HALLOWEEN TOWN

by Lucius Shepard

 

My first story sale was to F&SF, though I almost didn’t find out about it. I had sent in a story, “Solitario’s Eyes,” and never received any response. Being busy with a new band, I just figured they had rejected it. Thus I was greatly surprised when I was called out of practice to answer the phone and heard, “This is Ed Ferman,” coming from the receiver. Turns out that Mr. Ferman had sent a check and a contract and the post office had not delivered it. “I hope you haven’t sold it,” he said. “It’s coming out next month and we have a very nice cover for it.” Needless to say, that made my day. Hell, it made my month ... now that I think about it, it was probably the best damn thing that happened to me that year.—Lucius Shepard

 

This is the story of Clyde Ormoloo and the willow wan, but it’s also the story of Halloween, the spindly, skinny town that lies along the bottom of the Shilkonic Gorge, a meandering crack in the earth so narrow that on a clear day the sky appears to those hundreds of feet below as a crooked seam of blue mineral running through dark stone. Spanning the gorge is a forest with a canopy so dense that a grown man, if he steps carefully, can walk across it; thus many who live in Halloween must travel for more than a mile along the river (the Mossbach) that divides their town should they wish to see daylight. The precipitous granite walls are concave, forming a great vaulted roof overhead, and this concavity becomes exaggerated near the apex of the gorge, where the serpentine roots of oak and hawthorn and elm burst through thin shelves of rock, braiding their undersides like enormous varicose veins.

 

Though a young boy can toss a stone from one bank to the other, the Mossbach is held to be quite a broad river by the citizenry, and this is scarcely surprising, considering their narrow perspective. Space is at a premium and the houses of the town, lacking all foundation, must be bolted to the walls of the gorge. Their rooms, rarely more than ten feet deep, are stacked one atop another, like the uneven, teetering columns of blocks erected by a toddler, and are ascended to by means of external ladders or rickety stairs or platforms raised by pulleys (a situation that has proved a boon to fitness). A small house may reach a height of forty feet, and larger ones, double stacks topped off by ornamental peaked roofs, often tower more than eighty feet above the Mossbach. When families grow close, rooms may be added that connect two or more houses, thereby creating a pattern of square shapes across the granite redolent of an enormous crossword puzzle; when feuds occur, these connecting rooms may be demolished. Public venues like O’Malloy’s Inn and the Downlow have expanded by carving out rooms from the rock, but for much of its length, with its purplish days and quirky architecture and night mists, Halloween seems a habitation suited for a society of intelligent pigeons ... though on occasion a purely human note is sounded. Sandy shingles notch the granite shore and piers of age-blackened wood extend out over the water, illumined by gas lamps or a single dangling bulb, assisting the passage of the flat-bottomed skiffs that constitute the river’s sole traffic. Frequently you will see a moon-pale girl (or a dark-skinned girl with a peculiar pallor) sitting at the end of such a pier beneath a fan of radiance, watching elusive, luminous silver fish appearing and disappearing beneath the surface with the intermittency of fireflies, waiting for her lover to come poling his skiff out of the sempiternal gloom.

 

* * * *

 

At forty-one, Clyde Ormoloo had the lean, muscular body of a construction worker (which, in fact, he had been) and the bleak disposition of a French philosopher plagued by doubts concerning the substantive worth of existence (which, in essence, he had become). His seamed face, surmounted by a scalp upon which was raised a crop of black stubble, was surpassingly ugly, yet ugly in such a way that appealed to women who prize men for their brutishness and use them as a setting to show off the diamond of their beauty. These women did not stay for long, put off by Clyde’s unrelenting and perhaps unnatural scrutiny. Three years previously, while working a construction site in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania (his home and the birthplace of Joe Namath, the former NFL quarterback), he had been struck a glancing blow to the head by a rivet dropped from the floor above and, as a result, he had begun to see too deeply into people. The injury was not a broken spine (he was in the hospital one night for observation), yet it paralyzed Clyde. Whereas before the accident he had been a beer guzzler, an ass-grabber, a blue-collar bon vivant, now when he looked into a woman’s eyes (or a man’s, for that matter), he saw a terrible incoherence, flashes of greed, lust, and fear exploding into a shrapnel of thought that somehow succeeded in contriving a human likeness. His friends seemed unfamiliar—he understood that he had not known them, merely recognized the shapes of their madness. He asked questions that made them uncomfortable and made comments that they failed to grasp and took for insults. Increasingly, women told their friends they didn’t know him anymore and turned away when he drew near. Men rejected him less subtly and formed new friendships with those whose madnesses complemented their own.

 

“Sooner or later,” said one of his doctors, “almost everyone arrives at the conclusion that people are chaotic skinbags driven by the basest of motives. You’ll adjust.”

 

None of the doctors could explain Clyde’s sudden increase in intelligence and they were bemused by his contention that this increase was a byproduct of improved vision. In Clyde’s view, his new capacity to analyze and break down the images conveyed by light lay at the root of his problem—the rivet had struck his skull above the site of the visual cortex, had it not? At the movies, in rock clubs, in any poorly lit circumstance, he felt almost normal, though most movies—themselves creations of light—seemed designed to inspire Pavlovian responses in idiots, and thus Clyde began attending the local arthouse, hiding his face beneath a golf cap so as not to be recognized.

 

“Try sunglasses,” suggested a specialist.

 

Sunglasses helped, but Clyde felt like a pretentious ass wearing them day in, day out during the gray inclemency of a Beaver Falls winter. He considered moving to Florida, but knew this would be no more than a stopgap. The sole passion he clung to from his old, happy life (never mind that it had been an illusion) was his love of football, and for a while he thought football might save him. He spent hours each night watching ESPN Classic and the NFL Network. Football was the perfect metaphor, he thought, for contemporary man’s frustration with the limitations of the social order, and therein rested its appeal. Whenever the officials (who in the main were professional men, lawyers, accountants, insurance executives, and the like, apt instruments of repression) threw their yellow flags and blew their silver whistles, preventing a three-hundred-pound mesomorph from ripping out a young quarterback’s throat, they were in effect reminding the millions tuning in that they could expect no more than a partial fulfillment of their desires ... and yet they did this with the rabid participation of the masses, who dressed in appropriate colors, rooting for the home team or the visitors, but acknowledging by the sameness of their dress that there was only one side, the side that sold them jerseys and caps. Thus football had evolved into a training tool of the corporate oligarchy, posing a dreary object lesson that conditioned proles to accept their cancer-ridden, consumerist fates enthusiastically. Having thought these things, the game lost much of its appeal for Clyde. And so, plagued by light, alone in a world where solitude is frowned upon, if not perceived as the symptom of a deviant pathology, he petitioned the town of Halloween to grant him citizenship.

 

* * * *

 

The population of Halloween fluctuates between three thousand and thirty-eight hundred, and is sustained at those levels by the Town Council. At the time Clyde put in his application, the population hovered around thirty-two hundred, so breaching the upper limit would not be a problem. To his surprise, the decision to reject or approve him would not be rendered by the council in full session, but by a committee of three men named Brad, Carmine, and Spooz, and the meeting was held at the Sub-Cafe, an establishment that had been excavated out of the granite; a neon sign was bracketed to the rock above the entrance, indigo letters flashing on and off, producing eerie reflections in the water, and the interior looked a little like Brownie’s back in Beaver Falls, with digital beer signs and some meager Christmas decorations and piped-in music (the Pogues were playing when he entered), TVs mounted here and there, maple paneling and subdued lighting, photographs of former patrons on the walls, tables, a horseshoe-shaped bar and waitresses wearing indigo Sub-Café T-shirts. A comforting mutter arose from the crowd at the bar, and two of the committee were seated at a back table.

 

Carmine and Spooz, it turned out, were cousins who did not share a family resemblance. Spooz was a genial, round-cheeked man in his mid-thirties, already going bald, and Carmine was five or six years younger, lean and sallow, with a vulpine face, given to toothpick-chewing and lip-curling. Brad, who had to be called away from a group gathered around a punchboard, was a black guy with baby dreads, a real beanpole, maybe six-six or six-seven. He brought a beer over for Clyde and gave him a grin as he pulled a chair up to the table. They drank and talked small and Clyde, gesturing at the TVs, asked if they had cable.

 

“Shit, no,” said Carmine, and Spooz said, “The cable and the satellite company are having a turf war, so nobody can get either one.”

 

“Cable wouldn’t work down here, anyway,” said Carmine. “Satellite, neither.”

 

“How come?” Clyde asked.

 

“We got a service that burns stuff for us,” Spooz said. “They send DVDs down the next day.”

 

“Ormoloo,” said Brad. “That’s French, isn’t it? Doesn’t it have something to do with gilding?”

 

“Beats me.” Clyde drained his glass and signaled the waitress to bring another round. “My dad was this big old guy who founded a hippie commune out in Oregon. He changed his name legally to Elephant Ormoloo. When my mom married him, she changed hers to Tijuana Ormoloo. When she divorced him, she changed it back to Marian Bleier. She told me I could choose between Bleier and Ormoloo. I was ten years old and pissed at her for leaving my dad, even though he’d been screwing around on her, so I chose Ormoloo. Anyway....” Clyde resettled in his chair. “I don’t think my dad even realized it sounded French. He used to buy these Hindu posters from a head shop. You know, the ones with blue goddesses and guys with elephant heads and all that. He loved those damn posters. I think he was trying for a Hindu effect with the name.”

 

After a silence during which the PA system began piping in the Pretenders, Carmine shifted his toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue and said, “Too much information, guy.”

 

Irritated, Clyde said, “I thought you wanted to know shit about me.”

 

“Take it easy, man,” said Brad, and Spooz, with an apologetic look, said, “We want to get to know you, okay? But we got a lot of ground to cover here.”

 

Clyde hadn’t noticed any particular rush on the part of the committee, but kept his mouth shut.

 

Spooz unfolded a wrinked sheet of paper and spread it on the table. To make it stay flat, he put empties on it top and bottom. The paper was Clyde’s application.

 

“So, Cliff,” Spooz said. “Seems like you’ve got a very excellent reason for wanting to move here.”

 

“That’s Clyde, not Cliff,” said Clyde.

 

Spooz peered at the paper. “Oh ... right.”

 

The waitress delivered their beers and plunked herself down in the chair next to Clyde. She was a big sexy girl, a strawberry blonde with a big butt, big thighs, big everything, kind of an R. Crumb woman, albeit with a less ferocious smile.

 

“You going to sit in, Joanie?” Brad asked.

 

“Might as well.” She winked at Clyde. “I ain’t making no money.”

 

“I thought you guys were going to decide,” said Clyde, feeling that things were becoming a bit arbitrary. “Can just anybody get in on this?”

 

“That’s how democracy works,” said Carmine. “They do it different where you come from?”

 

“Maybe he doesn’t like girls.” Joanie did a movie star-quality pout.

 

“I like girls fine. I ... It’s...” Clyde drew a breath and let it run out. “This is important to me, and I don’t think you’re taking it seriously. You don’t know my name, you’re not asking questions. My application looks like it’s been in the wastebasket. I’m getting the idea this is all a big joke to you people.”

 

“You want me to fuck off, I will,” Joanie said.

 

“I don’t want anybody to fuck off. Okay? All I want is for this to be a real interview.”

 

Carmine gave him the fisheye. “You don’t think this is a real interview?”

 

“We’re in a freaking bar, for Christ’s sakes. Not the town hall.”

 

“So what’re you saying? The interview’s not real unless it’s in a building with a dome?” Carmine spat on the floor, and Joanie punched him in the arm and said, “You going to clean that up?”

 

“This is the town hall,” Carmine said.

 

“Uh-huh. Sure it is,” said Clyde.

 

Brad tapped him on the arm in order to break up the stare-down he was having with Carmine. “It’s the truth, dude. Anywhere the committee meets, it’s the town hall.”

 

Carmine popped a knuckle. “I suppose where you come from, they do that different, too.”

 

“Yeah, matter of fact.” Clyde fixed him with a death stare. “One thing, they don’t let sour little fucks decide anything important.”

 

“All right, all right,” Spooz said. “Let’s everybody calm down. The man wants some questions. Anyone have a question?”

 

Carmine said meanly, “I got nothing,” and Brad appeared to be mulling it over.

 

“What sort of work you do?” Joanie asked.

 

Clyde started to point out that the question had been answered on his application; but he was grateful for this much semblance of order and said, “Construction. I’m qualified to operate most types of heavy machinery. I do carpentry, masonry, roofing. I’ve done some wiring, but just basic stuff. Pretty much you name it.” He glanced at Carmine and added, “Too much information?”

 

Carmine held out a hand palm down and waggled it, as if to say that Clyde was right on the edge of overcommunicating.

 

Brad said, “I don’t believe we’ve got any construction going, but he could start out down at the Dots.”

 

Spooz agreed and Clyde was about to ask what were the Dots, when Joanie cut in and asked if he had a girlfriend.

 

“How about we keep it serious?” said Spooz.

 

“I am serious!” she said.

 

“Naw,” said Clyde. “No girlfriend. But I’m accepting applications.”

 

Joanie took a pretend-swat at him with a menu.

 

Brad followed with a question about his expertise in furniture building, and then Spooz and Joanie had questions about his long-term goals (indefinite), his police record (nothing heavy-duty since he was kid), and his health concerns (none as far as he knew). They had other questions, too, which Clyde answered honestly. He began to relax, to think that he was making an overall good impression—Brad and Joanie were in his corner for sure, and though Spooz was Carmine’s cousin, Clyde had the idea that they weren’t close, so he figured as long as he didn’t blow it, he was in.

 

The atmosphere grew convivial, they had a few more beers, and at last Spooz said to his colleagues, “Well, I guess we know enough, huh?”

 

Joanie and Brad concurred, and Clyde asked if they wanted him to go away so they could talk things over. Not necessary, they told him, and then Carmine said, “Here’s a question for you. How do you feel about the Cowboys?”

 

At a loss, Clyde said, “You talking about the Dallas Cowboys?”

 

Carmine nodded, and Clyde, assuming that this didn’t require a legitimate answer, said, “Screw ‘em. I’m a Steelers fan.”

 

Brad, who had been resting his elbows on the table, sat back in his chair. Joanie was frozen for a second and then busied herself in bussing the table. Spooz lowered his eyes as if deeply saddened. Carmine smiled thinly and inspected his fingernails.

 

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Clyde said. “That was a serious question?”

 

Brad asked what time it was, and Spooz checked his watch and said it was six-thirty.

 

“Hey,” said Clyde. “You need me to be a Cowboys fan, I’ll be a Cowboys fan. I don’t give a good goddamn about football, really.”

 

That seemed to horrify them.

 

“What do you want from me? You want I should paint myself silver and blue every Sunday? Come on!”

 

“Monday,” said Brad. “We don’t get the games until Monday.”

 

Spooz’s stern expression dissolved into a grin. “I can’t keep this up. Congratulations, man.”

 

Baffled for the moment, Clyde said, “What are you talking?”

 

“You’ve been jumped in. This was like your initiation. The council accepted you last week.”

 

“You’ll be on probationary status for six months,” Joanie said. “But it’s more-or-less a done deal.”

 

Brad and Spooz both shook his hand, and Joanie gave him a hug and a kiss with a little extra on it, and people came over from the bar to congratulate him. Clyde kept saying happily, “I can’t believe you guys were just busting my chops. You fuckers had me going there!”

 

Carmine, who apparently had taken a real dislike to him, waited until the crowd around Clyde had dissipated to offer a limp handshake. “Don’t get giddy,” he said, putting his mouth close beside Clyde’s cheek. “Things might not work out for you here.”

 

* * * *

 

Walnuts are Halloween’s chief export, its only source of income (apart from the occasional tourist and the post office, which does a bang-up business once a year, stamping cards and letters) and are prized by connoisseurs in the upper world for their rich, fruity flavor, a flavor derived from steeping in the ponds south of town known as the Dots—three of them, round as periods, they create an elision interrupting the erratic black sentence of the Mossbach. Recently there have been complaints that the walnuts are no longer up to standard. The mulberries and plants that, dissolved into a residue, suffuse the walnuts, imbuing them with their distinct taste, no longer fall from the sky crack in profusion; and neither do the walnuts fall so thickly as they once they did, plop-plop-plopping into the water like a sort of wooden hail. Nowadays the townspeople are not above importing mulberries and certain weeds and even walnuts, and dumping them into the ponds, a practice decried by connoisseurs; yet they continue to pay the exorbitant prices.

