Arthur, I don't want to think that you are losing your mind.' 'If I have to, I'll show you my hands,' I said. It cost me an effort to say it. 'But only if I have to.' Richard stood up and found his cane. He looked old and frail. 'I'll get the dune buggy. We'll look for the boy.' 'Thank you, Richard.' He walked out towards the rutted dirt track that led to his cabin  I could just see the roof of it over the Big Dune, the one that runs almost the whole length of Key Caroline. Over the water towards the Cape, the sky had gone an ugly plum colour, and the sound of thunder came faintly to my ears. I didn't know the boy's name but I saw him every now and again, walking along the beach at sunset, with his sieve under his arm. He was tanned almost black by the sun, and all he was ever clad in was a frayed pair of denim cutoffs. On the far side of Key Caroline there is a public beach, and an enterprising young man can make perhaps as much as five dollars on a good day, patiently sieving the sand for buried quarters or dimes. Every now and then I would wave to him and he would wave back, both of us noncommital, strangers yet brothers, yearround dwellers set against a sea of money spending, Cadillacdriving, loudmouthed tourists. I imagine he lived in the small village clustered around the post office about a half mile further down. When he passed by that evening I had already been on the porch for an hour, immobile, watching. I had taken off the bandages earlier. The itching had been intolerable, and it was always better when they could look through their eyes. It was a feeling like no other in the world  as if I were a portal just slightly ajar through which they were peeking at a world which they hated and feared. But the worst part was that I could see, too, in a way. Imagine your mind transported into a body of a housefly, a housefly looking into your own face with a thousand eyes. Then perhaps you can begin to see why I kept my hands bandaged even when there was no one around to see them. It began in Miami. I had business there with a man named Cresswell, an investigator from the Navy Department. He checks up on me once a year  for a while I was as close as anyone ever gets to the classified stuff our space programme has. I don't know just what it is he looks for; a shifty gleam in the eye, maybe, or maybe a scarlet letter on my forehead. God knows why. My pension is large enough to be almost embarrassing. Cresswell and I were sitting on the terrace of his hotel room, sipping drinks and discussing the future of the US space programme. It was about threefifteen. My fingers began to itch. It wasn't a bit gradual. It was switched on like electric current. I mentioned it to Cresswell. 'So you picked up some poison ivy on that scrofulous little island,' he said, grinning. 'The only foliage on Key Caroline is a little palmetto scrub,' I said. 'Maybe it's the sevenyear itch.' I looked down at my hands. Perfectly ordinary hands. But itchy. Later in the afternoon I signed the same old paper ('I do solemnly swear that I have neither received nor disclosed and divulged information which would ') and drove myself back to the Key. I've got an old Ford, equipped with handoperated brake and accelerator. I love it  it makes me feel selfsufficient. It's a long drive back, down Route 1, and by the time I got off the big road and on to the Key Caroline exit ramp, I was nearly out of my mind. My hands itched maddeningly. If you have ever suffered through the healing of a deep cut or a surgical incision, you may have some idea of the kind of itch I mean. Live things seemed to be crawling and boring in my flesh. The sun was almost down and I looked at my hands carefully in the glow of the dash lights. The tips of them were red now, red in tiny, perfect circlets, just above the pad where the fingerprint is, where you get calluses if you play guitar. There were also red circles of infection on the space between the first and second joint of each thumb and finger, and on the skin between the second joint and the knuckle. I pressed my right fingers to my lips and withdrew them quickly, with a sudden loathing. A feeling of dumb horror had risen in my throat, woollen and choking. The flesh where the red spots had appeared was hot, feverish, and the flesh was soft and gelid, like the flesh of an apple gone rotten. I drove the rest of the way trying to persuade myself that I had indeed caught poison ivy somehow. But in the back of my mind there was another ugly thought. I had an aunt, back in my childhood, who lived the last ten years of her life closed off from the world in an upstairs room. My mother took her meals up, and her name was a forbidden topic. I found out later that she had Hansen's disease leprosy. When I got home I called Dr Flanders on the mainland. I got his answering service instead. Dr Flanders was on a fishing cruise, but if it was urgent, Dr Ballanger 'When will Dr Flanders be back?' 'Tomorrow afternoon at the latest. Would that ' 'Sure.' I hung up slowly, then dialled Richard. I let it ring a dozen times before hanging up. After that I sat indecisive for a while. The itching had deepened. It seemed to emanate from the flesh itself. I rolled my wheelchair over to the bookcase and pulled down the battered medical encyclopedia that I'd had for years. The book was maddeningly vague. It could have been anything, or nothing. I leaned back and closed my eyes. I could hear the old ship's clock ticking on the shelf across the room. There was the high, thin drone of a jet on its way to Miami. There was the soft whisper of my own breath. I was still looking at the book. The realization crept on me, then sank home with a frightening rush. My eyes were closed, but I was still looking at the book. What I was seeing was smeary and monstrous, the distorted, fourthdimensional counterpart of a book, yet unmistakable for all that. And I was not the only one watching. I snapped my eyes open, feeling the constriction of my heart. The sensation subsided a little, but not entirely. I was looking at the book, seeing the print and diagrams with my own eyes, perfectly normal everyday experience, and I was also seeing it from a different, lower angle and seeing it with other eyes. Seeing not a book but an alien thing, something of monstrous shape and ominous intent. I raised my hands slowly to my face, catching an eerie vision of my living room turned into a horror house. I screamed. There were eyes peering up at me through splits in the flesh of my fingers. And even as I watched the flesh was dilating, retreating, as they pushed their mindless way up to the surface. But that was not what made me scream. I had looked into my own face and seen a monster. The dune buggy nosed over the hill and Richard brought it to a halt next to the porch. The motor gunned and roared choppily. I rolled my wheelchair down the inclined plane to the right of the regular steps and Richard helped me in. 'All right, Arthur,' he said. 'It's your party. Where to?' I pointed down towards the water, where the Big Dune family begins to peter out. Richard nodded. The rear wheels spun sand and we were off. I usually found time to rib Richard about his driving, but I didn't bother tonight. There was too much else to think about  and to feel they didn't want the dark, and I could feel them straining to see through the bandages, willing me to take them off. The dune buggy bounced and roared through the sand towards the water, seeming almost to take flight from the tops of the small dunes. To the left the sun was going down in bloody glory. Straight ahead and across the water, the thunderclouds were beating their way towards us. Lightning forked at the water. 'Off to your right,' I said. 'By that leanto.' Richard brought the dune buggy to a sandspraying halt beside the rotted remains of the leanto, reached into the back, and brought out a spade. I winced when I saw it. 'Where?' Richard asked expressionlessly. 'Right there.' I pointed to the place. He got out and walked slowly through the sand to the spot, hesitated for a second, then plunged the shovel into the sand. It seemed that he dug for a very long time. The sand he was throwing back over his shoulder looked damp and moist. The thunderheads were darker, higher, and the water looked angry and implacable under their shadow and the reflected glow of the sunset. I knew long before he stopped digging that he was not going to find the boy. They had moved him. I hadn't bandaged my hands last night, so they could see  and act. If they had been able to use me to kill the boy, they could use me to move him, even while I slept. 'There's no boy, Arthur.' He threw the dirty shovel into the dune buggy and sat tiredly on the seat. The coming storm cast marching, crescentshaped shadows along the sand. The rising breeze rattled sand against the buggy's rusted body. My fingers itched. 'They used me to move him,' I said dully. 'They're getting the upper hand, Richard. They're forcing their doorway open, a little at a time. A hundred times a day I find myself standing in front of some perfectly familiar object  a spatula, a picture, even a can of beans  with no idea how I got there, holding my hands out, showing it to them, seeing it as they do, as an obscenity, something twisted and grotesque 'Arthur,' he said. 'Arthur, don't. Don't.' In the failing light his face was wan with compassion. 'Standing in front of something, you said. Moving the boy's body, you said' But you can't walk, Arthur. You're dead from the waist down.' I touched the dashboard of the dune buggy. 'This is dead, too. But when you enter it, you can make it go. You could make it kill. It couldn't stop you even if it wanted to.' I could hear my voice rising hysterically. 'I am the doorway, can't you understand that? They killed the boy, Richard! They moved the body!' 'I think you'd better see a medical man,' he said quietly. 'Let's go back. Let's , 'Check! Check on the boy, then! find out ' 'You said you didn't even know his name.' 'He must have been from the village. It's a small village. Ask ' 'I talked to Maud Harrington on the phone when I got the dune buggy. If anyone in the state has a longer nose, I've not come across her. I asked if she'd heard of anyone's boy not coming home last night. She said she hadn't.' 