This book has been rejected 117 times, and it’s all the fault of that evil soul-hopping spirit in Richard Coldiron’s head. Or maybe the other four people in there. By Scott Nicholson

AS I DIE LYING

By Scott Nicholson

Writing as Richard Coldiron

Or Maybe the Evil Spirit That Possessed Them Both

Copyright © 2010 Scott Nicholson

Published by Haunted Computer Books at Smashwords

www.hauntedcomputer.com

OTHER BOOKS BY SCOTT NICHOLSON

Speed Dating with the Dead

The Red Church

The Skull Ring

Drummer Boy

Forever Never Ends

Disintegration

As I Die Lying

Burial to Follow

Flowers

Ashes

The First

Gateway Drug

Murdermouth: Zombie Bits

Transparent Lovers

Creative Spirit

Troubled

Solom

They Hunger

OTHER BOOKS BY RICHARD COLDIRON:

None.

If there were, Scott Nicholson stole them. After he killed Richard.

Richard Coldiron was rumored to have completed a draft of the sequel, The Tao of Boo .

We’ll see.

CHAPTER ONE

Begin at the beginning.

In an autobiography, that means you have to relive your life. And that’s the last thing I want to do. Once was more than enough. And five times was far too many.

Unless it’s six, in which case all that follows was written by that other guy, the one trying to hitchhike my story and make me sound worse than I really am. If he wasn’t such a lousy writer, this would have been published long ago and we wouldn’t have gotten to the end. Some of us might have lived happily ever after.

Rest assured, anytime I look cruel, inept, or sociopathic in this story, it’s because he’s changed things around. He wants a fall guy so he can get away with murder. My murder. Maybe your murder, too.

So I look for evidence. Everything else is just metaphysical tourism.

Photographs and locks of hair, pressed flowers and postcards, teddy bears and blue ribbons. Memories, souvenirs, keepsakes, and your girlfriend’s big toe. Old love letters and other horrors, agonies, scars. Why do we hoard such things?

I’ve come to believe it’s because we need proof.

History, even revisionist history, is written by the winners. So if you want to tell the whole story, the true story, get it out there yourself and make everyone believe. With luck and a shrewd marketing push, it’s a bestseller. If you’re pathetic, you’re filed in Self-Help. If this book is published under the last name “Zwiecker” and ends up on the bottom shelf in the fantasy section, then you'll know he’s won.

Publish or perish, they say. We plan to do both, though we’re not sure in which order.

So when I begin at the beginning, I’ll skip the part where Mother bled between her legs and Daddy was sitting on the couch with a bottle of Jack as I squirted into Ottaqua, Iowa, like a bloody watermelon seed.

Ray Bradbury claims to remember being born. He’s a great writer, but that’s total bullshit. Nobody remembers, but people treat it like it’s a big deal. You carry your birth date around all your life and it nails you to Social Security cards, party invitations, and all those forms you fill out in school. Then, on your tombstone, where you only get a little bit of space to sum up your life, some wax-faced creep chisels in a set of meaningless numbers instead of poetry or a secret love or the name of your favorite candy.

In the end, all you get is a few words.

This is all the proof I can offer:

I was on my hands and knees when memory cursed me, awareness laughed in my face, and ego slipped into my head like an ice cream ghost. Light streamed through the window, golden and warm. Light was good. Light was safe, even though it tasted like dust.

The brown thing was in the shadows. It was soft and smelled like Mother, all cigarettes and Ivory soap and things beyond my vocabulary like “senescence.” My arms and legs wriggled toward the brown thing, my belly skinning across the floor. I reached the shadow. My fingers closed on the fur and I was pulling it closer when the boot came down on my hand.

My hand was on fire and my eyes were sparks and my chest was a Play-Doh volcano. The boot stretched out and up into the dark, taller than a tree. It was a man built of midnight and stitches and thunder. He bent down and picked up the brown thing. His boots shook the floor as he stomped into the light but all I could see was the scuffed leather, worn laces, and cracked tongue of the boot near my face.

Then the boots danced. They licked me and painted me with bright strips of color. The thunder waltzed me away from my room to a land that light never reached.

But I wasn’t alone.

“ Hello,” the boy said. Like the midnight man, the boy clung to the shadows. He might have been there the whole time and I hadn’t seen him.

“ Who are you?”

“ A friend.”

“ I don’t like friends.” I put my hand in my mouth and tried to suck the sore away.

“ Chin up, pup. He’s gone now.”

The boy sounded brave, plus I had nowhere else to run. “Did you send him away?”

“ No, I dragged you in here where it’s safe.”

“ Where are we?”

“ I call it the Bone House.”

“ It’s dark.”

“ Here’s your teddy bear.” He held it out to me.

I grabbed it and brushed its soft fabric against my cheek until my tears were cold.

“ Do you trust me?” my friend said.

I nodded, not sure if he could see me.

“ Okay,” he said. “You have to leave the Bone House now, but I’ll be here to help whenever you need me.”

“ Promise?”

“ Cross my heart and hope to die.”

And he kept his promise, except that “hoping to die” part. The boy learned how to hide me when we heard the boots in the hallway. Into the closet, buried under broken toys and dirty blankets and a Big Bird poster. Under the bed, cuddling dust bunnies with my nose as the boots walked across the floor, inches from my face. Behind the desk, chewing my lip, afraid to breathe until the midnight man gave up and shambled off to find Mother instead.

When I heard the boots in the kitchen, the King Kong roar and shattering of glass, Mother's high squeaking Godzilla cries, I knew I had escaped again. The boots stomped until they grew tired, until the thunder spent its fury. Then my friend and I would share a smile. We had lived to hide another day.

My friend taught me a simple game.

Dodge the boots.

Run and hide.

Become invisible when you could, hold your breath when you couldn’t.

But nobody wins the game every time. And the odds favored the midnight man. He seemed to grow taller and stronger and darker the better we got at hiding. When he found me, plucked me out of my corners and nooks, held me up with a thick trembling arm, then I knew it was time to let my friend have this body. My friend would take the punishment while I went away to the Bone House. I hate to say it, but I think he even liked it a little.

I’d watch from the window as the boots did their dance, crushed a minuet across my friend's legs, waltzed over his kidneys, and jitterbugged up his spine. I knew it was me being beaten, my bruised flesh that I would eventually revisit, but at least I didn't have to suffer. My friend did that for me. That's how much my friend loved me.

We would talk, after. He would give me back my body, with its red welts and pink scrapes, and go into his hidden room in the Bone House. Since it hurt to move, I would huddle in my squeaky bed with my teddy bear. I tasted salt and sometimes blood. My friend would whisper soothing words inside my head.

"You're okay now, Richard. Midnight is over."

I trembled. For both of us.

"Did you hear the front door slam?" he said.

I nodded, hugging the raw meat of my legs to my chest as the plains wind banged against the windows. Any storm was welcome as long as it hid the sound of boots.

"He’s gone. You can breathe again."

“ Thanks.”

“ That’s why I’m here.”

My friend didn't have a name back then. There was only us. He didn't need a name until later, when things got more complicated and the Bone House became crowded. But I can tell you the teddy bear was named Wee Willie Winky because one of his eyes was stitched too tightly. And my name was Richard. I forgot to tell you that, but you can see it on the cover of the book, unless that other guy changed it.

"Did he hurt you bad?" Secretly, I was glad it was him instead of me.

"Not so bad, this time. Not like the time when the two teeth got loose and I bit my tongue. That time, even your mother got scared."

"Yeah, remember how she pushed the midnight man away and picked you up?” I said. “With your arm bent out at that funny angle, like you had an extra elbow? That was the only time she ever tried to stop him."

"They were nice to me at the hospital. They gave me a lollipop, and that pretty nurse said she'd never seen such a brave young man."

I wished I’d been around for that lollipop. Maybe he’d tricked me so he could have the lollipop instead of me. "What does 'brave' mean?"

"It's when bad things happen and you don't cry." He’d probably learned that from a book in school, or maybe church, or that one time we went to a Boy Scout meeting.

"Are you brave?"

"I don't know. But when they asked me how it happened, I said it just the way Mother told me. She made me keep saying it over and over in the car. 'I fell down the steps, and put out my arm to stop.'"

"Why did she want you to make up a story like that?" I didn’t care why, but this was my friend and I liked the way he talked. Plus he was sharing a very important lesson in how to lie, and what boy could resist such a thing?

"It wasn't a story. You know how she says if you believe something hard enough, you can make it true? Well, she wanted that story to be true. She believed it more."

I pulled the blankets tight under my chin. The fabric was scratchy, like Father's cheeks. "Do you remember what really happened?"

“ I didn't hide good enough, that's all."

"Sometimes, just before he goes to sleep, or when he's on the couch watching TV, he makes me take the boots off his feet. They're not so scary when they're off.”

“ Tongues hanging out. Tired dogs. But they sure are stinky. Wee willie stinky."

I looked up at the ceiling, at the shadows of trees dancing in front of the streetlights. The room smelled of purple Kool-Aid and old socks and rats behind the walls, and sometimes I prayed to Jesus for clean laundry. If my friend wasn’t around, I’d sometimes throw in a prayer for candy or a Matchbox car. But the ceiling was in the way, so I couldn’t see the sky or heaven. "Maybe one night we could hide the boots after he's asleep.”

"Then he'd really be mad,” the voice said. Sometimes my friend spoke out loud instead of just thinking it, and that was a little scary until I got used to it. I’m glad it didn’t happen when other people were around. Not often, anyway.

“ Maybe it's the boots that make him mad.”

"Maybe,” he said. “It's stupid to be brave."

"Does Mother hate the boots?" I asked questions I was afraid to answer. He never minded when I tricked him into telling the truth once in a while.

"I don't know. She keeps telling the midnight man 'I love you.'"

"Maybe there are different kinds of love. She likes to hold me and sing to me. She says she loves me and kisses me on the forehead and tucks me under the blankets even when she knows the midnight man is coming. Even when she knows he's got his boots on."

"Maybe he would hurt her more if she didn't love him, so she's afraid to stop."

I swallowed hard. Darkness crawled in from the corners, its edges sharp. I put my head under the pillow. Love was easy when it was just some invisible person in your head, but when you had to pretend to love in the real world, who wouldn’t be a little crazy and afraid? "Love means you have to be brave?"

“ Sometimes your mother cries when she says she loves you. That means she's either lying or she's not brave."

My friend was clever but I usually came up with a comeback, because in your own autobiography you don’t want anybody to think you’re playing second fiddle or fifth harmonica or ninth penny whistle. "But how can she love me and the midnight man at the same time?"

"Maybe she only loves the midnight man when his boots are off. Maybe they’re sole mates. Get it, s-o-l-e?"

"Funny, ha ha. Love shouldn't go on and off like that. I love you all the time. And I don't want to die like Jesus had to before He could get people to love Him," I said to the person in my head. Throwing in the Jesus bit was a little melodramatic, seeing as how we’d only been to church three times, and only one of them didn’t involve food. You can sure get the best coconut cakes at church.

"I love you, Richard,” he said. “I'll never leave you. I won't let you get hurt."

I tucked Wee under my bruised arm. Wads of cotton spilled from the rips in its neck and leg. The midnight man had done that, but Wee didn’t have an invisible friend to hide him, and I wasn’t sharing mine. "It's not so bad hiding. Inside, where it’s dark. I wish we could stay there all the time."

“ We can't both go into the Bone House."

"Why not?"

"Who would watch Wee? Wee can never be alone."

My friend loved double meanings and playing with words. It helped pass the time when he was stuck in the Bone House. And maybe he wanted to be a writer when he grew up, just like everybody else. But first he’d have to live long enough to grow up.

Thump thump .

Our eyes opened, our shared heart boomed like the storm rolling down the hallway, but only one of us got to flee for the hidden room inside my skull.

Me first. Always me.

"Up the stairs, away, away, away," whispered my friend. "Sounds like someone’s putting his foot down."

And off I’d go.

CHAPTER TWO

Later I learned that the midnight man was only my father. The boots visited less often as I got older, and the friend inside my head didn't come out much. Rather, I didn’t go inside the Bone House to see him.

I found other playmates at school, ones you could see and who talked with real voices. I learned the world was much bigger than the nightmares trapped between the walls of my bedroom. Life smelled of chalk and Hope Hill’s perfume and burning leaves and strawberry milkshake. My childish fears seemed silly out under the sunshine, where boys and girls played kick ball and pain was farther away than Jesus or the clouds in the blue sky or other insubstantial, amorphous objects.

Father preserved his boot leather but discovered other ways to torture. He attacked with words, and maybe that’s where I get my literary talent. Not that I want to give that bastard any credit at all for this book, since the byline is up for debate. But he could really pour it on.

He invented a dozen fresh insults, doused acid on my psyche, and dubbed me “Dumbbell.” This seemed to give him more pleasure than the physical abuse. Mother had begun her descent from youth into old age without slowing down for the middle years. She was weary from lifting her forearms to fend off the blows, beaten down by the sight of her own emaciated and battered flesh, worn from clinging to the spidery threads of black hope. Father, however, seemed to grow younger, as if he’d tapped a perverted fountain of youth, Narcissus at a whiskey vat.

Father worked at the John Deere plant, spot welding harrow joints and tractor wheels. He helped make the machines for the slaves of the soil, those who turned the dark drift and loess of the Iowa tableland. He was chained to the dirt without even the pleasure of holding it in his hand, kicking at it with his scuffed boots, or checking the sky for portents. He had wanted to be a crop duster, but never had the time and money to get his pilot's license.

Perhaps the air could have stolen his anger. Perhaps his frustration was in being earthbound, because he was particularly venomous after returning from weekend air shows in Cedar Falls or Des Moines. On the Christmas I was nine, he gave me a model kit for a Northrop P-61 Black Widow fighter, and we spent the snowy afternoon carefully putting it together. He let me glue the fuselage myself and guided my hands as I joined the propeller and engine parts.

His mouth watered as he concentrated on the more tedious attachments, and he sucked in his drool with a whistling sound before it could dribble down his chin. He had not even been drinking that day, or at least his breath didn't smell like vinegar and shoe polish yet. He made engine noises with his mouth, as if he were imagining a scale model of himself at the controls. We applied the decals just as Mother pulled the steaming golden turkey from the oven.

Never had so much laughter filled that usually sullen apartment. My stocking was bloated with peppermints, walnuts, and lemon drops, and I shared the bounty with my parents. We huddled around the skeleton of the turkey, its alabaster bones a silent centerpiece to the gathering. We even sang "White Christmas" together, at least the few lines we knew. Father sang in a bassy parody of Bing Crosby, Mother bleated half-heartedly, and I croaked in an atonal barrage of sound that was more percussion than harmony.

The model plane crash-landed under the heel of Father's boot two days later, after his first day back at the plant. It was my fault, I admit. I just didn’t hide it good enough. Christmas was over, and none of us were making any resolutions for the new year. Father renewed his verbal assaults, calling me "Little bastard" and "Fuckwit," stringing together seventeen dirty words in fits of misplaced poetic genius, but his pet name for me was "Shit For Brains."

One day I brought home my report card, and he looked down the neat rows of A’s until he found my C in citizenship.

"Hey, Shit For Brains, what's this C for?" he bellowed, spittle and bourbon mist spraying out of his mouth. The cruel muscles of his forearms bulged under the rolled-up sleeves of his flannel shirt, the toes of his boots flexing. "Your teacher says here, 'Richard doesn't get along well with the other students. He fails to participate in class activities.' Now what kind of horseshit is that?"

I mumbled something, afraid to meet his fiery eyes. I didn’t know he could read that well. I’d never heard him use the word “participate.” He was clearly far more dangerous than I’d ever considered. I sensed my friend fluttering uneasily in the Bone House like a bat at an Alaskan sundown.

"It figures I'd turn out a problem child. A fucking bad seed. Your asshole Granddad can rest in peace now that the Coldiron curse has been safely passed on to the next generation."

My only memory of Granddad had been seeing him laid out in that coffin the year before. I had taken my place in line and walked past him, the way Mother told me. She held my hand. I didn't know what I was supposed to do, but my friend in the Bone House said I should pretend to be sad.

I recognized Granddad's face from some of the blurry photographs that had fallen out of one of Father's airplane books. He had mean eyes, like he was mad at the camera, but his skin was smooth. He was wearing a blue uniform with medals pinned on his chest. But in the coffin he was all wrinkled and his skin was as dull as wax fruit and, of course, his eyes were closed. The cloth on the inside of the coffin was purple, the color of a king's robe. He smelled like chemicals and bad bacon.

Mother said, "Doesn't he look so good ? Like he’s sleeping and he could just sit up and talk."

I didn't want that to happen. I stared at the little wires of white hair that stuck out of his ear. Some people in the back of the room were crying, and I looked at Father's face. It was red, maybe because his necktie was choking him. That was the only time I ever saw him wear a tie, at least until he was in a coffin himself.

Father looked a little like the man in the coffin. They both had the same sharp nose and round chin, just like me. But unlike Granddad, Father was smiling a little bit, a tiny smile that barely turned up at the corners of his mouth, the kind you get when you're doing something fun that you know is wrong. The man in the coffin, his mouth had fallen in a little, as if he had swallowed his teeth. He didn't look like a man who carried secret curses, at least not anymore. Unless they were in one of his pockets that I couldn’t see. You know how people get when they’re hiding something good.

I wondered what kind of curse Granddad had passed down. I had heard about the Mummy's Curse from peeking into the living room at late-night movies. I pictured Granddad coming back wrapped in rotted rags, reaching out with hands like mittens to get Father, to squeeze that little smile off his face. Was it hope or fear that rattled in my chest at the thought, and why did laughter echo from the Bone House?

Maybe that's why Father was so angry, because he couldn't escape the curse, and it would someday track him down. But then, Father didn't need an excuse to be angry. A barking dog could set him off, or a flat tire in the rain, or that time the blow torch didn’t get hot enough. But I don’t like to remember any of that, so let’s get back to the report card.

"Get out of my sight, you sorry sack of shit," he said, ripping up the report card and throwing the four pieces into the air. I went to my room and hid in the closet until Mother called me to dinner. I tiptoed into the living room. Father was asleep on the couch, his boots propped up on a ragged pillow. I eased around the boots and gathered the pieces of the report card, taped them back together, and forged Father’s signature, pressing extra hard with the tip of the pen.

School wasn't bad. It was peaceful there. No one ever hit me at school or called me Shit For Brains. The other kids were mostly just a murmur in the background to me, white noise to be ignored. The worst thing was sitting behind Hope Hill, whose honey-blond hair smelled like the sun and made me ache inside.

I buried my nose in a book, even when I was supposed to be learning things like why the Earth circled around the sun without flying off into space. I didn't need to know why. If they said it did, that was good enough for me, and it’s not like I could do anything about it anyway. I’d already learned that there were facts and the truth, and then there was the real stuff of this world, the Bone House, the lies, the secret curses, stuff that mattered.

When Mother started letting me go outside by myself, I found new games. I explored the neighborhood and prowled in the junk cars that were scattered behind the garage next door. I pretended I was Huck Finn, hiding away on Jackson Island. I made a nest in an old dog pen, hidden from the world by vines and weeds. There was a hole in the wire where the dogs used to get out, and I used it as a tunnel. The doghouse was tall enough for me to sit up. Enough room for a boy and his dreams, plus all the turds were dry.

I liked to read there, books checked out from the school library, borrowed from Mother's shelves, or sometimes a comic bought at the corner store for a quarter. A few boards were missing in the doghouse roof, and the late afternoon sun streamed through the gap, flooding my hideaway with light and bringing the words on the pages to life. I read of fellow castaways like Robinson Crusoe and the Swiss Family Robinson, I went around and under the world in the books of Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, I went to other worlds that had been given mantle by the mind of H.G. Wells and J.R.R. Tolkien. Don’t tell anybody, but I also liked Nancy Drew.

I could stay there until nightfall, unless Mother called to see where I was. Then I would slither out of the tunnel of foliage and walk out of the nearby cedar trees to make her think I had been playing in the woods like a normal boy. I thought it was important to have a secret place that wasn’t the Bone House. My belly tingled when I was hiding alone, knowing no one could find me. I felt sneaky and safe, and once in a while my invisible friend joined me even though he didn’t need to listen for boots.

When the sun started sinking below the flat horizon, it was time to go home for dinner. I waited for the shadows to grow long, then flitted from one to the next, pretending to be a spy. Most of the time, Father would already be asleep when I crept through the door, with his hand dangling down to the dirty rug, his mouth open and snoring, his lidless bottle sitting on the coffee table beside him. Mother and I would eat silently at the little Formica kitchen table, usually pigs in a poke, Vienna sausages rolled in canned biscuits, pinto beans, macaroni, a dinner that cost less than a dollar. Above us hung a collector’s plate of Jesus, gilded with foil and perched on a brass wire. She didn’t make me pray, just let me eat in peace and silence. Then I could slip off to bed before she woke up Father.

I didn't hate Father for wearing the boots. I was supposed to love him, the same way I was supposed to love Jesus. Just because . But even if I had to love him, that didn't mean that I couldn't do it while hiding in the dark. Locked doors were useless. His boots liked to smash doors almost as much as they liked skindancing, though he never found the door to the Bone House.

And sometimes, in the sunlight, he was nice. On Saturday mornings, he would already be awake and sitting on the couch watching cartoons when I shuffled into the living room in my Speed Racer pajamas. I’d rub my sleepy eyes and crawl up next to him, dragging my dreams. He smelled like coffee and aftershave, and he’d put his arm around me. His stubble scratched my cheek as he hugged me and my teddy bear, and no anger burned in the red corners of his eyes. He never called me “Shit For Brains” on Saturday mornings, just the occasional affectionate “Dumbbell.”

