CHAPTER 57 Larry and Leo were sitting on the curb in front of the house. Larry was drinking a warm Hamm's

CHAPTER 57

Larry and Leo were sitting on the curb in front of the house. Larry was drinking a warm Hamm's Beer, Leo a warm Orange Spot. You could have anything to drink in Boulder that you wanted these days, as long as it came in a can and you didn't mind drinking it warn. From out back came the

402 steady, gruff roar of the Lawnboy. Lucy was cutting the grass. Larry had offered to do it, but Lucy shook her head. "Find out what's wrong with Leo, if you can." It was the last day of August. The day after Nadine had moved in with Harold, Leo hadn't appeared for breakfast. Larry had found the boy in his room, dressed only in his underpants, his thumb in his mouth. He was uncommunicative and hostile. Larry had been more frightened than Lucy, because she didn't know how Leo had been when Larry had first encountered him. His name had been Joe then, and he had been brandishing a killer's knife. The best part of a week had passed since then, and Leo was a little better, but he hadn't come back all the way and he wouldn't talk about what had happened. "That woman has something to do with it," Lucy had said, screwing the cap onto the lawnmower's tank. "Nadine? What makes you think that?" "Well, I wasn't going to mention it. But she came by the other day while you and Leo were trying the fishing down at Cold Creek. She wanted to see the boy. I was just as glad the two of you were gone." "Lucy—" She gave him a quick kiss, and he had slipped his hand under her halter and given her a friendly squeeze. "I judged you wrong before," she said. "I guess I'll always be sorry for—that. But I'm never going to like Nadine Cross. There's something wrong with her." Larry didn't answer, but he thought Lucy's judgment was probably a true one. That night up by King Sooper's she had been like a crazy woman. "There's one other thing-when she was here, she didn't call him Leo. She called him the other name. Joe." He looked at her blankly as she turned the automatic starter and got the Lawnboy going. Now, half an hour after that discussion, he drank his Hamm's and watched Leo bounce the Ping- Pong ball he had found the day the two of them had walked up to Harold's, where Nadine now lived. The small white ball was smudged, but not dented. Thok-thok-thok against the pavement. Bouncy- bouncy-bally, look-at-theway-we-play. Leo (he was Leo now, wasn't he?) hadn't wanted to go inside Harold's house that day. Into the house where Nadine-mom was now living. "You want to go fishing, kiddo?" Larry offered suddenly. "No fish," Leo said. He looked at Larry with his strange, seawater green eyes. "Do you know Mr. Ellis?" "Sure." "He says we can drink the water when the fish come back. Drink it without—" He made a hooting noise and waved his fingers in front of his eyes. "You know." "Without boiling it?" "I like Dick. Him and Laurie. Always give me something to eat. He's afraid they won't be able to, but I think they will." "Will what?" "Be able to make a baby. Dick thinks he may be too old. But I guess he's not." Larry started to ask how Leo and Dick had gotten on that subject, and then didn't. The answer, of course, was that they hadn't. Dick wouldn't talk to a small boy about something so personal as making a baby. Leo had just... had just known. Yes, Leo knew things... or intuited them. He hadn't wanted to go in Harold's house and had said something about Nadine... he couldn't remember exactly what... but Larry had recalled that discussion and had felt very uneasy when he heard that Nadine had moved in with Harold. It had been as if the boy was in a trance, as if (-thok-thok-thok-) Larry watched the Ping-Pong ball bounce up and down, and suddenly he looked into Leo's face. The boy's eyes were dark and faraway. The sound of the lawnmower was a faroff, soporific drone. The daylight was smooth and warm. And Leo was in a trance again, as if he had read Larry's thought and simply responded to it. Leo had gone to see the elephant. Very casually Larry said: "Yes, I think they can make a baby. Dick can't be any more than fifty- five at the outside. Cary Grant made one when he was almost seventy, I believe." "Who's Cary Grant?" Leo asked. The ball went up and down, up and down. (Notorious. North by Northwest.) "Don't you know?" he asked Leo.

