The floor beneath us trembled, as if the familiar which haunted this church came now unto us, to protect its own. The fabric of sane space and time seemed to twist and crack; the church seemed filled with spectres and litten with the hellglow of eternal cold fire. It seemed that I saw James Boon, hideous and misshapen, cavorting around the supine body of a woman, and my Granduncle Philip behind him, an acolyte in a black, hooded cassock, who held a knife and a bowl. 'Deum vobiscum magna vermis , The words shuddered and writhed on the page before me, soaked in the blood of sacrifice, prize of a creature that shambles beyond the stars A blind, interbred congregation swaying in mindless, demonic praise; deformed faces filled with hungering, nameless anticipation And the Latin was replaced by an older tongue, ancient when Egypt was young and the Pyramids unbuilt, ancient when this Earth still hung in an unformed, boiling firmament of empty gas 'Gyyagin vardar Yogsoggoth! Verminis! Gyyagin! Gyyagin! Gyyagin!' The pulpit began to rend and split, pushing upwards Calvin screamed and lifted an arm to shield his face. The narthex trembled with a huge, tenebrous motion like a ship wracked in a gale. I snatched up the book and held it away from me; it seemed filled with the heat of the sun and I felt that I should be cindered, blinded. 'Run!' Calvin screamed. 'Run!' But I stood frozen and the alien presence filled me like an ancient vessel that had waited for years  for generations! 'Gyyagin vardar!' I screamed. 'Servant of Yogsoggoth, the Nameless One! The Worm from beyond Space! Star Eater! Blinder of Time! Verminis! Now comes the Hour of Filling, the Time of Rending! Verminis! Alyah! Alyah! Gyyagin!' Calvin pushed me and I tottered, the church whirling before me, and fell to the floor. My head crashed against the edge of an upturned pew, and red fire filled my head yet seemed to clear it. I groped for the sulphur matches I had brought. Subterranean thunder filled the place. Plaster fell. The rusted bell in the steeple pealed a choked devil's carillon in symJ)athetic vibration. My match flared. I touched it to the book just as the pulpit exploded upwards in a rending explosion of wood. A huge black maw was discovered beneath; Cal tottered on the edge his hands held out, his face distended in a wordless scream that I shall hear for ever. And then there was a huge surge of grey, vibrating flesh. The smell became a nightmare tide. It was a huge outpouring of a viscid, pustulant jelly, a huge and awful form that seemed to skyrocket from the very bowels of the ground. And yet, with a sudden horrible comprehension which no man can have known, I perceived that it was but one ring, one segment, of a monster worm that had existed eyeless for years in the chambered darkness beneath that abominated church! The book flared alight in my hands, and the Thing seemed to scream soundlessly above me. Calvin was struck glancingly and flung the length of the church like a doll with a broken neck. It subsided  the thing subsided, leaving only a huge and shattered hole surrounded with black slime, and a great screaming, mewling sound that seemed to fade through colossal distances and was gone. I looked down. The book was ashes. I began to laugh, then to howl like a struck beast. All sanity left me and I sat on the floor with blood streaming from my temple, screaming and gibbering into those unhallowed shadows while Calvin sprawled in the far corner, staring at me with glazing, horrorstruck eyes. I have no idea how long I existed in that state. It is beyond all telling. But when I came again to my faculties, shadows had drawn long paths around me and I sat in twilight. Movement had caught my eye, movement from the shattered hole in the narthex floor. A hand groped its way over the riven floorboards. My mad laughter choked in my throat. All hysteria melted into numb bloodlessness. With terrible, vengeful slowness, a wracked figure pulled itself up from darkness, and a halfskull peered at me. Beetles crawled over the fleshless forehead. A rotted cassock clung to the askew hollows of mouldered collarbones. Only the eyes lived  red, insane pits that glared at me with more than lunacy; they glared with the empty life of the pathless wastes beyond the edges of the Universe. It came to take me down to darkness. That was when I fled screeching, leaving the body of my lifelong friend unheeded in that place of dread. I ran until the air seemed to burst like magma in my lungs and brain. I ran until I had gained this possessed and tainted house again, and my room, where I collapsed and have lain like a dead man until today. I ran because even in my crazed state, and even in the shattered ruin of that deadyetanimated shape, I had seen the family resemblance. Yet not of Philip or of Robert, whose likenesses hang in an upstairs gallery. That rotted visage belonged to James Boon, Keeper of the Worm! He still lives somewhere in the twisted, lightless wanderings beneath Jerusalem's Lot and Chapelwaite  and It still lives. The burning of the book thwarted It, but there are other copies. Yet I am the gateway, and I am the last of the Boone blood. For the good of all humanity I must die and break the chain for ever. I go to the sea now, Bones. My journey, like my story, is at an end. May God rest you and grant you all peace. CHARLES The odd series of papers above was eventually received by Mr Everett Granson, to whom they had been addressed. It is assumed that a recurrence of the unfortunate brain fever which struck him originally following the death of his wife in 1848 caused Charles Boone to lose his sanity and murder his companion and longtime friend, Mr Calvin McCann. The entries in Mr McCann's pocket journal are a fascinating exercise in forgery, undoubtedly perpetrated by Charles Boone in an effort to reinforce his own paranoid delusions. In at least two particulars, however, Charles Boone is proved wrong. First, when the town of Jerusalem's Lot was 'rediscovered' (I use the term historically, of course),the floor of the narthex, although rotted, showed no sign of the explosion or huge damage. Although the ancient pews were overturned and several windows shattered, this can be assumed to be the work of vandals from neighbouring towns over the years. Among the older residents of Preacher's Corners and Tandrell there is still some idle rumour about Jerusalem's Lot (perhaps, in his day, it was this kind of harmless folk legend which started Charles Boone's mind on its fatal course), but this seems hardly relevant. Second, Charles Boone was not the last of his line. His grandfather, Robert Boone, sired at least two bastards. One died in infancy. The second took the Boone name and located in the town of Central Falls, Rhode Island. I am the final descendant of this offshoot of the Boone line; Charles Boone's second cousin, removed by three generations. These papers have been in my committal for ten years. I offer them for publication on the occasion of my residence in the Boone ancestral home, Chapelwaite, in the hope that the reader will find sympathy in his heart for Charles Boone's poor, misguided soul. So far as I can tell, he was correct about only one thing this place badly needs the services of an exterminator. There are some huge rats in the walls, by the sound. Signed, James Robert Boone 2 October 1971. FOREWORD Let's talk, you and I. Let's talk about fear. The house is empty as I write this; a cold February rain is falling outside. It's night. Sometimes when the wind blows the way it's blowing now, we lose the power. But for now it's on, and so let's talk very honestly about fear. Let's talk very rationally about moving to the rim of madness and perhaps over the edge. My name is Stephen King. I am a grown man with a wife and three children. I love them, and I believe that the feeling is reciprocated. My job is writing, and it's a job I like very much. The stories  Carrie, 'Salem's Lot, and The Shining  have been successful enough to allow me to write fulltime, which is an agreeable thing to be able to do. At this point in my life I seem to be reasonably healthy. In the last year I have been able to reduce my cigarette habit from the unfiltered brand I had smoked since I was eighteen to a low nicotine and tar brand, and I still hope to be able to quit completely. My family and I live in a pleasant house beside a relatively unpolluted lake in Maine; last fall I awoke one morning and saw a deer standing on the back lawn by the picnic table. We have a good life. Still let's talk about fear. We won't raise our voices and we won't scream; we'll talk rationally, you and I. We'll talk about the way the good fabric of things sometimes has a way of unravelling with shocking suddenness. At night, when I go to bed, I still am at pains to be sure that my legs are under the blanket after the lights go out. I'm not a child any more but I don't like to sleep with one leg sticking out. Because if a cool hand ever reached out from under the bed and grasped my ankle, I might scream. Yes, I might scream to wake the dead. That sort of thing doesn't happen, of course, and we all know that. In the stories that follow you will encounter all manner of night creatures; vampires, demon lovers, a thing that lives in the closet, all sorts of other terrors. None of them are real. The thing under my bed waiting to grab my ankle isn't real. I know that, and I also know that if I'm careful to keep my foot under the covers, it will never be able to grab my ankle. Sometimes I speak before groups of people who are interested in writing or in literature, and before the questionandanswer period is over, someone always rises and asks this question Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects? I usually answer this with another question Why do you assume that I have a choice? Writing is a catchascatchcan sort of Occupation. All of us seem to come equipped with filters on the floors of our minds, and all the filters having differing sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through yours. What catches in yours may pass through mine, no sweat. All of us seem to have a builtin obligation to sift through the sludge that gets caught in our respective mindfilters, and what we find there usually develops into some sort of sideline. The accountant may also be a photographer. The astronomer may collect coins. The schoolteacher may do gravestone rubbings in charcoal. The sludge caught in the mind's filter, the stuff that refuses to go through, frequently becomes each person's private obsession. In civilized society we have an unspoken agreement to call our obsessions 'hobbies.' Sometimes the hobby can become a fulltime job. The accountant may discover that he can make enough money to support his family taking pictures; the schoolteacher may become enough of an expert on grave rubbings to go on the lecture circuit. And there are some professions which begin as hobbies and remain hobbies even after the practitioner is able to earn his living by pursuing his hobby; but because 'hobby' is such a bumpy, comonsounding little word, we also have an unspoken agreement that we will call our professional hobbies 'the arts.' Painting. Sculpture. Composing. Singing. Acting. The playing of a musical instrument. Writing. Enough books have been written on these seven subjects alone to sink a fleet of luxury liners. And the only thing we seem to be able to agree upon about them is this that those who practise these arts honestly would continue to practise them even if they were not paid for their efforts; even if their efforts were criticized or even reviled; even on pain of imprisonment or death. To me, that seems to be a pretty fair definition of obsessional behaviour. It applies to the plain hobbies as well as the fancy ones we call 'the arts'; gun collectors sport bumper stickers reading you WILL TAKE MY GUN