Feelings

"Five million dollars, Mr. Weinstein? Five million? Where did you come up with such an outrageous figure?"

Howard Weinstein studied his prey across the table in his office conference room. Until today, Dr. Walter Johnson had been little more than a name on a subpoena and interrogatories. His C.V. put his age at fifty-one but he looked a tired old sixty as he sat next to the natty attorney the insurance company had assigned him. His face was lined, haggard, and pale, his movements slow, his voice soft, weak, his shoulders slumped inside a grey suit that looked too big for him. Maybe the strain of the malpractice suit was getting to him. Good. That might spur him to push his insurance company for an early settlement.

"Five million?" Dr. Johnson repeated.

Howard hesitated. I'm the one who's supposed to be asking the questions, he thought. This is my show. But he had asked his last question and so the deposition was essentially over. He wanted to say, It's my favorite number, but this was a legal proceeding and Lydia's fingers were poised over her steno machine's keyboard, awaiting his reply. So he looked Dr. Walter Johnson straight in his watery blue eyes and said,

"That's the compensation my client deserves for the permanent injuries he suffered at your hands due to your gross negligence. He will suffer lifelong impairment–"

"I saved his life!"

"That is hardly clear, Dr. Johnson. It's up to a jury to decide."

"When you sue me within my coverage," Dr. Johnson said, staring at his folded hands where they rested on the table before him, "I can say to myself, 'He's doing business.' But five million dollars? My malpractice coverage doesn't go that high. That will ruin me. That will take everything I own – my house, all the investments I've made over the years, all the money I've put away for my children and future grandchildren – and still leave me millions in debt. You're not just threatening me, you're threatening my family." He looked up at Howard. "Do you have a family, Mr. Weinstein?"

"Is that a threat, Dr. Johnson?" Howard knew the doctor was making no threat, but he reacted instinctively to keep the defendant off balance. He had no children and had divorced his wife three years ago. And anyway, he wouldn't have cared if the doc had been threatening her.

"Oh, no. I was simply wondering if you might have any conception of what this sort of threat does to someone and to his family. My homelife is a shambles. I've had constant stomachaches for months, I'm losing weight, my daughters are worried about me, my wife is a wreck. Do you have any idea what kind of misery you cause?"

"I am more concerned with the misery you caused my client, Dr. Johnson."

The doctor looked him square in the eyes. Howard felt as if the older man's gaze were penetrating to the back of his skull.

"I don't think you feel anything for anyone, Mr. Weinstein. You need a real lesson in empathy. Do you even know what empathy is?"

"I have empathy for my clients, Dr. Johnson."

"I sincerely doubt that. I think the only empathy you know is for your bank account."

"Okay, that's it," Howard said, nodding to Lydia at the steno machine as he closed his case folder and rose from his seat. He had let this go on too long already. "The deposition's over. Thank you for your cooperation, Dr. Johnson. We'll see you in court."

He ushered out the defendant and his attorney, then stepped over to where Lydia was packing up her gear. "Let me see the end of that tape," he said.

"Howie–!"

Ignoring her mild protest, he opened the tape compartment and pulled out the long strip of steno paper. As he scanned through it, looking for where when Dr. Johnson had begun running off at the mouth, Lydia said,

"You're really not going to ruin him, are you? You're really not going to take everything he owns?" She was thin, dark-haired, attractive in a brittle sort of way.

Howard laughed. "Nah! Too much trouble. It's S.O.P.: Ask for an exorbitant amount, then settle for somewhere near the limit of his coverage. Taking all his assets – which I could probably get if we go to court – and going through a long liquidation process would be a big hassle. Best thing to do is to get that big check from the insurance company, take my forty percent, then move on to the next pigeon."

"Is that all he is? A pigeon?"

"Waiting to be plucked."

He knew there was something wrong with the metaphor there, but didn't bother to figure out what. He had found the spot he had been searching for on the tape. He marked it with a pen.

"Stop the transcription here."

"Why?"

"It's where the doc made his closing sob story about threatening his family and–"

"–your empathy for your bank account?" She smiled up at him.

"Yeah. I don't want that part in the deposition."

Her smile took a mischievous twist. "I sort of liked that part."

"Ditch it."

"I can't do that."

"Sure you can, Sis."

Her smile was gone now. "I won't. It's illegal."

In a sudden surge of anger, Howard ripped the offending section from the tape and tore it into tiny pieces. He never would have dared this with any other licensed court stenographer, but Lydia was his sister, and big brothers could take certain liberties with little sisters. Which was the main reason he used her. Her name had been Chambers since her wedding four years ago, so no one was the wiser.

He tossed the remains in the air and they fluttered to the floor in a confetti flurry.

Lydia's lips trembled. "I hate you! You're just like Dad!"

"Don't say that!"

"It's true! You're just a 'Daddy Shoog' with a law degree!"

"Shut up!" Howard quickly closed the door to the outer office. "I told you never to mention him around here!"

He prayed none of the secretaries had heard. One of them might get to thinking and might make the connection. She might find out that Lenny Winter, the Fifties d-j known as "Daddy Shoog," was really Leonard Weinstein, Howard's father. And then it wouldn't be long before it was all over Manhattan: Howard Weinstein was the son of that fat balding guy doing the twist and shilling his "One Mo' Once Golden Oldies" albums like Ginsu knives ("But wait! There's more!") on late night tv commercials.

God! He'd never be able to maintain credibility at another deposition, let alone conduct a court case.

He had made every effort to avoid even a faint resemblance to his father: He'd grown a thick, black mustache, he took care of his hair, combing in a style his father had never used when he had a full head of it, and he kept his body trim and hard. No one would ever guess he was the son of Daddy Shoog.

Had to hand it to the old jerk, though. He was really cleaning up on those doo-wop retreads, especially since he was forgoing the inconvenience of paying royalties to the original artists.

"Too bad you inherited Dad's ethics instead of his personality. The only reason I come around is because I'm family. You've got no friends. Your wife dumped you, you've–"

"Your marriage didn't last too long either, Miss Holier Than Thou."

"True, but I'm the one who ended it, not Hal. You got dumped."

"Elise didn't dump me! I dumped her!"

And did a damn fine job of it, too. Left her without a pot to pee in. God, had he been glad to be rid of her! Three endless years of her nagging, "You're never home! I feel like a widow!" Blah-blah-blah. He'd taught her the folly of suing a lawyer for divorce.

"So what have you got, Howie? You've got your big law practice and that's it!"

"And that's plenty!" She pulled this shit on him every time they argued. Really liked to twist the knife. "I'm just thirty-two and already I'm a legend in this town! A fucking legend!"

"And what are you doing after lunch, Mr. Legend? Going down to St. Vincent's to scrape up another client?"

"Hey! My clients are shitbums. You think I don't know that? I know it. Damn, do I know it! But they've been injured and they've got a legal right to maximum recovery under the law! It's my duty–"

"Save it for the jury or the newspapers, Howie," Lydia said. Her voice sounded tired, disgusted. She picked up her steno gear and headed for the door. "You and Dad – you make me ashamed."

And then she was gone.

Howard left the files on the desk and went into his private office. He ran a hand through his thick dark hair as he gazed out at Manhattan's midtown spires. What was wrong with Lydia? Didn't she understand? The malpractice field was a gold mine. There were million-dollar clients out there who hadn't the vaguest inkling what they were worth. And if he didn't find them, somebody else would!

He'd come a long way. Started out in general practice, then sniffed the possibilities in liability law. Advertising on tv had brought him a horde of new clients, but all of them combined hadn't equaled the take from his first medical malpractice settlement. He had known then that malpractice was the only way to go.

Especially when you had a method.

It was simple, really. All it took was a few well-compensated contacts in the city's hospitals to let him know when a certain type of patient was being discharged. One of Howard's assistants – Howard used to go himself but he was above that now – would arrange to be there when the potential client left the hospital. He'd take him to lunch and subtly make his pitch.

You couldn't be too subtle, though. The prospective client was usually a neurosurgical patient, preferably an indigent sleazo who had shown up in the hospital emergency room with his head bashed in from a mugging or a fight over a bottle or a fix, or who'd fallen down a stairway or stumbled in front of a car during a stupor. Didn't matter what the cause as long as he'd wound up in the ER in bad enough shape for the neurosurgeon on call to be dragged in to put his skull and its contents back in order again.

"But you're not right since the surgery, are you?"

That was the magic question. The answer was almost invariably negative. Of course, the prospect hadn't been "right" before the surgery, either, but that was hard to prove. Nigh on impossible to prove. And even if the potential said he felt pretty good, he usually could find some major complaint when pressed, especially after it was explained to him that a permanent post-surgical deficit could be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of seven figures to him if things went his way.

Yeah, they were druggies and winos and all-purpose sleazos and it was an ordeal to be in conference with one of them for more than just a few minutes, but they were Howard's ticket to the Good Life. They were the perfect malpractice clients. He loved to stick them in front of a jury. Their shambling gaits, vacant stares, and disordered thought patterns wrung the hearts of even the most objective jurors. And since they were transients with no steady jobs, friends, or acquaintances, the defense could never prove convincingly that they had been just as shambling, vacant, and disordered before the surgery.

In most cases, the malpractice insurer took one look at the cient and reached for his checkbook: It was settlement time.

Yeah, life was sweet when you knew the bushes with the best berries.

*

Lydia was still fuming when she reached the garage downstairs. She handed in her ticket and found herself waiting next to Dr. Johnson. He nodded to her.

"Can't they find your car?" she said for lack of something better.

He shrugged. "Seems that way. Goes with the rest of the day, I guess." He looked tired, haggard, defeated. He smiled suddenly, obviously forcing it. "How'd I do up there?"

Lydia sensed his desperate need for some hope, some encouragement.

"You did very well, I thought. Especially at the end." She couldn't bring herself to tell him that his final remarks were shredded on the floor of the conference room.

"Do you think I have a snowball's chance in hell of coming out of this with the shirt on my back?"

Lydia couldn't help it. She had to say something to ease this poor man's mind. She put her hand on his arm.

"I see lots of these cases. I'm sure they'll settle within your coverage limits."

He turned to her. "Settle? I'm not going to settle anything!"

His intensity surprised her. "Why not?"

"Because if I agree to settle, it's as much as an admission that I've done something wrong! And I haven't!"

"But you never know what a jury will do, Dr. Johnson."

"So I've been told, over and over and over by the insurance company. 'Settle – settle – settle!' They're scared to death of juries. Better to pay off the bloodsucking lawyer and his client than risk the decision of a jury. Sure! Fine for them! They're only thinking about the bottom line. But I did everything right in this case! I released his subdural hematoma and tied off the leaking artery inside his skull. That man would have died without me! And now he's suing me!"

"I'm sorry," Lydia said.

It sounded lame to her but it was all she could say. She felt somehow partly responsible for Dr. Johnson's misery. After all, Howie was her brother.

"Maybe I should have done what a lot of my fellow neurosurgeons do: Refuse to take emergency room calls. That way you don't leave yourself open to the shyster sharks prowling around for a quick fortune. Maybe I should have gone into general practice with my brother back in our home town. A foggy little place on the coast..."

He rubbed a hand across his eyes. "Looks pretty hopeless, doesn't it. If I go to court, I could lose everything I've worked for during my entire career, and jeopardize my family's whole way of life. If I settle, I'm admitting I'm wrong when I know I'm right." His jaw tightened. "It's that damned greedy bastard lawyer."

Although Lydia knew the doctor was right, the words still stung. Howard might be a lot of things, but he was still her brother.

"Things have got to change," Dr. Johnson said. "This kind of abuse is getting way out of hand. There's got to be a change inthe laws to control these...these Hell's Angels in three-piece suits!"

"Don't hold your breath waiting for tort reform," Lydia said. "Ninety-nine percent of state legislators are lawyers, and they're all members of law firms that do a thriving business on liability claims. You don't really think they're going to take some of the bread and butter off their own tables, do you? Talk about conflict of interest!"

Dr. Johnson's expression became bleaker. "Then there's no hope of relief from the Howard Weinsteins of the world, is there? No way to give him a lesson in empathy, in knowing what kind of pain he causes in other people."

Dr. Johnson's car pulled up then, a maroon Jaguar XJ.

"I don't know how to teach him that lesson," he said. "My brother might, but I certainly don't." He sighed heavily. "I honestly don't know what I'm going to do."

"Keep fighting," Lydia told him as she watched him walk around the car and tip the attendant.

He looked at her over the hood of the Jaguar. There was a distant, resigned look in his eyes that made her afraid for him.

"Easy for you to say," he said, then got in and drove off.

Lydia stood there in the garage and watched him go, knowing in some intangible way that she would never see Dr. Walter Johnson again.

*

"He's dead! God, Howie, he's dead!"

Howard looked up at Lydia's pale, strained features as she leaned over his desk. He thought, Oh, no! It's Dad! It'll be in the papers! Everyone will know!

"Who?" he managed to say.

"Dr. Johnson! The guy you deposed last week in the malpractice case! He killed himself!"

Relief flooded through him. "He killed himself? Did he think that would let him off the hook? The jerk! We'll just take his estate to court!"

"Howard! He was depressed over this suit. You drove him over the edge!"

"I did nothing of the sort! What did he do? Shoot himself?"

Lydia's face got whiter. "No. He...he chopped his hand off. He bled to death."

Howard's mind suddenly went into high gear.

"Wait a minute. Wait. A. Minute! This is great! Great! It shows tremendous guilt over his negligence! He cut off the appendage that damaged his patient! No, wait! Wait! The act of suicide, especially in such a bizarre manner, points to a deranged mind. This means I can bring the hospital executive committee into the suit for allowing an obviously impaired physician to remain on the staff of their hospital. Maybe include the hospital's entire department of surgery, too! Oh, this is big! Big! Thank you, Lydia! You've just made my day! My year!"

She stood there with her mouth hanging open, looking stupid. "I don't believe you."

"What? What don't you believe? What?" What the hell was wrong with her, anyway?

"Isn't there a limit, Howard? Isn't there a place where you see a line and say to yourself, 'I can't cross over here. I'll cause too much pain on the other side.'"

He smiled at her. "Of course there is, Sis. And as soon as I find it, I'll let you know."

She didn't smile at the joke. Her face was hard, her eyes icy. "I think Dr. Johnson asked a good question last week. Do you have feelings, Howie? Do you ever feel anything for anybody but yourself?"

"Get off the soapbox, Sis."

"Gladly," she said. "Off the soapbox and out of your slimy presence." She turned toward the door, then back again. "Oh, by the way, I think you should know about Dr. Johnson's hand. You know, the one he cut off? They can't find it."

Howard fluttered his hands in the air. "Oooh! I'm scared! Maybe it will come crawling after me in my sleep tonight!"

She spun and slammed out the door. Howard immediately got on the intercom to his receptionist. "Chrissie? Get hold of Brian Jassie down at the coroner's office."

Missing hand? That sounded awful weird. He wanted the straight dope on it. And Brian Jassie could get it for him.

*

Brian had all the details by 4:00 p.m.

"This is what we got so far," he told Howard over the phone. "It's a strange one, I tell you."

"Just tell me what happened, Brian."

"Okay. Here's how they think it went down. About ten o'clock last night, at his Fifth Avenue office, this Dr. Johnson ties a tight tourniquet just above his right wrist with neat little pads to put extra pressure over the main arteries, and whacks off his hand. Records show he was a southpaw. There's evidence that he used local anesthesia. Well, he must have, right? I mean, sawing through your own wrist–"

"Brian!"

"Okay, okay. After the hand is off, there seems to be an interval of about half an hour during which we have no idea what he does, maybe some ritual or something, then he sits down, lowers his stump into a bucket, and loosens the tourniquet. Exsanguinates in a couple of minutes. Very neat, very considerate. No mess for anybody to clean up."

A real nut case, Howard thought. "Why do you say he was involved in some ritual?"

"Just a guess. There were candles all around the room and the histology department says the hand was off for around thirty minutes before he died."

"Then you have the hand."

"Uh, no, we don't."

Howard felt a little knot form in his stomach. "You're kidding."

"'Fraid not. The forensic team looked everywhere in the office and around the building. No hand."

So Lydia hadn't been pulling his chain. The hand really was missing. Well, that would only reinforce his contention that Dr. Johnson was mentally unbalanced and shouldn't have been allowed to practice. Yes, he would definitely bring the hospital executive committee into the suit.

Still, he wondered about that missing hand. He sat there smoothing his mustache and wondering where it could be.

*

The package arrived the next day.

Chrissie brought it to his desk unopened. It had come by Federal Express and was marked "Personal And Confidential." Howard had her stand by as he opened it, figuring it would have to be shoved into somebody's file – most of the "Personal And Confidential" mail he received was anything but.

Chrissie began to scream when the hand fell out onto his desk. She kept on screaming all the way down the hall to the reception area. Howard stared at the hand. It lay palm up on his desk blotter, a deathly, bled-out white except at the ragged, beefy red wrist stump. The skin was moist, glistening in the fluorescent glare. He could see the creases that ran along the palm and across the finger joints, could even see fingerprint whorls. A faintly sour smell rose from it.

