Now he was raising the knife, lowering it, raising it again. Making those low growling noises in his throat and jabbing the knife at the screen. Working himself up to actually rushing in the door, perhaps.

She came up behind him, not making any special effort to be quiet, but he didn’t hear her; Joe was lost in his own world. In an instant, unaware that she was going to do it, she clapped her hand over his wrist and twisted it violently in an anticlockwise direction.

Joe uttered a hissing gasp and Larry Underwood stirred a little in his sleep, turned over, and was quiet again. The knife fell to the grass between them, its serrated blade holding splintered reflections of the silver moon. They looked like luminous snowflakes.

He stared at her with angry, reproachful, and distrusting eyes. Nadine stared back uncompromisingly. She pointed back the way they had come. Joe shook his head viciously. He pointed at the screen and the dark lump in the sleeping bag beyond the screen. He made a horribly explicit gesture, drawing his thumb across his throat at the Adam’s apple. Then he grinned. Nadine had never seen him grin before and it chilled her. It could not have been more savage if those gleaming white teeth had been filed to points.

“No” she said softly. “Or I’ll wake him up now.”

Joe looked alarmed. He shook his head rapidly.

“Then come back with me. Sleep.”

He looked down at the knife, then up at her again. The savagery, for now at least, was gone. He was only a lost little boy who wanted his teddy, or the scratchy blanket which had graduated with him from the crib. Nadine recognized vaguely that this might be the time to make him leave the knife, to just shake her head firmly “No.” But then what? Would he scream? He had screamed after the lunatic soldier had passed out of sight. Screamed and screamed, huge, inarticulate sounds of terror and rage. Did she want to meet the man in the sleeping bag at night, and with such screams ringing in her ears and his?

“Will you come back with me?”

Joe nodded.

“All right,” she said quietly. He bent quickly and picked it up.

They went back together, and he crawled next to her trustingly, the interloper forgotten, at least temporarily. Wrapped his arms around her and went to sleep. She felt the old familiar ache in her belly, the one so much deeper and all-pervading than those caused by the exercise. It was a womanache, and nothing could be done about it. She fell asleep.

She woke up sometime in the early hours of the morning—she wore no watch—cold and stiff and terrified, afraid suddenly that Joe had cunningly waited until she was asleep to creep back to the house and cut the man’s throat in his sleep. Joe’s arms were no longer around her. She felt responsible for the boy, she had always felt responsible for the little ones who had not asked to be in the world, but if he had done that, she would cut him adrift. To take life when so much had been lost was the one unpardonable sin. And she could not be alone with Joe much longer without help; being with him was like being in a cage with a temperamental lion. Like a lion, Joe could not (or would not) speak; he could only roar in his lost little boy’s voice.

She sat up and saw that the boy was still with her. In his sleep he had drawn away from her a little, that was all. He had curled up like a fetus, his thumb in his mouth, his hand wrapped around the shaft of the knife.

Mostly asleep again already, she walked to the grass, urinated, and went back to her blanket. The next morning she was not sure if she had really awakened in the night or only dreamed she had.

If I dreamed, Larry thought, they must have been good dreams. He couldn’t remember any of them. He felt like his old self, and he thought today would be a good day. He would see the ocean today. He rolled up his sleeping bag, tied it to the bike-carrier, went back to get his pack… and stopped.

A cement path led up to the porch steps, and on both sides the grass was long and violently green. To the right, close by the porch itself, the dewy grass was beaten down. When the dew evaporated, the grass would spring back up, but now it held the shape of footprints. He was a city boy and no kind of woodsman (he had been more into Hunter Thompson than James Fenimore Cooper), but you would have to be blind, he thought, not to see by the tracks that there had been two of them: a big one and a small one. Sometime during the night they had come up to the screen and looked in at him. It gave him a chill. It was the stealth he didn’t like, and he liked the first touch of returning fear even less.

If they don’t show themselves pretty quick, he thought, I’m going to try and flush them out. Just the thought that he could do that brought most of his self-confidence back. He slipped into his pack and got going.

By noon he had reached US 1 in Wells. He flipped a coin and it came up tails. He turned south on 1, leaving the coin to gleam indifferently up from the dust. Joe found it twenty minutes later and stared at it as if it were a hypnotist’s crystal. He put it in his mouth and Nadine made him spit it out.

Two miles down the road Larry saw it for the first time, the huge blue animal, lazy and slow this day. It was completely different from the Pacific or the Atlantic that lay off Long Island. That part of the ocean looked complacent, somehow, almost tame. This water was a darker blue, nearly cobalt, and it came up to the land in one rushing swell after another and bit at the rocks. Spume as thick as eggwhite jumped into the air and then splattered back. The waves made a constant growling boom against the shore.

Larry parked his bike and walked toward the ocean, feeling a deep excitement that he couldn’t explain. He was here, he had made it to the place where the sea took over. This was the end of east. This was land’s end.

He crossed a marshy field, his shoes squishing through water standing around hummocks and clumps of reeds. There was a rich and fecund tidal smell. As he, drew closer to the headland, the thin skin of earth was peeled away and the naked bone of granite poked through—granite, Maine’s final truth. Gulls rose, clean white against the blue sky, crying and wailing. He had never seen so many birds in one place before. It occurred to him that, despite their white beauty, gulls were carrion eaters. The thought that followed was nearly unspeakable, but it had formed fully in his mind before he could push it away: The pickings must be real good just lately.

He began to walk again, his shoes now clicking and scraping on sun-dried rock which would always be wet in its many seams from the spray. There were barnacles growing in those cracks, and scattered here and there like shrapnel bursts of bone were the shells the gulls had dropped to get at the soft meat inside.

A moment later he stood upon the naked headland. The seawind struck him full force, lifting his heavy growth of hair back from his forehead. He lifted his face into it, into the harsh-clean salt-smell of the blue animal. The combers, glassy blue-green, moved slowly in, their slopes becoming more pronounced as the bottom shallowed up beneath them, their peaks gaining first a curl of foam, then a curdly topping. Then they crashed suicidally against the rocks as they had since the beginning of time, destroying themselves, destroying an infinitesimal bit of the land at the same time. There was a ramming, coughing boom as water was forced deep into some half-submerged channel of rock that had been carved out over the millennia.

He turned first left, then right, and saw the same thing happening in each direction, as far as he could see… combers, waves, spray, most of all an endless glut of color that took his breath away.

He was at land’s end.

He sat down with his feet dangling over the edge, feeling a little overcome. He sat there for half an hour or better. The seabreeze honed his appetite and he rummaged in his pack for lunch. He ate heartily. Thrown spray had turned the legs of his bluejeans black. He felt cleaned out, fresh.