 

Each morning Clyde would pole his skiff (something more difficult to do than it would appear) from the north end of town, where he had found temporary living quarters, to the Dots. He recalled how it had been going to work in Beaver Falls, steering his pickup past strip malls with gray snow banked out front, his seat littered with half-crushed cans and fast food garbage, pieces of bun, greasy paper, a fragment of tomato, a dead French fry, the heater cooking it all into a rotten smell, while the idiot voices of drive-time America yammered and puffy-faced, sullen, half-asleep drivers drank bitter coffee, listening to Howard Stern and Mancow Muller, trying to remember the gross bits with which to amuse their friends ... and he contrasted that with the uncanny peace of going to work now, gliding downstream beneath the still-darkened seam of sky, the only sound that of his pole lifting and planting, inhaling the cool, damp smell of the river mixed with fleeting odors of fish death and breakfasts cooking and limeflowers (a species with velvety greenish-white blooms peculiar to Halloween, sprouting from the dirt and birdlime that accumulated on the ledges), and occasionally another skiff coming toward him, the boatman saluting, and his thoughts glided, too, never stressed or scattered, just taking in the sights, past the simple, linear houses spread out across the rock walls like anagrams and scrambles, the blurred letters of the neon signs flickering softly in the mist, the lights at the end of spidery docks glowing witchily, haloed by glittering white particles, and once he reached the Dots, shallow circles of crystalline water illuminated in such a way as to reveal their walnut-covered bottoms (yet not enough light to trouble him), he would put on waders and grab a long rake and turn the walnuts so as to ensure they received the benefits of immersion on all sides equally.

 

Between fifty and sixty men and women joined him on the morning shift and he became friendly with several, and friends with one: Dell Weimer, a blond, overweight transplant from Lake Parsippany, New Jersey, where he had managed a convenience store. Dell had recently finished a short stretch in the Tubes, the geological formation that served as Halloween’s main punitive device, and would say nothing about it other than that it was “...some evil shit.” He was forthcoming, however, about the rest of the town in which he had lived for six years.

 

One morning Dell straightened from his labors and, as he was wont to do, clutched his back and began grousing about the job. “Fuck a bunch of walnuts,” he said on this occasion. “Here we are breaking our butts for nothing!”

 

Clyde asked him to explain, because he had been led to believe the town depended on the walnuts, and Dell said, “Ever hear of Pet Nylund?”

 

“Sounds familiar.”

 

“You know. The rock star guy.”

 

“Yeah ... yeah! My ex used to like his stuff. Real morbid crap.”

 

“He’s born and raised in Halloween.”

 

“You’re kidding?”

 

“Yeah, he lives here when he’s not in L.A. I’ll show you his place. He bought up all the land around the gorge—he must own a fucking million acres. He invested heavy in energy and bioengineering stocks about thirty years ago and the stock went through the roof.”

 

“Bioengineering. Tinkering with genes and all that?”

 

“Right. He had his own company come down in here ... Mutagenics, I think their name was. They were doing experiments south of the Dots, flushing shit into the river. Don’t eat nothing come out of that river, son, ‘less you want to grow gills.” Dell paused to work out a kink. “Like I was saying, they flushed their chemicals so they washed away underground. The Mossbach goes subta—you know.”

 

“Subterranean.”

 

“Yeah, right. God only knows what’s growing down there. The Mutagenics people couldn’t leave fast enough, so you know some bad shit happened. But even though the water here’s okay, the fishies got that poison in ‘em and there is some weird-looking stuff in that river. Anyhow, Pet’s worth billions, so he endows the town. Now the town’s a billionaire, too. Nobody’s got to work, except for Nylund struck a deal with the council. In return for the endowment, people have to live like always until after he dies. He doesn’t want to watch the place change and he knows the money’s bound to change it. After he’s gone, he don’t give a damn about what happens, but for now we got to bust our behinds.” Dell winced and rubbed his back again. “If he shows his face around here, I might do us all a favor and off the son-of-a-bitch.”

 

That night in the Sub-Café, Clyde asked Joanie, with whom he was having a thing, if the Pet Nylund story was true.

 

“Who told you? Dell, I bet,” she said. “That lazy bastard’s going to wind up back in the Tubes.”

 

She told the bartender that she was going on break and hustled Clyde out onto the pier that fronted the bar. The mist was thick and, although he heard people laughing out on the water, he couldn’t see past the end of the pier. Eight or nine skiffs were tied up to the pilings; the current made them appear to nudge against each other with ungainly eagerness, like pigs at a trough.

 

“You’re not supposed to know any of that stuff until you’re off probation,” Joanie said.

 

“Why not?”

 

“Because knowing about it might make you unmotivated.”

 

“There’s no reason to think it’ll make me less unmotivated five months from now.”

 

Joanie cast about to see if anyone was within earshot. “It’s all about the benefits, see. They kick in once you’re a citizen. Retirement, full medical ... and I mean full. They’ll even pay for a tummy tuck, anything you want. Nylund thinks if the probationers knew, they wouldn’t get into the spirit of the town. They’d just be faking it.”

 

The water slurped against the pilings, as if a big something had given them a lick.

 

“Dell mentioned this company, Mutagenics.”

 

“You don’t want to be talking about that,” said Joanie, affecting a sober expression. “And don’t you even think about going south of the Dots. We got this one idiot who goes south a lot, but one day she’s going to turn up missing. Happens eventually to everybody who pokes their nose down there.”

 

“So what’s up with that?”

 

“If I could tell you, I’d probably be missing. I don’t go there. Ever. But don’t talk about it, okay? With Dell or anyone ... except with me. I don’t want you getting in trouble. With me...” She threw a stiff punch to the point of his shoulder. “You’re already in trouble.”

 

“Ow! Jesus!” He grabbed her and pulled her against him. He squeezed and her breath came out in a trebly oof. Her eyes half-closed and she ground her hips against him. The mists swirled and thickened, sealing them off from the Sub-Café, until only a vague purplish flickering remained of the sign.

 

“Ouch,” Joanie said.

 

* * * *

 

Ms. Helene Kmiec, the widow of Stan Kmiec, former head of the town council, was at thirty-six a relatively young woman to have endured such a tragedy, and this perhaps explained her emotional resilience. Since her husband’s death eight months ago in a boating accident south of the Dots, she had taken a succession of lovers and started a new business involving the use of a webcam and bondage gear (this according to Dell, who further stated that Ms. Kmiec, a petite blonde with, in his words, “trophy-sized balloons,” could give him a spanking any old time she wanted). She also took in boarders. The remainder of her time was devoted to the care and feeding of the town’s sole surviving cat, a Turkish angora named Prince Shalimar who had survived for five and a half years, considerably longer, it was believed, than any other cat in Halloween’s shadowy history.

 

“Something around here likes cats a leetle too much,” she said to Clyde on the occasion of their first meeting. “People claim to have seen it, but this is all they’ve come up with.”

 

She handed Clyde a photocopied poster with an artist’s rendering of a raggedy Rorschach inkblot looming over a cat and underneath it the words:

 

* * * *

 

REWARD!!!

 

For information leading to the capture of

 

Halloween’s Cat Killer

 

* * * *

 

Beneath that was Ms. Kmiec’s contact information.

 

“It’s not much to go on,” Clyde said, and tried to hand back the poster. Ms. Kmiec told him to hang onto it—she had plenty more.

 

“The damn thing’s fast,” she said. “Fast and sneaky. Hard to get a handle on its particulars. At least that gives you a general idea of its size.” She studied the picture. “It’s nailed damn near every cat in town for the past forty years, but it’s not getting Princey.”

 

“You think it’s the same one’s been doing it all that time?”

 

“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “It comes around here, I got something for it. One or many, old or young, that sucker’s going down.”

 

“Why don’t you get a dog?”

 

“Dogs get taken by things in the river. Cats have the good sense to stay clear of the water.”

 

They were sitting together on a sofa in her cramped, fourth-floor living room, a ten-by-eight-foot space with a door that connected to a corridor leading to the house next door. Its cadmium yellow walls were dense with framed photographs, many of them shots of Ms. Kmiec in various states of undress, and the largest depicting her arm-in-arm with the late Mr. Kmiec, a pudgy, white-haired gent whose frown lines and frozen smile implied that such an expression did not come easily to his face. In this photograph she wore an ankle-length skirt, a cardigan, and a prim, gone-to-Jesus expression, leaving the impression that she had stepped away from the sexual arena before her time, an error since corrected. The skirt and the cardigan had been replaced that day with a gold dressing gown loosely belted over a skimpy black latex costume.

 

“There’s one thing we should get straight before you move in,” she said. “For the record, I did not kill my husband. You may hear talk that I did...”

 

“I’m not big on gossip,” Clyde said, avoiding looking at her for fear he might see the truth of her statement—the light in the room was brighter than he would have liked.

 

“...but I didn’t. Stan was a chore and we didn’t always get along. There’s times now I still resent him, but he was a good guy at heart. He was always helping me with my projects. Matter of fact, he was helping me out the day he died. We were down south looking for the cat killer and something snaked over the side of the skiff and took him under. Wasn’t a thing I could have done. People say if I’d loved Stan, I would have gone in after him. Maybe there’s some truth to that. I did love him, but Stan was twenty-six years older than me. Maybe I didn’t love him enough.”

 

She inched forward on the sofa, reached out her hand and touched Mr. Kmiec’s image on the wall opposite. She seemed to be having a moment and Clyde waited until she had leaned back to ask what she had meant by “something snaked over the side.”

 

“South of the Dots there’s a lot of strange flora and fauna,” she said. “We don’t know half what’s there. Don’t you be going down that way until you get acclimated.” She patted his knee. “We wouldn’t want to lose you.”

 

A masculine wail of distress floated up from below and Ms. Kmiec jumped to her feet. “Oh, damn! I forgot about him! Here I am chattering away and ... I don’t know what I’m thinking!” She fingered out a key from the pocket of her robe and passed it to Clyde. “I have to take care of something. Can you show yourself up? It’s the eighth floor.”

 

Clyde said, “Sure,” and scrunched in his knees so she could get past.

 

“Now I put you right above the Prince’s room,” she said as she stood in the open door, a section of the gorge’s granite wall visible behind her. “I know you’re bound to have company, and I don’t care about that. But I made certain the bed in that room is extra stable, because the Prince hates sharp noises. So if the headboard comes loose and starts banging, or whatever, do your best to fix it temporarily and I’ll get someone in to do repairs ASAP. All right?”

 

She shrugged out of her robe and tossed it onto the arm of the sofa and started down the ladder, seeding Clyde’s brain with an afterimage of pale, shapely legs and swelling breasts restrained by narrow, shiny strips of rubber. A second later her head popped back into view.

 

“If you want, look in on the Prince. He loves new people.” Her brow furrowed, as if trying to recall some further instruction; then she brightened and said, “Welcome to Kasa Kmiec!”

 

* * * *

 

The eighth floor was a room with a half-bath added on. Within a ten-by-twelve space, it contained a captain’s bed with shelves in the bottom, a wicker chair, bookshelves and a TV niche built into the walls, a stove and sink, and small refrigerator. It was as cunningly crafted as a ship’s cabin, with every inch of space utilized. Initially Clyde felt he might break something whenever he moved, but he adapted to his new quarters and soon, when lying on the bed, he began to have a sense of spaciousness.

 

He enjoyed sitting in the wicker chair after work with the lamp dialed low, vegetating until his energy returned, and then he would turn the light on full. He had discovered that he liked being smart when alone, liked the solitary richness of his mind, and he would sketch plans for the house he intended to build after he got off probation; he would read and speculate on subjects of which he had been unaware prior to the accident (Indian influences on Byzantine architecture, the effects of globalization upon Lhasa and environs, et al.); but always his thoughts returned to the town where he had sought refuge, whose origins no one appeared to know or question, whose very existence seemed as mysterious as the nation of Myanmar or the migratory impulses of sea turtles. He had supposed—unrealistically, perhaps—that the people of Halloween would have a clearer perspective on life than did the people in Beaver Falls; but they had similar gaps in their worldview and ignored these gaps as if they were insignificant, as if by not including them in the picture, everything made sense, everything was fine. He had hoped the town would be a solution, but now he suspected it was simply another sort of problem, more exotic and perhaps more complex, one that he would have to leave the light on a great deal in order to resolve if he hoped to get to the bottom of it.

 

When he heard the winch complain, the chain slithering through the pulley, signs that Joanie was on her way up in the elevator that operated above the fifth floor, he would dim the lamp so he would be unable to perceive the telltales that betrayed the base workings of her mind and the fabrication of her personality. She understood why he did this—at least he had explained his troubles—but it played into her appreciation of herself as an entry-level girlfriend, and she often asked if she wasn’t pretty enough for him, if that was why he lowered the lights. He told her that she was more than pretty enough, but she grew increasingly morose and would say she knew they were a short-term thing and that he would someday soon find someone who made him happy, as would she, and it was better this way—this way, when the inevitable happened they would stay friends because they had been honest with each other and hadn’t gotten all deluded, and until then, well, they’d have some fun, wouldn’t they? Even in the half-dark, he realized it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, that her low self-esteem foredoomed the relationship. Understanding this about her, having so much apperception of the human ritual, dismayed him and he would try to boost her spirits by telling her stories about his life topside (the citizens of Halloween referred to other parts of America as “topside” or “the republic”) or by mocking Mrs. Kmiec’s cat.

 

Beside the bed was a trapdoor that had once permitted egress to the floor below, but now was blocked by a sheet of two-inch plexiglass—a plastic cube had been constructed within the old wooden room for the protection of its sole inhabitant, a fluffy white blob with a face and feet. When Clyde first opened the trapdoor, Prince Shalimar had freaked out, climbing the walls, throwing himself at the inner door; now, grown accustomed to Clyde and Joanie peering at him, he never glanced in their direction. The place was a cat paradise filled with mazes upon which to climb, scratching posts, dangling toys, and catnip mice. Infrequently the Prince would swat at one or another of the toys; now and then he would chew on a catnip mouse; but a vast majority of his time was spent sleeping in a pillowed basket close to his litter box.

 

“It’s not even a cat anymore,” Joanie said one evening as they looked down on the Prince, snoozing on his pillow. “It’s like some kind of mutant.”

 

“Ms. Kmiec gives him enemas,” said Clyde.

 

“You’re kidding!”

 

“Swear to God. I looked down there one time and she had a plastic tube up his butt.”

 

“Did she see you?”

 

“Yeah. She waved and went on with her business.”

 

“Wasn’t the cat pissed?”

 

“She was wearing work gloves and holding him down, but by the time I looked, he seemed to have quit struggling and was just lying there.”

 

Joanie shook her head in wonderment. “Helene is very, very weird.”

 

“Do you know her?”

 

“Not so much. She used to come in the bar with Stan. She’s always been weird. My big sister was the same year in school as with her—she says Helene was already into the dominatrix stuff when she was a kid. She quit doing it for Stan.”

 

“Maybe she didn’t quit. Maybe Stan was her only client for a while.”

 

“Maybe.”

 

Joanie leaned against him and Clyde draped an arm over her shoulder; the edge of his hand nudged her breast. They watched as the Prince gave a mighty fishlike heave and managed to flop onto his back.

 

“He doesn’t even have the energy to miaow anymore,” Clyde said. “He makes this sound instead. ‘Mrap, mrap.’ It’s like half a miaow. A shorthand miaow.”

 

Joanie caught his hand and placed it full on her breast. “Something happens to Helene, the poor bastard won’t stand a fighting chance. Nobody else is going to do for him the way she does. He’ll be like a bonbon for that fucking thing.”

 

They made loud, sweaty love with no regard for Prince’s sensibilities, banging the headboard against the wall, and afterward, with Joanie snoring gently beside him, Clyde was unable to rid himself of the image and lay thinking that they were all bonbons, soft white things in their flimsy protective shells, helplessly awaiting the emergence of some black maw or circumstance.

 

* * * *

 

Seven weeks after his arrival in Halloween, Clyde was working with a group of twenty or twenty-five in the central Dot, when he heard from Mary Alonso, a sinewy, brown-skinned gay woman in her early thirties, that Dell had been banished.

 

“‘Banished’?” he said, and laughed. “You can’t banish people, not since the Middle Ages.”

 

“Tell that to Dell.” Mary leaned against the rocky wall, a pose that stretched her T-shirt across her diminutive breasts, making them look like lumps of muscle. “They sent him up to the republic and he can’t come back. He’d been to the Tubes nine times. The tenth time and you’re gone.”

 

“Is that some kind of rule? Nobody told me.”

 

“When you’re through probation you get a book with the town laws. There aren’t many of them. Don’t kill anybody, don’t rape anybody, don’t screw up constantly. I guess they got Dell on the don’t screw up constantly.”