ONLY WHEN YOU PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM IT, and in the suburbs of Boston, housewives who discovered political activism during the busing furore often sported similar stickers reading YOU'LL TAKE ME TO PRISON BEFORE YOU TAKE MY CHILDREN OUT OF THE NEIGHBOURHOOD on the back bumpers of their station wagons. Similarly, if coin collecting were outlawed tomorrow, the astronomer very likely wouldn't turn in his steel pennies and buffalo nickels; he'd wrap them carefully in plastic, sink them to the bottom of his toilet tank, and gloat over them after midnight. We seem to be wandering away from the subject of fear, but we really haven't wandered very far. The sludge that catches in the mesh of my drain is often the stuff of fear. My obsession is with the macabre. I didn't write any of the stories which follow for money, although some of them were sold to magazines before they appeared here and I never once returned a cheque uncashed. I may be obsessional but I'm not crazy. Yet I repeat I didn't write them for money; I wrote them because it occurred to me to write them. I have a marketable obsession. There are madmen and madwomen in padded cells the world over who are not SO lucky I am not a great artist, but I have always felt impelled to write. So each day I sift the sludge anew, going through the castoff bits and pieces of observation, of memory, of speculation, trying to make something out of the stuff that didn't go through the filter and down the drain into the subconscious. Louis L'Amour, the Western writer, and I might both stand at the edge of a small pond in Colorado, and we both might have an idea at exactly the same time. We might both feel the urge to sit down and try to work it out in words. His story might be about water rights in a dry season, my story would more likely be about some dreadful, hulking thing rising out of the still waters to carry off sheep and horses and finally people. Louis L'Amour's 'obsession' centres on the history of the Amencan West; I tend more towards things that slither by starlight. He writes Westerns; I write fearsomes. We're both a little bit nuts. The arts are obsessional, and obsession is dangerous. It's like a knife in the mind. In some cases  Dylan Thomas comes to mind, and Ross Lockridge and Hart Craine and Sylvia Plath  the knife can turn savagely upon the person wielding it. Art is a localized illness, usually benign creative people tend to live a long time  sometimes terribly malignant. You use the knife carefully, because you know it doesn't care who it cuts. And if you are wise you sift the sludge carefully because some of that stuff may not be dead. After the why do you write that stuff question has been disposed of, the companion question comes up Why do people read that stuff? What makes it sell? This question carries a hidden assumption with it, and the assumption is that the story about fear, the story about horror, is an unhealthy taste. People who write me often begin by saying, 'I suppose you will think I'm strange, but I really liked 'Salem's Lot,' or 'Probably I'm morbid, but I enjoyed every page of The Shining.. I think the key to this may lie in a line of movie criticism from Newsweek magazine. The review was of a horror film, not a very good one, and it went something like this' a wonderful movie for people who like to slow down and look at car accidents.' It's a good snappy line, but when you stop and think about it, it applies to all horror films and stories. The Night of the Living Dead, with its gruesome scenes of human Cannibalism and matricide, was certainly a film for people who like to slow down and look at car accidents; and how about that little girl puking pea soup all over the priest in The Exorcist? Bram Stoker's Dracula, often a basis of comparison for the modern horror story (as it should be; it is the first with unabashedly psychoFreudian overtones), features a maniac named Renfeld who gobbles flies, spiders, and finally a bird. He regurgitates the bird, having eaten it feathers and all. The novel also features the impalement  the ritual penetration, one could say  of a young and lovely female vampire and the murder of a baby and the baby's mother. The great literature of the supernatural often contains the same 'let's slow down and look at the accident' syndrome Beowulf slaughtering Grendel's mother; the narrator of 'The TellTale Heart' dismembering his cataractstricken benefactor and putting the pieces under the floorboards; the Hobbit Sam's grim battle with Shelob the spider in the final book of Tolkien's Rings trilogy. There will be some who will object strenuously to this line of thought, saying that Henry James is not showing us a car accident in The Turn of the Screw; they will claim that Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories of the macabre, such as 'Young Goodman Brown' and 'The Minister's Black Veil', are also rather more tasteful than Dracula. It's a nonsensical idea. They are still showing us the car accident; the bodies have been removed but we can still see the twisted wreckage and observe the blood on the upholstery. In some ways the delicacy, the lack of melodrama, the low and studied tone of rationality that pervades a story like 'The Minister's Black Veil' is even more terrible than Lovecraft's batrachian monstrosities or the autodafe of Poe's 'The Pit and the Pendulum'. The fact is  and most of us know this in our hearts  that very few of us can forgo an uneasy peek at the wreckage bracketed by police cars and road flares on the turnpike at night. Senior citizens pick up the paper in the morning and immediately turn to the obituary column so they can see who they outlived. All of us are uneasily transfixed for a moment when we hear that a Dan Blocker has died, a Freddy Prinze, a Janis Joplin. We feel terror mixed with an odd sort of glee when we hear Paul Harvey on the radio telling us that a woman walked into a propeller blade during a rain squall at a small country airport or that a man in a giant industrial blender was vaporized immediately when a coworker stumbled against the controls. No need to belabour the obvious; life is full of horrors small and large, but because the small ones are the ones we can comprehend, they are the ones that smack home with all the force of mortality. Our interest in these pocket horrors is undeniable, but so is our own revulsion. The two of them mix uneasily, and the byproduct of the mix seems to be guilt a guilt which seems not much different from the guilt that used to accompany sexual awakening. It is not my business to tell you not to feel guilty, any more than it is my business to justify my novels or the short stories which follow. But an interesting parallel between sex and fear can be observed. As we become capable of having sexual relationships, our interest in those relationships awakens; the interest, unless perverted somehow, tends naturally towards copulation and the continuance of the species. As we become aware unavoidable termination, we become aware of the fearemotion. And I think that, as copulation tends towards selfpreservation, all fear tends towards a comprehension of the final ending. There is an old fable about seven blind men who grabbed seven different parts of an elephant. One of them thought he had a snake, one of them thought he had a giant palm leaf, one of them thought he was touching a stone pillar. When they got together, they decided they had an elephant. Fear is the emotion that makes us blind. How many things are we afraid of? We're afraid to turn off the lights when our hands are wet. We're afraid to stick a knife into the toaster to get the stuck English muffin without unplugging it first. We're afraid of what the doctor may tell us when the physical exam is over; when the airplane suddenly takes a great unearthly lurch in midair. We're afraid that the oil may run out, that the good air will run out, the good water, the good life. When the daughter promised to be in by eleven and it's now quarter past twelve and sleet is spatting against the window like dry sand, we sit and pretend to watch Johnny Carson and look occasionally at the mute telephone and we feel the emotion that makes us blind, the emotion that makes a stealthy ruin of the thinking process. The infant is a fearless creature only until the first time the mother isn't there to pop the nipple into his mouth when he cries. The toddler quickly discovers the blunt and painful truths of the slamming door, the hot burner, the fever that goes with the croup or the measles. Children learn fear quickly; they pick it up off the mother's or father's face when the parent comes into the bathroom and sees them with the bottle of pills or the safety razor. Fear makes us blind, and we touch each fear with all the avid curiosity of selfinterest, trying to make a whole out of a hudred parts, like the blind men with their elephant. We sense the shape. Children grasp it easily, forget it, and relearn as adults. The shape is there, and most of us come to realise what it is sooner or later it is the shape of a body under a sheet. All our fears add up to one great fear, all our fears are part of that great fear  an arm, a leg, a finger, an ear. We're afraid of the body under the sheet. It's our body. And the great appeal of horror fiction through the ages is that it serves as a rehearsal for our own deaths. The field has never been highly regarded; for a long time the only friends that Poe and Lovecraft had were the French, who have somehow come to an arrangement with both sex and death, an arrangement that Poe and Lovecraft's fellow Americans certainly had no patience with. The Americans were busy building railroads, and Poe and Lovecraft died broke. Tolkien's MiddleEarth fantasy went kicking around for twenty years before it became an aboveground success, and Kurt Vonnegut, whose books so often deal with the deathrehearsal idea, has faced a steady wind of criticism, much of it mounting to hysterical pitch. It may be because the horror writer always brings bad news you're going to die, he says; he's telling you to never mind Oral Roberts and his 'something good is going to happen to you', because something bad is also going to happen to you, and it may be cancer and it may be a stroke, and it may be a car accident, but it's going to happen. And he takes your hand and he enfolds it in his own and he takes you into the room and he puts your hands on the shape under the sheet and tells you to touch it here here and here Of course, the subjects of death and fear are not the horror writer's exclusive province. Plenty of socalled 'mainstream' writers have dealt with these themes, and in a variety of different ways  from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment to Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer stories. Fear has always been big. Death has always been big. They are two of the human constants. But only the writer of horror and the supernatural gives the reader such an opportunity for total identification and catharsis. Those working in the gentre with even the faintest understanding of what they are doing know that the entire field of horror and the supernatural is a kind of filter screen between the conscious and the subconscious; horror fiction is like a central subway station in the human psyche between the blue line of what we can safely internalize and the red line of what we need to get rid of in some way or another. When you read horror, you don't really believe what you read. You don't believe in vampires, werewolves, trucks that suddenly start up and drive themselves. The horrors that we all do believe in are of the sort that Dostoyevsky and Albee and MacDonald write about hate, alienation, growing lovelessly old, tottering out into a hostile world on the unsteady legs of adolescence. We are, in our real everyday worlds, often like the masks