On one of those mornings, while we were snuggling on the couch, I asked him about Granddad. His muscles stiffened a little under a shirt that smelled of rust and sweat.

"Why do you want to know?" His words were quiet, cautious, like thunder on the horizon that wasn’t sure of its direction.

"I never got to see him, except when he died. The other kids at school talk about going to their grandparents' house all the time."

"Well, he lived a long way away."

We had taken a plane to the funeral. I had looked out the windows at the clouds and, far below, saw the little squares that I thought made up the world, patches that were sewn together like on the quilt Mother brought out of my closet every winter. I wondered if that was how Jesus saw everything. If it was, I wondered how He could see little boys kneeling beside their beds in the dark. And I was pretty sure Jesus couldn’t see what went on in the Bone House.

"The preacher called him a hero," I said.

"He was in the war. Bomber pilot."

I thought of war movies I had seen, of planes flying in the air with balls of fire puffing up all around, of planes falling to the earth with black trails of smoke streaming out behind them.

"He must have been brave," I said.

"He wasn't afraid of dying. But he was scared of everything else."

"Did you love him?"

"You have to love your father, no matter what.”

So I was doing the right thing after all, even if it hurt. "But you were happy when he died."

"Because I got to fly in a plane."

"Oh." Then, "Father, what's the Coldiron Curse?"

His lips tightened and grew white. His sewage-green eyes narrowed to bright slits. On the television screen, a mouse was hitting a cat on the head with a fat hammer.

Father said between clenched teeth, "It's what's fucking with you from the inside."

With no warning, he swung out a fist, knocking over the coffee table and a floor lamp that didn't have a shade. The bare bulb shattered on the wooden floor. Mother murmured from the bedroom, shaken from sleep.

He stomped the table, snapping off one of its legs. “Fucking with you.”

I was scared. I tried to find the Bone House, but the rage was so sudden, I was confused and lost.

He flung the lamp against the wall, nearly knocking Mother’s Jesus plate from its wire perch.

“ From the inside ,” he roared.

Mother yelled from the bedroom, but I guess she kept the door locked. I don’t blame her.

Father didn't answer. He looked at me, through me, as if I were invisible, and went into the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened then ice cubes rattled in a glass, followed by the gurgling of liquid. I looked at the television. The cartoon cat had a stick of dynamite in its mouth, the burning fuse growing shorter.

It was time to change my clothes and go to the Bone House.

Nest , I mean. Nest.

CHAPTER THREE

Spring turned into summer and brought black-eyed Susans and black-eyed Mother.

A family moved into the apartment next door, the Bakkens from Pittsburgh. Even though they turned out to be minor characters, I remember them more vividly than I do my parents. Mister Bakken had a thick neck and fat slouching jowls that looked like they were trying to slide off his face. A bulbous clown nose, freckled like his cheeks, dangled like a fruit above his lips. Bumblebee eyes peered out from under the avalanche of his eyebrows. His hair and dustbroom mustache were bronze red.

His wife was thin and sharp-faced. She had the air of a weasel, furtive and bloodthirsty. Her skin was pasty and nearly translucent, as if mayonnaise had been swabbed over a skeleton, then shrink-wrapped and given life. She bit at her nails constantly, and when they were down to the quick, she gnawed at the red ends of her fingers. She wore knee-length cotton dresses, and her legs stuck out below them like birch branches, white and slender, as if they would fray instead of snap if you tried to break them.

They had a daughter named Sally. She was just a little older than me, which she found out the first day we met and seemed happy about. She had her father's freckled, red-headed features and her mother's nervous mannerisms. Her hair was in pigtails tied by rubber bands, and they bounced when she ran. A mouthful of braces turned her smile into a Frankenstein-monster flash of pink gums and silver wires.

She was never without her doll, a round-headed baby girl with yellow yarn for hair and perfect circles of blush painted on plastic cheeks. Its hard lips curled up in a permanent pout. Sally called it “Angel Baby.”

Father got Mr. Bakken a job at the John Deere plant, and they rode to work together in Father's ragged pickup truck. Sometimes they didn't come home until after dark, and from my bed I would hear Mother yelling at Father and feel the floor shake as the furniture rattled in the living room. Then I would hear the stinging slap of flesh on flesh, followed by a cry, or more breaking glass. I would shrink even deeper into the dark under the blankets, trying to crawl far away from the world where things broke. Far enough that I could meet my invisible friend in the Bone House if necessary.

One night Mother yelled "Did you go to that damned bar again?"

"I work to put food on this table, I'll do as I damn well please, bitch."

He also called her Puke-face and Fuckwit, every name he could think of except Shit For Brains. He saved that one. He must have had a special place in his heart for me.

Once Mother said something about "You and your whores." This was followed by a cold, long silence during which even the wind seemed afraid to breathe. Then Father's words parted the stillness like the jagged edge of a glacier in a dark sea or a frozen knife in a rotten cantaloupe or an ice cream headache during a prayer.

“ You’re the best whore I know.”

Then the walls bent and the clock shattered and the blood flowed and the night fell in upon itself as the boots danced.

The day after that, Mother slept until noon and her face was puffy when she woke up. I was glad she didn't make me give her a good-morning hug because I didn't want to touch her watery skin. She must not have had an invisible friend to warn her about the boots. I sneaked away to my nest while she was taking a shower to steam away her soreness. Father didn't come home at all that evening.

Sometimes Mother and Mrs. Bakken sat at our kitchen table, talking about what they called the "menfolk." They would cradle cups of coffee and tap cigarettes, sitting there in house robes with dusty slippers on their feet. Mrs. Bakken looked even more like a skeleton when her hair was pinned back away from her face by curlers, making her taut forehead shine like a China plate. Sometimes she, like Mother, had a dark circle around one eye, but she seemed almost happy then. She smiled as if showing off a hard-won trophy.

They would lower their voices and say things like "Before he started drinking so much" and "He used to be so handsome when he was young" and “Before the devil got him.” Right there under the Jesus plate. Or "They're no good at all except for that thing between their legs," followed by girlish giggles.

I wondered if people loved each other because they were afraid to not love, if being alone was worse than being hurt all the time. Or maybe it was just the things between people's legs that made them love. I'd seen Mother naked in the bathroom, accidentally of course, but I always had to look twice to make sure it had been an accident the first time.

Even though the Bakkens seemed to cause a lot of problems between my parents, and the other way around, they spent lots of time together. Once in a while, they would all go out together on Friday night, leaving me alone with the television set for a babysitter. I didn't know what Sally did. I was afraid to knock on the Bakkens's door, afraid it would swing open and she would stand there in her little dress and pigtails, cradling Angel Baby in her freckled arms. I was afraid she might invite me in.

When our parents visited each other, Sally and I had to play together, and I suppose we became friends out of mutual desperation. While the grownups talked and drank in the living room, or grilled hot dogs on the scraggly patch of dirt out back, Sally and I pretended to be pirates or space explorers or cowboys. She was usually the leader and grew angry when I tried to change her made-up rules. We played dolls one time, in her crisp, neat room.

She had a crowd of dolls, and they all had names that I never bothered to memorize. She arranged them as if they were adults at a party and made up different voices for them so they could carry on conversations. I chose a large stuffed animal, a big green rabbit that had an upside-down straw basket on its head. I pretended it was an evil rabbit come to get bad grown-ups, hopping in and knocking over Sally's carefully seated dolls.

"Take that, Shit For Brains," I said, as Sally squealed and the dolls fell in a jumble of plastic arms and legs.

"No, grownups play nice ." She propped the dolls up again. "And no bad words, either, or I'll tell."

Whether she was going to tell my parents or the other dolls, I didn't ask. I sat there with the golden light of sunset peering through her blue curtains, our parents' voices rising over the rock music in the living room, one of them occasionally breaking into rough laughter. I wondered if this was how other kids lived, playing on a clean floor with dolls that didn't bleed. I wondered if other kids had to hide in their closets, dreading the sound of footsteps in the hall, talking to themselves. I was suddenly lonely and afraid, even with an invisible friend right there waiting in the Bone House, even with a dozen dolls around.

"You want to know a secret?" I asked Sally.

"Like a secret spy code?"

"Better than that. A secret place I know about."

"If you know, it's not a secret." She hugged Angel Baby to her chest.

"But I'm the only one who knows where it is."

"Why are you telling me ?"

"Because I was thinking we could be friends."

"But we're already friends. We play all the time." She fussed with Angel Baby's dress because the fabric was wrinkled.

"But I mean friends who talk to each other. Who tell each other stuff."

"We already talk."

"But not about secret stuff."

"You mean boy-and-girl stuff, like grownups do?"

I gulped, thinking about the Bone House. "Yeah, and other things, things you can't tell grownups about."

"Things you can only talk about in secret places?" Her voice had fallen to a whisper. I nodded.

"Then you have to be my boyfriend."

Boyfriend? Didn't that mean I had to love her? But that wasn't as bad as being alone. What was it my little friend had said? About being brave enough to love?

"Okay." My voice was as squeaky as chalk on a blackboard or throat with toast crumbs or a rubber ducky when you stomp it on purpose.

"Then you can't be mean to me anymore. Or to my dolls. Cross your heart and hope to die."

Hope to die? My invisible friend had said that the first time I met him. Love was even scarier than I thought. I swallowed the knot that lodged in my throat like a doll's head or other large, dry objects that you should never swallow but sometimes do. "Cross my heart and hope to die," I echoed.

"And you have to love me forever."

Did that mean all next year, even at school? School was only two weeks away. I pictured myself holding her bony hand in lunch line or carrying her books down to the bus stop. I pictured myself passing love letters in math class, avoiding the watchful eyes of Mrs. Elkerson. Those things weren't as bad as being alone.

"Okay, then."

"You have to say it." She leaned forward, her eyes serious.

"Say what?"

"Say 'I love you.' Just like that, only do it like they do in movies, kind of deep down and slow and out of breath."

In movies, there was always music, violin players just off the set, and blossoms of spring erupting all around. Here there was only the party noise in the next room and a floor full of baby dolls. But I had the out-of-breath part down easy.

My tongue was thick. My head buzzed, and I thought it might be my little friend telling me to not say it. Then the buzzing went away.

"I...I love you."

There. That wasn't so bad. That didn't hurt.

Yet.

"I love you, too, Richard. Now we get to hold hands."

She put her warm, moist palm to mine and we sat on the floor in silence. Her room smelled of cake.

"Is this all there is to love?" I asked after a minute.

"No, now we can tell each other secrets. Oh, and one more thing...you have to love Angel Baby. Because I love Angel Baby and you love me."

That made sense. But how many more would I have to love? Did the small hutch of my heart have enough room for more? What about those other dolls? Did I have to let all of them move into the Bone House?

"What kind of secrets are you going to tell me?" I asked. "I have the secret place to show you, but you haven't promised anything yet."

She looked hurt. "I promised to let you love me, didn't I? I promised to be your girlfriend."

She pouted like Angel Baby, only Sally's lips weren't as red. I looked out the window. The sun had gone all the way down and a couple of dots of dirty starlight pricked the black sky. Shadows grew fat in the corners of the room. I scooted closer to Sally.

She said, "I can tell you lots of things."

"Things?"

Her voice fell. "Things that you do when you're in love."

Curiosity and fear struggled in my chest, and fear lost for once. "What kinds of things, besides telling secrets? I watch television. I already know about...kissing."

She laughed, her mouth a flash of metal. Her eyes shone in the dim light, as glittering and piercing as a doll's.

"You're not that dumb, are you?"

Love's first hurt. My ears burned. My throat was a dry desert. My voice was lost somewhere in its sands. This love stuff was probably best kept in your own head or buried in the Sahara or the Mojave or some lesser-known but still-inhospitable geographic region.

Sally said, "Kissing is just the beginning. When you show me the secret place, then I'll tell you more."

More? Love wasn't scary enough already? Love had to have its own secrets, its own special set of fears?

I whispered hoarsely, "There's more ?"

"I'll tell you about bedsprings and the things between people's legs."

Like our mothers talked about? Did Sally know those kinds of secrets? Were girls born knowing them, and boys had to love a girl to unlock the mystery? Would love always be this confusing? Or was getting started the hardest part?

She leaned over in the darkness and I felt her warm bubble-gum breath on my cheek. Her lips touched there, briefly, and then pulled away, her saliva already cooling on my skin in the night air. My cheek was still tingling when my parents called to take me home.

I lay under the blankets in my bed, restless, listening to the night. Crickets chirped and an occasional car passed on the highway. Somewhere in the street, music played on a tinny radio. From down the hall, inside my parents' bedroom, came faint, rusty squeaking sounds. Questions circled around in my head like spun stars, burning brightly before dying and turning black, then falling one by one into the void of sleep.

CHAPTER FOUR

The next afternoon, still dizzy from promises of love, I showed Sally the nest. I led the way through the weeds and branches, and then held the vegetation aside so she could see the secret, sacred place.

"Any bugs in there?" She gave me a silver grimace.

"No, it smells a little like wet dog hair, but you get used to it after a while."

She crawled through the tunnel, brushing a prairie rose vine away from her face and sending a pink snow of petals to the ground. She dragged Angel Baby by one arm, and the doll's yellow hair tangled in thorns, causing Sally to whimper until I tore it free. Once inside, she sat up and blinked as her eyes adjusted to the dimness.

"Look at my stockings. My mother's going to kill me." She brushed at the dirt and grass stains on the knees of her white hose.

"Tell her you fell, then she'll feel sorry for you instead of yelling at you."

Sally looked around at the wooden walls that were brown with rot, then squinted up at the hole in the roof. "What do you do when it rains?"

"Usually get wet."

Her eyes grew dark, as if threatening clouds had passed over them. "You promised not to be mean, remember?"

I touched my heart, the one I had crossed with a promise the day before, afraid it would stop beating. "I wasn't trying to be smart-alecky. Sometimes I'd rather sit here and get soaked than to be out there ." I motioned to the world outside.

She thought I must have meant the junkyard. "Why don't you play in the cars instead?"

"Because cars have windows. People can see into them. Plus I think mice live in them. I've played in them before, pretended they were jets and spaceships and even cars I was driving. But I don't anymore, because of what happened."

"What happened?" Sally sat Indian-style with Angel Baby in her lap. I thought for a moment, then decided to trust her. I could tell the story because she loved me. I'd never told anyone else. Love makes you do dumb things.

I wanted to leave this part out, because it’s sort of embarrassing. But that one–you know, the one trying to steal my byline–believes this type of veracity just shows how foolish and untrustworthy I am. He's been revising this book, thinking it will get better over time, but he doesn't even notice if the structure is flawed.

Here’s what I think: he’s jealous. He may be this ancient, soul-hopping, omniscient entity, but he can’t write worth a damn. He doesn’t have the patience for it. When you have the whole world at your fingertips and unlimited evil to unleash, who cares about a stupid page?

For example, he doesn’t even realize drawing attention to the author is a bad idea. Look, here is a flashback told through dialogue. That’s a no-no in big-time New York-published autobiographies, even unauthorized ones. He’s the reason this book has been rejected so many times. Not me.

So let us get by with it just this one time and I swear we’ll never do it again. Otherwise we’d be here arguing about it until hell freezes over. Which, by the way, comes up near the end of the book, assuming he lets me get there in one piece.

"It happened before you moved here,” I told Sally. “This was back in March when it was just getting warm enough to play outside. The ground thawed out and the world was one big mud puddle. Mother told me not to get dirty, so I went through those trees into the junkyard, careful so I didn't get scraped on torn-up metal. I scratched my leg there once, and it stayed red for about a month and all this yellowy juice kept coming out of the cut."

Sally put the back of her hand to her mouth, revealing the pale flash of her open palm.

"I was in that old black Ford, the one that's all rounded at the corners and missing all its wheels. It smells old, like a basement full of clothes that nobody wears anymore. My father said he had wanted a car like it when he was teen-ager, but never had the money because he had so many goddamned mouths to feed. Anyway, I was just playing with the steering wheel and pulling down all those gearshifts, going in for a landing on Mars, when this big old man runs over, wiping his hands on an oily rag. He must have worked there at the garage.

"I slid down to the floorboard, trying to hide, but I couldn't fit under the seats. He opened the door and it creaked, just like those doors do in the movies when the monsters are coming to get somebody. He smelled like gasoline and his eyes were as dark as the stains on his clothes. I put my hands over my head, afraid he was going to kick me."

"Why did you think that?" Sally said, half horrified and half disbelieving.

"Because he had boots on."

Confusion crossed her face. "Did he kick you?"

"No, he squatted down and just said, 'What are you doing here, boy?', except he wasn't real mad. I told him I was flying the car like a spaceship. He said he used to do that when he was a boy, except he pretended they were boats. I couldn't picture him as a boy because he had gray stubble on his chin and creases around his eyes, like he'd started out old and had never gotten a chance to play.

"Then he said the car was an antique, plus there were a lot of ways to get hurt playing around all this glass and metal and then their insurance would go all to hell. He said we'd both get in trouble if I hurt myself. I was afraid to look at him, and the gasoline made my eyes sting.

"He asked if my mother knew I was playing out back here. I told him my mother never knew where I was, unless I was tucked into bed. Then he got a strange look on his face, like he'd just thought of a secret of his own. His voice got kind of quiet, and he said he wouldn't tell anybody if I wouldn't. Then he asked if he could play spaceship with me."

Sally hugged Angel Baby to her bosom, that flat chest inside her cotton top where mysterious little bumps had started to swell over the long hot weeks of summer.

"Is this a secret?" she whispered.

"No, the garage man knows it, so it's not a secret. I was scared to tell him I didn't want to play with him, that what I really wanted to do was run into the woods, where there were shadows. So I told him okay. He stood up and looked around, still wiping his hands, and licked the corners of his mouth, sort of like a dog does when you feed it peanut butter. Then he bent down and said, in a real low scary voice, 'Move over and I'll drive. You can be the captain.' So I did, and as soon as he got in, the whole car smelled like gasoline."

I was surprised at myself for telling so much. I guess I had kept my stories inside so long that they had built up and spilled over, like the bathtub did when I filled it full so I could pretend to be a deep-sea diver. Besides, you were supposed to share secrets with the person you had to love. Sally nodded, her pigtails bobbing, wanting me to go on with the story.

"His eyes kept looking around the junkyard, especially at the row of trees that stood between us and the apartment buildings. Then he said, 'Where we going, Captain?' I'd never played with a grownup before, so I wasn’t sure if he knew how to pretend for real. Plus I didn't feel right giving orders to a grownup. So I just said, 'Mars,' and he acted like he was driving while he scooted over toward me. I checked the round dials behind the steering wheel to make sure we were in the right orbit. He dropped the rag in his lap and reached over and rubbed my hair. 'Aye-aye, Captain,' he said, and he laughed, but it was kind of wheezy, like he couldn't breathe or something.

"Then his hand fell down to my shoulder and he was rubbing it. He took his other hand off the steering wheel and put it on the rag. He said the Martians might see us so we better slide down in the seat until we landed. Then he kind of leaned over on top of me. I told him we might wreck if he didn't watch where we were going, that we might run into an asteroid or something, or the Martians might send out fighter rockets. But he was breathing real funny and he pressed his lap against me. I felt the ball of the rag, and under that, something kind of hard, like he had a wrench in his pocket.

"Then he said something that didn't seem to have anything to do with the Mars mission. He said, 'We keep having girls. I've always wanted a son,' and for a second, I thought he meant the sun in the sky, but that was nowhere near Mars. And he kept on breathing through his nose and I was afraid he was going to die, and he moved his hand from my shoulder to my leg. His other hand was on the rag, he was rubbing the wrench in his pocket against me, and he started moaning and I thought he was pretending to crash land. And I said, 'Back off the thrusters and we'll pull through. It's our only hope.'"

Sally was looking at me like I was a hero, her blue eyes wide. Maybe she thought I was a brave captain, still able to give commands even while we were crashing. I liked the way she was looking at me.

"And he kept moaning and rubbing against me and suddenly his body got all stiff and he squeezed my leg real hard. I thought he was pretending to be scared about crashing and doing it so well that I was afraid he was having a heart attack. His face was all clenched up and his eyes were shut. Maybe he was so good at pretending that he could really see our rocket plowing into the red surface of Mars. Except he wasn't making the crashing sounds in his mouth the way you're supposed to.

"I told him, 'We survived the landing, we better get out our rayguns in case the Martians saw us,' and I was going to tell him that we better leave the ship in case it caught on fire. Because suddenly I wanted out of the car in real life because of the way he was looking at me. He was looking at me like I was the Martian. His eyes were tiny wet lines and his eyebrows were crunched down and he grabbed my arm and squeezed it, harder than he'd squeezed my leg."

"Did he hurt you?" Sally asked, and at that moment I felt I could tell her a hundred stories, secret or not, lies or the truth. Because she was listening.

"I didn't feel it too much because I was so scared. But he put his face close to mine and the gasoline fumes made me dizzy. For the first time, I noticed his teeth were sharp and yellow. Then he said, 'If you tell anybody, I'll come and get you and make you sorry.' He must have been afraid that he'd get in trouble for letting me play in the junkyard. Then he told me never to come back. He slid out of the car on the driver's side and looked around one more time. Then he held the door open so I could get out.

"He grabbed my arm again and pulled me into the sunshine, then said, right in my ear, so that his breath sprayed on my skin, 'I mean it. I'll come get you, and I won't be playing make-believe.' I was looking at his greasy black boots, but he grabbed my chin and tilted my head up. I looked into his eyes and I could have sworn there were things moving around in them, mean things. And there was something I'd almost forgot about until yesterday, when you were telling me about the things between people's legs."

"But that was one of the secrets I was going to tell," Sally whined. The sun had gotten higher in the sky and came through the roof, making her red hair shine like copper fire.