 

“What the hell? Don’t you have people believe in the Constitution down here?”

 

“The Constitution’s not what it used to be,” Mary said. “Guess you didn’t notice.”

 

“Well, how’s about Helene Kmeic?”

 

“Huh?”

 

“Helene Kmeic. Chances are she killed her husband. The way Joanie tells it, they didn’t hardly investigate.”

 

“I wouldn’t know about that.” Mary started raking again.

 

“Is Dell still around? Are they holding him somewhere?”

 

“Once they decide you’re gone, you’re gone. Only reason I know about it, I was at home and Tom Mihalic come around saying I had to work Dell’s shift.”

 

Distraught, Clyde threw aside his rake and went splashing away from the ranks of toiling men and women, stomping down hard, trying to crush as many walnuts as he could. He didn’t slow his pace until he had gone halfway along the narrow channel between the second and third Dot, and then only because he noticed the light had paled.

 

Unlike the other two Dots, the third and largest (some ninety feet in diameter) lay at the bottom of a hole that appeared to have been punched through from the surface—probably an old sinkhole—and was open to the weather. At present it was raining straight down, raining hard (a fact that wasn’t apparent back in the second Dot, where the walls of the Shilkonic all but sealed them off from the sky), and the pond was empty of laborers. The effect was of a pillar of rain resembling one of those transporter beams used in science fiction movies, except this was much bigger, a ninety-foot-wide column of excited gray particles preparing to zap a giant up from the bowels of an ashen planet, making a seething sound as it did, and amplifying the omnipresent damp smell of the gorge. Staring at it, Clyde’s anger planed away into despondency. He and Dell hadn’t been that close. They had gone out drinking three or four times, and he’d visited Dell’s place to watch DVDs, and they hung out during their lunch breaks, and that was it. But their relationship had the imprimatur of friendship. Dell’s breezy, profane irreverence reminded him of his friends back in Beaver Falls. People gossiped about each other a lot in Halloween, yet he recognized that they shied away from certain people and subjects: Pet Nylund and why there was no cable TV and what had happened to Helene Kmiec’s husband, to name three. Dell had talked freely about these and other taboos, though most of his talk was BS (perhaps that explained why he’d been banished), and while Clyde had been reluctant to respond in kind, due to his probationary status, neither had he discouraged Dell. A fly’s worth of guilt traipsed across his brain and he brushed it aside, telling himself that Dell was his own man and he, Clyde, wasn’t about to make this into a soap opera of recriminations and what-ifs.

 

By the time he reached the pond, the rain had stopped. Under ordinary circumstances, he kept clear of the third Dot (Spooz, as a representative of the council, had written a note excusing him from work there because of his sensitivity to light), yet Clyde felt he needed every jot of intellect in order to deal with his emotions and he moved out into the pond, glancing anxiously at the turbulent sky and the gaping crack of the gorge across the way—less than two months in town and he had already become an agoraphobe. To his left, a section of the granite wall evolved into a ledge. He boosted himself onto it and sat with his legs dangling. Twenty feet farther to the left lay a beach of sand and dirt and rubble, where grew several low bushes surrounding a stunted willow, the sole tree in all of Halloween. Clyde considered the complicated patterns of the bare twigs, thinking this was something the supporters of intelligent design, mistaking (as they frequently did) mere intricacy for skillful engineering, might point to in order to demonstrate the infinite forethought that had gone into God’s universal blueprint. Hell, he could do a better job himself, given the right tools. For starters, he’d outfit everyone with male and female genitalia so they wouldn’t be constantly trying to fuck one another over, and once they had experienced the joys of childbirth, they would likely stop trying to fuck themselves over, recognizing that survival was overrated, and would abandon procreation to the lesser orders and become a species of bonbon who placidly waited for extinction, recognizing this to be the summit of human aspiration. That question settled, he turned his attention to the matter at hand. He had been wrong in trying to banish Dell from mind, basically duplicating the action of the town. Not that he cared to hold onto guilt or any other emotion where Dell was concerned, but he needed to think about why he had been banished and how this might apply to him. He began to whistle—Clyde was an accomplished whistler and had gotten in the habit of accompanying himself while thinking. Whistling orchestrated his thoughts into a calm and orderly pattern, preferable to their usual agitated run. The sinkhole responded with a hint of reverb, adding a mellifluous quality to his tone, distracting him, and it was then he spotted a woman with pale skin and shoulder-length auburn hair peering at him through the willow twigs.

 

“Jesus!” said Clyde, for she had given him a start.

 

The twigs sectioned her face like the separations of a jigsaw puzzle, causing her to appear, as she turned her head, like a stained glass image come to life. She stepped out of cover, hopped up onto the far end of the ledge, scowled and said, “Get out of my way.”

 

She was slender and tall, and had on a white sundress that, being a little damp, clung to her body. She wore kneepads and elbow pads, and on her feet were a pair of brown sports shoes.

 

“Aren’t you cold?” Clyde asked.

 

She pulled a pair of thin gloves from the pocket of her skirt and put them on. In a town where pale women predominated, her pallor was abnormal, like chalk. Her mouth was so wide, its corners seemed to carry out the lines of her slanted cheekbones, and was perfectly molded, the lips neither too full nor too thin, lending her an air of confidence and serenity; her eyes, too, were wide, teardrop-shaped, almost azure in color. She let the scowl lapse into a mask of hostile diffidence, but her face was an open book to Clyde. Her confidence was not based on her beauty (in truth, he didn’t perceive her as beautiful, merely attractive—she was too skinny for his tastes), but spoke to the fact that she had little regard for beauty ... and not much regard for anything or anyone, if he read her right. She told him once again to move it so she could pass, and Clyde, irritated by her peremptory manner, pointed at the water and said, “Go around.”

 

“I don’t want to get wet,” she said.

 

“Yeah, I just bet you don’t. That would be icky.”

 

She affected a delighted expression and laughed: two notes, sharply struck, from the treble end of a keyboard. “You’re being clever, aren’t you? Now let me by.”

 

Clyde was tempted to make her squeeze past, and perhaps he would have done so once upon a time, but he was fascinated by the way her face changed with the movement of eyes and mouth, with every shift in attitude, one moment having an Asian cast, the next seeming entirely Caucasian, and the next expressing an alien quality ... and this grounded the charge of his anger. Wondering how old she was (he would not have been surprised to learn she was forty or twenty-five), he eased off the ledge and into the water.

 

As she walked past him on long, muscular legs, he tried to make nice, saying, “My name’s Clyde.”

 

“How appropriate,” she said.

 

When she reached the end of the ledge, she grabbed a miniscule projection of stone, placed the toe of one shoe in an equally imperceptible notch, and then went spidering across the granite face, making the traverse with such speed and precision, it was as if she were wearing sucker pads on her fingers and toes. Within seconds she had disappeared into the channel that led back to the second Dot.

 

“Whoa!” said Clyde.

 

* * * *

 

He told no one about having seen the woman. He did not tell Joanie because he knew she would leap to the conclusion that his interest was more than casual (which it wasn’t, or so he believed) and be upset; he did not tell Mary Alonso, who had taken Dell’s place as a source of gossip and information, and with whom he went out for drinks on occasion, usually along with Mary’s partner, Roberta, a fey, freckly, dark-haired girl, because he didn’t want to learn that the pale woman was a shrew or unstable—he preferred to let her remain a mystery (since we rarely feel compelled to mythologize the humdrum or the ordinary, his interest was likely more than casual). He began coming in early to work and staying late, using the time to practice his whistling in the reverb chamber of the third Dot, hoping to catch sight of her again. He worked on octave jumps, trills and ornamental phrasings, and developed a fresh repertoire of standards and novelty tunes. After a month he became sufficiently confident to essay a few numbers of his own composition (“fantasies,” he called them), foremost among them a ballad that he entitled “Melissa”—he thought the woman looked like a Melissa.

 

Whistling, for Clyde, was its own satisfaction, but when Mary Alonso told him about the talent contest held at the Downlow every year and urged him to enter, he thought, What the hell? He devoted himself to perfecting “Melissa,” adding a frill or two, reworking the somber middle passage, trimming the coda so the song fit within the contest’s four-minute limit, and one afternoon in March, with the contest less than a month away, while he sat practicing on the ledge, with a circle of wintry blue sky overhead and shadow filling the sinkhole, all except for a slice of golden light at the brim, the woman, dressed in jeans and a burgundy sweater, came poling a skiff from the south, emerging from the darkness of the gorge with lanterns hung all over the prow and sides and stern. Something about her posture announced her even before he made out her face. She beached the skiff near the willow and climbed onto the ledge and took a seat about three feet away. Her flat azurine stare seemed as hostile as before, but Clyde saw curiosity in her face. Neither of them spoke for a couple of ticks and then she said, “That’s a cool tune, man.”

 

“It’s something I’m working on,” he said.

 

“You made it up?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Very cool. What’s it called?”

 

“‘Melissa.’”

 

“Is she your girl ... your wife?”

 

“I don’t know why I called it that. The only Melissa I ever knew was back in grade school.”

 

“It sounds classical. You ever hear the opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, by Debussy?”

 

“I don’t think so.”

 

She appeared to have run out of questions.

 

“What’s it about, the opera?” asked Clyde.

 

“I don’t remember much. This sad chick’s married to this prince, but she’s in love with his brother. She cries a lot. It’s kind of a bummer. Your thing reminded me of it.”

 

She kicked her heels against the rock and gazed out across the pond. Clyde realized that at this distance he should be reading her more clearly—he should have seen past the level of body language into her chaotic core, where need and desire steamed upward and began to solidify into shards of thought; yet he could find no trace of her fundamental incoherence ... or else, unlike the rest of mankind, she was fundamentally coherent, her personality rising in a smooth, uninterrupted flow from its springs, a true and accurate extension of her soul.

 

“Not the notes,” she said. “The feeling.”

 

“Huh?” said Clyde.

 

“Your song. It reminded me of the opera. Not the melody or anything, but the feeling.” She said this with a trace of exasperation and then asked, “Why’re you staring at me?”

 

He was inclined to tell her that she had a smudge on her cheek (which she, in fact, did) or that she looked familiar; but she gazed at him with such intensity, he half-suspected that his inability to see into her basements signaled a commensurate ability on her part to see into his—afraid of being caught in a lie, then, he told her about his accident and its aftermath and explained how she appeared to be something of an anomaly, at least as regarded his hypothesis concerning light, intellect, and the chaotic underpinnings of human personality.

 

“Must be I’m in your blind spot,” she said. “Because I feel pretty chaotic ... at least most of the time.”

 

That he might have a blind spot disturbed him more than the thought that she might be a freak of nature.

 

“Light-based intelligence,” she said musingly. “What about Milton? He wrote great shit after he went blind.”

 

“I haven’t found a theory yet that explains everything or everyone. I suppose he’s an exception, like you.”

 

He thought she might be losing interest in the conversation and asked if she commonly hung out in the third Dot.

 

“Only during the season,” she said in a fake upper-crust accent. Letting up on the sarcasm, she added, “I pass through when I go exploring down south. And when I need to be by myself, I’ll stake out a spot next to the willow.”

 

“So if I see you beside the willow, I should beat it?”

 

“Not necessarily,” she said, and grinned. “You could whistle and see what develops. I’ve always had a thing for musicians.” With an easy motion, she pushed up to her feet. “I’ve got to get back. See you around, maybe.”

 

Clyde restrained himself from asking her to stay. “Hey, what’s your name?”

 

“Annalisa.”

 

She moved off and Clyde, watching the roll of her hips, knowing it was the wrong thing to do yet unable to suppress the urge, let out an appreciative whistle, an ornate variation on the wolf whistle that he had devised for just such occasions and often used to excellent effect, the intricacy of his embellishment compensating for the cornball tactic. Annalisa rolled her eyes, but he noticed a little extra sway in her walk as she went toward the skiff. He thought “Annalisa” was a much better title than “Melissa,” and he decided then and there to break up with Joanie.

 

* * * *

 

Usually Joanie was eager to go to his place, but that night, perhaps sensing trouble, she resisted being alone with him and they went for a drink at the Downlow, a labyrinthine nightclub excavated from the rock. Bass-heavy ambient music rumbled from hidden speakers. The rooms were lit by plastic boulders that shifted from dull orange to violet to blue-green, and served as tables; these were enclosed by groupings of sofas and easy chairs. There were decorative touches throughout—potted ferns; a diminutive statue that might have been Mayan or Olmec; a poster of Pet Nylund with his hair flying, face obscured, twisting the strings of his guitar—but not enough of them to create a specific statement. The overall effect was of a tiki bar in Bedrock whose interior decorator had been fired halfway through the job.

 

They chose an empty side room with an aquarium built into the walls, populated by fish with strange whiskery antennae and others without eyes. Clyde recognized none of them and asked Joanie what kind they were. She replied, “Who do you think I am? A fish scientist?” She looked sullen in the orange light, angry in the violet, depressed in the blue-green.

 

A waitress brought their drinks and, since Joanie’s mood showed no sign of improving, Clyde got straight to the point. He had worked out what he felt was a tactful approach, but he had barely begun when Joanie broke in and asked, “Who is she?”

 

Defensively, Clyde said, “You think I’ve been unfaithful?”

 

She scooted an inch or two farther away. “Don’t bullshit me. Men don’t jump unless they got some place to land.”

 

“I met this woman, all right?” said Clyde. “But we haven’t done anything yet.”

 

“Who is she?”

 

“If you weren’t so goddamn negative about our relationship. If you didn’t always....”

 

“Oh, it’s my fault?” She made a noise like the Prince did when he sneezed. “I guess I should have known from experience. I been dumped on more times than your toilet seat, so it must be me....”

 

“See, that’s what I’m talking about! You’re always putting yourself down.”

 

“It must be me and not the dickwads I go out with.”

 

“Maybe all I need is a break,” said Clyde. “A little space.”

 

Joanie injected an artificial brightness into her voice. “What a good idea! I’ll give you space while you cozy up to what’s-her-buttass and I’ll just hang loose in case things don’t work out.”

 

“Goddamn it, Joanie! You know that’s not what I mean.”

 

“Tell me who she is.”

 

Reluctantly, Clyde said, “I only met her a couple of times. Her name’s Annalisa.”

 

For a second Joanie was expressionless; then she spewed laughter. “Oh, man! You hooked up with the willow wan?”

 

“I haven’t hooked up with anybody!”

 

She put her head down and shook her head back and forth; her hair glowed orange as it swept the top of the boulder.

 

“What’d you call her ... the willow what?”

 

Joanie’s voice was nearly inaudible above a lugubrious bass line. “Wan. The willow wan. It’s what everybody calls her.”

 

“I don’t get it.”

 

“Because she’s pale as birdshit and always acts crazy and hangs out by the willow tree and she does all kinds of crazy things.”

 

“What’s she do that’s crazy?”

 

“I don’t know! Lots of things.”

 

“There must be something specific if everyone thinks she’s crazy.”

 

“She’s all the time going down south of the Dots. You have to be crazy to go there.” A look of entreaty crowded other emotions from her face, yet Clyde still saw anger and hurt. “She’s gaming you, man. You don’t want to mess with her. She games all the guys. She’s Pet Nylund’s ex-wife, for God’s sake! She still lives with him.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Am I speaking Spanish? She fucking lives with him. In his house.”

 

Some evidence of the disappointment he felt must have surfaced in his expression, for upon registering it she snatched her purse and jumped up from the sofa. He caught her wrist and said, “Joanie....”

 

She broke free and stood with her chin trembling. “Stay out of the Sub for a while, okay?”

 

A tear spilled from the corner of her eye and she rubbed it frantically, as if trying to kill a stinging insect; then she said something he didn’t catch and ran from the room.

 

Clyde had the impulse to offer consolation, but the weight of what she had said about Annalisa kept him seated. Though they had established the frailest of connections, nothing really, he felt betrayed, hurt, angry, everything Joanie had appeared to feel—the idea floated into his mind that she might want him to suffer and had lied about Annalisa. But if it were a lie, it would be easy to disprove and thus it was probably true. He downed his drink in two swallows and went into the main room, a semi-circular space with twenty or thirty of the boulder tables and a bar with a marble countertop and a stage, currently unoccupied, against the rear wall. Joanie was doing shots at the bar, bracketed by two men who had their hands all over her; when she saw him she gave her hair an assertive flip and pretended to be deeply interested in what one man (a big sloppy dude with long hair and a beard, Barry Something) was saying. He scanned the tables, hoping to spot a friendly face among the people sitting there. Finding none, he walked out onto the pier, sat on a piling under the entrance lights and listened to the gurgling of the Mossbach. Off along the bend, on the elbow of the curve, Pet Nylund’s house staggered up the cliff face, three side-by-side, crookedy towers, their uppermost rooms cloaked in darkness. Lights were on in several of the lower rooms. Clyde toyed with the notion of going over and busting through the door and venting his frustrations in a brawl. It was a bonehead play he would once have made without thinking, and that he now stopped to consider the consequences and hadn’t simply acted out his passions with animal immediacy, never mind it was the rational thing to do ... it dismayed him. Carmine, he told himself, might have been right in his estimation: maybe Halloween wasn’t going to work out for him.

