' 'Does he still live in Stratford?' 'Yes, over on Barnum Avenue. Would you like the address?' 'And the phone number, if you have it.' 'Okay. Did you know Don?' 'He used to buy my brother and me apple pie a'la mode down at the Stratford Diner.' 'Christ, that's been gone ten years. Wait a minute.' He came back on the phone and read an address and a phone number. Jim jotted them down, thanked Livingston, and hung up. He dialled 0 again, gave the number, and waited. When the phone began to ring, a sudden hot tension filled him and he leaned forward, turning instinctively away from the drugstore soda fountain, although there was no one there but a plump teenage girl reading a magazine. The phone was picked up and a rich, masculine voice, sounding not at all old, said, 'Hello?' That single word set off a dusty chain reaction of memories and emotions, as startling as the Pavlovian reaction that can be set off by hearing an old record on the radio. 'Mr Nell? Donald Nell?' 'Yes.' 'My name is James Norman, Mr Nell. Do you remember me, by any chance?' 'Yes,' the voice responded immediately. 'Pie a'la mode. Your brother was killed knifed. A shame. He was a lovely boy.' Jim collapsed against one of the booth's glass walls. The tension's sudden departure left him as weak as a stuffed toy. He found himself on the verge of spilling everything, and he bit the urge back desperately. 'Mr Nell, those boys were never caught.' 'No,' Nell said. 'We did have suspects. As I recall, we had a lineup at a Bridgeport police station.' 'Were those suspects identified to me by name?' 'No. The procedure at a police showup was to address the participants by number. What's your interest in this now, Mr Norman?' 'Let me throw some names at you,' Jim said. 'I want to know if they ring a bell in connection with the case.' 'Son, I wouldn't ' 'You might,' Jim said, beginning to feel a trifle desperate. 'Robert Lawson, David Garcia, Vincent Corey. Do any of those 'Corey,' Mr Nell said flatly. 'I remember him. Vinnie the Viper. Yes, we had him up on that. His mother alibied him. I don't get anything from Robert Lawson. That could be anyone's name. But Garcia that rings a bell. I'm not sure why. Hell. I'm old.' He sounded disgusted. 'Mr Nell, is there any way you could check on those boys?' 'Well, of course, they wouldn't be boys anymore.' Oh, yeah? 'Listen, Jimmy. Has one of those boys popped up and started harassing you?' 'I don't know. Some strange things have been happening. Things connected with the stabbing of my brother.' 'What things?' 'Mr Nell, I can't tell you. You'd think I was crazy.' His reply, quick, firm, interested 'Are you?' Jim paused. 'No,' he said. 'Okay, I can check the names through Stratford RI. Where can I get in touch?' Jim gave his home number. 'You'd be most likely to catch me on Tuesday night.' He was in almost every ight, but on Tuesday evenings Sally went to her pottery class. 'What are you doing these days, Jimmy?' 'Teaching school.' 'Good. This might take a few days, you know. I'm retired now.' 'You sound just the same.' 'Ah, but if you could see me!' He chuckled, 'D'you still like a good piece of pie a' la mode, Jimmy?' 'Sure,' Jim said. It was a lie. He hated pie a la mode. 'I'm glad to hear that. Well, if there's nothing else, I'll ' 'There is one more thing. Is there a Milford High in Stratford?' 'Not that I know of.' 'That's what I ' 'Only thing name of Milford around here is Milford Cemetery out on the Ash Heights Road. And no one ever graduated from there.' He chuckled dryly, and to Jim's ears it sounded like the sudden rattle of bones in a pit. 'Thank you,' he heard himself saying. 'Goodbye.' Mr Nell was gone. The operator asked him to deposit sixty cents, and he put it in automatically. He turned, and stared into a horrid, squashed face plastered up against the glass, framed in two spread hands, the splayed fingers flattened white against the glass, as was the tip of the nose. It was Vinnie, grinning at him. Jim screamed. Class again. Living with Lit was doing a composition, and most of them were bent sweatily over their papers, putting their thoughts grimly down on the page, as if chopping wood. All but three. Robert Lawson, sitting in Billy Steam's seat, David Garcia in Kathy Slavin's, Vinnie Corey in Chip Osway's. They sat with their blank papers in front of them, watching him. A moment before the bell, Jim said softly, 'I want to talk to you for a minute after class, Mr Corey.' 'Sure, Norm.' Lawson and Garcia tittered noisily, but the rest of the class did not. When the bell rang, they passed in their papers and fairly bolted through the door. Lawson and Garcia lingered, and Jim felt his belly tighten. Is it going to be now? Then Lawson nodded at Vinnie. 'See you later.' 'Yeah.' They left. Lawson closed the door, and from behind the frosted glass, David Garcia suddenly yelled hoarsely, 'Norm eats it!' Vinnie looked at the door, then back at Jim. He smiled. He said, 'I was wondering if you'd ever get down to it.' 'Really?' Jim said. 'Scared you the other night in the phone booth, right, dad?' 'No one says dad any more, Vinnie. It's not cool. Like cool's not cool. It's as dead as Buddy Holly.' 'I talk the way I want,' Vinnie said. 'Where's the other one? The guy with the funny red hair.' 'Split, man.' But under his studied unconcern, Jim sensed a wariness. 'He's alive, isn't he? That's why he's not here. He's alive and he's thirtytwo or three, the way you would be if ' 'Bleach was always a drag. He's nothing'.' Vinnie sat up behind his desk and put his hands down flat on the old graffiti. His eyes glittered. 'Man, I remember you at that lineup. You looked ready to piss your little old corduroy pants. I seen you lookin' at me and Davie. I put the hex on you.' 'I suppose you did,' Jim said. 'You gave me sixteen years of bad dreams. Wasn't that enough? Why now? Why me?' Vinnie looked puzzled, and then smiled again. 'Because you're unfinished business, man. You got to be cleaned up.' 'Where were you?' Jim asked. 'Before.' Vinnie's lips thinned. 'We ain't talkin' about that. Dig?' 'They dug you a hole, didn't they, Vinnie? Six feet deep. Right in the Milford Cemetery. Six feet of ' 'You shut up!' He was on his feet. The desk fell over in the aisle. 'It's not going to be easy,' Jim said. 'I'm not going to make it easy for you.' 'We're gonna kill you, dad. You'll find out about that hole.' 'Get out of here.' 'Maybe that little wifey of yours, too. 'You goddamn punk, if you touch her ' He started forward blindly, feeling violated and terrified by the mention of Sally. Vinnie grinned and started for the door. 'Just be cool. Cool as a fool.' He tittered. 'If you touch my wife, I'll kill you.' Vinnie's grin widened. 'Kill me? Man, I thought you knew, I'm already dead.' He left. His footfalls echoed in the corridor for a long time. 'What are you reading, hon?' Jim held the binding of the book, Raising Demons, out for her to read. 'Yuck.' She turned back to the mirror to check her hair. 'Will you take a taxi home?' he asked. 'It's only four blocks. Besides, the walk is good for my figure.' 'Someone grabbed one of my girls over on Summer Street,' he lied. 'She thinks the object was rape.' 'Really? Who?' 'Dianna Snow,' he said, making a name up at random. 'She's a levelheaded girl. Treat yourself to a taxi, okay?' 'Okay,' she said. She stopped at his chair, knelt, put her hands on his cheeks and looked into his eyes. 'What's the matter, Jim?' 'Nothing.' 'Yes. Something is.' 'Nothing I can't handle.' 'Is it something about your brother?' A draught of terror blew over him, as if an inner door had been opened. 'Why do you say that?' 'You were moaning his name in your sleep last night. Wayne, Wayne, you were saying. Run, Wayne.' 'It's nothing.' But it wasn't. They both knew it. He watched her go. Mr Nell called quarter past eight. 'You don't have to worry about those guys,' he said. 'They're all dead.' 'Is that so?' He was holding his place in Raising Demons with his index finger as he talked. 'Car smash. Six months after your brother was killed. A cop was chasing them. Frank Simon was the cop, as a matter of fact. He works out at Sikorsky now. Probably makes a lot more money.' 'And they crashed.' 'The car left the road at more than a hundred miles an hour and hit a main power pole. When they finally got the power shut off and scraped them out, they were cooked medium rare.' Jim closed his eyes. 'You saw the report?' 'Looked at it myself.' 'Anything on the car?' 'It was a hot rod.' 'Any description?' 'Black 1954 Ford sedan with "Snake Eyes" written on the side. Fitting enough. They really crapped out.' 'They had a sidekick, Mr Nell. I don't know his name, but his nickname was Bleach.' 'That would be Charlie Sponder,' Mr Nell said without hesitation. 'He bleached his hair with Clorox one time. I remember that. It went streakywhite, and he tried todye it back. The streaks went orange.' 'Do you know what he's doing now?' 'Career army man. Joined up in fiftyeight or nine, after he got a local girl pregnant.' 'Could I get in touch with him?' 'His mother lives in Stratford. She'd know.' 'Can you giye me her address?' 'I won't, Jimmy. Not until you tell me what's eating you.' 'I can't, Mr Nell. You'd think I was crazy.'. 'Try me.' 'I can't.' 'All right, son.' 'Will you ' But the line was dead. 'You bastard,' Jim said, and put the phone in the cradle. It rang under his hand and he jerked away from it as if it had suddenly burned him. He looked at it, breathing heavily. It rang three times, four. He picked it up. Listened. Closed his eyes. A cop pulled him over on his way to the hospital, then went ahead of him, siren screaming. There was a young doctor with a toothbrush moustache in the emergency room. He looked at Jim with dark, emotionless eyes. 'Excuse me, I'm James Norman and ' 'I'm sorry, Mr Norman. She died at 9.04p.m.' He was going to faint. The world went far away and swimmy, and there was a high buzzing in his ears. His eyes wandered without purpose, seeing green tiled walls, a wheeled stretcher glittering under the overhead fluorescents, a nurse with her cap on crooked. Time to freshen up, honey. An orderly was leaning against the wall outside Emergency Room No.1. Wearing dirty whites with a few drops of drying blood splattered across the front. Cleaning his fingernails with a knife. The orderly looked up and grinned into Jim's eyes. The orderly was David Garcia. Jim fainted. Funeral. Like a dance in three acts. The house. The funeral parlour. The graveyard. Faces coming out of nowhere, whirling close, whirling off into the darkness again. Sally's mother, her eyes streaming tears behind a black veil. Her father, looking shocked and old. Simmons. Others. They introduced themselves and shook his hand. He nodded, not remembering their names. Some of the women brought food, and one lady brought an apple pie and someone ate a piece and when he went out in the kitchen he saw it sitting on the counter, cut wide open and drooling juice into the pie plate like amber blood and he thought Should have a big scoop of vanilla ice cream right on top. He felt his hands and legs trembling, wanting to go across to the counter and throw the pie against the wall. And then they were going and he was watching himself, the way you watch yourself in a home movie, as he shook hands and nodded and said Thank you Yes, I will. Thank you I'm sure she is Thank you. When they were gone, the house was his again. He went over to the mantel. It was cluttered with souvenirs of their marriage. A stuffed dog with jewelled eyes that she had won at Coney Island on their honeymoon. Two leather folders  his diploma from B.U. and hers from U. Mass. A giant pair of styrofoam dice she had given him as a gag after he had dropped sixteen dollars in Pinky Silverstein's poker game a year or so before. A thin china cup she had bought in a Cleveland junk shop last year. In the middle of the mantel, their wedding picture. He turned it over and then sat down in his chair and looked at the blank TV set. An idea began to form behind his eyes. An hour later the phone rang, jolting him out of a light doze. He groped for it. 