403 "He was that actor," Leo said. "He was in Notorious. And Northwest." (North by Northwest.) "North by Northwest, I mean," Leo said in a tone of agreement. His eyes never left the Ping-Pong ball's bouncing course. That's right," he said. "How's Nadine-mom, Leo?" "She calls me Joe. I'm Joe to her." "Oh." A cold chill was weaving its slow way up Larry's back. "It's bad now." "Bad?" "It's bad with both of them." "Nadine and—" (Harold?) "Yes, him." "They're not happy?" "He's got them fooled. They think he wants them." "He?" "Him." The word hung on the still summer air. "They're going to go west," Leo said. "Jesus," Larry muttered. He was very cold now. The old fear swept him. Did he really want to hear any more of this? It was like watching a tomb door swing slowly open in a silent graveyard, seeing a hand emerge Whatever it is, I don't want to hear it, I don't want to know it. "Nadine-mom wants to think it's your fault," Leo said. "She wants to think you drove her to Harold. But she waited on purpose. She waited until you loved Lucymom too much. She waited until she was sure. It's like he's rubbing away the part of her brain that knows right from wrong. Little by little he's rubbing that part away. And when it's gone she'll be as crazy as everyone else in the West. Crazier maybe." "Leo—" Larry whispered, and Leo answered immediately: "She calls me Joe. I'm Joe to her." "Shall I call you Joe?" Larry asked doubtfully. "No." There was a note of pleading in the boy's voice. "No, please don't." "You miss your Nadine-mom, don't you, Leo?" "She's dead," Leo said with chilling simplicity. "Is that why you stayed out so late that night?" "And why you wouldn't talk?" "But you're talking now." "I have you and Lucy-mom to talk to." "Yes, of course—" "But not for always!" the boy said fiercely. "Not for always, unless you talk to Frannie! Talk to Frannie! Talk to Frannie!" "About Nadine?" "No!" "About what? About you?" Leo's voice rose, became even shriller. "It's all written down! You know! Frannie knows! Talk to Frannie!" "The committee—" "Not the committee! The committee won't help you, it won't help anyone, the committee is the old way, he laughs at your committee because it's the old way and the old ways are his ways, you know, Frannie knows, if you talk together you can—" Leo brought the ball down hard-THOK! and it rose higher than his head and came down and rolled away. Larry watched it, his mouth dry, his heart thudding nastily in his chest. "I dropped my ball," Leo said, and ran to get it. Larry sat watching him. Frannie, he thought.

The two of them sat on the edge of the bandshell stage, their feet dangling. It was an hour before dark, and a few people were walking through the park, some of them holding hands. The children's hour is also the lovers' hour, Fran thought disjointedly. Larry had just finished telling her everything Leo had said in his trance, and her mind was whirling with it.

404 "So what do you think?" Larry asked. "I don't know what to think," she said softly, "except I don't like any of the things that have been happening. Visionary dreams. An old woman who's the voice of God for a while and then walks off into the wilderness. Now a little boy who seems to be a telepath. It's like life in a fairy tale. Sometimes I think the superflu left us alive but drove us all mad." "He said I should talk to you. So I am." She didn't reply. "Well, Larry said, "if anything comes to you—" "Written down," Frannie said softly. "He was right, that kid. It's the whole root of the problem, I think. If I hadn't been so stupid, so conceited, as to write it all down... oh goddam me!" Larry stared at her, amazed. "What are you talking about?" "Its Harold," she said, "and I'm afraid. I haven't told Stu. I've been ashamed. Keeping the diary was so dumb... and now Stu... he actually likes Harold... everybody in the Free Zone likes Harold, including you." She uttered a laugh which was choked with tears. "After all, he was your... your spirit-guide on the way out here, wasn't he?" "I'm not tracking this very well," Larry said slowly. "Can you tell me what it is you're afraid of?" "That's just it—I don't really know. " She looked at him, her eyes wet with tears. "I think I'd better tell you what I can, Larry. I have to talk to someone. God knows I just can't keep it inside anymore, and Stu... Stu's maybe not the person who should hear. At least, not the first one." "Go ahead, Fran. Shoot." So she told him, beginning with the day in June that Harold had driven into the driveway of her Ogunquit home in Roy Brannigan's Cadillac. As she talked, the last bright daylight changed to a bluish shade. The lovers in the park began to drift away. A thin rind of moon rose. In the high-rise condominium on the far side of Canyon Boulevard, a few Coleman gaslamps had come on. She told him about the sign on the barn roof and how she had been sleeping when Harold risked his life to put her name on the bottom. About meeting Stu in Fabyan, and about Harold's shrill get-away-from- my-bone reaction to Stu. She told him about her diary, and about the thumbprint in it. By the time she finished, it was past nine o'clock and the crickets were singing. A silence fell between them and Fran waited apprehensively for Larry to break it. But he seemed lost in thought. At last he said, "How sure are you about that fingerprint? In your own mind are you positive it was Harold's?" She only hesitated a moment. "Yes. I knew it was Harold's print the first time I saw it." "That barn he put the sign on," Larry said. "You remember the night I met you I said I'd been up in it? And that Harold had carved his initials on a beam in the loft?" "It wasn't just his initials. It was yours, too. In a heart. The kind of thing a lovesick little boy would do on his school desk." She put her hands over her eyes and wiped them. "What a mess," she said huskily. "You're not responsible for Harold Lauder's actions, keed." He took her hand in both of his and held it tightly. He looked at her. "Take it from me, the original dipstick, oilslick, and drippy dick. You can't hold it against yourself. Because if you do... " His grip tightened to a degree where it became painful, but his face remained soft. "If you do, you really will go mad. It's hard enough for a person to keep their own socks pulled up, let alone someone else's." He took his hand away and they were quiet for a time. "You think Harold bears Stu a killing grudge?" he said at last. "You really think it's that deep?" "Yes," she said. "I really think that's a possibility. Maybe the whole committee. But I don't know what—" His hand fell on her shoulder and gripped it hard, stilling her. In the darkness his posture had changed, his eyes had widened. His lips moved soundlessly. — "Larry? What—" "When he went downstairs," Larry muttered. "He went down to get a corkscrew or something." "What?" He turned toward her slowly, as if his head was on a rusty hinge. "You know," he said, "there just might be a way to resolve all this. I don't guarantee it, because I didn't look in the book, but... it makes such beautiful sense... Harold reads your diary and not only gets an earful but an idea. Hell, he might have even been jealous that you thought of it first. Didn't all the best writers keep journals?" "Are you saying Harold's got a diary?" "When he went down to the basement, the day I brought the wine, I was looking around his living room. He said he was going to put in some chrome and leather, and I was trying to figure out how it would look. And I noticed this loose stone on the hearth—"

