IG WOKE, STIRRED BY A CLANG and a steely shriek. He sat up in the soot-smelling darkness, rubbing his eyes, the fire long out. He squinted to see who had opened the hatch, and caught an iron wrench in the mouth, hard enough to snap his head to the side. Ig rolled onto his elbows and knees, his mouth already full of blood. He felt solid lumps rolling against his tongue. He spit a slimy string of blood; teeth came with it, three of them.

A hand in a black leather glove reached into the chimney and got Ig by the hair and dragged him out of the furnace, bouncing his head off the iron hatch on the way out. It made a brassy ringing sound, like someone striking a gong. Ig was dumped onto the concrete floor. He tried to pick himself up, doing a rough push-up, and caught a steel-tipped black boot in the side. His arms gave out, and he went straight down, struck the concrete with his chin. His teeth banged together like a clapboard: Scene 666, take one, action!

His pitchfork. He had leaned it against the wall, just outside the furnace. He rolled and flung himself at it. His fingers swatted the handle, and it fell over with a clang. When he grabbed for the shaft, Lee Tourneau brought the heel of his boot down on Ig’s hand, and Ig heard the bones snap with a brittle crunch. It sounded like someone breaking a fistful of dry twigs. He turned his head to look up at Lee as Lee came down with the wrench again, and he was clubbed right between the horns. A white flash bomb went off in Ig’s head, brilliant burning phosphorus, and the world disappeared.

HE OPENED HIS EYES and saw the floor of the foundry sliding by beneath him. Lee had him by the collar of the shirt and was dragging him, his knees sliding across concrete. His hands were in front of his body, held together at the wrists by something. Loops of duct tape, it felt like. He tried to leap up and only managed to weakly kick his feet. The world was filled with the infernal drone of the locusts, and it took him a moment before he understood that the sound was only inside his head, because locusts were silent at night.

It was wrong, when considering the old foundry, to think about an outside and an inside. There was no roof; the inside was the outside. But Ig was hauled through a doorway and sensed that somehow they had come out into the night, although there was still dusty concrete under his knees. He couldn’t lift his head but had an impression of openness, of having left all walls behind. He heard Lee’s Caddy idling somewhere nearby. They were behind the building, he thought, not far from the Evel Knievel trail. His tongue moved sluggishly around in his mouth, an eel swimming in blood. The tip touched an empty socket where a tooth had been.

If he was going to try to use the horns on Lee, he was going to have to do it now, before Lee did what he had come here to do. But when he opened his mouth to speak, there came a black grinding shock of pain, and it was all he could do not to scream. His jaw was broken-shattered, maybe. Blood bubbled and ran from his lips, and he made a muzzy, damaged sound of pain.

They were at the top of a flight of concrete stairs, Lee breathing hard. He paused there. “Christ, Ig,” Lee said. “You don’t look like you’re that heavy. I’m not cut out for this kind of thing.”

He dropped Ig down the steps. Ig hit the first on his shoulder and the second on his face, and it felt like his jaw was breaking all over again, and he couldn’t help it, he did scream this time, a gravelly, strangled sound. He rolled the rest of the way to the bottom and sprawled across the dirt, nose in the earth.

After he came to rest, he held himself perfectly still-it seemed important to be still, the most important thing in the world-waiting for the black throb of pain in his smashed face to relent, at least a little. Distantly he heard boots scuff on the concrete stairs and crunch away across the earth. A car door opened. A car door slammed. The boot heels came crunching back. Ig heard a tinny clang and a hollow sloshing sound, neither of which he could identify.

“I knew I’d find you out here, Ig,” Lee said. “Couldn’t stay away, could you?”

Ig fought to lift his head and look up. Lee squatted beside him. He wore dark jeans and a white button-down shirt, sleeves rolled back to show his lean, strong forearms. His face was calm, almost good-humored. With one hand he absently picked at the cross nestled in the curls of golden hair on his chest.

“I’ve known I’d find you out here ever since Glenna called me a couple hours ago.” A smile flickered at the corners of his mouth for a moment. “She came home to find her apartment trashed. TV kicked in. Shit tossed everywhere. She called me right up. She was crying, Ig. She feels terrible. She thinks somehow you found out about our-what’s the right language for this?-our parking-lot tryst and that you hate her now. She’s scared you might hurt yourself. I told her I was more scared about you hurting her and that I thought she ought to spend the night with me. Would you believe she turned me down? She said she wasn’t afraid of you and needed to talk to you, before things went any further between me and her. Good ol’ Glenna. She’s sweet, you know. A little too desperate to please. A lot insecure. Pretty slutty. The second-closest thing to a disposable human being I’ve ever met. You’d be the first.”

Ig forgot his shattered jaw and tried to tell Lee to stay the fuck away from her. But when he opened his mouth, all that came out was another scream. Pain radiated from his smashed jawbone, and a darkness rushed up with it, gathering at the corners of his vision and then closing in around him. He breathed out-snorted blood from his nostrils-and fought it, pushed the darkness back by an effort of will.

“Eric doesn’t remember what happened in Glenna’s place this morning,” Lee said, in such a soft voice Ig almost missed it. “Why is that, Ig? He can’t remember anything except you throwing a pot of water in his face and nearly passing out. But something happened in that apartment. A fight? Something. I maybe would’ve had Eric along with me tonight-I’m sure he’d like to see you dead-but his face. You burned his face real good, Ig. If it was any worse, he would’ve had to take himself to a hospital and make up some lie about how he got hurt. He shouldn’t have gone in Glenna’s apartment anyway. Sometimes I think that guy has no respect for the law.” He laughed. “Maybe it’s for the best, though, that he’s not part of this. This kind of thing is just easier when there are no witnesses.”

Lee’s wrists rested on his knees, and the wrench hung from his right hand, twelve pounds of rusting iron.

“I can almost understand Eric not remembering what happened over at Glenna’s. A steel pot to the head will shake up a person’s memory. But I don’t know what to make of what happened when you showed up at the congressman’s office yesterday. Three people watched you walk in: Chet, our receptionist, and Cameron, who runs the X-ray, and Eric. Five minutes after you left, none of them could remember you being there. Only me. Even Eric wouldn’t believe you’d been there until I showed him the video. There’s video of the two of you talking, but Eric couldn’t tell me what you talked about. And there’s something else, too. The video. The video doesn’t look right. Like there’s something wrong with the tape…” His voice trailed off, and he was silent for a musing moment. “Distortion. But just around you. What did you do to the tape? What’d you do to them? And why didn’t it seem to touch me? That’s what I’d like to know.” When Ig didn’t reply, Lee lifted the wrench and poked him in one shoulder. “Are you listening, Ig?”

Ig had listened to every word, had been getting ready while Lee blabbed away, gathering what strength he had left to spring. He had pulled his knees under him and got his breath back and had just been waiting for the right moment, and here it was at last. He came up, batting the wrench aside and throwing himself at Lee, nailed him in the chest with his shoulder, knocked him back onto his ass. Ig got his hands up and put them around Lee’s throat-