This had to be a joke, Lydia's way of trying to shake him up. Well, it wasn't going to work. This thing had to be a fake. He'd seen those amazingly lifelike platters of sushi and bowls of sukiyaki in the windows of Japanese restaurants. What was it they called the stuff? Mihon. That was it. This was the same thing: expertly sculpted and colored plastic. A gruesome piece of anatomical mihon.

Howard touched it with his index finger and felt a faint pins-and-needles sensation run up his arm and all over his skin. It lasted about the time between eye blinks and then it was gone. But by then he had realized from the texture of the skin and the give of the flesh underneath that this wasn't mihon. This was the real thing!

He leapt out of his chair and stood there trembling, repeatedly wiping his finger on his suit coat as he shouted to Chrissie to call the police.

*

Howard was late getting out of the office that day. The endless questions from the detectives and the forensic people had put him far behind schedule. Then to top everything off, his last call of the day had been from Brian at the coroner's office. According to Brian, the forensic experts downtown said that the hand had definitely belonged to the late great Dr. Walter Johnson.

So now he was shook up, grossed out, and just plain tired. Irritable, too. He had snapped at the Rican garage attendant – Jose or Gomez or whatever the hell his name was – to move his ass and get the car up front pronto.

His red Porche 914 squealed down the ramp and screeched to a halt in front of him. As he passed the attendant and handed him a fifty-cent tip – half the usual – he could almost feel the man's animosity toward him.

No, wait...it was more than almost. It was as if he were actually experiencing the car jockey's anger and envy. It wormed into his system and for a moment Howard too was angry and envious. But at whom? Himself?

And just as suddenly as it came it was gone. He was once again just tired, irritable, and anxious to get himself out to the Island and home where he could have himself a stiff drink and relax.

Traffic wasn't bad. That was one advantage of leaving late. He cruised the LIE to Glen Cove Road, then headed north. He stopped at the MacDonald's drive-thru just this side of the sign that declared the southern limit of "The Incorporated Village of Monroe." He ordered up a Big Mac and fries. As he handed his money to the pimple-faced redheaded girl in the window, a wave of euphoria rolled over him. He felt slightly giddy. He looked up at the girl in her blue uniform and noticed her fixed grin and glazed eyes.

She's stoned! he thought. And damned if I don't feel stoned, too!

He took his bagged order from her and gunned away. The feeling faded almost immediately. But not his puzzlement. First the lot attendant and now the kid at Mickey-D's. What was going on here?

He pulled into his spot in the Soundview Condominiums lot and entered his townhouse. It was a three-storied job with a good view of Monroe Harbor. He'd done some legal work on the land sale and so had been able to get in on a pre-construction purchase. The price: one hundred and sixty-nine large. They were going for twice that now.

Yeah, if you knew the right people and had the wherewithal to take advantage of situations when they presented themselves, your net worth could only go one way: Up.

Howard pulled a Bud from the fridge and opened up the styrofoam Big Mac container. As he ate, he stared out over the still waters of the Long Island Sound at the lights along the Connecticut shore on the far side. Much as he tried not to, he couldn't help thinking about that severed hand in the mail today. Which led his thoughts around to Dr. Johnson. What was it he hadsaid about empathy last week?

I don't think you feel anything for anyone, Mr. Weinstein. You need a real lesson in empathy.

Something like that. And then a week later he had sat down in his office and cut off his hand, and then had somehow got it into a Federal Express overnight envelope and sent it to Howard. Personal And Confidential. And then he had let himself die.

...a lesson in empathy...

Then the hand had arrived and Howard had touched it, felt that tingle, and now he seemed to be able to sense what others were feeling.

...empathy...

Yeah, right. And any moment now, he'd hear Rod Serling's voice fill the room.

He finished the beer and went for another.

But let's not be too quick to laugh everything off, he told himself as he nibbled on some fries. Law school had taught him how to organize his thoughts and present cogent arguments. So far, there was a good case for his being the victim of some sort of curse. That would have been laughable yesterday, but this morning there had been a real live – no, strike that, make that dead – a dead human hand lying on his desk. A hand that had once belonged to a defendant in a very juicy malpractice case. A man who had said that Howard Weinstein needed a lesson in how other people felt.

And now Howard Weinstein had encountered two instances in which he had experienced another person's feelings.

Or thought he had.

That was the question. Had Dr. Johnson done a number on Howard's head? Had he planted some sort of suggestion in his subconscious and then reinforced it by sending him a severed hand?

Or was this the real thing? A dead man's curse?

Howard decided to take a scientific approach. The only way to prove a hypothesis was to test it in the field. He tossed off the second beer. Time to hit the town.

As he gathered up the MacDonald's debris, he noticed a dull ache all along his right arm. He rubbed it but that didn't help. He wondered how he could have strained it. Maybe it was a result of jerking away after touching that hand this morning. No, he didn't remember any pain then. He shrugged it off, pulled on a sweater, and stepped out into the spring night.

The air was cool and tangy with salt from the Sound. Too beautiful a night to squeeze back into the Porche, so he decided to walk the few blocks west down to the waterfront nightspots. He had only gone a few steps when he noticed that the ache in his arm was gone.

Canterbury's was the first place he came to along the newly renovated waterfront. He stopped in here occasionally with some of his local clients. Not a bad place for lunch, but after five it turned into a meat market. If AIDS had put a damper on the swinging singles scene, you couldn't tell it here. The space around Canterbury's oval bar was smoky, noisy, and packed with yuppie types.

Howard squeezed up to the bar and suddenly felt his knees get rubbery. He leaned against the mahogany edge and glanced at the fellow rubbing elbows with him to his right. He was downing a straight shot of something and chasing it with a few generous chugs of draft beer. There were four other shot glasses on the bar in front of him, all empty.

Howard lurched away toward the booths at the rear of the room and felt better immediately.

God, it's happening! It's true!

As he moved through the crowd, he was assaulted with a complex mixture of lust, boredom, fatigue, and inebriation. It was a relief to reach the relative sanctuary of the last booth in the rear. The emotions and feelings of the room became background noise, a sensory muzak.

But they were still there. On the way out from the city it had seemed he needed physical contact – from the garage attendant, the girl at Mickey D's – to get the sensory input. Now the feelings seemed to waft through the air.

Howard shut his eyes and rubbed his hands over his temples. This couldn't be happening, couldn't be real. This was the stuff of Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and Tales from the Darkside. This sort of thing did not happen to Howard Weinstein in little old Monroe, Long Island.

But he could not deny his own experience. He had felt drunk before noticing that the guy next to him was doing boilermakers.

Or had he?

Maybe he had unconsciously noticed the guy with the ball and the beer as he had stepped up to the bar and his mind had done the rest.

It was all so confusing. How could he know for sure?

"Can I get you something, Mr. Weinstein?"

Howard looked up. A well-stacked blonde stood over him with a tray under her arm and her order pad ready. She was thirtyish with too much make-up and too-blonde hair, but on the whole not someone he'd kick out of bed. She was dressed in the standard Canterbury cocktail waitress uniform of short skirt, black stockings, and low cut Elizabethan barmaid blouse, and she was smiling.

"How do you know my name?"

"Why shouldn't I? You're one of the more important men in Monroe, aren't you?"

She was interested in him. Howard couldn't read her thoughts, but he sensed her excited response to his presence. She was probably attracted to money and power and apparently he represented a modicum of both to her. There was a trace of sexual arousal and an undercurrent of anxiety as well.

Anxiety over what? That he'd give her the cold shoudler? He tried to see if he could affect that.

"Nice to be recognized," he said, "especially by such an attractive woman"...he craned his neck to see the name tag centered on her cleavage..."Molly."

The anxiety all but vanished and the sexual arousal rose two notches.

Bingo!

He ordered a Chivas and soda. He was ready for her when she returned with the drink.

"Looks like you'll be working late tonight, huh?"

He could feel her excitement swell. "Not necessarily. It's still the off season so it's not really crazy yet. When the tables are kinda slow like tonight I can usually get off early if I ask."

"Why don't you ask. I've got no plans for the evening. Maybe we could think of something to do together."

Her sexual arousal zoomed.

"Sounds good to me," she said with a smile and a wink.

Howard leaned back and sipped his scotch as he watched the gentle sway of her retreating butt.

So easy! Like having all the answers to a test before you sat down to take it.

This was a curse?

*

What a night!

Howard walked along the waterfront through the morning mist. He was still a little weak-kneed. He'd had loads of women over the years, plenty of one-night stands, even an all-nighter with a couple of pros. But never, never anything like what he had experienced last night.

As soon as they had got to Molly's apartment and begun the foreplay, he had found himself tapped into her feelings. He could sense her excitement, her pleasure – he was more than just aware of it, he was actually experiencing it himself. He could tell when he was going too fast or not fast enough. He found he could toy with her, tantalize her, bring her to peaks but keep her from going over the top. Finally he brought her to an Everest and leaped off with her. Her climax fused into his and the results were shattering. She was left gasping but he was utterly speechless.

And that had only been the first time.

Molly had finally fallen asleep telling him he was the greatest lover in the world, really meaning it. Howard had drifted off with her, thinking it wouldn't be bad if that message got around to all the attractive single women in town. Not bad at all.

He had awakened early and Molly had wanted him to stay but he had begged off. He was catching a new emotion from her: She was starting to get lovey-dovey feelings for him – or at least thought she was. And why not? Decent looks, money, power, and a great lover to boot.

What's not to love?

Those feelings tripped off sirens and red lights for Howard. Uh-uh. No love. Just good times and fun and stay loose. Love meant trouble. Women started thinking of marriage then.

He felt her hurt and disappointment as he left, trailing vague promises of getting together again real soon. But he couldn't go home just yet. He was too excited, too exhilarated. This was great! This was fantastic! The possibilities were endless. He walked on, exploring them in his mind.

A siren broke into his thoughts. He looked around and found he was in front of Monroe Community Hospital. An ambulance was racing up the road. As it neared, he felt a growing pressure in his chest. His breath clogged in his throat as the pain became a great lead weight, crushing his sternum. Then, as the ambulance passed and pulled into the approach to the emergency entrance, the pain receded.

Whoever was in that ambulance was having a heart attack. Howard was sure of it. He watched as the ambulance attendants carried someone into the emergency room on a stretcher. Heart attack. No doubt about it. Just one more bit of proof on the side of this so-called curse Dr. Johnson had laid on him. And it would be so easy to confirm. Just go up to the reception desk and ask: Did the ambulance get here with my uncle yet? The man with the chest pain?

He started across the lawn toward the four-story brick structure. As he neared it however, he began to feel nauseous and week. His head pounded, his abdomen burned, ached, cramped, and just plain hurt. Every joint, every bone in his body hurt. He began to wheeze, his vision blurred. It all got worse with eah step closer to the hospital but he forced himself on until he reached the emergency entrance and opened the door.

...pain... fear... pain... hope... pain... grief... pain... rage... pain... despair... pain... joy... pain... pain... pain... pain...

Like a physical assault from a Mongolian horde, like a massive torrent from a sundered damn, like ground zero at Hiroshima, the mental and physical agony flooded over Howard, sending him reeling and stumbling back across the driveway to the grass where he crumbled to his knees and crawled as fast as he could away from the hospital. Anyone watching him would have assumed he was drunk but he didn't care. He had to get away from that building.

He felt almost himself again by the time he reached the sidewalk. He sat on the curb, weak and nauseous, swearing he would never go near another hospital again.

It seemed there were drawbacks to this little power of his after all. But nothing he couldn't handle, nothing he couldn't ovecome. The advantages were too enormous!

He had to talk this out with somebody. Brainstorm it. But with whom. Suddenly, he smiled.

Lydia lived in the garden apartments on the downtown fringe, a short walk from here.

Of course!

*

Howard had looked like he was on drugs when Lydia opened the door to her apartment. She had been in the middle of a nice little dream of being married with two kids and no money problem when the pounding on the door had awakened her. Her brother's face had loomed large in the fish-eye peephole so she had opened up and let him in.

That proved a mistake. Howie was absolutely manic. While she made coffee he stalked around her tiny kitchen waving his arms and talking a mile a minute. Watching him, she thought he might be on speed; listening to him, she thought he might be on acid.

But Howie didn't do drugs.

Which meant he had gone crazy.

"Do you see what this means, Sis? Do you see! The possibilities are endless! Can you imagine what this will let me do at a deposition? If my questions are getting into a sensitive area, I'll know! I'll sense the defendant's fear, his anxiety, and I'll keep hitting those sore spots, pushing those secret buttons until he comes across with what I want. And even if he doesn't, I'll know where to look for the dirt. Same's true with cross-examinations in the court room. I'll know when I've hit a nerve. And speaking of court rooms, I thought of something that's even better – even better!" He stopped and pointed a finger at her. "Juries! Jury selection!"

Lydia stirred the boiling water into the instant coffee – decaf, for sure. She didn't want to hype him up even the tiniest bit more. "Right, Howie," she said softly. "That's a good point."

"Can you imagine how I'll be able to stack the jury box? I mean, I'll know how each juror feels about the case because I'll ask them point blank. I'll say, 'Mrs. So-and-so, how do you feel about the medical profession in general?' If I get some sort of warm glow from her, she's out, no matter what she says. But if I get anger or envy or plain old spitefulness, she's in. I can pack a jury with doctor-haters on all my malpractice cases!" He giggled. "The settlements will be astronomical!"

"Whatever makes you happy, Howie," Lydia said. "Now why don't you sit down and drink your coffee and take it easy." She had heard about Dr. Johnson's hand winding up on his desk yesterday. The shock must have got to him. "You can lie down on my bed if you want to."

He was staring at her.

"You think I'm nuts, don't you?"

"No, Howie. I just think you're feeling the strain of–"

"Right now I'm feeling what you're feeling. Which is a lot of disbelief, a little anxiety, a little fatigue, and a little compassion. Very little compassion."

"You don't need a crystal ball or a voodoo-hoodoo curse to figure that one out."

"And you've got a low backache, too. Right?"

Lydia felt a chill. Her low back did hurt. Her period was due tomorrow and her back always ached the day before.

"Half the world's got backaches, Howie."

"You've got to believe me, Lydia. There's got to be a way I can–" His eyes lit. "Wait a minute. I've got an idea." He began yanking the kitchen drawers open until he got to the utensils. He pulled out a paring knife and handed it to her.

"What's this for?" she said.

"I want you to poke yourself here and there on your body with the point–"

"Howie, are you nuts?"

"Not hard enough to break the skin; just enough to cause a little pain." He took the pen from the message pad by the phone and pointed to the kitchen door. "I'll be on the other side of the door there and I'll mark the spots and number them on myself with this pen."

"This is crazy!"

"I've got to convince you, Lydia. You're the only one in this world I trust."

Damn him! It had been like this all their lives. He always knew what to say to get her to go along.

"Okay."

He got on the other side of the swinging door. Lydia put her back to it and poked the knife point at the center of her left palm. It hurt, but certainly nothing she couldn't bear.

"That's one," said Howie from the other side of the door.

Lydia turned her hand over and jabbed the back of her hand.

"That's two," Howie said.

Lucky guesses, Lydia told herself uneasily. For variety, she poked the point gently against her cheek.

"Very funny," Howie said, "but I'm not writing on my face."

The words so startled her that the knife slipped from her grasp. As she grabbed for it, the blade sliced into her index finger.

"Hey!" Howie said, pushing through the door. "You weren't supposed to cut yourself!"

"It was an acc–" And then she realized. "My God, you knew!" She sucked her bleeding finger. He knew!

"Of course I knew. As a matter of fact, for an instant in there I actually saw the cut on my finger. Look here. Even drew it for you. See?"

Lydia did see: A half-inch crescent was drawn in ink across the pad of Howie's right index finger, perfectly matching the bloody one on her own.

Suddenly Lydia was weak. She lowered herself into a chair. "My God, Howie, it's really true, isn't it?"

"Sure is." He stood over her, beaming. "And I'm going to milk it dry." He turned and started toward the door.

"Where are you going?"

"Back to the condo. I need some sleep, and I've got a lot of thinking to do. Don't make any plans for dinner tonight. I'm treating. Lobster and champagne at Memison's."

"Aren't we generous."

"Make reservations for two."

And then he was gone. Lydia sat there trying to accept the fact that something that simply didn't happen in real life was happening in hers.

*

On the way home, Howard kept well away from the hospital. As he walked he realized that the courtroom was small potatoes, just a springboard into politics. United States Senator Howard Weinstein. He liked the sound of that. He'd know who to trust and who to boot. And after he'd built up his power base, maybe he'd go for the White House.

Hey, why the hell not?

He was tempted to stop by his father's place out on Shore Drive and see what he was up to. He hadn't heard from the old man in a couple of weeks. Might be interesting to see how Dad really felt about him. And then again, it might not.

He went straight home.

His right arm started bothering him at the front door. The ache was worse than he remembered from last night. Just to test a theory, he walked back outside again. The pain disappeared by the time he got to the parking lot. It recurred when he returned to the condo.

Which mean that someone nearby had a bad case of bursitis or something. So why the hell didn't the jerk do something about it?

Howard was too tired to worry about that now. He downed a couple of shots of scotch to calm his nerves and crawled under the covers. As he closed his eyes and tried to ignore the throb in his arm, he realized that he felt a little sad. Why? Or did the emotion even originate with him? Maybe somebody else nearby was unhappy or depressed about something. Was he getting more sensitive or what? This could get confusing.

