Father C. looked bad, but he wasn't a rotting corpse. Not quite. But the young priest obviously was very, very sick: his eyes were closed but sunken in pools of blue-black, his lips were white and cracked as if he had been out in a desert for days, his skin glowed-not with the healthy sheen of sunburn, but with the radioactive internal glow of the most intense fever-his hair was matted and spikey, and his hands were curled on his chest like animal claws. Father C.'s mouth was open wide and a thin line of drool ran down onto his pajama collar and his breathing rattled in his throat like loose stones. He didn't look much like a priest at that moment.

"Enough," whispered Mrs. McCafferty, shooing Mike toward the stairs.

It had been enough. Mike pedaled toward Mrs. Moon's so fast that the wind brought tears to his eyes.

She was dead.

He'd expected it when he knocked on the screen door and there was no answer. He'd known it when he'd stepped into the small, dark parlor and wasn't instantly surrounded by her cats.

He knew that Miss Moon, the librarian, usually walked over from her "apartment"-actually a floor she rented in a big old house on Broad that she shared with Mrs. Grossaint, the fourth-grade teacher-to have breakfast with her mother around eight. It wasn't quite seven-thirty now.

Mike moved from room to room in the small house, feeling the same nausea he'd had at the rectory. Quit being so weird. She went out walking early. The cats went with her. He knew that the cats wouldn't be caught dead outside the small, white frame house. OK, the cats ran off in the night and she went hunting for them. Or maybe Miss Moon finally took Mrs. M. to the Oak Hill Home in the past couple of days. It's past time. That was the logical answer. Mike knew that it wasn't the right one.

He found her on the tiny landing at the head of the stairs. The second floor was small-big enough just for Mrs. Moon's bedroom and a minuscule bathroom-and the landing was barely large enough to hold the small body.

Mike crouched on the top step, his heart pounding with such ferocity that it threatened to knock him off balance and tumble him back down the stairs. Except for the funeral of his paternal grandpa years earlier, he had never seen a dead body ... if one did not count the Soldier. Now Mike stared with a terrible mixture of sadness, horror, and curiosity.

She'd been dead long enough for her hands and arms to go rigid: the left one was crooked around the banister as if she had fallen and had been on the verge of pulling herself back up, the right hand rose vertically from the green carpet with the fingers curled as if clawing the air ... or warding off something terrible.

Mrs. Moon's eyes were open . . •. Mike realized that of all the hundreds of dead people he'd seen while watching other people's TVs, usually Dale's, none of the corpses ever had their eyes open . . . but Mrs. Moon's were so wide that they seemed to be bulging from their sockets. There was no question that she could see anything; Mike looked at the glazed and cloudy orbs and thought This is what dead is.

The liver marks on her face stood out almost three-dimen-sionally because of the blood drained away from the skin. Her neck was tense even in death, the muscles and tendons of her throat corded and stretched as if to the point of snapping from tension. She was wearing a quilted robe over some sort of pink nightgown, and her bony legs jutted straight out as if she'd fallen straight-legged and stiff, like a comic doing a pratfall in a silent film. One pink, fluffy slipper had come off. The old lady had painted her toenails the same color as the slipper, but that just made her wrinkled, warty, knotted foot look all the more bizarre, staring skyward with its old-lady toes.

Mike leaned forward, touched Mrs. Moon's left hand gingerly, and snatched his hand back. She was very cold, despite the intense heat of the house. He forced himself to look at the most terrible part of all this-her expression.

Mrs. Moon's mouth was open very, very wide, as if she had died while screaming. Her dentures had come loose and hung in the dark cavity like some bright and alien piece of plastic that had fallen in from somewhere else. The lines of her face had been molded and rearranged in a sculpture of pure terror.

Mike turned away and thumped down the carpeted stairs on his rear end, too shaky to rise to his feet. There had been only the slightest hint of decay in the air, like flowers that had died and been left in a sealed car on a hot day. Nothing as bad as the rectory.

Whoever killed her might still be in the house. Might be waiting behind the bedroom door up there.

Mike didn't stand to look or run. He had to sit there for a minute. There was a very loud noise in his ears, as if the crickets had started up again in the daylight, and he realized that small black spots were dancing in the periphery of his vision. He lowered his head between his knees, rubbed his cheeks hard.

Miss Moon'II be here in a few minutes. She'll find her mother like this.

Mike wasn't crazy about the spinsterish librarian-she'd once asked Mike why he even came by the library if he was so slow that he'd flunked fourth grade. Mike had grinned at her and said he was with friends-it had been true that day-but for some reason her comment had hurt him for many nights after that, in those seconds before drifting off to sleep.

Still, nobody deserves to find her mother like this.

Mike knew that if he were Duane, or maybe even Dale, he'd think of some clever boy-detective things to do, find some clues or something-he did not doubt for a second that the same . . . force . . . that had killed Duane and his uncle had murdered Mrs. Moon-but all Mike could think to do was clear his throat and call, "Here kitty, kitty, kitty. Here kitty."

No movement from the upstairs bedroom or bathroom-both doors were slightly ajar-and no motion from the shadows in the kitchen or back hall.

Standing on shaky legs, Mike forced himself to go up the stairs, to stay standing this time, and to look down one final time at Mrs. Moon. She was even tinier and older looking from this angle. Mike had the powerful urge to remove the loose dentures from her gaping mouth so she wouldn't choke. Then he imagined that snapping tortoise jaw coming up, the beak of a mouth snapping down, and his hand caught in the corpse's mouth as the dead eyes blinked and fixed on him. . . .

Stop it, dipshit. When Mike cursed, he often heard Jim Harlen's voice in his mind supplying the vocabulary. Right now Harlen's mental voice was telling him to get the fuck out of the house.

Mike raised his right hand in the motion he'd watched Father Cavanaugh perform a thousand times, and blessed the old lady's body, making the sign of the cross over her. He knew that Mrs. Moon wasn't Catholic, but if he'd known the words to the ritual, Mike would have performed the Last Rites at that second.

Instead, he said a short and silent prayer and then stepped to the slightly open door to the bedroom. The door was ajar just far enough to allow him to get his head in without touching the wood of the door or frame.

The cats were there. Many of the torn and shredded little corpses were lying on the carefully made bed; some had been impaled on three of the four bedposts; the heads of several more of the cats were lined up on Mrs. Moon's dresser next to her brushes and bottles of perfume and hand lotion. One cat, a tawny one that Mike remembered as the old lady's favorite, hung from the beaded chain of the overhead light; he had one blue eye and one yellow eye, and both stared at Mike every time the surprisingly long body revolved in its slow and silent turning.

Mike slammed down the stairs and was almost to the back door when he stopped, his throat burning with the urge to vomit. I can't let Miss Moon come in and find this. He had only minutes, perhaps less.