'But he's a local! He has to be!' He reached for the ignition switch but I stopped him. He turned to look at me and I began to unwrap my hands. From the Gulf, thunder muttered and growled. I didn't go to the doctor and I didn't call Richard back. I spent three weeks with my hands bandaged every time I went out. Three weeks just blindly hoping it would go away. It wasn't a rational act; I can admit that. If I had been a whole man who didn't need a wheelchair for legs or who had spent a normal life in a normal occupation, I might have gone to Doc Flanders or to Richard. I still might have, if it hadn't been for the memory of my aunt, shunned, virtually a prisoner, being eaten alive by her own ailing flesh. So I kept a desperate silence and prayed that I would wake up some morning and find it had been an evil dream. And little by little, I felt them. Them. An anonymous intelligence. I never really wondered what they looked like or where they had come from. It was moot. I was their doorway, and their window on the world. I got enough feedback from them to feel their revulsion and horror, to know that our world was very different from theirs. Enough feedback to feel their blind hate. But still they watched. Their flesh was embedded in my own. I began to realize that they were using me, actually manipulating me. When the boy passed, raising one hand in his usual noncommittal salute, I had just about decided to get in touch with Cresswell at his Navy Department number. Richard had been right about one thing  I was certain that whatever had got hold of me had done it in deep space or in that weird orbit around Venus. The Navy would study me, but they would not freakify me. I wouldn't have to wake up any more into the creaking darkness and stifle a scream as I felt them watching, watching, watching. My hands went out towards the boy and I realized that I had not bandaged them. I could see the eyes in the dying light, watching silently. They were large, dilated, goldenirised. I had poked one of them against the tip of a pencil once, and had felt excruciating agony slam up my arm. The eye seemed to glare at me with a chained hatred that was worse than physical pain. I did not poke again. And now they were watching the boy. I felt my mind sideslip. A moment later my control was gone. The door was open. I lurched across the sand towards him, legs scissoring nervelessly, so much driven deadwood. My own eyes seemed to close and I saw only with those alien eyes saw a monstrous alabaster seascape overtopped with a sky like a great purple way, saw a leaning, eroded shack that might have been the carcas of some unknown, fleshdevouring creature, saw an abominated creature that moved and respired and carried a device of wood and wire under its arm, a device constructed of geometrically impossible right angles. I wonder what he thought, that wretched, unnamed boy with his sieve under his arm and his pockets bulging with an odd conglomerate of sandy tourist coins, what he thought when he saw me lurching at him like a blind conductor stretching out his hands over a lunatic orchestra, what he thought as the last of the light fell across my hands, red and split and shining with their burden of eyes, what he thought when the hands made that sudden, flailing gesture in the air, just before his head burst. I know what I thought. I thought I had peeked over the rim of the universe and into the fires of hell itself. The wind pulled at the bandages and made them into tiny, whipping streamers as I unwrapped them. The clouds had blottered the red remnants of the sunset, and the dunes were dark and shadowcast. The clouds raced and boiled above us. 'You must promise me one thing, Richard,' I said over the rising wind. 'You must run if it seems I might try to hurt you. Do you understand that?' 'Yes.' He openthroated shirt whipped and rippled with the wind. His face was set, his own eyes little more than sockets in early dark. The last of the bandages fell away. I looked at Richard and they looked at Richard. I saw a face I had known for five years and come to love. They saw a distorted, living monolith. 'You see them,' I said. hoarsely. 'Now you see them.' He took an involuntary step backwards. His face became stained with a sudden unbelieving terror. Lightning slashed out of the sky. Thunder walked in the clouds and the water had gone black as the river Styx. 'Arthur ' How hideous he was! How could I have lived near him, spoken with him? He was not a creature, but mute pestilence. He was 'Run! Run, Richard!' And he did run. He ran in huge, bounding leaps. He became a scaffold against the looming sky. My hands flew up, flew over my head in a screaming, orlesque gesture, the fingers reaching to the only familiar thing in this nightmare world  reaching to the clouds. And the clouds answered. There was a huge, bluewhite streak of lightning that seemed like the end of the world. It struck Richard, it enveloped him. The last thing  remember is the electric stench of ozone and burnt flesh. When I awoke I was sitting calmly on my porch, looking out towards the Big Dune. The storm had passed and the air was pleasantly cool. There was a tiny sliver of moon. The sand was virginal  no sign of Richard or of the dune buggy. I looked down at my hands. The eyes were open but glazed. They had exhausted themselves. They dozed. I knew well enough what had to be done. Before the door could be wedged open any further, it had to be locked. For ever. Already I could notice the first signs of structural change in the hands themselves. The fingers were beginfling to shorten and to change. There was a small hearth in the living room, and in season I had been in the habit of lighting a fire against the damp Florida cold. I lit one now, moving with haste. I had no idea when they might wake up to what I was doing. When it was burning well I went out back to the kerosene drum and soaked both hands. They came awake immediately, screaming with agony. I almost didn't make it back to the living room, and to the fire. But I did make it. That was all seven years ago. I'm still here, still watching the rockets take off. There have been more of them lately. This is a spaceminded administration. There has even been talk of another series of manned Venus probes. I found out the boy's name, not that it matters. He was from the village, just as I thought. But his mother had expected him to stay with a friend on the mainland that night, and the alarm was not raised until the following Monday. Richard  well, everyone thought Richard was an odd duck, anyway. They suspect he may have gone back to Maryland or taken up with some woman. As for me, I'm tolerated, although I have quite a reputation for eccentricity myself. After all, how many exastronauts regularly write their elected Washington officials with the idea that spaceexploration money could be better spent elsewhere? I get along just fine with these hooks. There was terrible pain for the first year or so, but the human body can adjust to almost anything. I shave with them and even tie my own shoelaces. And as you can see, my typing is nice and even. I don't expect to have any trouble putting the shotgun into my mouth or pulling the trigger. It started again three weeks ago, you see. There is a perfect circle of twelve golden eyes on my chest. THE MANGLER Officer Hunton got to the laundry just ag the ambulance was leaving  slowly, with no siren or flashing lights. Ominous. Inside, the office was stuffed with milling, silent people, some of them weeping. The plant itself was empty; the big automatic washers at the far end had not even been shut down. It made Hunton very wary. The crowd should be at the scene of the accident, not in the office. It was the way things worked  the human animal had a builtin urge to view the remains. A very bad one, then. Hunton felt his stomach tighten as it always did when the accident was very bad. Fourteen years of cleaning human litter from highways and streets and the sidewalks at the bases of very tall buildings had not been able to erase that little hitch in the belly, as if something evil had clotted there. A man in a white shirt saw Hunton and walked towards him reluctantly. He was a buffalo of a man with head thrust forward between shoulders, nose and cheeks veinbroken either from high blood pressure or too many conversations with the brown bottle. He was trying to frame words, but after two tries Hunton cut him off briskly 'Are you the owner? Mr Gartley?' 'No no. I'm Stanner. The foreman. God, this ' Hunton got out his notebook. 'Please show me the scene of the accident, Mr Stanner, and tell me what happened.' Stanner seemed to grow even more white; the blotches on his nose and cheeks stood out like birthmarks. 'Ddo I have to?' Hunton raised his eyebrows. 'I'm afraid you do. The call I got said it was serious.' 'Serious ' Stanner seemed to be battling with his gorge; for a moment his Adam's apple went up and down like a monkey on a stick. 'Mrs Frawley is dead. Jesus, I wish Bill Garley was here.' 'What happened?' Stanner said, 'You better come over here.' He led Hunton past a row of hand presses, a shirtfolding unit, and then stopped by a laundrymarking machine. He passed a shaky hand across his forehead. 'You'll have to go over by yourself, Officer. I can't look at it again. It makes me I can't. I'm sorry.' Hunton walked around the marking machine with a mild feeling of contempt for the man. They run a loose shop, cut corners, run live steam through homewelded pipes, they work with dangerous cleaning chemicals without the proper protection, and finally, someone gets hurt. Or gets dead. Then they can't look. They can't Hunton saw it. The machine was still running. No one had shut it off. The machine he later came to know intimately the HadleyWatson Model6 Speed Ironer and Folder. A long and clumsy name. The people who worked here in the steam and the wet had a better name for it. The mangler. Hunton took a long, frozen look, and then he performed a first in his fourteen years as a lawenforcement officer he turned around, put a convulsive hand to his mouth, and threw up. 'You didn't each much,' Jackson said. The women were inside, doing dishes and talking babies while John Hunton and Mark Jackson sat in lawn chairs near the aromatic barbecue. Hunton smiled slightly at the understatement. He had eaten nothing. 'There was a bad one today,' he said. 'The worst.' 'Car crash?' 'No. Industrial.' 'Messy?' Hunton did not reply immediately, but his face made an involuntary, writhing grimace. He got a beer out of the cooler between them, opened it, and emptied half of it. 'I suppose you college profs don't know anything about industrial laundries?' Jackson chuckled. 'This one does. I spent a summer working in one as an undergraduate.' 'Then you know the machine they call the speed ironer?' Jackson nodded. 'Sure. They run damp flatwork through them, mostly sheets and linen. A big, long machine.' 'That's it,' Hunton said. 'A woman named Adelle Frawley got caught in it at the Blue Ribbon Laundry crosstown. It sucked her right in.' Jackson looked suddenly ill. 'But that can't happen, Johnny. There's a safety bar. If one of the women feeding the machine accidentally gets a hand under it, the bar snaps up and stops the machine. At least that's how I remember it.' Hunton nodded. 'It's a state law. But it happened.' Hunton closed his eyes and in the darkness he could see the HadleyWatson speed ironer again, as it had been that afternoon. It formed a long, rectangular box in shape, thirty feet by six. At the feeder end, a moving canvas belt moved under the safety bar, up at a slight angle, and then down. The belt carried the dampdried, wrinkled sheets in continuous cycle over and under sixteen huge revolving cylinders that made up the main body of the machine. Over eight and under eight, pressed between them like thin ham between layers of superheated bread. Steam heat in the cylinders could be adjusted up to 300 degrees for maximum drying. The pressure on the sheets that rode the moving canvas belt was set at 800 pounds per square foot to get out every wrinkle. And Mrs Frawley, somehow, had been caught and dragged in. The steel, asbestosjacketed pressing cylinders had been as red as barn paint, and the rising steam from the machine had carried the sickening stench of hot blood. Bits of her white blouse and blue slacks, even ripped segments of her bra and panties, had been torn free and ejected from the machine's far end thirty feet down, the bigger sections of cloth folded with grotesque and bloodstained neatness by the automatic folder. But not even that was the worst. 'It tried to fold everything,' he said to Jackson, tasting bile in his throat. 'But a person isn't a sheet, Mark. What I saw what was left of her ' Like Stanner, the hapless foreman, he could not finish. 'They took her out in a basket,' he said softly. Jackson whistled. 'Who's going to get it in the neck? The laundry or the state inspectors?' 'Don't know yet,' Hunton said. The malign image still hung behind his eyes, the image of the mangler wheezing and thumping and hissing, blood dripping down the green sides of the long cabinet in runnels, the burning stink of her 'It depends on who okayed that goddamn safety bar and under what circumstances.' 'If it's the management, can they wiggle out of it?' Hunton smiled without humour. 'The woman died, Mark. If Gartley and Stanner were cutting corners on the speed ironer's maintenance, they'll go to jail. No matter who they know on the City Council.' 