"You can still tell me. I remember that I looked at his pockets and they were empty. I don't know what he did with the wrench. I was afraid he might hit me with it. But he just stood there holding me and grinding his teeth.

"Then he let go and I ran into the woods and looked back at him. He was staring at me, wiping his hands on the rag. The spaceship was just an old black car again, rusty around the edges, and he was just an oily old man in dirty clothes. Then somebody called him from around the front of the garage. He shook his fist at me and I slipped into the trees. That's the last time I played over there."

"Does the man still work there?" Sally asked, maybe wanting to see what he looked like.

"I haven't seen him at the garage lately. But the people who work there don't seem to stay very long. I guess they get tired of the gasoline smell or something. But I'm still scared to play in the cars. That's why I come in through the back of the fence to get here, so they won't see me from the garage."

"This is a secret place, all right. It looks just like a big bunch of weeds from the outside. So, were you scared about that man?"

"I don't know. Sometimes I dream that he's coming to get me, that he's in my bedroom. He's got on his greasy clothes and he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wrench and he tightens it around my arm and I can't get away and he's turning the wrench and my arm turns around and around and he keeps rubbing my hair and he smells like gasoline and he's got on a spaceman helmet and then he leans over on me and I can't breathe and I wake up and I'm kicking my legs against the blankets and it's morning. Then I go to the window and look at the Ford to make sure it hasn't blasted off in the night."

"That sounds like a scary dream."

"Dreams aren't scary. They're just dreams. That's not as bad as him really coming after me."

"Grownups are strange. I don't know if I want to be in love like grownups after all."

"But you said we were in love. And you have to tell me the secrets. You promised."

"You mean you still want to be in love? It's already been almost a whole day."

I was confused. "I thought you said love was forever."

"I didn't cross my heart and hope to die."

She saw the pain in my eyes. It didn't seem to bother her. Her blue eyes were as cold as the garage man's had been. Now that I think about it, she probably smiled. Or maybe I’m remembering wrong, or lying again, or one of my headmates has taken over the keyboard.

"But it's okay, we can still play," she said, seeing the fallen look on my face. Did I still have to love her because I'd crossed my heart, even if she didn't love me?

"I'll tell you some secrets, then," she said. "Here's the best thing about love: You can still pretend like we're in love, the way grownups pretend."

CHAPTER FIVE

Sally and I sat cross-legged on the warped plywood floor of the doghouse. The sun was falling into late afternoon, shining through the gap in the roof like electric light.

"What’s this about grown-ups pretending to love?" I asked.

"If they loved each other the way people on TV do, they wouldn't hit each other or yell at each other."

"I thought they loved each other because they had to, because they were married."

"But we loved each other because we wanted to."

I noticed she said “loved.” Past tense. My heart fluttered like a house bird let out of a cage, discovering its wings only to slam into window glass and fall dead. Or maybe peck at its own reflection. When you’re that young, you can’t come up with clever metaphors, which is why you save your autobiography until you’re older and need money. Or someone has a gun to your head.

"But love also has to do with the squeaky bedsprings," she said. "You've heard them, haven't you? How they squeak over and over and over and sometimes you can hear your parents yelling like they're hurting each other, but they don't sound mad?"

I nodded. Just another of night's mysterious noises, along with faraway trains and the wind rustling through the cornfields and mice gnawing behind the walls and monsters breathing under the bed and a little person inside your skull. So the squeaking had something to do with love?

She continued, spreading out secrets like grape jelly on white bread. "You ever notice how your parents are happy the morning after the bedsprings squeak? Mine at least get through breakfast before they get mad at each other again. Because sometimes my mom burns the eggs or Daddy has a headache from drinking too much. Or Mom says she needs grocery money and then asks if he wants to have fun tonight."

I nodded again. I was remembering the bedsprings and how they used to squeak a lot back when I was younger, almost every night it seemed. But now the bedsprings only worked every week or so, mostly on Friday nights.

"And that's got something to do with what's between people's legs?" I asked.

She sighed and looked at me like I was a third grader. "Haven't you seen your parents naked?"

My mind flashed back to when I was very young, when Mother would take me into the bathtub with her. She would rub soap in my hair and laugh and splash water on my back. When she stood up to towel off, I saw a patch of black hair between her legs, frothed with white soap bubbles. I only knew it was a dark, secret place, one that had parts that didn't show. A place you knew was wrong to think about.

And walking down the hall and passing by the bathroom, seeing Father out of the corner of my eye standing over the toilet. And my eyes, despite my trying to look away, automatically going down to his hand that held the big red thing. I had something that hung down, too, but Father's must have hurt, it looked so monstrous and swollen and angry.

"I’ve seen naked people," I said. She wasn’t the only one who could pretend to know everything.

"Well, men have what they call a ‘babymaker.’ Like what you've got, except you've got a little boy thing. It's called a pee-pee now, but it'll grow up to be a babymaker, too."

My head was spinning, and my invisible friend was rattling the closet doors in the Bone House, looking for a place to hide. How did Sally know all these things? And did I really want a big red babymaker? If I didn't, was there any way to stop it from happening?

Sally went on, smug with the knowledge of grown-up secrets. "And women have muff pies. That's where the man puts his babymaker and then seeds crawl out of his babymaker into the pie and then little babies grow. And they have a hard time squeezing the babymaker into the pie, because it's so big, at least my daddy's is. And that's what makes the bedsprings squeak, because they have to fight to get those baby seeds planted."

My mouth hung open, airing out the base of my brain where this new information was settling. Babymakers and bedsprings, and all this somehow tied in with love. This stuff just got scarier and scarier. "But that means they would have a baby every time the bedsprings squeak."

"No, because of the blood. Haven't you ever seen the blood between your mother's legs?"

I hadn't, but I had seen little paper wads in the toilet, with streaks of blood running from them and down the inside of the toilet. Sometimes after the squeaking, now that I thought about it.

Sally said, "Because the blood washes away the baby."

I was struck with the image of a hundred bloody, tiny babies floating around in the toilet bowl. Then I was wondering if the babymaker was so big that it hurt the muff pie and that's what made women bleed. But I didn't dare ask Sally about it. She already thought I was stupid. Better to learn all I could while she was still willing to share her secrets.

At least now I understood the reason she didn't want to love me. She probably thought I was going to grow a babymaker and hurt her. She probably thought I was going to make her bleed.

And, even worse, I saw why Mother was afraid of Father. As if his boots weren't bad enough, he had other weapons he could use on her.

"So you have to be in love to try to make babies?" I asked.

She laughed at me, peeling my skin as if I were an apple, then cutting to the core. "Of course not. Babies are mistakes. Who wants to carry a baby around in their belly?"

I marveled at Sally, sitting there rich with exotic wisdom, her thin legs crossed in a pretzel of white hose, clutching Angel Baby, her coppery pigtails bobbing with delight as she ridiculed me. She was beautiful.

"But you have to be married to have babies, don't you? Or to make the bedsprings squeak?" I asked.

More laughter. "You silly boy. Remember that day your father called in sick to work, and your mother went downtown to do the shopping? She asked my mom if she wanted to come along, but my mom said she had housework to do. I didn't see you around anywhere."

Of course not. I wasn't going to stay in the apartment all day with Father, though he was too sick to put his boots on. I came to the nest with a couple of comic books. When it came down to Batman or a possible beating, even a dumbbell like me made the smart choice.

"Well, your mother was gone all morning, and your father came over to our place. He gave me a whole dollar to go buy some candy. Then I knew something was up. Has he ever given you a dollar?"

"Are you kidding?"

"So I snuck around the back of the apartment, outside my mom's bedroom, and I heard the bedsprings squeaking. And my daddy was at work down at the plant, so I know it wasn't him."

I shuddered at the thought of Father squeezing his big babymaker inside Sally's scrawny mother. It must have hurt her a lot.

"How come your mother let him hurt her? She didn't have to let him, since they weren't married," I said. Or maybe she hadn't let him. Father had ways of getting what he wanted.

Sally sliced me again with the knife edge of her laughter. "It doesn't hurt , stupid. It feels good. That's what love's about. It doesn't have anything to do with being married. It's about sharing secrets and holding hands and kissing and then playing babymaking.”

My hand went to the spot on my cheek Sally had kissed the night before. I tingled with the memory. A leaf fell from somewhere above, from one of the big straight hickory trees that bordered the junkyard. It feathered through the hole in the roof, landing on the back of Sally's neck. She reached up, thinking it was a bug, and batted it away.

While she was leaning back, I glanced between her crossed legs at the shadow under her dress.

"How come you kissed me last night?" I asked.

"Because I loved you."

"Like boyfriend and girlfriend."

"Yes. Real love, like grown-ups."

"But now you don't love me?"

"Not anymore. I just wanted to see if I could get you to love me. I did it all the time back in Pittsburgh. I had a different boyfriend every week."

How could somebody love so many people so fast?

"Did you kiss them all?" I asked, not sure if I wanted to know the answer. I wanted my kiss to be special.

"Of course. That's why all the boys wanted to love me."

"Did you...do anything else?" I tried to picture her naked, in bed with a boy, making the bedsprings squeak. I could only picture her with a big patch of soapy black hair between her legs.

Her voice dropped to a sneaky whisper. "I Frenched them."

"Frenched?" I was picturing Napoleon, whom I had read about, trying to put his babymaker into Sally, his big pointy hat falling down over his face.

"It's a kind of kiss. Come here and I'll show you."

I slid over beside her, my heart beating faster than squeaking bedsprings. I closed my eyes. I felt her warm breath inches from my face.

"Wait," I said, opening my eyes. Her eyes were closed and her dark eyelashes twitched like dying butterflies. Her lips were curled up like Angel Baby's and were shining with saliva.

"What is it?" she asked impatiently.

"If you don't love me anymore, why do you want to French me?"

"Because it's fun. It feels like something I'm not supposed to do. And it makes me tingle. And that's what grown-up love is all about."

"What if I don't want to be Frenched?" Now I was afraid of kissing her. I had already braced myself for the horrifying thought of loving Sally, like boyfriend and girlfriend, and I had run through a hundred dead-end hallways of the Bone House to get to the one thing I knew. That it felt good to be loved, even if it was scary. And now she was taking it back.

"You crossed your heart, remember?" Her voice was high and squeaky as bedsprings, she was so angry. "So you have to love me or hope to die."

"But you just said kissing didn't have anything to do with love."

"You're getting kissing mixed up with babymaking. And if you don't kiss me, I'm going to tell your parents about this place."

She nodded at the doghouse walls, her pigtails bobbing. The sun had sunk lower in the sky, the orange sunset lighting up the honeysuckle blossoms. The flowers glowed like Christmas lights on the vines that crawled down from the roof. Their sweet smell hung thick in the air. The world was candy.

I wondered if she was cruel enough to tell on me, and I decided she was. I thought of my father, bringing his boots down on the flimsy rotten walls until the outside world poured in like rain. I thought of my mother, her face lined with worry because her son was hiding out with a girl and probably doing bad things that made Jesus sad. But mostly, I wanted to feel that tingle again.

"Okay," I said, and then her lips were on mine, her tongue sliding into my mouth like a fat earthworm. I put my tongue up to stop hers, and it tangled briefly in the steel wires of her braces, and I imagined us locked together as the sun went down and then our parents finding us like that. I frantically worked my tongue free and she pressed her palms against my chest, pushing me onto my back.

She straddled me, on her knees with one leg on each side of me like a ten-gallon cowboy riding bronco on a half-pint pony in a clown's rodeo. I quit struggling, letting my tongue lie still as she explored my teeth. Her dress rode up to her waist, and she was rubbing her white-stockinged thighs against me in a familiar rhythm.

The rhythm of bedsprings.

I was helpless against the attack. My stomach clenched like one of Father's fists, but inside the tightness erupted a small hot fire. My mouth tickled where her slick tongue probed like a snail poking out of its shell. She was moaning like the garage man had when he had leaned on me. Love, or kissing, or babymaking, or whatever this was, was like ejecting from a rocket ship.

I felt a tingling down in my pee-pee and I was afraid it was about to grow into a big red babymaker.

I tried to push Sally away, because she was putting her muff pie down near my pee-pee that was trying to be a babymaker. My chest was tight and vomit tickled the back of my throat. I didn't want to have a babymaker and I didn't want it to make Sally bleed. I didn't want to have to love her anymore.

But she wasn't letting me up. Her eyes were closed and she rocked back and forth, just like those old people did on the porch down the street, except they sat in chairs and she was sitting on my belly. And her tongue flickered as if trying to find butterscotch candy down my throat.

And the more I thought about my pee-pee and trying to make it not turn into a babymaker, the more it tingled. Sally was rubbing over and over and over and I felt something was about to happen, something as mysterious as the early stars that I could see through the hole in the roof. Something as dangerous as the boots. Something as weird as the junkyard incident. Something I'd remember the rest of my life.

Something...something...

"Richard!" my mother called, from somewhere just a few yards outside the nest.

CHAPTER SIX

Sally froze, locked above me like a TV wrestler waiting for the referee to count to three. I was lying on my back looking up at her, afraid to breathe. My pee-pee didn't feel like it wanted to be a babymaker anymore. It felt like it wanted to crawl into a cold dark refrigerator and wait for halftime of a football game.

Mother called my name again.

I strained my ears, listening for her footsteps and the swish of weeds as she discovered the nest and looked inside. The blanket of night had almost completely covered the sky, giving me a small hope of not being found.

"Richard, I know you're out here. It's way past dinnertime, honey."

Sally leaned her mouth to my ear and one of her pigtails tickled my nose. "I thought this place was a secret ," she hissed.

"Sssh," I said, but I knew it wouldn't be our voices that gave us away. It would be the pounding heart, spilling out and carrying like the beat of voodoo drums across a black jungle. Or maybe the scarring screech of a jet plane crash landing. The fifty-megaton explosion between my legs. Something like that.

Mother shouted my name again, this time farther away.

Sally relaxed over me as if her bones had failed, her body sagging onto mine like a water balloon. Our pulses raced each other, working faster than bedsprings in the dead of night. I had found yet another way that love could be scary.

Sally rolled off me and smoothed her dress. She picked up Angel Baby and all I could see of their faces was the outline, twin shadows against a darker background. The feeble moon was trying to rise, but it must have been as tired and drained as we were.

"I tore the knee of my stocking," she said, her voice as cold and faraway as the dull stars or dead fish on a beach or a mole in a winter cornfield.

"Sally..." I searched the night for words. I still love you? Want to know a secret? Will you climb on me again?

"Tell your mother you tripped over a tree root and fell," I finished.

Her soft sobs filled the doghouse. Had I hurt her? I don't think I had used my babymaker on her.

"Are you bleeding?" My tongue was as dry and thick as an old board.

She snorted, blowing bubbles of laughter out of her nose. "Richard, you're such an idiot."

She was stomping with words. They hurt worse than boots. And I wish, sitting here typing, I could walk through the years and stomp back. After all, I’m the one who gets to tell how it really happened. But even now, this seems the best way to remember it. Yes, this will do.

"I'm going home now," she said, and I could sense her pout even if I couldn't see it clearly. Her voice dropped and her words slithered out like snakes. "This is a secret."

I could still try to be brave. "I won't tell anything.”

"Cross your heart and hope to die," she said, and she was telling me, not asking.

But I wasn't falling for that trick again. No more hoping to die, no matter what. She waited in the silent night that poured as smothering and heavy as maple syrup. Or blood from a savior’s palms. Or maybe just plain old smothering silence, the kind you hear in your head if you stop and really listen and everyone in the Bone House is asleep and not snoring.

"I never even loved you at all," she said. "I was lying. I just wanted to make you kiss me. Like I did all those other boys."

And I still had to love her, at least until I could figure out a way to uncross my heart. If love was going to be such a hot-and-cold ball of confusion, a strange mix of pain and pleasure, a tangle of limbs and tongues, then I didn't want to love anyone again for a long time.

But suddenly I was beyond the reach of her sharp weapons of hate, weapons that stabbed places even the boots hadn't touched. I was shrinking into the dark place in my head, hiding from this new kind of pain. She could not longer touch me, I was safe in a dark hall of the Bone House, looking through the eyes of my secret little friend, the secret that no external love would ever make me reveal.

“ Wait,” you must be thinking, “how come you’re telling me this now?”

I’ll let you in on the secret, if not her, because I can tell you’re starting to trust me despite my warning. We’re in this together, so you might as well have all the facts. Besides, I think I’m starting to love you.

Sally crawled out of the doghouse toward the weed-choked hole in the fence, her knees making crackling sounds on the crusty ground. My little friend sat alone in the dark, alone but not alone, because I was there with him. We were bound together more tightly than any lover's knot or hangman's noose or those silly contortions newlyweds do over the wedding cake when they’re trying to toast their future divorce.

"I've been away too long," my friend said. "I should have come sooner. I let you get hurt."

My body scooted across the rough plywood floor and followed Sally out of the hole. My nose took in the crisp aroma of crushed flowers and torn grass, the perfume of honeysuckle, and the smell of early dew. My ears heard a sleepy meadowlark spinning a lullaby. My hands stung from the sharp prick of fallen thorns as my body crawled. It was my flesh, but not me.

My head was poking out of the hole in the fence when my eyes saw a white slipper in the moonlight. And from the slipper, a long familiar leg rose up into the night sky.

Mother's shoe.

Mother's leg.

Mother.

My body stood, with the help of her hand lifting it by my shirt collar. My eyes looked around, adjusting to the brighter light of this outside world. Sally was hugging Mrs. Bakken over by the hickory trees, pressing her face into her mother's chest, and now the sound of Sally's wild crying reached my ears, drowning out the meadowlark's song.

"What's going on here, young man?" Mother asked my body, her voice a wedge of ice driven into my ears.

"Here?" my voice said, the strange muscles in my throat vibrating. Where was “here”? I thought I was in the Bone House.

"He made me, Mommy," Sally shrieked. "He made me do bad things."

Bad things? What bad things? Oh.

Those.

Sally squealed, her wet whimpers carrying across the apartment's backyard and into the night. My eyes saw lights blinking on across the back wall of the apartment building, my ears heard windows sliding open, my nose smelled cigarette smoke as heads stuck out to see if what was going on outside was better than their television shows.

"He made me go in there, then he made me kiss him. I tried to get away, but he kept grabbing me," Sally said. "And he wouldn't let me go."

She wailed like an air-raid siren, and was as well-rehearsed. Mother looked into my eyes as if she knew who I was and shook my shoulders. "Richard, what do you have to say for yourself?"

Richard? Yes, that was me. Yet not me. My head nodded, flopping up and down like a wet mop’s. Just the way my friend made it.

Mrs. Bakken stroked the top of Sally's head as if she were petting a rabbit. "There, there, honey, it will be okay. Did he hurt you?" Mrs. Bakken said, looking over at Mother and my borrowed flesh.

"N-no, Mommy." Sally sniffled extra loudly in case someone in the apartment windows hadn't heard the first time. "But he tried to. He tried to lift up my dress and was talking crazy things like putting his pee-pee in me and making me bleed. And I was so scared ."

She mixed the last word with a half-moan that yawned out through the trees and across the junkyard. My body was standing on legs that felt like wobbly stacks of tin cans.

"I'm so sorry," Mother said to Sally. "I swear, I don't know where he gets his meanness from."

Then, to me, "Lord, wait till your father hears about this." Then, to Sally, "You sure you're okay, honey?"

Sally nodded, bouncing her pigtails for emphasis, and wiped her eyes on her mother's shirt. "I've got a hole in my stocking, Mommy.”

"It's not your fault,” Mrs. Bakken said, and she looked all the way through my little friend into the dark place where I was hiding. Now I knew where Sally had learned to cut with invisible knives. It ran in the family.

And she’d learned the lesson we all get to eventually: it’s not whether you’re right or wrong, good or bad, true or false—it’s whether you have someone to blame.

I looked back down the long dark hall at Mrs. Bakken's face, cheeks paler than moonlight, her skin stretched as tight as panty hose over the steep bone of her head. Her eyes were as black as crow's wings, eyes that shot secrets out of the sky. And she saw that I saw.

"While the cat's away, the mice will splay," my little friend said to Mrs. Bakken, using my voice.

"What are you talking about?" Mrs. Bakken’s voice was a pitch-perfect imitation of her screeching daughter's. "Anne, he's gone crazy, that boy has."

"Tell us about Father and the bedsprings," I heard my voice say.

"What's this foolishness, Richard? I've never heard the like in all my days," Mother said.

"Did Father's babymaker hurt you?" my imaginary friend said, using my mouth. The words were nails, hammered into the coffin of the night.

"That's the kind of crazy things he was saying to me , Mommy," Sally said, finding fresh tears and straining to squeeze them into rivers. "All this stuff about babymakers and how I had to love him or he would hurt me. But he said if he loved me, then he'd have to hurt me with his babymaker, whatever that is."

Mother's hand struck my cheek, sparking a red burst of fire and pain. But the pain was brief, flickering and dying in an instant. My friend and I knew how to douse the flames of pain. This Bone House would never burn.

"Did it hurt you? Or did you like Father's babymaker?" we said.

Mrs. Bakken's eyes searched the trees, sneaking into the night sky, seeking escape. Mother let go of my shirt collar, her face blank beneath her curly mass of brown hair.

"You must have liked it, the way the two of you made the bedsprings squeak over and over and over, Mrs. Bakken,” we said. "Just like people who love each other. Just like married people."

"What's he talking about, Rita?" Mother asked Mrs. Bakken.

Mrs. Bakken's shiny China face cracked as she joined Sally in tears.

"Richard, what are you talking about?" Mother asked my body when she realized Mrs. Bakken was not going to answer.