of Comedy and Tragedy, grinning on the outside, grimacing on the inside. There's a central switching point somewhere inside, a transformer, maybe, where the wires leading from those two masks connect. And that is the place where the horror story so often hits home. The horrorstory writer is not so different from the Welsh sineater, who was supposed to take upon himself the sins of the dear departed by partaking of the dear departed's food. The tale of monstrosity and terror is a basket loosely packed with phobias; when the writer passes by, you take one of his imaginary horrors out of the basket and put one of your real ones in  at least for a time. Back in the 1950s there was a tremendous surge of giant bug movies  Them!. The Beginning of the End, The Deadly Mantis, and so on. Almost without fail, as the movie progressed, we found out that these gigantic, ugly mutants were the results of Abomb tests in New Mexico or on deserted Pacific atolls (and in the more recent Horror of Party Beach, which might have been subtitled Beach Blanket Armageddon, the culprit was nuclearreactor waste). Taken together, the bigbug movies form an undeniable pattern, an uneasy gestalt of a whole country's terror of the new age that the Manhattan Project had rung in. Later in the fifties there was a cycle of 'teenage' horror movies, beginning with such epics as TeenAgers from Outer Space and The Blob, in which a beardless Steve McQueen battled a sort of JellOmutant with the help of his teenaged friends. In an age when every weekly magazine contained at least one article on the rising tide of juvenile delinquency, the teenager fright films expressed a whole country's uneasiness with the youth revolution even then brewing; when you saw Michael Landon turn into a werewolf in a highschool leather jacket, a connection happened between the fantasy on the screen and your own floating anxieties about the nerd in the hot rod that your daughter was dating. To the teenagers themselves (I was one of them and speak from experience), the monsters spawned in the leased AmericanInternational studios gave them a chance to see someone even uglier than they felt themselves to be; what were a few pimples compared to the shambling thing that used to be a highschool kid in I Was a TeenAge Frankenstein? This same cycle also expressed the teenagers' own feeling that they were being unfairly put upon and put down by their elders, that their parents just 'did not understand'. The movies are formulaic (as so much of horror fiction is, written or filmed), and what the formula expresses most clearly is a whole generation's paranoia  a paranoia no doubt caused in part by all the articles their parents were reading. In the films, some terrible, warty horror is menacing Elmville. The kids know, because the flying saucer landed near lovers' lane. In the first reel, the warty horror kills an old man in a pickup truck (the old man was unfailingly played by Elisha Cook, Jr.). In the next three reels, the kids try to convince their elders that the warty horror is indeed slinking around. 'Get here before I lock you all up for violating the curfew!' Elmesville's police chief growls just before the monster slithers down Main Street, laying waste in all directions. In the end it is the quickthinking kids who put an end to the warty horror, and then go off to the local hangout to suck up chocolate malteds and jitterbug to some forgettable tune as the end credits run. That's three separate opportunities for catharsis in one cycle of movies  not bad for a bunch of lowbudget epics that were usually done in under ten days. It didn't happen because the writers and producers and directors of those films wanted it to happen; it happened because the horror tale lives most naturally at that connection point between the conscious and the subconscious, the place where both image and allegory occur most naturally and with the most devastating effect. There is a direct line of evolution between I Was a TeenAge Werewolf and Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and between TeenAge Monster and Brian De Palma's film Carrie. Great horror fiction is almost always allegorical; sometimes the allegory is intended, as in Animal Farm and 1984, and sometimes it just happens  J. R. R. Tolkien swore and down that the Dark Lord of Mordor was not Hitler in fantasy dress, but the theses and term papers to just that effect go on and on maybe because, as Bob Dylan says, when you got a lot of knives and forks, you gotta cut something. The works of Edward Albee, of Steinbeck, Camus, Faulkner  they deal with fear and death, sometimes with horror, but usually these mainstream writers deal with it in a more normal, reallife way. Their work is set in the frame of a rational world; they are stories that 'could happen'. They are on that subway line that runs through the external world. There are other writers  James Joyce, Faulkner again, poets such as T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton  whose work is set in the land of the symbolic unconsciousness. They are on the subway line running into the internal landscape. But the horror writer is almost always at the terminal joining the two, at least if he is on the mark. When he is at his best we often have that weird sensation of being not quite asleep or awake, when time stretches and skews, when we can hear voices but cannot make out the words or the intent, when the dream seems real and the reality dreamlike. That is a strange and wonderful terminal. Hill House is there, in that place where the trains run both ways, with its doors that swing sensibly shut; the woman in the room with the yellow wallpaper is there, crawling along the floor with her head pressed against that faint grease mark; the barrowwights that menaced Frodo and Sam are there; and Pickman's model; the wendigo; Norman Bates and his terrible mother. No waking or dreaming in this terminal, but only the voice of the writer, low and rational, talking about the way the good fabric of things sometimes has a way of unravelling with shocking suddenness. He's telling you that you want to see the car accident, and yes, he's right  you do. There's a dead voice on the phone. something behind the walls of the old house that sounds bigger than a rat.. movement at the foot of the cellar stairs. He wants you to see all of those things, and more; he wants you to put your hands on the shape under the sheet. And you want to put your hands there. Yes. These are some of the things I feel that the horror story does, but I am firmly convinced that it must do one more thing, this above all others It must tell a tale that holds the reader or the listener spellbound for a little while, lost in a world that never was, never could be. It must be like the wedding guest that stoppeth one of three. All my life as a writer I have been committed to the idea that in fiction the story value holds dominance Over every other facet of the writer's craft; characterization, theme, mood, none of those things is anything if the story is dull. And if the story does hold you, all else can be forgiven. My favourite line to that effect came from the pen of Edgar Rice Burroughs, no one's candidate for Great World Writer, but a man who understood story values completely. On page one of The Land That Time Forgot, the narrator finds a manuscript in a bottle; the rest of the novel is the presentation of that manuscript. The narrator says, 'Read one page, and I will be forgotten.' It's a pledge that Burroughs makes good on many writers with talents greater than his have not. In fine, gentle reader, here is a truth that makes the strongest writer gnash his teeth with the exception of three small groups of people, no one reads a writer's preface.


The exceptions are one, the writer's close family (usually his wife and his mother); two, the writer's accredited representative (and the editorial people and assorted munchkins), whose chief interest is to find out if anyone has been libelled in the course of the writer's wanderings; and three, those people who have had a hand in helping the writer on his way. These are the people who want to know whether or not the writer's head has gotten so big that he has managed to forget that he didn't do it by himself. Other readers are apt to feel, with perfect justification, that the author's preface is a gross imposition, a multipage commercial for himself, even more offensive than the cigarette ads that have proliferated in the centre section of the paperback books. Most readers come to see the show, not to watch the stage manager take bows in front of the footlights. Again, with perfect justification. I'm leaving now. The show is going to start soon. We're going to go into that room and touch the shape under the sheet. But before I leave, I want to take just two or three more minutes of your time to thank some people from each of the three groups above  and from a fourth. Bear with me as I say a few thankyou's To my wife, Tabitha, my best and most trenchant critic. When she feels the work is good, she says so; when she feels I've put my foot in it, she sets me on my ass as kindly and lovingly as possible. To my kids, Naomi, Joe, and Owen, who have been very understanding about their father's peculiar doings in the downstairs room. And to my mother, who died in 1973, and to whom this book is dedicated. Her encouragement was steady and unwavering, she always seemed able to find forty or fifty cents for the obligatory stamped, selfaddressed return envelope, and no one including myself was more pleased than she when I 'broke through'. In that second group, particular thanks are due my editor, William G. Thompson of Doubleday  Company, who has worked with me patiently, who has suffered my daily phone calls with constant good cheer, and who showed kindness to a young writer with no credentials some years ago, and who has stuck with that writer since then. In the third group are the people who first bought my work Mr Robert A. W. Lowndes, who purchased the first two stories I ever sold; Mr Douglas Allen and Mr Nye Willden of the Dugent Publishing Corporation, who bought so many of the ones that followed for Cavalier and Gent, back in the scuffling days when the cheques sometimes came just in time to avoid what the power companies euphemistically call 'an interruption in service'; to Elaine Geiger and Herbert Schnall and Carolyn Stromberg of the New American Library; to Gerard Van der Leun of Penthouse and Harris Deinstfrey of Cosmopolitan. Thanks to all of you. There's one final group that I'd like to thank, and that is each and every reader who ever unlimbered his or her wallet to buy something that I wrote. In a great many ways, this is your book because it sure never would have happened without you. So thanks. Where I am, it's still dark and raining. We've got a fine night for it. There's something I want to show you, something I want you to touch. It's in a room not far from herein fact, it's almost as close as the next page. Shall we go? Bridgton, Maine 27 February 1977 GRAVEYARD SHIFT Two A.M., Friday. Hall was sitting on the bench by the elevator, the only place on the third floor where a working joe could catch a smoke, when Warwick came up. He wasn't happy to see Warwick. The foreman wasn't supposed to show up on three during the graveyard shift; he was supposed to stay down in his office in the basement drinking coffee from the urn that stood on the corner of his desk. Besides, it was hot. It was the hottest June on record in Gates Falls, and the Orange Crush thermometer which was also by the elevator had once rested at 94 degrees at three in the morning. God only knew what kind of hellhole the mill was on the threetoeleven shift. Hall worked the picker machine, a balky gadget manufactured by a defunct Cleveland firm in 1934. He had only been working in the mill since April, which meant he was still making minimum 1.78 an hour, which was still all right. No wife, no steady girl, no alimony. He was a drifter, and during the last three years he had moved on his thumb from Berkeley (college student) to Lake Tahoe (busboy) to Galveston (stevedore) to Miami (shortorder cook) to Wheeling (taxi driver and dishwasher) to Gates Falls, Maine (pickermachine operator). He didn't figure on moving again until the snow fell. He was a solitary person and he liked the hours from eleven to seven when the blood flow of the big mill was at its coolest, not to mention the temperature. The only thing he did not like was the rats. The third floor was long and deserted, lit only by the sputtering glow of the fluorescents. Unlike the other levels of the mill, it was relatively silent and unoccupied  at least by the humans. The rats were another matter. The only machine on three was the picker; the rest of the floor was storage for the ninetypound bags of fibre which had yet to be sorted by Hall's long geartoothed machine. They were stacked like link sausages in long rows, some of them (especially the discontinued meltons and irregular slipes for which there were no orders) years old and dirty grey with industrial wastes. They made fine nesting places for the rats, huge, fatbellied creatures with rabid eyes and bodies that jumped with lice and vermin. Hall had developed a habit of collecting a small arsenal of softdrink cans from the trash barrel during his break. He pegged them at the rats during times when work was slow, retrieving them later at his leisure. Only this time Mr Foreman had caught him, coming up the stairs instead of using the elevator like the sneaky sonofabitch everyone said he was. 