 

Laughter from the doorway and Joanie emerged from the Downlow arm-in-arm with the two men she’d been flirting with at the bar. The bearded man caught Clyde staring and asked what he was looking at. Clyde ignored him and said, “Don’t do this to yourself, Joanie.”

 

She hardened her smile and Barry Something put a hand on Clyde’s chest and suggested he back the fuck off. The touch kindled a cold fury in Clyde that spread throughout his body, as if he’d been dunked in liquid nitrogen. He saw everything with abnormal clarity: the positions of the men, Joanie’s embittered face, the empty doorway, the green neon letters bolted to the rock. He spread his hands as though to say, no harm, no foul, and planted his right foot and drove his fist into Barry’s eye. Barry reeled away, went to his knees, grabbing his face. Joanie started yelling; the other man sidled nervously toward the entrance. Barry moaned. “Aw, fuck! Fuck!” he said. An egg-shaped lump was already already rising from his from his orbital ridge. Clyde grabbed Joanie’s arm and steered her toward his skiff. She fought him at first, but then started to cry. Some onlookers stepped out of the bar, drinks in hand, to learn what the fuss was about. Not a one of them moved to help Barry, who was rolling around, holding his eye. Talking and laughing, they watched Clyde pole the skiff into the center of the river. “Chickenshit bastard!” someone shouted. From a distance, the tableau in front of the bar appeared to freeze, as if its batteries had died. Joanie sat in the stern, her knees drawn up, gazing at the water. Her tears dried. Once or twice she seemed on the verge of speaking. He thought he should say something, but he had nothing to offer, still too adrenalized, too full of anger at Barry, at himself, too caught up in the dismal glory of the fight, confused as to whether it had validated his hopes for Halloween or had been an attempt to validate them. When they reached her pier, Joanie scrambled up onto it without a word and raced into her tiny, two-room house and slammed the door.

 

* * * *

 

Working alongside him the following morning, Mary Alonso, who had gotten a buzzcut and a dye job, leaving a half-inch of blond stubble that he thought singularly unattractive, filled Clyde in on Annalisa.

 

“She shares the house with Pet, but she’s not with him, you know,” she said. “She keeps to her half, he keeps to his. Joanie was being a bitch, telling you that without telling you the rest. Not that I blame her.”

 

“For real? She’s not sleeping with him?”

 

“She did once after the divorce, but it was sort of a reflex.”

 

Clyde flipped a rotten walnut up with his rake, caught it in midair and shied it at the wall, provoking a stare from another worker, whom the walnut had whizzed past. “How’d you hear that?”

 

“Before me and Roberta got together, Annalisa had a girl crush on Roberta. She thought she might be gay, but....” Mary strained to break up a clump of walnuts that had become trapped in underwater grass. “Turned out she wasn’t. Not even a little.” She scowled at Clyde. “Don’t look so damn relieved!”

 

Clyde held up a hand as though in apology. “So Roberta told you about her?”

 

“Yeah. They stayed friends and she talks to Roberta sometimes. But don’t get too happy. Her head’s fucked up from being with Pet all those years. She tells Roberta she’s going to leave, but she never does. There’s some kind of bizarre dependency still happening between her and Pet.”

 

Clyde went back to work with a renewed vigor, thinking that he might be the man to dissolve that bond. The weather was crisp and clear, and the sky crack showed a cold blue zigzag like a strip of frozen lightning that the ragged line of laborers beneath appeared to emulate. A seam of reflected light from the water jittered on the rock walls.

 

“I’m worried about you, man,” said Mary. “I love you, and I don’t want to see you get all bent out of shape behind this thing.”

 

“You love me?” Clyde gave a doltish laugh.

 

Mary’s face cinched with anger. “Right. Mister Macho. You think all love is is the shit that makes you feel dizzy. Everything else is garbage. Well, fuck you!” She threw down her rake and went chest to chest with him. “Yeah, I love you! Roberta loves you! It’s amazing we do, you’re such an ass-clown!”

 

Startled by this reaction, Clyde put a hand on her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to piss you off.”

 

She knocked his hand away, looking like she was itching to throw a punch.

 

“I wasn’t thinking,” Clyde said. “I was....”

 

“For someone claims to have a problem with smarts, you do a lot of not-thinking.” She picked up her rake and took a swipe at the walnuts.

 

The other workers, who had paused to watch, turned away and engaged in hushed conversations.

 

“You’re so caught up in your own crap, you can’t see anything else,” said Mary, who had toned down from fighting mad to grumpy.

 

“We’ve established I’m a dick, all right?” Clyde said. “Now what’re you trying to tell me?”

 

“Annalisa’s not Pet’s wife, and she’s not his girlfriend, but she’s his business because she lets herself be his business. Until that changes she’s poison for other guys. That’s the number one rule around here, even though they didn’t write it down: Don’t fuck with Pet Nylund’s business.”

 

“Or what? You go to the Tubes?”

 

“Keep being a dick. You’ll find out.”

 

Mary raked walnuts with a vengeance, as if she wanted to rip out the bottom of the Dot. Clyde rested both hands on the end of his rake and, as he gazed at the other workers, some intent on their jobs, some goofing off, some pretending to be busy, and then glanced up at the gorge enclosing them like the two halves of a gigantic bivalve, its lips almost closed, admitting a ragged seam of sky, at the gray walls stained with lichen and feathered with struggling ferns, he had an overpowering sense of both the unfamiliar and the commonplace, and realized with a degree of sadness what he should have understood long before: Halloween wasn’t, as he had hoped, an oasis with magical qualities isolated from the rest of the country; it was the flabby heart of dead-end America, a drear, crummy back alley between faceless cliff tenements where the big ones ate the little ones and not every dog had his day.

 

* * * *

 

For almost a week he took to sitting each night beneath the dangling seventy-five watt bulb at the end of Ms. Kmiec’s pier, hoping to catch Annalisa returning in her skiff from down south. He was a fool, he knew that—he had no reason to believe she felt anything for him, and the wonder was that he felt so much for her; yet he was unable to resist the notion (though he wouldn’t have admitted it, because saying the words would have forced him to confront their foolishness) that they had connected on an important level. To provide himself with an excuse for sitting there hour after hour, he borrowed one of Stan Kmiec’s old fishing rods and made a desultory cast whenever he sighted an approaching skiff. Briefly, he became interested in trying to land one of the silvery bioluminescent fish that flocked the dark water, but they proved too canny and the only thing he snagged was what he thought to be some sort of water snake, a skinny writhing shadow that snapped and did a twisting dance in mid-air, and succeeded in flinging out the hook ... and yet he heard no splash, as if it had flown off into the night.

 

The sixth night, unseasonably warm and misty (it had been like that all week and the bugs and bats were out in force), he spotted a skiff coming from the south with no light hung from its bow and knew it had to be Annalisa. She paused when she noticed him, letting the skiff glide. He whistled the opening bars of “Annalisa.” She turned the skiff, brought it alongside the pier, and said brightly, “What’s up?”

 

“Fishing.” He indicated the rod. “Thinking.”

 

She smiled. “Ooh. That must be hard work. Maybe I shouldn’t interfere.”

 

She had on jeans and a turtleneck and an old saggy gray cardigan; her hands were chapped and smudged with dirt , and her reddish brown hair (redder, he thought, than the last time he had seen her) was tied back with a black ribbon.

 

“The damage is done,” he said. “Come sit a while.”

 

She looped a line over a piling and he gave her a hand up. She settled beside him, her hip nudging his. She let out a sigh and looked across the water to the houses on the far side, a game board of bright and dark squares, their walls barely discernable and their piers lent definition by diffuse pyramids of wan light and whirling moths at their extremities. She smelled of shampoo and freshly turned earth, as if she had been gardening.

 

“I see Milly’s working late,” she said.

 

“Milly?”

 

“Milly Sussman. Don’t you even know your neighbors?”

 

“Guess not.”

 

“You need to get out more. How long have you been here? Three, four months? I should think you would have noticed Milly. Statuesque. Black hair. An extremely impressive woman.”

 

“Maybe ... yeah.”

 

With her hair back, her face seemed more Asian than before; her prominent cheekbones and narrow jaw formed a nearly trapezoidal frame for her exotic features, making them appear stylized like those of a beautiful anime cyborg. From all her tics and eye movements and the working of her mouth, he read a mixture of desire and fear. Something left a trail of bubbles out on the river. Three glowing silver fish hovered in the water beneath her Doc Martens. She peered at them and asked, “You catch anything?”

 

“Yep. I hooked me a nice-looking one.”

 

“You’re being clever again. I can tell.” She kicked her heels idly against the side of the pier. “We missed out, not living in the age of courtly speech. I could say, like, uh, ‘Hooked, sir? Thy hook is not set deep enough!’ And you could....”

 

He placed a hand on the back of her neck and drew her gently to him and kissed her. She pulled away and, with a nervous laugh, said, “Better watch it. You’ll get girl cooties.” The second time he kissed her, she displayed no reluctance, no resistance whatsoever. Her tongue darted out so quickly, it might have been an animal trapped in the cave of her mouth, desperate to escape, if only to another cave. He caught her waist, pulling her closer, and slipped his hand under the turtleneck, up along her ribcage to her breast, rolling the nipple with his thumb. Their teeth clicked together, they clawed at one another and sought fresh angles of attack, striving to penetrate and to admit the other more deeply. The kiss was brutish, clumsy, an expression of red-brained lust, and Annalisa surfaced from it like a diver with bursting lungs, exclaiming, “Oh god!”

 

After a few beats they kissed again, and were more measured in their explorations, yet no less lustful. Clyde was about to suggest they move things to his bedroom, but Annalisa spoke first.

 

“I can’t do this now.” She tugged the turtleneck down over her breasts. “I’m sorry. Really, really sorry. But I have to go.”

 

“Go where?”

 

“Home. I don’t want to, but....”

 

Despite himself, resentment crept into his voice. “Home to Pet.”

 

Annalisa cut her eyes toward him and finished straightening her clothes. “It’s complicated.”

 

“You going to explain it to me?”

 

“Yes, but I can’t now.” She rebuttoned the top button of her jeans.

 

“When am I going to see you?”

 

“I’m not sure.”

 

“I don’t understand,” he said. “You wanted me to kiss you.”

 

“I did. Very much.” She reached behind her head and retied her hair ribbon. “Since we’re being candid, I want to make your eyes roll back. But it’s dangerous. This was dangerous. I shouldn’t have let it happen.”

 

“How’s it dangerous?”

 

“You could die.”

 

She said this so flatly, he had to laugh. He wasn’t sure whether she was telling the truth or attempting to scare him off. He stared at her, perhaps sadly, because she reacted to his expression by saying, “For God’s sake! It was only a kiss.” He continued to stare and she said, “Okay, the losing-consciousness part, that was new.” She climbed into the skiff, undid the line, and held onto the piling. “I’m incredibly motivated to be with you. You probably sensed that.”

 

He nodded happily.

 

“There’s a safe way we can be together,” she went on. “But you have to give me time to work it out. Weeks, if necessary. Maybe a month. Can you do that? If not, tell me now, because Pet is insane. It’s not that he’s suspicious or jealous. He is batshit crazy and he hurts people.”

 

“I can do it.”

 

A flapping of wings overhead, followed by a long quavering cry that sounded like a man running out of breath while blowing trebly notes on a harmonica.

 

“If it takes a little longer even,” Annalisa said, “promise you’ll trust me.”

 

“Promise.”

 

“You won’t do anything stupid?”

 

“I’ll be cool.”

 

“Shake on it.”

 

She gave his hand a vigorous shake and trailed her fingers across his as she disengaged.

 

“All right. See you soon,” she said, and made a rueful face. “I’m sorry.”

 

It was slightly unreal watching her glide away into the dark and, after she had vanished, he felt morose and insubstantial, like a ghost who had suddenly been made aware of all the sensory richness of which he was deprived. The enclosure of the gorge, though invisible, oppressed him. Dampness cored his bones. It was impossible to hold onto promises in all that emptiness. Whatever it was that made bubbles out in the river was still making them, trawling back and forth in front of the pier, closing the distance with each pass, lifting the water with each turn, causing swells. Clyde walked away from the pier, chased by the whisper of the water, the gleeps and tweetlings of frogs and other night creatures, and wearily climbed the ladder to his apartment.

 

* * * *

 

They saw one another more frequently than he’d expected over the days that followed, running into each other in the bars, on the river, sometimes contriving to touch, and one afternoon, when Mrs. Kmiec sent him to Dowling’s (Halloween’s eccentric version of a supermarket and its most extensive building, four interconnected tiers of eight stories each) to pick up kitty litter, Annalisa accosted him in Pet Supplies, eighth floor, fourth tier, and drew him out through a door behind the shelves into a narrow space between the rear wall and the cliff face, and there she hiked up her skirt and they made violent, bone-rattling love balanced on girders above eighty feet of nothing, braced against rock that had been ornately tagged by generations of teenagers who had used the spot before them, swirls of orange, silver, blue, red, and fat letters outlined in black, most of them cursing the authority of man or god, whatever agency had ruled their particular moment, all their hormonal rebellion confined to this not-so-secret hideaway. Annalisa was sweet and shifty, cunning with her hips, yet she nipped his neck, marking his throat, and left a long scratch on his ribcage, and spoke in tongues, in gasps and throaty noises. It seemed less an act of abandon for her than one of desperation. Afterward he asked if this is what she’d had in mind when she mentioned a safe way of being together. “I couldn’t wait,” she said, staring at him with tremulous anxiety, as if the wrong word would break her, shatter the almost Asian simplicity of her face. He felt this to be the case, that she had put herself in physical and mental jeopardy by taking this step, and he realized that her strength and apparent independence was a carefully constructed shield that had prevented him from seeing what lay behind it—he still could not make out the roots of her trouble, but he sensed something restive, dammed up, a powerful force straining for release.

 

The week before the talent contest they held auditions at the Downlow. The stage was lit with a spot that pointed up the tawdryness of the glittery silver Saturns and comets on the dark blue painted backdrop; but there were amps and a good PA and professional quality mikes, everything a performer might need. Waiting to go on, through what seemed an interminable sequence of stand-up comics with no sense of timing, accordion players, twirlers, off-key vocalists, tap dancers, rappers, and a man who could put a foot behind his ear while standing and repeat everything you said backward (Clyde’s favorite), he had several drinks to ease his nerves and oil his instrument ... perhaps one too many, for when his turn came, following a sax player who noodled a decent rendition of “My Favorite Things,” he announced that he would be performing an original composition entitled, “‘Annali ... uh, Melissa.’” A guy in the back asked him to repeat the title and he said, “Sorry. I’m a little nervous. That’s ‘Melissa Anne.’”

 

Pet Nylund was supposed to be in the audience and, as he adjusted the mike, adding a bit touch of reverb, Clyde searched for him (though he couldn’t recall his face and wasn’t certain what he would be like after so many years away from the limelight), but the spot blinded him. He warmed up with a scale, which drew catcalls, but after he had performed, he received scattered applause, which was better than most had done. Afterward he was given a packet containing an entry number and forms, and told he was in. His main competition was the sax player, a black chick named Yolanda who sang a wicked version of “Chain of Fools,” and a young guy who did a one-man-band comedy act that was borderline obscene and a real crowd-pleaser. The singer and the young guy were one-two, he figured, but he stood a good chance for third place money, three hundred bucks and a Pet Nylund box set, enough to buy Annalisa something nice. He’d give the box set to Mary for Roberta, who was a fan.

 

He had another drink at the bar, looked around again for Annalisa and Pet, and talked to Spooz for a bit. Spooz complimented him on his whistling and said he should hang out—Brad would be along soon. Brad had a job topside that kept him running and was hardly ever around, and Clyde would have liked to stay and talk sports with him; but lately he preferred being alone with his thoughts of Annalisa to the company of others, so he begged off.