'Do you think they were cutting corners?' Hunton thought of the Blue Ribbon Laundry, badly lighted, floors wet and slippery, some of the machines incredibly ancient and creaking. 'I think it's likely,' he said quietly. They got up to go in the house together. 'Tell me how it comes out, Johnny,' Jackson said. 'I'm interested.' Hunton was wrong about the mangler; it was clean as a whistle. Six state inspectors went over it before the inquest, piece by piece. The net result was absolutely nothing. The inquest verdict was death by misadventure. Hunton, dumbfounded, cornered Roger Martin, one of the inspectors, after the hearing. Martin was a tall drink of water with glasses as thick as the bottoms of shot glasses. He fidgeted with a ballpoint pen under Hunton's questions. 'Nothing? Absolutely nothing doing with the machine?' 'Nothing,' Martin said. 'Of course, the safety bar was the guts of the matter. It's in perfect working order. You heard that Mrs Gillian testify. Mrs Frawley must have pushed her hand too far. No one saw that; they were watching their own work. She started screaming. Her hand was gone already, and the machine was taking her arm. They tried to pull her out instead of shutting it down  pure panic. Another woman, Mrs Keene, said she did try to shut it off, but it's a fair assumption that she hit the start button rather than the stop in the confusion. By then it was too late.' 'Then the safety bar malfunctioned,' Hunton said flatly. 'Unless she put her hand over it rather than under?' 'You can't. There's a stainlesssteel facing above the safety bar. And the bar itself didn't malfunction. It's circuited into the machine itself. If the safety bar goes on the blink, the machine shuts down.' 'Then how did it happen, for Christ's sake?' 'We don't know. My colleagues and I are of the opinion that the only way the speed ironer could have killed Mrs Frawley was for her to have fallen into it from above. And she had both feet on the floor when it happened. A dozen witnesses can testify to that.' 'You're describing an impossible accident,' Hunton said. 'No. Only one we don't understand.' He paused, hesitated, and then said 'I will tell you one thing, Hunton, since you seem to have taken this case to heart. If you mention it to anyone else, I'll deny I said it. But I didn't like that machine. It seemed almost to be mocking us. I've inspected over a dozen speed ironers in the last five years on a regular basis. Some of them are in such bad shape that I wouldn't have a dog unleashed around them  the state law is lamentably lax. But they were only machines for all that. But this one it's a spook. I don't know why, but it is. I think if I'd found one thing, even a technicality, that was off whack, I would have ordered it shut down. Crazy, huh?' 'I felt the same way,' Hunton said. 'Let me tell you about something that happened two years ago in Milton,' the inspector said. He took off his glasses and began to polish them slowly on his vest. 'Fella had parked an old icebox out in his backyard. The woman who called us said her dog had been caught in it and suffocated. We got the state policeman in the area to inform him it had to go to the town dump. Nice enough fella, sorry about the dog. He loaded it into his pickup and took it to the dump the next morning. That afternoon a woman in the neighbourhood reported her son missing.' 'God,' Hunton said. The icebox was at the dump and the kid was in it, dead. As mart kind, according to the mother. She said he'd no more play in an empty icebox than he would take a ride with a strange man. Well, he did. We wrote it off. Case closed?' 'I guess,' Hunton said. 'No. The dump caretaker went out next day to take the door off the thing. City Ordinance No.58 on the maintenance of public dumping places.' Martin looked at him expressionlessly. 'He found six dead birds inside. Gulls, sparrows, a robin And he said the door closed on his arm while he was brushing them out. Gave him a hell of a jump. The mangler at the Blue Ribbon strikes me like that, Hunton. I don't like it.' They looked at each other wordlessly in the empty inquest chamber, some six city blocks from where the HadleyWatson Model6 Speed Ironer and Folder sat in the busy laundry, steaming and fuming over its sheets. The case was driven out of his mind in the space of a week by the press of more prosaic police work. It was only brought back when he and his wife dropped over to Mark Jackson's house for an evening of bid whist and beer. Jackson greeted him with 'Have you ever wondered if that laundry machine you told me about is haunted, Johnny?' Hunton blinked, at a loss. 'What?' 'The speed ironer at the Blue Ribbon Laundry, I guess you didn't catch the squeal this time.' 'What squeal?' Hunton asked, interested. Jackson passed him the evening paper and pointed to an item at the bottom of page two. The story said that a steam line had let go on the large speed ironer at the Blue Ribbon Laundry, burning three of the six women working at the feeder end. The accident had occurred at 3.45 p.m. and was attributed to a rise in steam pressure from the laundry's boiler. One of the women, Mrs Annette Gillian, had been held at City Receiving Hospital with seconddegree burns. 'Funny coincidence,' he said, but the memory of Inspector Martin's words in the empty inquest chamber suddenly recurred It's a spook. .. And the story about the dog and the boy and the birds caught in the discarded refrigerator. He played cards very badly that night. Mrs Gillian was propped up in bed reading Screen Secrets when Hunton came into the fourbed hospital room. A large bandage blanketed one arm and the side of her neck. The room's other occupant, a young woman with a pallid face, was sleeping. Mrs Gillian blinked at the blue uniform and then smiled tentatively. 'If it was for Mrs Cherinikov, you'll have to come back later. They just gave her medication.' 'No, it's for you, Mrs Gillian.' Her smile faded a little. 'I'm here unofficially  which means I'm curious about the accident at the laundry. John Hunton.' He held out his hand. It was the right move. Mrs Gillian's smile became brilliant and she took his grip awkwardly with her unburnt hand. 'Anything I can tell you, Mr Hunton. God, I thought my Andy was in trouble at school again.' 'What happened?' 'We was running sheets and the ironer just blew up  or it seemed that way. I was thinking about going home an' getting off my dogs when there's this great big bang, like a bomb. Steam is everywhere and this hissing noise, awful.' Her smile trembled on the verge of extinction. 'It was like the ironer was breathing. Like a dragon, it was. And Alberta  that's Alberta Keene  shouted that something was exploding and everyone was running and screaming and Ginny Jason started yelling she was burnt. I started to run away and I fell down. I didn't know I got it worst until then. God forbid it was no worse than it was. That live steam is three hundred degrees.' 'The paper said a steam line let go. What does that mean?' 'The overhead pipe comes down into this kinda flexible line that feeds the machine. George  Mr Stanner  said there must have been a surge from the boiler or something. The line split wide open.' Hunton could think of nothing else to ask. He was making ready to leave when she said reflectively 'We never used to have these things on that machine. Only lately. The steam line breaking. That awful, awful accident with Mrs Frawley, God rest her. And little things. Like the day Essie got her dress caught in one of the drive chains. That could have been dangerous if she hadn't ripped it right out. Bolts and 'things fall off. Oh, Herb Diment  he's the laundry repairman  has had an awful time with it. Sheets get caught in the folder. George says that's because they're using too much bleach in the washers, but it never used to happen. Now the girls hate to work on it. Essie even says there are still little bits of Adelle Frawley caught in it and it's sacrilege or something.


Like it had a curse. It's been that way ever since Sherry cut her hand on one of the clamps.' 'Sherry?' Hunton asked. 'Sherry Ouelette. Pretty little thing, just out of high school. Good worker. But clumsy sometimes. You know how young girls are.' 'She cut her hand on something?' 'Nothing strange about that. There are clamps to tighten down the feeder belt, see. Sherry was adjusting them so we could do a heavier load and probably dreaming about some boy. She cut her finger and bled all over everything.' Mrs Gillian looked puzzled. 'It wasn't until after that the bolts started falling off. Adelle was you know about a week later. As if the machine had tasted blood and found it liked it. Don't women get funny ideas sometimes, Officer Hinton?' 'Hunton,' he said absently, looking over her head and into space. Ironically, he had met Mark Jackson in a washateria in the block that separated their houses, and it was there that the cop and the English professor still had their most interesting conversations. Now they sat side by side in bland plastic chairs, their clothes going round and round behind the glass portholes of the coinop washers. Jackson's paperback copy of Milton's collected works lay neglected beside him while he listened to Hunton tell Mrs Gillian's story. When Hunton had finished, Jackson said, 'I asked you once if you thought the mangler might be haunted. I was only half joking. I'll ask you again now.' 'No,' Hunton said uneasily. 'Don't be stupid.' Jackson watched the turning clothes reflectively. 'Haunted is a bad word. Let's say possessed. There are almost as many spells for casting demons in as there are for casting them out. Frazier's Golden Bough is replete with them. Druidic and Aztec lore contain others. Even older ones, back to Egypt. Almost all of them can be reduced to startlingly common denominators. The most common, of course, is the blood of a virgin.' He looked at Hunton, 'Mrs Gillian said the trouble started after this Sherry Ouelette accidentally cut herself.' 'Oh, come on,' Hunton said. 'You have to admit she sounds just the type,' Jackson said. 'I'll run right over to her house,' Hunton said with a small smile. 'I can see it. "Miss Ouelette, I'm Officer John Hunton. I'm investigating an ironer with a bad case of demon possession and would like to know if you're a virgin." Do you think I'd get a chance to say goodbye to Sandra and the kids before they carted me off to the booby hatch?' 'I'd be willing to bet you'll end up saying something just like that,' Jackson said without smiling. 'I'm serious, Johnny. That machine scares the hell out of me and I've never seen it., 'For the sake of conversation,' Hunton said, 'what are some of the other socalled common denominators?' Jackson shrugged. 'Hard to say without study. Most AngloSaxon hex formulas specify graveyard dirt or the eye of a toad. European spells often mention the hand of glory, which can be interpreted as the actual hand of a dead man or one of the hallucinogenics used in connection with the Witches' Sabbath  usually belladonna or a psilocybin derivative. There could be others.' 'And you think all those things got into the Blue Ribbon ironer? Christ, Mark, I'll bet there isn't any belladonna within a fivehundredmile radius. Or do you think someone whacked off their Uncle Fred's hand and dropped it in the folder?' 'If seven hundred monkeys typed for seven hundred years 'One of them would turn out the works of Shakespeare,' Hunton finished sourly. 'Go to hell. Your turn to go across to the drugstore and get some dimes for the dryers.' It was very funny how George Stanner lost his arm in the mangler. Seven o'clock Monday morning the laundry was deserted except for Stanner and Herb Diment, the maintenance man. They were performing the twiceyearly function of greasing the mangler's bearings before the laundry's regular day began at seventhirty. Diment was at the far end, greasing the four secondaries and thinking of how unpleasant this machine made him feel lately, when the mangler suddenly roared into life. He had been holding up four of the canvas exit belts to get at the motor beneath and suddenly the belts were running in his hands, ripping the flesh off his palms, dragging him along. He pulled free with a convulsive jerk seconds before the belts would have carried his hands into the folder. 