'What are you up to, Hall?' 'The rats,' Hall said, realizing how lame that must sound now that all the rats had snuggled safely back into their houses. 'I peg cans at 'em when I see 'em.' Warwick nodded once, briefly. He was a big beefy man with a crew cut. His shirtsleeves were rolled up and his tie was pulled down. He looked at Hall closely. 'We don't pay you to chuck cans at rats, mister. Not even if you pick them up again.' 'Harry hasn't sent down an order for twenty minutes,' Hall answered, thinking Why couldn't you stay the hell put and drink your coffee? 'I can't run it through the picker if I don't have it.' Warwick nodded as if the topic no longer interested him. 'Maybe I'll take a walk up and see Wisconsky,' he said. 'Five to one he's reading a magazine while the crap piles up in his bins.' Hall didn't say anything. Warwick suddenly pointed. 'There's one! Get the bastard!' Hall fired the Nehi can he had been holding with one whistling, overhand motion. The rat, which had been watching him from atop one of the fabric bags with its bright buckshot eyes, fled with one faint squeak. Warwick threw back his head and laughed as Hall went after the can. 'I came to see you about something else,' Warwick said. 'Is that so?' 'Next week's Fourth of July week.' Hall nodded. The mill would be shut down Monday to Saturday  vacation week for men with at least one year's tenure. Layoff week for men with less than a year. 'You want to work?' Hall shrugged. 'Doing what?' 'We're going to clean the whole basement level. Nobody's touched it for twelve years. Helluva mess. We're going to use hoses.' 'The town zoning committee getting on the board of directors?' Warwick looked steadily at Hall. 'You want it or not? Two an hour, double time on the fourth. We're working the graveyard shift because it'll be cooler.' Hall calculated. He could clear maybe seventyfive bucks after taxes. Better than the goose egg he had been looking forward to. 'All right.' 'Report down by the dye house next Monday.' Hall watched him as he started back to the stairs. Warwick paused halfway there and turned back to look at Hall. 'You used to be a college boy, didn't you?' Hall nodded. 'Okay, college boy, I'm keeping it in mind.' He left. Hall sat down and lit another smoke, holding a soda can in one hand and watching for the rats. He could just imagine how it would be in the basement  the subbasement, actually, a level below the dye house. Damp, dark, full of spiders and rotten cloth and ooze from the river  and rats. Maybe even bats, the aviators of the rodent family. Gah. Hall threw the can hard, then smiled thinly to himself as the faint sound of Warwick's voice came down through the overhead ducts, reading Harry Wisconsky the riot act. Okay, college boy, I'm keeping it in mind. He stopped smiling abruptly and butted his smoke. A few moments later Wisconsky started to send rough nylon down through the blowers, and Hall went to work. And after a while the rats came out and sat atop the bags at the back of the long room watching him with their unblinking black eyes. They looked like a jury. Eleven P.M., Monday. There were about thirtysix men sitting around when Warwick came in wearing a pair of old jeans tucked into high rubber boots. Hall had been listening to Harry Wisconsky, who was enormously fat, enormously lazy, and enormously gloomy. 'It's gonna be a mess,' Wisconsky was saying when Mr Foreman came in. 'You wait and see, we're all gonna go home blacker'n midnight in Persia.' 'Okay!' Warwick said. 'We strung sixty lightbulbs down there, so it should be bright enough for you to see what you're doing. You guys ' he pointed to a bunch of men that had been leaning against the drying spools  'I want you to hook up the hoses over there to the main water conduit by the stairwell. You can unroll them down the stairs. We got about eighty yards for each man, and that should be plenty. Don't get cute and spray one of your buddies or you'll send him to the hospital. They pack wallop.' 'Somebody'll get hurt,' Wisconsky prophesied sourly. 'Wait and see.' 'You other guys,' Warwick said pointing to the group that Hall and Wisconsky were a part of. 'You're the crap crew tonight. You go in pairs with an electric wagon for each team. There's old office furniture, bags of cloth, hunks of busted machinery, you name it. We're gonna pile it by the airshaft at the west end. Anyone who doesn't know how to run a wagon?' No one raised a hand. The electric wagons were batterydriven contraptions like miniature dump trucks. They developed a nauseating stink after continual use that reminded Hall of burning power lines. 'Okay,' Warwick said. 'We got the basement divided up into sections, and we'll be done by Thursday. Friday we'll chainhoist the crap out. Questions?' There were none. Hall studied the foreman's face closely, and he had a sudden premonition of a strange thing coming. The idea pleased him. He did not like Warwick very much. 'Fine,' Warwick said. 'Let's get at it.' Two A.M., Tuesday. Hall was bushed and very tired of listening to Wisconsky's steady patter of profane complaints. He wondered if it would do any good to belt Wisconsky. He doubted it. It would just give Wisconsky something else to bitch about. Hall had known it would be bad, but this was murder. For one thing, he hadn't anticipated the smell. The polluted stink of the river, mixed with the odour of decaying fabric, rotting masonry, vegetable matter. In the far corner, where they had begun, Hall discovered a colony of huge white toadstools poking their way up through the shattered cement. His hands had come in contact with them as he pulled and yanked at a rusty geartoothed wheel, and they felt curiously warm and bloated, like the flesh of a man afflicted with dropsy. The bulbs couldn't banish the twelveyear darkness; it could only push it back a little and cast a sickly yellow glow over the whole mess. The place looked like the shattered nave of a desecrated church, with its high ceiling and mammoth discarded machinery that they would never be able to move, its wet walls overgrown with patches of yellow moss, and the atonal choir that was the water from the hoses, running in the halfclogged sewer network that eventually emptied into the river below the falls. And the rats  huge ones that made those on third look like dwarfs. God knew what they were eating down here. They were continually overturning boards and bags to reveal huge nests of shredded newspaper, watching with atavistic loathing as the pups fled into the cracks and crannies, their eyes huge and blind with the continuous darkness. 'Let's stop for a smoke,' Wisconsky said. He sounded out of breath, but Hall had no idea why; he had been goldbrickmg all night. Still, it was about that time, and they were currently out of sight of everyone else. 'All right.' He leaned against the edge of the electric wagon and lit up. 'I never should've let Warwick talk me into this,' Wisconsky said dolefully. 'This ain't work for a man. But he was mad the other night when he caught me in the crapper up on four with my pants up. Christ, was he mad.' Hall said nothing. He was thinking about Warwick, and about the rats. Strange, how the two things seemed tied together. The rats seemed to have forgotten all about men in their long stay under the mill; they were impudent and hardly afraid at all. One of them had sat up on its hind legs like a squirrel until Hall had got in kicking distance, and then it had launched itself at his boot, biting at the leather. Hundreds, maybe thousands. He wondered how many varieties of disease they were carrying around in this black sumphole. And Warwick. Something about him  'I need the money,' Wisconsky said. 'But Christ Jesus, buddy, this ain't no work for a man. Those rats.' He looked around fearfully. 'It almost seems like they think. You ever wonder how it'd be, if we was little and they were big ' 'Oh, shut up,' Hall said. Wisconsky looked at him, wounded. 'Say, I'm sorry, buddy. It's just that ' He trailed off. 'Jesus, this place stinks!' he cried. 'This ain't no kind of work for a man!' A spider crawled off the edge of the wagon and scrambled up his arm. He brushed it off with a choked sound of disgust. 'Come on,' Hall said, snuffing his cigarette. 'The faster, the quicker.' 'I suppose,' Wisconsky said miserably. 'I suppose.' Four A.M., Tuesday. Lunchtime. Hall and Wisconsky sat with three or four other men, eating their sandwiches with black hands that not even the industrial detergent could clean. Hall ate looking into the foreman's little glass office. Warwick was drinking coffee and eating cold hamburgers with great relish. 'Ray Upson had to go home,' Charlie Brochu said. 'He puke?' someone asked. 'I almost did.' 'Nuh. Ray'd eat cowflop before he'd puke. Rat bit him.' Hall looked up thoughtfully from his examination of Warwick. 'Is that so?' he asked. 'Yeah.' Brochu shook his head. 'I was teaming with him. Goddamndest thing I ever saw. Jumped out of a hole in one of those old cloth bags. Must have been big as a cat. Grabbed on to his hand and started chewing.' 'Jeesus,' one of the men said, looking green. 'Yeah,' Brochu said. 'Ray screamed just like a woman, and I ain't blamin' him. He bled like a pig. Would that thing let go? No sir. I had to belt it three or four times with a board before it would. Ray was just about crazy. He stomped it until it wasn't nothing but a mess of fur. Damndest thing I ever saw. Warwick put a bandage on him and sent him home. Told him to go to the doctor tomorrow.' 'That was big of the bastard,' somebody said. As if he had heard, Warwick got to his feet in his office, stretched, and then came to the door. 'Time we got back with it.' The men got to their feet slowly, eating up all the time they possibly could stowing their dinner jackets, getting cold drinks, buying candy bars. Then they started down, heels clanking dispiritedly on the steel grillework of the stair risers. Warwick passed Hall, clapping him on the shoulder. 'How's it going, college boy?' He didn't wait for an answer. 