And, more than that, Dale knew at that second that it wasn't all right, that Mike's miscalculation could have cost them their lives on this beautiful July morning.

What was waiting in the darkness of the woods back there?

Dale closed his eyes and thought of Mrs. Duggan, eight months dead ... of Tubby Cooke the way Dale had seen him, white and bloated, the skin beginning to come off like white rubber that's rotted from the inside out ... of long, moist things tunneling underfoot, jaws waiting under the thin blanket of loam and leaves ... of the Soldier the way Mike had described it, face rippling and flowing into a lamprey's funnel ringed with teeth. . . .

They rode into town without speaking, waving tiredly as Uncle Henry dropped each of them off.

Evening fell a bit earlier this night than the last, almost imperceptibly so but enough to remind the careful observer that the solstice had passed and that the days were getting shorter rather than longer. The sunset was that long, achingly beautiful balance of stillness in which the sun seemed to hover like a red balloon above the western horizon, the entire sky catching fire from the death of day, a sunset unique to the American Midwest and ignored by most of its inhabitants. The twilight brought the promise of coolness and the certain threat of night.

Mike had meant to nap during the day-he was so tired that his eyelids felt gritty and his throat was sore from fatigue-but there was too much to do. "Vandals" had torn the screen off Memo's window during the night; Mike's mother had heard the noise and gone rushing in to see the breeze blowing papers and old sepia photographs off Memo's table, the curtains billowing out wildly into the yard as if someone had just passed through them.

Memo was all right, although agitated to the point that her Winking made no sense and she would not wait for questions to answer. Mike's mother was upset-at the vandalism, at the fact of her son's obsession coming true. She had called her husband at work and then called Barney, who had come over in the middle of the night, scratched his head, and said that vandals had been a problem that summer and asked Mrs. O'Rourke if Michael or any of the girls had had a run-in with C. J. Congden or Archie Kreck. Mike's mom had said that her girls were not allowed to talk to trash like Congden or Kreck and that Mike didn't have anything to do with them; then she asked if this vandalism and the Peeping Tom Mike had seen might be related to the killing of Mrs. Moon's cats-a crime the entire town was talking about. Barney had scratched his head again, promised that he'd patrol by their house more often, and gone about his business. Mike's dad had called back from the brewery and said that he'd been able to change shifts with someone and that after Saturday night, he'd be off nights for the entire summer rather than just three weeks.

Mike had repaired the screen-his mom had retrieved it and locked it in place, but the latch had been torn out of the sill and the frame had been broken in two places-and while doing so he noticed the slime. It was dried to the color and texture of old mucus and wasn't immediately visible because of the torn filaments of the screen itself. But it was there. Mike had touched it and shuddered.

Once, a couple of years earlier when Mike was eight or nine, he and his dad had been fishing on some dark tributary of the Spoon when Mike had hooked an eel. Freshwater eels were rare even on the broader Illinois River, and Mike had never seen one before. As soon as the long, yellow-green, snakelike body broke the surface, Mike had thought water moccasin and turned to run, forgetting for a second that he was in a rowboat. His dad caught him by a belt loop just as Mike was leaving the boat at high speed, and-intrigued by the writhing thing on the end of the boy's line-had reeled in first his son and then the eel, ordering Mike to use the net on it.

Mike remembered his revulsion and fascination at the thing. The eel's body was thicker than that of a snake, more reptilian and ancient somehow, and it rippled and flowed like something not spawned on this world. The body was coated with a layer of ooze, as if the thing secreted mucus. The long jaws were lined with needle-sharp teeth.

Mike's dad had tied off the net and lashed it to the side of the boat to keep the thing alive in the water until they returned to the bridge where they'd parked, and they slowly trolled back that way, Mike aware of the writhing thing just below the waterline. But when they beached the small boat, the eel was gone. It had somehow slithered through a gap in the net one-fifth the diameter of its body. All that was left was a coating of slime, as if the thing's skin and flesh had been mostly liquid and not too important to leave behind.

Just like the goop on the screen.

Mike cleaned the remaining windowscreen with kerosene, as if to kill any germs left behind, re-glued and stapled the frame as best he could, replaced the broken part of the screen, and set it back in place, adding two more latches-one on the lower sill and one on the upper.

He found the bit of consecrated Host in the dirt below the window. He imagined the Soldier sliding upward to that window in the dead of night, its fingers flowing between the grille of the screen, its long snout questing toward Memo like a lamprey closing on a particularly juicy fish. . . .

Had the Host and the holy water stopped it? Or was it the Soldier at all? Possibly some other thing had come for his grandmother last night. ...

Mike felt like crying. His clever scheme had ended in confusion and near disaster. Mike had seen the Rendering Truck set back in the trees behind the Black Tree. He had smelled it. And that stench of death could have been from the rotting bodies of his friends if they had chosen to ride home on their bikes the way he had planned.

Mike knew that they were in a war as certainly as his father had known during World War II. Only there were no fronts or places of safety in this war, and the enemy owned the night.

He pedaled over to St. Malachy's after lunch, but there was no word on Father Cavanaugh. The Highway Patrol and the Oak Hill police had been notified by the archdiocese of the priest's disappearance, but Mrs. McCafferty told him that everyone seemed to believe that Father C. had been discouraged by his illness and had gone home to Chicago. The thought of the young priest on the road somewhere, sick and feverish in a bus station, made her start crying again.

Mike reassured her that Father Cavanaugh hadn't gone home.

He dropped by Harlen's long enough to borrow a bottle of wine-Harlen said his mother would never miss it, it was Ripple, some "moose piss" that a cousin had given her-and Mike put it in a brown bag and rode his bike down to Bandstand Park. He didn't really think that he'd get any more useful information from Mink, but he felt like he still owed him something. Plus, it reassured him that someone had actually seen some of the events that were clouding Mike's life these days.

Mink was gone. His bottles and newspapers and even the rags of his flappy coat-the coat he wore summer and winter-were strewn about the dirt-floored crawlspace as if a localized hurricane had struck. There were five holes-each red-rimmed and perfectly round, each about eighteen inches across-riddling the dirt floor as if someone had been drilling for oil.

You're imagining the worst Mike told himself. Mink's probably off doing an odd job somewhere, having a drink with his buddies somewhere.

Except that Mike was sure he wasn't. He imagined those mad moments-during the night?-with Mink awakening from his wino dreams to the buckling of earth, the smell of decay and something worse rising into his hideout of almost seven decades. Mike imagined the old man hopping around that dark space as something large and white and terrible crashed up through the earth the way Mike's eel had broken the surface of the water, long jaws snapping, blind eyes searching.