'What the Christ, George!' he yelled. 'Shut the frigging thing off, George Stanner began to scream. It was a high, wailing, bloodmaddened sound that filled the laundry, echoing off the steel faces of the washers, the grinning mouths of the steam presses, the vacant eyes of the industrial dryers. Stanner drew in a great, whooping gasp of air and screamed again 'Oh God of Christ I'm caught I'M CAUGHT , The rollers began to produce rising steam. The folder gnashed and thumped. Bearings and motors seemed to cry out with a hidden life of their own. Diment raced to the other end of the machine. The first roller was already going a sinister red. Diment made a moaning, gobbling noise in his throat. The mangler howled and thumped and hissed. A deaf observer might have thought at first that Stanner was merely bent over the machine at an odd angle. Then even a deaf man would have seen the pallid, eyebulging rictus of his face, mouth twisted open in a continuous scream. The arm was disappearing under the safety bar and beneath the first roller; the fabric of his shirt had torn away at the shoulder seam and his upper arm bulged grotesquely as the blood was pushed steadily backwards. 'Turn if off!' Stanner screamed. There was a snap as his elbow broke. Diment thumbed the off button. The mangler continued to hum and growl and turn. Unbelieving, he slammed the button again and again nothing. The skin of Stanner's arm had grown shiny and taut. Soon it would split with the pressure the roll was putting on it; and still he was conscious and screaming. Diment had a nightmare cartoon image of a man flattened by a steamroller, leaving only a shadow. 'Fuses ' Stanner screeched. His head was being pulled down, down, as he was dragged forward. Diment whirled and ran to the boiler room, Stanner's screams chasing him like lunatic ghosts. The mixed stench of blood and steam rose in the air. On the left wall were three heavy grey boxes containing all the fuses for the laundry's electricity. Diment yanked them open and began to pull the long, cylindrical fuses like a crazy man, throwing them back over his shoulders. The overhead lights went out; then the air compressor; then the boiler itself, with a huge dying whine. And still the mangler turned. Stanner's screams had been reduced to bubbly moans. Diment's eye happened on the fire axe in its glassedin box. He grabbed it with a small, gagging whimper and ran back. Stanner's arm was gone almost to the shoulder. Within seconds his bent and straining neck would be snapped against the safety bar. 'I can't,' Diment blubbered, holding the axe. 'Jesus, George, I can't, I can't, I ' The machine was an abattoir now. The folder spat out pieces of shirt sleeve, scraps of flesh, a finger. Stanner gave a huge, whooping scream and Diment swung the axe up and brought it down in the laundry's shadowy lightlessness. Twice. Again. Stanner fell away, unconscious and blue, blood jetting from the stump just below the shoulder. The mangler sucked what was left into itself and shut down. Weeping, Diment pulled his belt out of its loops and began to make a tourniquet. Hunton was talking on the phone with Roger Martin, the inspector. Jackson watched him while he patiently rolled a ball back and forth for threeyearold Patty Hunton to chase. 'He pulled all the fuses?' Hunton was asking. 'And the off button just didn't function, huh? Has the ironer been shut down? Good. Great. Huh? No, not official.' Hunton frowned, then looked sideways at Jackson. 'Are you still reminded of that refrigerator, Roger? Yes. Me too, Goodbye.' He hung up and looked at Jackson. 'Let's go see the girl, Mark.' She had her own apartment (the hesitant yet proprietary way she showed them in after Hunton had flashed his buzzer made him suspect that she hadn't had it long), and she sat uncomfortably across from them in the carefully decorated, postagestamp living room. 'I'm Officer Hunton and this is my associate, Mr Jackson. It's about the accident at the laundry.' He felt hugely uncomfortable with this dark, shyly pretty girl. 'Awful,' Sherry Ouelette murmured. 'It's the only place I've ever worked. Mr Gartley is my uncle. I liked it because it let me have this place and my own friends. But now.. it's so spooky.' 'The State Board of Safety has shut the ironer down pending a full investigation,' Hunton said. 'Did you know that?' 'Sure,' She sighed restlessly. 'I don't know what I'm going to do ' 'Miss Ouelette,' Jackson interrupted, 'you had an accident with the ironer, didn't you? Cut your hand on a clamp, I believe?' 'Yes, I cut my finger.' Suddenly her face clouded. 'That was the first thing.' She looked at them woefully. 'Sometimes I feel like the girls don't like me so much any more as if I were to blame.' 'I have to ask you a hard question,' Jackson said slowly. 'A question you won't like. It seems absurdly personal and off the subject, but I can only tell you it is not. Your answers won't ever be marked down in a file or record.' She looked frightened. 'Ddid I do something?' Jackson smiled and shook his head; she melted. Thank God for Mark, Hunton thought. 'I'll add this, though the answer may help you keep your nice little flat here, get your job back, and make things at the laundry the way they were before.' 'I'd answer anything to have that,' she said. 'Sherry, are you a virgin?' She looked utterly flabbergasted, utterly shocked, as if a priest had given communion and then slapped her. Then she lifted her head, made a gesture at her neat efficiency apartment, as if asking them how they could believe it might be a place of assignation. 'I'm saving myself for my husband,' she said simply. Hunton and Jackson looked calmly at each other, and in that tick of a second, Hunton knew that it was all true a devil had taken over the inanimate steel and cogs and gears of the mangler and had turned it into something with its own life. 'Thank you,' Jackson said quietly. 'What now?' Hunton asked bleakly as they rode back. 'Find a priest to exorcise it?' Jackson snorted. 'You'd go a far piece to find one that wouldn't hand you a few tracts to read while he phoned the booby hatch. It has to be our play, Johnny.' 'Can we do it?' 'Maybe. The problem is this We know something is in the mangler. We don't know what.' Hunton felt cold, as if touched by a fleshless finger. 'There are a great many demons. Is the one we're dealing with in the circle of Bubastis or Pan? Baal? Or the Christian deity we call Satan? We don't know. If the demon had been deliberately cast, we would have a better chance. But this seems to be a case of random possession.' Jackson ran his fingers through his hair. 'The blood of a virgin, yes. But that narrows it down hardly at all. We have to be sure, very sure.' 'Why?' Hunton asked bluntly. 'Why not just get a bunch of exorcism formulas together and try them out?' Jackson's face went cold. 'This isn't cops 'n' robbers, Johnny. For Christ's sake, don't think it is. The rite of exorcism is horribly dangerous. It's like controlled nuclear fission, in a way. We could make a mistake and destroy ourselves. The demon is caught in that piece of machinery. But give it a chance and ' 'It could get out?' 'It would love to get out,' Jackson said grimly. 'And it likes to kill.' When Jackson came over the following evening, Hunton had sent his wife and daughter to a movie. They had the living room to themselves, and for this Hunton was relieved. He could still barely believe what he had become involved in. 'I cancelled my classes,' Jackson said, 'and spent the day with some of the most godawful books you can imagine. This afternoon I fed over thirty recipes for calling demons into the tech computer. I've got a number of common elements. Surprisingly few.' He showed Hunton the list blood of a virgin, graveyard dirt, hand of glory, bat's blood, night moss, horse's hoof, eye of toad. There were others, all marked secondary. 'Horse's hoof,' Hunton said thoughtfully. 'Funny ' 'Very common. In fact ' 'Could these things  any of them  be interpreted loosely?' Hunton interrupted. 'If lichens picked at night could be substituted for night moss, for instance?' 'Yes.' 'It's very likely,' Jackson said. 'Magical formulas are often ambiguous and elastic. The black arts have always allowed plenty of room for creativity.' 'Substitute JellO for horse's hoof,' Hunton said. 'Very popular in bag lunches. I noticed a little container of it sitting under the ironer's sheet platform on the day the Frawley woman died. Gelatine is made from horses' hooves.' Jackson nodded. 'Anything else?' 'Bat's blood well, it's a big place. Lots of unlighted nooks and crannies. Bats seem likely, although I doubt if the management would admit to it. One could conceivably have been trapped in the mangler.' Jackson tipped his head back and knuckled bloodshot eyes. 'It fits it all fits.' 'It does?' 'Yes. We can safely rule out the hand of glory, I think. Certainly no one dropped a hand into the ironer before Mrs Frawley's death, and belladonna is definitely not indigenous to the area.' 'Graveyard dirt?' 'What do you think?' 'It would have to be a hell of a coincidence,' Hunton said. 'Nearest cemetery is Pleasant Hill, and that's five miles from the Blue Ribbon.' 'Okay,' Jackson said. 'I got the computer operatorwho thought I was getting ready for Halloween  to run a positive breakdown of all the primary and secondary elements on the list. Every possible combination. I threw out some two dozen which were completely meaningless. The others fall into fairly clearcut categories. The elements we've isolated are in one of those.' 'What is it?' Jackson grinned. 'An easy one. The mythos centres in South America with branches in the Caribbean. Related to voodoo. The literature I've got looks on the deities as strictly bush league, compared to some of the real heavies, like Saddath or HeWhoCannotBeNamed. The thing in that machine is going to slink away like the neighbourhood bully' 'How do we do it?' 'Holy water and a smidgen of the Holy Eucharist ought to do it. And we can read some of the Leviticus to it. Strictly Christian white magic.' 'You're sure it's not worse?' 'Don't see how it can be,' Jackson said pensively. 'I don't mind telling you I was worried about that hand of glory. That's very black juju. Strong magic.' 'Holy water wouldn't stop it?' 'A demon called up in conjunction with the hand of glory could eat a stack of Bibles for breakfast. We would be in bad trouble messing with something like that at all. Better to pull the goddamn thing apart.' 'Well, are you completely sure 'No, but fairly sure. It all fits too well.' 'When?' 'The sooner, the better,' Jackson said. 'How do we get in? Break a window?' Hunton smiled, reached into his pocket, and dangled a key in front of Jackson's nose. 'Where'd you get that? Gartley?' 'No,' Hunton said. 'From a state inspector named Martin.' 'He knows what we're doing?' 'I think he suspects. He told me a funny story a couple of weeks ago.' 'About the mangler?' 'No,' Hunton said. 