'Come on,' Hall said patiently to Wisconsky, who was tying his shoelace. They went downstairs. Seven A.M., Tuesday. Hall and Wisconsky walked out together; it seemed to Hall that he had somehow inherited the fat Pole. Wisconsky was almost comically dirty, his fat moon face smeared like that of a small boy who has just been thrashed by the town bully. There was none of the usual rough banter from the other men, the pulling of shirttails, the cracks about who was keeping Tony's wife warm between the hours of one and four. Nothing but silence and an occasional hawking sound as someone spat on the dirty floor. 'You want a lift?' Wisconsky asked him hesitantly. 'Thanks.' They didn't talk as they rode up Mill Street and crossed the bridge. They exchanged only a brief word when Wisconsky dropped him off in front of his apartment. Hall went directly to the shower, still thinking about Warwick, trying to place whatever it was about Mr Foreman that drew him, made him feel that somehow they had become tied together. He slept as soon as his head hit the pillow, but his sleep was broken and restless he dreamed of rats. One A.M., Wednesday. It was better running the horses. They couldn't go in until the crap crews had finished a section, and quite often they were done hosing before the next section was clear  which meant time for a cigarette. Hall worked the nozzle of one of the long hoses and Wisconsky pattered back and forth, unsnagging lengths of the hose, turning the water on and off, moving obstructions. Warwick was shorttempered because the work was proceeding slowly. They would never be done by Thursday, the way things were going. Now they were working on a helterskelter jumble of nineteenthcentury office equipment that had been piled in one corner  smashed rolltop desks, mouldy ledgers, reams of invoices, chairs with broken seatsand it was rat heaven. Scores of them squeaked and ran through the dark and crazy passages that honeycombed the heap, and after two men were bitten' the others refused to work until Warwick sent someone upstairs to get heavy rubberized gloves, the kind usually reserved for the dyehouse crew, which had to work with acids. Hall and Wisconsky were waiting to go in with their hoses when a sandyhaired bullneck named Carmichael began howling curses and backing away, slapping at his chest with his gloved hands. A huge rat with greystreaked fur and ugly, glaring eyes had bitten into his shirt and hung there, squeaking and kicking at Carmichael's belly with its back paws. Carmichael finally knocked it away with his fist, but there was a huge hole in his shirt, and a thin line of blood trickled from above one nipple. The anger faded from his face. He turned away and retched. Hall turned the hose on the rat, which was old and moving slowly, a snatch of Carmichael's shirt still caught in its jaws. The roaring pressure drove it backward against the wall, where it smashed limply. Warwick came over, an odd, strained smile on his lips. He clapped Hall on the shoulder. 'Damn sight better than throwing cans at the little bastards, huh, college boy?' 'Some little bastard,' Wisconsky said. 'It's a foot long.' 'Turn that hose over there.' Warwick pointed at the jumble of furniture. 'You guys, get out of the way!' 'With pleasure,' someone muttered. Carmichael charged up to Warwick, his face sick and twisted. 'I'm gonna have compensation for this! I'm gonna , 'Sure,' Warwick said, smiling. 'You got bit on the titty. Get out of the way before you get pasted down by this water.' Hall pointed the nozzle and let it go It hit with a white explosion of spray, knocking over a desk and smashing two chairs to splinters. Rats ran everywhere, bigger than any Hall had ever seen. He could hear men crying out in disgust and horror as they fled, things with huge eyes and sleek, plump bodies. He caught a glimpse of one that looked as big as a healthy sixweek puppy. He kept on until he could see no more, then shut the nozzle down. 'Okay!' Warwick called. 'Let's pick it up!' 'I didn't hire out as no exterminator!' Cy Ippeston called mutinously. Hall had tipped a few with him the week before. He was a young guy, wearing a smutstained baseball cap and a Tshirt. 'That you, Ippeston?' Warwick asked genially. Ippeston looked uncertain, but stepped forward. 'Yeah. I don't want no more of these rats. I hired to clean up, not to maybe get rabies or typhoid or somethin'. Maybe you best count me out.' There was a murmur of agreement from the others. Wisconsky stole a look at Hall, but Hall was examining the nozzle of the hose he was holding. It had a bore like a.45 and could probably knock a man twenty feet. 'You saying you want to punch your clock, Cy?' 'Thinkin' about it,' Ippeston said. Warwick nodded. 'Okay. You and anybody else that wants. But this ain't no unionized shop, and never has been. Punch out now and you'll never punch back in. I'll see to it.' 'Aren't you some hot ticket,' Hall muttered. Warwick swung around. 'Did you say something, college boy?' Hall regarded him blandly. 'Just clearing my throat, Mr Foreman.' Warwick smiled. 'Something taste bad to you?' Hall said nothing. 'All right, let's pick it up!' Warwick bawled. They went back to work. Two A.M., Thursday. Hall and Wisconsky were working with the trucks again, picking up junk. The pile by the west airshaft had grown to amazing proportions, but they were still not half done. 'Happy Fourth,' Wisconsky said when they stopped for a smoke. They were working near the north wall, far from the stairs. The light was extremely dim, and some trick of acoustics made the other men seem miles away. 'Thanks.' Hall dragged on his smoke. 'Haven't seen many rats tonight.' 'Nobody has,' Wisconsky said. 'Maybe they got wise.' They were standing at the end of a crazy, zigzagging alley formed by piles of old ledgers and invoices, mouldy bags of cloth, and two huge flat looms of ancient vintage. 'Gah,' Wisconsky said, spitting. 'That Warwick ' 'Where do you suppose all the rats got to?' Hall asked, almost to himself. 'Not into the walls ' He looked at the wet and crumbling masonry that surrounded the huge foundation stones. 'They'd drown. The river's saturated everything.' Something black and flapping suddenly divebombed them. Wisconsky screamed and put his hands over his head. 'A bat,' Hall said, watching after it as Wisconsky straightened up. 'A bat! A bat!' Wisconsky raved. 'What's a bat doing in the cellar? They're supposed to be in trees and under eaves and ' 'It was a big one,' Hall said softly. 'And what's a bat but a rat with wings?' 'Jesus,' Wisconsky moaned. 'How did it ' 'Get in? Maybe the same way the rats got out.' 'What's going on back there?' Warwick shouted from somewhere behind them. 'Where are you?' 'Don't sweat it,' Hall said softly. His eyes gleamed in the dark. 'Was that you, college boy?' Warwick called. He sounded closer. 'It's okay!' Hall yelled. 'I barked my shin!' Warwick's short, barking laugh. 'You want a Purple Heart?' Wisconsky looked at Hall. 'Why'd you say that?' 'Look.' Hall knelt and lit a match. There was a square in the middle of the wet and crumbling cement. 'Tap it.' Wisconsky did. 'It's wood.' Hall nodded. 'It's the top of a support. I've seen some other ones around here. There's another level under this part of the basement.' 'God,' Wisconsky said with utter revulsion. Threethirty A.M., Thursday. They were in the northeast corner, Ippeston and Brochu behind them with one of the highpressure hoses, when Hall stopped and pointed at the floor. 'There I thought we'd come across it.' There was a wooden trapdoor with a crusted iron ringbolt set near the centre. He walked back to Ippeston and said, 'Shut it off for a minute.' When the hose was choked to a trickle, he raised his voice to a shout. 'Hey! Hey, Warwick! Better come here a minute!' Warwick came splashing over, looking at Hall with that same hard smile in his eyes. 'Your shoelace come untied, college boy?' 'Look,' Hall said. He kicked the trapdoor with his foot. 'Subcellar.' 'So what?' Warwick asked. 'This isn't break time, col' 'That's where your rats are,' Hall said. 'They're breeding down there. Wisconsky and I even saw a bat earlier.' Some of the other men had gathered around and were looking at the trapdoor. 'I don't care,' Warwick said. 'The job was the basement, not ' 'You'll need about twenty exterminators, trained ones,' Hall was saying. 'Going to cost the management a pretty penny. Too bad.' Someone laughed. 'Fat chance.' Warwick looked at Hall as if he were a bug under glass. 'You're really a case, you are,' he said, sounding fascinated. 'Do you think I give a good goddamn how many rats there are under there?' 'I was at the library this afternoon and yesterday,' Hall said. 'Good thing you kept reminding me I was a college boy. I read the town zoning ordinances, Warwick they were set up in 1911, before this mill got big enough to coopt the zoning board. Know what I found?' Warwick's eyes were cold. 'Take a walk, college boy. You're fired.' 'I found out,' Hall ploughed on as if he hadn't heard, 'I found out that there is a zoning law in Gates Falls about vermin. You spell that vermin, in case you wondered. It means diseasecarrying animals such as bats, skunks,  unlicensed dogs  and rats. Especially rats. Rats are mentioned fourteen times in two paragraphs, Mr Foreman. So you just keep in mind that the minute I punch out I'm going straight to the town commissioner and tell him what the situation down here is.' He paused, relishing Warwick's hatecongested face. 'I think that between me, him, and the town committee, we can get an injunction slapped on this place. You're going to be shut down a lot longer than just Saturday, Mr Foreman. And I got a good idea what your boss is going to say when he turns up. Hope your unemployment insurance is paid up, Warwick.' Warwick's hands formed into claws. 'You damned snotnose, I ought to ' He looked down at the trapdoor, and suddenly his smile reappeared. 'Consider yourself rehired, college boy.' 'I thought you might see the light.' Warwick nodded, the same strange grin on his face. You're just so smart. I think maybe you ought to go down 'There, Hall, so we got somebody with a college education to give us an informed opinion. You and Wisconsky.' 'Not me!' Wisconsky exclaimed. 'Not me, I' Warwick looked at him. 'You what?' Wisconsky shut up. 'Good,' Hall said cheerfully. 'We'll need three flashlights. I think I saw a whole rack of those sixbattery jobs in the main office, didn't I?' 'You want to take somebody else?' Warwick asked expansively. 'Sure, pick your man.' 'You,' Hall said gently. The strange expression had come into his face again. 'After all, the management should be represented, don't you think? Just so Wisconsky and I don't see too many rats down there?' Someone (it sounded like Ippeston) laughed loudly. Warwick looked at the men carefully. They studied the tips of their shoes. Finally he pointed at Brochu. 'Brochu, go up to the office and get three flashlights. Tell the watchman I said to let you in.' 'Why'd you get me into this?' Wisconsky moaned to Hall. 'You know I hate those ' 'It wasn't me,' Hall said, and looked at Warwick. Warwick looked back at him, and neither would drop his eyes. Four A.M., Thursday. Brochu returned with the flashlights. He gave one to Hall, one to Wisconsky, one to Warwick. 'Ippeston! Give the hose to Wisconsky.' Ippeston did so. The nozzle trembled delicately between the Pole's hands. 'All right,' Warwick said to Wisconsky. 'You're in the middle. If there are rats, you let them have it.' Sure, Hall thought. And if there are rats, Warwick won't see them. And neither will Wisconsky, after he finds an extra ten in his pay envelope. Warwick pointed at two of the men. 'Lift it.' One of them bent over the ringbolt and pulled. For a moment Hall didn't think it was going to give, and then it yanked free with an odd, crunching snap. The other man put his fingers on the underside to help pull, then withdrew with a cry. His hands were crawling with huge and sightless beetles. With a convulsive grunt the man on the ringbolt pulled the trap back and let it drop. The underside was black with an odd fungus that Hall had never seen before. The beetles dropped off into the darkness below or ran across the floor to be crushed. 