"You'll have to ask Sally. She's the one who got the dollar's worth of candy," we said. "She's the one who knows all about love."

Sally and her mother huddled together, crying in the night, as two dozen prying eyes watched from the windows and a dozen tongues started wagging.

I went to bed that night without supper, my body tucking itself in, my mouth offering no prayers to Jesus. I was safely under the blankets when my little friend let me have my flesh back, then I was swimming toward the dark waters of sleep. Just as I dozed off, as bright colors flashed and tried to form dreams, I heard Mother and Father in the living room.

They were speaking to each other without yelling. I couldn't hear the words, but I could tell by the tone of their voices that they were saying important, weighty things. Grown-up things.

Then I was asleep and I was in the land where no garage men laughed and no boots danced and no babymakers turned into monsters.

I awoke early the next day and dressed quietly. The walls were still standing, and no sound came from my parents' bedroom. The night had not been broken by blows or bedsprings.

I went outside, onto the porch that we shared with the Bakkens, and down the cracked wooden steps that slanted to the driveway. There, on the porch, was Angel Baby. Sally's one true love.

I picked it up by the yellow yarn of its hair and looked into its glass eyes. Its eyes that never cried. Its eyes that had seen everything. I didn't like the secrets in them.

I carried the doll into the kitchen and laid it on the chipped kitchen table, its arms and legs twisted under its cloth belly. I eased open the kitchen drawer and pulled out a rusty butcher knife.

I plunged the blunt knife into Angel Baby's belly and the tip of the blade thunked into the table. The fabric ripped and white chunks of foam rubber spilled out onto the floor. I sawed the knife back and forth, throwing a frenzied snow into the air. I chopped at the brittle plastic limbs, those selfish arms that demanded hugs and those chubby legs that bled air. I hammered the blade down on those pouting lips and I hacked off the cute button nose and I popped the glass eyes from their round sockets and I claimed a scalp of yellow yarn.

I carried the pieces outside and left them at the Bakkens’s door.

To this day, I’m still not sure whether I was mad at Sally because she loved me or because she’s the one who got a dollar’s worth of candy.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mr. Bakken pounded on our door, yelling, "Come out, you goddamn cuckold."

I was in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal full of unfortunate marshmallow charms. Father opened the door and looked out, scratching inside the sleeve of his gray T-shirt. Mr. Bakken reached through the hole in the screen and grabbed at Father's throat. Father stepped back and kicked the handle off the storm door so that it swung open. Then he stepped out onto the porch, a crooked smile on his chapped lips like the one he'd worn at Granddad's funeral.

"Let's do it up right, Mac," he said, with rare cheer.

Mr. Bakken punched Father in the side of the head. Father became a wolverine, a blur of ferocity, an International Harvester of pain and rage. He brought his sharp fists into Mr. Bakken's beefy red face again and again, until I couldn't see Mr. Bakken's freckles for the blood. When Mr. Bakken fell down, crumpled like a sack of feed corn in the dirt by the driveway, Father's dancing boots gave a rare daylight performance.

The police came and took Father away and the crackling radio in one of the police cars said something about a domestic dispute and then a bunch of numbers that started with ten.

“ I have to go bail him out,” Mother said.

“ Why?” I failed to understand why she wanted to shatter the peace that had descended in our home like the sudden silence in a forest after a hunter’s shotgun blast.

“ I have to,” she said. “I married him.”

Father returned like a conquering hero, the cock of the block, strutting around preening his feathers. At least the attention kept his anger off me and Mother. Looking back, I believe it was the closest I ever came to admiring him. Then again, how could I know what I was thinking? That sounds like something my invisible friend would dream up, or one of the headmates who claim to be my co-writers. Admire that bastard? Never.

The Bakkens moved a week later. We watched them pack. Mother stood on the porch biting her white lips, a glass of brown liquid in her hand. Liquor from one of Father's bottles.

The Bakkens filled up their blue station wagon, piled the stuff of their life on top until I thought the roof might cave in. Mr. Bakken's face was bandaged like a mummy's. Only his burning eyes showed, looking around like he wished he could set fire to the apartment building, the woods, the checkerboard landscape, and the entire world, but mostly like he wanted to set fire to the past. If only our life stories were paper pages instead of real things.

I watched from the kitchen window as Mr. Bakken stomped the tailgate of the wagon shut and walked back into their apartment. Sally came outside, her pigtails gone, her dull bronze hair wilting under the August sun. She carried an armful of dolls, squeezing them against her chest as if afraid that someone might snatch them away, pieces of Angel Baby tangled among them. She climbed into the open door into the backseat without looking around.

She hadn't given me a good-bye kiss.

So much for love and its eternal promise.

Then Mrs. Bakken came out, even paler than usual. She had blue bruises under her eyes and her face was puffy. She gnawed at the tip of her pinky like an animal trying to free itself from a steel trap. She stared at her feet as she walked to the car. The invisible knives of her glare had been packed away with the spatulas, blankets, and towels.

Mr. Bakken brought up the rear of the miserable parade. He went down the stairs and turned to Mother.

"At least we get to leave. You have to stay," he said, his words muffled by his swollen lips. "I guess everybody gets what they deserve."

Then he closed the car doors and got behind the wheel and started the engine. Mother went inside. As the station wagon pulled out of the driveway, its tires crunching on asphalt crumbs, I caught a glimpse of the back of Sally's head and wondered what her next boyfriend would be like and if she would French him.

Mostly I wondered what sort of candy she’d bought with that dollar—chocolate or caramel.

And as the sun shone down on me like the light of heaven, there on the porch, I felt unfamiliar muscles stretch across my face. I was smiling.

"All's well that ends swell," said Mister Milktoast inside my head. “Or swollen.”

"Who said it's the end?" I answered, not moving my lips, my own personal ventriloquist’s dummy.

"I promise I won't leave you again, ever, Richard."

"Cross your heart and hope to die?"

"Cross our heart, my friend," Mister Milktoast said.

"Where did you ever come up with the name 'Mister Milktoast'?"

"I thought you named me," he said.

"Gee, I hope this doesn't mean I'm crazy. You know, talking to the little person in my head."

"It's not you that's crazy. Blame me. What do you think I'm here for?"

I couldn’t argue with that, but probably other people could. "I guess I better keep you secret, anyway."

"Might be a good idea. People wouldn't understand. And some secrets are better if you don't share them."

"Okay. Since you promise not to leave me again, I promise not to tell."

"Deal."

The sun was bright and warm on my face. I felt a strange joy, knowing that I would never again be alone. This was better than a first kiss. This relationship had potential.

Father didn't go to work anymore, just sat on the couch watching TV with the lights off and drinking straight from his bottles. I hid in my room or in the woods up the street. Now that the nest was no longer secret, it had lost all its magic. Plus Sally had poisoned it forever with her love.

When school started I was able to escape Father for half a day at a time. I still wasn't "associating well with others," but it was safe to read there. By the time I got home in the afternoon, Father was usually snoring on the couch or drinking across town in the Moose Lodge. Mother got a job at the Ottaqua Five and Ten, back in the days when “dollar stores” seemed like a great value, and she worked most nights.

I was by myself, but not lonely. I had Mister Milktoast. I had books. The people in books were much better friends than the people in real life. The people in books never walked off the pages to love me or kick me. I could close books.

Days mixed together like playing cards shuffled into a deck of months. Father was rotting, his breath an open sewer and his face a red rash of cracked veins. Mother had started drinking, too, but they drank silently, joylessly, and with grim determination, in separate rooms.

My body was becoming a stranger's. A knot had grown on the front of my neck at the part where I swallowed and my voice started cracking and squeaking when I talked. Mysterious hair sprouted over my lip and on my chin and even between my legs. Most horrible of all, my pee-pee was beginning to redden and swell, turning into an alien monster.

In the midst of this physiological turmoil, Father returned to his raging old self, as if the years spent in a drunken, pacific stupor were merely a refreshing vacation from his true life's work. The walls were apt to bend more often than not, and Mother was a more willing sparring partner now. Our living room was a clutter of shattered monuments to marital discord: the coffee table, propped up on one corner by an old set of encyclopedias; Mother's big ceramic Siamese cat curled up by the front door, its ears chipped off; the Jesus plate on the shelf, two strips of duct tape crossed on its back to hold it together; a glass-speared wedding photograph; and other assorted war relics.

Why they never divorced, once I came to see the possible escape it offered them, was beyond me. Mutual desperation strengthened their union, as if being needed only as a punching bag was better than not being needed at all. Occasionally in the night the bedsprings still squeaked, though they sounded awkward and rusty. And even less occasionally, laughter filled the apartment, usually inspired by the television shows that I refused to watch.

Perhaps this was a normal life. Perhaps we could have gone on this way for years, until I went away to college and studied literature and learned how to write a best-selling novel by offering witty autobiographical insights. Then I could have bought my parents a cottage on the Massachusetts seashore, one with an extra guest room to serve as a liquor cabinet. They could sip their golden years away in dark rooms until their tired blood gave out and the sun rose one morning over the Atlantic to shine in on their waxen corpses.

Then I could come up and carry the boxes of everything they were into the light. I could air out their photo albums and the yellowing wedding lace and the aviator mask collection. I could dig through the stained love letters and the cat postcards and the wrinkled brown bag of buffalo nickels. Then I would reach the bottom and find that it all added up to nothing. I would gather the scraps of their lives and dump them in the gray rubbish can at the corner of the driveway, put up a "For Sale" sign on their memories, and continue on up the stairs to my own attic and its dusty boxes.

But such an easy decay would have been anticlimactic, right? It would have violated our unwritten contract, our symbiotic relationship, our mutual understanding that we are both creating this adventure with every word and each sentence and every acceptance of a lie. We're equally complicit, and equally guilty.

I'm not very good at keeping secrets, and you're not very good at minding your own business. Because this is as close as you'll ever get to being inside my head, and you want more. And I need you because otherwise I will never know I was me.

We're in this together, all of us. All the way.

You probably won’t believe what happened next, but I may as well tell you anyway, since we’ve come this far.

Plus it involves sex and violence.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I killed the son of a bitch.

Father was on the fiery edge of a binge, scorching the night like a garlic dragon. His boots were itching to dance. He was Fred Astaire on angel dust, Jekyll's Hyde masquerading as Gene Kelly, a Saturday-night-feverish John Travolta channeling Hitler’s goose-stepping storm troopers.

Mother caught the brunt of his wrath on her bony shoulders, so incapacitated herself that she couldn't lift a flaccid arm in her own defense. His blows rained down on her, a blistering storm, a torrent of fists and feet. I listened from my bedroom, tingling from the electric tension of his thunder.

His slaps rang though the air like a whip flogging a dented piece of sheet metal. Mother moaned and whimpered, too dehydrated to cry. I ran into the living room and saw her on the floor, leaning against the couch, a thick trickle of pink saliva running from one corner of her mouth, her dark hair greasy with sweat like the mane of a horse that had been ridden too hard.

Father stood over her, his fists quivering. They were clenched so tightly he could have squeezed blood from a concrete block. He brought his boot down and Mother collapsed like a wet shoebox. He began stamping tattoos on her mealy flesh, urging fresh vintages from the juice of her veins. He danced as if the devil himself were calling the tune.

I went to the kitchen and drew out the rusty blade that fit my palm like a lover's slender hand. It was the same knife that had dealt with Angel Baby. I was fourteen now, not a kid anymore. I was as strong as a weed, as wiry as an oak, as unforgiving as the January wind.

I moved through the wreckage of the living room. With each step, I left Richard Allen Coldiron behind. The closer I got to the man who had given me life, the farther I was from son he had made. By the time I'd crossed the living room, the new thing wearing my flesh had completely sloughed off the inhibitions of Richard Coldiron, packed that weakness away in hidden closets, booked me a room in the Bone House with a window to the world.

The thing-with-the-knife raised its arm.

I could only watch in horrible fascination. I was used to Mister Milktoast taking over, but he was nowhere around. Was this my arm lifting, throwing a sharp shadow on the wall? Was it my bones and muscles that had flexed themselves into revenge? Was it my eyes Mother was looking into, her own eyes as wide as Jesus plates? Was it me plunging the knife into the meat of Father's back with a chicken-soupy sound?

Father was so intent on his artistic toe-tapping that he didn't register the metal intruder that had found a home between his shoulder blades. He froze, his right leg raised in a victory jig, his boot poised for a dramatic climax to his love ballet. It became his swan song, the culmination of years of dedicated practice.

He spun, all grace forgotten, his sewer eyes spinning wildly in his head like slot machine reels trying to line up Lucky Sevens. As he fell, his mouth formed questions that had no answers. Just before he landed, driving the knife completely through his chest to plow through his splintered rib cage, his eyes stopped spinning long enough to lock onto mine, and in his last slippery moments he recognized his executioner.

Or so he thought.

He lay on his back, a crimson gurgle rising from the black depths of his throat as his esophagus sucked madly for air. Mother screeched but had no energy to rise. The thing-with-the-knife that was me watched Father's final discoveries march across his features in a platoon of twitching facial expressions. Father found cold sobriety, he found betrayal, he found agony returning like a karmic boomerang bouncing back threefold. And if he searched for God and salvation and redemption, he must have come up empty.

If indeed the thing-with-the-knife was me, then what happened next was entirely the thing's own actions. As Mother watched, slipping into the feverish cold of shock, the thing-with-the-knife rolled Father over and yanked the slick knife handle out of his ruined flesh. Then the thing hacked at Father's bootlaces, scarring the leather, screaming and frothing in search of socks. Then the boots were off, flopping over, impotent.

And that's where I found myself when the thing gave me back my skin and bones. The thing shambled off to the Bone House where Mister Milktoast lived and where I had been briefly imprisoned.

"Richard," Mother moaned. "Lord, no...no...no..."

Her voice trailed on with her mantra of denial as I looked down at the bloody boot I held in one hand and the butchering steel shaft that I held in the other. The rich crimson sauce coagulated, turning a crusted red brown as it cooled and dried. I blinked in the soft glow of electric light bulbs as if I had just come back from a journey to the blackest corners of night.

And I was standing over my father's corpse.

And Mother was trying to stand and my own legs were gelatin and Father's legs were bloody noodles.

Mother took the knife from my hand and looked into my eyes and held my chin as if she were scolding me for sneaking into the cookie jar. Her eyes shone like stones in a creek bed.

"Listen, Richard. Here's how it happened."

How? I had seen, hadn't I? I was there.

"It was me ," she said. Her voice was cold and metallic, like the knife. "I killed him. I...got tired of him beating me...I was scared he was going to kill me..."

No, Father had wanted to kill her slowly, not all at once. Her sudden death would have robbed him of a reason to get up in the morning. Their dance had been scripted from the beginning.

"Listen now, baby," she went on, and sobs crept into her words. "When the police come...you don't know anything, okay? You were in your room and you heard a fight and came out and saw him dead...you got blood on you when you took the knife from me turned him over.”

And the tears broke free, running down her scared face. And fear fed her mind, threw fuel on the flames of panic. I nodded, numbly. I wanted to be gelatin again, to sag back into the dark hollow in my head. Even then, I didn’t want any responsibility for my actions. I was a disciple of the Blame Game and I had learned at the feet of masters.

"And the police will know...self-defense or something... people will understand if it's me . It's the only way."

She made me call the police. A long night of questions followed, and I didn't have to pretend that I was hazy on the sequence of events. Mother sat at the kitchen table talking to the officers as red and blue lights pulsed through the window from the driveway. Her hands, the ones she had rubbed in her husband's blood, were shaking, but her voice was firm. Much later, the police led her out into the cold night through the crowd of neighbors and she sat in the back seat of one of the police cars. I watched from the porch as she was driven away, and she waved at me with one bloody hand.

"Was that you, Mister Milktoast?" I asked later, in the silence of my dark bedroom.

"That wasn't us. That couldn't have been us."

"Who, then?"

"Richard. I think...we've got company."

Of course, what else could he say? After all, we’d learned the Blame Game together.

Never had I been so proud of Mother as when she stood calmly before the court and spun a hundred tales of abuse that were too vivid to be mere imagination. Never had I loved her so as she bravely detailed her imaginary crime. Never had I hated her so as she took the blame that was rightfully mine.

After the testimony of a handful of neighbors, not a jury in the country would have convicted her. Following a finding of not guilty by just cause, she walked down the high-roofed halls of the courthouse as a headline, beset by an army of photographers and news crews and tight-jawed reporters. As she walked down the granite steps, holding her red wool coat closed against the early spring wind, she dropped to page two. Driving away, her story was shunted to the back burner. In a week, she was last week's news.

Except at home.

"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked.

"No."

"What's done is done."

"It'll never be done."

"I still love you."

"I don't need love." I could lie like that. "What's it ever brought me?"

"We still have each other."

"That's even worse."

"I don't care what people say. I just care about us."

"Do you miss him?" I was afraid to ask, afraid not to ask.

"I just get lonely sometimes. And tired."

"Don't cry. He's not worth it."

"I'm not crying for him."

Crying for us. Always for us. "Shh. It's okay."

"It's not okay."

"Let's not talk anymore. It's time for bed."

THIS CHAPTER HAS NO NUMBER

"You think?" I asked Mister Milktoast.

We were waiting in the hall to see Mrs. Bell, the high school guidance counselor. I had been sent to her because I made it into the ninth grade without ever fitting in. Plus people thought my mother had killed my father. If I didn’t have Mister Milktoast, I probably would have doubted my sanity. But if two people share the same delusion, it’s not really a delusion, is it?

"Sounds a little crazy to me,” he answered. “And you know what I think about you and crazy."

"Yeah. But it sort of makes sense."

"Come on, Richard. Multiple personality disorder? Who are you trying to kid? Nobody falls for that anymore."

"How else can I explain your existence? You're not the result of schizophrenia. 'Split from reality.' That doesn't quite fit the bill. And I don't think you'll let me write you off as the invisible childhood friend any longer."

"No,” Mister Milktoast said. “And there's the new one to think about. The one who killed Father."

"See? That takes care of the 'multiple' part."

"But how can you call it a 'disorder'? From where I'm sitting, it looks like I'm the one who keeps things in here from falling apart."

"I've got to hand it to you there."

"And don't you ever forget it. United we stand, divided we autumn."

"We'll stick together until the end. You've kind of grown on me, you know?"

Laughter trickled from a classroom down the empty hall. Normal people, normal noise. I sat there having a conversation with myself. Or maybe I’m just making this up, more revisionist history because the truth is too unbearable.

"And there's the fact that most documented cases of MPD occur in women who were sexually abused as children. There are hundreds of psychiatrists who still don't believe it exists. Besides, now they call it ‘dissociative disorder.’ Fancier name."

“ Are you going to go Freudian on me?” I said. “Use my traumatic childhood as an excuse for all the terrible things you’ll do later?”

“ Your brains are Freud or scrambled, but you’ll always be Jung at heart.”

The door opened beside us. Mrs. Bell poked her head out and said, "Richard Coldiron?"

"Yes, ma'am." I stood and walked into her office.

"Let me handle this," I whispered to Mister Milktoast.

"What's that?" Mrs. Bell said, sitting behind her big wooden desk. Her hair was white, like stuffing that had spilled out of a hole in a pillow.

"Nothing." I slouched into the chair that Mrs. Bell waved me toward.

"Look on the wall," Mister Milktoast said inside my head. "A shrinking certificate. Be careful."

Pipe down , I commanded.

Mrs. Bell shuffled some papers on her desk. "So, what seems to be the trouble, Richard?" she finally said, smiling as she looked into my eyes. Hers was a Grinch smile, one that looked like children's torn flesh was hidden behind the tight lips.

I studied my shoelaces. "No trouble, ma'am."

"That's not what I hear." She rattled her papers.

"Well..."

"We can talk about it. Everything you say stays with me. Our little secret."

Oh, great. Secrets. "There's nothing to talk about."

The Grinch smile slid downward. Her chair squeaked as she leaned back. "When there's family turmoil such as this..." She paused and looked at the pale-green cinder block wall as if she had a window. "...then it's bound to have some kind of negative impact on the innocent."

I shrugged. She obviously didn’t understand the concept of “guilty bystanders.”

"When you lose a loved one, sometimes the grief gets buried,” she said. “It's okay to let it out."

"I'm fine, really. I just like to keep things to myself."

"Hmmm. Just remember that it wasn't your fault."

Mister Milktoast echoed her in my thoughts. Hear that, Richard? It wasn't your fault. How original.

I got a sudden headache. The bad voice came out like acid vomit.

"Oh, yes the fuck, it was ," the voice roared inside my head. My veins split, my eyes watered. For a second, I thought I had said it out loud, but Mister Milktoast assured me I hadn’t. Of course, he might have been lying. While you can always trust me, and I’ve found him more or less reliable, everyone has an ulterior motive, and don’t ever forget it. All bets are off in revisionist history.

Mrs. Bell saw me wince. Then I was gone, inside, and all I could do was watch and wait. The Bone House was safe, but like a bomb shelter, it both protected and imprisoned.

"It's okay to feel sad," she said, and her smile was back. Grinch with an appetite for all the sweet little Cindy Lou Whos of the world.

"It was my fault,” the voice told her, using my mouth and lips and vocal chords and lungs. "But I'm not a damn bit sorry."

Mrs. Bell nodded slowly and seriously. "Now we're getting somewhere. Let these feelings out."

She scribbled on a notepad while talking to herself. "'Problems with authority? Possible Oedipus complex? Post-traumatic stress disorder?'"

She had a long conversation with the thing that had taken over my mouth.

And they thought I didn't associate well with others. They hadn’t met Little Hitler yet.

CHAPTER NINE

Ottaqua, Iowa. 1989.