He pushed it all away and wrapped himself in dreams of dazzling courtroom prowess and political glory.

*

The pain awoke him at four in the afternoon. The aching throb in his right arm was worse than ever. He wondered if it had anything to do with touching the hand. Maybe Dr. Johnson was getting even with him after all.

That was not a pleasant thought.

But then why would the pain stop as soon as he left the condo? He couldn't figure this out.

He phoned Lydia. "How about an early dinner, Sis?"

"How early?"

"As early as possible."

"I made reservations for 7:30."

"We'll change them."

"Is something wrong, Howie?" There was a hint of real concern in her voice.

He told her about the pain in his arm. "I've got to get out of here. That's the only time it stops."

"Okay. Meet you there at 5:30."

That was when the peasants ate, but the pain wouldn't allow Howard to be snooty. He took a quick shower and hurried outside before his hair had dried. Blessed relief from the pain came at the far end of the parking lot.

*

"I'll take that one," Howard said, pointing out a big-tailed two-pounder in Memison's live lobster tank.

"Excellent choice, sir," the waiter said, then turned to Lydia. "And you, Miss?"

"I'll have the fish dinner, please."

Howard was surprised. He sensed a skittish reluctance in her. "No lobster? I thought you loved lobster!"

She was staring at the tank. "I do. But standing here and pointing out the one I'm going to eat...somehow it's not the same. Makes me feel like some sort of executioner."

Howard couldn't help laughing. "I swear to God you're from Mars, Sis. From Mars!"

When they returned to the table, Howard refilled their tall, slim champagne glasses from the bottle in the bucket. He watched a fly buzz angrily against the window that ran alongside their table. Outside at the marina, the boats rocked gently at their moorings. He savored the peace.

"You're awful quiet, Howie," Lydia said after a moment.

"Am I?"

"Compared to this morning, you're a sphinx."

Howard didn't know what to tell her, how to say it. Maybe the best thing to do was to lay it all out. Maybe she could help him sort it out.

"I think I'm having second thoughts about this special 'empathy' I've developed," he said finally. "Maybe it really is a curse. I seem to be getting increasingly sensitive. I mean, as I walked over here I got rushes of feelings from everyone I passed. There was this little kid crying on the corner. He had lost his mom and I found myself – me – utterly terrified. I couldn't move, I was so scared. Thank God his mother found him just then or I don't know what I'd have done. And when she whacked him on the backside for running off, I felt it. It hurt! The kid was the worst, but I was picking up all sorts of conflicting emotions. It was almost a relief to get in here. Good thing we're so early and it's almost deserted."

"Why'd you have our table moved? To get away from that fat guy?"

Howard nodded. "Yeah. He must have stuffed himself from the buffet. I thought my stomach was going to burst. I couldn't enjoy my dinner feeling like that. And if he's going to have a gallbladder attack, I don't want to be near him."

The fly's buzzing continued. It was beginning to annoy him.

"Howard," Lydia said, looking at him intently. She only called him Howard when she was mad or really serious about something. "Can this really be happening?"

"Don't you think I've asked myself that a thousand times since last night? But yes, it's real, and it's happening to me."

He signaled their waiter as he passed. "Could you do something about that fly?"

"Of course."

The waiter returned in a moment with a fly swatter. He swung it as Howard was pouring more champagne.

Pain like Howard had never known in his life flashed through his entire body as his ears roared and his vision went stark white. It was gone in an instant, over as soon as it had begun.

"My God, Howard, what's the matter!"

Lydia was staring at him, wide-eyed and ashen-faced. He glanced around. So were the other people in the place. He felt their disapproval, their annoyance. The waiter began sopping up the champagne he had spilled when he had dropped the bottle.

"Wh-what happened?"

"You screamed and spasmed like you were having a seizure! Howard, what's wrong with you?"

"When he swatted that fly," he said, nodding his head in the direction of the retreating waiter, "I...I think I felt it."

Her disbelief stung him. "Oh, Howard–"

"It's true, Sis. It hurt so much for that one tiny second there I thought I was going to die."

"But a fly, Howard? A fly?" She stared at him. "What's wrong?"

Suddenly he was very hot. Terribly hot. His skin felt like it was on fire. He looked down at his bare arms and watched the skin turn red, rise up in blisters, burst open. He felt as if he were being boiled alive.

...boiled...

His lobster! The kitchen was only a few feet away. They'd be cooking it now – dropping it live into a pot of boiling water!

Screaming with the pain, he leaped up from the table and ran for the door.

Outside...coolness. He leaned against the outer wall of Memison's, gasping and sweating, oblivious to the stares of the passers-by but too well aware of their curiosity.

"Howard, are you going crazy?" It was Lydia. She had followed him out.

"Didn't you see me? I was burning up in there!" He looked down at his arms. The skin was perfect, unblemished.

"All I saw was my brother acting like a crazy man!"

He felt her concern, her fear for him, and her embarrassment because of him.

"When they started boiling my lobster, they started boiling me! I could feel myself being boiled alive!"

"Howard, this has got to stop!"

"Damn right it does." He pushed himself off the wall and began walking down the street, back toward his condo. "I've got some thinking to do. See you."

*

Lydia was having her first cup of coffee when Howard called the next morning.

"Can I come over, Sis?" His voice was hoarse, strained. "I've got to get out of here."

"Sure, Howie. Is it the arm again?"

"Yeah! Feels like it's being crushed!"

Crushed. That rang a bell somewhere in the back of her mind. "Come right over. I'll leave the door unlocked. If I'm not here, make yourself at home. I'll be back soon. I've got an errand to run."

She hung up, pulled on jeans and a blouse, and hurried down to the Monroe Public Library. A crushed arm...she rememebred something about that, something to do with the Soundview Condos.

It took her awhile, but she finally tracked it down in a microfilm spool of the Monroe Express from two years ago last summer...

*

Howard looked like hell. He looked distracted. He wasn't paying attention.

"Listen to me, Howard! It happened two years ago! They were pouring the basement slab in your section of condos. As the cement truck was backing up, a construction worker slipped in some mud and the truck's rear wheels rolled right over his arm. Crushed it so bad even Columbia Presbyterian couldn't save it."

He looked at her dully. "So?"

"So don't you see? You're not just tuned in to the feelings and sensations of people and even lobsters and bugs around you. You're picking up the residuals of old pains and hurts."

"Is that why it's so noisy in here?"

"'Noisey'?"

"Yeah. Emotional noise. This place is crowded, I mean jammed with emotions, some faint, some strong, some up, some down, some really mean ones. So confusing."

Lydia remembered that these garden apartments had been put up shortly after the war – World War II. If Howard could actually feel forty-plus years of emotion –

"I wish they'd go away and let me sleep. I'd give anything for just a moment's peace."

Lydia went to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom and found the bottle of Valium her doctor had prescribed for her when she was divorcing Harry. She shook two of the yellow tablets into her palm and gave them to Howard with a cup of water.

"Take these and go lie down on my bed. They'll help you sleep."

He did as he was told and shuffled off to the next room, moving like a zombie. Lydia's heart went out to him. She called a friend and begged her to take the steno job she had lined up for this afternoon, then settled down to watch over her big brother.

He slept fitfully through the day. Around dark she took a shower to ease her tension-knotted muscles. It helped some. Wrapped in her terrycloth robe, she returned to the kitchen and found him standing there looking worse than ever.

"I can't stand it!" he said in a voice that sounded as if it were going to break into a million jagged pieces. "It's making me crazy. It's even in my dreams! All those feelings! I'm going nuts!"

His wild eyes frightened her. "Just calm down, Howie. I'll make you something to eat and then we can–"

"I've gotta get outta here! I can't take it any longer!"

He started for the door. Lydia tried to stop him.

"Howard–!"

He pushed her aside. "Got to get out!"

By the time she threw on enough clothing to follow him, he was nowhere to be seen.

*

The night was alive with fear and joy and lust and pain and pleasure and love, emotionally and physically strobing Howard with heat and light. He needed relief, he needed quiet, he needed peace.

And there, up ahead, he saw it... a cool and dark place... almost empty of emotions, of feelings of any sort.

He headed for it.

*

She got the call the next morning.

"Are you Lydia Chambers, sister of Howard Weinstein?" said an official sounding voice.

Oh, God!

"Yes."

"Would you come down to the Crosby Marina, please, m'am?".

"Oh, no! He's not–"

"He's okay," the voice said quickly. "Physically, at least."

*

Lt. Donaldson drove her out to the buoy in a Marine Police outboard. Howard sat in a rowboat tied to the bobbing red channel marker in the center of Monroe Harbor.

"Seems he stole the boat last night," said the lieutenant, who had curly blond hair and looked to be in his mid-thirties. "But he seems to have gone off the deep end. He won't untie from the buoy and he starts screaming and swinging an oar at anyone who comes near. He asked for you."

He cut the engine and let the outboard drift toward Howard and the rowboat.

"Tell them to leave me alone, Sis!" Howard said when they got to within a couple of dozen feet of him.

He looked wild – unshaven, his clothes smudged and wrinkled, his hair standing up at crazy angles. And in his eyes, a dangerous, cornered look.

He looks insane, she thought.

"Come ashore, Howard," she said, trying to exude friendliness and calm confidence. "Come home now."

"I can't, Sis! You can explain it to them. Make them understand. This is the only place where it's quiet, where I can find peace. Oh, I know the fish are eating and being eaten below, but it's sporadic and it's far away and I can handle that. I just can't be in town anymore!"

Lt. Donaldson whispered out of the side of his mouth. "He's been talking crazy like that since we found him out here this morning."

Lydia wondered what she could tell the lieutenant: That her brother wasn't crazy, that he was suffering from a curse? Start talking like that and they'd be measuring her for a straitjacket, too.

"You can't stay out here, Howard."

"I have to. There's a gull's nest in the buoy and the little birds were hungry this morning and it made me hungry, too. But then the mother came and fed them and now their bellies are full and they're content"... he began to sob... "and so am I and I just want to stay here near them where it's quiet and peaceful."

She heard the lieutenant growl. "All right. That does it!"

He stood up and signaled to shore. Another larger boat roared out from the marina. There were men in white jackets aboard, and they were carrying something that looked like a net.

*

"He'll be asleep for awhile yet, Mrs. Chambers," said Dr. Gold. "We had to inject him with a pretty stiff dose of Thorazine to quiet him down."

It had been horrifying to watch them throw a net over her own brother and haul him into the bigger boat like a giant fish, but there had been no other way. Howard would have died out on the water if they had left him there.

She had spent most of the morning signing papers and answering countless questions on Howard's medical and emotional history, family history, current stresses and strains. She had told Dr. Gold everything, including Howard's receiving the hand in the mail two days ago. God, was it only two days ago? Everything...except the part about feeling the pain and emotions of other people...and animals and even insects. She couldn't bring herself to risk trying to explain that to Dr. Gold. He might think she was sharing her brother's psychosis.

"When can he leave?" she asked.

"Not for twenty-eight days at least. That's how long he's committed. Don't worry too much. This appears to be an acute psychosis precipitated by that grisly incident with the severed hand. We'll start his psychotherapy immediately, find an appropriate medication, and do what we can to get him on his psychological feet again as soon as possible. I think he'll do just fine."

Lydia wasn't too sure of that, but all she could do was hope. At least the Monroe Neuropsychiatric Institute was brand new. It had opened only last winter. She had heard about it, but since she never came to this part of town, she hadn't seen it until now. It seemed pleasant enough. And since most of the patients here were probably sedated to some degree, their emotions wouldn't be too strong. Maybe Howard had a chance here.

Dr. Gold walked her to the door.

"In a way it's sort of ironic that your brother should wind up here."

"Why is that?"

"Well, he's one of the limited partners that developed this little hospital. All of the limited partners got a certified historic rehabilitation tax credit for investing, one of the few goodies remaining after tax overhaul."

"Rehabilitation?" A warning bell sounded in a far corner of her mind. "You mean it isn't a new building?"

"Oh, my goodness, no. We've cleaned it up to look spanking new, but in reality it's a hundred and fifty years old."

"A hundred and fifty–!"

"Yes. It was abandoned for such a long time. I understand it was being used for dogfights before we took it over. Even used it as a place to train young fighting pit bulls. Trained them with kittens. A sick, sick–" He stared at her. "Are you all right?"

"Dog fights?" Oh, God, what would that do to Howard? Wouldn't the residual from something like that send him right up the wall?

"I'm sorry if I upset you."

"I'm okay," she said, steeling herself to ask the next question. "What was the building originally?"

"Originally? Why I thought everybody knew that, but I guess you're too young to remember. Up until the early 1960s it was the Monroe Slaughterhouse. One of the busiest in the–"

He stopped as the sound came down the hall – a long, hoarse, agonized scream that echoed off the freshly painted walls and tore into Lydia's soul.

Howard was awake.

 

foreword to "Tenants"

The idea for "Tenants" had been wandering through the back of my mind for years. A simple little story about an escaped killer who thinks he's found the perfect hideout from the law in a remote house at the end of a road through a salt marsh. The old coot who lives there is crazy: He keeps talking about his tenants, but he's alone in the shack. Or is he?

I could have set it anywhere, but I chose Monroe – not only because I'd set "Feelings" there, but because I was squeezing out these stories while writing Reborn, also set in Monroe, and I saw a connection. I'd envisioned Reborn of as the first part of a long roman fleuve that would unite The Keep, The Tomb, and The Touch. Why were all these strange things happening in Monroe? But why were all these strange things happening in Monroe? Why had the Dat tay vao been drawn to Monroe in The Touch? Was it all random, or was there a reason? I realized Reborn contained that reason. So if the old guy in "Tenants" has some strange boarders, maybe they too wound up in Monroe for a reason. The locale had no direct effect on the novelette itself, but it gave me a little extra kick to know I was connecting it to the cycle.

Gus and his tenants appear again briefly in Nightworld.

 

Tenants

The mail truck was coming.

Gilroy Connors, shoes full of water and shirt still wet from the morning's heavy dew, crouched in the tall grass and punk-topped reeds. He ached all over; his thighs particularly were cramped from holding his present position. But he didn't dare move for fear of giving his presence away.

So he stayed hunkered down across the road from the battered old shack that looked deserted but wasn't – there had been lights on in the place last night. With its single pitched roof and rotting cedar shake siding, it looked more like an overgrown outhouse that a home. A peeling propane tank squatted on the north side; a crumbling brick chimney supported a canted TV antenna. Beyond the shack, glittering in the morning sunlight, lay the northeast end of Monroe Harbor and the Long Island Sound. The place gave new meaning to the word isolated. As if a few lifetimes ago someone had brought a couple of tandems of fill out to the end of the hard-packed dirt road, dumped them, and built a shack. Except for a rickety old dock with a sodden rowboat tethered to it, there was not another structure in sight in either direction. Only a slender umbilical cord of insulated wire connected it to the rest of the world via a long column of utility poles marching out from town. All around was empty marsh.

Yeah. Isolated as all hell.

It was perfect.

As Gil watched, the shack's front door opened and a grizzled old man stumbled out, a cigarette in his mouth and a fistful of envelopes in his hand. Tall and lanky with an unruly shock of gray hair standing off his head, he scratched his slightly protruding belly as he squinted in the morning sunlight. He wore a torn undershirt that had probably been white once and a pair of faded green work pants held up by suspenders, He looked as rundown as his home, and as much in need of a shave and a bath as Gil felt. With timing so perfect that it could only be the result of daily practice, the old guy reached the mailbox at exactly the same time as the white jeep-like mail truck.

Must have been watching from the window.

Not an encouraging thought. Had the old guy seen Gil out here? If he had, he gave no sign. Which meant Gil was still safe.

He fingered the handle of the knife inside his shirt.

Lucky for him.

While the old guy and the mailman jawed, Gil studied the shack again. The place was a sign that his recent run of good luck hadn't deserted him yet. He had come out to the marshes to hide until things cooled down in and around Monroe and had been expecting to spend a few real uncomfortable nights out here. The shack would make things a lot easier.

Not much of a place. At most it looked big enough for two rooms and no more. Barely enough space for an ancient couple who didn't move around much – who ate, slept, crapped, watched TV and nothing more. Hopefully, it wasn't a couple. Just the old guy. That would make it simple. A wife, even a real sickly one, could complicate matters.

Gil wanted to know how many were living there before he invited himself in. Not that it would matter much. Either way, he was going in and staying for a while. He just liked to know what he was getting into before he made his move.

One thing was sure: He wasn't going to find any money in there. The old guy had to be next to destitute. But even ten bucks would have made him richer than Gil. He looked at the rusting blue late-sixties Ford Torino with the peeling vinyl roof and hoped it would run. But of course it ran. The old guy had to get into town to cash his Social Security check and buy groceries, didn't he?

Damn well better run.

It had been a long and sloppy trek into these marshes. He intended to drive out.

Finally the mail truck clinked into gear, did a U-turn, and headed back the way it had come. The old guy shoved a couple of envelopes into his back pocket, picked up a rake that had been leaning against the Ford, and began scratching at the dirt on the south side of the house.