'You're next, Norm.' 'Vinnie?' 'Man, she was like one of those clay pigeons in a shooting gallery. Wham and splatter.' 'I'll be at the school tonight, Vinnie. Room 33. I'll leave the lights off. It'll be just like the overpass that day. I think I can even provide the train.' 'Just want to end it all, is that right?' 'That's right,' Jim said. 'You be there.' 'Maybe.' 'You'll be there,' Jim said, and hung up. It was almost dark when he got to the school. He parked in his usual slot, opened the back door with his passkey, and went first to the English Department office on the second floor. He let himself in, opened the record cabinet, and began to flip through the records. He paused about halfway through the stack and took out one called HiFi Sound Effects. He turned it over. The third cut on the A side was 'Freight Train 3.04'. He put the album on top of the department's portable stereo and took Raising Demons out of his overcoat pocket. He turned to a marked passage, read something, and nodded. He turned out the lights. Room 33. He set up the stereo system, stretching the speakers to their widest separation, and then put on the freighttrain cut. The sound came swelling up out of nothing until it filled the whole room with the harsh clash of diesel engines and steel on steel. With his eyes closed, he could almost believe he was under the Broad Street trestle, driven to his knees, watching as the savage little drama worked to its inevitable conclusion. He opened his eyes, rejected the record, then reset it. He sat behind his desk and opened Raising Demons to a chapter entitled 'Malefic Spirits and How to Call Them'. His lips moved as he read, and he paused at intervals to take objects out of his pocket and lay them on his desk. First, an old and creased Kodak of him and his brother, standing on the lawn in front of the Broad Street apartment house where they had lived. They both had identical crew cuts, and both of them were smiling shyly into the camera. Second, a small bottle of blood. He had caught astray alley cat and slit its throat with his pocketknife. Third, the pocketknife itself. Last, a sweatband ripped from the lining of an old Little League baseball cap. Wayne's cap. Jim had kept it in secret hopes that some day he and Sally would have a son to wear it. He got up, went to the window, looked out. The parking lot was empty. He began to push the school desks towards the walls, leaving a Tough circle in the middle of the room. When that was done he got chalk from his desk drawer and, following the diagram in the book exactly and using a yardstick, he drew a pentagram on the floor. His breath was coming harder now. He turned off the lights, gathered his objects in one hand, and began to recite. 'Dark Father, hear me for my soul's sake. I am one who promises sacrifice. I am one who begs a dark boon for sacrifice. I am one who seeks vengeance of the left hand. I bring blood in promise of sacrifice.' He screwed the cap off the jar, which had originally held peanut butter, and splashed it within the pentagram. Something happened in the darkened schoolroom. It was not possible to say exactly what, but the air became heavier. There was a thickness in it that seemed to fill the throat and the belly with grey steel. The deep silence grew, swelled with something unseen. He did as the old rites instructed. Now there was a feeling in the air that reminded Jim of the time he had taken a class to visit a huge power station  a feeling that the very air was crammed with electric potential and was vibrating. And then a voice, curiously low and unpleasant, spoke to him. 'What do you require?' He could not tell if he was actually hearing it or only thinking that he did. He spoke two sentences. 'It is a small boon. What do you offer?' Jim spoke two words. 'Both,' the voice whispered. 'Right and left. Agreed?' 'Yes.' 'Then give me what is mine. He opened his pocketknife, turned to his desk, laid his right hand down flat, and hacked off his right index finger with four hard chops. Blood flew across the blotter in dark patterns. It didn't hurt at all. He brushed the finger aside and switched the pocketknife to his right hand. Cutting off the left finger was harder. His range hand felt awkward and alien with the missing finger, and the knife kept slipping. At last, with an impatient grunt, he threw the knife away, snapped the bone, and ripped the finger free. He picked them both up like breadsticks and threw them into the pentagram. There was a bright flash of light, like an oldfashioned photographer's flashpowder. No smoke, he noted. No smell of brimstone. 'What objects have you brought?' 'A photograph. A band of cloth that has been dipped in his sweat.' 'Sweat is precious,' the voice remarked, and there was a cold greed in the tone that made Jim shiver. 'Give them to me.' Jim threw them into the pentagram. The light flashed. 'It is good,' the voice said. 'If they come,' Jim said. There was no response. The voice was gone  if it had ever been there. He leaned closer to the pentagram. The picture was still there, but blackened and charred. The sweatband was gone. In the street there was a noise, faint at first, then swelling. A hot rod equipped with glasspack mufflers, first turning on to Davis Street, then approaching. Jim sat down, listening to hear if it would go by or turn in. It turned in. Footfalls on the stairs, echoing. Robert Lawson's highpitched giggle, then someone going 'Shhhhh!' and then Lawson's giggle again. The footfalls came closer, lost their echo, and then the glass door at the head of the stairs banged open. 'Yoohoo, Normie!' David Garcia called, falsetto. 'You there, Normie?' Lawson whispered, and then giggled. 'Vas you dere, C holly?' Vinnie didn't speak, but as they advanced up the hall, Jim could see their shadows. Vinnie's was the tallest, and he was holding a long object in one hand. There was a light snick of sound, and the long object became longer still. They were standing by the door, Vinnie in the middle. They were all holding knives. 'Here we come, man,' Vinnie said softly. 'Here we come for your ass.' Jim turned on the record player. 'Jesus!' Garcia called out, jumping. 'What's that?' The freight train was coming closer. You could almost feel the walls thrumming with it. The sound no longer seemed to be coming out of the speakers but from the hall, from down tracks someplace far away in time as well as space. 'I don't like this, man,' Lawson said. 'It's too late,' Vinnie said. He stepped forward and gestured with the knife. 'Give us your money, dad.' letusgo Garcia recoiled. 'What the hell , But Vinnie never hesitated. He motioned the others to spread out, and the thing in his eyes might have been relief. 'Come on, kid, how much you got?' Garcia asked suddenly. 'Four cents,' Jim said. It was true. He had picked them out of the penny jar in the bedroom. The most recent date was 1956. 'You fuckin' liar.' .leave him alone Lawson glanced over his shoulder and his eyes widened. The walls had become misty, insubstantial. The freight train wailed. The light from the parkinglot streetlamp had reddened, like the neon Burrets Building Company sign, stuttering against the twilight sky. Something was walking out of the pentagram, something with the face of a small boy perhaps twelve years old. A boy with a crew cut. Garcia darted forward and punched Jim in the mouth. He could smell mixed garlic and pepperoni on his breath. It was all slow and painless. Jim felt a sudden heaviness, like lead, in his groin, and his bladder let go. He looked down and saw a dark patch appear and spread on his pants. 'Look, Vinnie, he wet himself!' Lawson cried out. The tone was right, but the expression on his face was one of horror  the expression of a puppet that has come to life only to find itself on strings. 'Let him alone,' the Waynething said, but it was not Wayne's voice  it was the cold, greedy voice of the thing from the pentagram. Run, Jimmy! Run! Run! Run!' Jim slipped to his knees and a hand slapped down on his back, groping for purchase, and found none. He looked up and saw Vinnie, his face stretching into a caricature of hatred, drive his knife into the Waynething just below the breastbone and then scream, his face collapsing in on itself, charring, blackening, becoming awful. Then he was gone. Garcia and Lawson struck a moment later, writhed, charred, and disappeared. Jim lay on the floor, breathing harshly. The sound of the freight train faded. His brother was looking down at him. 'Wayne?' he breathed. And the face changed. It seemed to melt and run together. The eyes went yellow, and a horrible, grinning malignancy looked out at him. 'I'll come back, Jim,' the cold voice whispered. And it was gone. He got up slowly and turned off the record player with one mangled hand. He touched his mouth. It was bleeding from Garcia's punch. He went over and turned on the lights. The room was empty. He looked out into the parking lot and that was empty, too, except for one hubcap that reflected the moon in idiot pantomime. The classroom air smelled old and stale  the atmosphere of tombs. He erased the pentagram on the floor and then began to straighten up the desks for the substitute the next day. His fingers hurt very badly  what fingers? He would have to see a doctor. He closed the door and went downstairs slowly, holding his hands to his chest. Halfway down, something a shadow, or perhaps only an intuition  made him whirl around. Something unseen seemed to leap back. Jim remembered the warning in Raising Demons  the danger involved. You could perhaps summon them, perhaps cause them to do your work. You could even get rid of them. But sometimes they come back. He walked down the stairs again, wondering if the nightmare was over after all. THE LEDGE 'Go on,' Cressner said again. 'Look in the bag.' We were in his penthouse apartment, fortythree stories up. The carpet was deepcut pile, burnt orange. In the middle, between the Basque sling chair where Cressner sat and the genuine leather couch where no one at all sat, there was a brown shopping bag. 'If it's a payoff, forget it,' I said. 'I love her.' 'It's money, but it's not a payoff. Go on. Look.' Re was smoking a Turkish cigarette in an onyx holder. The aircirculation system allowed me just a dry whiff of the tobacco and then whipped it away. He was wearing a silk dressing gown on which a dragon was embroidered. His eyes were calm and intelligent behind his glasses. He looked just like what he was an Anumberone, 500 carat, dyedinthewool son of a bitch. I loved his wife, and she loved me. I had expected him to make trouble, and I knew this was it, but I just wasn't sure what brand it was. I went to the shopping bag and tipped it over. Banded bundles of currency tumbled out on the rug. All twenties. I picked one of the bundles up and counted. Ten bills to a bundle. There were a lot of bundles. 'Twenty thousand dollars,' he said, and puffed on his cigarette. I stood up. 'Okay.' 'It's for you.' 'I don't want it.' 'My wife comes with it.' I didn't say anything. Marcia had warned me how, it would be. He's like a cat, she had said. An old tom full of meanness. He'll try to make you a mouse. 'So you're a tennis pro,' he said. 'I don't believe I've ever actually seen one before.' 'You mean your detectives didn't get any pictures?' 'Oh, yes.' He waved the cigarette holder negligently. 'Even a motion picture of the two of you in that Bayside Motel. A camera was behind the mirror. But pictures are hardly the same, are they?' 'If you say so.' He'll keep changing tacks, Marcia had said. It's the way he puts people on the defensive. Pretty soon he'll have you hitting out at where you think he's going to be, and he'll get you someplace else. Say as little as possible, Stan. And remember that I love you. 