 

The lights were on in Ms. Kmiec’s living room and, as he ascended the ladder, taking pains not to slip, because drunken ladder mishaps were a common occurrence in Halloween (only the week before Tim Sleight, whom Clyde knew from the Dots, had gotten a load on and plunged two floors, narrowly missing a granite outcropping and splashing in the river), Ms. Kmiec’s door flew open and, framed in a spill of yellow glare, she leaned out and said merrily, “Clyde Ormoloo! Come have a drink!”

 

Her hair was pinned up loosely, riding atop her head like the remains of some blond confection, a soufflé that had fallen, a wedding cake that had been dropped. She had on a black lace peignor and a pair of matching panties; her unconfined breasts bobbled as she swayed in the doorway. She or someone had made bullseyes of her nipples with concentric circles of green ink. He assumed she was trashed and warned her to be careful.

 

“Clyde Ormoloo-loo!” She pouted. “You get in here right now! There’s someone wants to see you!” She sang this last sentence and leaned farther out and beckoned to Clyde.

 

He scaled the remaining rungs, pushed past her and closed the door to prevent her from doing a half-gainer into the Mossbach.

 

The yellow room was as always, but for three notable exceptions: Prince was curled up on the sofa, his head tucked into his stomach, and the large framed photograph of Stan and Helene had been defaced by the realistic cartoon (also in green ink) of a stubby erect penis sticking out from the center of Mr. Kmiec’s forehead. An aromatherapy candle that had gone out sprouted from a blue glass dish on the coffee table—the packaging, which lay on the floor, said it was Tyrrhenian Musk, a product of Italy, but it smelled like charred Old Spice to Clyde. He had the idea that he was interrupting one of Helene’s private sessions.

 

“See!” Helene. She leaned into Clyde. “Princey’s here!”

 

With some effort she lifted Prince, cradling him like a baby, and pressed him into Clyde’s chest, as if expecting him to hold the animal. Prince yielded an annoyed, “Mrap,” and struggled weakly. Clyde saw that the door leading to the adjoining house stood partway open.

 

“Is someone here?” he asked.

 

Helene buried her face in Prince’s tummy and made growly noises, offending the cat still more.

 

A big tanned woman with strong features, muscular arms and legs, several inches taller than Clyde, black hair tumbled about her broad shoulders, entered from the corridor, bottle in hand. Her face reminded him of the image of an empress embossed on a Persian coin that his dad once showed him, too formidable to be beautiful, yet beautifully serene and leonine beneath her ringleted mane. She wore a red Lycra sports bra and shorts that did their best to control an exuberant bust and mighty rear end. His first thought was that she must be a transsexual, but there was no sign of an Adam’s apple and her hands were slender and finely boned—three rings, none a wedding band, adorned them, including a significant diamond nested among opals.

 

“Hello,” she said in a humid contralto. “I’m Milly. And you must be Clyde. Would you care for some apple brandy? It’s sooo good!”

 

“Yeah ... okay.” Clyde perched on the couch beside Helene, who was still making much over the cat. Recalling Annalisa’s description, he said, “You’re Milly Sussman?”

 

“The same.”

 

Moving with a stately grace, Milly took a seat in an easy chair and poured a dollop of brandy each into three diminutive glasses shape like goblets.

 

“I thought you owned the house across the way,” Clyde said.

 

“I own two houses.” She held up two fingers for emphasis. “One’s basically an office. Helene?”

 

“Yes, please!” She scooted to the edge of the couch. Prince writhed free, fell with a thud to the floor, and waddled off to find a quieter spot.

 

“New friends,” Milly said, lifting her glass.

 

Helene chugged the brandy; Clyde had a sip.

 

“It is good,” he said, setting down his glass. “I notice you have a tan. That’s unusual around here.”

 

Milly examined her arms. “I’m just back from three glorious weeks in Thailand. Well, not just back, but I was there recently. A little island not far from Kosumui. You should have seen me then. I was nearly absolutely black. But now....” She heaved a dramatic sigh. “I’m entombed in Halloween once again.”

 

Helene went over to the portrait of her late husband and studied it with her head cocked.

 

“You must like it here,” Clyde said. “I mean, two houses.”

 

“It has its charms.” Milly crossed her legs. “Lately, however, I find it limiting. And you?”

 

Helene hunted for something on the end table beside the easy chair, was impeded in her search by the folds of her peignor and shrugged out of it. She located what she had been looking for—a Magic Marker—and stood sucking on the tip, apparently contemplating an addition to her work. Though for seven, eight seconds out of ten on the average, Clyde’s thoughts turned to Annalisa, the sight of Helene almost naked was difficult to ignore.

 

Milly repeated her question: “And you?” Her smile seemed to acknowledge Clyde’s distraction.

 

“I liked it better when I first arrived,” he said. “I guess maybe I’m finding it limiting, too.”

 

With a knee resting on the arm of Milly’s chair, Helene drew on the portrait.

 

Milly ran a hand along her thigh, as if to smooth out an imaginary wrinkle in the skin-tight Lycra. “Perhaps there’s a way we can help one another exceed those limits.”

 

Choosing his words with care, Clyde said, “We’re probably talking about different sorts of limits.”

 

“Ah.” Her face impassive, she sipped her brandy.

 

They endured a prickly silence; then Clyde asked, “So what do you do ... for a living?”

 

“I have a foundation that funds cottage industries in the Third World. I was a lawyer; I suppose I still am. But the law....” She made a disaffected noise.

 

“We could use some cottage industries here. This raking walnuts thing gets pretty old.”

 

“Actually I was speaking to Pet about that very thing before I left for Thailand. Of course we don’t need them, but diversity might infuse the people with a better attitude. Raking walnuts, packaging walnuts, shipping walnuts, all this ridiculous drudgery.... It reinforces the notion that he owns them. But he insists on running the town his way. Pet’s an unpleasant little man. He’s one of the reasons I’m thinking about leaving.”

 

“Never met the guy.”

 

“I did some legal work for him during the nineties. I liked him then, but he’s changed a great deal since he stopped performing.”

 

“There!” Helene backed off a few paces to assess her work. Atop Stan Kmiec’s head she had created the line drawing of a parrot that, its head turned sideways, was threatening to bite the stubby appendage protruding from his brow.

 

“Very nice,” said Milly. “Clyde and I were talking about Pet, dear. Anything you’d care to contribute?”

 

“Pet’s an even bigger prick than Stan,” she said absently, and cast about the room. “I think Prince went over to your place.”

 

She headed off along the connecting corridor, weaving from wall to wall.

 

“Well,” said Clyde, sliding to the edge of the sofa. “I’ve got work in the morning. Walnuts to rake.”

 

“A question before you go,” Milly said. “I realize that men—many of them—find me too Amazonian for their tastes. Is that why you turned me down?”

 

Clyde was startled by her frankness.

 

She smiled. “Be truthful, now!”

 

“It’s more a case of my head not being in the right place,” he said.

 

She put her glass on the coffee table, leaning close to him as she did. He became aware of the smallness of the room, and the heated scent of her body, and had a paranoid flash, recalling movies featuring women of her dimension and fitness level who served villains, generally of Eastern European origin, as paid assassins; yet he picked up nothing from her other than a gloomy passivity.

 

“I’ve got stuff on my mind,” he said. “Life stuff, you know.”

 

Milly sank back into the cushions, again crossing her legs. “Helene told me you were unattached.”

 

A scream ripped along the corridor between the houses, followed by an explosive crash of glass breaking. Clyde and Milly sprang to their feet at nearly the same moment and, due to the cramped quarters, her head struck him on the point of the chin, knocking him back onto the sofa and sending white lights shooting into his eyes, while she went down heavily between the easy chair and the end table. She managed to unwedge herself and struggled up into a crouch, when Helene rushed in and bowled her over again. Helene yanked at a drawer in the end table, pulling it completely out and spilling a large pistol, a .357, onto the floor.

 

“Son-of-a-bitch got Prince!” she said tearfully.

 

She cocked the gun and scampered across the coffee table between Milly and Clyde; she flipped a row of wall switches and threw open the door. Exterior lights bathed the granite cliff and the neighboring houses in an infernal white radiance, illuminating every crevice and projection. From the sofa, Clyde had a glimpse of something unusual. Traversing the cliff ten yards above them was a greenish black creature—at that distance it resembled an enormous cabbage that had been left out in the rain and rotted, losing all but an approximation of its spherical form, its leaves shredded and hanging off the central structure like the decaying rags of a homeless person. It moved rapidly, albeit in a series of fits and starts, growing taller, skinnier, pausing, then shrinking and becoming cabbage-like again, its body flowing between those poles, as if its means of perambulation involved muscular contractions and expulsions of air similar to those utilized by an octopus. Still groggy, Clyde sat up, hoping for a clearer look, but Helene blocked the doorway. She braced against the doorframe, adopting a shooter’s stance, and squeezed off three rounds that boomed across the gorge and shattered the air inside the yellow room. Clyde stumbled up off the sofa just as she said, “Damn it!” and began fumbling with the gun. She tugged on the trigger, holding the weapon at such an angle that, if it hadn’t been jammed, it would have blown off her foot.

 

“Wait!” he said, going toward her.

 

A petulant expression replaced one of stupefied determination. She transferred the gun to her left hand and, playing keep away, thrust it out over the gorge, a clumsy movement that caused her to overbalance. She flailed her arms, clutched at the air, shrieked in terror and toppled out the doorway. Clyde made a dive for her and snagged an ankle, stopping her fall, but momentum swung her against the side of the house—she smacked into the wall headfirst and went limp. The edge of the doorway cut into the back of Clyde’s arms. He eased forward, so his arms were clear, his torso and head extended over the gorge, and firmed up his grip, paying no mind to Milly’s hysterical advice. The dark river and the diminished pier and the strip of yellow-white sand beside it looked like really keen accessories to a toy model of the town. He closed his eyes to forestall dizziness. Other voices were heard. A man poked his head out the window of the house next door and told him not to let go. Someone else called from below, telling him to swing Helene out over the river and let her drop into the water, as if a forty-foot plunge were nothing to fear. Women’s voices shrilled; thick, sleep-dulled male voices rumbled and children squeaked. It seemed the gunshots had waked half the population of Halloween and they each and every one were offering stupid suggestions.

 

“Milly! Get behind me,” he said. “Grab my ankles.”

 

She did as told and immediately began yanking him into the room.

 

“No, stop ... stop!” he said. “Don’t pull until I tell you. Okay?”

 

Inch by inch, Clyde worked his grip higher on Helene’s leg. Sweat broke on his forehead. Helene was not a heavy woman, but he couldn’t get his back into the lift and a hundred-ten, hundred-twenty pounds of dead weight took a toll on his arms. Her head kept banging against the house and he decided this was a good thing—if she woke and went to thrashing about, he might lose her. The lights gave him a headache and the small crowd that had gathered on the shingle below distracted him. Once he had secured a hold on Helene’s knee, he told Milly to pull him about six inches back. She tugged on his ankles and Clyde twisted onto his side, a movement that swung Helene’s free leg toward him. Holding her by the knee with one arm, he trapped the other leg and locked both hands behind her thighs. He told Milly to pull him six inches farther, and when she did, he heaved on Helene, shifting her up along his body to a point where he had a grip on her hips and buttocks, and a faceful of lace panties.

 

“Okay,” he said to Milly. “Bring us in.”

 

Once they were inside the room, Milly dragged Helene off him. The cheer that arose from the gorge was fainter than he might have expected, as if a sizable portion of those watching had been rooting against them. Blood smeared Helene’s mouth and chin, most coming from her nose—Clyde thought it might be broken. While Milly ministered to her, he had a seat on the sofa and pounded the rest of his brandy. He poured another glass and knocked down the lion’s share of that. The muscles in his shoulders burned. Helene came back to the world crying and carrying on about Stan, how ashamed she was for defacing his picture. She didn’t remember a thing about the accident or Prince, but planted a bloody kiss on Clyde’s mouth in gratitude after Milly brought her up to speed. Milly decided to take Helene over to her place, where she could better care for her, and said she’d be back to check on him as soon she made Helene comfortable.

 

Clyde closed his eyes and thought about the cat-killer (it wasn’t the first inexplicable thing he’d seen here, but it certainly staked claim to being the headline on Weird News), and about Prince mrapping around Cat Heaven, and about Annalisa, what lay ahead for them and how it would be ... and then he was being shaken awake by Steve Germany, a squat, shaven-headed man, all his features crowded together toward the center of his face, a walnut raker who worked nights as a bouncer at the Downlow, and another bouncer, Dan or Dave, he couldn’t recall, sat next to him, and Spooz studied him from the easy chair, his double-chinned mug pale as an onion, and said, “Man, did you screw up,” and there was a fourth guy, a scrawny, shriveled-up, narrow-shouldered geezer with a prunish face (except for a young man’s sneering mouth) and his gray hair in a pony tail, wearing a midnight blue velvet jacket over a T-shirt bearing the design of a Chinese character on the chest and black jeans belted with a buckle in the shape of a P flocked round by silver birds (it looked as if he’d borrowed his grandson’s clothes) and this enfeebled gangster of love, this Lilliputian Monster of Rock (Clyde knew he was Pet Nylund), produced a pocket tape recorder, clicked the play button, and Clyde heard his own voice say, “‘Annali ... Melissa,’” pause, crackle, and then, “Sorry. I’m a little nervous. That’s ‘Melissa Anne.’”

 

“Do you know who I am?” Pet asked in a sandpapery wheeze, and Clyde, realizing that he was in deep shit, understanding that it didn’t much matter how he responded, answered, “George Michaels’s dad?”

 

Pet bared his teeth in a yellow smile. “Tube his ass!”

 

* * * *

 

The Tubes were situated at the opposite end of town from the Dots, occupying the summit of a sixty-foot-high granite mound and hidden by a high concrete block wall overgrown by lichen—it looked like an old WWII gun emplacement guarding the entrance to Halloween. That evening, however, it radiated evil energies visible to Clyde as pulsating streams of gray vapor and had the gargantuan aspect of an ancient citadel, a habitat fit for wizards and eldritch beasts. After the one-sided struggle to subdue him, someone had given Clyde an injection. Nothing calmative. His heart raced, his nerves twitched, and his thoughts flared like fireworks, illuminating one or another heretofore hidden corner of his brain before being dissipated by a new pyrotechnic display of insights and colors. Tattered glowing white wings without bodies, the relics of revenant birds and angels, swerved near and then vanished into the purple gloom; troll faces materialized from the coarse rock and spoke booming words, like the magic words in a children’s book, and the black water acquired a skin of serpent scales. If he had not been trussed like a mummy, thin ropes pinning his arms to his sides and lashing his legs together, he could have gotten behind the hallucinations, and he would have offered a vociferous complaint if he hadn’t also been gagged. As it was, he rolled about, rocking the skiff, until Spooz kicked him in the liver.

