The iron hatch and the curved brick walls muffled sound, but as from a great distance he heard a sharp, anguished cry, followed by laughter. It was a girl. She screamed, “Please!” She screamed, “Don’t, stop!” Ig pushed open the iron door of the furnace, his pulse banging hard inside him.

He scrambled out through the hatch into the clear, clean light of the August morning. Another wavering cry of fear-or pain-came from his left, through a doorless opening that led outside. On some half-conscious level, Ig registered for the first time a throaty, hoarse quality to the shouting voice and understood that he wasn’t hearing a girl at all, but a boy, one whose voice was shrill with panic. Ig did not slow, but flew barefoot across the concrete, past the wheelbarrow full of old and rusting tools. He grabbed the first instrument that came to hand without stopping or looking at it, just wanted something to swing.

They were outside, on the asphalt: three wearing clothes and one wearing only streaks of mud and a pair of too-small white jockey shorts. The boy in his underwear, scrawny and long in the torso, was perhaps as young as thirteen. The others were older boys, juniors or seniors in high school.

One of them, a kid with a shaved head shaped like a lightbulb, sat on top of the nearly naked boy, smoking a cigarette. A few paces behind him was a fat kid in a wifebeater. His face was sweaty and gleeful and he hopped from foot to foot, his fat-boy tits jiggling. The oldest of the boys stood to the left, holding a small, writhing garter snake by the tail. Ig recognized this snake-impossible but true-as the one that had given him the longing looks the day before. She twisted, trying to lift herself high enough to bite the boy who held her, but was unable. This third boy held a pair of garden shears in his other hand. Ig stood behind them all, in the doorway, looking down at them from six feet above the ground.

“No more!” screamed the boy in his underwear. His face was grimy, but clear lines of pink skin stood out where tears had cut tracks in the dirt. “Stop, Jesse! It’s enough!”

The smoker, Jesse, sitting on top of him, flicked hot ash in the boy’s face. “Shut the fuck up, cumstain. It’s enough when I say.”

Cumstain had already been burned with the cigarette several times. Ig could see three bright, shiny, red spots of inflamed tissue on his chest. Jesse moved the tip of the cigarette from burn mark to burn mark, holding it only an inch from Cumstain’s skin. The glowing coal traced a rough triangle.

“You know why I burned a triangle?” Jesse asked. “That’s how the Nazis marked a fag. That’s your mark. I woulda given you something not so bad, but you hadda squeal like you’re taking it up the ass. Plus, your breath smells like fresh dick.”

“Ha!” shouted the fat boy. “That’s funny, Jesse!”

“I got just the thing to get rid of that dick smell,” said the boy with the snake. “Something to wash his mouth out.”

As he spoke, the third boy lifted the open blades of the shears and put them behind the head of the garter snake and, operating the handles with one hand, snapped her head off with a wet crunch. The diamond-shaped head bounced across the blacktop. It sounded hard, like a rubber ball. The trunk of the snake jerked and writhed, curling up on itself and then uncoiling in a series of mighty spasms.

“Geeeee!” screamed Fatboy, leaping up and down. “You decapernated that fucker, Rory!”

Rory crouched beside Cumstain. Blood came from the snake’s neck in quick arterial spurts.

“Suck it,” Rory said, shoving the snake in Cumstain’s face. “All you got to do is suck it and Jesse is done.”

Jesse laughed and inhaled deeply from his cigarette, so the coal at the tip brightened to an intense, poisonous red.

“Enough,” said Ig, his own voice unrecognizable to himself-a deep, resonant voice that seemed to come from the bottom of a chimney-and as he spoke, the cigarette in Jesse’s mouth erupted like a firecracker, going up in a white flash.

Jesse screamed and flipped back off Cumstain, falling into the high grass. Ig jumped from the cement landing into the weeds and stabbed the handle of the tool he was holding into the fat boy’s stomach. It was like poking a tire, a feeling of springy, hard resistance shivering up the shaft. The fat kid coughed and went back on his heels.

Ig wheeled around and pointed the business end of the tool at the boy named Rory. Rory let go of the snake. It hit the blacktop and twisted desperately about, as if still alive and trying to squirm away.

Rory rose slowly to his feet and took a step back onto a low heap of wooden planks and old cans and rusting wire. The junk shifted underfoot, and he wobbled and sat down again. He stared at what Ig was pointing at him: an ancient pitchfork with three curved and rusting tines.

There was a stitch in Ig’s lungs, a seared feeling, such as he often felt when one of his asthma attacks was coming on, and he exhaled, trying to breathe out the tightness in his chest. Smoke gushed from his nostrils. At the periphery of his vision, he saw the boy in jockey shorts rising to one knee and wiping at his face with both hands, trembling in his tightie-whities.

“I want to run,” said Jesse.

“Me, too,” the fat kid said.

“Just leave Rory here to die alone,” Jesse said. “What’d he ever do for us?”

“He got me two weeks’ detention for flooding the bathroom at school, and I didn’t even plug the toilets up,” said the fat kid. “I was just standing there. So fuck him. I want to live!”

“Then you better run,” Ig told them, and Jesse and Fatboy turned and sprinted for the woods.

Ig lowered the pitchfork and sank the points into the ground, leaned on the handle, looking over it at the teenage boy sitting on the trash heap. Rory did not attempt to rise but stared back with large, fascinated eyes.

“Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done, Rory,” Ig asked him. “I want to know if this is a new low for you, or if you’ve done worse.”

Speaking automatically, Rory said, “I stole forty bucks from my mother to buy beer, and my older brother, John, beat her up when she said she didn’t know what happened to the money. Johnnie thought she blew it on scratch tickets and was lyin’, and I didn’t say anything because I was afraid he’d beat me up, too. The way he hit her was like hearing someone kick a watermelon. Her face still isn’t right, and I feel sick whenever I kiss her good night.” As he spoke, a dark stain began to spread across the crotch of Rory’s denim shorts. “Are you going to kill me?”

“Not today,” Ig said. “Go. I release you.” The smell of Rory’s urine appalled him, but he kept it from showing in his face.

Rory pushed himself back to his feet. His legs were shaking visibly. He slid sideways and began to retreat toward the tree line, walking backward, keeping his gaze on Ig and Ig’s pitchfork. He wasn’t watching where he was going and almost stumbled over Cumstain, who still sat on the ground in his underwear and a pair of unlaced tennis sneakers. Cumstain held an armful of laundry to his chest and was staring at Ig with the same look he might’ve given some dead and diseased thing, a carcass withered by infection.

“Do you want a hand up?” Ig asked him, stepping toward him.

At that, Cumstain leaped to his feet and backed a few steps off. “Keep away from me.”

“Don’t let him touch you,” Rory said.

Ig met Cumstain’s gaze and said, in the most patient voice he could muster, “I was just trying to help.”

Cumstain’s upper lip was drawn back in a disgusted sneer, but his eyes had in them the dazed and distant look with which Ig was becoming familiar-the look that said the horns were taking hold and casting their influence.

“You didn’t help,” Cumstain said. “You fucked everything up.”

“They were burning you,” Ig said.

“So what? All the freshmen who make swim team get a mark. All I had to do was suck a little snake to show I enjoy the taste of blood, and then I was going to be solid with them. And you went and ruined it.”