'I invited you up because I thought we should have a little mantoman chat, Mr Norris. Just a pleasant conversation between two civilized human beings, one of whom has made off with the other's wife.' I started to answer but decided not to. 'Did you enjoy San Quentin?' Cressner said, puffing lazily. 'Not particularly.' 'I believe you passed three years there. A charge of breaking and entering, if I'm correct.' 'Marcia knows about it,' I said, and immediately wished I hadn't. I was playing his game, just what Marcia had warned against. Hitting soft lobs for him to smash back. 'I've taken the liberty of having your car moved,' he said, glancing out the window at the far end of the room. It really wasn't a window at all the whole wall was glass. In the middle was a slidingglass door. Beyond it, a balcony the size of a postage stamp. Beyond that, a very long drop. There was something strange about the door. I couldn't quite put my finger on it. 'This is a very pleasant building,' Cressner said. 'Good security. Closedcircuit TV and all that. When I knew you were in the lobby, I made a telephone call. An employee then hotwired the ignition of your car and moved it from the parking area here to a public lot several blocks away.' He glanced up at the modernistic sunburst clock above the couch. It was 8.05. 'At 8.20 the same employee will call the police from a public phone booth concerning your car. By 8.30, at the latest, the minions of the law will have discovered over six ounces of heroin hidden in the spare tyre of your trunk. You will be eagerly sought after, Mr Norris.' He had set me up. I had tried to cover myself as well as I could, but in the end I had been child's play for him. 'These things will happen unless I call my employee and tell him to forget the phone call.' 'And all I have to do is tell you where Marcia is,' I said. 'No deal, Cressner, I don't know. We set it up this way just for you.' 'My men had her followed.' 'I don't think so I think we lost them at the airport.' Cressner sighed, removed the smouldering cigarette holder, and dropped it into a chromium ashtray with a sliding lid. No fuss, no muss. The used cigarette and Stan Norris had been taken care of with equal ease. 'Actually,' he said, 'you're right. The old ladiesroom vanishing act. My operatives were extremely vexed to have been taken in by such an ancient ruse. I think it was so old they never expected it.' I said nothing. After Marcia had ditched Cressner's operatives at the airport, she had taken the bus shuttle back to the city and then to the bus station; that had been the plan. She had two hundred dollars, all the money that had been in ny savings account. Two hundred dollars and a Greyhound bus could take you anyplace in the country. 'Are you always to uncommunicative?' Cressner asked, and he sounded genuinely interested. 'Marcia advised it.' A little more sharply, he said 'Then I imagine you'll stand on your rights when the police take you in. And the next time you see my wife could be when she's a little old grandmother in a rocker. Have you gotten that through your head? I understand that possession of six ounces of heroin could get you forty years.' 'That won't get you Marcia back.' He smiled thinly. 'And that's the nub of it, isn't it? Shall I review where we are? You and my wife have fallen in love. You have had an affair if you want to call a series of onenighters in cheap motels an affair. My wife has left me. However, I have you. And you are in what is called a bind. Does that summarize it adequately?' 'I can understand why she got tired of you,' I said. To my surprise, he threw back his head and laughed. 'You know, I rather like you, Mr Norris. You're vulgar and you're a piker, but you seem to have heart. Marcia said you did. I rather doubted it. Her judgement of character is lax. But you do have a certain verve. Which is why I've set things up the way I have. No doubt Marcia has told you that lam fond of wagering.' 'Yes.' Now I knew what was wrong with the door in the middle of the glass wall. It was the middle of winter, and no one was going to want to take tea on a balcony fortythree stories up. The balcony had been cleared of furniture. And the screen had been taken off the door. Now why would Cressner have done that? 'I don't like my wife very much,' Cressner said, fixing another cigarette carefully in the holder. 'That's no secret. I'm sure she's told you as much. And I'm sure a man of your experience knows that contented wives do not jump into the hay with the local tennisclub pro at the drop of a racket. In my opinion, Marcia is a prissy, wheyfaced little prude, a whiner, a weeper, a bearer of tales, a 'That's about enough,' I said. He smiled coldly. 'I beg your pardon. I keep forgetting we are discussing our beloved. It's 8.16. Are you nervous?' I shrugged. 'Tough to the end,' he said, and lit his cigarette. 'At any rate, you may wonder why, if I dislike Marcia so much, I do not simply give her her freedom ' 'No, I don't wonder at all.' He frowned at me. 'You're a selfish, grasping, egocentric son of a bitch. That's why. No one takes what's yours. Not even if you don't want it any more. He went red and then laughed. 'One for you, Mr Norris. Very good.' I shrugged again. 'I'm going to offer you a wager. If you win, you leave here with the money, the woman, and your freedom. On the other hand, if you lose, you lose your life.' I looked at the clock. I couldn't help it. It was 8.19. 'All right,' I said. What else? It would buy time, at least. Time for me to think of some way to beat it out of here, with or without the money. Cressner picked up the telephone beside him and dialled a number. 'Tony? Plan two. Yes.' He hung up. 'What's plan two?' I asked. 'I'll call Tony back in fifteen minutes, and he will remove the offending substance from the trunk of your car and drive it back here. If I don't call, he will get in touch with the police.' 'Not very trusting, are you?' 'Be sensible, Mr Norris. There is twenty thousand dollars on the carpet between us. In this city murder has been committed for twenty cents.' 'What's the bet?' He looked genuinely pained. 'Wager, Mr Norris, wager. Gentlemen make wagers. Vulgarians place bets.' 'Whatever you say.' 'Excellent. I've seen you looking at my balcony.' 'The screen's off the door.' 'Yes. I had it taken off this afternoon. What I propose is this that you walk around my building on the ledge that juts out just below the penthouse level. If you circumnavigate the building successfully, the jackpot is yours.' 'You're crazy.' 'On the contrary. I have proposed this wager six times to six different people during my dozen years in this apartment. Three of the six were professional athletes, like youone of them a notorious quarterback more famous for his TV Commercials than his passing game, one a baseball player, one a rather famous jockey who made an extraordinary yearly salary and who was also afflicted with extraordinary alimony problems. The other three were more ordinary citizens who had differing professions but two things in common a need for money and a certain degree of body grace.' He puffed his cigarette thoughtfully and then continued. 'The wager was declined five times out of hand. On the other occasion, it was accepted. The terms were twenty thousand dollars against six months' service to me. I collected. The fellow took one look over the edge of the balcony and nearly fainted.' Cressner looked amused and contemptuous. 'He said everything down there looked so small. That was what killed his nerve.' 'What makes you think ' He cut me off with an annoyed wave of his hand. 'Don't bore me, Mr Norris. I think you will do it because you have no choice. It's my wager on the one hand or forty years in San Quentin on the other. The money and my wife are only added fillips, indicative of my good nature.


' 'What guarantee do I have that you won't doublecross me? Maybe I'd do it and find out you'd called Tony and told him to go ahead anyway.' He sighed. 'You are a walking case of paranoia, Mr Norris. I don't love my wife. It is doing my storied ego no good at all to have her around. Twenty thousand dollars is a pittance to me. I pay four times that every week to be given to police bagmen. As for the wager, however ' His I thought about it, and he left me. I suppose he knew that the real mark always convinces himself. I was a thirtysixyearold tennis bum, and the club had been thinking of letting me go when Marcia applied a little gentle pressure. Tennis was the only profession I knew, and without it, even getting a job as a janitor would be tough  especially with a record. It was kid stuff, but employers don't care. And the funny thing was that I really loved Maria Cressner. I had fallen for her after two nineo'clock tennis lessons, and she had fallen for me just as hard. It was a case of Stan Norris luck, all right. After thirtysix years of happy bachelorhood, I had fallen like a sack of mail for the wife of an Organization overlord. The old tom sitting there and puffing his imported Turkish cigarette knew all that, of course. And something else, as well. I had no guarantee that he wouldn't turn me in if I accepted his wager and won, but I knew damn well that I'd be in the cooler by ten o'clock if I didn't. And the next time I'd be free would be at the turn of the century. 'I want to know one thing,' I said. 'What might that be, Mr Norris?' 'Look me right in the face and tell me if you're a welsher or not.' He looked at me directly. 'Mr Norris,' he said quietly, 'I never welsh.' 'All right,' I said. What other choice was there? He stood up, beaming. 'Excellent! Really excellent! Approach the door to the balcony with me, Mr Norris.' We walked over together. His face was that of a man who had dreamed this scene hundreds of times and was enjoying its actuality to the fullest. 'The ledge is five inches wide,' he said dreamily. 'I've measured it myself. In fact, I've stood on it, holding on to the balcony, of course. All you have to do is lower yourself over the wroughtiron railing. You'll be chesthigh. But, of course, beyond the railing there are no handgrips. You'll have to inch your way along, being very careful not to overbalance.' My eye had fastened on something else outside the window something that made my blood temperature sink several degrees. It was a wind gauge. Cressner's apartment was quite close to the lake, and it was high enough so there were no higher buildings to act as a windbreak. That wind would be cold, and it would cut like a knife. The needle was standing at ten pretty steadily, but a gust would send the needle almost up to twentyfive for a few seconds before dropping off. 'Ah, I see you've noticed my wind gauge,' Cressner said jovially. 'Actually, it's the other side which gets the prevailing wind; so the breeze may be a little stronger on that side. But actually this is a fairly still night. I've seen evenings when the wind has gusted up to eightyfive you can actually feel the building rock a little. A bit like being on a ship, in the crow's nest. And it's quite mild for this time of year.' He pointed, and I saw the lighted numerals atop a bank skyscraper to the left. They said it was fortyfour degrees. But with the wind, that would have made the chill factor somewhere in the midtwenties. 'Have you got a coat?' I asked. I was wearing a light jacket. 'Alas, no.' The lighted figures on the bank switched to show the time. It was 8.32. 'And I think you had better get started, Mr Norris, so I can call Tony and put plan three into effect. A good boy but apt to be impulsive. You understand.' I understood all right. Too damn well. But the thought of being with Marcia, free from Cressner's tentacles and with enough money to get started at something made me push open the slidingglass door and step out on to the balcony. It was cold and damp; the wind ruffled my hair into my eyes. 