Gil decided it was now or never. He straightened up and walked toward the shack. As his feet crunched on the gravel of the yard, the old man wheeled and stared at him with wide, startled eyes.

"Didn't mean to scare you," Gil said in his friendliest voice.

"Well, you sure as hell did, poppin' outta nowhere like that!" the old man said in a deep, gravelly voice. The cigarette between his lips bobbed up and down like a conductor's baton. "We don't exactly get much drop-in company out here. What happen? Boat run outta gas?"

Gil noticed the we with annoyance but played along. A stalled boat was as good an excuse as any for being out here in the middle of nowhere.

"Yeah. Had to paddle it into shore way back over there," he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

"Well, I ain't got no phone for you to call anybody–"

No phone! It was all Gil could do to keep from cheering.

"–but I can drive you down to the marina and back so you can get some gas."

No hurry." He moved closer and leaned against the old Torino's fender. "You live out here all by yourself?"

The old man squinted at him, as if trying to recognize him. "I don't believe we've been introduced, son."

"Oh, right." Gil stuck out his hand. "Rick... Rick Summers."

"And I'm George Haskins," he said, giving Gil's hand a firm shake.

"What're you growing there?"

"Carrots. I hear fresh carrots are good for your eyes. Mine are so bad I try to eat as many as I can."

Half blind and no phone. This was sounding better every minute. Now, if he could just find out who the rest of the we was, he'd be golden.

He glanced around. Even though he was out in the middle of nowhere at the end of a dirt road that no one but the mailman and this old fart knew existed, he felt exposed. Naked, even. He wanted to get inside.

"Say, I sure could use a cup of coffee, Mr. Haskins. You think you might spare me some?"

*

George hesitated. Making coffee for the stranger would mean bringing him inside. He didn't like that idea at all. He hadn't had anybody into the house since the late sixties when he took in his tenants. And he'd had damn few visitors before that. People didn't like coming this far out, and George was just as glad. Most people pried. They wanted to know what you did way out here all by yourself. Couldn't believe anybody sane would prefer his own company to theirs.

And of course, there was the matter of the tenants.

He studied this young man who had popped out of nowhere. George's eyes weren't getting any better– "Cataracts only get worse," the doctor had told him – but he could plainly see that the stranger wasn't dressed for boating, what with that blue work shirt and gray denims he was wearing. And those leather shoes! Nobody who knew boats ever wore leather shoes on board. But they were selling boats to anybody with cash these days. This landlubber probably didn't know the first thing about boating. That no doubt was why he was standing here on land instead of chugging about the harbor.

He seemed pleasant enough, though. Good-looking, too, with his muscular build and wavy dark hair. Bet he had an easy time with the girls. Especially easy, since from what George understood of the world today, all the girls were easy.

Maybe he could risk spotting him a cup of coffee before driving him down to the marina. What harm could there be in that? The tenants were late risers and had the good sense to keep quiet if they heard a strange voice overhead.

He smiled. "Coffee? Sure. Come on inside. And call me George. Everybody else does." He dropped his cigarette into the sandy soil and stomped on it, then turned toward the house.

Just a quick cup of coffee and George would send him off. The longer he stayed, the greater the chances of him finding out about the tenants. And George couldn't risk that. He was more than their landlord.

He had sworn to protect them.

*

Gil followed close on the old guy's back up the two steps to the door. Inside was dark and stale, reeking of years of cigarette smoke. He wondered when was the last time George had left a window open.

But being indoors was good. Out of sight and inside – even if it stank, it was better than good. It was super. He felt as if a great weight had been lifted from him.

Now to find out who made up the rest of the we.

"Got this place all to yourself, ay?" he said, glancing quickly about. They were standing in a rectangular space that passed for a living room/dining room/kitchen. The furniture consisted of an old card table, a rocker, a tilted easy chair, and a dilapidated couch. Shapeless piles of junk cluttered every corner. An ancient Motorola television set with a huge chassis and a tiny screen stood on the far side of the room diagonally across from the door. The screen was lit and a black chick was reading some news into the camera:

"...eriously injuring an orderly in a daring escape from the Monroe Neuropsychiatric Institute. He was last reported in Glen Cove–"

Gil whooped. "Glen Cove! Awright!" That was the wrong direction! He was safe for the moment. "Fantastic!" he yelled, stomping his foot on the floor.

"Hey! Hold it down!" George said as he filled a greasy, dented aluminum kettle with water and put it on the gas stove.

Gil felt the customary flash of anger at being told what what he could or couldn't do, but cooled it. He stepped between George and the TV set as he saw his most recent mug shot appear on the screen. The black chick was saying:

"If you see this man, do not approach him. He might be armed and is considered dangerous."

Gil said, "Sorry. It's just that sometimes I get excited by the news."

"Yeah?" George said, lighting another cigarette. "Don't follow it much myself. But you got to keep quiet. You might disturb the tenants and they–"

"Tenants?" Gil said a – lot more loudly than he intended. "You've got tenants?"

The old guy was biting his upper lip with what few teeth he had left and saying nothing.

Gil stepped down the short hall, gripping the handle of the knife inside his shirt as he moved. Two doors: The one on the left was open, revealing a tiny bathroom with a toilet, sink, and mildewy shower stall; the one on the right was closed. He gave it a gentle push. Empty: dirty, wrinkled sheets on a narrow bed, dresser, mirror, clothes thrown all around, but nobody there.

"Where are they?" he said, returning to the larger room.

George laughed – a little too loudly, Gil thought – and said, "No tenants. Just a joke. Creepy-crawlies in the crawlspace is all. You know, snapping turtles and frogs and snakes and crickets."

"You keep things like that under your house?" This was turning out to be one weird guy.

"In a manner of speaking, yes. You see, a zillion years ago when I built this place, a big family of crickets took up residence"–he pointed down–"in the crawl space. Drove me crazy at night. So one day I get the bright idea of catching some frogs and throwing them in there to eat the crickets. Worked great. Within two days, there wasn't a chirp to be heard down there."

"Smart."

"Yeah. So I thought. Until the frogs started croaking all night. They were worse than the crickets!"

Gil laughed. "I get it. So you put the snakes down there to catch the frogs!"

"Right. Snakes are quiet. They eat crickets, too. Should've thought of them in the first place. Except I wasn't crazy about living over a nest of snakes."

This was getting to sound like the old lady who swallowed the fly.

Gill said, "And so the next step was to put the turtles down there to eat the snakes."

"Yeah." As George spooned instant coffee into a couple of stained mugs, Gil tried not to think about when they last might have had a good washing. "But I don't think they ate them all, just like I don't think the snakes ate all the frogs, or the frogs ate all the crickets. I still hear an occasional chirp and croak once in a while. Anyway, they've all been down there for years. I ain't for adding anything else to the stew, or even looking down there."

"Don't blame you."

George poured boiling water into the mugs and handed him one.

"So if you hear something moving underfoot, it's just one of my tenants."

"Yeah. Okay. Sure."

This old guy was fruitcake city. As crazy as –

...Crazy. That was what that college chick had called him that night when he had tried to pick her up along the road. She was cute. There were a lot of cute girls at Monroe Community College, and he'd always made it a point to drive by every chance he could. She'd said he was crazy to think she'd take a ride from a stranger at that hour of the night. That had made him mad. All these college broads thought they were better and smarter than everybody else. And she'd started to scream when he grabbed her, so he'd hit her to make her stop but she wouldn't stop. She kept on screaming so he kept on hitting her and hitting her and hitting and hitting...

"You're spilling your coffee," George said.

Gil looked down. So he was. It was dripping over the edge of his tilted mug and splashing onto the floor. As he slurped some off the top and sat on the creaking couch, he realized how tired he was. No sleep in the past twenty-four hours. Maybe the coffee would boost him.

"So how come you live out here all by yourself?" Gil asked, hoping to get the conversation on a saner topic than snakes and snapping turtles in the crawlspace.

"I like being by myself."

"You must. But whatever rent you pay on this place, it's too much."

"Don't pay no rent at all. I own it."

"Yeah, but the land–"

"My land."

Gil almost dropped his coffee mug. "Your land! That's impossible!"

"Nope. All twenty acres been in my family for a zillion and two years."

Gil's brain whirled as he tried to calculate the value of twenty acres of real estate fronting on Monroe Harbor and Long Island Sound.

"You're a fucking millionaire!"

George laughed. "I wish! I'm what you call 'land poor', son. I've got to pay taxes on all this land if I want to keepit, and the damn bastards down at City Hall keep raising my rates and my assessed value so that I've got to come up with more and more money every year just to stay here. Trying to force me out, that's what they're up to."

"So sell, for Christ sake! There must be developers chomping at the bit to get ahold of this land. You could make 'em pay through the nose for a piece of waterfront and all your money worries would be over!"

George shook his head. "Naw. Once you sell one little piece, it's like a leak in a dam. It softens you, weakens you. Soon you're selling another piece, and then another. Pretty soon, I'll be living on this little postage stamp surrounded by big ugly condos, listening to cars and mopeds racing up and down the road with engines roaring and rock and roll blasting. No thanks. I've lived here in peace, and I want to die here in peace."

"Yeah, but–"

"Besides, lots of animals make their homes on my land. They've been pushed out of everywhere else in Monroe. All the trees have been cut down back there, all the hollows and gullies filled in and paved over. There's no place else for them to go. This is their world, too, you know. I'm their last resort. It's my duty to keep this place wild as long as I can. As long as I live...which probably won't be too much longer."

Oh, yes...crazy as a loon. Gil wondered if there might be some way he could get the old guy to will him the property and then cork him off. He stuffed the idea away in the To-Be-Developed file.

"Makes me glad I don't have a phone," George was saying.

Right...no phone and no visitors.

Gil knew this was the perfect hiding place for him. Just a few days was all he needed. But he had to stay here with the old guy's cooperation. He couldn't risk anything forceful – not if George met the mailman at the box every day.

And from a few things the old man had said, he thought he knew just what buttons to push to convince George to let him stay.

*

George noted that his guest's coffee mug was empty. Good. Time to get him moving on. He never had company, didn't like it, and wasn't used to it. Made him itchy. Besides, he wanted this guy on his way before another remark about the tenants slipped out. That had been a close call before.

He stood up.

"Well, guess it's about time to be running you down to the marina for that tank of gas."

The stranger didn't move.

"George," he said in a low voice, "I've got a confession to make."

"Don't want to hear it!" George said. "I ain't no priest! Tell it somewhere else. I just want to help get you where you're going!"

"I'm on the run, George."

Oh, hell, George thought. At least that explained why he was acting so skittish. "You mean there's no boat waiting for gas somewhere?"

"I..." His voice faltered. "I lied about the boat."

"Well ain't that just swell. And who, may I ask,"–George wasn't so sure he wanted the answer to this, but he had to ask – "are you on the run from?"

"The Feds."

Double hell. "What for?"

"Income tax evasion."

"No kidding?" George was suddenly interested. "How much you take them for?"

"It's not so much 'how much' as 'how long.'"

"All right: How long?"

"Nine years. I haven't filed a return since I turned eighteen."

"No shit! Is that because you're stupid or because you've got balls?"

"Mr. Haskins," the stranger said, looking at him levelly and speaking with what struck George as bone-deep conviction, "I don't believe any government's got the right to tax what a working man earns with the sweat of his brow."

"Couldn't of said it better myself!" George cried. He thought his heart was going to burst. This boy was talking like he'd have wanted his son to talk, if he'd ever had one. "The sonsabitches'll bleed you dry if you let 'em! Look what they've been doin' to me!"

The young stranger stared at the floor. "I was hoping you'd understand."

"Understand? Of course I understand! I've been fighting the IRS for years but never had the guts to actually resist! My hat's off to you!"

"Can I stay the night?"

That brought George up short. He wanted to help this courageous young man, but what was he going to do about the tenants?

"What's going to happen to you if they catch you? What kind of sentence you facing?"

"Twenty."

George's stomach turned. A young guy like this in the hole for twenty years just for not paying taxes. He felt his blood begin to boil.

"Bastards!"

He'd have to chance it. Tenants or not, he felt obligated to give this guy a place to stay for the night. It would be okay. The tenants could take the day off and just rest up. They'd been working hard lately. He'd just have to watch his mouth so he didn't make another slip about them.

"Well, George? What do you say?"

"I can let you stay one night and one night only," George said. "After that–"

The young fellow leaped forward and shook his hand. "Thanks a million, George!"

"Hear me out now. Only tonight. Come tomorrow morning, I'll drive you down to the train station, get you a ticket, and put you on board for New York with all the commuters. Once in the city, you can get lost real easy."

George thought he saw tears in the young man's eyes. "I don't know how to thank you."

"Never mind that. You just hit the sack in my room. You look bushed. Get some rest. No one'll know you're here."

He nodded, then went to the window and gazed out at the land. "Beautiful here," he said.

George realized it would probably look even more beautiful if the window were cleaner, but his eyes weren't good enough to notice much difference.

"If this were mine," the young fellow said passionately, "I'd sure as hell find a way to keep it out of the hands of the developers and the tax men. Maybe make it into a wildlife preserve or bird sanctuary or something. Anything to keep it wild and free."

Shaking his head, he turned and headed for the back room. George watched him in wonder. A wildlife preserve! Why hadn't he thought of that? It would be untaxable and unsubdividable! What a perfect solution!

But it was too late to start the wheels turning on something like that now. It would take years to submit all the proposals and wade through all the red tape to get it approved. And he didn't have years. He didn't need a doctor to tell him that his body was breaking down. He couldn't see right, he couldn't breathe right, and Christ Almighty, he couldn't even pee right. The parts were wearing out and there were no replacements available.

And what would happen when he finally cashed in his chips? What would happen to his land? And the tenants? Where would they go?

Maybe this young fellow was the answer. Maybe George could find a way to leave the land to him. He'd respect it, preserve it, just as George would if he could go on living. Maybe that was the solution.

But that meant he'd have to tell him the real truth about the tenants. He didn't know if the guy was ready for that.

He sat down in the sun on the front steps and lit another cigarette. He had a lot of thinking to do.

*

The five o'clock news was on.

George had kept himself busy all day, what with tending to the carrot patch outside and cleaning up a bit inside. Having company made him realize how long it had been since he'd given the place a good sweeping.

But before he'd done any of that, he'd waited until the young fellow had fallen asleep, then he'd lifted the trapdoor under the rug in the corner of the main room and told the tenants to lay low for the day. They'd understood and said they'd be quiet.

Now he was sitting in front of the TV watching Eyewitness News and going through today's mail: Three small checks from the greeting card companies – not much, but it would help pay this quarter's taxes. He looked up at the screen when he heard "the Long Island town of Monroe" mentioned. Some pretty Oriental girl was sitting across from a scholarly looking fellow in a blue suit. She was saying,

"...explain to our viewers just what it is that makes Gilroy Connors so dangerous, Dr. Kline."

"He's a sociopath."

"And just what is that?"

"Simply put, it is a personality disorder in which the individual has no sense of 'mine' and 'not-mine,' no sense of right or wrong in the traditional sense."

"No conscience, so to speak."

"Exactly."

"Are they all murderers like Connors?"

"No. History's most notorious criminals and serial killers are sociopaths, but violence isn't a necessary facet of their make-up. The confidence men who rip off the pensions of widows or steal from a handicapped person are just as sociopathic as the Charles Mansons of the world. The key element in the sociopathic character is his or her complete lack of guilt. They will do whatever is necessary to get what they want and will feel no remorse over anyone they have to harm along the way."

"Gilroy Connors was convicted in the Dorothy Akers murder. Do you think he'll kill again?"

"He has to be considered dangerous. He's a sociopathic personality with a particularly low frustration threshhold. But he is also a very glib liar. Since the truth means nothing to him, he can take any side of a question, any moral stance, and speak on it with utter conviction."

A voice – George recognized it as belonging to one of the anchormen – called from off-camera: "Sounds like he'd make a great politician!"

Everyone had a good laugh, and then the Oriental woman said, "But all kidding aside, what should our viewers do if one of them should spot him?"

Dr. Kline's expression was suddenly grim. "Lock the doors and call the police immediately."

The camera closed in on the Asian girl. "There you have it. We've been speaking to Dr. Edward Kline, a Long Island psychiatrist who examined Gilroy Connors and testified for the state at the Dorothy Akers murder trial.

"In case you've been asleep or out of the country during the last twenty-four hours, all of Long Island is being combed for Gilroy Connors, convicted killer of nineteen year old college coed Dorothy Akers. Connors escaped custody last night when, due to an error in paperwork, he was accidentally transferred to the Monroe Neuropsychiatric Institute instead of a maximum security facility as ordered by the court. The victim's father, publisher Jeffrey Akers, is offering a fifty thousand dollar reward for information leading to his recapture."

Fifty thousand! George thought. What I could do with that!

"You've heard Dr. Kline," she continued. "If you see this man, call the police immediately."

A blow-up of a mug shot appeared on the screen. George gasped. He knew that man! Even with his rotten vision, he could see that the face on the TV belonged to the man now sleeping in his bed! He turned around to look toward the bedroom and saw his house guest standing behind him, a knife in his hand.

"Don't even think about that reward, old man," Connors said in a chillingly soft voice. "Don't even dream about it."