'Look,' Hall said. There was a rusty lock bolted on the underside, now broken. 'But it shouldn't be underneath,' Warwick said. 'It should be on top. Why ' 'Lots of reasons,' Hall said. 'Maybe so nothing on this side could open it  at least when the lock was new. Maybe so nothing on that side could get up.' 'But who locked it?' Wisconsky asked. 'Ah,' Hall said mockingly, looking at Warwick. 'A mystery.' 'Listen,' Brochu whispered. 'Oh, God,' Wisconsky sobbed. 'I ain't going down there!' It was a soft sound, almost expectant; the whisk and patter of thousands of paws, the squeaking of rats. 'Could be frogs,' Warwick said. Hall laughed aloud. Warwick shone his light down. A sagging flight of wooden stairs led down to the black stones of the floor beneath. There was not a rat in sight. 'Those stairs won't hold us,' Warwick said with finality. Brochu took two steps forward and jumped jip and down on the first step. It creaked but showed no sign of giving way. 'I didn't ask you to do that,' Warwick said. 'You weren't there when that rat bit Ray,' Brochu said softly. 'Let's go,' Hall said. Warwick took a last sardonic look around at the circle of men, then walked to the edge with Hall. Wisconsky stepped reluctantly between them. They went down one at a time. Hall, then Wisconsky, then Warwick. Their flashlight beams played over the floor, which was twisted and heaved into a hundred crazy hills and valleys. The hose thumped along behind Wisconsky like a clumsy serpent. When they got to the bottom, Warwick flashed his light around. It picked out a few rotting boxes, some barrels, little else. The seep from the river stood in puddles that came to ankle depth on their boots. 'I don't hear them any more,' Wisconsky whispered. They walked slowly away from the trapdoor, their feet shuffling through the slime. Hall paused and shone his light on a huge wooden box with white letters on it. 'Elias Varney,' he read, '1841. Was the mill here then?' 'No,' Warwick said. 'It wasn't built until 1897. What difference?' Hall didn't answer. They walked forward again. The subcellar was longer than it should have been, it seemed. The stench was stronger, a smell of decay and rot and things buried. And still the only sound was the faint, cavelike drip of water. 'What's that?' Hall asked, pointing his beam at a jut of concrete that protruded perhaps two feet into the cellar. Beyond it, the darkness continued and it seemed to Hall that he could now hear sounds up there, curiously stealthy. Warwick peered at it. 'It's no, that can't be right.' 'Outer wall of the mill, isn't it? and up ahead 'I'm going back,' Warwick said, suddenly turning around. Hall grabbed his neck roughly. 'You're not going anywhere, Mr Foreman.' Warwick looked up at him, his grin cutting the darkness. 'You're crazy, college boy. Isn't that right? Crazy as a loon.' 'You shouldn't push people, friend, keep going.' Wisconsky moaned. 'Hall ' 'Give me that.' Hall grabbed the hose. He let go of Warwick's neck and pointed the hose at his head. Wisconsky turned abruptly and crashed back towards the trapdoor. Hall did not even turn. 'After you, Mr Foreman.' Warwick stepped forward, walking under the place where the mill ended above them. Hall flashed his light about, and felt a cold satisfaction  premonition fulfilled. The rats had closed in around them, silent as death. Crowded in, rank on rank. Thousands of eyes looked greedily back at him. In ranks to the wall, some fully as high as a man's shin. Warwick saw them a moment later and came to a full stop. 'They're all around us, college boy.' His voice was still calm, still in control, but it held a jagged edge.


'Yes,' Hall said. 'Keep going.' They walked forward, the hose dragging behind. Hall looked back once and saw the rats had closed the aisle behind them and were gnawing at the heavy canvas hosing. One looked up and almost seemed to grin at him before lowering his head again. He could see the bats now, too. They were roosting from the roughhewn overheads, huge, the size of crows or rooks. 'Look,' Warwick said, centring his beam about five feet ahead. A skull, green with mould, laughed up at them. Further on Hall could see an ulna, one pelvic wing, part of a ribcage. 'Keep going,' Hall said. He felt something bursting up inside him, something lunatic and dark with colours. You are going to break before I do, Mr Foreman, so help me God. They walked past the bones. The rats were not crowding them; their distances appeared constant. Up ahead Hall saw one cross their path of travel. Shadows hid it, but he caught sight of a pink twitching tail as thick as a telephone cord. Up ahead the flooring rose sharply, then dipped. Hall could hear a stealthy, rustling sound, a bit sound. Something that perhaps no living man had ever seen. It occurred to Hall that he had perhaps been looking for something like this through all his days of crazy wandering. The rats were moving in, creeping on their bellies, forcing them forward. 'Look,' Warwick said coldly. Hall saw. Something had happened to the rats back here, some hideous mutation that never could have survived under the eye of the sun; nature would have forbidden it. But down here, nature had taken on another ghastly face. The rats were gigantic, some as high as three feet. But their rear legs were gone and they were blind as moles, like their flying cousins. They dragged themselves forward with hideous eagerness. Warwick turned and faced Hall, the smile hanging on by brute willpower. Hall really had to admire him. 'We can't go on, Hall. You must see that.' 'The rats have business with you, I think,' Hall said. Warwick's control slipped. 'Please,' he said. 'Please.' Hall smiled. 'Keep going.' Warwick was looking over his shoulder. 'They're gnawmg into the hose. When they get through it, we'll never get back.' 'I know. Keep going.' 'You're insane ' A rat ran across Warwick's shoe and he screamed. Hall smiled and gestured with his light. They were all around, the closest of them less than a foot away now. Warwick began to walk again. The rats drew back. They topped the miniature rise and looked down. Warwick reached it first, and Hall saw his face go white as paper. Spit ran down his chin. 'Oh, my God. Dear Jesus. And he turned to run. Hall opened the nozzle of the hose and the highpressure rush of water struck Warwick squarely on the chest, knocking him back out of sight. There was a long scream that rose over the sound of the water. Thrashing sounds. 'Hall" Grunts. A huge, tenebrous squeaking that seemed to fill the earth. 'HALL FOR GOD'S SAKE ' A sudden wet ripping noise. Another scream, weaker. Something huge shifted and turned. Quite distinctly Hall heard the wet snap that a fractured bone makes. A legless rat, guided by some bastard form of sonar, lunged against him, biting. Its body was flabby, warm. Almost absently Hall turned the hose on it, knocking it away. The hose did not have quite so much pressure now. Hall walked to the brow of the wet hill and looked down. The rat filled the whole gully at the far end of that noxious tomb. It was a huge and pulsating grey, eyeless, totally without legs. When Hall's light struck it, it made a hideous mewling noise. Their queen, then, the magna mater. A huge and nameless thing whose progeny might some day develop wings. It seemed to dwarf what remained of Warwick, but that was probably just illusion. It was the shock of seeing a rat as big as a Holstein calf. 'Goodbye, Warwick;' Hall said. The rat crouched over Mr Foreman jealously, ripping at one limp arm. Hall turned away and began to make his way back rapidly, halting the rats with his hose, which was growing less and less potent. Some of them got through and attacked his legs above the tops of his boots with biting lunges. One hung stubbornly on at his thigh, ripping at the cloth of his corduroy pants. Hall made a fist and smashed it aside. He was nearly threequarters of the way back when the huge whirring filled the darkness. He looked up and the gigantic flying form smashed into his face. The mutated bats had not lost their tails yet. It whipped around Hall's neck in a loathsome coil and squeezed as the teeth sought the soft spot under his neck. It wriggled and flapped with its membranous wings, clutching the tatters of his shirt for purchase. Hall brought the nozzle of the hose up blindly and struck at its yielding body again and again. It fell away and he trampled it beneath his feet, dimly aware that he was screaming. The rats ran in a flood over his feet, up his legs. He broke into a staggering run, shaking some off. The others bit at his belly, his chest. One ran up his shoulder and pressed its questing muzzle into the cup of his ear. He ran into the second bat. It roosted on his head for a moment, squealing, and then ripped away a flap of Hall's scalp. He felt his body growing numb. His ears filled with the screech and yammer of many rats. He gave one last heave, stumbled over furry bodies, fell to his knees. He began to laugh, a high, screaming sound. Five A.M., Thursday. 'Somebody better go down there,' Brochu said tentatively. 'Not me,' Wisconsky whispered. 'Not me.' 'No, not you, jelly belly,' Ippeston said with contempt. 'Well, let's go,' Brogan said, bringing up another hose. 'Me, Ippeston, Dangerfield, Nedeau. Stevenson, go up to the office and get a few more lights.' Ippeston looked down into the darkness thoughtfully. 'Maybe they stopped for a smoke,' he said. 'A few rats, what the hell.' Stevenson came back with the lights; a few moments later they started down. NIGHT SURF After the guy was dead and the smell of his burning flesh was off the air, we all went back down to the beach. Corey had his radio, one of those suitcasesized transistor jobs that take about forty batteries and also make and play tapes. You couldn't say the sound reproduction was great, but it sure was loud. Corey had been welltodo before A6, but stuff like that didn't matter any more. Even his big radiotapeplayer was hardly more than a nicelooking hunk of junk. There were only two radio stations left on the air that we could get. One was WKDM in Portsmouth some backwoods deejay who had gone nuttyreligious. He'd play a Perry Como record, say a prayer, bawl, play a Johnny Ray record, read from Psalms (complete with each selah', just like James Dean in East of Eden), then bawl some more. Happytime stuff like that. One day he sang Bringing in the Sheaves' in a cracked, mouldy voice that sent Needles and me into hysterics. The Massachusetts station was better, but we could only get it at night. It was a bunch of kids. I guess they took over the transmitting facilities of WRKO or WBZ after everybody left or died. They only gave gag call letters, like WDOPE or KUNT or WA6 or stuff like that. Really funny, you know  you could die laughing. That was the one we were listening to on the way back to the beach. I was holding hands with Susie; Kelly and Joan were ahead of us, and Needles was already over the brow of the point and out of sight. Corey was bringing up the rear, swinging his radio. The Stones were singing 'Angie'. 'Do you love me?' Susie was asking. 'That's all I want to know, do you love me?' Susie needed constant reassurance. I was her teddy bear. 'No,' I said. She was getting fat, and if she lived long enough, which wasn't likely, she would get really flabby. She was already mouthy. 'You're rotten,' she said, and put a hand to her face. Her lacquered fingernails twinkled dimly with the halfmoon that had risen about an hour ago. 'Are you going to cry again?' 