'Bon soir,' Cressner said behind me, but I didn't bother to look back. I approached the railing, but I didn't look down. Not yet. I began to do deepbreathing. It's not really an exercise at all but a form of selfhypnosis. With every inhaleexhale, you row a distraction out of your mind, until there's nothing left but the match ahead of you. I got rid of the money with one breath and Cressner himself with two. Marcia took longer  her face kept rising in my mind, telling me not to be stupid, not to play his game, that maybe Cressner never welshed, but he always hedged his bets. I didn't listen. I couldn't afford to. If I lost this match, I wouldn't have to buy the beers and take the ribbing; I'd be so much scarlet sludge splattered for a block of Deakman Street in both directions. When I thought I had it, I looked down. The building sloped away like a smooth chalk cliff to the street far below. The cars parked there looked like those matchbox models you can buy in the fiveanddime. The ones driving by the building were just tiny pinpoints of light. If you fell that far, you would have plenty of time to realize just what was happening, to see the wind blowing your clothes as the earth pulled you back faster and faster. You'd have time to scream a long, long scream. And the sound you'made when you hit the pavement would be like the sound of an overripe watermelon. I could understand why that other guy had chickened out. But he'd only had six months to worry about. I was staring forty long, grey, Marcia4ess years in the eye. I looked at the ledge. It looked small, I had never, seen five inches that looked so much like two. At least the building was fairly new; it wouldn't crumble under me. I hoped. I swung over the railing and carefully lowered myself until I was standing on the ledge. My heels were out over the drop. The floor on the balcony was about chesthigh, and I was looking into Cressner's penthouse through the wroughtiron ornamental bars. He was standing inside the door, smoking, watching me the way a scientist watches a guinea pig to see what the latest injection will do. 'Call,' I said, holding on to the railing. 'What?' 'Call Tony. I don't move until you do.' He went back into the living room  it looked amazingly warm and safe and cosy  and picked up the phone. It was a worthless gesture, really. With the wind, I couldn't hear what he was saying. He put the phone down and returned. 'Taken care of, Mr Norris.' 'It better be.' 'Goodbye, Mr Norris. I'll see you in a bit perhaps.' It was time to do it. Talking was done. I let myself think of Marcia one last time, her lightbrown hair, her wide grey eyes, her lovely body, and then put her out of my mind for good. No more looking down, either. It would have been too easy to get paralysed, looking down through that space. Too easy to just freeze up until you lost your balance or just fainted from fear. It was time for tunnel vision. Time to concentrate on nothing but left foot, right foot. I began to move to the right, holding on to the balcony's railing as long as I could. It didn't take long to see I was going to need all the tennis muscle my ankles had. With my heels beyond the edge, those tendons would be taking all my weight. I got to the end of the balcony, and for a moment I didn't think I was going to be able to let go of that safety. I forced myself to do it. Five inches, hell, that was plenty of room. If the ledge were only a foot off the ground instead of 400 feet, you could breeze around this building in four minutes flat, I told myself. So just pretend it is. Yeah, and if you fall 'from a ledge a foot off the ground, you just say rats, and try again. Up here you get only one chance. I slid my right foot further and then brought my left foot next to it. I let go of the railing. I put my open hands up, allowing the palms to rest against the rough stone of the apartment building. I caressed the stone. I could have kissed it. A gust of wind hit me, snapping the collar of my jacket against my face, making my body sway op the ledge. My heart jumped into my throat and stayed there until the wind had died down. A strong enough gust would have peeled me right off my perch and sent me flying down into the night. And the wind would be stronger on the other side. I turned my head to the left, pressing my cheek against the stone. Cressner was leaning over the balcony, watching me. 'Enjoying yourself?' he asked affably. He was wearing a brown camel'shair overcoat. 'I thought you didn't have a coat,' I said. 'I lied,' he answered equably. 'I lie about a lot of things.' 'What's that supposed to mean?' 'Nothing nothing at all. Or perhaps it does mean something. A little psychological warfare, eh, Mr Norris? I should tell you not to linger overlong. The ankles grow tired, and if they should give way ' He took an apple out of his pocket, bit into it, and then tossed it over the edge. There was no sound for a long time. Then, a faint and sickening plop. Cressner chuckled. He had broken my concentration, and I could feel panic nibbling at the edges of my mind with steel teeth. A torrent of terror wanted to rush in and drown me. I turned my head away from him and did deepbreathing, flushing the panic away. I was looking at the lighted bank sign, which now said 8.46, Time to Save at Mutual! By the time the lighted numbers read 8.49, I felt that I had myself under control again. I think Cressner must have decided I'd frozen, and I heard a sardonic patter of applause when I began to shuffle towards the corner of the building again. I began to feel the cold. The lake had whetted the edge of the wind; its clammy dampness bit at my skin like an auger. My thin jacket billowed out behind me as I shuffled along. I moved slowly, cold or not. If I was going to do this, I would have to do it slowly and deliberately. If I rushed, I would fall. The bank clock read 8.52 when I reached the corner. It didn't appear to be a problem  the ledge went right around, making a square corner  but my right hand told me that there was a crosswind. If I got caught leaning the wrong way, I would take a long ride very quickly. I waited for the wind to drop, but for a long time it refused to, almost as though it were Cressner's willing ally. It slapped against me with vicious, invisible fingers, praying and poking and tickling. At last, after a particularly strong gust had made me rock on my toes, I knew that I could wait for ever and the wind would never drop all the way off. So the next time it sank a little, I slipped my right foot around and, clutching both walls with my hands, made the turn. The crosswind pushed me two ways at once, and I tottered. For a second I was sickeningly sure that Cressner had won his wager. Then I slid a step further along and pressed myself tightly against the wall, a held breath slipping out of my dry throat. That was when the raspberry went off, almost in my ear. Startled, I jerked back to the very edge of balance. My hands lost the wall and pinwheeled crazily for balance. I think that if one of them had hit the stone face of the building, I would have been gone. But after what seemed an eternity, gravity decided to let me return to the wall instead of sending down to the pavement fortythree stories below. My breath sobbed out of my lungs in a pained whistle. My legs were rubbery. The tendons in my ankles were humming like highvoltage wires. I had never felt so mortal. The man with the sickle was close enough to read over my shoulder. I twisted my neck, looked up, and there was Cressner, leaning out of his bedroom window four feet above me. He was smiling, in his right hand he held a New Year's Eve noisemaker. 'Just keeping you on your toes,' he said. I didn't waste my breath. I couldn't have spoken above a croak anyway. My heart was thudding crazily in my chest. I sidled five or six feet along, just in case he was thinking about leaning out and giving me a good shove. Then I stopped and closed my eyes and deepbreathed until I had my act back together again. I was on the short side of the building now. On my right only the highest towers of the city bulked above me. On the left, only the dark circle of the lake, with a few pinpricks of light which floated on it. The wind whooped and moaned. The crosswind at the second corner was not so tricky, and I made it around with no trouble. And then something bit me. I gasped and jerked. The shift of balance scared me, and I pressed tightly against the building. I was bitten again. No not bitten but pecked. I looked down. There was a pigeon standing on the ledge, looking up with bright, hateful eyes. You get used to pigeons in the city; they're as common as cab drivers who can't change a ten. They don't like to fly, and they give ground grudgingly, as if the sidewalks were theirs by squatters' rights. Oh, yes, and you're apt to find their calling cards on the hood of your car. But you never take much notice. They may be occasionally irritating, but they're interlopers in our world. But I was in his, and I was nearly helpless, and he seemed to know it. He pecked my tired right ankle again, sending a bright dart of pain up my leg. 'Get,' I snarled at it. 'Get out.' The pigeon only pecked me again. I was obviously in what he regarded as his home; this section of the ledge was covered with droppings, old and new. A muted cheeping from above. I cricked my neck as far back as it would go and looked up. A beak darted at my face, and I almost recoiled. If I had, I might have become the city's first pigeoninduced casualty. It was Mama Pigeon, protecting a bunch of baby pigeons just under the slight overhang of the roof. Too far up to peck my head, thank God. Her husband pecked me again, and now blood was flowing. I could feel it. I began to inch my way along again, hoping to scare the pigeon off the ledge. No way. Pigeons don't scare, not city pigeons, anyway. If a moving van only makes them amble a little faster, a man pinned on a high ledge isn't going to upset them at all. The pigeon backpedalled as I shuffled forward, his bright eyes never leaving my face except when the sharp beak dipped to peck my ankle. And the pain was getting more intense now; the bird was pecking at raw flesh and eating it, for all I knew. I kicked at it with my right foot. It was a weak kick, the only kind I could afford. The pigeon only fluttered its wings a bit and then returned to the attack. I, on the other hand, almost went off the side. The pigeon pecked me again, again, again. A cold blast of wind struck me, rocking me to the limit of balance; pads of my fingers scraped at the bland stone, and I came to rest with my left cheek pressed against the wall, breathing heavily. Cressner couldn't have conceived of worse torture if he had planned it for ten years. One peck was not so bad. Two or three were little more. But that damned bird must have pecked me sixty times before I reached the wroughtiron railing of the penthouse opposite Cressner's. Reaching that railing was like reaching the gates of heaven. My hands curled sweetly around the cold uprights and held on as if they would never let go. Peck. The pigeon was staring up at me almost smugly with its bright eyes, confident of my impotence and its own invulnerability. I was reminded of Cressner's expression when he had ushered me out on to the balcony on the other side of the building. Gripping the iron bars more tightly, I lashed out with a hard, strong kick and caught the pigeon squarely. It emitted a wholly satisfying squawk and rose into the air, wings flapping. A few feathers, dove grey, settled back to the ledge or disappeared slowly down into the darkness, swanboating back and forth in the air. Gasping, I crawled up on to the balcony and collapsed there. Despite the cold, my body was dripping with sweat. I don't know how long I lay there, recuperating. The building hid the bank clock, and I don't wear a