'About a refrigerator. Come on.' Adelle Frawley was dead; sewed together by a patient undertaker, she lay in her coffin. Yet something of her spirit perhaps remained in the machine, and if it did, it cried out. She would have known, could have warned them. She had been prone to indigestion, and for this common ailment she had taken a common stomach tablet called EZ Gel, purchasable over the counter of any drugstore for seventynine cents. The side panel holds a printed warning People with glaucoma must not take EZ Gel, because the active ingredient causes an aggravation of that condition. Unfortunately, Adelle Frawley did not have that condition. She might have remembered the day, shortly before Sherry Ouelette cut her hand, that she had dropped a full box of EZ Gel tablets into the mangler by accident. But she was dead, unaware that the active ingredient which soothed her heartburn was a chemical derivative of belladonna, known quaintly in some European countries as the hand of glory. There was a sudden ghastly burping noise in the spectral silence of the Blue Ribbon Laundry  a bat fluttered madly for its hole in the insulation above the dryers where it had roosted, wrapping wings around its blind face. It was a noise almost like a chuckle. The mangler began to run with a sudden, lurching grind belts hurrying through the darkness, cogs meeting and meshing and grinding, heavy pulverizing rollers rotating on and on. It was ready for them. When Hunton pulled into the parking lot it was shortly after midnight and the moon was hidden behind a raft of moving clouds. He jammed on the brakes and switched off the lights in the same motion; Jackson's forehead almost slammed against the padded dash. He switched off the ignition and the steady thumphissthump became louder. 'It's the mangler,' he said slowly. 'It's the mangler. Running by itself. In the middle of the night.' They sat for a moment in silence, feeling the fear crawl up their legs. Hunton said, 'All right. Let's do it.' They got out and walked to the building, the sound of the mangler growing louder. As Hunton put the key into the lock of the service door, he thought that the machine did sound alive  as if it were breathing in great hot gasps and speaking to itself in hissing, sardonic whispers. All of a sudden I'm glad I'm with a cop,' Jackson said. He shifted the brown bag he held from one arm to the other. Inside was a small jelly jar filled with holy water wrapped in waxed paper, and a Gideon Bible. They stepped inside and Hunton snapped up the light switches by the door. The fluorescents flickered into cold life. At the same instant the mangler shut off. A membrane of steam hung over its rollers. It waited for them in its new ominous silence. 'God, it's an ugly thing,' Jackson whispered. 'Come on,' Hunton said. 'Before we lose our nerve.' They walked over to it. The safety bar was in its down position over the belt which fed the machine. Hunton put out a hand. 'Close enough, Mark. Give me the stuff and tell me what to do.' 'But ' 'No argument.' Jackson handed him the bag and Hunton put it on the sheet table in front of the machine. He gave Jackson the Bible. 'I'm going to read,' Jackson said. 'When I point at you, sprinkle the holy water on the machine with your fingers. You say In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, get thee from this place, thou unclean. Got it?' 'Yes.' 'The second time I point, break the wafer and repeat the incantation again. 'How will we know if it's working?' 'You'll know. The thing is apt to break every window in the place getting out. If it doesn't work the first time, we keep doing it until it does.' 'I'm scared green,' Hunton said. 'As a matter of fact, so am I.' 'If we're wrong about the hand of glory ' 'We're not,' Jackson said. 'Here we go.' He began. His voice filled the empty laundry with spectral echoes. 'Turnest not though aside to idols, nor make molten gods for yourself. I am the Lord thy God and the land will vomit you out for having defiled it, as it vomited out nations before you.' Jackson looked up, his face strained, and pointed.' The words fell like stones into a silence that had suddenly become filled with a creeping, tomblike cold. The mangler remained still and silent under the flourescents, and to Hunton it still seemed to grin. Hunton sprinkled holy water across the feeder belt. There was a sudden, gnashing scream of tortured metal. Smoke rose from the canvas belts where the holy water had touched and took on writhing, redtinged shapes. The mangler suddenly jerked into life. We've got it!' Jackson cried above the rising clamour. 'It's on the run!' He began to read again, his voice rising over the sound of the machinery. He pointed to Hunton again, and Hunton sprinkled some of the host. As he did so he was suddenly swept with a bonefreezing terror, a sudden vivid feeling that it has gone wrong, that the machine had called their bluff  and was the stronger. Jackson's voice was still rising, approaching climax. Sparks began to jump across the arc between the main motor and the secondary; the smell of ozone filled the air, like the copper smell of hot blood. Now the main motor was smoking; the mangler was running at an insane, blurred speed; a finger touched to the central belt would have caused the whole body to be hauled in and turned to a bloody rag in the space of five seconds. The concrete beneath their feet trembled and thrummed. A main bearing blew with a searing flash of purple light, filling the chill air with the smell of thunderstorms, and still the mangler ran, faster and faster, belts and rollers and cogs moving at a speed that made them seem to blend and merge, change, melt, transmute Hunton, who had been standing almost hypnotized, suddenly took a step backwards. 'Get away!' he screamed over the blaring racket. 'We've almost got it!' Jackson yelled back. 'Why ' There was a sudden indescribable ripping noise and a fissure in the concrete floor suddenly raced towards them and past, widening. Chips of ancient cement flew up in a starburst. Jackson looked at the mangler and screamed. It was trying to pull itself out of the concrete, like a dinosaur trying to escape a tar pit. And it wasn't precisely an ironer any more. It was still changing, melting. The 550volt cable fell, spitting blue fire, into the rollers and was chewed away. For a moment two fireballs glared at them like lambent eyes, eyes filled with a great and cold hunger. Another fault line tore open. The mangler leaned towards them, within an ace of being free of the concrete moorings that held it. It leered at them; the safety bar had slammed up and what Hunton saw was a gaping, hungry mouth filled with steam. They turned to run and another fissure opened at their feet. Behind them, a great screaming roar as the thing came free. Hunton leaped over, but Jackson stumbled and fell sprawling. Hunton turned to help and a huge, amorphous shadow fell over him, blocking the fluorescents. It stood over Jackson, who lay on his back, staring up in a silent rictus of terror  the perfect sacrifice. Hunton had only a confused impression of something black and moving that bulked to a tremendous height above them both, something with glaring electric eyes the size of footballs, an open mouth with a moving canvas tongue. He ran Jackson's dying scream followed him. When Roger Martin finally got out of bed to answer the doorbell, he was still only a third awake; but when Hunton reeled in, shock slapped him fully into the world with a rough hand. Hunton's eyes bulged madly from his head, and his hands were claws as he scratched at the front of Martin's robe. There was a small oozing cut on his cheek and his face was splashed with dirty grey specks of powdered cement. His hair had gone dead white. 'Help me for Jesus' sake, help me. Mark is dead. Jackson is dead.' 'Slow down,' Martin said. 'Come in the living room.' Hunton followed him, making a thick whining noise in this throat, like a dog. Martin poured him a twoounce knock of Jim Beam and Hunton held the glass in both hands, downing the raw liquor in a choked gulp. The glass fell unheeded to the carpet and his hands, like wandering ghosts, sought Martin's lapels again. 'The mangler killed Mark Jackson. It it oh God, it might get out! We can't let it get out! We can't.. we. oh ' He began to scream, a crazy, whooping sound that rose and fell in jagged cycles. Martin tried to hand him another drink but Hunton knocked it aside. 'We have to burn it,' he said. 'Burn it before it can get out. Oh, what if it gets out? Oh Jesus, what if ' His eyes suddenly flickered, glazed, rolled up to show the whites, and he fell to the carpet in a stonelike faint. Mrs Martin was in the doorway, clutching her robe to her throat. 'Who is he, Rog? Is he crazy? I thought ' She shuddered. 'I don't think he's crazy.' She was suddenly frightened by the sick shadow of fear on her husband's face. 'God, I hope he came quick enough.' He turned to the telephone, picked up the receiver, froze. There was a faint, swelling noise from the east of the house, the way that Hunton had come. A steady, grinding clatter, growing louder. The livingroom window stood half open and now Martin caught a dark smell on the breeze. An odour of ozone or blood. He stood with his hand on the useless telephone as it grew louder, louder, gnashing and fuming, something in the streets that was hot and steaming. The blood stench filled the room. His hand dropped from the telephone. It was already out. THE BOOGEYMAN 'I came to you because I want to tell my story,' the man on Dr Harper's couch was saying. The man was Lester Billings from Waterbury, Connecticut. According to the history taken from Nurse Vickers, he was twentyeight, employed by an industrial firm in New York, divorced, and the father of three children. All deceased. 'I can't go to a priest because I'm not a Catholic. I can't go to a lawyer because I haven't done anything to consult a lawyer about. All I did was kill my kids. One at a time. Killed them all.' Dr Harper turned on the tape recorder. Billings lay straight as a yardstick on the couch, not giving it an inch of himself. His feet protruded stiffly over the end. Picture of a man enduring necessary humiliation. His hands were folded corpselike on his chest. His face was carefully set He looked at the plain white composition ceiling as if seeing scenes and pictures played out there. 'Do you mean you actually killed them, or ' 'No.' Impatient flick of the hand. 'But I was responsible. Denny in 1967. Shirl in 1971. And Andy this year. I want to tell you about it.' Dr Harper said nothing. He thought that Billings looked haggard and old. His hair was thinning, his complexion sallow. His eyes held all the miserable secrets of whisky. 'They were murdered, see? Only no one believes that. If they would, things would be all right.' 'Why is that?' 'Because Billings broke off and darted up on his elbows, staring across the room. 'What's that?' he barked. His eyes had narrowed to black slots. 'What's what?' 'That door.' 'The closet,' Dr Harper said. 'Where I hang my coat and leave my overshoes.' 'Open it. I want to see.' Dr Harper got up wordlessly, crossed the room, and opened the closet. Inside, a tan raincoat hung on one of four or five hangers. Beneath that was a pair of shiny goloshes. The New York Times had been carefully tucked into one of them. That was all. 'All right?' Dr Harper said. 'All right.' Billings removed the props of his elbows and returned to his previous position. 'You were saying,' Dr Harper said as he went back to his chair, 'that if the murder of your three children could be proved, all your troubles would be over. Why is that?' 'I'd go to jail,' Billings said immediately. 'For life. And you can see into all the rooms in a jail. All the rooms.' He smiled at nothing. 'How were your children murdered?' 'Don't try to jerk it out of me!' Billings twitched around and stared balefully at Harper. 'I'll tell you, don't worry. I'm not one of your freaks strutting around and pretending to be Napoleon or explaining that I got hooked on heroin because my mother didn't love me. I know you won't believe me. I don't care. It doesn't matter. Just to tell will be enough.' 'All right.' Dr Harper got out his pipe. 'I married Rita in 1965  I was twentyone and she was eighteen. She was pregnant. That was Denny.' His lips twisted in a rubbery, frightening grin that was gone in a wink. 'I had to leave college and get a job, but I didn't mind. I loved both of them. We were very happy. 