I was in my senior year of high school, filling dreary days as if they were journal entries, the secret dairy of an uninspired life. A miserable memoir written in invisible ink. I wish I had typed it then instead of having to do it now, when memory fails me and I have better things to do. Then I could fake the ending and we could all go on with our lives. But this is a book and you expect me to tell everything just as it really happened, despite all that bullshit about voices in my head.

Think about it a moment.

In writing, you’re supposed to avoid clichés like the plague or else make them obvious like you knew it all along. Wink wink.

But the first time I go and kill somebody, I reach for that convenient excuse of being squirrel-shit nutty. And, even today, I’m not sure whether I really killed my father or if I just freaked out because Mother did it. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference now. It’s not like Mister Milktoast wrote this book, or Little Hitler. Fuck them. My name’s on the cover and that’s that. I am the author.

And if I’m not, they better put my name on the royalty checks anyway.

So, back to 1989 and forget that other stuff. Let’s get real.

I was the kind of teenager that, if I were in high school today, everyone would worry about my walking in on a bad hair day and shooting up the place. The kids at school viewed me as an alien freak, the greasy-haired, wild-eyed boy who clung to the corners. They whispered behind my back about what had happened to my father or sometimes taunted me to my face, especially Brickman, the school thug. My fantasies never moved to mass murder, though. That seems so impersonal. Besides, I had poetry.

Others had sports, student government, clubs, or band instruments to consume their time and energy. I dawdled between the covers of books, fixed in two-dimensional fantasies whose protagonists traveled where I could only go by proxy, who dared to have lives that seemed far more real than mine. Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Brautigan, John Steinbeck, anybody but Faulkner. I prefer my liars to do it honestly, though I could never manage the trick.

Home life was increasingly torturous and I avoided our apartment whenever I could. Mother was drinking nonstop by then, downing huge tumblers of strong brown bourbon, slowing only to replenish the ice. The misty-eyed mirth of her early experiments with liquid escape had progressed rapidly into a constant haze that was punctuated ever more frequently by fits of anxiety and despair. She was in the final stages of decay, as if the flesh would have given up if not for the preserving quality of the alcohol. Father had taught both of us well, only he’d given us different lessons.

On my rare visits, she became clingy and wept openly. I tried to soothe her and coax her out of the bottle, but she was beyond reach. The horrors of the past were too real, still too fresh because she treasured the memories even as she obliterated them with drink. She collected and savored them just as she had once done the ceramic cats that lined her windowsill. Those knick-knacks now gathered dust while her new hobby of slow self-destruction filled the shelves of her life.

I had quit sleeping there three months before, when she had started crawling into bed with me again. She was only seeking comfort, needing a man in her life, a replacement. There was something blasphemous in that mockery of family closeness, even though the physical contact was limited. What was most horrible was the flicker of arousal I had felt. I tried to tell myself it was a lie, an illusion, but I could never trust myself to stay there again. I didn’t even want to think of my babymaker tilling that fallow soil.

I spent the nights in the old Plymouth Valiant I had bought with money earned from my summer job bagging groceries at the Food Fair. I had a constant crick in my neck, my breath stank, and my clothes grew crisp from continuous wear. My grades suffered and many times I was on the verge of running away, to start an untainted life in a far city, free of everything but the chains of memory and the people in my head. What kept me in Ottaqua was the hope that I could rescue my mother from her black pit of despair. As if I could be the savior of anything—call me what you will, I never had any messianic delusions.

In the classroom, I was sullen and aloof, and I secretly ridiculed the ambitions of the other students. They were planning to go to college, get married, and have jobs, buy homes and a stake in the American dream. The seeds of envy were ready to sprout into hate. I found myself wallowing in bitterness, just like Father had done. The Coldiron Curse hadn't died with him after all.

Virginia became my savior. She was an outcast, too, but had sought out the role, rehearsed it as a devoted understudy, and slipped into it like stage costume. She was from a wealthy family, both parents members of the local school board. She sat across from me in Biology, and I stole glances of her out of the corner of my eye, watching her with an admiration that bordered on worship. When she caught me looking, she would smile at me with perfect teeth.

Though I had an affinity for Biology, I wasn't a top student because I was afraid of standing out, of being noticed. But I wanted Virginia to notice. With her fine ash-blonde hair and oval face, she became the meat of my dreams, the main course of my unformed fantasies. Her eyes weren't bovine as were those of the cheerleaders and beauty queens. These were cobalt blue and deep, almost painful to look at.

She wasn't squeamish about dissection, and I’ve always admired a girl who had a way with a blade. That semester, as we graduated from worms to frogs to small sharks, her savagery escalated accordingly. When her partner was no longer willing to work with her, repulsed that Virginia was going so far beyond the demands of the assignments, I volunteered my services. I had been working alone, shunned, the twenty-fifth student of a class broken into pairs.

Virginia had a terrific sense of humor. She saw right away that I matched her skill with a scalpel. She enjoyed shocking the others, sticking pins haphazardly into the eyes of the defenseless dead creatures. Once she fashioned a crude earring by attaching a fish heart to a looped paper clip and wore it most of the afternoon. Finally a teacher stirred from apathy long enough to report her to the school authorities. A quick search of the rules found nothing prohibiting the ornamental display of animal organs, though Virginia was chastised for "disrupting the classroom." Of course, because of her parents' being on the school board, no one was willing to suspend her.

Because she was an untouchable, she became even more outlandish. She began wearing a black leather jacket she had found behind a bar on Devlin Street. The jacket had a huge grinning skull sewn on the back, with crimson ribbons of flesh clinging to the bone. What she was doing in that part of town, and what would happen when the owner claimed his rightful property, I never asked. She wore camouflage pants that billowed out above the ankles and adopted hiking boots long before it became a weary fashion.

We quickly became inseparable. She saw behind the granite facade of indifference I hid behind, saw the sensitive child inside the man I was awkwardly becoming, or maybe she peeked through the windows of the Bone House. In turn, I encouraged her originality and served as a willing audience for her stunts. She was "Negative Girl" and I was "Her Poet," not because I ever wrote anything but scribbles on napkins, but because I wore thick glasses with black frames and she mistook my involuntary solitude for intellectual disdain. We began meeting at the football field during lunch, sitting in the bleachers and looking for gods in the April clouds.

Our friendship had been based on mutual distrust of "the system," and our relationship had been confined to school hours. In some secret locker in my heart, I had stored a small hope of something more. Certainly not love, not ever again love, Sally had carved that coffin and Mother had driven the nails. Virginia caused me to twitch, and she inflicted a vague ache I hadn’t known since Hope Hill’s aromatic hair.

One lunch hour at the football field, she went for the kill. "What really happened that night, Richard?"

I smelled the grass that a worker was mowing, smelled the lilies that grew in the marshy moat around the press box. I counted the wrens that were sitting on a power line overhead. There were seven.

"I don't know for sure. I guess what they wrote in the papers is probably the truth."

"Didn't your mother ever talk about it?"

"I suppose she's trying to forget." Just like I was

"Doesn't it freak you out?"

To know that sometimes things happen that are beyond your control? Even if you made them happen? Though I enjoyed looking into those blue eyes, I turned away from her. "I don't want to talk it about it anymore."

She touched my shoulder. "Hey, Poet, it's okay."

Three sparrows flew away.

"We all have our secrets. Forget about it," she said.

Forgetting was my sole occupation. Or rather, soul occupation, as Mister Milktoast put it. He loved his puns.

"Richard?"

I looked at the power line. The sparrows were gone, stolen by the freedom of wings.

"What?"

"Let's go out on a date."

I turned back to her and fought upstream against the force of her eyes. After a moment, I was breathing again. I smiled, trying out unfamiliar muscles. "Are you kidding?"

"Well, I can't wait forever. Were you ever going to ask me ?"

"You're the Negative Girl." Though I wasn’t a writer until much later, until I started this autobiography, I’d already come to know the emasculating sting of rejection.

"And you're afraid of me."

No, just afraid of myself. And the secret person inside. Or all three of us. "Your Poet fears only words," I said.

"Words like 'yes'?"

I nodded my head, afraid to say it. She laughed.

"I'd go anywhere with you." I stared with desperate eyes, hoping their loneliness glittered instead of stabbed. She returned my smile, and her face outshone the spring sun.

My heart soared like the sparrows. Then it plunged, shot down by worry. I had never dated. How should I dress? How did normal people do this? Was I supposed to get tickets to the ballet, or was a coffee house more in order? Was I supposed to try to kiss her? French her?

I hadn't told Virginia I lived in my car. She probably thought my slovenly appearance was just more disdain, a further rebuke of the straight world. I didn't want to take her home to meet my mother, either. There would be none of the niceties of a storybook courtship.

"As long as you drive," I said. She had made fun of my old rusty sedan when I pointed it out among the gleaming cars in the school parking lot. She drove a jet-black Mitsubishi, given to her by her grandfather, who had been a county commissioner and realtor for decades and had owned half of Ottaqua at one time or another.

"Okay, but you can't say anything about my speeding. I've got a foot of lead in this here shit-kicking boot," she said.

"Are you trying to scare me away?" I’d delved into the melodramatic pop of The Smiths and The Cure, music best described as “Let’s fuck and die.” I assumed that air of nihilistic nonchalance. "What better way to go than in a massacre of metal and gasoline?"

"That's my Poet, finding romance in violence," she said, laughing with the confidence of one who was young enough to think the future rolled on endlessly, with no detours or red lights to slow the ride.

"I'll meet you tonight." I sensed I had a date with destiny as well as with this wild and wonderful girl. Something stirred inside the Bone House, but I made sure the doors were closed and bolted.

"Come here to the football field at seven and we'll figure out what to do," I said, so casually it might have been rehearsed. Or spoken by someone else. "Maybe we can catch a movie down at the Flick, go out for pizza or something."

Normal, safe, teen-age stuff.

"Or we can sit and watch the stars, talk about people. Get away from it all." Virginia’s voice had taken on a dreamy quality, and she idly twirled a strand of her white-blonde hair. There was a promise in her words, or perhaps a threat. Anticipation of either rushed blood to my head, choking off reason. I was ready to risk everything for a chance to be close to her. And, she didn’t know it, but so was she.

We walked back to the main building. She blew me a kiss just before we parted, then made a snatching motion with her hand, pretending to put the imaginary kiss in her pocket. Corny, but we both knew it was corny, which made it much more daring.

"For later," she said, and at that moment I fell in love for real.

“ Fell” is the proper word for it, or “autumned,” as Mister Milktoast would say. I was rushing from dizzy heights. My chest expanded like a helium balloon. The clouds spun and the sky bled blue as I watched her walk through the doors. So this was what those FM radio songs were about.

The rest of the day blurred by. After school, I stopped by my mother's place for some clean clothes. I had been storing my stuff in the trunk of the Valiant, but everything smelled of musty metal and gasoline. Mother had left my bedroom untouched, perhaps in the hope that I would one day return. I pulled into the cluttered driveway and headed up the apartment steps, determined to get in and out quickly. When I went inside, she was slouched at the kitchen table in a matted gray bathrobe, gazing out the window at the big beech tree across the street, or maybe a dead squirrel that had been caught in a rundown.

An army of liquor bottles covered the linoleum floor. Flies hovered over half-empty plates of food, finding heaven in the heaps of fetid meat and moldy pools of gravy. The stench of bourbon hung thick and sweet in the air, along with a deeper, ranker odor. Mother was sitting in her own vomit.

She gave me a bleary look.

"My big boy's home," she rasped, her cracked lips trying to smile, but even that coordination was beyond her. Her lips wiggled like a pair of fat earthworms mating on a hotplate. A strand of yellow drool ran from one corner of her mouth, collecting at the base of her chin, and a gob fell into her lap as she lifted her head.

She had aged a dozen years in the weeks since I had last seen her. Creases and splotches fought for domination on the ruined topography of her face. The late afternoon sun through the window sharpened her features, sparing not a single wrinkle. The light was honest and brutal.

She looked at me with puffy prizefighter eyes, her swollen red lids like overripe fruit. I looked into them and shuddered.

This woman had endured unimaginable pain to bring me into the world, in an assault of fire and needles between her bloody thighs. This woman had sung me lullabies, changed my diapers, and given me suckle from her stretch-marked breasts. This woman had delivered me to my earliest and most terrible enemy and then absolved herself through voluntary amnesia. Her weakness paved the road of my childhood with blood and bruises. Her love had covered up my gravest sin like flowers smothering a coffin.

She spread her arms, like a crippled bat trying to take flight. Her robe fell open, revealing her scrawny, pink nakedness.

"Come here and give Mommy a big hug," she said.

CHAPTER TEN

No love is more sacred than that between mother and son. All maternal kinships should resemble a Renaissance painting of Madonna and Child. The mother with her milk-white skin and healthy blush of rose at her cheeks, gazing lovingly down at the plump-faced infant who is wearing a cherubic smile. An ideal captured in oil, preferably with dramatic clouds etched overhead, funneling holy light. But here, in this true illusion of life, there is no such graceful light and there are no virginal births.

A black rage rolled over me. I wanted to reach across the table and pull Mother out of her filth, slap her across the face until I drove out whatever demons she harbored. But I knew the demons. I had inherited them and they walked the halls of my Bone House.

The rage passed, and as the dark veil dissolved, I saw her as she really was, weak and scared and self-deluded. She sought any escape she could find and was willing to go to obscene extremes for distraction. She was to be pitied, not hated.

The one who was to be hated was beyond the reach of retribution. If there was blame, it lay with him. He had done irreparable damage, plowed mad furrows in the fields of our lives and sown salt, then had escaped into death. I could only hope there was a hell, or somewhere even more deserving of his wretched citizenship.

"Mother," I said, brushing her wiry, unkempt hair away from her waxen forehead. "You don't have to do this."

She began crying. I would have thought those eyes had been wrung dry long ago, like a bed sheet twisted in the hands of an impassive washwoman. But crystal tears collected in their corners, glistening around the rims before beginning their slow, sad journey down her cheeks. Emotions always disgusted me, whether my own or another’s.

"...not your fault...," she said, between sobs. "My poor baby...it's not your fault."

"Shh, it's okay now. You've just had a little too much to drink. Everything will be okay."

"I'm so sorry...for everything."

I held her by the chin and wiped her face with the dirty cloth of my shirtsleeve. She reached for the mayonnaise jar she used for a tumbler, her fingertips smearing fresh prints on the greasy glass. She was no longer bothering with ice cubes. Ice only slowed her descent into oblivion. Watered-down suicide.

"I had to get away, Mother. After everything else, at least we had each other. But even that turned bad. We're still in his shadow."

"I just get so lonely sometimes." Her tears gave out, and glass reclaimed her eyes.

"I do, too. I miss you, Mother."

"Then come back."

"You know I can't."

I began clearing the dishes off the table. I carried a stack of plates over to the sink, my back turned to her. The world beyond the window was a place of sky and sunshine, a landscape that couldn't possibly house such miseries as ours. On the sidewalk, two girls played hopscotch, taking turns skipping through blue-chalked squares.

"It can be like before...like, you know...all of it."

"Never again. Not after that."

"But it happened."

"That wasn't us. That couldn't have been us."

"How can you say that? You were there," she said. Her drunkenness had turned cold, her voice arctic.

"Because I had to be," I said, unwilling to face her. "Do you think I knew what was happening? I was only a child."

"But not innocent."

"Nobody's innocent."

I could hear the clink of glass and a gurgling sound as she refilled her drink. She took an audible gulp. Her throat must have been stripped of all sensation by her prolonged abuse. Her sibilants mushed with a smooth familiarity, as if she had delivered this soliloquy to the uncaring air many times.

"He was your father. No matter what else, that can't be changed. You're the flesh of his flesh. And they say blood runs thick. Blood runs thicker than water."

I rattled the dishes and turned on the faucet full force, trying to drown out her damning words.

"Thicker than water," she repeated, softly, but I could hear her even over the roaring in my ears. I ran out of the kitchen. The thunderstorm of rage was returning, stretching from a closet deep inside my Bone House, widening like the flat Midwestern horizon outside.

It was Little Hitler, the bastard child of night, the one I thought was extinct, his mission accomplished. His return was triumphant and cruel as he wallowed in my misfortune and savored the lemony sting of my pain. He brought with him his baggage of paranoia and deceit, as well as memories I hoped had been forever buried. He had desecrated that grave of time gone by, unearthing my most horrible moment and dragging its skeleton through the halls of my head.

"No, no, no!" I shouted, pressing my hands against my temples, trying to physically squeeze Little Hitler out.

Mother thought I was yelling at her. I could hear her stirring, trying to flog her wasted leg muscles into standing up.

My spasms eased and light returned. I stood on the threshold of my room and the threshold of my past. I found myself sagging against the door jamb. The memory had been beaten down, reinterred. Little Hitler was gone.

I went into my room. It was like entering the museum of someone else's life. Exhibit A: My old desk, where I had built model cars, the top pitted where spilled glue had eaten through the polyurethane finish. Exhibit B: A poster of The Beatles, curling at the corners, taped at the creases where the paper had split with age. John, Paul, George, and Ringo looked down like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Exhibit C: My pine-slatted bed, the blankets spread but wrinkled, where I had knelt in prayer, where I had cuddled teddy bears, where Mother had told me good-night stories, where boots had walked, where Mister Milktoast sobbed, where me and Mother had...

Where monsters had crawled from the darkened space beneath, where horrors real and imagined had transpired.

The room was just as I had left it. I was afraid Mother might have begun sleeping there, to dream of flesh and meadows, spring rain and sin, with my scent on the pillow. But the bedspread was the same one that had been there when I had moved out, and it was unstained.

I looked out the window above my desk. It was partially open, and a small breeze played through the dingy curtains. Many times I had gazed at this scene. The garage next door was unchanged, still flaking battleship-gray paint from its cinder-block walls. The lot was strewn with junk cars, engines that had been raped and tossed aside, rusting metal scraps that covered the ground like red bones. The smell of gasoline and grease clogged the air around the building. The occasional ringing of a tool falling on the concrete floor mixed with revving motors and the rowdy voices of mechanics in a symphony of atonal masculinity.

To the rear of the garage was a sliver of the street, and beyond that, a scraggly patch of woods. A gap had been cut through the trees by the power company, the trimmed precision out of place in that forlorn foothold of nature. I had played in those woods as a child, blissful stolen hours away from home with Mister Milktoast as my only company.

At the end of the garage lot was the old dog pen I had used as a secret clubhouse. Where I had kissed Sally Bakken in my tenth year. Where I had uncrossed my heart and risked death. Now honeysuckle vines choked the fence, and the roof of the doghouse had collapsed under the weight of tireless rot.

In the distance, a cornfield stood, waving young starchy arms. The wind cut over the tops of the stalks and pressed out gentle patterns that resembled ocean waves searching for a shore. Many times I had sailed away in my mind, across that imaginary green sea and over the horizon, to a land where little boys were never punished.

I went to the closet. My clothes hung there as if from gallows. The person who had worn them had been prosecuted for his crimes. Not in the halls of human justice, but in the highest court. Judgment had been passed, with appeal denied. Richard Allen Coldiron was condemned to serve a life sentence as himself.

I turned and walked out of the room, leaving it to gather cobwebs and cracks.

Mother was halfway through her drink when I entered into the kitchen. Flies buzzed around her head, frantic now that their food supply had disappeared. One landed on Mother's nose and fiddled its front legs as if washing up before dinner. She didn't notice, and it drank freely of her toxic sweat.

"You're mad at me, aren't you?" Her voice was cracked and coarse.

"No," I said. "I don't care enough to be mad."

"Why don't you sit down and tell me about what's going on in your life? Talk to your Mom?"

"There's nothing to say."

"You know how hard I tried to change."

"People never change."

"I need to drink. It's the only way I can forget. But it only works once in a while."

"That's good for you, but what about me?"

"What about you?" She finally noticed the fly and brushed it away.

"Don't you think I'm trying to forget, too? And that coming back just makes it harder? Why do you think I left?"

"Because of that...and the drinking?"

"You make me sick, Mother. Just look at yourself. You can't even make it to the sink to vomit. How much longer before you can't get to the bathroom?"

"But you love me," she said, giving me that crooked, watery smile.

"Because I have to."

"Is Mommy pretty?"

People never changed. They only got worse.

"Ask the mirror.” I wished I hadn't come. I wished I had never left. I wished.

I turned at the door and looked back at her. She was a well-known stranger, a familiar alien. We had been through so much together. Too much to ever be close again.

"When are you coming back?" she said, running her trembling, knotty finger over the rim of her jar. Mercifully, she had drawn her robe so that it once again covered her chest.

"I'll be back. But not to stay."

"Do you need money?"

"I'm fine."

"You be good now." Her voice had taken on a faraway quality, as if she were speaking to the golden boy I had never been. That I had never been allowed to be.

I looked back a final time as I walked out into the unforgiving sun. Mother's eyes were like searchlights, their wavery beams crawling across the floor, looking for an undrained bottle. She had already forgotten I had been there. She had boarded her ship. She was sailing across a sea of her own, to a land where mothers never had to say they were sorry.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I drove back to the football field to meet Virginia. Despite the bright beauty of the spring evening, and what little snatches of fragrant blossom I caught among the smell of burning motor oil, I found no peace in nature. The encounter with Mother lingered, leaving an acrid aftertaste. I negotiated the straight flat streets as if I were being pulled along by an outside power, like reluctant electricity drawn through a circuit.

Virginia was waiting when I got there, arms folded, leaning against her car. I was cheered by the sight of her expressive face. She had selected navy blue slacks in place of her camouflage. The fabric clung tightly to her flesh, showing the sleek promise of her curves. I felt underdressed since I had on a twice-worn red flannel shirt and blue jeans hardened with overuse. But she was wearing her brazen leather jacket and her usual arrogant pout, so I decided maybe not much had changed.