405 "YES!" she yelled, so loudly that he jumped. "The day I snuck in... and Nadine Cross came... I sat on the hearth... I remember that loose stone." She looked at Larry again. "There it is again. As if something had us by the nose, was leading us to it..." "Coincidence," he said, but he sounded uneasy. "Is it? 'We were both in Harold's house. We both noticed the loose stone. And we're both here now. Is it coincidence?" "I don't know." "What was under that stone?" "A ledger," he said slowly. "At least, that was the word stamped on the cover. I didn't look in it. At the time I thought it could just as easily have belonged to the previous owner of the house as to Harold. But if it did, wouldn't Harold have found it? We both noticed the loose stone. So let's say he finds it. Even if the guy who lived there before the flu had filled it up with little secrets— the amount he cheated on his taxes, his sex fantasies about his daughter, I don't know what all-those secrets wouldn't have been Harold's secrets. Do you see that?" "Yes, but—" "Don't interrupt while Inspector Underwood is elucidating, you giddy slip of a girl. So if the secrets weren't Harold's secrets, why would he have put the ledger back under the stone? Because they were his secrets. That was Harold's journal." "Do you think it's still there?" "Maybe. I think we'd better look and see." "Now?" "Tomorrow. He'll be out with the Burial Committee, and Nadine has been helping out at the power station afternoons." "All right," she said. "Do you think I should tell Stu about this?" "Why don't we wait? There's no sense stirring things up unless we're sure it's something important. The book might be gone. It might be nothing but a list of things to do. It might be full of perfectly innocent things. Or Harold's master political plan. Or it might be in code." "I hadn't thought of that. What will we do if there is... something important?" "Then I guess we'll have to bring it up before the Free Zone Committee. Another reason to get it done quickly. We're meeting on the second. The committee will handle it." "Will it?" "Yes, I think so," Larry said, but he was also thinking of what Leo had said about the committee. She slipped off the edge of the bandshell and onto the ground. "I feel better. Thanks for being here, Larry." "Where should we meet?" "The little park across from Harold's. What about there, at one o'clock tomorrow afternoon?" "Fine," Larry said. "I'll see you then." Frannie went home feeling lighter at heart than she had for weeks. As Larry said, the alternatives were now fairly clear. The ledger might prove all of their fears groundless. But if it proved otherwise... Well, if it was otherwise, let the committee decide. As Larry had reminded her, they were meeting on the evening of the second, at Nick and Ralph's place, out near the end of Baseline Road. When she got home, Stu was sitting in the bedroom, a felt-tip marker in one hand and a weighty leather-bound volume in the other. The title, stamped in gold leaf on the cover, was An Introduction to the Colorado Code of Criminal Justice. "Heavy reading," she said, and kissed him on the mouth. "Arg." He tossed the book across the room and it landed on the dresser with a thump. "Al Bundell brought it over. He and his Law Committee are really up and in the doins, Fran. He wants to talk to the Free Zone Committee when we meet day after tomorrow. What have you been up to, pretty lady?" "Talking with Larry Underwood." He looked at her closely for a long moment. "Fran-have you been crying?" "Yes," she said, meeting his gaze steadily, "but I feel better now. Much better." "Is it the baby?" "No." "What, then?" "I'll tell you tomorrow night. I'll tell you everything that's been on what passes for my mind. Until then, no questions. Kay?" "Is it serious?" "Stu, I don't know." He looked at her for a long, long time. "All right, Frannie," he said. "I love you." "I know. And I love you, too."

406 "Bed?" She smiled. "Race you."