 

Making jokes at his expense, they lugged him up from the river and through a door and laid him down on a concrete slab lit by arc lamps, a penitentiary setting that had the industrial look and soul-shriveling feel and dry negative smell of an execution ground. A single star shone in the sky crack, its name unknown, so he called it Azrael, then Disney, then Fremont Phil or Capricorn Sue, depending on its sex. He lifted his head and saw six, no, seven perfectly round openings in the concrete, one of them covered with a piece of sheet iron, a winch mounted above each, and he flashed on the idea that perfectly round holes were a motif in Halloween, there were the Dots and the Tubes and ... well, there were a couple of examples, anyway, and he imagined that some gigantic, perfectly round, acid-exuding worm or humongous beetle with diamond-hard mandibles had bored the holes, and pictured gaping mouths waiting at the bottom to be fed. A voice among other voices, Brad’s voice, distracted him, and he tried to find him, craning his neck, rolling his eyes, a friend come to intercede, and Brad kneeled beside him, his stubby dreadlocks looking like a tarantula hat, and hooked a chain to one of the ropes strapping his chest and said, “Sorry, man. Nothing personal.” He measured the width of Clyde’s shoulders with a tape and said, “Number Five’ll do,” and Clyde made eye contact with him and saw only a core impersonality—the man derived pleasure from being impersonal, from just doing his job and following orders, the glad-handing, Dallas Cowboy-loving torturer of Halloween town, and he couldn’t fathom why he had failed to see this before and supposed that the blackness of Brad’s skin absorbed the light and thus prevented him from ... no, no, no, don’t go there, he chuckled inwardly at the nuttiness of worrying about being politically correct, like a prisoner of the Inquisition fretting over his eczema, and then he was picked up and suspended over Number Five, and felt the chain grow taut, Brad steadying him as he was lowered, saying with relish, the last voice Clyde heard, “If you twist around too much, man, you’ll rub off the chain and we’ll have to fish you out with hooks,” and Clyde, at eye-level with Brad’s feet, envisioned hooks tearing off chunks of flesh grown too soft and rotten to impale, an image he carried down into the dark, the dank, claustrophobia-inducing dark of a pit that fit around him more tightly than a coffin, down, down, down, scraping the walls (the tube was canted at a slight angle), scarcely enough room to tip back his head and see the coin of lesser darkness above being devalued, dwindling and dwindling until it was the size of a half dollar, a quarter, a dime ... and that was when he fell, bumping and battering his way to the bottom. A shred of instinct came into play and he bent his knees as much as possible to absorb the blow, landing with most of his weight on the left foot, the resultant pain so bad it seemed to fill his entire body until he forced it back, compressed it into a throbbing ache beneath his knee, shifting onto his right foot to alleviate it further, and yet the pain was still very bad, burning like a cancer in the bone, and something slithered, rattled, clinked down the tube and lashed him across the face, chipping a tooth, and he tasted blood (they had dropped the chain, or else it had torn loose from the winch) and he panicked and tried to spit out the gag and scream for what must have been a couple of minutes before he recognized the chain attached to his chest remained taut and they had flung down a second chain. Playing a trick. Having their little joke. Anger helped him deal with the pain, but he was incapable of sustaining it. Time grew sluggish, the seconds oozed past, each one a complex droplet of fear, agony, hope, fatalism, despair. He began to see and hear things that he hoped were unreal. Fish with fangs and cicatrice grins swam at him through the walls. The stone was a living depth of stone, breathing in and out, each contraction bruising his ribs, compressing his lungs. He couldn’t think, poisoned by shock and trauma, and he wished they would finish him, drench him with scalding water or drown him in oil ... it didn’t matter. Ragged, grating voices doubled by echoes told him things about himself that he thought only he knew, things he hadn’t known, and things he wanted to deny. He said her name as though it were a charm against them, Annalisa, and kept on saying it until it became as meaningless as rosary devotions. The voices persisted and told him lies about her. That whey-faced bitch gamed you, man. Every night she goes home to that yellow smile and those gnarly bones. You know what they do? Think about it. What was she? His groupie? And she still lives with him? Come on! You think that’s going to change? Look where you are. She gave up a little tongue, a little tit, and threw you a quickie ... now she’s laughing at you while Pet’s hitting that big white butt of hers over and over and....

 

The voices became garbled, too many to hear, an inchoate stew of vowels and consonants that eventually faded, leaving only a single voice, that of a young man saying, “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, amen,” speaking so rapidly, the words ran together, and then, “...blessed be the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, Holy Mary...” repeating this fragment, this same broken prayer, again and again. It annoyed him that the guy didn’t know the words and he tried to beam them at him (it sounded like he was right next door), and the guy must have received the transmission, because he began to say it correctly, Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with theeblessedartthouamong ... etcetera. Clyde got caught up in the rhythm of the prayer, in the sheer velocity of it. He seemed to be skittering across the prayer’s surface as if it were a globe and he was a spider seeking to maintain his place by scuttling along the equator, but the globe spun too quickly and, dizzy from the spin, he lost traction and was blown off into the abyss, pinwheeling down into a noiseless, bottomless dark where there was a complete absence of pain and even spiders feared to tread.

 

* * * *

 

A transformative thought visited Clyde, dropping down from the aether where it customarily dallied, occasionally occupying the minds of cosmic beings, the type of thought with which, if he could have mastered it, he might have comprehended the process of the world as though it were a problem in simple arithmetic, or effect the path of astronomical objects, or divine the future by the mere contemplation of a grape. Of course he was incapable of mastering it—it was too vast, too important, surrounding him the way a balloon might surround an ant. He inhaled its heady atmosphere, trying to absorb all the intelligence he could, but retained only fragments that translated into useless homily, some garbage about fitting a purpose to his life and finding (or was it founding?) a kingdom, and one item more specific, no less fragmentary, the phrase, “...below the fifty-seventh parallel.” Yet he took these things to heart. He passed through the skin of the thought, clung to its outer surface until it wafted away, leaving him woozily awake and marginally aware of his surroundings, his leg aching (but the pain greatly diminished), watching a boatman—an indistinct black figure—thrust with his pole, making a faint splash and sending the skiff skimming beneath a dim sprinkle of white stars, dull and unwinking as bread crumbs on a dark blue cloth. He lay in the prow, with someone breathing regularly beside him (he was too exhausted to turn his head and determine who), and flirted with the notion that the ancient Greeks had been accurate concerning their speculations on the afterlife, and old What’s-his-face, Charon, had come to ferry them across the River Styx into the mouths of Hell. Though this was patently untrue (he smelled rotten walnuts and suspected they were crossing the third Dot), he had no doubt that the imagery was apt, that one of Pet’s boys had been ordered to take them south and dump the bodies. He struggled to kindle a spark of rebellion, to resist this fate, but fatigue and whatever narcotic had been given him for the pain muffled his fire. He just wanted to sleep. Before passing out, the last question he asked (of whomever it is we ask these questions) was, he wondered if this was what had happened to Dell....

 

They were crossing an underground lake, a stretch of water whose dimensions were impossible to judge—the walls and ceiling were lost in darkness, though lamps had been hung off the sides and both ends of the skiff, making them look, Clyde supposed, like one of those strange electric creatures that inhabited ocean trenches. Light from a lantern in the stern sprayed around the mysterious figure of the boatman, somewhat less mysterious now that he could see baggy jeans and a green down jacket patched with duct tape, a hood hiding the face. His leg throbbed and there was a considerable swelling beneath the knee (his trousers had been cut away). He eased onto his side and came face-to-face with a young brown-skinned man wearing a sleeveless T-shirt and clutching a blanket about his shoulders, gathered at the throat, a pose that made him appear boyish; yet his arms were thick and well muscled, those of a man. A gash on his cheekbone leaked a pink mixture of blood and serum. As if registering the weight of Clyde’s scrutiny, his eyes fluttered open, murmured something, and closed them again.

 

“That’s David Batista,” said Annalisa. “Pet’s editor. He was in the tube next to you.”

 

She pushed back the cowl and shook out her hair; she had puffy half-circles under her eyes. Clyde wanted to ask a basic question, but his tongue stuck to his palette.

 

“Are you okay?” she asked.

 

He wetted his lips and swallowed. “Leg hurts.”

 

“Yeah, Roberta says it’s fractured.”

 

“Roberta?”

 

“Mary Alonso’s Roberta. I’ll give you another pill.”

 

At her feet, he noticed a tarpaulin covering someone wearing jeans and a pair of gray boots.

 

“And that,” she said in a deliberate manner. “That is Pet.”

 

Energy appeared to run out from her, rendering her a stony figure whose pallid animating principle stemmed from some un-alive source, as if the name pronounced had the power to transform warmth into cold, joy into hatred, every vital thing into its deathly opposite, and she stood motionless, frozen to her pole, with sunken cheek and haunted eye, a steerswoman dread and implacable, more so than Charon. Then, stepping back from the place where memory or emotion had borne her, she thrust with the pole, propelling the skiff into a channel with pitted walls like those of an old castle. Clyde felt a cold brush of anxiety that, although triggered by her reaction, seemed a general anxiety springing from every element of their situation.

 

Annalisa fed him a white tablet not much larger than a pinhead, warned him to keep his hands clear of the water, saying, “There’s things in there will take it off,” and returned to her position in the stern. Batista woke and slid over to allow Clyde more room; then he sat up and Clyde asked him what was going on.

 

“All I know is these four women pulled us out and tubed Brad,” Batista said. “Milly Sussman ... you know her? Big, good-looking woman? She seemed to be the one running the show. She had the gun, anyway. She said she wanted us put somewhere safe until things got settled, so Annalisa’s taking us south. I don’t know what they’ve got in mind for Pet.”

 

Annalisa was off in her own world, not listening to the conversation.

 

“If half the stuff in his memoirs is true,” Batista went on, “they can drop him in the Tubes and leave him for all I care.”

 

Clyde recognized Batista’s voice as that of the guy who had said his Hail Marys wrong, if that were possible; he thought about inquiring whether or not he, Batista, had heard his advice, but decided it would be too much of a complication. “That’s what you were doing?” he asked. “Helping him write his memoirs?”

 

Batista nodded. “Routing out a sewer would have been cleaner work. I told him I was quitting, so he tubed me.” He shot Clyde an appraising look. “Did they give you drugs? This guy I know said they had drugs that made it worse.”

 

“They gave me something nasty,” Clyde said.

 

The white tablet kicked in. He felt warm, muddled, distant from pain. He luxuriated in the sense of bodily perfection that attended even the movement of a finger and admired the swelling on his shinbone for the subtlety of its coloration. A cloying vegetable scent infused the air and this, too, pleased him, though he was not able to identify it. The most apt comparative he could find (only this odor was far more acidic) was the incense his mom had ordered from a catalogue during her charismatic Catholic phase, Genuine Biblical Times Incense from Jerusalem, smell what our Lord and Savior smelled, and she had hated the stuff, said she couldn’t get the stink out of her new sofa, so Clyde had appropriated the incense and used it to mask the smell of pot.

 

They emerged from the channel into another section of the gorge, skimming along beneath a gray-blue sky, a broad expanse in relation to Halloween’s sky crack. The cliffs here were perpendicular to the river and higher than the cliffs in town. Some ninety or a hundred feet wide, the Mossbach had here acquired a murky greenish tint, meandering between steep, sloping banks from which sprouted dense tangles of strange vegetation: blackish green grass sprinkled with starfish-shaped white blossoms and stubby, many-branched trees that resembled a hybrid of bonsai and gorgonians; the majority of these were also blackish green, yet some of the fans were tinged with indigo. Dark globular bushes, each with thousands of tiny leaves, quivered as they drifted past, and vines, some thick as hawsers, others fine as wires, looped in and out like exposed veins feeding the micro-environment. The place had the dire atmospherics of a wicked fairy tale, a secret grotto poisoned by the presence of an evil spirit, and the early morning light held a pall that seemed a byproduct of the pungent odor (Clyde thought he recognized the base smell as cat shit, but doubted that could be right). Fat insects with wings like fractured blades of zircon wobbled drunkenly from shrub to shrub, giving the impression that the work they did was making them ill.

 

They rounded a bend and Clyde, glancing over his shoulder, was presented with a vista that to his eyes, grown accustomed to confined spaces, was a virtual Grand Canyon of confinements. Here the shore widened and the cliffs made him think of illustrations in children’s dinosaur books, having a Paleolithic jaggedness, their summits tattered with mist. Bracketed to the rock was a Halloween house of black metal (two columns of six stories). The walls had a dull chitin-like finish that lent the rooms (quite a bit larger than usual) the aspect of twelve rectangular beetles crawling up the cliff in tight formation. Fifteen feet below the first floor of the house, directly beneath it, tucked flush against the rock and fronted by a pebbly shingle that continued on to fringe the shoreline farther south, stood a flat-roofed, one-story building painted bluish green, a shade too bright to be called viridian. Clyde soon realized that paint was not responsible for the color—the structure was furred with lichen, the odd patch of raw concrete showing through. In one such spot the stenciled black letters MU AGE beneath a portion of a skull-and-crossbones added an indefinite yet ominous caption to the scene. Mutagenics, Clyde said to himself, remembering his conversation with Dell. The window screens were rusted but intact; the door was cracked open. To the left of the building lay a plot of fenced-in, furrowed dirt. Ordinary ferns sprouted from the rock above it, fluttering in the breeze as if signaling for help, hoping to be rescued from the encroachment of more alien growth. One thing distinguished the place above all else, verifying Clyde’s suspicions concerning the odor: cats of every breed and description sunned themselves on the building’s roof, peeped from thickets, crept along the margin of the water, perched primly in rocky niches and gazed scornfully down on those below. The shingle, their sandbox, was littered with turds. He took them to be feral descendants of the survivors of the cat-killer, yet they reacted with neither aggression nor fear and merely turned an incurious eye toward the intruders. There were hundreds of them, yet they made precious little noise, a scattering of miaows where one might have expected an incessant caterwauling. Some rubbed against Batista’s ankles as he half-carried Clyde to the lee of the building and helped him sit with his back to the wall.

 

The derelict building; the house of black metal; the strangely silent cats; the unusual vegetation; the sluggish jade river winding between towering cliffs—these things caused Clyde to envision that they were characters in a great unwritten fantasy novel by Joseph Conrad, the ruins of civilization subsumed by elements of an emergent one ruled by the sentient offspring of our former housepets and, in this semi-subterranean backwater, the narrator and a handful of his friends were attempting to stave off the inevitable eternal night of their species by swapping anecdotes about mankind’s downfall, individual tales of apocalyptic folly that, taken in sum, constituted a mosaic of defeat and sounded the death knell of the human spirit. He pictured a venerable storyteller, his gray-bearded jaw clenched round a pipe stem, rotted teeth tilted like old gravestones in the tobacco-stained earth of his gums, puffing vigorously to keep his coal alive and exhaling a cloud of pale smoke that engulfed his listeners as he spoke and seemed by this noxious inclusion to draw their circle closer.... Clyde laughed soddenly, amused by his ornate bullshit.

 

From the skiff, an outcry.

 

At the water’s edge Annalisa stood over Pet, who was on his knees, his hands bound. He still had on his dark blue velvet jacket. She whacked him across the shoulders with her pole and he laboriously got his feet. Clyde felt divorced from the situation and tracked the progress of a gray tabby as it sneaked near one of the globular bushes, made a sinuous, twisting leap, snatched a bug from midair and fell to tearing it apart. Another cat jumped down from the roof, eyed them with middling hostility, and sauntered off. Batista pressed his shoulder against the door of the Mutagenics building and forced it open—the swollen wood made a skreeking noise. After a minute he hunkered down beside Clyde, who asked what he had found inside.

 

“A bunch of nothing,” said Batista. “Couple of lab tables and a file cabinet. A door ... probably leads up into the house.”

 

Urged on by Annalisa, Pet came stumbling up from the shingle. Clyde thought of an old Italian vampire movie in which the main vampire had been exhumed from his crypt, a skeleton, but after a starlet’s blood had been drizzled on his fangs, he gradually reacquired sinew and flesh and skin—Pet appeared to be stuck partway through that process. Annalisa inserted the pole between his ankles, tripped him, and he went sprawling.

 

“Crazy bitch!” He wiped sand from his mouth with his coat sleeve. “Think this’ll get you anything?”

 

“Don’t worry about me,” Annalisa said. “You’re the one with the problem.”

 

“I got no problem,” said Pet with a smirk. “Brad and the guys’ll be coming around the bend any minute, and you’ll be on your haunches, begging for a bone.”

 

“Watch your mouth!” Clyde had been aiming for belligerence, but the words were so slurred, they came out, “Wushamou.”

 

“You don’t know her, pal. She’d go down on a sick monkey if she thought she’d gain an edge.” Pet chuckled. “Remember the tour with Oasis, honey? Man, you guys should have seen her. I told her....”

 

Batista had been juggling some pebbles in his palm—he shied one at Pet, striking him in the chest.

 

“It won’t be Brad coming,” Annalisa said. “It’ll be Milly.”

 

“Milly?” Pet snorted. “That’s crap! She wouldn’t be involved in something this stupid.”

 

No one said anything.

 

Pet looked at them each in turn. “What are you people fucking trying to pull?”

 

Annalisa sat next to Clyde and asked how he was doing.

 

“What’s in those pills you gave me?”

 

“Morphine sulfate.”

 

Clyde grunted. “I must be doing okay, then.”

 

Pet shifted, trying to get comfortable. “This is all about him? This mutt?”

 

“Why not?” said Annalisa. “It doesn’t have to be, but sure, let’s make it about him.”

 

She rested her head on Clyde’s shoulder. The contact warmed him—he hadn’t noticed that he was cold—and left him feeling dozy. For a minute or ten, the only sounds were the rush of the river and the cats.

 

“I’m hungry,” said Batista.

 

“Me, too.” Pet propped himself on an elbow. “What say we scrag a few cats and roast ‘em? We can have a picnic. Got any mint jelly? I hear roast cat’s great with mint jelly.”

 

Annalisa leaned forward, trembling and tense. “You hungry?”

 

Uneasiness surfaced in Pet’s face.

 

“I said, are you hungry?”

 

That drained-of-life quality she had displayed earlier was back. Clyde had a hunch that she intended to kill Pet and caught at her arm; but she was already moving toward Pet. She strode past him, however, and fumbled with the garden gate; she flung it open, causing consternation among the cats trailing after her, and dug with her hands in the dirt, uprooting two big onions dangling from their stalks.