She grinned at me. I don't know if I was openly ogling her or if my mind was away, back in the hellhole of Mother's apartment. I caught myself and adopted my role as the Poet, putting on my subliminal smile. Even without giving my face over to the people in the Bone House, I had learned to fake it.

I pulled my car up beside hers. We got in her Mitsubishi and looked across the handbrake at each other.

"Where to now?" she asked, leaning back and stiff-arming the wheel like a race-car driver.

"Let's just get out of here," I said.

I was replaying the scene with Mother in my head, and I had to let that episode fade to gray before I could relax. I stared through the windshield as we went across the parking lot and down the black ribbon of asphalt. Virginia must have thought I was being reflective, thinking deep poetic thoughts. End the line with whatever rhymes with “fake.”

She hadn't lied about her craving for speed, because as soon as we hit the long stretches of road that were lined with nothing but cornfield and flood ditch, she bottomed out the gas pedal. We were doing over a hundred miles an hour, a black bullet shot from an aimless gun, hurtling through the Iowa evening. I looked out the passenger-side window and everything was a green blur, and farther out was the fixed point of the horizon, as if we were at rest and the Earth revolving under us at an insane speed. At any moment, the world would lose its integrity, disintegrate into pieces, and gravity would fail, flinging us into the vast emptiness of space.

Air, its peace broken and cleaved, roared angrily beneath and around the car. The engine whirred at a frantic pitch, pistons protesting the extreme stress. The tires were making contact with the road only as an afterthought. My body unconsciously braced for a crash, but my mind was unmoved, an impartial observer.

I looked at Virginia, and her face was clenched, her eyes perhaps seeing beyond the highway. Seeing and desiring. The tip of her tongue poked out of the corner of her mouth and her eyes shone like motor oil in a mud puddle, iridescent and madly beautiful. I could tell she wasn't showing off. She was simply showing .

Maybe our lives are defined by specific moments. Perhaps we each have a photograph hanging in some vast hall in an afterworld, our essence captured for eternity. If so, that was Virginia's snapshot, hunched in ecstasy, mocking mortality, straddling the dividing line and ready to roll either way, into death or further life. But if that was her photograph, some dismal cosmic curator had to shuffle down the hall and replace it, because of what happened later.

I was pushed back against my seat by the invisible hand of inertia. My senses were heightened by danger, the primitive fight-or-flight syndrome. Nervous sweat collected in my armpits and along my scalp line. I could smell cinnamon from the gum wrappers in the ashtray, even over the chemical odor of the vinyl upholstery. I could smell Virginia's hair, enriched by expensive shampoo and twice as potent as Hope Hill’s, and underneath that, the stale honey of her feminine skin. I could feel dirt under my fingernails and microscopic lice tilling the dust of my flesh. The virginal stubble under my chin tingled. Bittersweet coppery death played in my mouth, frolicking around my teeth and tickling my tonsils, gaily tempting me to swallow.

We hit a small ridge in the road and became briefly airborne. The gyrating world had thrown us, finally giving us to the heavens. Six eternities passed, hundreds of stars consumed the gases of their own bellies and collapsed, galaxies pinwheeled in reverse until they were handfuls of nothingness, gods spilled their seed prematurely. Virginia gasped, her cheeks flushed from simultaneous orgasm with those gods. Then we touched down with a groan of metal and rubber, back among mortals, the Earth reconstituted.

Virginia eased off the pedal and we slowed to a speed that was merely unsafe. Her eyes widened as her system greedily produced and devoured adrenalin. We crossed a bridge that spanned a small creek, our slipstream rattling the rusty "Caution" sign as we passed. The silvery waters underneath swept on to the Mississippi Delta, unimpressed.

Virginia looked at me to see if I was afraid. I wasn’t there. I had been replaced. Mister Milktoast was in my driver’s seat, protecting me. These little pretend games of death were antique hat to him. After surviving boots, these were tiddlywinks and jacks, played in safe sunshine.

"That was fun, wasn't it?" she said, her sultry voice pitched higher in her excitement.

"That's what I like," Mister Milktoast said, stifling a mock yawn. "Going nowhere backwards."

"Well, I'm a good driver. I might become an Indy car racer someday."

"What about your career as a biologist?"

"You can only go so far. After you get to the bone, there's nothing left.” She took one hand from the wheel to casually brush back a strand of yellow hair.

"I'm not so sure. They say beauty's only skin deep, but who really knows?"

"And what do you think?"

"About beauty or about your career?"

"Beauty. What does a poet know about anything else?"

"Okay. Beauty is like pornography. I know it when I see it."

"Have you seen it?"

"Beauty or pornography?"

She laughed and said, "I guess you can see both at the same time. But I meant beauty."

"I see it now, with new eyes." Mister Milktoast loved the sly little play on words. I was the only one in on the joke.

She glanced at me, still giddy from the rush of danger. She slowed further and began looking around at the scenery. We were twenty miles from town, far from the familiar stomping grounds of our lives, but our lives were relentless pursuers. We had briefly escaped, but had now been tracked down and recaptured.

Mister Milktoast gave back my body. Maybe he figured I’d be needing it.

"I'll live on a farm someday," she said.

"You don't sound so enthusiastic about it."

"It's so peaceful out here in the country."

"There's no place for a negative girl. These hands weren't made to hang laundry and shuck corn," I said, reaching over and touching her hand, running my fingers over the pad of her thumb, then holding.

We rode in silence, looking out of our steel and glass bubble like two goldfish, gaping at a world we could never enter. Checkerboards of farms spread out in the distance and the sun was beginning to set, throwing mystical orange light over the land. Silos stood in silhouette, mute witnesses to years both fat and lean. Barns sagged, spine-weary from the constant weight of hay. Dots of brown cattle grazed with enthusiasm, unknowingly speeding their fate. At farmhouse dinner tables, rough-handed men were having plates of steaming biscuits passed to them. Through this lonely country we rolled, silent observers of a land that had no use for the likes of us.

This land owned people. These flat brown fields tied people down like scarecrows. More than seed was planted here. People were planted, too, their roots gripping the soil with feverish, bone-worn desperation. Generations had scratched in this dirt, facing withering drought and suffocating snow with equanimity, reaping their harvests of pain and misery. These were not our people.

I realized at that moment that I had to leave. Graduation was only six weeks away. All I had here was Mother and her bizarre self-torture, the punishment for my past sin that had spilled onto her, indelibly staining both our lives. And, briefly, I had Virginia. I looked over at her.

"What are you doing after you graduate?" she asked, as if she had read my mind.

Her tongue had slipped back out and then in, like a snake poking out of its den to check the weather. Her high cheeks were pink with joy. Her ocean-blue eyes twinkled, mermaid's eyes, as if she knew of secret underwater places. I fell into those eyes, swam in their crisp waters, bathed myself clean.

"I don't know yet. Maybe go to college, but not right away. What about you?"

"You mean after my racing career is over?" She laughed and snapped on the radio, music by Kansas or Boston or one of those other bands irrevocably tied to their geography.

"I guess that will keep you busy, but I suspect you're going to need more than speed to be happy."

"Well, you have family here, don't you?"

Family. Mother, the matron saint of bourbon. Father, long dead, but not nearly long enough. Mister Milktoast, who would never leave me. Little Hitler, who would never let me leave him.

"No," I said, unable to explain. "There's nothing for me here."

"Are you already giving up on us, before we've even started?"

"I didn't know there was an 'us.' I thought you drove me out here in the country to scare me to death, then leave my body in a ditch by the side of the road."

"No, that's only the guys I don't like."

"Which is most of them?"

"Check the ditches."

"Okay, I'm not giving up," I said.

"I've given up. I surrender."

"To me?" I knew my romantic style was lame, but given my role models, it could have been worse.

"Well, to everything. You know back there, when we going a hundred and ten? I do that at least twice a week. And you know what?"

The mirth had left her voice, and her words were weak with melancholy. I wasn't sure if she was trying to shock me or impress me.

"What?"

"Every single time, this whole spring, I've wanted to turn the wheel and go into the ditch. To tumble and roll until there wasn't enough left of me to fill a Dixie cup."

A hush fell over the car, weighty as a boulder, and even the tinny rock music couldn’t squelch it.

"Why?" I said, my voice a whisper.

"Because. I have everything I want. All the money I could ever spend. I've got a perfect sit-com family. Dad plays golf and Mom's the president of the PTA. Both on the goddamned school board, for Christ’s sake. They keep telling me what a bright future I have ahead of me. But I'm fucking miserable."

I said nothing.

“ What would you do if you had everything you ever wanted?” she said.

I started to say, “Get laid a lot,” but that wasn’t the kind of thing you bring up when you’re trying to get laid. Plus, considering the way I lost my virginity, it wasn’t a subject I wanted to broach.

She continued. "Tonight, I was going to take you with me. Get you out here and then wreck us, turn us both into chopped liver. And I almost did it, too. And I don't even know why."

A moment of dead silence. Something fell off a shelf in the Bone House.

"What stopped you?" I finally asked.

"Because it wouldn't be fair. I want to die, I want to go into the hellfire the minister always threatened me with. I deserve it. But I don't want to go alone. I'm afraid to go alone. Isn’t that lame?"

Some dead president once said there was nothing to fear but fear itself. He died anyway, and he killed a lot of people on his way to the grave. So fuck that. Be afraid.

"Why do you want to die?" I finally asked, because there were no other words.

"How could I make you understand, Richard? You're weird, but a normal kind of weird. I'm so screwed up all the time, and I don't have anybody to talk to. I just want to get out of this life, away from the goddamn voices ."

"Voices?" I swallowed my heart. It tasted like licorice.

"Nobody can understand. Not even you."

"You can talk to me. I'm your Poet, remember?"

"You're probably just like the others, just want to get between my legs for a little horizontal hoedown, then throw me aside like a cum rag. Why the hell did I think you were any different?"

Tears squeezed out of the corners of her eyes, the water of her blue seas spilling hotly down her cheeks. Women and their tears. And they wondered why men took advantage of them. She pulled over to the side of the deserted road and pressed her forehead against the steering wheel. The radio shifted into something with a bass line that sounded like a march into the sea.

After a second that seemed a year, I touched her hair gently and leaned close. What a couple we made, Romeo and Juliet gone insane, huddled in a dark car in the Iowa twilight. Crickets fiddled among the cornrows; otherwise, nothing interrupted the starry silence but noise that drifted from a distant antenna.

We were two souls reaching out to each other across a great gulf, tenuously connecting over a pit of despair and loneliness and bleak imagery. Virginia with her death wish and false bravado, and me with my headful of little friends and a thirst for whatever liquid I could squeeze from the moon. The odds would have been greatly against us no matter the circumstances. As it was, we had no chance.

Maybe we should have died together. A fitting end to nothing. But somebody had other plans.

"Tell me about the voices," I said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

"You'll think I'm crazy," Virginia said, between soft sobs.

"This world makes people crazy. It's a survival mechanism." I scooted closer to her.

I was disoriented, as if this intimacy was beyond me, as if it were another doing the touching and I was an alien butterfly emerging from a black cocoon, fluttering madly toward the light.

Virginia's tears had stopped, but I could see the streaks on her face in the lunar glow. Her features were shrouded in darkness except the glint of her eyes. But as I looked at her, it was as if I were peering down a long dark hall, removed from the world of sight and sound. The one looking through my eyes was hard and cold, the one who moved my arms toward her was not me.

I had felt this way before, on that long ago night that I did not want to remember. I could only watch, horrified yet fascinated, as this new thing, this part of me, this hidden self tried on my flesh as it were a thrift shop suit. It liked the fit and gray was always in style.

"I hear voices in my head, Richard." Virginia's words echoed from across a dead universe, bits of broken sound. The thing that was me and not me nodded at her in the dark. "I hear them all the time. I can't make them shut up."

"We all hear voices, Virginia.” His voice was a shadow of mine, his tone soothing yet flat, almost mechanical. “Some people just don't listen. Those are the crazy ones, don't you think?"

Whose words did he say? Mine, or his own? You’d think after all this time I’d have figured it out, but I’m still reluctant to choose sides until I know who wins.

Virginia was startled into silence.

"What do your voices say?" we asked.

Chirping crickets. Stupid, four-on-the-floor FM classic rock turned low. Her breathing, fast and shallow. A rustling breeze among cornstalks. The hooting of an unseen owl. The ticking of the cooling motor.

"You believe me?" she asked.

"Why would you lie?"

"To get what I want."

"What do you want?"

"Everything and nothing. Attention. To be loved. Isn't that what we all want?"

"Aren't you loved? You have a family."

"Sure. Daddy loved me, all right. So hard it hurt. Since I was seven."

What was she telling me?

Not that. Not her? Inside my Bone House, I was horrified, repulsed at the depravities that humans could inflict on their own flesh and blood. Incestuous perversion, the kind of thing that makes you clamp your hands over your eyes but spread your fingers for just the tiniest peek.

But this Loverboy-thing, the fresh me, he was juiced. He smelled pain the way a predator senses weakness in the prey. He savored the aroma. "You mean..."

"Yeah." Her voice fell, the air made fragile. "I didn't know what he was doing, not until later. But by then, I couldn't stop him. But even the first time, I knew it was wrong somehow. Maybe it was the way he kept calling it 'our little secret.'"

Secrets. You’d think we’d all learn. Instead, we keep trusting. We keep on crossing our hearts and hoping to die.

Loverboy's comforting hands searched, found her, held her in the dark.

"I thought it was the way all daddies loved their little girls. The bastard."

"Did you ever tell anyone?" I hoped she hadn’t.

"My mom, once. I told her Daddy was touching me in ways that made me feel strange. She said Daddy was just showing his love. She didn't want to know. She had garden clubs and church bazaars, appointments at the hairdresser, hospital fundraisers, local politics and stuff. She didn't want to be bothered with family problems.

"At first, it was just once in a while, so far apart that I almost forgot about it. I guess it probably happened more than I remember, because sometimes I would come back to myself, as if I had been away. I'd be hurting down there and sticky, and I felt dizzy, like I'd been spinning too fast on a merry-go-round. And I'd see Daddy later, and he wouldn't look me in the eye. That's when I knew that we were doing a bad thing."

" He was doing a bad thing. You weren't to blame." I couldn’t tell if that was me saying it, or if Loverboy was trying a sensitive route into her flesh. Maybe there was no difference.

"He gave me ice cream, after."

Ice cream. The moon had risen higher, a sick white smile among the leering stars. Virginia was a black silhouette against the weak blanket of light outside the car. I could see the quiescent angles of her profile now, her lips parted, words waiting in her mouth.

"It's the little girl's voice that talks to me the most. She's always afraid. She doesn't want me to talk to people. She wants to play dolls."

"Is she talking to you now?" Loverboy moved closer, until he could feel the stirring of her breath. I was helpless, watching this monster inside me stripmine her past, extracting nightmarish ore. Or maybe I was riding the coal car.

Her voice became childish, sing-songy. "No. She goes away when men are around. She thinks men are bad."

Headlights glared on the horizon, disembodied white eyes that grew in size as they approached. In their light, I saw Virginia's face. The dark circles of shadows around her eyes made her look like a cornered animal. Her skin was almost translucent, and for a fleeting moment, I was afraid she was going to slip from under my hands, turn to mist, and join the nightfog that hovered over the ground outside. But they weren't my hands, they were Loverboy's, and he wasn't ready to let go.

The headlights swept onto us, flooding us in their searing brilliance. It was a battered pickup truck, the kind that every farmer in the country drove. It slowed a little as it passed. Perhaps the driver thought we had car trouble, that we had broken down here miles from anywhere. We were stranded, all right, but on a road from which there could be no rescue. The truck's tail lights brightened as the driver touched the brakes, and then the lights winked and hurried off into the distance, red eyes that marked the evil twin of the white eyes.

Leaving us to ourselves. All of our selves.

"And there's a tough girl, older," Virginia said, her voice going deep and coarse. "She started when I was fourteen, when I finally started fighting back. She calls herself 'the Bitch.'

"She stole this jacket off a barstool. She likes to make me go to biker bars and strip joints, dangerous places, so she can show what a badass she is. She gets me to drink until I black out. She's got me to shoot heroin, too. Huddled me down in a fucking alley in Des Moines littered with winos and big rats, kneeling in puddles of stale piss and gutter trash with a rubber tube around my arm. Some faceless dick with rotten breath melts down the shit in a spoon, with a couple of us strangers gathered round like cavemen at the first fire.

"Then the dick, the voodoo-man, sticks the shiny tip of a needle in the liquid and draws it up, and I hold out my arm and he slides it in, a hundred bucks a hit, and it's warm gold, it's blue wax, it's a fucking lime-yellow cloud that changes into a horse with wings, floats down and carries me away. And I'm sweat and death and God and goddamned. And the bitch likes it, maybe she even lets the voodoo-man fuck her, maybe any of the strangers, too. But it's me lying there helpless, me with my back on wet newspapers and rags while they take turns.

"Then they're gone, and it's just me, staring at the faraway streetlights, collecting my bones and putting them back together, fumbling for my clothes in the dark, getting up and walking back to the world I had flown out of. But you know what?"

The night and Loverboy both waited for her to answer her own question.

"The Bitch thought she was escaping. That out there, there would be no fucking problems. But it's only a bigger prison. It only goes so far. Well, fuck it all anyway."

The edge left her voice and she sounded weary, defeated. "There's enough of me left to stay away long enough to not get hooked. Part of me worries that I'll get AIDS, that maybe the Bitch wants me to get AIDS. But that's not so bad. AIDS is normal. AIDS kills you safely. It's the other things I worry about."

She paused. The silent dark was like a smooth onyx cliff face on which we were both grappling for purchase. Only I didn’t control my own fingers.

"Like wanting to kill people," she said matter-of-factly. "Now do you think I'm crazy?"

I wasn't one to judge. I had real blood, hot and red, on my hands. Not theoretical blood in some faraway future. And I had liked it. No, no, no, that had been Little Hitler. Or Mother. Anybody but me.

I finally spoke, surprised I still had voice. "You said you had wanted to kill us in a car crash. But you didn't. You don't really even want to kill yourself."

"Sure, I don't. But I'm weak, and I'm getting weaker. The Bitch has her way with me more and more often. And this new one. It really scares me."

"New one?"

"It came with the Bitch, but it doesn't do much. It just hangs around in the back of my head. But once in a while, it whispers . Nasty things. And it's bad. It wants to make me hurt people."

Her voice had become the child's again, then just as quickly shifted back. I thought of Mrs. Ball, the high school counselor, and how she’d tried to trick me with Freudian horseshit. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar, but sometimes it was a banana. Loverboy preferred the banana.

"Hey, I know about Sybil, multiple personality disorder, and all that,” she said. “I thought about going to a shrink. But what good would that do? What could I say? 'Hey, Doc, I got too many birds in the lighthouse. Give me some ice cream and let's fuck.'"

She laughed bitterly. "I know I'd end up in a rubber room somewhere, wasted on a dozen different tranquilizers, half the time pounding my head against the wall, the other half sucking my thumb and staring off into space. Hell, the Bitch might even like that. And the little girl, at least she'd be safe. But this other voice, it wouldn't like that at all. It says it has plans for me."

"Plans?"

"Its voice is cold, like it's been dead a long time, trapped under ice water. Why am I telling you this? I knew you wouldn't understand."

How could I tell her about my Little People, the residents of the Bone House, a personal commune of confusion where no one ever did the laundry? I knew the courage it took for her to bare her soul like this, to expose herself to my scorn and ridicule. I was aware of the trust she was placing in me, the tiny crystal snowflake of her sanity she was exposing. But I could say nothing. Loverboy was feeding on her vulnerability, growing stronger. He took my mouth.

Besides, anybody dumb enough to trust deserves whatever they get. You just lose all respect for them.

"I understand," Loverboy said, and drew closer to her in the dark. "It's okay to be different. I like you for who you are."

"Who the fuck am I?"

"You're Virginia. Don't ever forget that. No matter what else, you've got yourself, even if the whole world is screwed up. And I'll be here for you."

"Aren't you afraid of me? I just told you I wanted to kill you.

"But you didn't kill me. Or yourself. You want to live."

Loverboy held her with my arms, smelling her tension, raw and metallic. My strange Loverboy voice was soothing and artificial, a baritone of betrayal. "I'll help you, Virginia."

"Richard..."

"Shh. It's going to be okay."

I pressed my face against her cheek, there under the distant Midwestern moon. Outside the car, among the corn and sparse forest that surrounded us, night creatures scurried for food or shelter in an unending circle of death, mocked by the laughing wind. Miles away, people huddled in front of the blue campfires of television sets, frantic from having too much time and burdened with having to spend it all. Back in Ottaqua, Mother was probably passed out face down in her own filth.

Virginia and I were alone. We were on an island beset by inky oceans, and the darkness extended into the heavens and beyond, behind the curtain of stars and galactic debris it had thrown up for illusion's sake. The true darkness that was behind everything.

My lips met the delicate shell of her ear.

"Daddy wants sugar," Loverboy whispered.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"What?" the chick said.

Why the fuck did I say that? I'd better be careful, or I won't be peeling the old banana tonight. No monkey business. And, thanks, Richard, for letting me be the first-person, present-tense narrator here, because, let’s face it, you know how to write but you couldn’t fuck your way out of a soggy Hilton sister. Leave that part to me. "Uh—I said I wanted to kiss you."

"I like you, Richard, maybe even love you, but right now I'm so screwed up, I can't trust my feelings. After all I've told you, I can't believe you haven't jumped out of the car and run into the cornfields."

Richard? Oh, yeah, what's-his-face, the one who went away. I feel him back there somewhere, watching from the dark. Such a spaghetti dick. Let him stay back there. Let's see, what would he say next?

