“It’s a dog,” Lowe suggested.

But it wasn’t a dog. The sound came straight from the thick throat of Michael Hrubek, who with an astonishingly loud crash stumbled into the midst of the path twenty feet in front of the orderlies and froze like a fat statue.

Lowe, thinking of the many times he’d bathed and coddled and reasoned with Hrubek, suddenly felt himself the team leader. He stepped forward. “Hello, Michael. How are you?”

The response was mumbled.

Jessup called, “Hey, Mr. Michael! My fave patient! You all right?”

Except for muddy shorts Hrubek was naked. His face was outlandishly alien-with its blue tint, pursing lips and possessed eyes.

“Aren’tcha cold?” Lowe found the voice to say.

“You’re Pinkerton agents, you fuckers.”

“No, it’s me. It’s Frank. You remember me, Michael. From the hospital. And you know Stu here. We’re the fuckin’-A orderlies from E Ward. You know us, man. Hey…” He laughed good-naturedly. “What are you doing without any clothes on?”

“What are you doing hiding in yours, fucker?” Hrubek retorted with a sneer.

Suddenly the reality of their mission struck Lowe with a jolt. My God, they weren’t in the hospital. They weren’t surrounded by fellow staffers. There was no telephone here, no psychiatric nurses nearby with two hundred milligrams of phenobarb. He grew weak with fear and when Hrubek gave a shout and fled up the valley, Jessup not far behind, Lowe remained where he was.

“Frank, hold up!” Lowe called.

But Jessup didn’t wait, and reluctantly Lowe too started after the huge blue-white monster, who was leaping along the trail. Hrubek’s voice echoed in the damp valley, begging not to be shot or tortured. Lowe caught up with Jessup and they ran side by side.

The orderlies crashed through the undergrowth, swinging their truncheons like machetes. Jessup panted, “Jesus, on these rocks! How can he run on these rocks?” A memory suddenly came to Lowe-the image of Hrubek standing behind the hospital’s main building, his shoes around his neck, walking barefoot on gravel, over and over, muttering as if speaking to his feet and encouraging them to toughen up. That had been just last week.

“Frank,” Lowe wheezed, “there’s something funny about this. We oughta-”

And then they were flying.

Sailing through the black air. Trees and rocks tumbling upside down, over and over. With identical screams they plunged into the ravine that Hrubek had easily leapt over. The orderlies smacked against the rocks and branches on their way down and their spinning bodies slammed into the ground with vicious jolts. An icy cold began to radiate through Lowe’s thigh and arm. They lay motionless in the gray ooze of the mud.

Jessup tasted blood. Lowe examined his bent fingers, attention to which flagged when he wiped the mud from his forearm and found that it wasn’t mud at all but a wide, foot-long scrape where skin used to be. “Cock-sucker,” he wailed. “I’m gonna hurt that asshole bad, it’s the last thing I do. Oh, shit. I’m bleeding to death. Oh, shit…” Lowe rolled into a sitting position and pressed the scrape, feeling in horror his own hot, torn flesh. Jessup was content to lie unmoving in the methane-scented mud and breathe a few cubic centimeters of air, the most his stunned lungs would accept. He gasped wetly. After a moment he was able to whisper, “I think-”

Lowe never found out what was on Jessup’s mind because at that moment Hrubek strode into the middle of the ravine. He casually bent down, pushing Stuart Lowe aside, and plucked the men’s tear-gas canisters from their belts, flinging them deep into the woods. He turned abruptly back to Lowe, who looked up into Hrubek’s leering face and began to scream.

“Stop that!” Hrubek screamed in return. “Stop that noise!”

Lowe did, and using the advantage of Hrubek’s own panic scrabbled away. Jessup’s eyes closed and he began muttering incoherently.

Lowe lifted the truncheon.

“You’re from Pinkerton,” Hrubek barked. “Pinker-ton. I’m in the pink, Mr. Fuckin’-A Orderly. Your arm looks pretty pink and tend-er. Nice try, but you shouldn’t’ve come after me-I’ve got a death to at-tend to.”

The rubber stick in Lowe’s hand remained poised for a moment, then with a gushing sound landed in the mud at his feet. He took off, running blindly through the woods, his courage suddenly as flimsy as the grass and saplings that bent beneath his pounding feet.

“Oh, don’t leave me, Stu,” Jessup cried into the mud at his lips. “I don’t want to die alone.”

Hrubek watched the disappearing form of Stuart Lowe then knelt on top of Jessup, pushing his head further into the ground. The orderly tasted dirt and grass, the flavor of which reminded him of his childhood. He began to cry.

“You dumb fucker,” Hrubek said. Then he raged, “And I can’t wear your clothes either.” He poked sharply at the stitched label, Marsden State Mental Health Facility, on Jessup’s jumpsuit. “What good are you?” He began to sing, “ ‘Good night, ladies, good night, ladies, I’m going to see you cry…’ ”

“Will you let me go, please, Michael?”

“You found me out, and what I’m doing has to be a surprise. ‘Good night, laaaaaaadies, I’m going to see you die!’ ”

“I won’t tell nobody, Michael. Please let me go. Oh, please. I got a wife.”

“Oh, is she pret-ty? Do you fuck her often? Do you fuck her in unpleasant ways? Say, what’s her address?”

“Please, Michael…”

“Sorry,” Hrubek whispered and leaned down.

The orderly’s scream was very loud and very brief. To Michael Hrubek’s unbounded pleasure, it set in flight an exquisite owl, curiously golden in the ravine’s blue light, which soared from a nearby oak tree and passed not five feet from the huge man’s astounded face.

“… repeating, the National Weather Service has issued an emergency storm warning for residents of Marsden, Cooper and Mahican counties. Winds in excess of eighty miles an hour, tornadoes and severe flooding in low-lying areas are expected. The Marsden River is already at flood level and expected to rise at least three more feet, cresting around one or two a.m. We’ll bring you bulletins as more information is available…”

Portia found them in the den, leaning over the teak stereo cabinet, both grim.

Classical music resumed and Owen shut the radio off.

Portia asked what the problem was.

“Storm.” He turned to look out the window. “The Marsden-it’s one of the rivers that feed the lake.”

“We were getting estimates on building up the shoreline,” Lis said. “But we didn’t think there’d be any flooding till the spring.”

Lis left the den and walked into the large greenhouse, looking up at the sky, murky but still placid.

Her sister saw her troubled face and glanced at Owen.

“There’s no foundation,” he explained to her. “The greenhouse. Your parents built it right on the ground. If the yard floods-”

“It’ll be the first to go,” Lis said. Not to mention, she thought, what the fifty-foot oak tree, hovering overhead, might do to the thin glass panes of the greenhouse roof. She glanced at the brick wall beside her and absently straightened a stone gargoyle, who grinned mischievously as he stuck out his long, curly tongue. “Damn,” she whispered.

“Are you sure it’ll flood?” Portia asked. She sounded irritated-because, Lis supposed, her escape from the L’Auberget manse tonight was looking complicated.

“If it goes up three feet,” Lis said, “it’ll flood. It’ll come right into the yard. It happened in the sixties, remember? Washed away the old porch. That was right here. Where we’re standing.”

Portia said she didn’t recall.

Lis looked at the windows again, wishing they had time to put plywood on the roof and sides. They’d be lucky to build up the lakefront by two feet and tape half the windows before the storm hit. “So,” she said, sighing, “we tape and sandbag.”