Bonnie screamed behind him.

“Go on in the bedroom,” Reggie said. He stepped out into the hallway to get between them. Bryant was only two paces away now. One limp, white hand was reaching out to grasp the twin barrels of the Stevens.

Reggie pulled both triggers.

The blast was like a thunderclap in the narrow hallway. Fire licked momentarily from both barrels. The stink of burned powder filled the air. Bonnie screamed again, piercingly. Corey’s shirt shredded and blackened and parted, not so much perforated as disintegrated. Yet when it blew open, divorced from its buttons, the fish whiteness of his chest and abdomen was incredibly unmarked. Reggie’s frozen eyes received an impression that the flesh was not really flesh at all, but something as insubstantial as a gauze curtain.

Then the shotgun was slapped from his hands, as if from the hands of a child. He was gripped and thrown against the wall with teeth-rattling force. His legs refused to support him and he fell down, dazed. Bryant walked past him, toward Bonnie. She was cringing in the doorway, but her eyes were on his face, and Reggie could see the heat in them.

Corey looked back over his shoulder and grinned at Reggie, a huge and moony grin, like that offered to tourists by cow skulls in the desert. Bonnie was holding her arms out. They trembled. Over her face, terror and lust seemed to pass like alternating flashes of sunshine and shadow.

“Darling,” she said.

Reggie screamed.

THIRTY-TWO

“Hey,” the bus driver said. “This is Hartford, Mac.”

Callahan looked out the wide, polarized window at the strange country, made even stranger by the first seeping light of morning. In the Lot they would be going back now, back into their holes.

“I know,” he said.

“We got a twenty-minute rest stop. Don’t you want to go in and get a sandwich or something?”

Callahan fumbled his wallet out of his pocket with his bandaged hand and almost dropped it. Oddly, the burned hand didn’t seem to hurt much anymore; it was only numb. It would have been better if there had been pain. Pain was at least real. The taste of death was in his mouth, a moronic, mealy taste like a spoiled apple. Was that all? Yes. That was bad enough.

He held out a twenty. “Can you get me a bottle?”

“Mister, the rules—”

“And keep the change, of course. A pint would be fine.”

“I don’t need nobody cutting up on my bus, mister. We’ll be in New York in two hours. You can get what you want there. Anything.”

I think you are wrong, friend, Callahan thought. He looked into the wallet again to see what was there. A ten, two fives, a single. He added the ten to the twenty and held it out in his bandaged hand.

“A pint would be fine,” he said. “And keep the change, of course.”

The driver looked from the thirty dollars to the dark, socketed eyes, and for one terrible moment thought he was holding conversation with a living skull, a skull that had somehow forgotten how to grin.

“Thirty dollars for a pint? Mister, you’re crazy.” But he took the money, walked to the front of the empty bus, then turned back. The money had disappeared. “But don’t you go cutting up on me. I don’t need nobody cutting up on my bus.”

Callahan nodded like a very small boy accepting a deserved reprimand.

The bus driver looked at him a moment longer, then got off.

Something cheap, Callahan thought. Something that will burn the tongue and sizzle the throat. Something to take away that bland, sweet taste…or at least allay it until he could find a place to begin drinking in earnest. To drink and drink and drink—

He thought then that he might break down, begin to cry. There were no tears. He felt very dry, and completely empty. There was only…that taste.

Hurry, driver.

He went on looking out the window. Across the street, a teenaged boy was sitting on a porch stoop with his head folded into his arms. Callahan watched him until the bus pulled out again, but the boy never moved.

THIRTY-THREE

Ben felt a hand on his arm and swam upward to wakefulness. Mark, near his right ear, said, “Morning.”

He opened his eyes, blinked twice to clear the gum out of them, and looked out the window at the world. Dawn had come stealing through a steady autumn rain that was neither heavy nor light. The trees which ringed the grassy pavilion on the hospital’s north side were half denuded now, and the black branches were limned against the gray sky like giant letters in an unknown alphabet. Route 30, which curved out of town to the east, was as shiny as sealskin—a car passing with its taillights still on left baleful red reflections on the macadam.

Ben stood up and looked around. Matt was sleeping, his chest rising and falling in regular but shallow respiration. Jimmy was also asleep, stretched out in the room’s one lounge chair. There was an undoctor-like stubble on the planes of his cheeks, and Ben ran a palm across his own face. It rasped.

“Time to get going, isn’t it?” Mark asked.

Ben nodded. He thought of the day ahead of them and all its potential hideousness, and shied away from it. The only way to get through it would be without thinking more than ten minutes ahead. He looked into the boy’s face, and the stony eagerness he saw there made him feel queasy. He went over and shook Jimmy.

“Huh!” Jimmy said. He thrashed in his chair like a swimmer coming up from deep water. His face twitched, his eyes fluttered open, and for a moment they showed blank terror. He looked at them both unreasoningly, without recognition.

Then recognition came, and his body relaxed. “Oh. Dream.”

Mark nodded in perfect understanding.

Jimmy looked out the window and said “Daylight” the way a miser might say money. He got up and went over to Matt, took his wrist and held it.

“Is he all right?” Mark asked.

“I think he’s better than he was last night,” Jimmy said. “Ben, I want the three of us to leave by way of the service elevator in case someone noticed Mark last night. The less risk, the better.”

“Will Mr Burke be okay alone?” Mark asked.

“I think so,” Ben said. “We’ll have to trust to his ingenuity, I guess. Barlow would like nothing better than to have us tied up another day.”

They tiptoed down the corridor and used the service elevator. The kitchen was just cranking up at this hour—almost quarter past seven. One of the cooks looked up, waved a hand, and said, “Hi, Doc.” No one else spoke to them.

“Where first?” Jimmy asked. “The Brock Street School?”

“No,” Ben said. “Too many people until this afternoon. Do the little ones get out early, Mark?”

“They go until two o’clock.”

“That leaves plenty of daylight,” Ben said. “Mark’s house first. Stakes.”

THIRTY-FOUR

As they drew closer to the Lot, an almost palpable cloud of dread formed in Jimmy’s Buick, and conversation lagged. When Jimmy pulled off the turnpike at the large green reflectorized sign that read route 12 jerusalem’s lot cumberland cumberland ctr, Ben thought that this was the way he and Susan had come home after their first date—she had wanted to see something with a car chase in it.

“It’s gone bad,” Jimmy said. His boyish face looked pale and frightened and angry. “Christ, you can almost smell it.”

And you could, Ben thought, although the smell was mental rather than physical: a psychic whiff of tombs.

Route 12 was nearly deserted. On the way in they passed Win Purinton’s milk truck, parked off the road and deserted. The motor was idling, and Ben turned it off after looking in the back. Jimmy glanced at him inquiringly as he got back in. Ben shook his head. “He’s not there. The engine light was on, and it was almost out of gas. Been idling there for hours.” Jimmy pounded his leg with a closed fist.