"Hey, Virginia, it'll be all right." And it'll be even more all right when I get into those hot little pants, girl. Come on, give it up to the man. Let Loverboy rock you. Hey, don't push my hand away. You know you want it.

"I don't know. I'm just so confused right now. I'm not even sure why I wanted to go out with you. Maybe I sensed you weren't like the others, that maybe you'd listen instead of going for an easy lay. Because I've never told anybody else about this. I just feel so naked right now, like all the layers of my soul have been stripped away. I'm afraid."

Yeah, easy lay, naked, riding bareback, that's the idea here. Take it all off, baby, uh-huh, strip those reservations right now and quit pretending to act vulnerable. Because first we have to go through this fucked-up game where I have to pretend to give a damn. But, hey, the end justifies the means. And your end is pretty fucking worthy of justification, babe.

So think, think, think. "There's nothing to be afraid of. I won't let anything hurt you."

"That's fine for out here, in the real world. But what about in my head? Are you going to go in there and protect me?"

"Trust me." Yeah. “Trust,” that’s what that limp-wristed Richard would say. Now I'll just reach out here ever so slowly for your knee—what's this? Oh, the goddamned gearshift. Whoever invented foreign cars didn’t know shit about getting laid.

Ah, there, nice, soft skin. Well, pants, anyway, but I can feel the heat underneath. I can get them off in time, no problemo , my man. Just be easy right now. I don't care if the old six-inch submarine's ready to plow through dry dock and go deep. Patience is the key. Time it just right, and I'll do more skindiving than Jacques-fucking-Costeau.

"I want to trust somebody, Richard. I just don't want to be alone."

"I won't let you be alone, Virginia. I like being close to you, I like spending time with you. I don't care what kind of problems you have, I know we can work them out." Maybe you and that Richard-fuck back there can. Just let me have what I want and you can have that codpopper all to yourself. The two of you can sit and talk about relationships over coffee and whole-wheat bagels tomorrow morning. Maybe he'll even get you to buy. But I need some tonight . I need a bite of that sweet honey bun.

"I know you wouldn't hurt me on purpose, but the way things are, you're bound to get tired of me after a while."

Hey, turn off the waterworks, baby. Damn. I thought I was making progress. I wish that "bitch" would come out, the one she said liked to get laid. She'd be on her back right now, with those big buttery bagel thighs spread open and—hell, I better work with what I've got. She'll like it if I brush her tears away. Yeah, she'll think I'm sensitive . "Hey, I won't get tired of you. I'm just now getting to know you. And I like what I see so far."

Ah, there we go. Her skin's so soft. She's got fine curves. Breasts like—think romantically, now, be creative, damn it—breasts like firm loaves of fresh-baked pumpernickel. Hmm, a little weak. I guess Cheese Crotch is the poet, not me.

"Promise you won't ever hate me?"

Hate you? Hell, no, I'm a lover, sweetmeat, and now that you've got me on this pastry kick, I want to lick the frosting right off your little love doughnut. Come on, Richie, feed me some fucking one-liners here. I’m doing this for both of us. "Hate you? How could anybody ever hate you?"

"Daddy must have."

Dear old Daddy. Broke it in early, huh? Well, don't hold that shit against me . On second thought, hold it against me. All of it, until it squishes. “He's got his own problems. The important thing is to remember that it's not your fault."

"Richard, you're so nice to me."

Yeah, but nice won't drill you. You need it hard and hot, make you feel like a real woman, make you feel whole again. Yeah, a hole, that's right, you're a hole, waiting to be filled. And I've got the John Deere front-end loader right here to do the job. And old Richie-wuss back there can watch. See how a real Bob the Builder operates. "I just want you to feel like it's okay to be different. I like you the way you are."

"Even with my voices?"

Voices? What a bunch of crap. Everybody's got voices, don't they? Look at old Richie here. But he's not saying anything, is he? Cat must have his tongue. And this little pussycat here is going to have my tongue. "The Virginia I know is warm, friendly, and human, with a great sense of humor. She's special, and she makes me feel good. She wears fashionable fish-hearts."

"Oh, Richard."

Hey. Laughter. That's good. Get away from that sentimental, morbid stuff and get her relaxed. Now, if I can just—yeah, there we go. These damned bucket seats weren't made for the old boybone bootscoot, that's for sure. And this bulky leather jacket of hers, that's a pain to work through. Hey, she may be into leather, but I want to get her out of leather.

Loverboy, you're a fucking riot, even if I do say so myself, and there’s nobody around to shut me up. Right, Richie? Man, her hair smells good. And her breath on my neck. Yeah, that tingles, all the way down to there . "You know something?"

"What?"

"I've been admiring you for a long time. Remember all those times you caught me looking at you in Biology class?" Yeah, Richie, I was there, even if you didn't know it. I'm a sneaky little bastard.

"Of course I caught you. You were sitting there all bug-eyed with your tongue hanging out, looking like one of those pickled-assed bullfrogs we cut up. But lots of guys look at me like that."

"Well, I was imagining that you were a great sculpture, maybe a Greek goddess fashioned in creamy marble, placed high on a hill where all the citizens could pay tribute. Because such beauty deserves to be worshipped." Hey, that was pretty good. And she's laughing again. She's flattered. She's probably heard a thousand come-on lines, but nothing like this. Let's work this angle a little. You're on a roll, Loverboy.

"Richard, where do you come up with this stuff?"

I wonder that myself. "And the beauty without is only a pale shadow of the beauty within."

Heh, this poetic horseshit works. Richie never would have thought of anything like this. Goddamn, I'm good. Now, let me get close to those lips again. Maybe this time I'll get a little sugar for the soul. Yeah, closer, closer, she's not backing away, yes, yes , YES .

"Mmmmm. Richard."

Soft, tasty lips. She's murmuring now, practically purring. Loverboy, she's putty in your hands, wet dough, roll her, feel her biscuity shapes, yeah, go down her back a little, not too fast...there, she's willing, she's getting there. Okay...

Goddammit, what the hell? Here comes a damn car. Out here in the middle of fucking nowhere in the dead of night and some cornfed yokel's got to hoof it down the only road in this Godforsaken corner of the county. I'd better ease off a little so they don't think somebody's getting raped or something.

Shit.

They didn't even slow down. Probably thought we were a couple of homicidal maniacs out for a night's hunt, just waiting for some fuckwit to stop. Crazy old world these days. Now, back to business. Ah, she's nice and toasty, nothing like cuddling on a chilly spring night like this. That's good, just play around the lips a little, I think she's ready for me to slip her a little tongue, yeah, open up just a little. Whoa, she's not buying it. Man, she's one long slow drink. Damn.

"Richard?"

"What, honey?" Is calling her "honey" being too forward? But hey, she's the one who asked me out tonight. She's the one who drove me out to the asshole-end of Iowa and pulled over in Deadsville. She must have at least suspected I'd want to slip her the old sesame stick. And she must have wanted it a little bit herself. We could have fucking talked back in the Ottaqua Waffle Shop. Damn, there I go with the food again. I must be hungry. But man don’t get bred by bread alone. Heh, heh.

Wait, that was Mister Milktoast, that other little squishy dude hanging back there with Richie. He needs to just shut his ass up if he knows what’s good for him.

"I don't think we're ready for this."

Not ready for this? Hell, your yeast is rising. That oven's not going to get any warmer. And I've got the rolling pin right here in my pants. "Not ready for this? But it feels so natural."

"I laid my heart out for you, all my secrets. And I really do appreciate you listening. And caring. But I still feel as if I hardly know you."

What's there to know? I've got a long hard French loaf with your name on it. Don't make it complicated. Who cares if old Richie-kins went away, the one you like so much? I look the same, wear the same clothes, I've got his brown hair and goddamned myopic eyes. Even this voice is the same, though it's a little too squeaky for a stud like me. Much as I hate it, our dicks are the same size. I must admit, though, I'm just a little bit harder than Richie could ever be. And besides, I thought all us swinging dicks were just alike to you chicks. "What you see is what you get. I'm not that hard to figure out. So I'm a little bit weird on the outside, but inside, I'm just like everybody else."

Except for those other fucking runts scrabbling around back there with Richard. Like they’d ever get any action without me.

"But I don't want you to be like everybody else, Richard."

Crap. Now we're back to this sensitivity bit. This is getting me nowhere. Going in fucking circles. And the old heat-seeking missile's about ready for lift-off. "I'm your Poet. And you're my Negative Girl. But that doesn't mean you have to say 'no' to everything."

"I'm not saying 'no,' I'm just saying 'not yet.'"

Easy, now. Thin ice here. The old conundrum, that Mars and Venus thing. She’s talking “relationship” while I’m talking a few squirts between friends. She's about to get pissed off, and that will virtually guarantee no biscuit-making tonight. But she still hasn't pushed my hands away. Think, Loverboy. If you're really the world's greatest, then you can turn this little situation around. Wonder what that little fuckwit Richie would say to her? Hey, Rich, you back there? What are you doing, diddling yourself in the dark? Help me out here. I'm your pal.

What? You serious?

Damn, that's brilliant . You're a genius, Richie, even if you're a pathetic loser. Why didn't I think of that? Probably because my balls are the size of Mississippi watermelons. Hang in there, my hairy friends, relief may be in sight. Let me play the card I've got up my sleeve, the ace in the hole that may get the ace in the hole. "I love you, Virginia."

Let it sink in, give it a chance to shiver through her body, down there to the inner workings. Down there where it matters. Ah, she just now sighed. Bingo, my man. Let's sauce the old noodle, let's do the doggie dance, let's wrap the Maypole, let's wax the tadpole, let's get ready to fucking rumble .

"I'm not ready."

What the fuck?

"I know you probably think you mean it. But I have to be sure."

Sure? I know the moonlight's pathetic, but damn, girl, you ought to be able to sense the bulge in my crotch. It's twitching like a caged weasel, and it's all because of you. Here, let me unzip, let the weasel go “pop,” cut to the fucking chase.

"Richard? What are you doing?"

What does it look like? Now you're putting on the virgin act? It's not like you've never seen one before. Go on, touch it, it won't bite you. Much.

"Richard, stop it."

Goddamn, she's trying to claw my fucking eyes out. Where'd those damned glasses go?

"You son of a bitch."

“ I love you.” Hammer it home and maybe you’ll nail her yet.

“ You don’t do that to people you love.”

Love. Christ in a crème brulee.

Well, you blew this one big-time, Loverboy. You could probably go ahead and take her, but hell, getting there's half the fun. And you're a lover, not a fighter. Let her save it for a fucking rainy day. Probably wants to keep it all in the family anyway. And it's not like I won't have other chances. Hear that, Richie-fuck? I'll be back .

Right now, I'm going back to my room, way back there away from this crazy bitch. What a waste. Well, let her have the Mini Meat if she's so worked up about him. I don't want to be around anyway when these blue balls start aching.

She's all yours, Richie, my man.

Thanks for sharing.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

We drove home in silence. Virginia had been nearly physically raped, I had been totally mentally raped. There was no speeding on the road back to Ottaqua, no joyous headlong rushing into the hot jaws of oblivion, none of the wild velocities of the ride out. Only the sullen moon, hanging like a dead maggot in the night sky, tracking our motion. The two people who had set out as wide-eyed children on a great adventure wer returning beaten and broken, made ancient with misery.

I felt like a puppet with no hand inside. Spent, used, tossed aside. Somewhere in the complicated shadows, I was harboring Loverboy. And what was most horrible was the realization that I was responsible for him. That he had sprung full-blown from the demented crypts of my mind. That I had in some way fathered this monstrosity.

But when he came out, I was helpless. I was pushed back, locked away in the Bone House, where I could only watch, repelled yet fascinated. I could never have been that self-confident, that arrogant. Such stores of aggressiveness had been tapped only once before, in the darkest moment of my past, when Little Hitler had worn my flesh and committed patricide. Even Mister Milktoast, my comforter and pacifier, had dissipated before Loverboy's all-consuming ardor.

Worse, there was some part of me in Loverboy, some wedge of my own terrible salacity. I had shared his arousal, his desire to inflict his turgid sex upon Virginia. But I was sickened by his brutal disregard for her feelings. How could I comfort her after she had told so much, opened herself so completely, only, in her eyes, to have me turn into a cruel, venal beast?

We entered the crumbling, dimly lit outskirts of Ottaqua. The streets were deserted, as if we had come upon a ghost town that even the dead had abandoned. A scattering of cold empty buildings greeted us, their black windows watching like suspicious eyes. I tried my voice, afraid that it was not yet fully mine. "Virginia, what happened back there...I'd just like to try and explain."

"I thought everything was perfectly clear." Her voice was flat, tone-dead. Under the weak glare of the streetlights, I could see her blue eyes staring ahead, shimmering with tears she wouldn't let herself shed.

"I wasn't myself." As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I wanted to grab them and shove them back inside, to swallow them and choke on their bitterness.

"Yeah, sure. Let me guess. A little voice in your head made you do it. Now there's a real original idea." She was back behind her walls again, the walls of a complex castle that she must have built over the years to protect herself. She had opened the gate just a crack, on the slim hope that maybe the enemy outside the walls wasn't waiting to conquer her after all. And I had stormed inside, salted her courtyards, dismantled her turrets, put torch to the battlements of her trust.

No, I hadn't. Loverboy was the invader. Always someone else to blame.

"What I mean is...I'm sorry, Virginia."

"Don't be. At least you were honest. Showed me right up front where I stood with you. I guess I ought to at least thank you for not stringing me along."

She had risen to sarcasm. Maybe that was a sign of healing. A sole to heel , Mister Milktoast whispered. If you foot the bill.

"I know you're mad at me and probably disappointed,” I said. “But I hope you don't give up on us.”

"Us? It takes two to make an 'us,' and I thought there was only you . You and whatever you wanted."

"Please try and understand. I never wanted to hurt you."

"Understanding is just one of your little word games to get in my pants. I'll bet you were laughing on the inside the whole time. God, what a fool I was to even think somebody cared. And that word ‘love’..."

Her tears broke loose, found fresh paths down her smooth round cheeks. She turned the car into the parking lot where I had left my Valiant. She stopped and we sat without speaking.

A distant siren wailed, a punctuation mark on the desolate night. "I guess there's nothing else to say," she said, finally.

There’s sackcloth in your closet , Mister Milktoast whispered. And ashes in your hearth.

"I'll see you tomorrow,” I said, and The Poet groped for that one final stanza. “And, Virginia...I am sorry."

If only I had known there was no tomorrow. Many times in the years after, I replayed that night, that parting, as if it were a decent Bogart film, and in my mind I tried a thousand different lines, a thousand different last chances. All films, like all memories, become scratched and worn, foggy with age. But the images fly past in the same sequence, over and over again, unchanged. In the end, there's only the words "The End."

“ The end is the chief thing of all,” Aristotle once wrote. And here I am, still in the middle. If heaven exists, and if I ever make it there, I’m going to find Aristotle, rip off his fucking robe, wrap it around his scrawny Greek neck, and squeeze until his eyeballs pop.

I got out and stood in the moist April air, watching her drive away. I walked numbly to my car. I stared at the lights over the football field, stared without blinking until my eyes burned, stared until my tears blurred the lights, making them into fat shiny stars.

I wondered why we had to live in a world where everything was somebody's fault. Somebody had to be sorry. Somebody had to be wrong. And somebody had to pay. Virginia. Mother. Father. Sally Bakken. Loverboy. Mister Milktoast. Little Hitler. All the people who had touched my life. Who had squeezed at it, picked at it until it was an open sore, raw and gangrenescent.

I burrowed under a pile of dirty clothes in the front seat of the Valiant, trying to worm myself into sleep. The soft velvet curtain of slumber teased me, gamboling around the edges of my consciousness. But when I reached for it to wrap myself in its black-fibered folds, it danced away, leaving me with the hot electric currents of my thoughts. Finally, the thoughts fractured into nonsense and scurried into the corners of my consciousness, and the curtains of the Bone House drew closed.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Surrounded by a mist backlit and imbued with fluorescent shades of lavender, aqua, and chromium yellow, the colors of madness shimmering in an obscene parody of a rainbow. Formless, weightless. A brighter but unwholesome radiance, flickering among the malchromatic ribbons, summoning. I must go there.

Discordant music, a haunting melody turned inside out, the sound of shadows made merry, ominous droning bass at the threshold of reason underlying lilting notes played on impossible instruments, scherzo chaos in the wings, brazen bridges leaping unjustly to piercing heights of altissimo, invisible strings vibrating at random, all rising to an impotent crescendo.

The radiance swells, hovers, absorbs, a bloated luminescence. Among its ethereal wisps, a shape. Monolithic, primitive matter. Changing. Weaving itself from amorphous threads. A chimera taking human form. Virginia.

She comes to me, swathed only in elegant vapor, crossing the insubstantial landscape. Her arms upturned, yielding, inviting. Face glowing with rapture, eyes glittering specks, ashen hair fluttering in the directionless wind. Approaching without motion.

Her skin is effervescent, writhing as if unseen creatures are wriggling underneath and animating her flesh. Her mouth opens, an impossible black cavern between the twitching arc of her lips. Inside, things darker than black flit and slither, entwining in a sinuous coalition that becomes her tongue.

She is close now, leaning, and I cannot run. My legs are fused to the unseen landscape. I am both stage prop and star in the drama.

Her hands reach for the side of my face, fingers splayed in mocking tenderness. Her fingers caress me, crawl lightly over my cheeks like lithesome snakes. Her touch is ice, frozen, dead. Her wrists are gaping like her mouth, a red slit in each, and grotesque creatures are fluttering in there as well.

Her lips are on me, her breath putrid and foul, rich with decay. The elusive kiss is finally mine, given with feral and relentless passion. The black thing inside her mouth that is masquerading as her tongue enters me, probes me, squirms in violent intercourse. The tart acid of tomb dust violates my taste buds. I feel a small hot ember of desire in my soul, a desire beyond flesh, a yearning deeper than lust and earthly sin.

Please, no, but oh, yes, don't...stop...don't...don't stop.

Her trout-skin tongue ejaculates cold and vile fluids, darkness made substance, flooding me with glaciers, and I welcome the penetration, I shatter and become whole.

I am aloof, blissful, as Virginia withdraws. The glitter of her eyes fades, their crazed illumination dying like sunken suns. Her flesh unwraps itself, and she is absorbed into the swirling iridescence. She is etherealizing, her limbs and then her torso merging with the mist. Last to dissolve is her eyes, which hover for a thick, fleeting eternity. The onyx dots of her pupils expand into the blue irises and then over into the milky white sclera. Her eyes become black orbs, dead stars, then nothing, only a coiling tendril of darkness that wends into the uncoordinated bands of rainbows and then disappears.

I lunge into the mist, chasing her, I fight the colors that have become solid and play over my skin, embracing me, binding me, choking me...

I awoke in a cold sweat. The old clothes that served as my blankets were tangled around my arms. My journey through a brief stream-of-pompousness interlude to denote a dream sequence was a little clumsy, but I crawled onto the shores of consciousness all the same.

I opened my eyes, saw the incomplete darkness that was only night. I saw electrical light and stars through the windshield that were only radiant energy. I saw the fog of my breath that was only water vapor. I saw that I had flesh that was only flesh. My throat burned with infection. My head pounded as if my skulltop had lifted like a roof in a hurricane and had been nailed back into place by a hundred hammers.

I closed my eyes again, searching for a place between sleep and dream, beyond the insane reach of either. Somehow the night passed.

The next morning, I went to school. It was a mechanical act, as if I were too numb to make decisions. I was a robot, programmed to routine. The dream followed me like a bad case of Mexican-food gas.

I searched the halls for Virginia, needing to talk to her before classes started. Perhaps the damage wasn't irreparable, and if I could explain myself in the light of day, my behavior wouldn't seem so horrible. I desperately looked for her face among the crowd, afraid she would be too ashamed or disgusted to come to school that morning. My classmates seemed to be evading me even more than usual, as if this were the day I might be packing a semiautomatic.

Brickman stepped out of the gabbling masses, Brickman the peddler who sold oregano joints to the freshmen.

"What's up, Coldiron?" he said, slapping me on the back so heartily it hurt. A few of his dull moronic friends gathered around, friends he had bought with stolen beer and porn magazines. "Surprised to see you here today."

"What do you care?"

"Hey, is that any way to talk to a friend?"

"I don't have any money, so there's no use threatening to beat me up."

The attention was unusual. I had a reputation for being a loner, for being so unpredictable and perhaps dangerous that I escaped harassment. There were easier pickings walking the gray and scuffed tiles of the school corridors. What could I have that Brickman and his gap-toothed disciples wanted?

"I'm here to help you, man."

"Fuck off."

A silence fell as the gang waited to see how Brickman would respond to the challenge. He warmed to the spotlight and swelled his chest a little. "I was just offering my comfort in this time of sorrow."

"Sorrow? What the hell are you talking about?"

"Your hot lady friend. The one you been hangin' around with."

"What?" Had she told him, confided in this monster somehow? Impossible.

"Haven't you heard?" His pimply face broke into a black grin. I wanted to drive my fist into his vacuous mouth.

"Heard what?" I said.

"She killed herself last night."

Time stopped as his words hung in the air, words that dripped with glee. My heart stopped as well, caught between beats.

Brickman's voice came from somewhere far away. "Slashed her wrists, man. Painted the town red. Fucked herself up but good ."

Even through the veil that was dropping between me and the real world, a gray gauze that both swaddled and bound, I understood what Brickman wanted. Not money. Money was all around, money could be taken. Brickman wanted what he and his ilk treasured above all else. The currency of pain.

I elbowed him in the stomach and broke through the crowd, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of my tears.