*

"You're hurtin' my hands!" the old fart whined as Gil knotted the cord around his wrists.

"I'm putting you down for the night, old man, and you're staying down!"

He pulled the rope tighter and the old man yelped.

Gil said, "There – that ought to hold you."

George rolled over onto his back and stared up at him. "What are you going to do with me?"

"Haven't figured that out yet."

"You're gonna kill me, aren't you?" There was more concern than fear in his eyes.

"Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on how you behave."

Truthfully, he didn't know what to do. It would be less of a hassle to kill him now and get it over with, but there was the problem of the mailman. If George wasn't waiting curbside at the box tomorrow morning, the USPS might come knocking on the door. So Gil had to figure out a way to pressure George into acting as if everything was nice and normal tomorrow. Maybe he'd have George stand at the door and wave to the mailman. That might work. He'd have to spend some time figuring this out.

"All that stuff you said about dodging the tax man was just lies, wasn't it?"

Gil smiled at the memory. "Yeah. Pretty good, wasn't it? I mean, I made that up right off the top of my head. Sucked you in like smoke, didn't I?"

"Nothing to be proud of."

"Why not?"

"You heard what they called you on the TV: a 'socialpath'. Means you're crazy."

"You watch your mouth, old man!" Gil could feel the rage surging up in him like a giant wave. He hated that word. "I'm not crazy! And I don't ever want to hear that word out of your mouth again!"

"Doesn't matter anyway," George said. "Soon as you're out of here, my tenants will untie me."

Gil laughed. "Now who's crazy!"

"It's true. They'll free me."

"That's enough of that," Gil said. It wasn't funny any more. He didn't like being called crazy any more than he liked being near crazy people. And this old man was talking crazy now. "No more of that kind of talk out of you!"

"You'll see. I'm their protector. Soon as you're–"

"Stop that!" Gil yanked George off the bed by his shirt front. He was losing it – he could feel it going. "God damn that makes me mad!"

He shoved the old man back against the wall with force enough to rattle the whole house. George's eyes rolled up as he slumped back onto the bed. A small red trickle crawled along his scalp and mixed with the gray of his hair at the back of his head.

"Sleep tight, Pops," Gils said.

He left George on the bed and returned to the other room. He turned the antique TV back on. After what seemed like an inordinately long warm-up time, the picture came in, flipped a few times, then held steady. He hoped there wasn't another psychiatrist on talking about him.

He hated psychiatrists. Hated them! Since he'd been picked up for killing that college chick, he'd seen enough of their kind to last a couple of lifetimes. Why'd she have to go and die? It wasn't fair. He hadn't meant to kill her. If only she'd been a little more cooperative. But no – she'd had to go and laugh in his face. He'd just got mad, that was all. He wasn't crazy. He just had a bad temper.

Psychiatrists! What'd they know about him? Labeling him, pigeonholing him, saying he had no conscience and never felt sorry for anything he did. What'd they know? Did they know how he'd cried after Mom had burnt up in that fire in Dad's car? He'd cried for days. Mom wasn't supposed to be anywhere near that car when it caught fire. Only Dad.

He had loads of feelings, and nobody had better tell him any different!

He watched the tube for awhile, caught a couple of news broadcasts, but there was only passing mention of his escape and the reward the girl's old man had posted for him. Then came a report that he had been sighted on Staten Island and the search was being concentrated there.

He smiled. They were getting further and further away from where he really was.

He shut off the set at eleven-thirty. Time for some more sleep. Before he made himself comfortable on the couch, he checked out the old man's room. He was there, snoring comfortably under the covers. Gil turned away and then spun back again.

How'd he get under the covers?

Two strides took him to the bedside. His foot kicked against something that skittered across the floor. He found what it was: the old guy's shoes. They'd been on his feet when he'd tied him up! He yanked back the covers and stared in open-mouthed shock at the old man.

George's hands and feet were free. The cords were nowhere in sight.

Just then he thought he caught a blur of movement by the doorway. He swung around but there was nothing there. He turned back to George.

"Hey, you old fart!" He shook George's shoulder roughly until his eyes opened. "Wake up!"

George's eyes slowly came into focus. "Wha–?"

"How'd you do it?"

"Go 'way!"

George rolled onto his other side and Gil saw a patch of white gauze where he had been bleeding earlier. He flipped him onto his back again.

"How'd you untie yourself, goddammit?"

"Didn't. My tenants–"

"You stop talking that shit to me, old man!" Gil said, cocking his right arm.

Goerge flinched away but kept his mouth shut. Maybe he was finally learning.

"You stay right there!"

Gil tore through the drawers and piles of junk in the other room until he found some more cord. During the course of the search he came across a check book and some uncashed checks. He returned to the bedroom and began tying up George again.

"Don't know how you did it the first time, but you ain't doing it again!"

He spread-eagled George on the sheet and tied each skinny limb to a separate corner of the bed, looping the cord down and around on the legs of the frame. Each knot was triple-tied.

"There! See if you can get out of that!"

As George opened his mouth to speak, Gil glared at him and the old man shut it with an almost audible snap.

"That's the spirit," Gil said softly.

He pulled the knife out of his shirt and held its six inch blade up before George. The old man's eyes widened.

"Nice, isn't it? I snatched it from the kitchen of that wimpy Monroe Neuropsychiatric Institute. Would've preferred getting myself a gun, but none of the guards there were armed. Still, I can do a whole lot of damage with something like this and still not kill you. Understand what I'm saying to you, old man?"

George nodded vigorously.

"Good. Now what we're going to have here tonight is a nice quiet little house. No noise, no talk. Just a good night's sleep for both of us. Then we'll see what tomorrow brings."

He gave George one last hard look straight in the eye, then turned and headed back to the couch.

*

Before sacking out for the night, Gil went through George's check book. Not a whole lot of money in it. Most of the checks went out to cash or to the township for quarterly taxes. He noticed one good-sized regular monthly deposit that was probably his Social Security check, and lots of smaller sporadic additions.

He looked through the three undeposited checks. They were all made out to George Haskins, each from a different greeting card company. The attached invoices indicated they were in payment for varing numbers of verses.

Verses?

You mean old George back thre tied up to the bed was a poet? He wrote greeting card verse?

Gil looked around the room. Where? There was no desk in the shack. Hell, he hadn't seen a piece of paper since he got here! Where did George write this stuff?

He went back to the bedroom. He did his best not to show the relief he felt when he saw that old George was still tied up nice and tight.

"Hey, old man," he said, waving the checks in the air. "How come you never told me you were a poet?"

George glared at him. "Those checks are mine! I need them to pay my taxes!"

"Yeah? Well, right now I need them a lot more than you do. I think tomorrow morning we'll make a little trip down to the bank so you can cash these." He checked the balance in the account. "And I think you just might make a cash withdrawal, too."

"I'll lose my land if I don't pay those taxes on time!"

"Well then, I guess you'll just have to come up with some more romantic 'verses' for these card companies. Like, 'George is a poet / And nobody know it.' See? It's easy!"

Gil laughed as he thought of all the broads who get those flowery, syrupy birthday and anniversary cards and sit mooning over the romantic poems inside, never knowing they were written by this dirty old man in a falling down shack on Long Island!

"I love it!" he said, heading back to the couch. "I just love it!"

He turned out all the lights, shoved the knife between two of the cushions, and bedded down on the dusty old couch for the night. As he drifted off to sleep, he thought he heard rustling movements from under the floorboards. George's 'tenants', no doubt. He shuddered at the thought. The sooner he was out of here, the better.

*

What time is it?

Gil was rubbing the sleep from his eyes and peering around in the mineshaft blackness that surrounded him. Something had awakened him. But what? He sat perfectly still and listened.

A few crickets, maybe a frog – the noises seemed to come from outside instead of from the crawlspace – but nothing more than that.

Still, his senses were tingling with the feeling that something was wrong. He stood up and stepped over toward the light switch. As he moved, his foot caught on something and he fell forward. On the way down his ribs slammed against something else, something hard, like a chair. He hit the floor with his left shoulder. Groaning, he got to his knees and crawled until his fingers found the wall. He fumbled around for the light switch and flipped it.

When his eyes had adjusted to the glare, he glanced at the clock over the kitchen sink – going on 4:00 a.m. He thought he saw something move by the sink but when he squinted for a better look, it was just some junk George had left there. Then he turned back toward the couch to see what had tripped him up.

It was the little hassock that had been over by the rocking chair when he had turned the lights out. At least he was pretty sure it had been there. He knew it hadn't been next to the couch where it was now. And the chair he had hit on his way down – that had been over against the wall.

In fact, as he looked around he noticed that not a single piece of furniture in the whole room was where it had been when he had turned out the lights and gone to sleep three or four hours ago. It had all been moved closer to the couch.

Someone was playing games. And Gil only knew of one possible someone.

Retrieving his knife from the couch, he hurried to the bedroom and stopped dead at the door. George was tied hand and foot to the corners of the bed, snoring loudly.

A chill rippled over Gil's skin.

"How the hell...?"

He went back to the main room and checked the door and windows – all were locked from the inside. He looked again at the furniture, clustered around the couch as if the pieces had crept up and watched him as he slept.

Gil didn't believe in ghosts but he was beginning to believe this little shack was haunted.

And he wanted out.

He had seen the keys to the old Torino in one of the drawers. He found them again and hurried outside to the car. He hoped the damn thing started. He wasn't happy about hitting the road so soon, but he preferred taking his chances with the cops out in the open to being cooped up with whatever was haunting that shack.

As he slipped behind the wheel, he noticed a sliver of light shining out from inside the shack's foundation. That was weird. Really weird. Nobody kept a light on in a crawlspace. He was about to turn the ignition key but held up. He knew it was going to drive him nuts if he left without seeing what was down there.

Cursing himself for a jerk, he turned on the Ford's headlamps and got out for a closer look.

The light was leaking around a piece of plywood fitted into an opening in the foundation cinder blocks. It was hinged at the bottom and held closed by a short length of one-by-two shoved through the handle at the top. He pulled out the one-by-two and hesitated.

Connors, you are an asshole, he told himself, but he had to see what was in there. If it was snakes and snapping turtles, fine. That would be bad enough. But if it was something worse, he had to know.

Gripping the knife tightly in one hand, he yanked the board toward him with the other and quickly peered in, readying himself to slam it shut in an instant. But what he saw within so shocked him he almost dropped the knife.

There was a furnished apartment inside.

The floor of the crawlspace was carpeted. It was worn, industrial grade carpet, but it was carpet. There were chairs, tables, bunk beds, the works. A fully furnished apartment...with a ceiling two feet high.

Everything was doll size except the typewriter. That was a portable electric model that looked huge in contrast to everything else.

Maybe George wasn't really crazy after all. One thing was certain: The old fart had been lying to him. There were no snakes and snapping turtles living down here in his crawlspace.

But just what the hell was living down here?

Gil headed back inside to ask the only man who really knew.

As he strode through the big room, his foot caught on something and he went down again, landing square on his belly. It took him a moment to catch his breath, then he rolled over and looked to see what had tripped him.

It wasn't the hassock this time. A length of slim cord was stretched between the leg of the couch and an eye-hook that had been screwed into the wall.

"Son of a bitch!"

He got up and continued on his way – carefully now, scanning the path for more trip ropes. There were none. He made it to the bedroom without falling again–

–and found George sitting on the edge of the bed, massaging his wrists.

Dammit! Every time he turned around it was something else! He could feel the anger and frustration begin to bubble up toward the overflow levels.

"Who the hell untied you?"

"I ain't talking to you."

Gil pointed the knife at him. "You'll talk, old man, or I'll skin you alive!"

"Leave him alone and leave our home!"

It was a little voice, high-pitched without being squeaky, and it came from directly behind him. Gil whirled and saw a fully dressed little man – or something squat, hairy, and bullnecked that came pretty close to looking like a little man – no more than a foot and a half high, standing outside the bedroom door. By the time Gil realized what he was looking at, the creature had started to run.

Gil's first thought was, I'm going crazy! But suddenly he had an explanation for that two-foot high furnished apartment in the crawlspace, and for the moving furniture and trip cords.

He bolted after it. Here was what had been tormenting him tonight! He'd get the little sucker and–

He tripped again. A cord that hadn't been there a moment ago was stretched across the narrow hall. Gil went down on one knee and bounded up again. He'd been half ready for that one. They weren't going to–

Something caught him across the chin and his feet went out from under him. He landed flat on his back and felt a sharp, searing pain in his right thigh. He looked down and saw he had jabbed himself in the leg with his own knife during the fall.

Gil leapt to his feet, the pain a distant cry amid the blood rage that hammered though his brain. He roared and slashed at the rope that had damn near taken his head off and charged into the big room. There he saw not one but two of the little bastards. A chant filled the air:

"Leave him alone and leave our home! Leave him alone and leave our home!"

Over and over, from a good deal more than two voices. He couldn't see any others. How many of the little runts were there? No matter. He'd deal with these two first, then hunt down the others and get to the bottom of this.

The pair split, one darting to the left, the other to the right. Gil wasn't going to let them both escape. He took a single step and launched himself through the air at the one fleeing leftward. He landed with a bone-jarring crash on the floor but his outstretched free hand caught the leg of the fleeing creature. It was hairier than he had realized – furry, really – and it struggled in his grasp, screeching and thrashing like a wild animal as he pulled it toward him. He squeezed it harder and it bit his thumb. Hard. He howled with the pain, hauled the thing back, and flung it against the nearest wall.

Its screeching stopped as it landed against the wall with an audible crunch and fell to the floor, but the chant went on:

"...our home! Leave him alone, and leave our home! Leave him..."

"God damn it!" Gil said, sucking on his bleeding thumb. It hurt like hell.

Then he saw the thing start to move. Mewling in pain, it had begun a slow crawl toward one of the piles of junk in the corner.

"No, you don't!" Gil shouted.

The pain, the rage, that goddamn chant, they all came together in a black cloud of fury that engulfed him. No way he was going to let that little shit get away and set more booby traps for him. Through that cloud, he charged across the room, lifted the thing up with his left hand, and raised the knife in his right. Dimly he heard a voice shouting somewhere behind him but he ignored it.

He rammed the knife through the damned thing, pinning it to the wall.

The chant stopped abruptly, cut off in mid verse. All he could hear was George's wail.

*

"Oh, no! Oh, Lord, no!"

George stood in the hall and stared at the tiny figure impaled on the wall, watched it squirm as dark fluid flowed down the peeling wallpaper. Then it went slack. He didn't know the little guy's name – they all looked pretty much the same through his cataracts – but he felt like he'd lost an old friend. His anguish was a knife lodged in his own chest.

"You've killed him! Oh, God!"

Gil glared at him, his eyes wild, his breathing ragged. Saliva dripped from a corner of his mouth. He was far over the edge.

"Right, old man. And I'm gonna get the other one and do the same to him!"

George couldn't let that happen. The little guys were his responsibility. He was their protector. He couldn't just stand here like a useless scarecrow.

He launched himself at Gil, his long, nicotine-stained fingernails extended like claws, raking for the younger man's eyes. But Gil pushed him aside easily, knocking him to the floor with a casual swipe if his arm. Pain blazed through George's left hip as he landed, shooting down his leg like a bolt of white hot lightning.

"You're next, you worthless old shit!" Gil screamed. "Soon as I finish with the other little squirt!"

George sobbed as he lay on the floor. If only he were younger, stronger. Even ten years ago he probably could have kicked this punk out on his ass. Now all he could do was lie here on the floor like the worthless old half-blind cripple he was. He pounded the floor helplessly. Might as well be dead!

Suddenly he saw another of the little guys dash across the floor toward the couch, saw the punk spot him and leap after him.

"Run!" George screamed. "Run!"

*

Gil rammed his shoulder against the back of the couch as he shoved his arm far beneath it, slashing back and forth with the knife, trying to get a piece of the second runt. But the blade cut only air and dust bunnies.

As he began to withdraw his arm, he felt something snake over his hand and tighten on his wrist. He tried to yank away but the cord – he was sure it was a cord like the one he had used to truss George – tightened viciously.

A slip knot!

The other end must have been tied to one of the couch legs. He tried to slash at the cord with the knife but he couldn't get the right angle. He reached under with his free left hand to get the knife and realized too late that they must have been waiting for him to do that very thing. He felt another noose tighten over that wrist–

–and still another over his right ankle.

The first cold trickles of fear ran down Gil's spine.

In desperation he tried to tip the couch over to give him some room to maneuver but it wouldn't budge. Just then something bit deeply into his right hand. He tried to shake it off and in doing so he loosened his grip on the knife. It was immediately snatched from his grasp.

At that moment the fourth noose tightened around his left ankle, and he knew he was in deep shit.

They let him lay there for what must have been an hour. He strained at the ropes, trying to break them, trying to untie the knots. All he accomplished was to sink their coils more deeply into his flesh. He wanted to scream out his rage – and his fear – but he wouldn't give them the satisfaction. He heard George moving around somewhere behind him, groaning with pain, heard little voices – How many of the little fuckers were there, anyway? – talking in high-pitched whispers. There seemed to be an argument going on. Finally, it was resolved.

Then came a tugging on the cords as new ones were tied around his wrists and ankles and old ones released. Suddenly he was flipped over onto his back.