'Shut up!' She sounded like she was going to cry again, all right. We came over the ridge and I paused. I always have to pause. Before A6, this had been a public beach. Tourists, picnickers, runnynosed kids and fat baggy grandmothers with sunburned elbows. Candy wrappers and popsicle sticks in the sand, all the beautiful people necking on their beach blankets, intermingled stench of exhaust from the parking lot, seaweed, and Coppertone oil. But now all the dirt and all the crap was gone. The ocean had eaten it, all of it, as casually as you might eat a handful of Cracker Jacks. There were no people to come back and dirty it again. Just us, and we weren't enough to make much mess. We loved the beach too, I guess  hadn't we just offered it a kind of sacrifice? Even Susie, little bitch Susie with her fat ass and her cranberry bellbottoms. The sand was white and duned, marked only by the hightide line  twisted skein of seaweed, kelp, hunks of driftwood. The moonlight stitched inky crescentshaped shadows and folds across everything. The deserted lifeguard tower stood white and skeletal some fifty yards from the bathhouse towards the sky like a finger bone. And the surf, the night surf, throwing up great bursts of foam, breaking against the headlands for as far as we could see in endless attacks. Maybe that water had been halfway to England the night before. '"Angie", by the Stones,' the cracked voice on Corey's radio said. 'I'm sureya dug that one, a blast from the past that's a golden gas, straight from the grooveyard, a platta that mattas. I'm Bobby. This was supposed to be Fred's night, but Fred got the flu. He's all swelled up.' Susie giggled then, with the first tears still on her eyelashes. I started towards the beach a little faster to keep her quiet. 'Wait up!' Corey called. 'Bernie? Hey, Bernie, wait up!' The guy on the radio was reading some dirty limericks, and a girl in the background asked him where did he put the beer. He said something back, but by that time we were on the beach. I looked back to see how Corey was doing. He was coming down on his backside, as usual, and he looked so ludicrous I felt a little sorry for him. 'Run with me,' I said to Susie. 'Why?' I slapped her on the can and she squealed. 'Just because it feels good to run.' We ran. She fell behind, panting like a horse and calling r me to slow down, but I put her out of my head. The wind rushed past my ears and blew the hair off my forehead. I could smell the salt in the air, sharp and tart. The surf pounded. The waves were like foamed black glass. I kicked off my rubber sandals and pounded across the sand barefoot, not minding the sharp digs of an occasional shell. My blood roared. And then there was the leanto with Needles already inside and Kelly and Joan standing beside it, holding hands and looking at the water. I did a forward roll, feeling sand go down the back of my shirt, and fetched up against Kelly's legs. He fell on top of me and rubbed my face in the sand while Joan laughed. We got up and grinned at each other. Susie had given up running and was plodding towards us. Corey had almost caught up to her. 'Some fire,' Kelly said. 'Do you think he came all the way from New York, like he said?' Joan asked. 'I don't know.' I couldn't see that it mattered anyway. He had been behind the wheel of a big Lincoln when we found him, semiconscious and raving. His head was bloated to the size of a football and his neck looked like a sausage. He had Captain Trips and n6t far to go, either. So we took him up to the Point that overlooks the beach and burned him. He said his name was Alvin Sackheim. He kept calling for his grandmother. He thought Susie was his grandmother. This struck her funny, God knows why. The strangest things strike Susie funny. It was Corey's idea to burn him up, but it started off as a joke. He had read all those books about witchcraft and black magic at college, and he kept leering at us in the dark beside Alvin Sackheim's Lincoln and telling us that if we made a sacrifice to the dark gods, maybe the spirits would keep protecting us against A6. Of course none of us really believed that bullshit, but the talk got more and more serious. It was a new thing to do, and finally we went ahead and did it. We tied him to the observation gadget up there  you put a dime in it and on a clear day you can see all the way to Portland Headlight. We tied him with our belts, and then we went rooting around for dry brush and hunks of driftwood like kids playing a new kind of hideandseek. All the time we were doing it Alvin Sackheim just sort of leaned there and mumbled to his grandmother. Susie's eyes got very bright and she was breathing fast. It was really turning her on. When we were down in the ravine on the other side of the outcrop she leaned against me and kissed me. She was wearing too much lipstick and it was like kissing a greasy plate. I pushed her away and that was when she started pouting. We went back up, all of us, and piled dead branches and twigs up to Alvin Sackheim's waist. Needles lit the pyre with his Zippo, and it went up fast. At the end, just before his hair caught on fire, the guy began to scream. There was a smell just like sweet Chinese pork. 'Got a cigarette, Bernie?' Needles asked. 'There's about fifty cartons right behind you.' He grinned and slapped a mosquito that was probing his arm. 'Don't want to move.' I gave him a smoke and sat down. Susie and I met Needles in Portland. He was sitting on the kerb in front of the State Theatre, playing Leadbelly tunes on a big old Gibson guitar he had looted someplace. The sound echoed up and down Congress Street as if he were playing in a concert hall. Susie stopped in front of us, still out of breath. 'You're rotten, Bernie.' 'Come on, Sue. Turn the record over. That side stinks.' 'Bastard. Stupid, unfeeling son of a bitch. Creep!' 'Go away,' I said, 'or I'll black your eye, Susie. See if I don't.' She started to cry again. She was really good at it. Corey came up and tried to put an arm around her. She elbowed him in the crotch and he spit in her face. 'I'll kill you!' She came at him, screaming and weeping, making propellers with her hands. Corey backed off, almost fell, then turned tail and ran. Susie followed him, hurling hysterical obscenities. Needles put back his head and laughed. The sound of Corey's radio came back to us faintly over the surf. Kelly and Joan had wandered off. I could see them down by the edge of the water, walking with their arms around each other's waist. They looked like an ad in a travel agent's window  Fly to Beautiful St Lorca. It was all right. They had a good thing. 'Bernie?' 'What?' I sat and smoked and thought about Needles flipping back the top of his Zippo, spinning the wheel, making fire with flint and steel like a caveman. 'I've got it,' Needles said. 'Yeah?' I looked at him. 'Are you sure?' 'Sure I am. My head aches. My stomach aches. Hurts to piss. 'Maybe it's just Hong Kong flu. Susie had Hong Kong flu. She wanted a Bible.' I laughed. That had been while we were still at the University, about a week before they closed it down for good, a month before they started carrying bodies away in dump trucks and burying them in mass graves with payloaders. 'Look.' He lit a match and held it under the angle of his jaw. I could see the first triangular smudges, the first swelling. It was A6, all right. 'Okay,' I said. 'I don't feel so bad,' he said. 'In my mind, I mean. You, though. You think about it a lot. I can tell.' 'No I don't.' A lie. 'Sure you do. Like that guy tonight. You're thinking about that, too. We probably did him a favour, when you get right down to it. I don't think he even knew it was happening.' 'He knew.' He shrugged and turned on his side. 'It doesn't matter.' We smoked and I watched the surf come in and go out. Needles and Captain Trips. That made everything real all over again. It was late August already, and in a couple of weeks the first chill of fall would be creeping in. Time to move inside someplace. Winter. Dead by Christmas, maybe, all of us. In somebody's front room with Corey's expensive radiotapeplayer on top of a bookcase full of Reader's Digest Condensed Books and the weak winter sun lying on the rug in meaningless windowpane patterns. The vision was clear enough to make me shudder. Nobody should think about winter in August. It's like a goose walking over your grave. Needles laughed. 'See? You do think about it.' What could I say? I stood up. 'Going to look for Susie.' 'Maybe we're the last people on earth, Bernie. Did you ever think of that?' In the faint moonlight he already looked half dead, with circles under his eyes and pallid, unmoving fingers like pencils. I walked down to the water and looked out across it. There was nothing to see but the restless, moving humps of the waves, topped by delicate curls of foam. The thunder of the breakers was tremendous down here, bigger than the world. Like standing inside a thunderstorm. I closed my eyes and rocked on my bare feet. The sand was cold and damp and packed. And if we were the last people on earth, so what? This would go on as long as there was a moon to pull the water. Susie and Corey were up the beach. Susie was riding him as if he were a bucking bronc, pounding his head into the running boil of the water. Corey was flailing and splashing. They were both soaked. I walked down and pushed her off with my foot. Corey splashed away on all fours, spluttering and whoofing. 'I hate you!' Susie screamed at me. Her mouth was a dark grinning crescent. It looked like the entrance to a fun house. When I was a kid my mother used to take us kids to Harrison State Park and there was a fun house with a big clown face on the front, and you walked in through the mouth. 'Come on, Susie. Up, Fido.' I held out my hand. She took it doubtfully and stood up. There was damp sand clotted on her blouse and skin. 'You didn't have to push me, Bernie. You don't ever ' 'Come on.' She wasn't like a jukebox; you never had to put in a dime and she never came unplugged. We walked up the beach towards the main concession. The man who ran the place had had a small overhead apartment. There was a bed. She didn't really deserve a bed, but Needles was right about that. It didn't matter. No one was really scoring the game any more. The stairs went up the side of the building, but I paused for just a minute to look in the broken window at the dusty wares inside that no one had cared enough about to loot stacks of sweatshirts ('Anson Beach' and a picture of sky and waves printed on the front), glittering bracelets that would green the wrist on the second day, bright junk earrings, beachballs, dirty greeting cards, badly painted ceramic madonnas, plastic vomit (So realistic! Try it on your wife!), Fourth of July sparklers for a Fourth that never was, beach towels with a voluptuous girl in a bikini standing amid the names of a hundred famous resort areas, pennants (Souvenir of Anson Beach and Park), balloons, bathing suits. There was a snack bar up front with a big sign saying TRY OUR CLAM CAKE SPECIAL. I used to come to Anson Beach a lot when I was still in high school. That was seven years before A6, and I was going with a girl named Maureen. She was a big girl. She had a pink checked bathing suit. I used to tell her it looked like a tablecloth. We had walked along the boardwalk in front of this place, barefoot, the boards hot and sandy beneath our heels. We had never tried the clam cake special. 'What are you looking at?' 