The first of September dawned gray and rainy, a dull, forgettable day-but one that no resident of the Free Zone ever forgot. That was the day the power came back on in North Boulder... briefly, at least. At ten to noon, in the control room of the power station, Brad Kitchner looked at Stu, Nick, Ralph, and Jack Jackson, who were all standing behind him. Brad smiled nervously and said, "Hail Mary, fulla grace, help me win this stock-car race." He yanked two big switches down hard. In the huge and cavernous hall below them, two trial generators began to whine. The five men walked over to the wallto-wall polarized glass window and looked below, to where almost a hundred men and women stood, all of them wearing protective goggles as per Brad's order. "If we did something wrong, I'd rather blow two than fifty-two," Brad had told them earlier. The generators began to whine more loudly. Nick elbowed Stu and pointed to the office ceiling, Stu looked up and began to grin. Behind the translucent panels, the fluorescents had begun to glow weakly. The generators cycled up and up, reached a high, steady hum, and leveled off. Down below, the crowd of assembled workers broke into spontaneous applause, some of them wincing as they did so; their hands were raw and frayed from wrapping copper wire hour after drudging hour. The fluorescents were shining brightly and normally now. For Nick, the feeling was the exact opposite of the dread he had known when the lights went out m Shoyo—not one of entombment now, but of resurrection. The two generators supplied power to one small section of North Boulder in the North Street area. There were people in the area who hadn't known about the test that morning, and many of these people fled as if all the devils of hell were after them. TV sets went on in blares of snow. In a house on Spruce Street, a blender whirred into life, trying to blend a cheeseand-egg mixture that had congealed long since. The blender's motor soon overloaded and blew out. A power saw whined into life in a deserted garage, puffing sawdust out of its guts. Stove burners began to glow. Marvin Gaye began to sing from the loudspeakers of an oldies record shop called the Wax Museum; the words, backed by a jive disco beat, seemed like a dream of the past come to life: "Let's dance... let's shout... get funky what it's all about... let's dance... let's shout..." A power transformer blew on Maple Street and a gaudy spiral of purple sparks drifted down, lit on the wet grass, and went out. At the power station, one of the generators began to whine at a higher, more desperate note. It began to smoke. People backed away, poised just below the point of panic. The place began to fill with the sickish-sweet smell of ozone. A buzzer went off stridently. "Too high!" Brad roared. "Bastard's crossing over! Overloading!" He scrambled across the room and slammed both switches back up. The whine of the generators began to die, but not before there was a loud pop and screams, deadened by the safety glass, from below. "Holy crow," Ralph said. "One of em's afire." Above them, the fluorescents faded to sullen cores of white light, then went out completely. Brad jerked open the control room door and came out on the landing. His words echoed flatly in the big open space. "Get the foam to that! Hustle!" Several foam extinguishers were turned on the generators, and the fire was doused. The smell of ozone still hung on the air. The others crowded out on the landing beside Brad. Stu laid a hand on his shoulder. "I'm sorry it turned out the way it did, man, " he said. Brad turned toward him, grinning. "Sorry? What for?" "Well, it caught fire, didn't it?" Jack asked. "Shit, yes! It surely did! And somewhere around North Street there's a transformer all blown to shit. We forgot, goddammit, we forgot! They got sick, they died, but they didn't go around turning off their electrical appliances before they did it! There are TVs on, and ovens, and electric blankets, all over Boulder. Hell of a power drain. These generators, they're built to cross over when the load's heavy in one place and light in another. That one down there tried to cross, but all the others were shut down, see?" Brad was fairly jerking with excitement. "Gary! You remember the way Gary, Indiana, was burned to the ground?" They nodded. "Can't be sure, we'll never be sure, but what happened here could have happened there. Could be the power didn't go off soon enough. One shorted-out electric blanket could have been enough under the right conditions, just like Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over that lantern in Chicago. These

407 gennies tried to cross and had nothing to cross to. So they burned out. We're lucky it happened, that's what I thinktake my word for it." "If you say so," Ralph responded doubtfully. Brad said, "We've got the job to do all over again, but only on one motor. We'll be in business. But—" Brad had begun to snap his fingers, an unconscious gesture of excitement. "We don't dare turn the juice back on until we're sure. Can we get another work-crew? A dozen guys or so?" "Sure, I guess so," Stu said. "What for?" "A Turning-Off Crew. Just a bunch of guys to go around Boulder and turn off everything that was left on. We don't dare turn the juice back on until that gets done. We got no fire department, man." Brad laughed a little crazily. "We're having a Free Zone Committee meeting tomorrow night," Stu said. "You come on over and explain why you want them, and you'll get your men. But are you sure that overload won't happen again?" "Pretty damn sure, yeah. It wouldn't have happened today if there hadn't been so much stuff left on. Speaking of that, somebody ought to go over to North Boulder and see if it's burning down." Nobody was sure if Brad was joking or not. As it turned out there were several small fires, mostly from hot appliances. None of them spread in the drizzle that was falling. And what people in the Zone remembered later about the first of September 1990 was that it was the day the power came back on-if only for thirty seconds or so.

