finished the muffins first, while Bertie prepared both a chocolate milkshake and a vanilla Coke. Our star eater was also a two-fisted drinker.

By the time I followed the muffins with the hash and sausages, a second bodach had appeared. This one and the first moved through the diner with an air of agitation, back and forth, here and there, always returning to the smiley gourmand, who remained oblivious of them.

When the bacon cheeseburgers and the well-done fries were ready, I slapped one hand against the bell that rested beside the griddle, to alert Bertie that the order was up. She served it hot, kissing plate to counter without a rattle, as she always does.

Three bodachs had gathered at the front window, persistent shadows that remained impervious to the wilting power of the desert sun, peering in at us as though we were on exhibit.

Months often pass during which I encounter none of their kind. The running pack that I'd seen earlier in the street and now this convocation suggested that Pico Mundo was in for hard times.

Bodachs are associated with death much the way that bees seek the nectar of flowers. They seem to sip of it.

Ordinary death, however, does not draw a single bodach, let alone a swarm of them. I've never seen one of these beasts hovering at the bedside of a terminal cancer patient or in the vicinity of someone about to suffer a fatal heart attack.

Violence attracts them. And terror. They seem to know when it's coming. They gather like tourists waiting for the predictable eruption of a reliable geyser in Yellowstone Park.

I never saw one of them shadowing Harlo Landerson in the days before he murdered Penny Kallisto. I doubt that any bodachs were in attendance when he raped and throttled the girl.

For Penny, death had come with terrible pain and intolerable fear; surely each of us prays-or merely hopes, depending on his certainty of God-that his death will not be as brutal as hers. To bodachs, however, a quiet strangulation apparently isn't sufficiently exciting to bestir them from whatever lairs they inhabit in whatever strange realm is their true home.

Their appetite is for operatic terror. The violence they crave is of the most extreme variety: multiple untimely deaths spiced with protracted horror, served with cruelty as thick as bad gravy.

When I was nine years old, a drug-whacked teenager named Gary Tolliver sedated his family-little brother, little sister, mother, father- by doctoring a pot of homemade chicken soup. He shackled them while they were unconscious, waited for them to wake, and then spent a weekend torturing them before he killed them with a power drill.

During the week preceding these atrocities, I had twice crossed Tolliver's path. On the first occasion, he'd been followed closely by three eager bodachs. On the second occasion: not three but fourteen.

I have no doubt that those inky forms roamed the Tolliver house throughout that bloody weekend, invisible to the victims and to the killer alike, slinking from room to room as the scene of the action shifted. Observing. Feeding.

Two years later, a moving van, driven by a drunk, sheered off the gasoline pumps at a busy service station out on Green Moon Road, triggering an explosion and fire that killed seven. That morning, I had seen a dozen bodachs lingering there like misplaced shadows in the early sun.

Nature's wrath draws them as well. They were seething over the ruins of the Buena Vista Nursing Home after the earthquake eighteen months ago, and did not leave until the last injured survivor had been extracted from the rubble.

If I had passed by Buena Vista prior to the quake, surely I would have seen them gathering. Perhaps I could have saved some lives.

When I was a child, I first thought that these shades might be malevolent spirits who fostered evil in those people around whom they swarmed. I've since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.

I've come to believe that bodachs don't foster terror, after all, but take sustenance from it in some fashion. I think of them as psychic vampires, similar to but even scarier than the hosts of daytime-TV talk shows that feature emotionally disturbed and self-destructive guests who are encouraged to bare their damaged souls.

Attended now by four bodachs inside the Pico Mundo Grille and also watched by others at the windows, Fungus Man washed down the final bites of his burgers and fries with the last of his milkshake and vanilla Coke. He left a generous tip for Bertie, paid his check at the cashier's station, and departed the diner with his slinking entourage of slithery shadows.

Through dazzles of sunlight, through shimmering curtains of heat rising from the baked blacktop, I watched him cross the street. The bodachs at his sides and in his wake were difficult to count as they swarmed over one another, but I would have bet a week's wages that they numbered no fewer than twenty.