“Eric!” Lee shouted. “Eric, he’s got a knife!”

But the Gremlin came to life in a rasping, grinding burst, and Ig’s foot found the gas before he was even settled in the seat. The Gremlin lurched forward, and the passenger door thudded shut. Ig’s gaze darted to the rearview mirror, and he saw Eric Hannity trotting across the lot, pistol in his hand, barrel pointed at the ground.

Chunks of asphalt flew from the back tires and glittered in the sunlight, skeins of gold. As Ig pulled out, he shot another glance at the rearview mirror and saw Lee and Eric standing in the dust cloud. Lee’s good right eye was closed again, and he was waving a hand at the billowing grit. The half-blind left eye, though, was open and staring after Ig with an alien sort of fascination.

HE STAYED OFF THE INTERSTATE on the way back-back where? He didn’t know. Ig drove automatically, with no conscious thought to direction. He wasn’t sure what had just happened to him. Or, rather, he knew what had happened but not what it meant. It wasn’t anything Lee had said or done; it was what he hadn’t said, hadn’t done. The horns hadn’t touched him. Lee alone, of all the people Ig had dealt with today, had told Ig only what he wanted to tell; his confession had been a considered decision, not a helpless impulse.

Ig wanted off the road, as soon as possible. Would Lee call the police and tell them Ig had shown up in a deranged state and come at him with a knife? No, actually, Ig didn’t think he would. Lee wouldn’t bring the law into this if he could avoid it. Still, Ig kept to the speed limit and watched his rearview mirror for police cruisers.

He wished he could be coolly in control, could handle his getaway like Dr. Dre-be a stone-cold badass-but his nerves were jangled and his breath was short. He had finally come up against the edge of emotional exhaustion. Crucial systems were shutting down. He couldn’t keep going like this. He needed to get a handle on what was happening to him. He needed a fucking saw, a sharp-toothed saw, needed to cut the miserable things off his head.

The sun beat at the window in flashes, a soothing, hypnotic repetition. Images beat the same way in Ig’s mind. The open Swiss Army knife on the ground, Vera riding her wheelchair down the hill, Merrin flashing her cross at him that day ten years ago in church, the horned image of himself in the security monitor at the congressman’s office, the golden cross shining in the summer light at Lee’s throat-and Ig twitched in surprise, knees knocking the steering wheel. A peculiar and unpleasant idea came to him, an impossible idea, that Lee was wearing her cross, had taken it off her dead body, a trophy. Only no, she hadn’t been wearing it their last night together. Still: It was hers. It had been just a gold cross like any other, not a mark on it to show who it had belonged to, and yet he felt sure it was the same cross she’d been wearing the first day he saw her.

Ig restlessly twisted at his goatee, wondering if it might be as simple as that, if Merrin’s cross had turned off the horns (muted them) in some way. Crosses held back vampires, didn’t they? No, that was worse than garbage, that was nonsense. He had walked into the house of the Lord earlier that morning, and Father Mould and Sister Bennett had fallen all over themselves to tell him their secrets and ask his permission to sin.

But Father Mould and Sister Bennett hadn’t been in the church. They had been beneath it. That wasn’t a holy place. It was a gym. Had they worn crosses, had they dressed themselves in any sign of their faith? Ig remembered Father Mould’s cross, hanging from one end of the twenty-pound bar set across the bench press, and Sister Bennett’s bare throat. What do you say to that, Ig Perrish? Ig Perrish didn’t say anything; he drove.

A boarded-up Dunkin’ Donuts flashed by on his left, and he realized he was near the town woods, not far from the road running up to the old foundry. He was less than half a mile from where Merrin had been murdered, the very same place he’d gone last night to curse and rave and piss and pass out. It was as if the day’s whole motion had merely described a great circle that was always, inevitably, going to lead him back to where he had started.

He slowed and turned. The Gremlin thudded down the single-lane gravel road, with trees growing close on either side. Fifty feet from the highway, the lane was blocked by a chain, a BB-dented No Trespassing sign hanging from it. He drove off the road and around it and back up into the ruts.

Soon the foundry came into sight through the trees. It stood in an open field at the top of a hill and should’ve been in sunlight but instead was dark, seemed to be in shadow. Maybe a cloud was across the sun; but when Ig squinted up through the windshield, he saw an impossibly clear late-day sky.

He drove until he was at the edge of the meadow around the remains of the foundry, then stopped the car. He left the engine running and got out.

When Ig was a child, the foundry had always seemed like the ruins of a castle, straight out of the Brothers Grimm, a place in the deep, dark forest where a wicked prince might lure an innocent to the slaughter-exactly what had happened here, it turned out. It was a surprise to discover as an adult that it wasn’t so very far off in the woods after all, just maybe a hundred feet from the road. Ig started toward the place where her body had been found and where the memorial for her was kept by her friends and family. He knew the way, had been there often since her death. Snakes followed, but he pretended not to notice.

The black cherry tree was as he had left it the night before. He had yanked her pictures down out of the branches. They lay scattered among weeds and bushes. The bark, a pale, scaly crust, was peeling away to show the rotten reddish wood beneath. Ig had pulled his pecker out and pissed into the weeds, on his own feet, and into the face of the plastic Virgin Mary figurine that had been left in a natural hollow between two of the thickest roots. He had despised that Mary with her idiot smile, symbol of a story that meant nothing, servant of a God who was no good to anyone. He had no doubt that Merrin had called out to God here in this place while she was being raped and killed, in her heart if not with her voice. God’s reply had been that due to the high volume of calls she could expect to be on hold until she was dead.

Ig glanced casually at the statue of Mary now, started to look away, and then did a double take. The Holy Mother looked as if she had been held in flames. The right half of her smiling, beatific face was scabbed black, like a marshmallow left too long over a campfire. The other half of her face had run like wax. That side was frowning and deformed. The sight of her gave Ig a brief moment of light-headedness, and he swayed and put his foot on something round and smooth that rolled under his heel and-

– for a moment it was night and the stars were wheeling overhead and he was peering up into the branches and gently drifting leaves, and he said, “I see you up there.” Talking to whom-God? Rocking on his heels in the warm night before he went-

– straight back on his ass, slamming butt-first into the dirt. He looked past his feet and saw he had stepped on a bottle of wine, the same bottle he’d brought out the night before. He bent and picked it up and shook it, and wine sloshed inside.

He got up and tipped his head back for an uneasy look into the branches of the black cherry tree. Leaves fluttered gently above. He moved his tongue around the tacky, bad-tasting cavity of his mouth, then turned and started back to the car.

Ig stepped over a snake or two on the way, still ignoring them. He uncorked the wine and had a swallow. It was hot from a day spent in the sun, but he didn’t mind. It tasted like Merrin when he went down on her: a taste of oils and copper. It tasted like weeds, too, as if it had in some way absorbed the fragrance of the summer itself, after an evening spent beneath the tree.