An hour later, Fran pedaled her bike into Eben G. Fine Park across from Harold's. At the park's north end, just beyond the picnic tables, Boulder Stream chuckled mildly along. The morning's drizzly rain was turning into a fine mist. She looked around for Larry, didn't see him, and parked her bike. She walked through the dewy grass toward the swings and a voice said, "Over here, Frannie." Startled, she looked toward the building that housed the men's and women's toilets, and felt a moment of utter confused fear. A tall figure was standing in the shadows of the short passageway `running through the center of the dual comfort station, and for just a moment she thought... Then the figure stepped out and it was Larry, dressed in faded jeans and a khaki shirt. Fran relaxed. "Did I scare you?" he asked. "You did, just a little." She sat down in one of the swings, the thud of her heart beginning to slow. "I just saw a shape, standing there in the dark..." "I'm sorry. I thought it might be safer, even though there's no direct line of sight from here to Harold's place. I see you rode a bicycle, too." She nodded. "Quieter." "I stowed mine out of sight in that shelter." He nodded to an open-walled, low-roofed building by the playground. Frannie trundled her bike between the swings and the slide and into the shelter. The odor inside was musty and fetid. The place had been a make-out spot for kids too young or too stoned to drive, she guessed. It was littered with beer bottles and cigarette ends. There was a crumpled pair of panties in the far corner and the remains of a small fire in the near one. She parked her bike next to Larry's and came back outside quickly. In those shadows, with the scent of that long-dead sex-musk in her nose, it was too easy to imagine the dark man standing just behind her, his twisted coathanger in hand. "Regular Holiday Inn, isn't it?" Larry said dryly. "Not my idea of pleasant accommodations," Fran said with a little shiver. "No matter what comes of this, Larry, I want to tell Stu everything tonight." Larry nodded. "Yeah, and not just because he's on the committee. He's also the marshal." Fran looked at him, troubled. Really for the first time she understood that this expedition might end with Harold in jail. They were going to sneak into his house without a warrant or anything and poke around. "Oh, bad," she said. "Not too good, is it?" he agreed. "You want to call it off?" She thought for a long time and then shook her head. "Good. I think we ought to know, one way or the other." "Are you sure they're both gone?" "Yes. I saw Harold driving one of the Burial Committee trucks early this morning. And all the people who were on the Power Committee were invited over for the tryout." "You sure she went?" "It would look damn funny if she didn't, wouldn't it?" Fran thought that over, then nodded. "I guess it would. By the way, Stu said they hope to have most of the town electrified again by the sixth."

408 "That's going to be a mighty day," Larry said, and thought how nice it would be to sit down in Shannon's or the Broken Drum with a big Fender guitar and an even bigger amp and play something-anything, as long as it was simple and had a heavy beat-at full volume. "Gloria," maybe, or "Walkin' the Dog." Just about anything, in fact, except "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" "Maybe," Fran said, "we ought to have a cover story, though. Just in case." Larry grinned crookedly. "Want to say we're selling magazine subscriptions if one of them comes back?" "Har-har, Larry." "Well, we could say we came to tell her what you just told me about getting the juice turned on again. If she's there." Fran nodded. "Yes, that might be okay." "Don't kid yourself, Fran. She'd be suspicious if we told her we'd come up because Jesus Christ just appeared and is walking back and forth on top of the City Reservoir." "If she's guilty of something." "Yes. If she's guilty of something." "Come on," Fran said after a moment's thought. "Let's go.

There was no need for the cover story. Steady hard rapping at first the front and then the back door convinced them that Harold's house was indeed empty. It was just as well, Fran thought the more she thought about the cover they'd worked out, the thinner it seemed. "How did you get in?" Larry asked. "The cellar window." They went around to the side of the house and Larry pulled and tugged fruitlessly at the window while Fran kept watch. "Maybe you did," he said, "but it's locked now." "No, it's just sticking. Let me try." But she had no better luck. Sometime between her first clandestine trip out here and now, Harold had locked up tight. "What do we do now?" she asked him. "Let's break it." "Larry, he'll see it." "Let him. If he doesn't have anything to hide, he'll think it was just a couple of kids, breaking windows in empty houses. It sure looks empty, with all the shades pulled down. And if he does have something to hide, it'll worry him plenty and he deserves to be worried. Right?" She looked doubtful but didn't stop him as he took off his shirt, wrapped it around his fist and forearm, and crunched the basement window. Glass tinkled inward and he felt around for the catch. "Here tis." He released it and the window slid back. Larry slipped through and turned to help her. "Be careful, kiddo. No miscarriages in Harold Lauder's basement, please." He caught her under the arms and eased her down. They looked around the rumpus room together. The croquet set stood sentinel. The air hockey table was littered with little snips of colored electrical wire. "What's this?" she said, picking up a piece of it. "This wasn't here before." He shrugged. "Maybe Harold's building a better mousetrap." There was a box under the table and he fshed it out. The cover said: DELUXE REALISTIC WALKIE-TALKIE SET, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. Larry opened the box, but the heft of it had already told him it was empty. "Building walkie-talkies instead of mousetraps," Fran said. "No, this wasn't a kit. You buy this kind ready to go. Maybe he was modifying them somehow. It sounds like Harold. Remember how Stu bitched about the walkietalkie reception when he and Harold and Ralph were out hunting for Mother Abagail?" She nodded, but there was still something about those snips of wire that bothered her. Larry dropped the box back onto the floor and made what he would later think of as the most wildly erroneous statement of his entire life. "It doesn't matter," he said. "Let's go., They went up the stairs, but this time the door at the top was locked. She looked at him and Larry shrugged. "We've come this far, right?" Fran nodded. Larry bumped his shoulder against the door a few times to get the feel of the bolt on the other side, and then rammed it hard. There was a snapping-metal sound, a clunk, and the door swung open. Larry bent and picked up a bolt assembly from the linoleum kithen floor. "I can put this back on and he'll never know the difference. That is, if there's a screwdriver handy." "Why bother? He's going to see the broken window." "That's true. But if the bolt's back on the door, he'll... what are you smiling about?"