He saw George sitting in the rocker holding an ice pack to his left hip. And on the floor there were ten – Jesus, ten of them! – foot-and-a-half tall furry little men standing in a semi-circle, staring at him.

One of them stepped forward. He was dressed in doll clothes: a dark blue pullover – it even had an Izod alligator on the left breast – and tan slacks. He had the face of a sixty-year old man with a barrel chest and furry arms and legs. He pointed at Gil's face and spoke in a high pitched voice:

"C'ham is dead and it's on your head."

Gil started to laugh. It was like landing in Munchkinland, but then he saw the look in the little man's eyes and knew this was not one of the Lollipop Kids. The laugh died in his throat.

He glanced up at the wall where he'd pinned the first little runt like a bug on a board and saw only a dark stain.

The talking runt gestured two others forward and they approached Gil, dragging his knife. He tried the squirm away from them but the ropes didn't allow for much movement.

"Hey, now, wait a minute! What're you–?"

"The decision's made: You'll make the trade."

Gill was beginning to know terror. "Forget the goddamn rhymes! What's going on here?"

"Hold your nose," the talking runt said to the pair with the knife, "and cut off his clothes. Best be cautious lest he make you nauseous."

Gil winced as the blade began to slice along the seams of his shirt, waiting for the sharp edge to cut him. But it never touched him.

*

George watched as the little guys stripped Connors. He had no idea what they were up to and he didn't care. He felt like more of a failure than ever. He'd never done much with his life, but at least since the end of the Sixties he had been able to tell himself that he had provided a safe harbor for the last of the world's Little People.

When had it been – Sixty-nine, maybe – when all eleven of them had first shown up at his door looking for shelter. They'd said they were waiting for "when time is unfurled and we're called by the world." He hadn't the vaguest notion what that meant but he'd experienced an immediate rapport with them. They were Outsiders, just like he was. And when they offered to pay rent, the deal was sealed.

He smiled. That rhymed. If you listened to them enough, you began to sound like them. Since they spoke in rhyme all the time – there was another one – it was nothing for them to crank out verse for the greeting card companies. Some of the stuff was pretty sappy, but it paid the taxes.

But what next? One of the little guys had been murdered by this psycho who now knew their secret. Soon all the world would know about these Little People. George had doubly failed at his job: He hadn't protected them and hadn't kept their secret. He was just what the punk had called him: a worthless old shit.

He heard Connors groan and looked up. He was nude as a jaybird and the little guys had tied him with new ropes looped through rings fastened high on the walls at each end of the room. They were hauling him off the floor, stringing him across the room like laundry hung out to dry.

George suddenly realized that although he wasn't too pleased with being George Haskins, at this particular moment he preferred it by far to being Gilroy Connors.

*

Gil felt as if his arms and legs were going to come out of their sockets as the runts hauled him off the floor and stretched him out in the air. For a moment he feared that might be their plan, but when he got half way between the floor and the ceiling, they stopped pulling on the ropes.

He couldn't ever remember feeling so damn helpless in all his life.

The lights went out and he heard a lot of shuffling below him but he couldn't see what they were doing. Then came the sound, a new chant, high-pitched and stacatto in a language he had never heard before, a language that didn't seem at home on the human tongue.

A soft glow began to rise from below him. He wished he could see what they were doing. All he could do was watch their weird shadows on the ceiling. So far they hadn't caused him too much pain, but he was beginning to feel weak and dizzy. His back got warm while his front grew cold and numb, like there was a cool wind coming from the ceiling and passing right through him, carrying his energy with it. All of his juice seemed to be flowing downward and collecting in his back.

So tired...and his back felt so heavy. What were they doing below him?

*

They were glowing.

George had watched them carry C'ham, their dead member, to a spot directly below Connor's suspended body. They had placed one of George's coffee mugs at C'ham's feet, then they stripped off their clothes and gathered in a circle around him. They had started to chant. After a while, a faint yellow light began to shimmer around their furry little bodies.

George found the ceremony fascinating in a weird sort of way – until the glow brightened and flowed up to illuminate the suspended punk. Then even George's lousy eyes could see the horror of what was happening to Gilroy Connors.

His legs, arms, and belly were a cold dead white, but his back was a deep red-purple color, like a gigantic bruise, and it bulged like the belly of a mother-to-be carrying triplets. George could not imagine how the skin was holding together, it was stretched so tight. Looked like it would rupture any minute. George shielded his face, waiting for the splatter. But when it didn't come, he chanced another peek.

It was raining on the Little People.

The skin hadn't ruptured as George had feared. No, a fine red mist was falling from Connors' body. Red microdroplets were slipping from the pores in the purpled swelling on his back and falling through the yellow glow, turning it orange. The scene was as beautiful as it was horrifying.

The bloody dew fell for something like half an hour, then the glow faded and one of the little guys boosted another up to the wall switch and the lights came on. George did not have to strain his eyes to know that Gilroy Connors was dead.

As the circle dissolved, he noticed that the dead little guy was gone. Only the mug remained under Conners.

George found his mouth dry when he tried to speak.

"What happened to... to the one he stabbed?"

"C'ham?" said the leader. George knew this one; his name was Kob. "He's over there."

Sure enough. There were ten little guys standing over by the couch, one of them looking weak and being supported by the others.

"But I thought–"

"Yes. C'ham was dead, but now he's back because of the Crimson Dew."

"And the other one?"

Kob glanced over his shoulder at Connors. "I understand there's a reward for his capture. You should have it. And there's something else you should have."

The little man stepped under Connors' suspended body and returned with the coffee mug.

"This is for you," he said, holding it up.

George took the mug and saw that it was half-filled with a thin reddish liquid.

"What am I supposed to do with this?"

"Drink it."

George's stomach turned. "But it's... from him."

"Of course. From him to you." Kob gave George's calf a gentle slap. "We need you George. You're our shield from the world–"

"Some shield!" George said.

"It's true. You've protected us from prying eyes and we need you to go on doing that for some time to come."

"I don't think I've got much time left."

"That's why you should drain that cup."

"What do you mean?"

"Think of it as extending your lease," Kob said.

George looked over at C'ham who'd surely been dead half an hour ago and now was up and walking about. He looked down into the cup again.

...extending your lease.

Well, after what he'd just seen, he guessed anything might be possible.

Tightening his throat against an incipient gag, George raised the cup to his lips and sipped. The fluid was lukewarm and salty – like a bouillon that had been allowed to cool too long. Not good, but not awful, either. He squeezed his eyes shut and chugged the rest. It went down and stayed down, thank the Lord.

"Good!" Kob shouted, and the ten other Little People applauded.

"Now you can help us cut him down and carry him outside."

*

"So what're you going to do with all that money, George?" Bill said as he handed George the day's mail.

"I ain't got it yet."

George leaned against the roof of the mail truck and dragged on his cigarette. He felt good. His morning backache was pretty much a thing of the past, and he could pee with the best of them – hit a wall from six feet away, he bet. His breathing was better than it had been in thirty years. And best off all, he could stand here and see all the way south along the length of the harbor to downtown Monroe. He didn't like to think about what had been in that mug Kob had handed him, but in the ten days since he had swallowed it down he had come to feel decades younger.

He wished he had some more of it.

"Still can't get over how lucky you were to find him laying in the grass over there," Bill said, glancing across the road. "Especially lucky he wasn't alive from what I heard about him."

"Guess so," George said.

"I understand they still can't explain how he died or why he was all dried up like a mummy."

"Yeah, it's a mystery, all right."

"So when you do get the fifty thou – what are you going to spend it on?"

"Make a few improvements on the old place, I guess. Get me some legal help to see if somehow I can get this area declared off-limits to developers. But mostly set up some sort of fund to keep paying the taxes until that comes to pass."

Bill laughed and let up on the mail truck's brake. "Not ready for the old folks' home yet?" he said as he lurched away.

"Not by a long shot!"

I've got responsibilities, he thought. And tenants to keep happy.

He shuddered.

Yes, he certainly wanted to keep those little fellows happy.

 

foreword to "Faces"

I'd planned on writing three 10,000 word novelettes for Night Visions 6. I wound up doing four.

Sometime in November I sent Paul Mikol the 30,000 words of new fiction I'd promised. He called back a few weeks later to say that the third story, "Ethics," was a little too lighthearted and too much like "Feelings." Could I do another in its place? My immediate reaction was, He's nuts. But I said I'd think about it. I went back to the two stories in question and reread them back to back.

He was right. I'd written "Feelings" and the other piece months apart and hadn't seen the similarities.

So here it was almost December and I needed 10K words of new fiction. I'd been perking a story about a serial killer (this was 1987, before The Silence of the Lambs and the serial killer glut) but one with a difference. This one would be female (they're almost always male), hideously deformed, and sympathetic. I felt if I could tell you about the forces driving Carly to these murderous acts – her childhood, her needs, her emotional hungers – you might understand her. You might even find some sort of love for her.

Years later I happened to reread Richard Matheson's "Born of Man and Woman" and realized what a signicant – though unconscious – influence it had on my story. I believe Carly is Matheson's little girl all gown up.

To date "Faces" is my most reprinted story and remains one of my favorites. And it has a tenuous link to the Adversary Cycle. You see, Carly was conceived just about the same time Carol Stevens conceived her child in Reborn.

 

Faces

Bite her face off.

No pain. Her dead already. Kill her quick like others. Not want make pain. Not her fault.

The boyfriend groan but not move. Face way on ground now. Got from behind. Got quick. Never see. He can live.

Girl look me after the boyfriend go down. Gasp first. When see face start scream. Two claws not cut short rip her throat before sound get loud.

Her sick-scared look just like all others. Hate that look. Hate it terrible.

Sorry, girl. Not your fault.

Chew her face skin. Chew all. Chew hard and swallow. Warm wet redness make sickish but chew and chew. Must eat face. Must get all down. Keep down.

Leave the eyes.

The boyfriend groan again. Move arm. Must leave quick. Take last look blood and teeth and stare-eyes that once pretty girlface.

Sorry, girl. Not your fault.

Got go. Get way hurry. First take money. Girl money. Take the boyfriend wallet, also too. Always take money. Need money.

Go now. Not too far. Climb wall of near building. Find dark spot where can see and not be seen. Where can wait. Soon the Detective Harrison arrive.

In downbelow can see the boyfriend roll over. Get to knees. Sway. See him look the girlfriend.

The boyfriend scream terrible. Bad to hear. Make so sad. Make cry.

*

Kevin Harrison heard Jacobi's voice on the other end of the line and wanted to be sick.

"Don't say it," he groaned.

"Sorry," said Jacobi. "It's another one."

"Where?"

"West Forty-ninth, right near–"

"I'll find it." All he had to do was look for the flashing red lights. "I'm on my way. Shouldn't take me too long to get in from Monroe at this hour."

"We've got all night, lieutenant." Unsaid, but well understood, was an admonishing, You're the one who wants to live on Long Island.

Beside him in the bed, Martha spoke from deep in her pillow as he hung up.

"Not another one?"

"Yeah."

"Oh, God! When is it going to stop?"

"When I catch the guy."

Her hand touched his arm, gently. "I know all this responsibility's not easy. I'm here when you need me."

"I know." He leaned over and kissed her. "Thanks."

He left the warm bed and skipped the shower. No time for that. A fresh shirt, yesterday's rumpled suit, a tie shoved into his pocket, and he was off into the winter night.

With his secure little ranch house falling away behind him, Harrison felt naked and vulnerable out here in the dark. As he headed south on Glen Cove Road toward the LIE, he realized that Martha and the kids were all that were holding him together these days. His family had become an island of sanity and stability in a world gone mad.

Everything else was in flux. For reasons he still could not comprehend, he had volunteered to head up the search for this killer. Now his whole future in the department had come to hinge on his success in finding him.

The papers had named the maniac "the Facelift Killer." As apt a name as the tabloids could want, but Harrison resented it. The moniker was callous, trivializing the mutilations perpetrated on the victims. But it had caught on with the public and they were stuck with it, especially with all the ink the story was getting.

Six killings, one a week for six weeks in a row, and eight million people in a panic. Then, for almost two weeks, the city had gone without a new slaying.

Until tonight.

Harrison's stomach pitched and rolled at the thought of having to look at one of those faceless corpses again.

*

"That's enough," Harrison said, averting his eyes from the faceless corpse.

The raw, gouged, bloody flesh, the exposed muscle and bone were bad enough, but it was the eyes – those naked, lidless, staring eyes were the worst.

"This makes seven," Jacobi said at his side. Squat, dark, jowly, the sergeant was chewing a big wad of gum, noisily, aggressively, as if he had a grudge against it.

"I can count. Anything new?"

"Nah. Same m.o. as ever – throat slashed, money stolen, face gnawed off."

Harrison shuddered. He had come in as Special Investigator after the third Facelift killing. He had inspected the first three via coroner's photos. Those had been awful. But nothing could match the effect of the real thing up close and still warm and oozing. This was the fourth fresh victim he had seen. There was no getting used to this kind of mutilation, no matter how many he saw. Jacobi put on a good show, but Harrison sensed the revulsion under the sergeant's armor.

And yet...

Beneath all the horror, Harrison sensed something. There was anger here, sick anger and hatred of spectacular proportions. But beyond that, something else, an indefinable something that had drawn him to this case. Whatever it was, that something called to him, and still held him captive.

If he could identify it, maybe he could solve this case and wrap it up. And save his ass.

If he did solve it, it would be all on his own. Because he wasn't getting much help from Jacobi, and even less from his assigned staff. He knew what they all thought – that he had taken the job as a glory grab, a shortcut to the top. Sure, they wanted to see this thing wrapped up, too, but they weren't shedding any tears over the shit he was taking in the press and on TV and from City Hall.

Their attitude was clear: If you want the spotlight, Harrison, you gotta take the heat that goes with it.

They were right, of course. He could have been working on a quieter case, like where all the winos were disappearing to. He'd chosen this instead. But he wasn't after the spotlight, dammit! It was this case – something about this case!

He suddenly realized that there was no one around him. The body had been carted off, Jacobi had wandered back to his car. He had been left standing alone at the far end of the alley.

And yet not alone.

Someone was watching him. He could feel it. The realization sent a little chill – one completely unrelated to the cold February wind – trickling down his back. A quick glance around showed no one paying him the slightest bit of attention. He looked up.

There!

Somewhere in the darkness above, someone was watching him. Probably from the roof. He could sense the piercing scrutiny and it made him a little weak. That was no ghoulish neighborhood voyeur, up there. That was the Facelift Killer.

He had to get to Jacobi, have him seal off the building. But he couldn't act spooked. He had to act calm, casual.

*

See the Detective Harrison's eyes. See from way up in dark. Tall-thin. Hair brown. Nice eyes. Soft brown eyes. Not hard like many-many eyes. Look here. Even from here see eyes make wide. Him know it me.

Watch the Detective Harrison turn slow. Walk slow. Tell inside him want to run. Must leave here. Leave quick.

Bend low. Run cross roof. Jump to next. And next. Again til most block away. Then down wall. Wrap scarf round head. Hide bad-face. Hunch inside big-big coat. Walk through lighted spots.

Hate light. Hate crowds. Theatres here. Movies and plays. Like them. Some night sneak in and see. See one with man in mask. Hang from wall behind big drapes. Make cry.

Wish there mask for me.

Follow street long way to river. See many light across river. Far past there is place where grew. Never want go back to there. Never.

Catch back of truck. Ride home.

Home. Bright bulb hang ceiling. Not care. The Old Jessi waiting. The Jessi friend. Only friend. The Jessi's eyes not see. Ever. When the Jessi look me, her face not wear sick-scared look. Hate that look.

Come in kitchen window. The Jessi's face wrinkle-black. Smile when hear me come. Tv on. Always on. The Jessi can not watch. Say it company for her.

"You're so late tonight."

"Hard work. Get moneys tonight."

Feel sick. Want cry. Hate kill. Wish stop.

"That's nice. Are you going to put it in the drawer?"

"Doing now."

Empty wallets. Put moneys in slots. Ones first slot. Fives next slot. Then tens and twenties. So the Jessi can pay when boy bring foods. Sometimes eat stealed foods. Mostly the Jessi call for foods.

The Old Jessi hardly walk. Good. Do not want her go out. Bad peoples round here. Many. Hurt one who not see. One bad man try hurt Jessi once. Push through door. Thought only the blind Old Jessi live here.

Lucky the Jessi not along that day.

Not lucky bad man. Hit the Jessi. Laugh hard. Then look me. Get sick-scared look. Hate that look. Kill him quick. Put in tub. Bleed there. Bad man friend come soon after. Kill him also too. Late at night take both dead bad men out. Go through window. Carry down wall. Throw in river.

No bad men come again. Ever.

"I've been waiting all night for my bath. Do you think you can help me a little?"

Always help. But the Old Jessi always ask. The Jessi very polite.

Sponge the Old Jessi back in tub. Rinse her hair. Think of the Detective Harrison. His kind eyes. Must talk him. Want stop this. Stop now. Maybe will understand. Will. Can feel

*

Seven grisly murders in eight weeks.

Kevin Harrison studied a photo of the latest victim, taken before she was mutilated. A nice eight by ten glossy furnished by the her agent. A real beauty. A dancer with Broadway dreams.