'Rita got pregnant just a little while after Denny was born, and Shirl came along in December of 1966. Andy came in the summer of 1969, and Denny was already dead by then. Andy was an accident. That's what Rita said. She said sometimes that birthcontrol stuff doesn't work. I think that it was more than an accident. Children tie a man down, you know. Women like that, especially when the man is brighter than they. Don't you find that's true?' Harper grunted noncommitally. 'It doesn't matter, though. I loved him anyway.' He said it almost vengefully, as if he had loved the child to spite his wife. 'Who killed the children?' Harper asked. 'The boogeyman,' Lester Billings answered immediately. 'The boogeyman killed them all. Just came out of the closet and killed them.' He twisted around and grinned. 'You think I'm crazy, all right. It's written all over you. But I don't care. All I want to do is tell you and then get lost.' 'I'm listening,' Harper said. 'It started when Denny was almost two and Shirl was just an infant. He started crying when Rita put him to bed. We had a twobedroom place, see. Shirl slept in a crib in our room. At first I thought he was crying because he didn't have a bottle to take to bed any more. Rita said don't make an issue of it, let it go, let him have it and he'll drop it on his own. But that's the way kids start off bad. You get permissive with them, spoil them. Then they break your heart. Get some girl knocked up, you know, or start shooting dope. Or they get to be sissies. Can you imagine waking up some morning and finding your kid  your son  is a sissy? 'After a while, though, when he didn't stop, I started putting him to bed myself. And if he didn't stop crying I'd give him a whack. Then Rita said he was saying "light" over and over again. Well, I didn't know. Kids that little, how can you tell what they're saying. Only a mother can tell. 'Rita wanted to put in a nightlight. One of those wall plug things with Mickey Mouse or Huckleberry Hound or something on it. I wouldn't let her. If a kid doesn't get over being afraid of the dark when he's little, he never gets over it. 'Anyway, he died the summer after Shirl was born. I put him to bed that night and he started to cry right off. I heard what he said that time. He pointed right at the closet when he said it. "Boogeyman," the kid says. "Boogeyman, Daddy." 'I turned off the light and went into our room and asked Rita why she wanted to teach the kid a word like that. I was tempted to slap her around a little, but I didn't. She said she never taught him to say that. I called her a goddamn liar. 'That was a bad summer for me, see. The only job I could get was loading PepsiCola trucks in a warehouse, and I was tired all the time. Shirl would wake up and cry every night and Rita would pick her up and sniffle. I tell you, sometimes I felt like throwing them both out a window. Christ, kids drive you crazy sometimes. You could kill them. 'Well, the kid woke me at three in the morning, right on schedule. I went to the bathroom, only a quarter awake, you know, and Rita asked me if I'd check on Denny. I told her to do it herself and went back to bed. I was almost asleep when she started to scream. 'I got up and went in. The kid was dead on his back. Just as white as flour except for where the blood had had sunk. Back of the legs, the head, the athe buttocks. His eyes were open. That was the worst, you know. Wide open and glassy, like the eyes you see on a moosehead some guy put over his mantel. Like pictures you see of those gook kids over in Nam. But an American kid shouldn't look like that. Dead on his back. Wearing diapers and rubber pants because he'd been wetting himself again the last couple of weeks. Awful, I loved that kid.' Billings shook his head slowly, then offered the rubbery, frightening grin again. 'Rita was screaming her head off. She tried to pick Denny up and rock him, but I wouldn't let her.


The cops don't like you to touch any of the evidence. I know that ' 'Did you know it was the boogeyman then?' Harper asked quietly. 'Oh, no. Not then. But I did see one thing. It didn't mean anything to me then, but my mind stored it away.' 'What was that?' 'The closet door was open. Not much. Just a crack. But I knew I left it shut, see. There's drycleaning bags in there. 3 A kid messes around with one of those and bango. Asphyxiation. You know that?' 'Yes. What happened then?' Billings shrugged. 'We planted him.' He looked morbidly at his hands, which had thrown dirt on three tiny coffins. 'Was there an inquest?' 'Sure.' Billings's eyes flashed with sardonic brilliance. 'So me backcountry fuckhead with a stethoscope and a black bag full of Junior Mints and a sheepskin from some cow college. Crib death, he called it! You ever hear such a pile of yellow manure? The kid was three years old!' 'Crib death is most common during the first year,' Harper said carefully, 'but that diagnosis has gone on death certificates for children up to age five for want of a better ' Bulishit!' Billings spat out violently. Harper relit his pipe. We moved Shirl into Denny's old room a month after the funeral. Rita fought it tooth and nail, but I had the last word. It hurt me, of course it did. Jesus, I loved having the kid in with us. But you can't get overprotective. You make a kid a cripple that way. When I was a kid my mom used to take me to the beach and then scream herself hoarse. "Don't go out so far! Don't go there! It's got an undertow! You only ate an hour ago! Don't go over your head!" Even to watch out for sharks, before God. So what happens? I can't even go near the water now. It's the truth. I get the cramps if I go near a beach. Rita got me to take her and the kids to Savin Rock once when Denny was alive. I got sick as a dog. I know, see? You can't overprotect kids. And you can't coddle yourself either. Life goes on. Shirl went right into Denny's crib. We sent the old mattress to the dump, though. I didn't want my girl to get any germs. 'So a year goes by. And one night when I'm putting Shirl into her crib she starts to yowl and scream and cry. "Boogeyman, Daddy, boogeyman, boogeyman!" 'That threw a jump into me. It was just like Denny. And I started to remember about that closet door, open just a crack when we found him. I wanted to take her into our room for the night.' 'Did you?' 'No.' Billings regarded his hands and his face twitched. 'How could I go to Rita and admit I was wrong? I had to be strong. She was always such a jellyfish look how easy she went to bed with me when we weren't married.' Harper said, 'On the other hand, look how easily you went to bed with her.' Billings froze in the act of rearranging his hands and slowly turned his head to look at Harper. 'Are you trying to be a wise guy?' 'No, indeed,' Harper said. 'Then let me tell it my way,' Billings snapped. 'I came here to get this off my chest. To tell my story. I'm not going to talk about my sex life, if that's what you expect. Rita and I had a very normal sex life, with none of that dirty stuff. I know it gives some people a charge to talk about that, but I'm not one of them.' 'Okay,' Harper said. 'Okay,' Billings echoed with uneasy arrogance. He seemed to have lost the thread of his thought, and his eyes wandered uneasily to the closet door, which was firmly shut. 'Would you like that open?' Harper asked. 'No!' Billings said quickly. He gave a nervous little laugh. 'What do I want to look at your overshoes for? 'The boogeyman got her, too,' Billings said. He brushed at his forehead, as if sketching memories. 'A month later. But something happened before that. I heard a noise in there one night. And then she screamed. I opened the door real quick  the hall light was on  and she was sitting up in the crib crying and something moved. Back in the shadows, by the closet. Something slithered.' 'Was the closet door open?' 'A little. Just a crack.' Billings licked his lips. 'Shirl was screaming about the boogeyman. And something else that sounded like "claws". Only she said "craws", you know. Little kids have trouble with that "I" sound. Rita ran upstairs and asked what the matter was. I said she got scared by the shadows of the branches moving on the ceiling.' 'Crawset?' Harper said. 'Huh?' 'Crawset closet. Maybe she was trying to say "closet".' 'Maybe,' Billings said. 'Maybe that was it. But I don't think so.I think it was "claws".' His eyes began seeking the closet door again. 'Claws, long claws.' His voice had sunk to a whisper. 'Did you look in the closet?' 'Yyes.' Billings's hands were laced tightly across his chest, laced tightly enough to show a white moon at each knuckle. 'Was there anything in there? Did you see the ' 'I didn't see anything!' Billings screamed suddenly. And the words poured out, as if a black cork had been pulled from the bottom of his soul 'When she died I found her, see. And she was black. All black. She swallowed her own tongue and she was just as black as a nigger in a minstrel show and she was staring at me. Her eyes, they looked like those eyes you see on stuffed animals, all shiny and awful, like live marbles, and they were saying it got me, Daddy, you let it get me, you killed me, you helped it kill me.. His words trailed off. One single tear very large and silent, ran down the side of his cheek. 'It was a brain convulsion, see? Kids get those sometimes. A bad signal from the brain. They had an autopsy at Hartford Receiving and they told us she choked on her tongue from the convulsion. And I had to go home alone because they kept Rita under sedation. She was out of her mind. I had to go back to that house all alone, and I know a kid don't just get convulsions because their brain frigged up. You can scare a kid into convulsions. And I had to go back to the house where it was.' He whispered, 'I slept on the couch. With the light on., 'Did anything happen?' 'I had a dream,' Billings said. 'I was in a dark room and there was something I couldn't couldn't quite see, in the closet. It made a noise a squishy noise. It reminded me of a comic book I read when I was a kid. Tales from the Crypt, you remember that? Christ! They had a guy named Graham Ingles; he could draw every godawful thing in the world  and some out of it. Anyway, in this story this woman drowned her husband, see? Put cement blocks on his feet and dropped him into a quarry. Only he came back. 'He was all rotted and blackgreen and the fish had eaten away one of his eyes and there was seaweed in his hair. He came back and killed her. And when I woke up in the middle of the night, I thought that would be leaning over me. With claws long claws. Dr Harper looked at the digital clock inset into his desk. Lester Billings had been speaking for nearly half an hour. He said, 'When your wife came back home, what was her attitude towards you?' 'She still loved me,' Billings said with pride. 'She still wanted to do what I told her. That's the wife's place, right? This women's lib only makes sick people. The most important thing in life is for a person to know his place. His. his uh. 'Station in life?' 'That's it!' Billings snapped his fingers. 'That's it exactly. And a wife should follow her husband. Oh, she was sort of colourless the first four or five months after  dragged around the house, didn't sing, didn't watch the TV, didn't laugh. I knew she'd get over it. When they're that little, you don't get so attached to them. After a while you have to go to the bureau drawer and look at a picture to even remember exactly what they looked like. 'She wanted another baby,' he added darkly. 