watch. I sat up before my muscles could stiffen up on me and gingerly rolled down my sock. The right ankle was lacerated and bleeding, but the wound looked superficial. Still, I would have to have it taken care of, if I ever got out of this. God know what germs pigeons carry around. I thought of bandaging the raw skin but decided not to. I might stumble on a tied bandage. Time enough later. Then I could buy twenty thousand dollars' worth of bandages. I got up and looked longingly into the darkened penthouse opposite Cressner's. Barren, empty, unlived in. The heavy storm screen was over this door. I might have been able to break in, but that would have been forfeiting the bet. And I had more to lose than money. When I could put it off no longer, I slipped over the railing and back on to the ledge. The pigeon, a few feathers worse for wear, was standing below his mate's nest, where the guano was thickest, eyeing me balefully. But I didn't think he'd bother me, not when he saw I was moving away. It was very hard to move away  much harder than it had been to leave Cressner's balcony. My mind knew I had to, but my body, particularly my ankles, was screaming that it would be folly to leave such a safe harbour. But I did leave, with Marcia's face in the darkness urging me on. I got to the second short side, made it around the corner, and shuffled slowly across the width of the building. Now that I was getting close, there was an almost ungovernable urge to hurry, to get it over with. But if I hurried, I would die. So I forced myself to go slowly. The crosswind almost got me again on the fourth corner, and I slipped around it thanks to luck rather than skill. I rested against the building, getting my breath back. But for the first time I knew that I was going to make it, that I was going to win. My hands felt like half4rozen steaks, my ankles hurt like fire (especially the pigeonpecked right ankle), sweat kept trickling in my eyes, but I knew I was going to make it. Halfway down the length of the building, warm yellow light spilled out on Cressner's balcony. Far beyond I could see the bank sign glowing like a welcomehome banner. It was 10.48, but it seemed that I had spent my whole life on those five inches of ledge. And God help Cressner if he tried to welsh. The urge to hurry was gone. I almost lingered. It was 11.09 when I put first my right hand on the wroughtiron balcony railing and then my left. I hauled myself up, wriggled over the top, collapsed thankfully on the floor and felt the cold steel muzzle of a .45 against my temple. I looked up and saw a goon ugly enough to stop Big Ben dead in its clockwork. He was grinning. 'Excellent!' Cressner's voice said from within. 'I applaud you, Mr Norris!' He proceeded to do just that. 'Bring him in, Tony.' Tony hauled me up and set me on my feet so abruptly that my weak ankles almost buckled. Going in, I staggered against the balcony door. Cressner was standing by the livingroom fireplace, sipping brandy from a goblet the size of a fishbowl. The money had been replaced in the shopping bag. It still stood in the middle of the burntorange rug. I caught a glimpse of myself in a small mirror on the other side of the room. The hair was dishevelled, the face pallid except for two bright spots of colour on the cheeks. The eyes looked insane. I got only a glimpse, because the next moment I was flying across the room. I hit the Basque chair and fell over it, pulling it down on top of me and losing my wind. When I got some of it back, I sat up and managed 'You lousy welsher. You had this planned.' 'Indeed I did,' Cressner said, carefully setting his brandy on the mantel. 'But I'm not a welsher, Mr Norris. Indeed no. Just an extremely poor loser. Tony is here only to make sure you don't do anything illadvised.' He put his fingers under his chin and tittered a little. He didn't look like a poor loser. He looked more like a cat with canary feathers on its muzzle. I got up, suddenly feeling more frightened than I had on the ledge. 'You fixed it,' I said slowly. 'Somehow, you fixed it.' 'Not at all. The heroin has been removed from your car. The car itself is back in the parking lot. The money is over there. You may take it and go.' 'Fine,' I said. Tony stood by the glass door to the balcony, still looking like a leftover from Halloween. The.45 was in his hand. I walked over to the shopping bag, picked it up, and walked towards the door on my jittery ankles, fully expecting to be shot down in my tracks. But when I got the door open, I began to have the same feeling that I'd had on the ledge when I rounded the fourth corner I was going to make it. Cressner's voice, lazy and amused, stopped me. 'You don't really think that old lady'sroom dodge fooled anyone, do you?' I turned back slowly, the shopping bag in my arms. 'What do you mean?' 'I told you I never welsh, and I never do. You won three things, Mr Norris. The money, your freedom, my wife. You have the first two. You can pick up the third at the country morgue.' I stared at him, unable to move, frozen in a soundless thunderclap of shock. 'You didn't really think I'd let you have her? he asked me pityingly. 'Oh, no. The money, yes. Your freedom, yes. But not Marcia. Still, I don't welsh. And after you've had her buried ' I didn't go near him. Not then. He was for later. I walked towards Tony,. who looked slightly surprised until Cressner said in a bored voice 'Shoot him, please.' I threw the bag of money. It hit him squarely in the gun hand, and it struck him hard. I hadn't been using my arms and wrists out there, and they're the best part of any tennis player. His bullet went into the burntorange rug, and then I had him. His face was the toughest part of him. I yanked the gun out of his hand and hit him across the bridge of the nose with the barrel. He went down with a single very weary grunt, looking like Rondo Hatton. Cressner was almost out the door when I snapped a shot over his shoulder and said, 'Stop right there, or you're dead.' He thought about it and stopped. When he turned around, his cosmopolitan worldweary act had curdled a little around the edges. It curdled a little more when he saw Tony lying on the floor and choking on his own blood. 'She's not dead,' he said quickly. 'I had to salvage something, didn't I?' He gave me a sick, cheeseeating grin. 'I'm a sucker, but I'm not that big a sucker,' I said. My voice sounded lifeless, dead. Why not? Marcia had been my life, and this man had put her on a slab. With a finger that trembled slightly, Cressner pointed at the money tumbled around Tony's feet. 'That,' he said, 'that's chickenfeed. I can get you a hundred thousand. Or five. Or how about a million, all of it in a Swiss bank account? How about that? How about , 'I'll make you a bet,' I said slowly. He looked from the barrel of the gun to my face. 'A ' 'A bet,' I repeated. 'Not a wager. Just a plain old bet. I'll bet you can't walk around this building on the ledge out there.' His face went dead pale. For a moment I thought he was going to faint. 'You ' he whispered. 'These are the stakes,' I said in my dead voice. 'If you make it, I'll let you go. How's that?' 'No,' he whispered. His eyes were huge, staring. 'Okay,' I said, and cocked the pistol. 'No!' he said, holding his hands out. 'No! Don't! I.. all right.' He licked his lips. I motioned with the gun, and he preceded me out on to the balcony. 'You're shaking,' I told him. 'That's going to make it harder.' 'Two million,' he said, and he couldn't get his voice above a husky whine. 'Two million in unmarked bills.' 'No,' I said. 'Not for ten million. But if you make it, you go free. I'm serious.' A minute later he was standing on the ledge. He was shorter than I; you could just see his eyes over the edge, wide and beseeching, and his whiteknuckled hands gripping the iron rail like prison bars. 'Please,' he whispered. 'Anything.' 'You're wasting time,' I said. 'It takes it out of the ankles.' But he wouldn't move until I had put the muzzle of the gun against his forehead. Then he began to shuffle to the right, moaning. I glanced up at the bank clock. It was 11.29. I didn't think he was going to make it to the first corner. He didn't want to budge at all, and when he did, he moved jerkily, taking risks with his centre of gravity, his dressing gown billowing into the night. He disappeared around the corner and out of sight at 12.01, almost forty minutes ago. I listened closely for the diminishing scream as the crosswind got him, but it didn't come. Maybe the wind had dropped. I do remember thinking the wind was on his side, when I was out there. Or maybe he was just lucky. Maybe he's out on the other balcony now, quivering in a heap, afraid to go any further. But he probably knows that if I catch him there when I break into the other penthouse, I'll shoot him down like a dog. And speaking of the other side of the building, I wonder how he likes that pigeon. Was that a scream? I don't know. It might have been the wind. It doesn't matter. The bank clock says 12.44. Pretty soon I'll break into the other apartment and check the balcony, but right now I'm just sitting here on Cressner's balcony with Tony's.45 in my hand. Just on the offchance that he might come around that last corner with his dressing gown billowing out behind him. Cressner said he's never welshed on a bet. But I've been known to. STRAWBERRY SPRING Springheel Jack. I saw those two words in the paper this morning and my God, how they take me back. All that was eight years ago, almost to the day. Once, while it was going on, I saw myself on nationwide TV  the Walter Cronkite Report. Just a hurrying face in the general background behind the reporter, but my folks picked me out right away. They called longdistance. My dad wanted my analysis of the situation; he was all bluff and hearty and mantoman. My mother just wanted me to come home. But I didn't want to come home. I was enchanted. Enchanted by that dark and mistblown strawberry spring, and by the shadow of violent death that walked through it on those nights eight years ago. The shadow of Springheel Jack. In New England they call it a strawberry spring. No one knows why; it's just a phrase the oldtimers use. They say it happens once every eight or ten years. What happened at New Sharon Teachers' College that particular strawberry spring there may be a cycle for that, too, but if anyone has figured it out, they've never said. At New Sharon, the strawberry spring began on 16 March 1968. The coldest winter in twenty years broke on that day. It rained and you could smell the sea twenty miles west of the beaches. The snow, which had been thirtyfive inches deep in places, began to melt and the campus walks ran with slush. The Winter Carnival snow sculptures, which had been kept sharp and clearcut for two months by the subzero temperatures, at last began to sag and slouch. The caricature of Lyndon Johnson in front of the Tep fraternity house cried melted tears. The dove in front of Prashner Hall lost its frozen feathers and its plywood skeleton showed sadly through in places. And when night came the fog came with it, moving silent and white along the narrow college avenues and thoroughfares. The pines on the wall poked through it like counting fingers and it drifted, slow as cigarette smoke, under the little bridge down by the Civil War cannons. It made things seem out of joint, strange, magical. The unwary traveller would step out of the jukethumping, brightly lit confusion of the Grinder, expecting the hard clear starriness of winter to clutch him and instead he would suddenly find himself in a silent, muffled world of white drifting fog, the only sound his own footsteps and the soft drip of water from the ancient gutters. You half expected to see Gollum or Frodo and Sam go hurrying past, or to turn and see that the Grinder was gone, vanished, replaced by a foggy panorama of moors and yew trees and perhaps a