'Nothing. Come on.' I had sweaty, ugly dreams about Alvin Sackheim. He was propped behind the wheel of his shiny yellow Lincoln, talking about his grandmother. He was nothing but a bloated, blackened head and a charred skeleton. He smelled burnt. He talked on and on, and after a while I couldn't make out a single word. I woke up breathing hard. Susie was sprawled across my thighs, pale and bloated. My watch said 3.50, but it had stopped. It was still dark out. The surf pounded and smashed. High tide. Make it 4.15. Light soon. I got out of bed and went to the doorway. The sea breeze felt fine against my hot body. In spite of it all I didn't want to die. I went over in the corner and grabbed a beer. There were three or four cases of Bud stacked against the wall. It was warm, because there was no electricity. I don't mind warm beer like some people do, though. It just foams a little more. Beer is beer. I went back out on the landing and sat down and pulled the ring tab and drank up. So here we were, with the whole human race wiped out, not by atomic weapons or biowarfare or pollution or anything grand like that. Just the flu. I'd like to put down a huge plaque somewhere, in the Bonneville Salt Flats, maybe. Bronze Square. Three miles on a side. And in big raised letters it would say, for the benefit of any landing aliens JUST THE FLU. I tossed the beer can over the side. It landed with a hollow clank on the cement walk that went around the building. The leanto was a dark triangle on the sand. I wondered if Needles was awake. I wondered if I would be. 'Bernie?' She was standing in the doorway wearing one of my shirts. I hate that. She sweats like a pig. 'You don't like me much any more, do you, Bernie?' I didn't say anything. There were times when I could still feel sorry for everything. She didn't deserve me any more than I deserved her. 'Can I sit down with you?' 'I doubt if it would be wide enough for both of us.' She made a choked hiccuping noise and started to go back inside. 'Needles has got A6,' I said. She stopped and looked at me. Her face was very still. 'Don't joke, Bernie.' I lit a cigarette. 'He can't! He had , 'Yes, he had A2. Hong Kong flu. Just like you and me and Corey and Kelly and Joan.' 'But that would mean he isn't ' 'Immune.' 'Yes. Then we could get it.' 'Maybe he lied when he said he had A2. So we'd take him along with us that time,' I said. Relief spilled across her face. 'Sure, that's it. I would have lied if it had been me. Nobody likes to be alone, do they?' She hesitated. 'Coming back to bed?' 'Not just now.' She went inside. I didn't have to tell her that M was no guarantee against A6. She knew that. She had just blocked it out. I sat and watched the surf. It was really up. Years ago, Anson had been the only halfway decent surfing spot in the state. The Point was a dark, jutting hump against the sky. I thought I could see the upright that was the observation post, but it probably was just imagination. Sometimes Kelly took Joan up to the point. I didn't think they were up there tonight. I put my face in my hands and clutched it, feeling the skin, its grain and texture. It was all narrowing so swiftly, and it was all so mean  there was no dignity in it. The surf coming in, coming in, coming in. Limitless. Clean and deep. We had come here in the summer, Maureen and I, the summer after high school, the summer before college and reality and A6 coming out of Southeast Asia and covering the world like a pall, July, we had eaten pizza and listened to her radio, I had put oil on her back, she had put oil on mine, the air had been hot, the sand bright, the sun like a burning glass. I AM THE DOORWAY Richard and I sat on my porch, looking out over the dunes to the Gulf. The smoke from his cigar drifted mellowly in the air, keeping the mosquitoes at a safe distance. The water was a cool aqua, the sky a deeper, truer blue. It was a pleasant combination. 'You are the doorway,' Richard repeated thoughtfully. 'You are sure you killed the boy  you didn't just dream it?' 'I didn't dream it. And I didn't kill him, either  I told you that. They did. I am the doorway.' Richard sighed. 'You buried him?' 'Yes.' 'You remember where?' 'Yes.' I reached into my breast pocket and got a cigarette. My hands were awkward with their covering of bandages. They itched abominably. 'If you want to see it, you'll have to get the dune buggy. You can't roll this ' I indicated my wheelchair  'through the sand.' Richard's dune buggy was a 1959 VW with pillowsized tyres. He collected driftwood in it. Ever since he retired from the real estate business in Maryland he had been living on Key Caroline and building driftwood sculptures which he sold to the winter tourists at shameless prices. He puffed his cigar and looked out at the Gulf. 'Not yet. Will you tell me once more?' I sighed and tried to light my cigarette. He took the matches away from me and did it himself. I puffed twice, dragging deep. The itch in my fingers was maddening. 'All right,' I said. 'Last night at seven I was out here, looking at the Gulf and smoking, just like now, and J  'Go further back,' he invited. 'Further?' 'Tell me about the flight.' I shook my head. 'Richard, we've been through it and through it. There's nothing ' The seamed and fissured face was as enigmatic as one of his own driftwood sculptures. 'You may remember,' he said. 'Now you may remember.' 'Do you think so?' 'Possibly. And when you're through, we can look for the grave.' 'The grave,' I said. It had a hollow, horrible ring, darker than anything, darker even than all that terrible ocean Cory and I had sailed through five years ago. Dark, dark, dark. Beneath the bandages, my new eyes stared blindly into the darkness the bandages forced on them. They itched. Cory and I were boosted into orbit by the Saturn 16, the one all the commentators called the Empire State Building booster. It was a big beast, all right. It made the old Saturn 1B look like a Redstone, and it took off from a bunker two hundred feet deep  it had to, to keep from taking half of Cape Kennedy with it. We swung around the earth, verifying all our systems, and then did our inject. Headed out for Venus. We left a Senate fighting over an appropriations bill for further deepspace exploration, and a bunch of NASA people praying that we would find something, anything. 'It don't matter what,' Don Lovinger, Project Zeus's private whiz kid, was very fond of saying when he'd had a few. 'You got all the gadgets, plus five soupedup TV cameras and a nifty little telescope with a zillion lenses and filters. Find some gold or platinum. Better yet, find some nice, dumb little blue men for us to study and exploit and feel superior to. Anything. Even the ghost of Howdy Doody would be a start.' Cory and I were anxious enough to oblige, if we could. Nothing had worked for the deepspace programme. From Borman, Anders, and Lovell, who orbited the moon in '6 and found an empty, forbidding world that looked like dirty beach sand, to Markhan and Jacks, who touched down on Mars eleven years later to find an arid wasteland of frozen sand and a few struggling lichens, the deepspace programme had been an expensive bust. And there had been casualties  Pederson and Lederer, eternally circling the sun when all at once nothing worked on the secondto4ast Apollo flight. John Davis, whose little orbiting observatory was holed by a meteoroid in a oneinathousand fluke. No, the space programme was hardly swinging along. The way things looked, the Venus orbit might be our last chance to say we told you so. It was sixteen days out  we ate a lot of concentrates, played a lot of gin, and swapped a cold back and forth  and from the tech side it was a milk run. We lost an airmoisture converter on the third day out, went to backup, and that was all, except for flits and nats, until reentry. We watched Venus grow from a star to a quarter to a milky crystal ball, swapped jokes with Huntsville Control, listened to tapes of Wagner and the Beatles, tended to automated experiments which had to do with everything from measurements of the solar wind to deepspace navigation. We did two midcourse corrections, both of them infinitesimal, and nine days into the flight Cory went outside and banged on the retractable DESA until it decided to operate. There was nothing else out of the ordinary until. 'DESA,' Richard said. 'What's that?' 'An experiment that didn't pan out. NASAese for Deep Space Antenna  we were broadcasting pi in highfrequency pulses for anyone who cared to listen.' I rubbed my fingers against my pants, but it was no good; if anything, it made it worse. 'Same idea as that radio telescope in West Virginia  you know, the one that listens to the stars. Only instead of listening, we were transmitting, primarily to the deeper space planets  Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus. If there's any intelligent life out there, it was taking a nap.' 'Only Cory went out?' 'Yes. And if he brought in any interstellar plague, the telemetry didn't show it.' 'Still ' 'It doesn't matter,' I said crossly. 'Only the here and now matters. They killed the boy last night, Richard. It wasn't a nice thing to watch  or feel. His head it exploded. As if someone had scooped out his brains and put a hand grenade in his skull.' 'Finish the story,' he said. I laughed hollowly. 'What's to tell?' We went into an eccentric orbit around the planet. It was radical and deteriorating, three twenty by seventysix miles. That was on the first swing. The second swing our apogee was even higher, the perigree lower. We had a max of four orbits. We made all four. We got a good look at the planet. Also over six hundred stills and God knows how many feet of film. The cloud cover is equal parts methane, ammonia, dust, and flying shit. The whole planet looks like the Grand Canyon in a wind tunnel. Cory estimated windspeed at about 600mph near the surface. Our probe beeped all the way down and then went out with a squawk. We saw no vegetation and no sign of life. Spectroscope indicated only traces of the valuable minerals. And that was Venus. Nothing but nothing  except it scared me. It was like circling a haunted house in the middle of deep space. I know how unscientific that sounds, but I was scared gutless until we got out of there. I think if our rockets hadn't gone off, I would have cut my throat on the way down. It's not like the moon. The moon is desolate but somehow antiseptic. That world we saw was utterly unlike anything that anyone has ever seen. Maybe it's a good thing that cloud cover is there. It was like a skull that's been picked clean that's the closest I can get. On the way back we heard the Senate had voted to halve spaceexploration funds. Cory said something like 'looks like we're back in the weathersatellite business, Artie.' But I was almost glad. Maybe we don't belong out there. Twelve days later Cory was dead and I was crippled for life. We bought all our trouble on the way down. The chute was fouled. How's that for life's little ironies? We'd been in space for over a month, gone further than any humans had ever gone, and it all ended the way it did because some guy was in a hurry for his coffee break and let a few lines get fouled. We came down hard. A guy that was in one of the copters said it looked like a gigantic baby falling out of the sky, with the placenta trailing after it. I lost consciousness when we hit. I came to when they were taking me across the deck of the Portland. They hadn't even had a chance to roll up the red carpet we were supposed to've walked on. I was bleeding. Bleeding and being hustled up to the infirmary over a red carpet that didn't look anywhere near as red as I did I was in Bethesda for two years. They gave me the Medal of Honor and a lot of money and this wheelchair. I came down here the next year. I like to watch the rockets take off.' 'I know,' Richard said. He paused. 'Show me your hands.' 'No.' It came out very quickly and sharply. 'I can't let them see. I've told you that.' 'It's been five years,' Richard said. 'Why now, Arthur? Can you tell me that?' 'I don't know. I don't know! Maybe whatever it is has a long gestation period. Or who's to say I even got it out there? Whatever it was might have entered me in Fort Lauderdale. Or right here on this porch, for all I know.' Richard sighed and looked out over the water, now reddish with the lateevening sun. 'I'm trying.