I tell him that a lot of lives depend on me finding that book.

And he says, too bad.

And I say, no, the fact is only his life depends on it.

And the librarian hits a button on his keyboard and says he's calling the police.

"Wait," Helen says, and spreads her hand on the counter, her fingers sparkling and loaded with step-cut emeralds and cabochon star sapphires and black, cushion-cut bort diamonds. She says, "Symon, take your pick."

And the librarian, his top lip sucks up to his nose so his upper teeth show. He blinks, once, twice, slow, and he says, "Honey, you can keep your tacky drag queen rhinestones."

And the smile on Helen's face doesn't even flicker.

The man's eyes roll up, and the muscles in his face and hands go smooth. His chin drops to his chest, and he slumps forward against his keyboard, then twists and slides to the floor.

Constructive destruction.

Helen reaches a priceless hand to turn the monitor and says, "Damn."

Even dead on the floor, he looks asleep. His giant gelled hair broke his fall.

Reading the monitor, Helen says, "He changed the screen. I need to know his password."

No problem. Big Brother fills us all with the same crap. My guess is he was clever the same way everybody thinks they're clever. I tell her to type in "password."

Chapter 25

Mona rolls the sock off my foot. The stretchy sock insides, the fibers, they peel my scabs off. My crusted blood flakes off onto the floor. The foot is swollen until it's smooth with all its wrinkles stretched out. My foot, a balloon spotted red and yellow. With a folded towel under it, Mona pours the rubbing alcohol.

The pain's so instant you can't tell if the alcohol is boiling hot or ice cold. Sitting on the motel bed, my pant leg rolled up, with Mona kneeling on the carpet at my feet, I grab two handfuls of bedspread and grit my teeth. My back arched, my every muscle bunches tight for a few long seconds. The bedspread's cold and soaked with my sweat.

Pockets of something soft and yellow, these blisters almost cover the bottom of my foot. Under the layer of dead skin, you can see a dark, solid shape inside each blister.

Mona says, "What've you been walking on?"

She's heating a pair of tweezers over Oyster's plastic cigarette lighter.

I ask what the deal is with the advertisements Oyster's running in newspapers. Is he working for a law firm? The outbreaks of skin fungus and food poisoning, are they for real?

The alcohol drips off my foot, pink with dissolved blood, onto the folded motel towel. She sets the tweezers on the damp towel and heats a needle over Oyster's cigarette lighter. With a rubber band, she reaches back and bundles her hair into a thick ponytail.

"Oyster calls all that 'antiadvertising,' " she says. "Sometimes businesses, the really rich ones, they pay him to cancel the ads. How much they pay, he says, reflects how true the ads probably are."

My foot won't fit inside my shoe anymore. In the car, earlier today, I asked if Mona could look at it. Helen and Oyster are out buying new makeup. They're stopping to defuse three copies of the poems book at a big used-book store down the street. The Book Barn.

I say what Oyster's doing is blackmail. It's casting aspersions.

Now it's almost midnight. Where Helen and Oyster really are I don't want to know.

"He's not saying he's a lawyer," Mona says. "He's not saying there's a lawsuit. He's just running an ad. Other people fill in the blanks. Oyster says he's just planting the seed of doubt in their minds."

She says, "Oyster says it's only fair since advertising promises something to make you happy."

With her kneeling, you can see the three black stars tattooed above Mona's collarbone. You can see down her blouse, past the carpet of chains and pendants, and she isn't wearing a bra, and I'm counting 1, counting 2, counting 3 ...

Mona says, "Other members of the coven do it, too, but it's Oyster's idea. He says the plan is to undermine the illusion of safety and comfort in people's lives."

With the needle, she lances a yellow blister and something drops out. A little brown piece of plastic, it's covered in stinking ooze and blood and lands on the towel. Mona turns it over with the needle, and the yellow ooze soaks into the towel. She picks it up with the tweezers and says, "What the heck is this?"

It's a church steeple.

I say, I don't know.

Mona, her mouth gaps open with her tongue pushing out. Her throat slides up inside her neck skin, gagging. She waves a hand in front of her nose and blinks fast. The yellow ooze stinks that bad. She wipes the needle on the towel. With one hand she holds my toes, and with the other she lances another blister. The yellow sprays out in a little blast, and there on the towel is half of a factory smokestack.

She tweezers it and wipes it on the towel. Her face wrinkled tight around her nose, she looks at it close-up and says, "You want to tell me what's going on?"

She lances another blister, and out pops the onion dome from a mosque, covered in blood and slime. With her tweezers, Mona pulls a tiny dinner plate out of my foot. It's hand-painted with a border of red roses.

Outside our motel room, a fire siren screams by in the street.

Out of another blister oozes the pediment from a Georgian bank building.

The cupola from a grade school busts out of the next blister.

Sweating. Deep breathing. Gripping my soft, dripping handfuls of bedspread, I grit my teeth. Looking up at the ceiling, I say, someone is killing models.

Pulling out a bloody flying buttress, Mona says, "By stepping on them?"

And I tell her, fashion models.

The needle digs around in the sole of my foot. The needle fishes out a television antenna. The tweezers fish out a gargoyle. Then roof tiles, shingles, tiny slates and gutters.

Mona lifts one edge of the stinking towel and folds it so a clean side shows. She pours on more alcohol.

Another fire engine screams by the motel. Its red and blue lights flash across the curtains.

And I can't draw another full breath, my foot burns so bad.

We need, I say. I need ... we need .. .

We need to go back home, I say, as soon as possible. If I'm right, I need to stop the man who's using the culling poem.

With the tweezers, Mona digs out a blue plastic shutter and lays it on the towel. She pulls out a shred of bedroom curtains, yellow curtains from the nursery. She pulls out a length of picket fence, and pours on more alcohol until it drips off my foot clear. She covers her nose with her hand.

Another fire engine screams by, and Mona says, "You mind if I just turn on the TV and see what's up?"

I stretch my jaws at the ceiling and say, we can't.. . we can't...

Alone with her now, I say, we can't trust Helen. She only wants the grimoire so she can control the world. I say, the cure for having too much power is not to get more power. We can't let Helen get her hands on the original Book of Shadows.

And so slow I can't see her move, Mona draws a fluted Ionic column out of a bloody pit below my big toe. Slow as the hour hand on a clock. If the column's from a museum or a church or a college, I can't remember. All these broken homes and trashed institutions.

She's more of an archaeologist than a surgeon.

And Mona says, "That's funny."

She lines up the column with the other fragments on the towel. Frowning as she leans back into my sole with the tweezers, she says, "Helen told me the same thing about you. She says you only want to destroy the grimoire."

It should be destroyed. No one can handle that kind of power.

On television is an old brick building, three stories, with flames pouring up from every window. Firemen point hoses and feathery -white arcs of water. A young man holding a microphone steps into the shot, and behind him Helen and Oyster are watching the fire, their heads leaned together. Oyster's holding a shopping bag. Helen holds his other hand.