'I told her it was a bad idea. Oh, not for ever, but for a while. I told her it was a time for us to get over things and begin to enjoy each other. We never had a chance to do that before. If you wanted to go to a movie, you had to hassle around for a babysitter. You couldn't go into town to see the Mets unless her folks would take the kids, because my mom wouldn't have anything to do with us. Denny was born too soon after we were married, see? She said Rita was just a tramp, a common little cornerwalker. Cornerwalker is what my mom always called them. Isn't that a sketch? She sat me down once and told me diseases you can get if you went to a cor to a prostitute. How your pri your penis has just a little tiny sore on it one day and the next day it's rotting right off. She wouldn't even come to the wedding.' Billings drummed his chest with his fingers. 'Rita's gynaecologist sold heron this thing called an IUD  interuterine device. Foolproof, the doctor said. He just sticks it up the woman's her place, and that's it. If there's anything in there, the egg can't fertilize. You don't even know it's there.' He smiled at the ceiling with dark sweetness. 'No one knows if it's there or not. And next year she's pregnant again. Some foolproof.' 'No birthcontrol method is perfect,' Harper said. 'The pill is only ninetyeight per cent. The IUD may be ejected by cramps, strong menstrual flow, and, in exceptional cases, by evacuation.' 'Yeah. Or you can take it out.' 'That's possible.' 'So what's next? She's knitting little things, singing in the shower, and eating pickles like crazy. Sitting on my lap and saying things about how it must have been God's will. Piss.' 'The baby came at the end of the year after Shirl's death?' 'That's right. A boy. She named it Andrew Lester Billings. I didn't want anything to do with it, at least at first. My motto was she screwed up, so let her take care of it. I know how that sounds but you have to remember that I'd been through a lot. 'But I warmed up to him, you know it? He was the only one of the litter that looked like me, for one thing. Denny looked like his mother, and Shirl didn't look like anybody, except maybe my Grammy Ann. But Andy was the spitting image of me. 'I'd get to playing around with him in his playpen when I got home from work. He'd grab only my finger and smile and gurgle. Nine weeks old and the kid was grinning up at his old dad. You believe that?' 'Then one night, here I am coming out of a drugstore with a mobile to hang over the kid's crib. Me! Kids don't appreciate presents until they're old enough to say thank you, that was always my motto. But there I was, buying him silly crap and all at once I realize I love him the most of all. I had another job by then, a pretty good one, selling drill bits for Cluett and Sons. I did real well, and when Andy was one, we moved to Waterbury. The old place had too many bad memories. 'And too many closets. 'That next year was the best one for us. I'd give every finger on my right hand to have it back again. Oh, the war in Vietnam was still going on, and the hippies were still running around with no clothes on, and the niggers were yelling a lot, but none of that touched us. We were on a quiet street with nice neighbours. We were happy,' he summed up simply. 'I asked Rita once if she wasn't worried. You know, bad luck comes in threes and all that. She said not for us. She said Andy was special. She said God had drawn a ring around him.' Billings looked morbidly at the ceiling. 'Last year wasn't so good. Something about the house changed. I started keeping my boots in the hall because I didn't like to open the closet door any more. I kept thinking Well, what if it's in there? All crouched down and ready to spring the second I open the door? And I'd started thinking I could hear squishy noises, as if something black and green and wet was moving around in there just a little. 'Rita asked me if I was working too hard, and I started to snap at her, just like the old days. I got sick to rny stomach leaving them alone to go to work, but I was glad to get out. God help me, I was glad to get out. I started to think, see, that it lost us for a while when we moved. It had to hunt around, slinking through the streets at night and maybe creeping in the sewers. Smelling for us. It took a year, but it found us. It's back. It wants Andy and it wants me. I started to think, maybe if you think of a thing long enough, and believe in it, it gets real. Maybe all the monsters we were scared of when we were kids, Frankenstein and Wolfman and Mummy, maybe they were real. Real enough to kill the kids that were supposed to have fallen into gravel pits or drowned in lakes or were just never found. Maybe.. 'Are you backing away from something, Mr Billings?' Billings was silent for a long time  two minutes clicked off the digital clock. Then he said abruptly 'Andy died in February. Rita wasn't there. She got a call from her father. Her mother had been in a car crash the day after New Year's and wasn't expected to live. She took a bus back that night. 'Her mother didn't die, but she was on the critical list for a long time  two months. I had a very good woman who stayed with Andy days. We kept house nights. And closet doors kept coming open.' Billings licked his lips. 'The kid was sleeping in the room with me. It's funny, too. Rita asked me once when he was two if I wanted to move him into another room. Spock or one of those other quacks claims it's bad for kids to sleep with their parents, see? Supposed to give them traumas about sex and all that. But we never did it unless the kid was asleep. And I didn't want to move him. I was afraid to, after Denny and Shirl.' 'But you did move him, didn't you?' Dr Harper asked. 'Yeah,' Billings said. He smiled a sick, yellow smile. 'I did.' Silence again. Billings wrestled with it. 'I had to!' he barked finally. 'I had to! It was all right when Rita was there, but when she was gone, it started to get bolder. It started ' He rolled his eyes at Harper and bared his teeth in a savage grin. 'Oh, you won't believe it. I know what you think, just another goofy for your casebook, I know that, but you weren't there, you lousy smug headpeeper. 'One night every door in the house blew wide open. One morning I got up and found a trail of mud and filth across the hall between the coat closet and the front door. Was it going out? Coming in? I don't know! Before Jesus, I just don't know! Records all scratched up and covered with slime, mirrors broken and the sounds the sounds He ran a hand through his hair. 'You'd wake up at three in the morning and look into the dark and at first you'd say, "It's only the clock." But underneath it you could hear something moving in a stealthy way. But not too stealthy, because it wanted you to hear it. A slimy sliding sound like something from the kitchen drain. Or a clicking sound, like claws being dragged lightly over the staircase banister. And you'd close your eyes, knowing that hearing it was bad, but if you saw it.. 'And always you'd be afraid that the noises might stop for a little while, and then there would be a laugh right over your face and breath of air like stale cabbage on your face, and then hands on your throat.' Billings was pallid and trembling. 'So I moved him. I knew it would go for him, see. Because he was weaker. And it did. That very first night he screamed in the middle of the night and finally, when I got up the cojones to go in, he was standing up in bed and screaming. "The boogeyman, Daddy boogeyman. wanna go wif Daddy, go wif Daddy."' Billings's voice had become a high treble, like a child's. His eyes seemed to fill his entire face; he almost seemed to shrink on the couch. 'But I couldn't,' the childish breaking treble continued, 'I couldn't. And an hour later there was a scream. An awful gurgling scream. And I knew how much I loved him because I ran, in, I didn't even turn on the light, I ran, ran, ran, oh, Jesus God Mary, it had him; it was shaking him, shaking him just like a terrier shakes a piece of cloth and I could see something with awful slumped shoulders and a scarecrow head and I could smell something like a dead mouse in a pop bottle and I heard.. He trailed off, and then his voice clicked back into an adult range. 'I heard it when Andy's neck broke.' Billings's voice was cool and dead. 'It made a sound like ice cracking when you're skating on a country pond in winter.' 'Then what happened?' 'Oh, I ran,' Billings said in the same cool, dead voice. 'I went to an allnight diner. How's that for complete cowardice? Ran to an allnight diner and drank six cups of coffee. Then I went home. It was already dawn. I called the police even before I went upstairs. He was lying on the floor and staring at me. Accusing me. A tiny bit of blood had run out of one ear. Only a drop, really. And the closet door was open  but just a crack.' The voice stopped. Harper looked at the digital clock. Fifty minutes had passed. 'Make an appointment with the nurse,' he said. 'In fact, several of them. Tuesdays and Thursdays?' 'I only came to tell my story,' Billings said. 'To get it off my chest. I lied to the police, see? Told them the kid must have tried to get out of his crib in the night and they swallowed it. Course they did. That's just what it looked like. Accidental, like the others. But Rita knew. Rita. finally knew. He covered his eyes with his right arm and began to weep. 'Mr Billings, there is a great deal to talk about,' Dr Harper said after a pause. 'I believe we can remove some of the guilt you've been carrying, but first you have to want to get rid of it.' 'Don't you believe I do?' Billings cried, removing his arm from his eyes. They were red, raw, wounded. 'Not yet,' Harper said quietly. 'Tuesdays and Thursdays?' After a long silence, Billings muttered, 'Goddamn shrink. All right. All right.' 'Make an appointment with the nurse, Mr Billings. And have a good day.' Billings laughed emptily and walked out of the office quickly, without looking back. The nurse's station was empty. A small sign on the desk blotter said 'Back in a Minute.' Billings turned and went back into the office. 'Doctor, your nurse is , The room was empty. But the closet door was open. Just a crack. 'So nice,' the voice from the closet said. 'So nice.' The words sounded as if they might have come through a mouthful of rotted seaweed. Billings stood rooted to the spot as the closet door swung open. He dimly felt warmth at his crotch as he wet himself. 'So nice,' the boogeyman said as it shambled out. It still held its Dr Harper mask in one rotted, spadeclaw hand. GREY MATTER They had been predicting a norther all week and along about Thursday we got it, a real screamer that piled up eight inches by four in the afternoon and showed no signs of slowing down. The usual five or six were gathered around the Reliable in Henry's NiteOwl, which is the only little store on this side of Bangor that stays open right around the clock. Henry don't do a huge business  mostly, it amounts to selling the college kids their beer and wine  but he gets by and it's a place for us old duffers on Social Security to get together and talk about who's died lately and how the world's going to hell. This afternoon Henry was at the counter; Bill Pelham, Bertie Connors, Carl Littlefield, and me was tipped up by the stove. Outside, not a car was moving on Ohio Street, and the ploughs was having hard going. The wind was socking drifts across that looked like the backbone on a dinosaur. Henry'd only had three customers all afternoon  that is, if you want to count in blind Eddie. Eddie's about seventy, and he ain't completely blind. Runs into things, mostly. He comes in once or twice a week and sticks a loaf of bread under his coat and walks out with an expression on his face like there, you stupid sonsabitches, fooled you again. Bertie once asked Henry why he never put a stop to it. 'I'll tell you,' Henry said. 