 

She brought them to Pet, pushed them at him. “Eat these.”

 

“Fuck you!” He turned away.

 

“Don’t be afraid,” she said in a wound-tight voice. “They won’t poison you any more than you’ve already been poisoned.”

 

An inch of apprehension crept into his defiant expression.

 

“That’s right,” she said. “For over a year I’ve been bringing you treats from my garden. If you weren’t afraid of doctors, a checkup might have revealed cancer. You must be riddled with it by now.”

 

Pet tried to shrug it off, but he was plainly rattled.

 

“Of course you’re such a toxic little freak,” she went on, “could be you just absorb the shit. Maybe it’s actually making you healthier.”

 

She paused, as if giving this possibility its due consideration, and then swung the onions, striking Pet in the face, knocking him onto his back. She straddled him and hit him again and again, her hair flying into her eyes. Each blow thudded on bone. He tried to buck her off, but in a matter of seconds his body went limp. She kept on hitting him, taking two-handed swings, gasping with every one, like the gasps she uttered when she made love. The cats nearest her shrank from the violence, wheeling about and scampering off. Clyde yelled for her to stop and, in no particular hurry, Batista went over, threw his arms around her and pulled her away. She resisted, but he was too strong—he lifted her and whirled her about. The onions flew from her hand, bouncing and rolling to Clyde’s feet. They were mushed and lopsided, dirt and speckles of blood clinging to their pale surfaces.

 

“Let me go,” she said dully.

 

He released her and she gave him a little shove as she stepped away. She walked down to the river and pushed back her hair and stood gazing upstream. Flecks of onionskin were stuck to the blood on Pet’s face. His eyes were shut and the breath shuddered out of him. Clyde couldn’t tell if he was conscious. Batista hovered betwixt and between as if unable to decide with whom to align himself. One of the cats started lapping at the blood on the onions, ignoring Clyde’s halfhearted attempts to shoo it away.

 

He called out to Annalisa—she backhanded a wave, a gesture of rejection he chose to interpret as her needing a moment. He felt the morphine taking him as his adrenaline rush faded and he did his best to keep his mind focused. He wanted to comfort her, yet he doubted that she could be comforted or that comfort was the appropriate medicine. He could relate to her outburst of rage against a man who had misused her. Everyone was mad that way; but mad enough to be a poisoner? To delight in secret over another’s slow demise? That required a refined madness, a spiritual abscess that might prove to be untreatable. He drew in a shaky breath and was cold again. The landscape no longer seemed so epic and exotic, humanized and made paltry by her violent excess. Just a bunch of filthy cats, an abandoned building and some cliffs.

 

Batista came over and sat down. After a minute or two, so did Annalisa. Clyde draped an arm about her. She relaxed beneath the weight and cozied into him and he let go of his questions, persuaded by the animal consolation of her body. The cats, filling in the open spaces they had vacated, seemed emblems of normalcy, sniffing and shitting, batting at bugs, much in the way the world goes on following the hush created by an explosion, with people scurrying about, engines starting, all the noise and talk and bustle paving over a cratered silence, all the clocks once again ticking in unison.

 

* * * *

 

The sun was not yet in view, but a golden tide had scrubbed the shadows from the top of the western cliff wall and, as the light brightened, some of the place’s eerie luster was restored. About a half-hour after the beating, Pet sat up. He shot a bitter glance toward Annalisa and lowered his head. His left eye was swollen shut, his forehead bruised. Blood from his nose reddened his lips and chin, and he breathed through his mouth. No one spoke to him. He cast about, as though searching for something to occupy himself; then he lay back down and turned onto his side, facing away from them. Soon afterward the cats retreated, withdrawing swiftly into the underbrush to the south, a cat stampede that left nary a one in sight.

 

“Where are they going?” Batista asked.

 

Annalisa disengaged from Clyde, wearily lifting his arm away. She said something that sounded like “lurruloo,” and peered south along the shore. Clyde heard a yowling, a cacophony of small, abrasive voices, and saw a greenish black something slide out of the brush and onto the shingle: the cat killer surrounded by a tide of cats. Whenever it shrank, spreading out into its rotted-cabbage mode, cats leapt onto its “skirts,” clinging to them as it grew tall and spindly.

 

“Help me get him up!” Annalisa said to Batista.

 

Together they hustled Clyde into the building, a wide single room of unpainted concrete, dappled with lichen and reeking of mildew, empty but for lab tables and a filing cabinet, the floors littered with glass and other debris. A recessed black metal door set in the rear wall. They started to lower him to the floor, but he insisted upon remaining upright, propped against one of the tables. Pet scrambled inside as Batista shut the door. Out the window, Clyde saw the creature, utilizing its peculiar means of locomotion, slip along the shingle and come to a halt beside the skiff. Stretched to its full height, seven feet or thereabouts, it reminded him of a bedraggled Christmas tree that had been left out for the garbage and lost its pyramidal form, become lopsided and limp; instead of a plastic star, it was topped off by a glabrous, football-shaped, seemingly featureless head, dark olive in color. A few cats still clung to it, nibbling the fringes of its skin. The ground in its wake was strewn with half-conscious cats—some rolled onto their backs in a show of delight—and others could be seen wobbling off into the brush. The creature’s body rippled, its loose flaps of skin creating a shimmying effect, and it produced a loud ululation, “Lurruloo,” that had the throatiness and wooden tonality of a bassoon, deflating as the last note died—close at hand, now it looked less like a melted cabbage than an ugly green-and-black throw rug with a funny lump at the center. A bloated white cat that bore a striking resemblance to Prince waddled out from behind it and collapsed on its side.

 

“All this thing’s doing is getting cats fucked up,” Clyde said, peering around Batista, who was hogging the window. “It’s not killing them.”

 

“They love cats,” Pet said. “The cats keep ‘em groomed and the lurruloo turn ‘em into cat junkies. It’s people they kill.”

 

“Because you and those idiot friends of yours were hunting them.” Annalisa spat out the words.

 

“Uh-huh, sure. They were carrying peace signs and singing ‘Kumbaya’ before we came along. What do you think happened to the Mutagenics people?”

 

“Yeah, what did happen to them?” Batista asked. “Your memoirs are a little blurry on the subject.”

 

“There’s more than one of these things?” asked Clyde.

 

“Pet stranded them here,” Annalisa told Batista. “They tried escaping through the caves. No one’s sure what happened.”

 

“The caves?” said Clyde.

 

“What was I supposed to do? Let ‘em tell the world about their exciting new species?” Angry, Pet took a step toward her. “It would have been the end of Halloween, man. Soldiers and scientists all over the place.”

 

Annalisa banged her fist against the filing cabinet. “If you hadn’t poisoned their environment, you would never have known they were there. They would have never been motivated to visit the surface.”

 

“Fuck a bunch of Greenpeace bullshit!” Pet affected a feminine voice: “You realize they’re not animals, don’t you? They steal cats and destroy TV cables. Surely you can see they’re intelligent? They deserve our protection.”

 

Pet was reacting, Clyde observed, as if the beating had never occurred, either because he felt equal to Annalisa now that she was onion-less, or because argument was simply a pattern they had developed. For that matter, she was reacting more-or-less the same. It made him wonder if beatings might also be one of their patterns.

 

“They don’t like it here!” she said. “Why do you think they only send one up at a time?”

 

“If they only send one,” said Clyde, “how can you tell there’s more than one?”

 

Pet sniffed. “I don’t fucking care why. But if they keep coming, I’ll give ‘em more than chemicals to worry about.”

 

“I doubt that,” Annalisa said. “When Milly gets here we’re going to have a discussion about them ... and you.”

 

“I’m still betting on Brad.”

 

“We tubed Brad. By now some of the others are probably down there with him, and Milly has the rest of your thugs doing doggie tricks. You shouldn’t have gotten so tight with your lawyer. She knows all the right buttons to push.”

 

“Hey!” Clyde yelled. “Does somebody want to answer my questions?”

 

Annalisa looked at him dumfounded, as if she had only just noticed his presence.

 

“What you said those about things sending one up at a time?” Batista turned from the window. “There’s three outside now.”

 

Pet and Annalisa crowded him out the way.

 

“I see one out front.” Annalisa.

 

“There’s one ... behind the fence.” Pet.

 

“Where’s the third?”

 

The light from the window was suddenly blotted out. Pet and Annalisa backed away, and Clyde found himself looking into a maw of glistening, grayish meat that overspread the window screen. The lurruloo made a squelching noise—its flesh convulsed and it sprayed a thick, clear liquid onto the mesh, which began to yield a thin white smoke.

 

“Jesus Christ! That’s acid!” Batista said. “Can it squeeze through there?”

 

“It’s not real strong,” said Annalisa. “It’ll take at least ten, fifteen minutes to eat through the mesh.”

 

With a sprightly air, Pet produced a prodigious key ring bearing a couple of dozen keys and shook them so they jangled. “Don’t sweat it, man. I got this covered.”

 

He crossed the room to the black door, fiddled with the keys, and unlocked it. Clyde continued to be fascinated by the lurruloo. Its insides were as ugly as a raw mussel, pulsing and thickly coated with juice. An outer fringe of its skin was visible at the bottom of the window—it was lined with yellowish hooks of bone not much bigger than human teeth that bit into the concrete.

 

Beyond the door a cramped spiral stair had been carved out of the rock. Though Batista helped him, ascending the stair started Clyde’s leg throbbing again. Annalisa offered another pill, but he turned her down, wanting to keep his head clear. Opening off the stairs was a space twice the size of a normal room in Halloween, furnished with a pool table, a red-and-inky blue Arabian carpet, and a teak sofa and chairs upholstered in a lustrous red fabric splotched with mildew. The black metal walls were figured by a rack half-full of cues, an erotic bas relief and two louvered windows that striped the room with light, items that completed a modernistic take on American Bordello. Clyde lowered himself carefully onto the sofa, Pet sprawled in a chair, and Batista hung by the door. Annalisa climbed the interior stair, which corkscrewed up through the ceiling at one end of the room, returning after a brief absence carrying a pair of lace panties. She dropped them in Pet’s lap and sat beside Clyde.

 

“I thought you quit using this place,” she said.

 

Pet smiled—there were still traces of blood on his teeth. He tossed the panties onto the floor.

 

“You’re such a shithead,” she said.

 

“What do you care?”

 

“I don’t care ... but it pisses me off, you lying to me.”

 

“It wasn’t me, okay. It must have been one of the guys.”

 

“You promised me nobody....”

 

“What is it with you two?” Clyde pushed himself up against the sofa cushion and looked at Annalisa. “You just tried to kill him. Hell, you’ve been trying to kill him for a year! And now you’re upset because he’s lying?”

 

“I told you, it’s complicated,” she said weakly.

 

“Naw, this isn’t complicated. This is deeply twisted!” Clyde inched away from her in order to get some separation. “We’re in trouble here, and you two are carrying on like it’s Days of Our Lives.”

 

Annalisa’s eyes filled. “We’re not in trouble. The lurruloo can’t climb metal.”

 

“Great! Good to know. But that doesn’t answer my question. I....”

 

“How’s this for an answer, tough guy?” Pet kicked the bottom of Clyde’s left foot.

 

His eyes shut against the pain, Clyde heard a noise as of metal under stress and seemed to feel the room shift. Annalisa screamed and fell against him. Pet squawked and there was a thudding noise, followed by Batista cursing. When he opened his eyes, he saw the room was at a severe tilt. Batista lay on the floor, rubbing his head. Pet still sat in his chair, gripping both arms, a confused, wizened monkey in a blue velvet jacket. Boosting herself up, Annalisa walked downslope to the nearest window and peered through the vents.

 

“God,” she said. “There must be fifty of them outside.”

 

Batista joined her at the window. “I thought you said the acid wasn’t strong. It must be eating through the brackets.”

 

“They had to have done most of the damage beforehand.” She glanced at Pet. “Not intelligent, huh?”

 

The room sagged downward again.

 

“We’ve got to get higher.” Pet headed for the stairs.

 

“Not a smart idea,” said Batista. “If they weakened these brackets, they might have done the ones higher up, too. You want to fall from forty feet? Sixty feet?”

 

“Annalisa!” Wincing, Clyde stood, balancing on one foot and the sofa arm, in too much discomfort to worry about clearheadedness. “I need a pill.”

 

“Let’s go back down.” Pet’s voice held a note of panic.

 

“You’re not opening that door,” said Batista, blocking his way. “They’re bound to be in the lab by now ... and on the stairs. Give me the keys.”

 

Clyde let the pill Annalisa handed him begin to dissolve under his tongue.

 

Batista motioned to Annalisa. “Help me turn the sofa over. Pet ... get under a chair or something.”

 

Ignoring Pet’s dissent, Batista and Annalisa got the sofa turned and they crowded beneath it, Clyde first, Annalisa in the middle, facing him, and then Batista, the cushions muffling their bodies. Clyde put a fist through the cloth back of the sofa and grabbed onto a wooden support strut. He could hear Pet muttering and then it was quiet, except for the three of them breathing. He’d had no time to be afraid and now it was so unreal.... He thought people on an airplane in trouble might feel this way, that somehow it was going to blow over, that nothing was really wrong, that the hand of God would intervene or the pilot would discover a miraculous solution, all in the moment before the plane began its final plunge and hope was transformed into terror. Annalisa buried her face in his shoulder and whispered, “I love you.” If she had spoken earlier he would have questioned the words, he would have asked how could she love him and be involved with a sickness like Pet Nylund? How could she be distracted from love by a petty hatred, even the greatest hatred being a petty indulgence when compared to love? Things being what they were, however, he repeated the words inaudibly into her hair and, as if saying made it so, he felt love expand in him like an explosion taking the place of his heart, an overwhelming burst of tenderness and desire and regret that dissolved his doubts and recriminations, a sentimental rush that united with the rush of the morphine and eroded his sensibilities until he was only aware of her warmth and the pressure of her breasts and the fragrance of her hair.... A shriek of metal, the room jolted downward once more and then came free of its brackets entirely and fell, slamming edge-on into the roof of the Mutagenics lab. It rolled off the roof, smashed into the ground sideways, rolled again. They managed to maintain the integrity of their shelter somewhat through the first crash, but when the room began to roll, the sofa levitated, leaving them clutching the cushions, and Clyde went airborne during the second crash and lost consciousness. The next he knew, Batista was shouting, pulling him from beneath a chair and some heavy brown fabric that he thought might be the carpet backing. He was disoriented, his vision not right. Sunlight spilled into the room, which was tilted, the furniture jumbled against what once had been a wall, half-submerged in water. Annalisa kneeled in the water, fluttering her hands above Pet, who lay partly beneath some bulky object. Her hands were red and her down jacket was smeared with redness as well. Clyde blacked out again and was shaken awake by Batista, who jammed a pool cue into his hand and yelled once again. He glanced up at the sun, the cliffs, and recognized that he was outside. Befuddled, he gazed at the pool cue. Batista, bleeding from a cut on his scalp, asked if he could deal with it. Clyde wasn’t clear on the precise nature of “it,” but thought it best to go along with the program. His vision still wasn’t right, but he gripped the cue purposefully and nodded.

 

“I’ll go get her,” Batista said, and moved off down the slope, disappearing through a gash in the black metal surface the size and approximate shape of a child’s wading pool.

 

Clyde realized he was sitting about a third of the way up the side wall of the room, and realized further that the room was in the river, sticking out of the sun-dazzled green water like a giant domino with no dots. What did they call blank dominoes? He couldn’t remember. His head ached, the glare hurt his eyes, and his leg was badly swollen—he could feel a fevered pulse in it, separate from the beat of his heart. He started to drift, but a scream from below, from within the room, brought him back. Annalisa. He reacted toward the gash, but movement was not a viable option. Even morphine couldn’t mask the pain that a slight change of position caused. He tightened his grip on the cue and, when Annalisa screamed again, he tuned it out.

 

Cats seethed along the shore in front of the Mutagenics lab; their faint cries came to him. They appeared interested in something on the opposite side of the Mossbach, but Clyde could see nothing that would attract such concentrated interest, just granite and ferns, swarming gnats and.... His chest went cold with shock. Twenty, twenty-five feet above was an overhanging ledge and a dozen or so lurruloo were inching along it, some of their hooks latching onto the cliff wall, some onto the ledge, unable to secure a firm hold on either. The extreme end of the ledge was positioned over the uppermost portion of the half-sunken room and, should this be their intent, would allow them to drop onto the metal surface one or two at a time. Gritting his teeth, Clyde turned in order to face those that dropped. More lurruloo were plastered to the cliff above the ledge, looking at that angle like an audience of greenish black sombreros with misshapen crowns and exceptionally wide, not-quite-symmetrical brims. Thirty or forty of them. Goofy-looking buggers, but deadly, said an inner voice with a British Colonial accent. Saw one take old MacTavish back in ‘98. ‘Orrible, it was! He made a concerted effort to straighten out, focusing on the end of the ledge, and became entranced by the patterns of the moss growing beneath it.