Druidcircle or a sparkling fairy ring. The jukebox played 'Love Is Blue' that year. It played 'Hey, Jude' endlessly, endlessly. It played 'Scarborough Fair. And at ten minutes after eleven on that night a junior named John Dancey on his way back to his dormitory began screaming into the fog, dropping books on and between the sprawled legs of the dead girl lying in a shadowy corner of the Animal Sciences parking lot, her throat cut from ear to ear but her eyes open and almost seeming to sparkle as if she had just successfully pulled off the funniest joke of her young life  Dancey, an education major and a speech minor, screamed and screamed and screamed. The next day was overcast and sullen, and we went to classes with questions eager in our mouths  who? why? when do you think they'll get him? And always the final thrilled question Did you know her? Did you know her? Yes, I had an art class with her. Yes, one of my roommate 's friends dated her last term. Yes, she asked me for a light once in the Grinder. She was at the next table. Yes, Yes, I Yes yes oh yes, I We all knew her. Her name was Gale Cerman (pronounced Kerrman), and she was an art major. She wore granny glasses and had a good figure. She was well liked but her roommates had hated her. She had never gone out much even though she was one of the most promiscuous girls on campus. She was ugly but cute. She had been a vivacious girl who talked little and smiled seldom. She had been pregnant and she had had leukemia. She was a lesbian who had been murdered by her boyfriend. It was strawberry spring, and on the morning of 17 March we all knew Gale Cerman. Half a dozen State Police cars crawled on to the campus, most of them parked in front of Judith Franklin Hall, where the Cerman girl had lived. On my way past there to my ten o clock class I was asked to show my student ID. I was clever. I showed him the one without the fangs. 'Do you carry a knife?' the policeman asked cunningly. 'Is it about Gale Cerman?' I asked, after I told him that the most lethal thing on my person was a rabbit'sfoot key chain. 'What makes you ask?' He pounced. I was five minutes late to class. It was strawberry spring and no one walked by themselves through the halfacademical, halffantastical campus that night. The fog had come again, smelling of the sea, quiet and deep. Around nine o'clock my roommate burst into our room, where I had been busting my brains on a Milton essay since seven. 'They caught him,' he said. 'I heard it over at the Grinder.' 'From who?' 'I don't know. Some guy. Her boy4riend did it. His name is Carl Amalara.' I settled back, relieved and disappointed. With a name like that it had to be true. A lethal and sordid little crime of passion. 'Okay,' I said. 'That's good.' He left the room to spread the news down the hall. I reread my Milton essay, couldn't figure out what I had been trying to say, tore it up and started again. It was in the papers the next day. There was an incongruously neat picture of Amalara  probably a highschool graduation picture  and it showed a rather sadlooking boy with an olive complexion and dark eyes and pockmarks on his nose. The boy had not confessed yet, but the evidence against him was strong. He and Gale Cerman had argued a great deal in the last month or so, and had broken up the week before. Amalara's roomie said he had been 'despondent'. In a footlocker under his bed, police had found a seveninch hunting knife from L. L. Bean's and a picture of the girl that had apparently been cut up with a pair of shears. Beside Amalara's picture was one of Gale Cerman. It blurrily showed a dog, a peeling lawn flamingo, and a rather mousy blonde girl wearing spectacles. An uncomfortable smile had turned her lips up and her eyes were squinted. One hand was on the dog's head. It was true then. It had to be true. The fog came again that night, not on little cat's feet but in an improper silent sprawl. I walked that night.


I had a headache and I walked for air, smelling the wet, misty smell of the spring that was slowly wiping away the reluctant snow, leaving lifeless patches of last year's grass bare and uncovered, like the head of a sighing old grandmother. For me, that was one of the most beautiful nights I can remember. The people I passed under the haloed streetlights were murmuring shadows, and all of them seemed to be lovers, walking with hands and eyes linked. The melting snow dripped and ran, dripped and ran, and from every dark storm drain the sound of the sea drifted up, a dark winter sea now strongly ebbing. I walked until nearly midnight, until I was thoroughly mildewed, and I passed many shadows, heard many footfalls clicking dreamily off down the winding paths. Who is to say that one of those shadows was not the man or the thing that came to be known as Springheel Jack? Not I, for I passed many shadows but in the fog I saw no faces. The next morning the clamour in the hall woke me. I blundered out to see who had been drafted, combing my hair with both hands and running the fuzzy caterpillar that had craftily replaced my tongue across the dry roof of my mouth. 'He got another one,' someone said to me, his face pallid with excitement. 'They had to let him go.' 'Who go?' 'Amalara!' someone else said gleefully. 'He was sitting in jail when it happened. When what happened?' I asked patiently. Sooner or later I would get it. I was sure of that. 'The guy killed somebody else last night. And now they're hunting all over for it.' 'For what?' The pallid face wavered in front of me again. 'Her head. Whoever killed her took her head with him.' New Sharon isn't a big school now, and was even smaller then  the kind of institution the public relations people chummily refer to as a 'community college'. And it really was like a small community, at least in those days; between you and your friends, you probably had at least a nodding acquaintance with everybody else and their friends. Gale Cerman had been the type of girl you just nodded to, thinking vaguely that you had seen her around. We all knew Ann Bray. She had been the first runnerup in the Miss New England pageant the year before, her talent performance consisting of twirling a flaming baton to the tune of 'Hey, Look Me Over'. She was brainy, too; until the time of her death she had been editor of the school newspaper (a onceweekly rag with a lot of political cartoons and bombastic letters), a member of the student dramatics society, and president of the National Service Sorority, New Sharon Branch. In the hot, fierce bubblings of my freshman youth I had submitted a column idea to the paper and asked for a date  turned down on both counts. And now she was dead worse than dead. I walked to my afternoon classes like everyone else, nodding to people I knew and saying hi with a little more force than usual, as if that would make up for the close way I studied their faces. Which was the same way they were studying mine. There was someone dark among us, as dark as the paths which twisted across the mall or wound among the hundredyearold oaks on the quad in back of the gymnasium. As dark as the hulking Civil War cannons seen through a drifting membrane of fog. We looked into each other's faces and tried to read the darkness behind one of them. This time the police arrested no one. The blue beetles patrolled the campus ceaselessly on the foggy spring nights of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth, and spotlights stabbed in to dark nooks and crannies with erratic eagerness. The administration imposed a mandatory nine o'clock curfew. A foolhardy couple discovered necking in the landscaped bushes north of the Tate Alumni Building were taken to the New Sharon police station and grilled unmercifully for three hours. There was a hysterical false alarm on the twentieth when a boy was found unconscious in the same parking lot where the body of Gale Cerman had been found. A gibbering campus cop loaded him into the back of his cruiser and put a map of the county over his face without bothering to hunt for a pulse and started towards the local hospital, siren wailing across the deserted campus like a seminar of banshees. Halfway there the corpse in the back seat had risen and asked hollowly, 'Where the hell am I?' The cop shrieked and ran off the road. The corpse turned out to be an undergrad named Donald Morris who had been in bed the last two days with a pretty lively case of flu  was it Asian last year? I can't remember. Anyway, he fainted in the parking lot on his way to the Grinder for a bowl of soup and some toast. The days continued warm and overcast. People clustered in small groups that had a tendency to break up and reform with surprising speed. Looking at the same set of faces for too long gave you funny ideas about some of them. And the speed with which rumours swept from one end of the campus to the other began to approach the speed of light; a wellliked history professor had been overheard laughing and weeping down by the small bridge; Gale Cerman had left a cryptic twoword message written in her own blood on the blacktop of the Animal Sciences parking lot; both murders were actually political crimes, ritual murders that had been performed by an offshoot of the SDS to protest the war. This was really laughable. The New Sharon SDS had seven members. One fairsized offshoot would have bankrupted the whole organization. This fact brought an even more sinister embellishment from the campus rightwingers outside agitators. So during those queer, warm days we all kept our eyes peeled for them. The press, always fickle, ignored the strong resemblance our murderer bore to Jack the Ripper and dug further back  all the way to 1819. Ann Bray had been found on a soggy path of ground some twelve feet from the nearest sidewalk, and yet there were no footprints, not even her own. An enterprising New Hampshire newsman with a passion for the arcane christened the killer Springheel Jack, after the infamous Dr John Hawkins of Bristol, who did five of his wives to death with odd pharmaceutical knickknacks. And the name, probably because of that soggy yet unmarked ground, stuck. On the twentyfirst it rained again, and the mall and quadrangle became quagmires. The police announced that they were salting plainclothes detectives, men and women, about, and took half the police cars off duty. The campus newspaper published a strongly indignant, if slightly incoherent, editorial protesting this. The upshot of it seemed to be that, with all sorts of cops masquerading as students, it would be impossible to tell a real outside agitator from a false one. Twilight came and the fog with it, drifting up the treelined avenues slowly, almost thoughtfully, blotting out the buildings one by one. It was soft, insubstantial stuff, but somehow implacable and frightening. Springheel Jack was a man, no one seemed to doubt that, but the fog was his accomplice and it was female or so it seemed to me. If was as if our little school was caught between them, squeezed in some crazy lover's embrace, part of a marriage that had been consummated in blood. I sat and smoked and watched the lights come on in the growing darkness and wondered if it was all over. My roommate came in and shut the door quietly behind him. 'It's going to snow soon,' he said. I turned around and looked at him. 'Does the radio say that?' 'No,' he said. 'Who needs a weatherman? Have you ever heard of strawberry spring?' 'Maybe,' I said. 'A long time ago. Something grandmothers talk about, isn't it?' He stood beside me, looking out at the creeping dark. 'Strawberry spring is like Indian summer,' he said, 'only much more rare. You get a good Indian summer in this part of the country once every two or three years. A spell of weather like we've been having is supposed to come only every eight or ten. It's a false spring, a lying spring, like Indian summer is a false summer. My own grandmother used to say strawberry spring means the worst norther of the winter is still on the way  and the longer this lasts, the harder the storm. 