'A few years back the Air Force wanted twenty million dollars to rig up a flyin' model of an airplane they had planned out. Well, it cost them seventyfive million and then the damn thing wouldn't fly. That happened ten years ago, when blind Eddie and myself were considerable younger, and I voted for the woman who sponsored that bill. Blind Eddie voted against her. And since then I've been buyin' his bread.' Bertie didn't look like he quite followed all of that, but he sat back to muse over it. Now the door opened again, letting in a blast of the cold grey air outside, and a young kid came in, stamping snow off his boots. I placed him after a second. He was Richie Grenadine's kid, and he looked like he'd just kissed the wrong end of the baby. His Adam's apple was going up and down and his face was the colour of old oilcloth. 'Mr Parmalee,' he says to Henry, his eyeballs rolling around in his head like ball bearings, 'you got to come. You got to take him his beer and come. I can't stand to go back there. I'm scared.' 'Now slow down,' Henry says, taking off his white butcher's apron and coming around the counter. 'What's the matter? Your dad been on a drunk?' I realized when he said that that Richie hadn't been in for quite some time. Usually he'd be by once a day to pick up a case of whatever beer was going cheapest at that time, a big fat man with jowls like pork butts and hamhock arms. Richie always was a pig about his beer, but he handled it okay when he was working at the sawmill out in Clifton. Then something happened  a pulper piled a bad load, or maybe Richie just made it out that way  and Richie was off work, free an' easy, with the sawmill company paying him compensation. Something in his back. Anyway, he got awful fat. He hadn't been in lately, although once in a while I'd seen his boy come in for Richie's nightly case. Nice enough boy Henry sold him the beer, for he knew it was only the boy doing as his father said. 'He's been on a drunk,' the boy was saying now, 'but that ain't the trouble. It's it's oh Lord, it's awful!' Henry saw he was going to bawl, so he says real quick 'Carl, will you watch things for a minute?' 'Sure.' 'Now, Timmy, you come back into the stockroom and tell me what's what.' He led the boy away, and Carl went around behind the counter and sat on Henry's stool. No one said anything for quite a while. We could hear 'em back there, Henry's deep, slow voice and then Timmy Grenadine's high one, speaking very fast. Then the boy commenced to cry, and Bill Pelham cleared his throat and started filling up his pipe. 'I ain't seen Richie for a couple of months,' I said. Bull grunted. 'No loss.' 'He was in oh, near the end of October,' Carl said. 'Near Halloween. Bought a case of Schlitz beer. He was gettin' awful meaty.' There wasn't much more to say. The boy was still crying, but he was talking at the same time. Outside the wind kept on whooping and yowling and the radio said we'd have another six inches or so by morning. It was midJanuary and it made me wonder if anyone had seen Richie since October  besides his boy, that is. The talking went on for quite a while, but finally Henry and the boy came out. The boy had taken his coat off, but Henry had put his on. The boy was kinda hitching in his chest the way you do when the worst is past, but his eyes was red and when he glanced at you, he'd look down at the floor. Henry looked worried. 'I thought I'd send Timmy here upstairs an' have my wife cook him up a toasted cheese or somethin'. Maybe a couple of you fellas'd like to go around to Richie's place with me. Timmy says he wants some beer. He gave me the money.' He tried to smile, but it was a pretty sick affair and he soon gave up. 'Sure,' Bertie says. 'What kind of beer? I'll go fetch her.' 'Get Harrow's Supreme,' Henry said. 'We got some cutdown boxes back there.' I got up, too. It would have to be Bertie and me. Carl's arthritis gets something awful on days like this, and Billy Pelham don't have much use of his right arm any more. Bertie got four sixpacks of Harrow's and I packed them into a box while Henry took the boy upstairs to th apartment, overhead. Well, he straightened that out with his missus and came back down, looking over his shoulder once to make sure the upstairs door was closed. Billy spoke up, fairly busting 'What's up? Has Richie been workin' the kid over?' 'No,' Henry said. 'I'd just as soon not say anything just yet. It'd sound crazy. I will show you somethin', though. The money Timmy had to pay for the beer with.' He shed four dollar bills out of his pocket, holding them by the corner, and I don't blame him. They was all covered with a grey, slimy stuff that looked like the scum on top of bad preserves. He laid them down on the counter with a funny smile and said to Carl 'Don't let anybody touch 'em. Not if what the kid says is even half right!' And he went around to the sink by the meat counter and washed his hands. I got up, put on my pea coat and scarf and buttoned up. It was no good taking a car; Richie lived in an apartment building down on Curve Street, which is as close to straight up and down as the law allows, and it's the last place the ploughs touch. As we were going out, Bill Pelham called after us 'Watch out, now.' Henry just nodded and put the case of Harrow's on the little handcart he keeps by the door, and out we trundled. The wind hit us like a sawblade, and right away I pulled my scarf up over my ears. We paused in the doorway just for a second while Bertie pulled on his gloves. He had a pained sort of a wince on his face, and I knew how he felt. It's all well for younger fellows to go out skiing all day and running those goddam waspwing snowmobiles half the night, but when you get up over seventy without an oil change, you feel that northeast wind around your heart. 'I don't want to scare you boys,' Henry said, with that queer, sort of revolted smile still on his mouth, 'but I'm goin' to show you this all the same. And I'm goin' to tell you what the boy told me while we walk up there because I want you to know, you see!' And he pulled a.45calibre hogleg out of his coat pocket  the pistol he'd kept loaded and ready under the counter ever since he went to twentyfour hours a day back in 1958. I don't know where he got it, but I do know the one time he flashed it at a stickup guy, the fella just turned around and bolted right out the door. Henry was a cool one, all right. I saw him throw out a college kid that came in one time and gave him a hard time about cashing a cheque. That kid walked away like his ass was on sideways and he had to crap. Well, I only tell you that because Henry wanted Bertie and me to know he meant business, and we did, too. So we set out, bent into the wind like washerwomen, Henry trundling that cart and telling us what the boy had said. The wind was trying to rip the words away before we could hear 'em, but we got most of it  more'n we wanted to. I was damn glad Henry had his Frenchman's pecker stowed away in his coat pocket. The kid said it must have been the beer  you know how you can get a bad can every now and again. Flat or smelly or green as the peestains in an Irishman's underwear. A fella once told me that all it takes is a tiny hole to let in bacteria that'll do some damn strange things. The hole can be so small that the beer won't hardly dribble out, but the bacteria can get in. And beer's good food for some of those bugs. Anyway, the kid said Richie brought back a case of Golden Light just like always that night in October and sat down to polish it off while Timmy did his homework. Timmy was just about ready for bed when he hears Richie say, 'Christ Jesus, that ain't right.' And Timmy says, 'What's that, Pop?' 'That beer,' Richie says. 'God, that's the worst taste I ever had in my mouth.' Most people would wonder why in the name of God he drank it if it tasted so bad, but then, most people have never seen Richie Grenadine go to his beer. I was down in Wally's Spa one afternoon, and I saw him win the goddamndest bet. He bet a fella he could drink twenty twobit glasses of beer in one minute. Nobody local would take him up, but this salesman from Montpelier laid down a twentydollar Bill and Richie covered him. He drank all twenty with seven seconds to spare  although when he walked out he was more'n three sails into the wind. So I expect Richie had most of that bad can in his gut before his brain could warn him. 'I'm gonna puke,' Richie say. 'Look out!' But by the time he got to the head it had passed off, and that was the end of it. The boy said he smelt the can, and it smeltlike something crawled in there and died. There was a little grey dribble around the top, too. Two days later the boy comes home from school and there's Richie sitting in front of the TV and watching the afternoon tearjerkers with every goddamn shade in the place pulled down. 'What's up?' Timmy asks, for Richie don't hardly ever roll in before nine. 'I'm watchin' the TV,' Richie says. 'I didn't seem to want to go out today.' Timmy turned on the light over the sink, and Richie yelled at him 'And turn off that friggin' light!' So Timmy did, not asking how he's gonna do his homework in the dark. When Richie's in that mood, you don't ask him nothing. 'An' go out an' get me a case,' Richie says. 'Money's on the table.' When the kid gets back, his dad's still sitting in the dark, only now it's dark outside, too. And the TV's off. The kid starts getting the creeps well, who wouldn't? Nothing but a dark flat and your daddy setting in the corner like a big lump. So he puts the beer on the table, knowing that Richie don't like it so cold it spikes his forehead, and when he gets close to his old man he starts to notice a kind of rotten smell, like an old cheese someone left standing on the counter over the weekend. He don't say shit or go blind, though, as the old man was never what you'd call a cleanly soul. Instead he goes into his room and shuts the door and does his homework, and after a while he hears the TV start to go and Richie's popping the top in his first of the evening. And for two weeks or so, that's the way things went. The kid got up in the morning and went to school an' when he got home Richie'd be in front of the television, and beer money on the table. The flat was smelling ranker and ranker, too. Richie wouldn't have the shades up at all, and about the middle of November he made Timmy stop studying in his room. Said he couldn't abide the light under the door. So Timmy started going down the block to a friend's house after getting his dad the beer. Then one day when Timmy came home from school  it was four o'clock and pretty near dark already  Richie says, 'Turn on the light.' The kid turned on the light over the sink, and damn if Richie ain't all wrapped up in a blanket. 'Look,' Richie says, and one hand creeps out from under the blanket. Only it ain't a hand at all. Something grey, is all the kid could tell Henry. Didn't look like a hand at all. Just a grey lump. Well, Timmy Grenadine was scared bad. He says, 'Pop, what's happening to you?' And Richie says, 'I dunno. But it don't hurt. It feels.. kinda nice.' So, Timmy says, 'I'm gonna call Dr Westphail.' And the blanket starts to tremble all over, like something awful was shaking  all over under there. And Richie says, 'Don't you dare. If you do I'll touch ya and you'll end up just like this.' And he slides the blanket down over his face for just a minute. By then we were up to the corner of Harlow arid Curve Street, and I was even colder than the temperature had been on Henry's Orange Crush thermometer when we came out. A person doesn't hardly want to believe such things, and yet there's still strange things in the world. I once knew a fella named George Kelso, who worked for the Bangor Public Works Department. He spent fifteen years fixing water mains and mending electricity cables and all that, an' then one day he just up an' quit, not two years before his retirement. Frankie Haldeman, who knew him, said George went down into a sewer pipe on Essex laughing and joking just like always and came up fifteen minutes later with his hair just as white as snow and his eyes staring like he just looked through a window into hell.