409 "Put the bolt back on, by all means. But how are you going to draw it from the cellar side of the door?" He thought about it and said, "Jeez, I hate a smartass woman worse than anything." He tossed the bolt onto the Formica kitchen counter. "Let's go look under that hearthstone." They went into the shadowy living room, and Fran felt anxiety start to creep up. Last time Nadine hadn't had a key. This time, if she came back, she would. And if she did come back, they would be caught red-handed. It would be a bitter joke if Stu's first job as marshal turned out to be arresting his own woman for breaking and entering. "That's it, isn't it?" Larry asked, pointing. "Yes. Be as quick as you can." "There's a good chance he's moved it, anyway." And Harold had. It was Nadine who had replaced it under the loose hearthstone. Larry and Fran knew nothing of that, only that when Larry pulled the loose hearthstone aside, the book lay there in the hollow beneath, the word LEDGER gleaming mellowly up at them in gold-filled letters. They both stared at it. The room seemed suddenly hotter, stuffier, darker. "Well," Larry said, "are we going to admire it or read it?" "You," Fran said. "I don't even want to touch it." Larry picked it out of the hole and automatically wiped the white stone-dust from the cover. He began to flip through it at random. The writing had been done with a felt-tipped marker of the sort that had been marketed under the pugnacious brand name Hardhead. It had allowed Harold to write in a tiny, perfect script-the handwriting of an intensely conscientious man, perhaps a driven man. There were no paragraph breaks. There was only an eyelash of a margin to the right and left, but that margin was constant, so straight that it might have been drawn with a ruler. "It'd take me three days to read all this," Larry said, and went on flipping toward the front of the book. "Hold it," Fran said, and reached over his arm to turn back a couple of pages. Here the steady flow of words was broken by a boldly boxed-off area. What had been enclosed seemed to be some sort of motto:

To follow one's star is to concede the power of some greater Force, some Providence; yet is it still not possible that the act of following itself is the taproot of even greater Power? Your GOD, your DEVIL, owns the keys to the lighthouse; I have grappled with that so long and hard in these last two months; but to each of us he has given the responsibility of NAVIGATION. HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

It is said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To vent them is more noble; that is to say the world must change for the good of you. I am on a great adventure. HAROLD EMERY LAUDER

410 those which began each boxed motto. They read that first sentence holding the ledger between them like children at a choir practice and Fran said "Oh!" in a small, strangled voice and stepped away, her hand pressed lightly to her mouth. "Fran, we have to take the book," Larry said. "Yes—" "And show it to Stu. I don't know if Leo's right about them being on the dark man's side, but at the very least, Harold is dangerously disturbed. You can see that." "Yes," she said again. She felt faint, weak. So this was how the matter of the diaries ended. It was as if she had known, as if she had known it all from the moment she saw that big smudged thumbprint, and she had to keep telling herself not to faint, not to faint. "Fran? Frannie? Are you all right?" Larry's voice. From far away. The first sentence in Harold's ledger: My great pleasure this delightful postApocalypse summer will be to kill Mr. Stuart Dog-Cock Redman; and just maybe I will kill her, too.