'Folk tales,' I said. 'Never believe a word.' I looked at him. But I'm nervous. Are you?' He smiled benevolently and stole one of my cigarettes from the open pack on the window ledge. 'I suspect everyone but me. and thee,' he said, and then the smile faded a little. 'And sometimes I wonder about thee. Want to go over to the Union and shoot some eightball? I'll spot you ten.' 'Trig prelim next week. I'm going to settle down with a magic marker and a hot pile of notes.' For a long time after he was gone, I could only look out the window. And even after I had opened my book and started in, part of me was still out there, walking in the shadows where something dark was now in charge. That night Adelle Parkins was killed. Six police cars and seventeen collegiatelooking plain clothes men (eight of them were women imported all the way from Boston) patrolled the campus. But Springheel Jack killed her just the same, going unerringly for one of our own. The false spring, the lying spring, aided and abetted him  he killed her and left her propped behind the wheel of her 1964 Dodge to be found the next morning and they found part of her in the back seat and part of her in the trunk. And written in blood on the windshield  this time fact instead of rumour  were two words HA! HA! The campus went slightly mad after that; all of us and none of us had known Adelle Parkins. She was one of those nameless, harried women who worked the breakback shift in the Grinder from six to eleven at night, facing hordes of hamburgerhappy students on study break from the library across the way. She must have had it relatively easy those last three foggy nights of her life; the curfew was 'being rigidly observed, and after nine the Grinder's only patrons were hungry cops and happy janitors  the empty buildings had improved their habitual bad temper considerably. There is little left to tell. The police, as prone to hysteria as any of us and driven against the wall, arrested an innocuous homosexual sociology graduate student named Hanson Gray, who claimed he 'could not remember' where he had spent several of the lethal evenings. They charged him, arraigned him, and let him go to scamper hurriedly back to his native New Hampshire town after the last unspeakable night of strawberry spring when Marsha Curran was slaughtered on the mall. Why she had been out and alone is forever beyond knowing  she was a fat, sadly pretty thing who lived in an apartment in town with three other girls. She had slipped on campus as silently and as easily as Springheel Jack himself. What brought her? Perhaps her need was as deep and as ungovernable as her killer's, and just as far beyond understanding. Maybe a need for one desperate and passionate romance with the warm night, the warm fog, the smell of the sea, and the cold knife. That was on the twentythird. On the twentyfourth the president of the college announced that spring break would be moved up a week, and we scattered, not joyfully but like frightened sheep before a storm, leaving the campus empty and haunted by the police and one dark spectre. I had my own car on campus, and I took six people downstate with me, their luggage crammed in helterskelter. It wasn't a pleasant ride. For all any of us knew, Springheel Jack might have been in the car with us. That night the thermometer dropped fifteen degrees, and the whole northern New England area was belted by a shrieking norther that began in sleet and ended in a foot of snow. The usual number of old duffers had heart attacks shovelling it away  and then, like magic, it was April. Clean showers and starry nights. They called it strawberry spring, God knows why, and it's an evil, lying time that only comes once every eight or ten years. Springheel Jack left with the fog, and by early June, campus conversation had turned to a series of draft protests and a sitin at the building where a wellknown napalm manufacturer was holding job interviews. By June, the subject of Springheel Jack was almost unanimously avoided  at least aloud. I suspect there were many who turned it over and over privately, looking for the one crack in the seemless egg of madness that would make sense of it all. That was the year I graduated, and the next year was the year I married. A good job in a local publishing house. In 1971 we had a child, and now he's almost school age. A fine and questing boy with my eyes and her mouth. Then, today's paper. Of course I knew it was here. I knew it yesterday morning when I got up and heard the mysterious sound of snowmelt running down the gutters, and smelled the salt tang of the ocean from our front porch, nine miles from the nearest beach. I knew strawberry spring had come again when I started home from work last night and had to turn on my headlights against the mist that was already beginning to creep out of the fields and hollows, blurring the lines of the buildings and putting fairy haloes around the street lamps. This morning's paper says a girl was killed on the New Sharon campus near the Civil War cannons. She was killed last night and found in a melting snowbank. She was not she was not all there. My wife is upset. She wants to know where I was last night. I can't tell her because I don't remember. I remember starting home from work, and I remember putting my headlights on to search my way through the lovely creeping fog, but that's all I remember. I've been thinking about that foggy night when I had a headache and walked for air and passed all the lovely shadows without shape or substance. And I've been thinking about the trunk of my car  such an ugly word, trunk and wondering why in the world I should be afraid to open it. I can hear my wife as I write this, in the next room, crying. She thinks I was with another woman last night. And oh dear God, I think so too. THE LAWNMOWER MAN In previous years, Harold Parkette had always taken pride in his lawn. He had owned a large silver Lawnboy and paid the boy down the block five dollars per cutting to push it. In those days Harold Parkette had followed the Boston Red Sox on the radio with a beer in his hand and the knowledge that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world, including his lawn. But last year, in midOctober, fate had played Harold Parkette a nasty trick. While the boy was mowing the grass for the last time of the season, the Castonmeyers' dog had chased the Smiths' cat under the mower. Harold's daughter had thrown up half a quart of cherry KoolAid into the lap of her new jumper, and his wife had nightmares for a week afterwards. Although she had arrived after the fact, she had arrived in time to see Harold and the greenfaced boy cleaning the blades. Their daughter and Mrs Smith stood over them, weeping, although Alicia had taken time enough to change her jumper for a pair of blue jeans and one of those disgusting skimpy sweaters. She had a crush on the boy who mowed the lawn. After a week of listening to his wife moan and gobble in the next bed, Harold decided to get rid of the mower. He didn't really need a mower anyway, he supposed. He had hired a boy this year; next year he would just hire a boy and a mower. And maybe Carla would stop moaning in her sleep. He might even get laid again. So he took the silver Lawnboy down to Phil's Sunoco, and he and Phil dickered over it. Harold came away with a brandnew Kelly blackwall tyre and a tankful of hitest, and Phil put the silver Lawnboy out on one of the pump islands with a handlettered FOR SALE sign on it. And this year, Harold just kept putting off the necessary hiring. When he finally got around to calling last year's boy, his mother told him Frank had gone to the state university. Harold shook his head in wonder and went to the refrigerator to get a beer. Time certainly flew, didn't it? My God, yes. He put off hiring a new boy as first May and then June slipped past him and the Red Sox continued to wallow in fourth place. He sat on the back porch on the weekends and watched glumly as a never ending progression of young boys he had never seen before popped out to mutter a quick hello before taking his buxom daughter off to the local passion pit. And the grass thrived and grew in a marvellous way. It was a good summer for grass; three days of shine followed by one of gentle rain, almost like clockwork. By midJuly, the lawn looked more like a meadow than a suburbanite's backyard, and Jack Castonmeyer had begun to make all sorts of extremely unfunny jokes, most of which concerned the price of hay and alfalfa. And Don Smith's fouryearold daughter Jenny had taken to hiding in it when there was oatmeal for breakfast or spinach for supper. One day in late July, Harold went out on the patio during the seventhinning stretch and saw a woodchuck sitting perkily on the overgrown back walk. The time had come, he decided. He flicked off the radio, picked up the paper, and turned to the classifieds. And halfway down the Part Time column, he found this Lawns mowed. Reasonable. 7762390. Harold called the number, expecting a vacuuming housewife who would yell outside for her son. Instead, a briskly professional voice said, 'Pastoral Greenery and Outdoor Services how may we help you?' Cautiously, Harold told the voice how Pastoral Greenery could help him. Had it come to this, then? Were lawncutters starting their own businesses and hiring office help? He asked the voice about rates, and the voice quoted him a reasonable figure. Harold hung up with a lingering feeling of unease and went back to the porch. He sat down, turned on the radio, and stared out over his glandular lawn at the Saturday clouds moving slowly across the Saturday sky. Carla and Alicia were at his motherinlaw's and the house was his. It would be a pleasant surprise for them if the boy who was coming to cut the lawn finished before they came back. He cracked a beer and sighed as Dick Drago was touched for a double and then hit a batter. A little breeze shuffled across the screenedin porch. Crickets hummed softly in the long grass. Harold grunted something unkind about Dick Drago and then dozed off. He was jarred awake a half hour later by the doorbell. He knocked over his beer getting up to answer it. A man in grassstained denim overalls stood on the front stoop, chewing a toothpick. He was fat. The curve of his belly pushed his faded blue overall out to a point where Harold half suspected he had swallowed a basketball. 'Yes?' Harold Parkette asked, still half asleep. The man grinned, rolled his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other, tugged at the seat of his overalls, and then pushed his green baseball cap up a notch on his forehead. There was a smear of fresh engine oil on the bill of his cap. And there he was, smelling of grass, earth, and oil, grinning at Harold Parkette. 'Pastoral sent me, buddy,' he said jovially, scratching his crotch. 'You called, right? Right, buddy?' He grinned on endlessly. 'Oh. The lawn. You?' Harold stared stupidly. 'Yep, me.' The lawnmower man bellowed fresh laughter into Harold's sleeppuffy face. Harold stood helplessly aside and the lawnmower man tromped ahead of him down the hall, through the living room and kitchen, and on to the back porch. Now Harold had placed the man and everything was all right. He had seen the type before, working for the sanitation department and the highway repair crews out on the turnpike. Always with a spare minute to lean on their shovels and smoke Lucky Strikes or Camels, looking at you as if they were the salt of the earth, able to hit you for five or sleep with your wife any time they wanted to. Harold had always been slightly afraid of men like this; they were always tanned dark brown, there were always nets of wrinkles around their eyes, and they always knew what to do. 