He tossed the photo aside and pulled the stack of files toward him. The remnants of six lives in this pile. Somewhere within had to be an answer, the thread that linked each of them to the Facelift Killer.

But what if there was no common link? What if were all the killings were at random, linked only by the fact that they were beautiful? Seven deaths, all over the city. All with their faces gnawed off. Gnawed.

He flipped through the victims one by one and studied their photos. He had begun to feel he knew each one of them personally:

Mary Detrick, 20, a junior at N.Y.U., killed in Washington Square Park on January 5. She was the first.

Mia Chandler, 25, a secretary at Merrill Lynch, killed January 13 in Battery Park.

Ellen Beasley, 22, a photographer's assistant, killed in an alley in Chelsea on January 22.

Hazel Hauge, 30, artist agent, killed in her Soho loft on January 27.

Elisabeth Paine, 28, housewife, killed on Feruary 2 while jogging late in Central Park.

Joan Perrin, 25, a model from Brooklyn, pulled from her car while stopped at a light on the Upper East Side on February 8.

He picked up the eight by ten again. And the last: Liza Lee, 21. Dancer. Lived across the river in Jersey City. Ducked into an alley for a toot with her boyfriend tonight and never came out.

Three blondes, three brunettes, one redhead. Some stacked, some on the flat side. All caucs except for Perrin. All lookers. But besides that, how in the world could these women be linked? They came from all over town, and they met their respective ends all over town. What could –

"Well, you sure hit the bullseye about that roof!" Jacobi said as he burst into the office.

Harrison straightened in his chair. "What you find?"

"Blood."

"Whose?"

"The victim's."

"No prints? No hairs? No fibers?"

"We're working on it. But how'd you figure to check the roof top?"

"Lucky guess."

Harrison didn't want to provide Jacobi with more grist for the departmental gossip mill by mentioning his feeling of being watched from up there.

But the killer had been watching, hadn't he?

"Any prelims from pathology?"

Jacobi shrugged and stuffed three sticks of gum into his mouth. Then he tried to talk.

"Same as ever. Money gone, throat ripped open by a pair of sharp pointed instruments, not knives, the bite marks on the face are the usual: the teeth that made them aren't human, but the saliva is."

The "non-human" teeth part – more teeth, bigger and sharper teeth that found in any human mouth – had baffled them all from the start. Early on someone remembered a horror novel or movie where the killer used some weird sort of false teeth to bite his victims. That had sent them off on a wild goose chase to all the dental labs looking for records of bizarre bite prostheses. No dice. No one had seen or even heard of teeth that could gnaw off a person's face.

Harrison shuddered. What could explain wounds like that? What were they dealing with here?

The irritating pops, snaps, and cracks of Jacobi's gum filled the office.

"I liked you better when you smoked."

Jacobi's reply was cut off by the phone. The sergeant picked it up.

"Detective Harrison's office!" he said, listened a moment, then, with his hand over the mouthpiece, passed the receiver to Harrison. "Some fairy wantsh to shpeak to you," he said with an evil grin.

"Fairy?"

"Hey," he said, getting up and walking toward the door. "I don't mind. I'm a liberal kinda guy, y'know?"

Harrison shook his head with disgust. Jacobi was getting less likable every day.

"Hello. Harrison here."

"Shorry dishturb you, Detective Harrishon."

The voice was soft, pitched somewhere between a man's and a woman's, and sounded as if the speaker had half a mouthful of saliva. Harrison had never heard anything like it. Who could be–?

And then it struck him: It was three a.m. Only a handful of people knew he was here.

"Do I know you?"

"No. Watch you tonight. You almosht shee me in dark."

That same chill from earlier tonight ran down Harrison's back again.

"Are…are you who I think you are?"

There was a pause, then one soft word, more sobbed than spoken:

"Yesh."

If the reply had been cocky, something along the line of And just who do you think I am?, Harrison would have looked for much more in the way of corroboration. But that single word, and the soul deep heartbreak that propelled it, banished all doubt.

My God! He looked around frantically. No one in sight. Where the fuck was Jacobi now when he needed him? This was the Facelift Killer! He needed a trace!

Got to keep him on the line!

"I have to ask you something to be sure you are who you say you are."

"Yesh?"

"Do you take anything from the victims – I mean, besides their faces?"

"Money. Take money."

This is him! The department had withheld the money part from the papers. Only the real Facelift Killer could know!

"Can I ask you something else?"

"Yesh."

Harrison was asking this one for himself.

"What do you do with the faces?"

He had to know. The question drove him crazy at night. He dreamed about those faces. Did the killer tack them on the wall, or press them in a book, or freeze them, or did he wear them around the house like that Leatherface character from that chainsaw movie?

On the other end of the line he sensed sudden agitation and panic: "No! Can not shay! Can not!"

"Okay, okay. Take it easy."

"You will help shtop?"

"Oh, yes! Oh, God, yes, I'll help you stop!" He prayed his genuine heartfelt desire to end this was coming through. "I'll help you any way I can!"

A long pause, then:

"You hate? Hate me?"

Harrison didn't trust himself to answer that right away. He searched his feelings quickly, but carefully.

"No," he said finally. "I think you have done some awful, horrible things but, strangely enough, I don't hate you."

And that was true. Why didn't he hate this murdering maniac? Oh, he wanted to stop him more than anything in the world, and wouldn't hesitate to shoot him dead if the situation required it, but there was no personal hatred for the Facelift Killer.

What is it in you that speaks to me? he wondered.

"Shank you," said the voice, couched once more in a sob.

And then the killer hung up.

Harrison shouted into the dead phone, banged it on his desk, but the line was dead.

"What the hell's the matter with you?" Jacobi said from the office door.

"That so-called 'fairy' on the phone was the Facelift Killer, you idiot! We could have had a trace if you'd stuck around!"

"Bullshit!"

"He knew about taking the money!"

"So why'd he talk like that? That's a dumb-ass way to try to disguise your voice."

And then it suddenly hit Harrison like a sucker punch to the gut. He swallowed hard and said:

"Jacobi, how do you think your voice would sound if you had a mouth crammed full of teeth much larger and sharper than the kind found in the typical human mouth?"

Harrison took genuine pleasure in the way Jacobi's face blanched slowly to yellow-white.

*

He didn't get home again until after seven the following night. The whole department had been in an uproar all day. This was the first break they had had in the case. It wasn't much, but contact had been made. That was the important part. And although Harrison had done nothing he could think of to deserve any credit, he had accepted the commissioner's compliments and encouragement on the phone shortly before he had left the office tonight.

But what was most important to Harrison was the evidence from the call – Damn! he wished it had been taped – that the killer wanted to stop. They didn't have one more goddam clue tonight than they'd had yesterday, but the call offered hope that soon there might be an end to this horror.

Martha had dinner waiting. The kids were scrubbed and pajamaed and waiting for their goonight kiss. He gave them each a hug and poured himself a stiff scotch while Martha put them in the sack.

"Do you feel as tired as you look?" she said as she returned from the bedroom wing.

She was a big woman with bright blue eyes and natural dark blond hair. Harrison toasted her with his glas.

"The expression 'dead on his feet' has taken on a whole new meaning for me."

She kissed him, then they sat down to eat.

He had spoken to Martha a couple of times since he had left the house twenty hours ago. She knew about the phone call from the Facelift Killer, about the new hope in the department about the case, but he was glad she didn't bring it up now. He was sick of talking about it. Instead, he sat in front of his cooling meatloaf and wrestled with the images that had been nibbling at the edges of his consciousness all day.

"What are you daydreaming about?" Martha said.

Without thinking, Harrison said, "Annie."

"Annie who?"

"My sister."

Martha put her fork down. "Your sister? Kevin, you don't have a sister."

"Not any more. But I did."

Her expression was alarmed now. "Kevin, are you all right? I've known your family for ten years. You mother has never once mentioned–"

"We don't talk about Annie, Mar. We try not to even think about her. She died when she was five."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Annie was...deformed. Terribly deformed. She never really had a chance."

*

Open trunk from inside. Get out. The Detective Harrison's house here. Cold night. Cold feel good. Trunk air make sick, dizzy.

Light here. Hurry round side of house.

Darker here. No one see. Look in window. Dark but see good. Two little ones there. Sleeping. Move away. Not want them cry.

Go more round. The Detective Harrison with lady. Sit table near window. Must be wife. Pretty but not oh-so-beauty. Not have mom-face. Not like ones who die.

Watch behind tree. Hungry. They not eat food. Talk-talk-talk. Can not hear.

The Detective Harrison do most talk. Kind face. Kind eyes. Some terrible sad there. Hides. Him understands. Heard in phone voice. Understands. Him one can stop kills.

Spent day watch the Detective Harrison car. All day watch at police house. Saw him come-go many times. Soon dark, open trunk with claw. Ride with him. Ride long. Wonder what town this?

The Detective Harrison look this way. Stare like last night. Must not see me! Must not!

*

Harrison stopped in mid-sentence and stared out the window as his skin prickled.

That watched feeling again.

It was the same as last night. Something was out in the backyard watching them. He strained to see through the wooded darkness outside the window but saw only shadows within shadows.

But something was there! He could feel it!

He got up and turned on the outside spotlights, hoping, praying that the backyard would be empty.

It was.

He smiled to hide his relief and glanced at Martha.

"Thought that raccoon was back."

He left the spots on and settled back into his place at the table. But the thoughts racing through his mind made eating unthinkable.

What if that maniac had followed him out here? What if the call had been a ploy to get him off-guard so the Facelife Killer could do to Martha what he had done to the other women?

My God...

First thing tomorrow morning he was going to call the local alarm boys and put in a security system. Cost be damned, he had to have it. Immediately!

As for tonight...

Tonight he'd keep the .38 under the pillow.

*

Run way. Run low and fast. Get bushes before light come. Must stay way now. Not come back.

The Detective Harrison feel me. Know when watched. Him the one, sure.

Walk in dark, in woods. See back many houses. Come park. Feel strange. See this park before. Can not be –

Then know.

Monroe! This Monroe! Born here! Live here! Hate Monroe! Monroe bad place, bad people! House, home, old home near here! There! Cross park! Old home! New color but same house.

Hate house!

Sit on froze park grass. Cry. Why Monroe? Do not want be in Monroe. The Mom gone. The Sissy gone. The Jimmy very gone. House here.

Dry tears. Watch old home long time till light go out. Wait more. Go to windows. See new folks inside. The Mom must took the Sissy and go. Where? How long?

Go to back. Push cellar window. Crawl in. See good in dark. New folks make nice cellar. Wood on walls. Rug on floor. No chain.

Sit floor. Remember...

Remember hanging on wall. Look little window near ceiling. Watch kids play in park cross street. Want go with kids. Want play there with kids. Want have friends.

But the Mom won't let. Never leave basement. Too strong. Break everything. Have tv. Broke it. Have toys. Broke them. Stay in basement. Chain round waist hold to center pole. Can not leave.

Remember terrible bad things happen.

Run. Run way Monroe. Never come back.

Till now.

Now back. Still hate house! Want hurt house. See cigarettes. With matches. Light all. Burn now!

Watch rug burn. Chair burn. So hot. Run back to cold park. Watch house burn. See new folks run out. Trucks come throw water. House burn and burn.

Glad but tears come anyway.

Hate house. Now house gone. Hate Monroe.

Wonder where the Mom and the Sissy live now.

Leave Monroe for new home and the Old Jessi.

*

The second call came the next day. And this time they were ready for it. The tape recorders were set, the computers were waiting to begin the tracing protocol. As soon as Harrison recognized the voice, he gave the signal. On the other side of the desk, Jacobi put on a headset and people started running in all directions. Off to the races.

"I'm glad you called," Harrison said. "I've been thinking about you."

"You undershtand?" said the soft voice.

"I'm not sure."

"Musht help shtop."

"I will! I will! Tell me how!"

"Not know."

Harrison paused, not sure what to say next. He didn't want to push, but he had to keep him on the line.

"Did you...hurt anyone last night."

"No. Shaw houshes. Your houshe. Your wife."

Harrison's blood froze. Last night – in the back yard. That had been the Facelift Killer in the dark. He looked up and saw genuine concern in Jacobi's eyes. He forced himself to speak.

"You were at my house? Why didn't you talk to me?"

"No-no! Can not let shee! Run way your house. Go mine!"

"Yours? You live in Monroe?"

"No! Hate Monroe! Once lived. Gone long! Burn old houshe. Never go back!"

This could be important. Harrison phrased the next question carefully.

"You burned your old house? When was that?"

If he could just get a date, a year...

"Lasht night."

"Last night?" Harrison remembered hearing the sirens and fire horns in the early morning darkness.

"Yesh! Hate houshe!"

And then the line went dead.

*

He looked at Jacobi who had picked up another line.

"Did we get the trace?"

"Waiting to hear. Christ, he sounds retarded, doesn't he?"

Retarded. The word sent ripples across the surface of his brain. Non-human teeth...Monroe...retarded...a picture was forming in the settling sediment, a picture he felt he should avoid.

"Maybe he is."

"You'd think that would make him easy to–"

Jacobi stopped, listened to the receiver, then shook his head disgustedly.

"What?"

"Got as far as the Lower East Side. He was probably calling from somewhere in one of the projects. If we'd had another thirty seconds–"

"We've got something better than a trace to some lousy pay phone," Harrison said. "We've got his old address!" He picked up his suit coat and headed for the door.

"Where we goin'?"

"Not 'we.' Me. I'm going out to Monroe."

*

Once he reached the town, it took Harrison less than an hour to find the Facelift Killer's last name.

He first checked with the Monroe Fire Department to find the address of last night's house fire. Then he went down to the brick fronted Town Hall and found the lot and block number. After that it was easy to look up its history of ownership. Mr. and Mrs. Elwood Scott were the current owners of the land and the charred shell of a three-bedroom ranch that sat upon it.

There had only been one other set of owners: Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Baker. He had lived most of his life in Monroe but knew nothing about the Baker family. But he knew where to find out: Captain Jeremy Hall, Chief of Police in the Incorporated Village of Monroe.

Captain Hall hadn't changed much over the years. Still had a big belly, long sideburns, and hair cut bristly short on the sides. That was the "in" look these days, but Hall had been wearing his hair like that for at least thirty years. If not for his Bronx accent, he could have played a redneck sheriff in any one of those southern chain gang movies.

After pleasantries and local-boy-leaves-home-to-become-big-city-cop-and-now-comes-to-question-small-town-cop banter, they got down to business.

"The Bakers from North Park Drive?" Hall said after he had noisily sucked the top layer off his steaming coffee. "Who could forget them? There was the mother, divorced, I believe, and the three kids – two girls and the boy."

Harrison pulled out his note pad. "The boy's name – what was it?"

"Tommy, I believe. Yeah – Tommy. I'm sure of it."

"He's the one I want."

Hall's eyes narrowed. "He is, is he? You're working on that Facelift case aren't you?"

"Right."

"And you think Tommy Baker might be your man?"

"It's a possibility. What do you know about him?"

"I know he's dead."

Harrison froze. "Dead? That can't be!"

"It sure as hell can be!" Without rising from his seat, he shouted through his office door. "Murph! Pull out that old file on the Baker case! Nineteen eighty-four, I believe!"

"Eighty-four?" Harrison said. He and Martha had been living in Queens then. They hadn't moved back to Monroe yet.

"Right. A real messy affair. Tommy Baker was thirteen years old when he bought it. And he bought it. Believe me, he bought it!"

Harrison sat in glum silence, watching his whole theory go up in smoke.

*

The Old Jessi sleeps. Stand by mirror near tub. Only mirror have. No like them. The Jessi not need one.

Stare face. Bad face. Teeth, teeth, teeth. And hair. Arms too thin, too long. Claws. None have claws like my. None have face like my.

Face not better. Ate pretty faces but face still same. Still cause sick-scared look. Just like at home.

Remember home. Do not want but thoughts will not go.

Faces.

The Sissy get the Mom-face. Beauty face. The Tommy get the Dad-face. Not see the Dad. Never come home anymore. Who my face? Never see where come. Where my face come? My hands come?

Remember home cellar. Hate home! Hate cellar more! Pull on chain round waist. Pull and pull. Want out. Want play. Please. No one let.

One day when the Mom and the Sissy go, the Tommy bring friends. Come down cellar. Bunch on stairs. Stare. First time see sick-scared look. Not understand.

Friends! Play! Throw ball them. They run. Come back with rocks and sticks. Still sick-scared look. Throw me, hit me.

Make cry. Make the Tommy laugh.

Whenever the Mom and the Sissy go, the Tommy come with boys and sticks. Poke and hit. Hurt. Little hurt on skin. Big hurt inside. Sick-scared look hurt most of all. Hate look. Hate hurt. Hate them.

Most hate the Tommy.

One night chain breaks. Wait on wall for the Tommy. Hurt him. Hurt the Tommy outside. Hurt the Tommy inside. Know because pull inside outside. The Tommy quiet. Quiet, wet, red. The Mom and the Sissy get sick-scared look and scream.

Hate that look. Run way. Hide. Never come back. Till last night.

Cry more now. Cry quiet. In tub. So the Jessi not hear.

*

Harrison flipped through the slim file on the Tommy Baker murder.