411 shrapnel. I trust your judgment, dear. It's going to be just like the old fairy tale about the tailor and the flies. Seven at a blow. Only in this case, we're dealing with a bunch of political cockroaches." Nadine pushed aside boots and scarves, made a hole, and slipped the shoebox into it. She covered it over again and then worked her way out of the closet. There. Done. For better or worse. She left the house quickly, not looking back, trying to ignore the voice that wouldn't stay dead, the voice that was now telling her to go back in there and pull the wires that ran between the blasting caps and the walkie-talkie, telling her to give this up before it drove her mad. Because wasn't that what was really lying somewhere up ahead, now maybe less than two weeks ahead? Wasn't madness the final logical conclusion? She slipped the bag of groceries into the Vespa's carrier and kicked the machine into life. And all the time she was driving away, that voice went on: You're not going to leave that there, are you? You're not going to leave that bomb in there, are you? In a world where so many have died— She leaned into a turn, barely able to see where she was going. Tears had begun to blur her eyes. —the one great sin is to take a human life. Seven lives here. No, more than that, because the committee was going to hear reports from the heads of several subcommittees. She stopped at the corner of Baseline and Broadway, thinking she would turn around and go back. She was shuddering all over. And later she would never be able to explain to Harold precisely what had happened-in truth, she never even tried. It was a foretaste of the horrors to come. She felt a blackness creeping over her vision. It came like a dark curtain slowly drawn, flipping and flapping in a mild breeze. Every now and then the breeze would gust, the curtain would flap more vigorously, and she would see a bit of daylight under its hem, a little bit of this deserted intersection. But the curtain came over her vision in steady blackout drifts and soon she was lost in it. She was blind, she was deaf, she was without the sense of touch. The thinking creature, the Nadine-ego, drifted in a warm black cocoon like seawater, like amniotic fluid. And she felt him creep into her. A shriek built up within her, but she had no mouth with which to scream. Penetration: entropy. She didn't know what those words meant, put together like that; she only knew that they were right. It was like nothing she had ever felt before. Later, metaphors occurred to her to describe it, and she rejected them, one by one: You're swimming and suddenly, in the midst of the warm water, you're treading water in a pocket of deep, numbing cold. You've been given Novocain and the dentist pulls a tooth. It comes out with a painless tug. You spit blood into the white enamel basin. There's a hole in you; you've been gouged. You can slip your tongue into the hole where part of you was living a second ago. You stare at your face in the mirror. You stare at it for a long time. Five minutes, ten, fifteen. No fair blinking. You watch with an intellectual sort of horror as your face changes, like the face of Lon Chaney, Jr., in a werewolf epic. You become a stranger to yourself, an olive-skinned Doppelganger, a psychotic Vampira with pale skin and fishslit eyes. It was really none of those things, but there was a tastetrace of all of them. The dark man entered her, and he was cold.

When Nadine opened her eyes, her first thought was that she was in hell. Hell was whiteness, the thesis to the dark man's antithesis. She saw white, ivory, bleached-out nothingness. White-white-white. It was white hell, and it was everywhere. She stared at the whiteness (it was impossible to stare into it), fascinated, agonized, for minutes before she realized she could feel the fork of the Vespa between her thighs, and that there was another color-green-at the periphery of her vision. With a jerk she pulled her eyes out of their blank, locked stare. She gazed around herself. Her mouth was slack, trembling; the eyes themselves dazed and horror-drugged. The dark man had been in her, Flagg had been in her, and when he had come he had driven her away from the windows of her five senses, her loopholes on reality. He had driven her as a man might drive a car or a truck. And he had brought her... where? She glanced toward the white and saw it was a huge blank drive-in movie screen against a background of white late afternoon rainy sky. Turning around, she saw the snack-bar. It was painted a garish flesh-tone pink. Written across the front was WELCOME TO THE HOLIDAY TWIN! ENJOY ENTERTAINMENT UNDER THE STARS TONITE!