'The back lawn's the real chore,' he told the man, unconsciously deepening his voice. 'It's square and there are no obstructions, but it's pretty well grown up.' His voice faltered back into its normal register and he found himself apologizing 'I'm afraid I've let it go.' 'No sweat, buddy. No strain. Greatgreatgreat.' The lawnmower man grinned at him with a thousand travellingsalesmen jokes in his eyes. 'The taller, the better. Healthy soil, that's what you got there, by Circe. That's what I always say.' By Circe? The lawnmower man cocked his head at the radio. Yastrzemski had just struck out. 'Red Sox fan? I'm a Yankees man, myself.' He clumped back into the house and down the front hall. Harold watched him bitterly. He sat back down and looked accusingly for a moment at the puddle of beer under the table with the overturned Coors can in the middle of it. He thought of getting the mop from the kitchen and decided it would keep. No sweat. No strain. He opened his paper to the financial section and cast a judicious eye at the closing stock quotations. As a good Republican, he considered the Wall Street executives behind the columned type to be at least minor demigods (By Circe??) and he had wished many times that he could better understand the Word, as handed down from the mount not on stone tablets but in such enigmatic abbreviations as pct. and Kdk and 3.28 up 23. He had once bought a judicious three shares in a company called Midwest Bisonburgers, Inc., that had gone broke in 1968. He had lost his entire seventyfivedollar investment. Now, he understood, bisonburgers were quite the coming thing. The wave of the future. He had discussed this often with Sonny, the bartender down at the Goldfish Bowl. Sonny told Harold his trouble was that he was five years ahead of his time, and he should A sudden racketing roar startled him out of the new doze he had just been slipping into. Harold jumped to his feet, knocking his chair over and staring around wildly. 'That's a lawnmower?' Harold Parkette asked the kitchen. 'My God, that's a lawnmower?' He rushed through the house and stared out of the front door. There was nothing out there but a battered green van with the words PASTORAL GREENERY, INC. painted on the side. The roaring sound was in back now. Harold rushed through his house again, burst on to the back porch, and stood frozen. It was obscene. It was a travesty. The aged red power mower the fat man had brought in his van was running on its own. No one was pushing it; in fact, no one was within five feet of it. It was running at a fever pitch, tearing through the unfortunate grass of Harold Parkette's back lawn like an avenging red devil straight from hell. It screamed and bellowed and farted oily blue smoke in a crazed kind of mechanical madness that made Harold feel ill with terror. The overripe smell of cut grass hung in the air like sour wine. But the lawnmower man was the true obscenity. The lawnmower man had removed his clothes  every stitch. They were folded neatly in the empty birdbath that was at the centre of the back lawn. Naked and grassstained, he was crawling along about five feet behind the mower, eating the cut grass. Green juice ran down his chin and dripped on to his pendulous belly. And every time the lawnmower whirled around a corner, he rose and did an odd, skipping jump before prostrating himself again. 'Stop!' Harold Parkette screamed. 'Stop that!' But the lawnmower man took no notice, and his screaming scarlet face never slowed. If anything, it seemed to speed up. Its nicked steel grill seemed to grin sweatily at Harold as it raved by. Then Harold saw the mole. It must have been hiding in stunned terror just ahead of the mower, in the swath of grass about to be slaughtered. It bolted across the cut band of lawn towards safety under the porch, a panicky brown streak. The lawnmower swerved. Blatting and howling, it roared over the mole and spat it out in a string of fur and entrails that reminded Harold of the Smiths' cat. The mole destroyed, the lawnmower rushed back to the main job. The lawnmower man crawled rapidly by, eating grass. Harold stood paralysed with horror, stocks, bonds, and bisonburgers completely forgotten. He could actually see that huge, pendulous belly expanding. The lawnmower man swerved and ate the mole. That was when Harold Parkette leaned out of the screen door and vomited into the zinnias. The world went grey, and suddenly he realized he was fainting, had fainted. He collapsed backwards on to the porch and closed his eyes. Someone was shaking him. Carla was shaking him. He hadn't done the dishes or emptied the garbage and Carla was going to be very angry but that was all right. As long as she was waking him up, taking him out of the horrible dream he had been having, back into the normal world, nice normal Carla with her Playtex Living Girdle and her buck teeth Buck teeth, yes. But not Carla's buck teeth. Carla had weaklooking chipmunk buck teeth. But these teeth were Hairy. Green hair was growing on these buck teeth. It almost looked like Grass? 'Oh my God,' Harold said. 'You fainted, buddy, right, huh?' The lawnmower man was bending over him, grinning with his hairy teeth. His lips and chin were hairy, too. Everything was hairy. And green. The yard stank of grass and gas and too sudden silence. Harold bolted up to a sitting position and stared at the dead mower. All the grass had been neatly cut. And there would be no need to rake this job, Harold observed sickly. If the lawnmower man missed a single cut blade, he couldn't see it. He squinted obliquely at the lawnmower man and winced. He was still naked, still fat, still terrifying. Green trickles ran from the corners of his mouth. 'What is this?' Harold begged. The man waved an arm benignly at the lawn. 'This? Well, it's a new thing the boss has been trying. It works out real good. Real good, buddy. We're killing two birds with one stone. We keep getting along towards the final stage, and we're making money to support our other operations to boot. See what I mean? Of course every now and then we run into a customer who doesn't understand  some people got no respect for efficiency, right?  but the boss is always agreeable to a sacrifice. Sort of keeps the wheels greased, if you catch me.' Harold said nothing. One word knelled over and over in his mind, and that word was 'sacrifice'. In his mind's eye he saw the mole spewing out from under the battered red mower. He got up slowly, like a palsied old man. 'Of course,' he said, and could only come up with a line from one of Alicia's folkrock records. 'God bless the grass.' The lawnmower man slapped one summerapplecoloured thigh. 'That's pretty good, buddy. In fact, that's damned good. I can see you got the right spirit. Okay if I write that down when I get back to the office? Might mean a promotion.' 'Certainly,' Harold said, retreating towards the back door and striving to keep his melting smile in place. 'You go right ahead and finish. I think I'll take a little nap 'Sure, buddy,' the lawnmower man said, getting ponderously to his feet. Harold noticed the unusually deep split between the first and second toes, almost as if the feet were well, cloven. 'It hits everybody kinda hard at first,' the lawnmower man said. 'You'll get used to it.' He eyed Harold's portly figure shrewdly. 'In fact, you might even want to give it a whirl yourself. The boss has always got an eye out for new talent.' 'The boss,' Harold repeated faintly. The lawnmower man paused at the bottom of the steps and gazed tolerantly up at Harold Parkette. 'Well, say, buddy. I figured you must have guessed God bless the grass and all.' Harold shook his head carefully and the lawnmower man laughed. 'Pan. Pan's the boss.' And he did a half hop, half shuffle in the newly cut grass and the lawnmower screamed into life and began to trundle around the house. 'The neighbours ' Harold began, but the lawnmower man only waved cheerily and disappeared. Out front the lawnmower blatted and howled. Harold Parkette refused to look, as if by refusing he could deny the grotesque spectacle that the Castonmeyers and Smiths wretched Democrats both  were probably drinking in with horrified but no doubt righteously Itoldyouso eyes. Instead of looking, Harold went to the telephone, snatched it up, and dialled police headquarters from the emergency decal pasted on the phone's handset. 'Sergeant Hall,' the voice at the other end said. Harold stuck a finger in his free ear and said, 'My name is Harold Parkette. My address is 1421 East Endicott Street. I'd like to report ' What? What would he like to report? A man is in the process of raping and murdering my lawn and he works for a fellow named Pan and has cloven feet? 'Yes, Mr Parkette?' Inspiration struck. 'I'd like to report a case of indecent exposure.' 'Indecent exposure,' Sergeant Hall repeated. 'Yes. There's a man mowing my lawn. He's in the, uh, altogether.' 'You mean he's naked?' Sergeant Hall asked, politely incredulous. 'Naked!' Harold agreed, holding tightly to the frayed ends of his sanity. 'Nude. Unclothed. Bareassed. On my front lawn. Now will you get somebody the hell over here?' 'That address was 1421 West Endicott?' Sergeant Hall asked bemusedly. 'East!' Harold yelled. 'For God's sake , 'And you say he's definitely naked? You are able to observe his, uh, genitals and so on?' Harold tried to speak and could only gargle. The sound of the insane lawnmower seemed to be growing louder and louder, drowning out everything in the universe. He felt his gorge rise. 'Can you speak up?' Sergeant Hall buzzed. 'There's an awfully noisy connection there at your end ' The front door crashed open. Harold looked around and saw the lawnmower man's mechanized familiar advancing through the door. Behind it came the lawnmower man himself, still quite naked. With something approaching true insanity, Harold saw the man's pubic hair was a roch fertile green. He was twirling his baseball cap on one finger. 'That was a mistake, buddy,' the lawnmower man said reproachfully. 'You shoulda stuck with God bless the grass.' 'Hello? Hello, Mr Parkette ' The telephone dropped from Harold's nerveless fingers as the lawnmower began to advance on him, cutting through the nap of Carla's new Mohawk rug and spitting out brown hunks of fibre as it came. Harold stared at it with a kind of birdandsnake fascination until it reached the coffee table. When the mower shunted it aside, shearing one leg into sawdust and splinters as it did so, he climbed over the back of his chair and began to retreat towards the kitchen, dragging the chair in front of him. 'That won't do any good, buddy,' the lawnmower man said kindly. 'Apt to be messy, too. Now if you was just to show me where you keep your sharpest butcher knife, we could get this sacrifice business out of the way real painless. I think the birdbath would do and then , Harold shoved the chair at the lawnmower, which had been craftily flanking him while the naked man drew his attention, and bolted through the doorway. The lawnmower roared around the chair, jetting out exhaust, and as Harold smashed open the porch screen door and leaped down the steps, he heard it  smelled it, felt it  right at his heels. The lawnmower roared off the top step like a skier going off a jump. Harold sprinted across his newly cut back lawn, but there had been too many beers, too many afternoon naps. He could sense it nearing him, then on his heels, and then he looked over his shoulder and tripped over his own feet. The last thing Harold Parkette saw was the grinning grill of the charging lawnmower, rocking back to reveal its flashing, greenstained blades, and above it the fat face of the lawnmower man, shaking his head in goodnatured reproof. 'Hell of a thing,' Lieutenant Goodwin said as the last of the photographs were taken. He nodded to the two men in white, and they trundled their basket across the lawn. 'He reported some naked guy on his lawn not two hours ago.