"This is it?"

"We didn't need to collect much paper," Captain Hall said. "I mean, the mother and sister were witnesses. There's some photos in that manila envelope at the back."

Harrison pulled it free and slipped out some large black and whites. His stomach lurched immediately.

"My God!"

"Yeah, he was a mess. Gutted by his older sister."

"His sister?"

"Yeah. Apparently she was some sort of freak of nature."

Harrison felt the floor tilt under him, felt as if he were going to slide off the chair.

"Freak?" he said, hoping Hall wouldn't notice the tremor in his voice. "What did she look like?"

"Never saw her. She took off after she killed the brother. No one's seen hide nor hair of her since. But there's a picture of the rest of the family in there."

Harrison shuffled through the file until he came to a large color family portrait. He held it up. Four people: two adults seated in chairs, a boy and a girl, about ten and eight, kneeling on the floor in front of them. A perfectly normal American family. Four smiling faces.

But where's your oldest child. Where's your big sister? Where did you hide that fifth face while posing for this?

"What was her name? The one who's not here?"

"Not sure. Carla, maybe? Look at the front sheet under Suspect."

Harrison did: "Carla Baker – called 'Carly.'"

Hall grinned. "Right. Carly. Not bad for a guy getting ready for retirement."

Harrison didn't answer. An ineluctable sadness filled him as he stared at the incomplete family portrait.

Carly Baker...poor Carly... where did they hide you away? In the cellar? Locked in the attic? How did your brother treat you? Bad enough to deserve killing?

Probably.

"No pictures of Carly, I suppose."

"Not a one."

That figured.

"How about a description?"

"The mother gave us one but it sounded so weird, we threw it out. I mean, the girl sounded like she was half spider or something!" He drained his cup. "Then later on I got into a discussion with Doc Alberts about it. He told me he was doing deliveries back about the time this kid was born. Said they had a whole rash of monsters, all delivered within a few weeks of each other."

The room started to tilt under Harrison again.

"Early December, 1968, by chance?"

"Yeah! How'd you know?"

He felt queasy. "Lucky guess."

"Huh. Anyway, Doc Alberts said they kept it quiet while they looked into a cause, but that little group of freaks – 'cluster,' he called them – was all there was. They figured that a bunch of mothers had been exposed to something nine months before, but whatever it had been was long gone. No monsters since. I understand most of them died shortly after birth, anyway."

"Not all of them."

"Not that it matters," Hall said, getting up and pouring himself a refill from the coffee pot. "Someday someone will find her skeleton, probably somewhere out in Haskins' marshes."

"Maybe." But I wouldn't count on it. He held up the file. "Can I get a xerox of this?"

*

"You mean the Facelift Killer is a twenty-year old girl?"

Martha's face clearly registered her disbelief.

"Not just any girl. A freak. Someone so deformed she really doesn't look human. Completely uneducated and probably mentally retarded to boot."

Harrison hadn't returned to Manhattan. Instead, he'd headed straight for home, less than a mile from Town Hall. He knew the kids were at school and that Martha would be there alone. That was what he had wanted. He needed to talk this out with someone a lot more sensitive than Jacobi.

Besides, what he had learned from Captain Hall and the Baker file had dredged up the most painful memories of his entire life.

"A monster," Martha said.

"Yeah. Born one on the outside, made one on the inside. But there's another child monster I want to talk about. Not Carly Baker. Annie... Ann Harrison."

Martha gasped. "That sister you told me about last night?"

Harrison nodded. He knew this was going to hurt, but he had to do it, had to get it out. He was going to explode into a thousnd twitching bloody pieces if he didn't.

"I was nine when she was born. December 2, 1968 – a week after Carly Baker. Seven pounds, four ounces of horror. She looked more fish than human."

His sister's image was imprinted on the rear wall of his brain. And it should have been after all those hours he had spent studying her in loathsome face. Only her eyes looked human. The rest of her was awful. A lipless mouth, flattened nose, sloping forehead, fingers and toes fused so that they looked more like flippers than hands and feet, a bloated body covered with shiny skin that was a dusky gray-blue. The doctors said she was that color because her heart was bad, had a defect that caused mixing of blue blood and red blood.

A repulsed nine-year old Kevin Harrison had dubbed her The Tuna – but never within earshot of his parents.

"She wasn't supposed to live long. A few months, they said, and she'd be dead. But she didn't die. Annie lived on and on. One year. Two. My father and the doctors tried to get my mother to put her into some sort of institution, but Mom wouldn't hear of it. She kept Annie in the third bedroom and talked to her and cooed over her and cleaned up her shit and just hung over her all the time. All the time, Martha!"

Martha gripped his hand and nodded for him to go on.

"After a while, it got so there was nothing else in Mom's life. She wouldn't leave Annie. Family trips became a thing of the past. Christ, if she and Dad went out to a movie, I had to stay with Annie. No babysitter was trustworthy enough. Our whole lives seemed to center around that freak in the back bedroom. And me? I was forgotten.

"After a while I began to hate my sister."

"Kevin, you don't have to–"

"Yes, I do! I've got to tell you how it was! By the time I was fourteen – just about Tommy Baker's age when he bought it – I thought I was going to go crazy. I was getting all B's in school but did that matter? Hell, no! 'Annie rolled halfway over today. Isn't that wonderful?' Big deal! She was five years old, for Christ sake! I was starting point guard on the highschool junior varsity basketball team as a goddam freshman, but did anyone come to my games? Hell no!

"I tell you, Martha, after five years of caring for Annie, our house was a powderkeg. Looking back now I can see it was my mother's fault for becoming so obsessed. But back then, at age fourteen, I blamed it all on Annie. I really hated her for being born a freak."

He paused before going on. This was the really hard part.

"One night, when my dad had managed to drag my mother out to some company banquet that he had to attend, I was left alone to babysit Annie. On those rare occasions, my mother would always tell me to keep Annie company – you know, read her stories and such. But I never did. I'd let her lie back there alone with our old black and white tv while I sat in the living room watching the family set. This time, however, I went into her room."

He remembered the sight of her, lying there with the covers half way up her fat little tuna body that couldn't have been much more than a yard in length. It was winter, like now, and his mother had dressed her in a flannel nightshirt. The coarse hair that grew off the back of her head had been wound into two braids and fastened with pink bows.

"Annie's eyes brightened as I came into the room. She hadnever spoken. Couldn't, it seemed. Her face could do virtually nothing in the way of expression, and her flipper-like arms weren't good for much, either. You had to read her eyes, and that wasn't easy. None of us knew how much of a brain Annie had, or how much she understood of what was going on around her. My mother said she was bright, but I think Mom was a little whacko on the subject of Annie.

"Anyway, I stood over her crib and started shouting at her. She quivered at the sound. I called her every dirty name in the book. And as I said each one, I poked her with my fingers – not enough to leave a bruise, but enough to let out some of the violence in me. I called her a lousy goddam tunafish with feet. I told her how much I hated her and how I wished she had never been born. I told her everybody hated her and the only thing she was good for was a freak show. Then I said, 'I wish you were dead! Why don't you die? You were supposed to die years ago! Why don't you do everyone a favor and do it now!'

"When I ran out of breath, she looked at me with those big eyes of hers and I could see the tears in them and I knew she had understood me. She rolled over and faced the wall. I ran from the room.

"I cried myself to sleep that night. I'd thought I'd feel good telling her off, but all I kept seeing in my mind's eye was this fourteen-year old bully shouting at a helpless five-year old. I felt awful. I promised myself that the first opportunity I had to be alone with her the next day I'd apologize, tell her I really didn't mean the hateful things I'd said, promise to read to her and be her best friend, anything to make it up to her.

"I awoke next morning to the sound of my mother screaming. Annie was dead."

"Oh, my God!" Martha said, her fingers digging into his arm.

"Naturally, I blamed myself."

"But you said she had a heart defect!"

"Yeah. I know. And the autopsy showed that's what killed her – her heart finally gave out. But I've never been able to get it out of my head that my words where what made her heart give up. Sounds sappy and melodramatic, I know, but I've always felt that she was just hanging on to life by the slimmest margin and that I pushed her over the edge."

"Kevin, you shouldn't have to carry that around with you! Nobody should!"

The old grief and guilt were like a slowly expanding balloon in his chest. It was getting hard to breathe.

"In my coolest, calmest, most dispassionate moments I convince myself that it was all a terrible coincidence, that she would have died that night anyway and that I had nothing to do with it."

"That's probably true, so–"

"But that doesn't change that fact that the last memory of her life was of her big brother – the guy she probably thought was the neatest kid on earth, who could run and play basketball, one of the three human beings who made up her whole world, who should have been her champion, her defender against a world that could only greet her with revulsion and rejection – standing over her crib telling her how much he hated her and how he wished she was dead!"

He felt the sobs begin to quake in his chest. He hadn't cried in over a dozen years and he had no intention of allowing himself to start now, but there didn't seem to be any stopping it. It was like running down hill at top speed – if he tried to stop before he reached bottom, he'd go head over heels and break his neck.

"Kevin, you were only fourteen," Martha said soothingly.

"Yeah, I know. But if I could go back in time for just a few seconds, I'd go back to that night and rap that rotten hateful fourteen-year old in the mouth before he got a chance to say a single word. But I can't. I can't even say I'm sorry to Annie! I never got a chance to take it back, Martha! I never got a chance to make it up to her!"

And then he was blubbering like a goddam wimp, letting loose half a lifetime's worth of grief and guilt, and Martha's arms were around him and she was telling him everything would be all right, all right, all right...

*

The Detective Harrison understand. Can tell. Want to go kill another face now. Must not. The Detective Harrison not like. Must stop. The Detctive Harrison help stop.

Stop for good.

Best way. Only one way stop for good. Not jail. No chain, no little window. Not ever again. Never!

Only one way stop for good. The Detective Harrison will know. Will understand. Will do.

Must call. Call now. Before dark. Before pretty faces come out in night.

*

Harrison had pulled himself together by the time the kids came home from school. He felt strangely boyant inside, like he'd been purged in some way. Maybe all those shrinks were right after all: sharing old hurts did help.

He played with the kids for a while, then went into the kitchen to see if Martha needed any help with slicing and dicing. He felt as close to her now as he ever had.

"You okay?" she said with a smile.

"Fine."

She had just started slicing a red pepper for the salad. He took over for her.

"Have you decided what to do?" she asked.

He had been thinking about it a lot, and had come to a decision.

"Well, I've got to inform the department about Carly Baker, but I'm going to keep her out of the papers for a while."

"Why? I'd think if she's that freakish looking, the publicity might turn up someone who's seen her."

"Possibly it will come to that. But this case is sensational enough without tabloids like the Post and The Light turning it into a circus. Besides, I'm afraid of panic leading to some poor deformed innocent getting lynched. I think I can bring her in. She wants to come in."

"You're sure of that?"

"She so much as told me so. Besides, I can sense it in her." He saw Martha giving him a dubious look. "I'm serious. We're somehow connected, like there's an invisible wire between us. Maybe it's because the same thing that deformed her and those other kids deformed Annie, too. And Annie was my sister. Maybe that link is why I volunteered for this case in the first place."

He finished slicing the pepper, then moved on to the mushrooms.

"And after I bring her in, I'm going to track down her mother and start prying into what went on in Monroe in February and March of sixty-eight to cause that so-called 'cluster' of freaks nine months later."

He would do that for Annie. It would be his way of saying good-bye and I'm sorry to his sister.

"But why does she take their faces?" Martha said.

"I don't know. Maybe because theirs were beautiful and hers is no doubt hideous."

"But what does she do with them?"

"Who knows? I'm not all that sure I want to know. But right now–"

The phone rang. Even before he picked it up, he had an inkling of who it was. The first sibilant syllable left no doubt.

"Ish thish the Detective Harrishon?"

"Yes."

Harrison stretched the coiled cord around the corner from the kitchen into the dining room, out of Martha's hearing.

"Will you shtop me tonight?"

"You want to give yourself up?"

"Yesh. Pleashe, yesh."

"Can you meet me at the precinct house?"

"No!"

"Okay! Okay!" God, he didn't want to spook her now. "Where? Anywhere you say."

"Jusht you."

"All right."

"Midnight. Plashe where lasht fashe took. Bring gun but not more cop."

"All right."

He was automatically agreeing to everything. He'd work out the details later.

"You undershtand, Detective Harrishon?"

"Oh, Carly, Carly, I understand more than you know!"

A sharp intake of breath and then silence at the other end of the line. Finally:

"You know Carly?"

"Yes, Carly. I know you." The sadness welled up in him again and it was all he could do to keep his voice from breaking. "I had a sister like you once. And you... you had a brother like me."

"Yesh," said that soft, breathy voice. "You undershtand. Come tonight, Detective Harrishon."

The line went dead.

*

Wait in shadows. The Detective Harrison will come. Will bring lots cop. Always see on TV show. Always bring lots. Protect him. Many guns.

No need. Only one gun. The Detective Harrison's gun. Him's will shoot. Stop kills. Stop forever.

The Detective Harrison must do. No one else. The Carly can not. Must be the Detective Harrison. Smart. Know the Carly. Understand.

After stop, no more ugly Carly. No more sick-scared look. Bad face will go way. Forever and ever.

*

Harrison had decided to go it alone.

Not completely alone. He had a van waiting a block and a half away on Seventh Avenue and a walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, but he hadn't told anyone who he was meeting or why. He knew if he did, they'd swarm all over the area and scare Carly off completely. So he had told Jacobi he was meeting an informant and that the van was just a safety measure.

He was on his own here and wanted it that way. Carly Baker wanted to surrender to him and him alone. He understood that. It was part of that strange tenuous bond between them. No one else would do. After he had cuffed her, he would call in the wagon.

After that he would be a hero for a while. He didn't want to be a hero. All he wanted was to end this thing, end the nightmare for the city and for poor Carly Baker. She'd get help, the kind she needed, and he'd use the publicity to springboard an investigation into what had made Annie and Carly and the others in their 'cluster' what they were.

It's all going to work out fine, he told himself as he entered the alley.

He walked half its length and stood in the darkness. The brick walls of the buildings on either side soared up into the night. The ceaseless roar of the city echoed dimly behind him. The alley itself was quiet – no sound, no movement. He took out his flashlight and flicked it on.

"Carly?"

No answer.

"Carly Baker – are you here?"

More silence, then, ahead to his left, the sound of a garbage can scraping along the stoney floor of the alley. He swung the light that way, and gasped.

A looming figure stood a dozen feet in front of him. It could only be Carly Baker. She stood easily as tall as he – a good six foot two – and looked like a homeless street person, one of those animated rag-piles that live on subway grates in the winter. Her head was wrapped in a dirty scarf, leaving only her glittery dark eyes showing. The rest of her was muffled in a huge, shapeless overcoat, baggy old polyester slacks with dragging cuffs, and torn sneakers.

"Where the Detective Harrishon's gun?" said the voice.

Harrison's mouth was dry but he managed to get his tongue working.

"In its holster."

"Take out. Pleashe."

Harrison didn't argue with her. The grip of his heavy Chief Special felt damn good in his hand.

The figure spread its arms; within the folds of her coat those arms seem to bend the wrong way. And were those black hooked claws protruding from the cuffs of the sleeves?

She said, "Shoot."

Harrison gaped in shock.

*

The Detective Harrison not shoot. Eyes wide. Hands with gun and light shake.

Say again: "Shoot!"

"Carly, no! I'm not here to kill you. I'm here to take you in, just as we agreed."

"No!"

Wrong! The Detective Harrison not understand! Must shoot the Carly! Kill the Carly!

"Not jail! Shoot! Shtop the kills! Shtop the Carly!"

"No! I can get you help, Carly. Really, I can! You'll go to a place where no one will hurt you. You'll get medicine to make you feel better!"

Thought him understand! Not understand! Move closer. Put claw out. Him back way. Back to wall.

"Shoot! Kill! Now!"

"No, Annie, please!"

"Not Annie! Carly! Carly!"

"Right. Carly! Don't make me do this!"

Only inches way now. Still not shoot. Other cops hiding not shoot. Why not protect?

"Shoot!" Pull scarf off face. Point claw at face. "End! End! Pleashe!"

The Detective Harrison face go white. Mouth hang open. Say, "Oh, my God!"

Get sick-scared look. Hate that look! Thought him understand! Say he know the Carly! Not! Stop look! Stop!

Not think. Claw go out. Rip throat of the Detective Harrison. Blood fly just like others.

No - No - No! Not want hurt!

The Detective Harrison gurgle. Drop gun and light. Fall. Stare.

Wait other cops shoot. Please kill the Carly. Wait.

No shoot. Then know. No cops. Only the poor Detective Harrison. Cry for the Detective Harrison. Then run. Run and climb. Up and down. Back to new home with the Old Jessi.

The Jessi glad hear Carly come. The Jessi try talk. Carly go sit tub. Close door. Cry for the Detective Harrison. Cry long time. Break mirror million piece. Not see face again. Not ever. Never.

The Jessi say, "Carly, I want my bath. Will you scrub my back?"

Stop cry. Do the Old Jessi's black back. Comb the Jessi's hair.

Feel very sad. None ever comb the Carly's hair. Ever.