412 The darkness had come on her at the intersection of Baseline and Broadway. Now she was far out on Twentyeighth Street, almost over the town line to... Longmont, wasn't it? There was a taste of him in her still, far back in her mind, like cold slime on a floor. She was surrounded by poles, steel poles like sentries, each of them five feet high, each bearing a matched set of drive-in speakers. There was gravel underfoot, but grass and dandelions were growing up through it. She guessed the Holiday Twin hadn't been doing much business since the middle of June or so. You could say that it had been kind of a dead summer for the entertainment biz. "Why am I here?" she whispered. It was only talking aloud, talking to herself; she expected no answer. So when she was answered, a shriek of terror pealed from her throat. All the speakers fell off the speaker poles at once and onto the weedstrewn gravel. The sound they made was a huge, amplified CHUNK! the sound of a dead body striking gravel. "NADINE," the speakers blared, and it was his voice, and how she shrieked then! Her hands flew to her head, her palms clapped themselves over her ears, but it was all the speakers at once and there was no hiding from that giant voice, which was full of fearful hilarity and dreadful comic lust. "NADINE, NADINE, OH HOW I LOVE TO LOVE NADINE, MY PET, MY PRETTY—" "Stop it!" she shrieked back, straining her vocal cords with the force of her cry, and still her voice was so small compared with that . giant's bellow. And yet, for a moment the voice did stop. There was silence. The fallen speakers looked up at her from the gravel like the rugose eyes of giant insects. Nadine's hands slowly came down from her ears. You've gone insane, she comforted herself. That's all it is. The strain of waiting... and Harold's games... finally planting the explosive... all of it has finally driven you over the edge dear, and you've gone crazy. It's probably better this way. But she hadn't gone crazy, and she knew it. This was far worse than being crazy. As if to prove this, the speakers now boomed out in the stern yet almost prissy voice of a principal reprimanding the student body over the high school intercom for some prank they had all played together. "NADINE. THEY KNOW." "They know," she parroted. She wasn't sure who they were, or what they knew, but she was quite sure it was inevitable. "YOU'VE BEEN STUPID. GOD MAY LOVE STUPIDITY; I DO NOT." The words crackled and rolled away into the late afternoon. Her clothes clung soddenly to her skin, her hair lay lankly against her pallid cheeks, and she began to shiver. Stupid, she thought. Stupid, stupid. I know what that word means. I think. I think it means death. "THEY KNOW EVERYTHING... EXCEPT THE SHOEBOX. THE DYNAMITE." Speakers. Speakers everywhere, staring up at her from the white gravel, peeking at her from clusters of dandelions closed against the rain. "GO TO SUNRISE AMPHITHEATER. STAY THERE. UNTIL TOMORROW NIGHT. UNTIL THEY MEET. AND THEN YOU AND HAROLD MAY COME. COME TO ME." Now Nadine began to feel a simple, shining gratitude. They had been stupid... but they had also been granted a second chance. They were important enough to have warranted intervention. And soon, very soon, she would be with him... and then she would go crazy, she was quite sure of it, and all this would cease to matter. "Sunrise Amphitheater may be too far," she said. Her vocal cords had been hurt somehow; she could only croak. "It may be too far for the..." For the what? She pondered. Oh! Oh yes! Right! "For the walkie-talkie. The signal." No answer. The speakers lay on the gravel, staring at her, hundreds of them. She pushed the Vespa's starter and the little engine coughed to life. The echo made her wince. It sounded like rifle fire. She wanted to get out of this awful place, away from those staring speakers. Had to get out. She overbalanced the motor-scooter going around the concession stand. She might have held it if she'd been on a paved surface, but the Vespa's rear wheel skidded out from under her in the loose gravel and she fell with a thump, biting her lip bloody and cutting her cheek. She got up, her eyes wide and skittish, and drove on. She was trembling all over. Now she was in the alley the cars drove through to get into the drive-in and the ticket stand, looking like a small toll-booth, was just ahead of her. She was going to get out. She was going to get away. Her mouth softened in gratitude.

413 Behind her, hundreds of speakers blared into life all at once, and now the voice was singing, a horrid, tuneless singing: "I'LL BE SEEING YOU... IN ALL THE OLD FAMILIAR PLACES... THAT THIS HEART OF MINE EMBRACES... ALL DAY THROOOOO..." Nadine screamed in her newly cracked voice. Huge, monstrous laughter came then, a dark and sterile cackling which seemed to fill the earth. "DO WELL, NADINE," the voice boomed. "DO WELL, MY FANCY, MY DEAR ONE." Then she gained the road and fled back toward Boulder at the Vespa's top speed, leaving the disembodied voice and staring speakers behind... but carrying them with her in her heart, for then, for always.

She was waiting for Harold around the corner from the bus station. When he saw her, his face froze and drained of color. "Nadine—" he whispered. The lunch bucket dropped from his hand and clacked on the pavement. "Harold," she said. "They know. We've got to—" "Your hair, Nadine, oh my God, your hair—" His face seemed to be all eyes. "Listen to me!" He seemed to gain some of himself back. "A-all right. What?" "They went up to your house and found your book. They took it away." Emotions at war on Haold's face: anger, horror, shame. Little by little they drained away and then, like some terrible corpse coming up from deep water, a frozen grin resurfaced on Harold's face. "Who? Who did that?" "I don't know all of it, and it doesn't matter anyway. Fran Goldsmith was one of them, I'm sure of that. Maybe Bateman or Underwood. I don't know. But they'll come for you, Harold." "How do you know?" He grabbed her roughly by the shoulders, remembering that she had put the ledger back under the hearthstone. He shook her like a ragdoll, but Nadine faced him without fear. She hadbeen face-to-face with more terrible things than Harold Lauder on this long, long day. "You bitch, how do you know?" "He told me." Harold's hands dropped away. "Flagg?" A whisper. "He told you? He spoke to you? And it did that?" Harold's grin was ghastly, the grin of the Reaper on horseback. "What are you talking about?" They were standing next to an appliance store. Taking her by the shoulders again, Harold turned her to face the glass. Nadine looked at her reflection for a long time. Her hair had gone white. Entirely white. There was not a single black strand left. Oh how I love to love Nadine. "Come on," she said. "We have to leave town." "Now?" "After dark. We'll hide until then, and pick up what camping gear we need on the way out." "West?" "Not yet. Not until tomorrow night." "Maybe I don't want to anymore," Harold whispered. He was still looking at her hair. She put his hand on it. "Too late, Harold," she said.