 

A tinkly piano melody began playing in his mind, something his grandmother had entertained him with when he was a kid, and it was playing still when the first lurruloo slipped off the ledge, spreading its fleshy skirts (for balance?) and landed thirty feet upslope with a wet, sloppy thump. Its hooks scrabbled for purchase on the metal as it slid, doing a three-quarter turn in the process, trying to push itself upright, yet incapable of controlling its approach. Holding the cue like a baseball bat, he timed his swing perfectly, cracking the back of its bulbous head, served up to him like a whiffle ball on a post three feet high. He heard a crunch and caught a whiff of foulness before it spilled into the water. His feeling of satisfaction was short-lived—two more dropped from the ledge, but collided in midair, knocking one into the river. The other landed on its side, injuring itself. As it slid past, its skirts flared at the edges, exposing dozens of yellowish hooks, perhaps a muscular reflex in response to trauma, and one tore a chunk from Clyde’s right thigh. Not serious, but it pissed him off.

 

“Batista!” he shouted, and a warbling, hooting response came from overhead, as if the lurruloo were cheering ... or they might be debating alternative strategies, discussing the finer points of inter-species relations.

 

Two more skidded toward him, one in advance of the other. Clyde balanced on a knee, his bad leg stuck out to the side like a rudder, and bashed the lead lurruloo in the head, then punched at the other with the tip of the cue—to his surprise, it penetrated the lurruloo’s skull to a depth of five or six inches. Before its body slipped from the cue, its bulk dragged him off balance, causing him to put all his weight on his bad leg. Dizzy, with opaque blotches dancing in his vision, he slumped onto the sun-heated metal. His leg was on fire, but he felt disconnected from it, as if it were a phantom pain. Human voices sounded nearby. He braced up on his elbows. Batista was boosting himself up through the gash and Annalisa sat beside it—she shook her head in vehement denial and talked to her outspread, reddened hands. Clyde couldn’t unscramble the words. Batista rushed up the slope, pool cue at the ready, and, reminded of duty, Clyde fumbled for his cue, grabbed the tip, sticky with a dark fluid, and made ready to join the fray. But Batista was doing fine on his own, laying waste to the lurruloo as they landed, before they could marshal a semblance of poise, knocking the pulpy bodies, dead and alive, into the river. In his sleeveless T-shirt and shorts, Batista the Barbarian. Clyde chortled at the image—a string of drool eeled between his lips.

 

The lurruloo on the ledge broke off their attack and began a withdrawal, flowing up the cliff face, while those above offered commiseration (this according to Clyde’s characterization of their lugubrious tones). Wise move, he said to himself. Better to retreat, to live and multiply and create the legend of the demon Batista, his Blue-Tipped Stick of Doom. Annalisa stared at him emptily and then, making an indefinite noise, she crawled up beside him. He caressed her cheek and she leaned into the touch. Her mouth opened, but she didn’t speak. He cradled her head, puzzled by her silence. They weren’t out of the woods yet, but they had survived this much and he thought she should be happier. He should be happier, excited by the victory, however trivial. But her silence, her vacant manner, impelled him to confront questions he couldn’t cope with at present. Their future, for one. She seemed nearly lifeless, not like previously, her energies channeled into some dread purpose, but more as though a light had guttered out inside her, reducing her to this inert figure.

 

“Oh, wow,” said Batista.

 

Hundreds of lurruloo had joined those on the cliff wall and they were wheeling as one, united in a great circular movement as though in flight from a predator, like a herd of wildebeest or a school of fish; but instead of fleeing, they continued to circle, creating a pattern that grew increasingly intricate—a great spiral that divided into two interlocking spirals, and this, too, divided, becoming a dozen patterns that fed into one another, each having a variant rhythm, yet they were rhythms in harmony with one another, the whole thing evolving and changing, a greenish black inconstancy that drew the eye to follow its shifting currents. It was a beautiful, mesmerizing thing and Clyde derived from it a sense of peace, of intellect sublimated to the principles of dance. He understood that the lurruloo were talking, attempting to communicate their desires, and the longer he watched them flow across the cliff face, the more convinced he became of their good intentions, their intrinsic gentleness. He imagined the pattern to be an apology, an invitation to negotiate, a statement of their relative innocence.... Shots rang out, sporadic at first, a spatter of pops, then a virtual fusillade. The pattern broke apart, the lurruloo scattering high and low into the south, twenty or thirty of their dead sinking into the Mossbach, the leakage from their riddled corpses darkening the green water. Clyde had been so immersed in contemplation, he felt wrenched out of his element and not a little distressed—he believed he had been on the cusp of a more refined comprehension, and he looked to see who had committed this act of mayhem. Two skiffs had rounded the bend in the river and were making for the wreckage of the metal room. Three men with rifles stood in the first and Clyde’s heart sank on recognizing Spooz among them; but his spirits lifted when he spotted a tanned figure clad in sweat pants and a bulky sweater in the second skiff: Milly. They pulled alongside and made their lines fast to what remained of a bracket. Batista, appearing hesitant, as if he, too, had been shocked by the slaughter, helped Milly out of the skiff and gave her the digest version of what had happened, concluding with Pet’s death, the battle, and its unusual resolution.

 

“The last bunch who were exposed to that hypnotic thing—I think it was about seven years ago—only one survived. You’re lucky we came along when we did.” Milly cocked an eye toward Annalisa. “How’s she doing?”

 

Batista made a negative noise. “She’s not communicating too well.”

 

Milly nodded sadly. “I always thought she’d be what killed Pet.”

 

Batista’s eyes dropped to her breasts. “She gave it the old college try.”

 

The river bumped the skiffs against the side of the room, causing a faint gonging; clouds passed across the sun, partially obscuring it; with the dimming of the light, as if to disprove his theories, Clyde felt suddenly sharper of mind.

 

Milly rubbed Batista’s shoulder, letting her fingers dawdle. “Why don’t you ride back with me? It’ll give us a chance to talk about your situation.”

 

She summoned Spooz and the other men. They hopped onto the half-submerged room and two of them peeled Annalisa away from Clyde. She went without a word, without a backward look, and that made another kind of pain in his chest, the kind morphine couldn’t touch. Milly squatted beside him, Spooz at her shoulder, and asked how he was.

 

“Real good,” he said. “For someone who doesn’t know what the hell’s going on. When were you people going to tell me about the lurruloo?”

 

“I’m sure Annalisa wanted to tell you. It’s supposed to be on a need-to-know basis.”

 

“It’s obvious Helene didn’t need to know.”

 

Milly shrugged, but said nothing.

 

“Seems irresponsible to me,” Clyde said. “Maybe even criminal.”

 

“Things in Halloween are going to run differently, now.”

 

“And you’re going to be running them?”

 

“For a while.”

 

He jerked his head at Spooz. “Is he part of the new order?”

 

“If he toes the line.”

 

“What about Brad?”

 

“Brad’s not part of anything anymore.”

 

In her serene face he read a long history of cunning and ruthlessness—it was like looking off the end of a pier in Halloween and seeing all the grotesque life swarming beneath the surface.

 

“The king is dead, long live the queen,” said Clyde. “Is that it? I’m getting the idea this whole thing fit right in with your plans. I mean, it couldn’t have worked out any better, huh?”

 

“I’m not going to have trouble with you, am I?” she asked mildly.

 

“Me? No way. Soon as I’m able, me and Annalisa are putting this place in the rear view.”

 

Milly mulled this over. “That might be a good idea.”

 

With a sincere expression, Spooz extended a hand, as if to help him up. “Square business, guy. I was just doing my job. No hard feelings?”

 

“Get your damn hand out of my face,” Clyde said. “I can manage my own self.”

 

* * * *

 

“Just below the fifty-seventh parallel...” included a lot of frozen territory: parts of Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bellarus, Sweden, Denmark, Canada, and Alaska. Ridiculous, to hang onto a fragment, a hallucinated phrase, a misfiring of neurons, out of all that had occurred, but he couldn’t shake the idea that it was important. Clyde had yet not founded, or found, a kingdom, but he had fitted a new purpose to his life, and it was for that reason he had parked his pickup in front of the neighborhood Buy-Rite on a cold December Saturday morning in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, waiting for the pharmacy to open so he could refill Annalisa’s migraine prescription. The migraines turned her into a zombie. She would lie in bed for a day, sometimes two days at a time, unable to eat, too weak to sit up, capable of speaking no more than a couple of words. Between the migraines and the anti-psychotics, they’d had maybe three good weeks out of the six months since they left Halloween. Those weeks had been pretty splendid, though, providing him hope that a new Annalisa was being born. Her psychologist was optimistic, but Clyde doubted she would ever again be the woman he originally met, and perhaps that woman had never truly existed. The knots that Pet Nylund tied in her had come unraveled with his death and they seemed to have been what was holding her together. Life in their apartment was so oppressive, so deadly quiet and gloomy, he had taken a job driving heavy equipment just to have a place to go. The guys on site thought him aloof and strange, but chalked that up to the fact that his wife was sick, and they defended him to their friends by saying, “The man is going through some shit, okay?”

 

His breath fogged the windshield and, tired of wiping it clear, he climbed down from the truck and leaned against the cold fender. The sun was muted to a tinny white glare by a mackerel sky, delicate altocumulus clouds laid out against a sapphire backdrop. A stiff wind blew along the trafficless street, chasing paper trash in the gutters, flattening a red, white, and blue relic of the recent presidential election against the Buy-Rite’s door for a fraction of a second, too quickly for him to determine which candidate it trumpeted. Not that it much mattered, The glass storefronts gave back perfect reflections of the glass storefronts on the opposite, sunnier side of the street. Quiznos. Ace Hardware. Toys ‘R’ Us was having a pre-Christmas sale. The post-apocalyptic vacancy of the place was spoiled by a black panel van that turned the corner and cruised slowly along and then pulled into the space next to Clyde’s pickup. An orange jack-o-lantern with a particularly jolly grin was spray-painted on the side of the van—it formed the O in dripping-blood horror movie lettering that spelled out HALLOWEEN. The window slid down to reveal Carmine’s sallow, vulpine face. He didn’t speak, so Clyde said, “What a shocker. Milly sent you to check up on us, did she?”

 

Carmine climbed out and came around the front of the van. “I had some business in town. She wanted me to look you up. See if you need more money and like that.”

 

“As long as the checks from the estate keep coming, we’re cool,” said Clyde. “How’d you find me?”

 

“I went over to your place. This woman told me you’d be here.”

 

“Annalisa’s nurse.”

 

“Whatever.” Carmine examined the bottom of his shoe. “How’s she making it ... Annalisa?”

 

“It’s slow, but she’ll be fine.” Clyde waved at the van. “This is new, huh?”

 

Carmine looked askance at the jack-o-lantern. “Milly’s trying to encourage tourism. She’s putting on a Halloween festival and all kinds of shit.”

 

“You think that’s wise? All you need is for a couple of tourists to get picked off by the lurruloo.”

 

“They aren’t a problem anymore.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“They’re not a problem. Milly handled it.”

 

“What are you talking? She wiped them out?”

 

“That’s not your business.”

 

Despite having less than fond memories of the lurruloo, Clyde found the notion that they had been exterminated more than horrifying, but was unable to think of an alternative way by which Milly could have handled it.

 

“Jesus, it’s fucking cold!” Carmine jammed his hands into his pockets and shuffled his feet. “So what’s life like in the republic?”

 

“Less benefits, little bit more freedom. It’s a trade-off.”

 

“Doesn’t sound like so good a deal to me.”

 

“That’s your opinion, is it?”

 

Carmine gave a dry laugh. “I got to book. Any messages you want sent back?”

 

“How’s Roberta and Mary Alonso?”

 

“They’re in dyke heaven, I guess. They were married a few weeks back.”

 

“No shit?”

 

“Milly made a law saying gay marriage is legal. Now she expects all the fruits to flock to Halloween.” Carmine spat off to the side. “Got to hand it to her. She knows how to get stuff done.”

 

“She makes the trains run on time.”

 

Puzzled by the reference, Carmine squinted at him, then walked around to the driver’s side of the van.

 

“Did Helene Kmiec kill her husband?” Clyde asked.

 

“How the fuck should I know?” Carmine started the engine.

 

“I’m serious, man. It’s bugging me. It’s the only question I have about Halloween I don’t know the answer to.”

 

“That’s the only one you got?” Carmine backed out of the parking space and yelled, “Man, did you even know where you were living?”

 

Clyde watched until the black speck of the van merged with the blackness of the street, wishing he’d asked after Joanie. He reached for a cigarette, the reflex of an old smoker, and said, “Fuck it.” He walked along the block to a newsstand that was opening up and bought a pack of Camel Wides. Out on the sidewalk, he lit one and exhaled a plume of smoke and frozen breath. Maybe Milly had blown up the entrance to the lurruloo’s caves, sealing them in—maybe that was all she had done. What, he asked himself, would the penalty be for the genocide of a new intelligent species? Most likely nobody would give a damn, just like him. They had their own problems and couldn’t be bothered. He thought about the 57th parallel and what might lie below it, and he thought about Annalisa’s sharp tongue and wily good humor, subsumed beneath a haze of drugs. He thought about a local bar, once a funeral home, that now was painted white inside, every inch and object, with plants in the enormous urns and round marble tables, usually filled with seniors—it troubled him that she liked to drink there.

 

“Hey, buddy!” The newsstand owner, an elderly man with a potbelly and unruly wisps of gray hair lying across his mottled scalp like scraps of cloud over a wasteland—he beckoned to Clyde from the doorway and said, “You can smoke inside if you want.” When Clyde hesitated, he said, “You’re going to freeze your ass. What’re you doing out there?”

 

Clyde told him, and the old man said, “She’s always late opening on Saturday. Come on in.”

 

With Clyde at his heels, the owner walked stiff-legged back inside, took a seat on a stool behind the counter, picked up a lit stogie from an ashtray and puffed on it until the coal glowed redly.

 

“Screw those bastards in the legislature telling us we can’t smoke in our own place,” said the owner. “Right?”

 

“Right.”

 

There must have been a thousand magazines on the shelves: drab economic journals; bright pornos sealed in plastic; hockey, boxing, football, wrestling, MMA, the entire spectrum of violent sport; women’s magazines with big, flashy graphics; People, Time, Rolling Stone; magazines for cat fanciers and antique collectors and pot smokers, for deer hunters and gun freaks and freaks of every persuasion; magazines about stamps and model trains, Japanese films and architecture, country cooking and travel in exotic lands; magazines in German, Italian, French. Clyde had patronized dozens of newsstands in his day, but never before had he been struck by the richness of such places, by the sheer profligacy of the written word.

 

“They tell you a man’s home is his castle, but you know how that goes,” said the owner, winking broadly at Clyde. “The little woman takes control and pretty soon you can’t sit in your favorite chair unless it’s covered in a goddamn plastic sheet. But a man’s place of business now, that’s his kingdom. That’s how come I named this place like I did.”

 

“What’s that?” Clyde asked.

 

The owner seemed offended that he didn’t know. “Kingdom News. People come in sometimes thinking I’m a Christian store, and I tell ‘em to check out the name. Herschel Rothstein, Proprietor. I ain’t no Christian. The point I’m making, shouldn’t nobody tell a man he can’t smoke in his damn kingdom.”

 

Clyde wondered if the owner and his newsstand might not have been summoned from the Uncreate, perhaps by the same entity that had visited him after his ordeal in the Tubes, so as to pose an object lesson. He had been considering kingdoms in grandiose terms, a place requiring a castle, at least a symbolic one, and great holdings; yet now he recognized that a kingdom could be a small, rich thing, an enterprise of substance somewhere below the 57th parallel. A newsstand, a bar, a fishing camp—someplace quiet and pristine where Annalisa would heal and thrive.

 

A young woman dressed in cold weather yuppie gear came in to buy a paper and wrinkled her nose at the smell of the old man’s cigar. He flirted outrageously with her and sent her away smiling, and they sat there, the owner on his stool, Clyde on a stack of Times-Leaders, laughing and smoking and talking about the bastards in the state legislature and the bigger bastards down in Washington, recalling days of grace and purity that never were, forgetting the wide world that lay beyond the door, happily cursing the twenty-first century and the republic in its decline, secure for the moment in the heart of their kingdom.