“My mother does,” said Clare. “She saw several right here at Ghost Ridge.”

Dale looked up at the hill looming above them. The rustling grasses sounded like urgent whispers. “But do you?” he asked.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Clare said softly, “but I saw one once.”

Dale waited, lying on his stomach in the comfortable confines of the sleeping bag and cupping his chin in his palm.

“I mentioned that my stepfather has a place in Mantua,” continued Clare at last. “My father was an artist in Florence, but after he was killed in an auto wreck, Mother married this older man from Mantua—his family has earned uncounted millions selling salami. The Salami King. A perfect title for the husband of one of Europe’s foremost divas.

“Anyway, I was about ten when Mother married this guy—his family made me nervous because the Salami King had a son six years older than me who’s always on the make—and we went to stay at his house in Mantua. We still spend several weeks every spring and autumn there—the summers and winters are miserable. Do you really want to hear this story, Professor Stewart?”

“Yes,” said Dale.

“The Mantua house is truly incredible,” said Clare. “The Salami King commissioned an architect back in the seventies to combine three old homes dating back to the sixteenth century and a courtyard into one huge home with interior design straight out of the twenty-third century. The stairway up to the library, for instance, doesn’t even have railings—just a single spiraling ribbon of steel for support and raw wood steps with skinny steel cables hanging on either side. It looks like some sort of dinosaur vertebrae rising up between these ancient terra cotta walls covered with the remnants of frescoes from the seventeen hundreds.

“Anyway, my room is just off the library, near the service elevator, and I have windows that look both outward onto the piazza and inward down onto the ancient courtyard that the architect had enclosed with clear Plexiglas doors and roofed in with steel. One night that first autumn we visited, I awoke some time after threeA.M. to the sound of a woman weeping. At first I was afraid it was Mother—this was less than a year after Father’s death and I knew she sometimes cried in private—but this crying was louder, coarser than anything I’d ever heard from Mother. I ran to the open interior window, since the crying was coming from inside the house.

“It was a woman dressed in black, just like so many of the old Italian women in Mantua and Florence today. But this was not an old woman. She wore a scarf, but I could see long, lustrous black hair escaping from it, and I could tell by her carriage and figure that she was a younger woman—in her twenties, perhaps. And she was carrying a baby. A dead baby.”

“How could you tell it was dead?” whispered Dale.

“I could tell,” said Clare. “The baby’s eyes were sunken and glazed over and staring. Its flesh was bloated and white beyond white. Its little hands were frozen into claws by rigor mortis. I could almost smell it.”

“Your window onto the courtyard was that close?” said Dale, trying not to sound skeptical.

“It was that close,” said Clare. “And then the woman looked up at me. Not at me, not through me, but into me. And then she just. . . disappeared. One instant she and the baby were there, the next instant they weren’t.”

“You said you were ten,” suggested Dale.

Clare had been lying on her back, looking at the stars as she recited all this, but now she rolled over to look at him. The little backpack stove sat between them, separating their bedrolls like a modern-day sword of honor.

“I was ten, but I saw what I saw,” she said softly.

“And, of course, there’s a legend in the town about a woman whose baby died in that house,” said Dale.

“Of course,” said Clare. “Actually, the baby had drowned in the well that used to be in that particular courtyard. The mother—who was only twenty, it turned out—refused to allow the child to be buried. She carried it around for weeks until the Mantuans restrained her and buried the child. Then the mother threw herself down the same well. That all happened late in the sixteen hundreds.”

“Good legend,” said Dale.

“I thought so.”

“Any chance that you heard the legend before you saw the ghost?” he asked.

“No,” said Clare Two Hearts. “No chance at all. My stepfather and his family wouldn’t talk about what I saw. I finally coaxed the story out of an eighty-six-year-old cook whose family had served the household for five generations.”

Dale had rubbed his chin, feeling the stubbled whiskers there. “So you do believe in ghosts,” he said.

“No,” said Clare Two Hearts. There was a silence, and then the two of them laughed at the same time.

“What do you believe, Clare?” asked Dale.

She looked at him for a long moment. Then she unzipped her old sleeping bag and folded back the top, in spite of the cold air. She had slipped out of her jeans and sweatshirt before crawling into the bag and now her bra and underpants glowed very white in the starlight.

“I believe,” she said, “that if you come over here, Professor Stewart, our lives are going to be changed in some way that neither one of us can imagine.”

Dale had hesitated, but only for the space of ten or fifteen wild heartbeats.

The five black dogs circled the farmhouse for days. When Dale came outside, they retreated to the fields or disappeared behind the outbuildings and barn. When he went back inside, they moved in close, circling, sitting, watching. Their tracks were everywhere in the melting snow and mud. At night he could hear them howl.

Finally he got tired of them, went out to his Land Cruiser, and drove to Oak Hill. There was a hardware store there that sold firearms and ammunition. Dale bought two boxes of.410-long shells. Driving out of Oak Hill, he saw the tall cornices of the Carnegie Library and pulled into the tiny parking lot. He had come here a few times as a kid—the Elm Haven library had been tiny, its books musty with age—but Dale knew that Duane had used this library regularly, sometimes walking all the way from his farm on the railroad tracks to do research here.

A weight seemed to lift off Dale’s shoulders as he settled into a study carrel and began to read from the heap of books he had collected in the stacks. This was more his métier—the books, the quiet hum of purposeful reading, the lamps on the tables—a clean, well-lighted place.

Dale took a crumpled page of yellow legal-pad paper out of his pocket. He had been carrying around the handwritten list of DOS messages for days. Now he looked at the last quote.

>The lords of right and truth are Thoth and Astes, the Lord Amentet. The Tchatcha round about Osiris are Kesta, Hapi, Tuamutef, and Qebhsenuf, and they are also round about the Constellation of the Thigh in the northern sky. Those who do away utterly sins and offenses, and who are in the following of the goddess Hetepsekhus, are the god Sebek and his associates who dwell in the water.

Dale had never researched or taught Egyptian mythology, but as an undergraduate decades earlier he had gone through an avid Howard Carter phase, so he remembered some of this context and knew the source. These words were from the papyrus of Ani, also known as The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Amazingly, the Oak Hill Library had a copy of this book, and now Dale used the index to look up the various names.

Anubis, although not mentioned directly had to be involved and was the easiest god to track down: also known as Anpu, Anubis was the jackal-headed son of Nephthys and Osiris and the deity given the greatest duties in guiding souls to the afterlife and protecting them once they were there. Anubis was the god of embalming and the god of the dead, although it became obvious in The Egyptian Book of the Dead that this role was usurped by Osiris as the centuries rolled past. It was thought that Anubis wore the head of a jackal, or a dog, because of the jackals and wild dogs that lurked around the Egyptian tombs, graves, and cities of the dead, always waiting for a rotting morsel.