He shouted after me as I ran down the hall. "Hey, man, I fucked her twice ."

His greasy pack of jackals howled with laughter as I burst through the doors, the sound swelling to a roar that filled my ears and compressed my skull, crushed me to charcoal.

When awareness returned, I was in the Valiant, driving toward the horizon, racing into the sun. I glanced in the rear-view mirror and Ottaqua was shrinking, its decrepit and rundown buildings becoming golden stubble on the landscape. It had never looked so beautiful as it did while disappearing.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, looked at the person that had lived my life. I looked behind my glasses into the dirt-brown weeping eyes that looked then beyond themselves into invisible faces. Faces that laughed and cried and mocked and smirked and stared back with black determination. The ones inside my head who had no intention of being left behind.

The Bone House grew wheels and the Little People were along for the ride.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I thought only of Virginia as the states whirred past under my frantic tires. I had driven across the flat prairies of Illinois and Indiana, each mile of straight ribbon highway the same as the one before, with only the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers to mark my progress. I slid through the soft hills of Kentucky while the sun set like a fat orange dime dropping into the slot of a broken pay phone. In the darkness, the Appalachian Mountains guided me up and on, as if in on some cosmic joke and anxious to see the punch line. Shady Valley, North Carolina, opened its crusty eyes in the morning to find that I had perched on its shoulder like a weary nightbird.

Under the new dawn, I drove through the narrow streets of Shady Valley, past the silent sleeping brick and the small dirt squares of garden. Tops of dormitories sparkled through the dewy oaks. I was too young to remember Westridge University from my first and only visit, but I had read of it. Old wooden houses with creekstone bases huddled near the road, their outbuildings camping under brown-blossomed apple trees. I wondered if one of those tired lonely houses had been Granddad's.

My eyes were puffy from a night of peering at the sweeping broom-edge of the headlights. The Valiant groaned, its pistons sick of thin oil and its joints creaky with automotive arthritis. I pulled behind an abandoned gas station, wrapped my head in dirty shirts, and slept. No dreams or inner voices rang their tinny bells.

I lived there for weeks, sleeping in my car, with only an ashtray full of coins keeping me from starvation while I tried to figure out my next step. Suicide was an option, of course, but maybe I wanted to hang around to finish my life and start this book. Sometimes you don’t know the reason for things. Some clowns say you have to let God take control, but fuck that fucker. Any sonofabitch who’d let a man rape his own little girl had no control and sure as hell didn’t deserve to meet me before I was ready to bitchslap Him back to the Book of Genesis. This called for spiritual cross-training, more forging by fire, beating soul plows into swords.

I found a bookstore called the Paper Paradise down on the main highway. I began spending my days there, drinking free coffee and haunting the aisles, finding comfort in the borrowed imaginations of books the way I had done as a child. I believe that was where Bookworm was born, squirming into the light of my consciousness, as I turned those pages and met Jung and Freud, Dante and Homer, Mohammed and Buddha.

Bookworm could have been there all along. It is horrible to not even know your own mind. But maybe none of us do, and that’s why we share these stories, even though half of everything is bullshit. We never know which half, and it keeps changing on us, so all we can do is keep searching and guessing and turning the page. Pray that you don’t get a paper cut.

I was holding a hardback copy of Herman Hesse's Siddhartha when the woman I came to know as Miss Billingsly came up behind me. I had seen her at the counter often enough to know she was the storeowner, and I tried to stay out of her sight as much as possible. Too bad I couldn’t be as invisible as my Bone House roommates.

"I see you know how to treat a book," she said, in her firmly gentle voice. I turned and she was looking at me over the top of her glasses. "You don't stretch it wide open and break the spine like most people do."

She had a sharp Roman nose and the iron-gray patches in her dark hair gave her a stern aspect, which was part of the reason that I avoided her. She pushed her cat-eye glasses up the steep slope of her nose. She was in constant battle with the glasses. They skied down her nose, cutting a slow slalom on her skin, then stopped at the slight bulb at the end of the run. They perched precariously there before leaping into space when she tilted her head. The glasses landed safely on her drooping bosom, dangling from a gold chain.

"I would never harm a book," I said. Only people , Little Hitler whispered, especially the ones I tried to love . I was afraid she was about to order me out of the store, exile me from my only refuge.

"I've seen you in here almost every day for three weeks. But I've never seen you buy anything."

I shrugged. "It's not because I don't want to."

"You're not a student, are you? When they come in to buy books, they have a list and a grimace, as if they've been sent to cut a hickory switch that's going to be used on their bare hind ends."

I was too uncertain to laugh, wondering where this was leading. "No, but I might go back to school someday. I just moved here."

She put her glasses back on. They instantly slid an inch down her nose. She peered over them like a school marm. "Where from?" she asked, hands on her hips.

"Iowa." Also known to me as Purgatory, The Seventh Stage of Hell, Auschwitz, the Badlands, that little room where you pee in a cup for a cancer test.

"A Midwesterner, huh? Did you start suffering from agoraphobia?"

If only I had such mundane fears. The truth? I killed my father, I'm working on killing my mother, I drove my first true love to kill herself, and the people in my head won't let me commit suicide. Other than that, I heard the scenery here was nice.

"Shady Valley seemed like a peaceful place to move to," I said. "My grandfather lived here once."

"I can see you love books. I tell you what, I need somebody to work here during the day. I've had a stream of students working for me, but they're always going off on vacations without giving notice. I'd like to have somebody who knows a little about books and has the time to spare. And you surely can't have a job, as much time as you're spending here."

I looked down at the floor, avoiding her schoolmarm gaze.

She continued, "That wasn't meant to be an insult. I'm offering you a job. A mutually beneficial relationship, I hope."

"But you don't know anything about me."

"What's there to know? If you can run a cash register, I don't care if you're the devil's keeper. Besides," she said, pointing at my mug, "if I'm going to keep you in coffee, I may as well get some work out of you. So, are you interested, Mr.—?"

"Richard Hitler. I mean Coldiron. Richard Coldiron, ma'am."

"Let me get the forms for you to sign, then I'll give you the official orientation." She cocked one of her sienna eyes. "Unless you have other plans for the day..."

"I was going to be here anyway."

I managed a weak smile, or maybe it was Mister Milktoast or even the new one, Bookworm. She pushed her glasses up her nose again and went into the storeroom. I started working at the Paper Paradise that day, though I did have to write my goddamned birth date on the job application. I lied about it, of course.

I worked there for four years, saved enough money to buy a small house and settle down to something resembling a routine. A lot of other stuff happened, some of it probably important, but don’t you hate it when you’re right in the middle of a good story and the author veers off into some meaningless masturbation? Sometimes you have to hit the fast-forward button. Any scars from that period are still scars, and the highlights will probably become important later on. I’ll let you know if any of it turns out to matter. Trust me.

Though I made my home in the North Carolina mountains, Iowa may as well be in my front yard, it's so much a part of my daily existence. The terrain is different; here, granite has been squeezed up from the Earth's crust and coated with dark alluvial soil, instead of being bulldozed flat by ancient glaciers and paved with red clay. But rain and snow still fall from the same sky, and the same sun still burns holes through the clouds.

When those clouds are blown by a hard northwestern wind and make shadows on the ground, I sometimes see faces in the mountains, fleeting black ghosts. If only the dead would stay dead, did not fly that way across the stands of ash and poplar, did not flit over the stunted, acid-raped balsams at the highest peaks that are ghosts themselves, perhaps my escape would have been successful. But those dead always move on, lance me with memories and then head to the Atlantic. It's the other ghosts that truly haunt, the other ghosts that linger and which no winds touch. Those without faces or else wearing my own.

I had hoped that here in these time-worn Appalachian mountains, I could lose myself among the rocks and streams, duck into the vast laurel thickets where the light never reaches. I could become loam, lie down and rot with the brown leaves, find noble purpose as food for grubs. Then perhaps my soul could emerge, cleansed of sins, to cavort with woodsprites and squirrels.

But nature and that bastard God, in their sadistic wisdom, have overblessed me with the gift of life. Instead of one soul for which to beg forgiveness, I get a congregation. But their sins are not their own, because they spill over onto me. And I can’t be sure if there is a part of me that motivates them, that has forced them to share my darkness, that has nourished them with possessive poison.

The sun reached through the windows of my house all day and the trees provided enough of a border that the lot seemed larger than half an acre. My neighbors kept to themselves, waved politely while mowing their lawns or hanging birdhouses from birch limbs. We were strangers, keeping our secrets as carefully as fences, in separate worlds only yards apart.

I wrote to Mother after I settled down, more out of guilt than a son's love. What did I hope to hear? That she had joined Alcoholics Anonymous and rededicated her life to Christ? That she had peddled the rights to her life story to be used in a made-for-TV movie? That somehow the drinking had permanently blacked out the past, so we could again safely be family?

I received an occasional rough-cornered postcard, featuring Mother's bleary scrawl, asking me to come home because she was getting lonely. Three times I sat in my packed car in my driveway, with several free days ahead, time enough for the drive to Iowa. Each time, I reached for the key and froze. I had escaped those memories, or at least put time and distance between them, and there I was, about to drive straight down a one-way street to a bone-littered tar pit.

I could hear myself as she opened the door.

"You're looking real good, Mother." Despite the roadmap of broken blood vessels on your face, despite your watery red eyes, despite your mottled skin that you insist on exposing far too intimately.

"No, really, the years have been kind to you." Kind enough to bring you closer to a restful grave and farther from the past.

"You haven't changed a bit." You're still drinking two pints a day and your breath is still rancid and you still don't look a day over a hundred and ten.

"It can be just like the old days." Except I don't have another father and you don't have a husband to dance with, because the medical examiner most definitely did not bury him with his boots on. If the dead someday rise up and walk, that's one corpse that will be barefoot.

"I'm so excited about the future." Because one day you will fall face-first in your own vomit and the flies will lay eggs in your eyes and at last I can be able to say "I love you" again. And my own time will expire, my own clock will wind down, and these little people in the Bone House will jump ship like a pack of wharf rats, leaving me finally and forever alone.

"Oh, yes, and the reason I hate you is because you heaped shit on me, guilt with one hand and love with the other. Because you apologized for your state of chronic denial. Because you fucking forgave me, when you should have nailed me to a dirty dogwood."

And after I envisioned this loathsome reunion, my hand dropped from the key and I unpacked the car and I got on with a life that would never end too soon. And I could write her a letter, telling her how the frost makes the grass sparkle magically and how the mountains have souls and the creek beds sing here and the wind bends the pines like green sails, telling her a thousand things about the world that swirls on around me. But I never, ever dared show anything of myself, of the son she raised who might or might not have emotions or tears or triumphs, who may or may not remember childhood's dreadful rites of passage, rites surely not meant to end in human sacrifice.

And I could never write how I hated Father, not merely because of the years of fearing his boots, not merely because he happened to die, not merely because he died by my hand or her hand or Little Hitler’s hand, but because we only killed him once instead of inflicting the thousand deaths he deserved.

And I could never thank her for protecting me, for enduring the taunts and whispers and accusations that followed her trial, for unselfishly throwing herself on the spears and daggers of public opinion. Because if we had been found out and stopped then, perhaps others might have been spared.

And I could never forgive her for trying to love me as no mother should love her son, even though surely there was room for forgiveness in my vampire heart. And, though her motives for loving may have been pure, the road of good intentions is paved with broken glass and the clabbered milk of kindness and maybe some shitty asphalt.

So I wrote instead of the slick-furred groundhog who lived under the barn up the road, of the backyard blue jays that battled in a flurry of soft feathers over mating rights, of the moles that cut endless random symbols in the soil, of the dying oak tree whose limbs were blue-gray with weary age. I wrote of Arlie Wesson and his tentacled astronauts, Martha Billingsly's hair done in a beehive that sagged like a sack of wet raccoons, Denny Moody's pickup truck with the deer antlers sticking out each side of the cab, Brittany's freshest tattoo, D.J. Uncle Daddy's latest obnoxious morning show jingle on the local AM station.

And I always came to the part where I had to write "Love, Richard," and each time I wrote a lie, folded the paper, and licked the strip of glue, sealed it not with a kiss but with mere saliva for a woman who could not know the meaning of a word she had never heard.

And I placed the letters in the mailbox, raised the red steel flag, and went back inside, my guilt assuaged for mother-writing but not for everything else. I could have happily grown old fooling myself, fooling everyone, pretending to believe in picnics and sunshine, yellow butterflies and flowering forsythia, Dick Clark and Froot Loops.

But if I hit fast-forward on the rest of my life, then I wouldn’t have much to write about. And, to be perfectly honest for a change, I’m afraid of what will happen if I ever finish this story. Maybe you’re the person who is making all this seem real. Without you, I really am alone.

So let’s see together, so neither of us has to be too afraid.

Because then came Beth, sweet Beth, true love Beth, the woman of my dreams, the kitten of my ka-boodle, who sent my heart kiting skyward to hell.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I met Beth at the gallery in the Westridge University Student Union. I went to art shows there to knock the dust off my brain, so I could at least watch how the rest of the human race played the existence game, even if I had to stay on the sidelines. Besides, Mister Milktoast liked the pretty colors.

The featured works that week were done by a graduate student who labored under the self-applied label of "postfuturism." The label was a handy excuse to combine the flat cubes of Picasso with the sensual serenity of Gauguin without bothering to master a disciplined style. The canvases swam with broadly applied pastels in uncoordinated bands of mauve, peach, and salmon.

I stood before a "landscape," six feet high by eight feet wide, as if the artist were proving true the old saying that size matters. On this surface, which strained to crush not three dimensions into two, but two dimensions into one, the artist had sopped on a background of oils thinned with mineral spirits so that every weave of the canvas showed through. Then, in a remarkable tribute to Brueghel, the artist had scattered a pollution of thick dark oil blots, which were scratched outwards in the impression of a hundred starry stick figures. To add insult to injury, a few daubs a la Van Gogh littered the lower right corner of the painting. As an afterthought, three or four collections of green dots, too obviously gouged by the wooden tip of the brush, hinted at trees. A dozen painters were rolling over in their graves, entire Flemish cemeteries were in turmoil.

I read the card beneath the painting: "In this work, entitled 'Landscape, Inner View,' I explored the imbalance between symmetry and the actual chaos underlying the most basic forms. What is a square but four lines? What is a cube but twelve lines? What is a circle but one line connected to itself? These principles, applied to nature and given color, make up the world we see. But when stripped bare, we see the world as it actually is, lineless, vague, and transient. Sale Price, $1,975."

I was chuckling to myself when my elbow was bumped. I looked beside me to see a young woman with a canvas backpack under her arms, taking notes in a pocket composition book. She studied the painting as if there were actually something to see, then wrote in the notebook, her jaw clenched in concentration.

She wore a too-round brown felt hat with a floppy brim, and her hair stuck out underneath like straws of toasted amber. She had thick, earnest eyelashes and her eyebrows were poised on her forehead as if they were frozen in a constant inquisitive stare. Her mouth was a red primrose, dewy and delicate. Her cream-colored wool sweater was rolled up at the sleeves, setting off the healthy tan of her skin. Loverboy twitched but I battened down his hatches.

She spoke without looking at me. "What's so funny?"

There were other people in the gallery, but we were alone in this corner, twin victims of the garish painting. Its ugliness shone like a painful light.

"Just admiring the coming wave of great art in America," I said. Or maybe I was mouthing a mix of Bookworm’s intellectual aloofness and Loverboy’s smart-assed seduction.

"And you find it funny?" She bent over her notes.

"Well, I must give it points for sheer brass."

"Brass? I don't see that color." Her nose wrinkled prettily as she looked at the painting. Little Hitler wanted to slap her, Loverboy wanted to…do that thing Loverboy did.

"'Color is mere absence of non-color,'" I said with mock gravity, perhaps quoting some great painter. It should have been a famous quote, if it wasn't. I'd have to ask Mister Milktoast later.

"If it's non-color, then you can see it even when it's not there," she said mock-seriously, then looked into my eyes. I drank greedily of the dark rings of her irises, green rings flecked with gold that glittered like sapphires in a seedbed. My face, our face, must have been too hard, too stern and uninviting, because she looked down.

Her bright lips curved into a tiny moue , the primrose folding up as if touched by winter’s first snow. Her cheekbones were high and finely sculpted by fingers far more feathery than those of Michelangelo. Her eyelashes fluttered like dark quick moths as she gazed at the floor.

"You're not the artist, are you?" I asked, suddenly too much aware again of my own brutal insensitivity. And of those inside my head, who might burst out at any moment like lunatic extras from an old Bette Davis movie.

"No, but I'm a friend of the artist. I'm taking notes for a class. I'm going to write a paper on her work."

I looked at the canvas, saw a black "x" scrawled in one corner. "She's a minimalist when it comes to signatures," I said, pointing.

"That's short for Xandria, which is short for Alexandria. Pretty cool, isn't it?"

"She's an American original, even down to leaving the price tag on the canvas and painting right over it."

"That's her statement that materialism ultimately pervades all artistic endeavors." She smiled, perhaps playing me like a sport fish that had a barbed hook in its mouth. I liked what the smile did to her face. I hadn't known many smiles. Loverboy leaped from the dark waters like a trout on a line but I reeled him back into the Bone House.

"So, what do you see in this thing? I mean, between the lines, of course," I said. I was enjoying playing the critic, even if I didn't own a black turtleneck or rakishly cocked beret, or even a blog for that matter. I had stewed in my own soiled juices too long, wearing isolation as insulation. I had been on a few dates since I'd been in Shady Valley, and had a few casual acquaintances sprinkled among the bookstore regulars whom I sometimes joined for lunch. But not enough contact to feel connected to the human race. Going to the movies or library or art shows were my sole escapes from my own unpleasant company.

But you know what they say: wherever you go, there you are. And there they are.

Just being close enough to smell the faint soap on her skin was as invigorating as standing under a silver waterfall. Sally’s bubble-gum breath, Hope Hill’s hair, Virginia’s leather jacket, Mother’s bourbon, all the feminine scents I’d come to know where subsumed by this new Bethness. I tried to think of mindless banter, to dredge up thoughts from some pool of wit, anything to keep the music of her voice filling my ears. Or maybe it was Loverboy, now jittering in my chest like a slam dancer on amphetamines.

Her voice played on. "See how these stick figures cower in insignificance against the sweeping vista of nature? That portrays the futility of human endeavor as well as the artist's own realization of the futility of her own work. The artist's failings are displayed proudly, almost flagrantly, yet not without a certain humility."

"Ah, self-flagellation is flaunting the obvious. And these color schemes that look like they were lifted from the interior of a 1950's diner?" I asked.

"Reality as fabrication, an artificially colored environment, nature as plastic plants and wax fruit."

"Did the artist tell you all of this?"

She hugged her notebook to the attractive curve of her chest and looked from the painting to me. "I'm working on a Masters in Art Theory. I can do this kind of stuff in my sleep."

With thoughts like that, who could ever sleep? "So you take this stuff seriously."

"Everybody's a critic. Most do it for free, but I'm going to do it for a living. Or else teach paste-eating first graders how to cut construction paper."

"Are you an artist yourself?"

"I've done my time, a few miles of charcoal scrawls and a dozen pounds of zinc-plate etching, but you know the saying about 'Those who can't, teach'?" She smiled again, forming cute lines at the corners of her mouth. Real lines, not Xandria's invisible ones. "What about you?"

"Me? An artist?"

My art was casting myself in misery as if it were bronze. Looking in the mirror as a self-portrait of the artist as satire, the artist as mud-eyed madman, the artist as inside joke. My life's work was a study in flesh, its cravings and pains, splashed in crimson on the canvas of the past. My masterpiece to date was a Father-carving, done in material so much more unforgiving of error than granite or wood.

"No, I'm no artist. Just another unpaid critic, I guess."

"So, do you want to meet the artist?"

"The mind behind the masterpiece? Certainly."

"The mouth behind the mind is now in the house."

The artist and her entourage entered through the gallery's double doors. The artist was a tall umber-skinned woman with a wide forehead and dark, piercing eyes. Her hair was corn-rowed tightly against her head, and a half-dozen earrings jutted from her left ear. She wore white coveralls, the better to show the multicolored stains that proclaimed her an artist: watery turquoises, weak lavenders, and poignant grays. She walked with an air of regal arrogance, an African empress.

At her sides, crowding her like cryptic bookends, were two teenaged twin boys dressed entirely in black. They both were gaunt and wore too much makeup. The one on the left had a bright red scarf tightened around his scrawny neck and his eye shadow made him look like a malnourished raccoon. The right bookend had a bad complexion that was threatening to erupt under his mask of whiteface. I could almost hear their bones rattle as they walked.

"Hi, Beth," the artist said, stepping toward us. The twins hung in the shadows, as if the spotlights over the paintings might turn them to dust. Xandria didn't seem overjoyed to see either Beth or me. She acted as if she was rarely overjoyed about anything. "Come to the show, I see."

"I said I would. Looks like you've got an audience," Beth said, nodding at the people at the other end of the gallery. "And groupies," she added, lowering her voice and glancing toward the twins.

"Them boys don't know much about grouping. Most of their action is with each other," Xandria said. "And who are you, white boy?"

"I'm Richard," I said, extending my hand. She looked at it as if it were a drop of blood. Beth looked away, back at the painting, the hideous "Landscape, Inner View."

"You a critic?" Xandria asked.

"No, just an art admirer."

"Well, what you think?"

"The truth?"

"Hey, man, this ain't no wine-and-cheese affair here. I hang these pieces of shit on the wall and put whatever ridiculous price on 'em that I feel like at the time. Last year, some blue-haired bitch from Charlotte came up for an exhibit, and the next thing I knew I was a 'discovery,' what she called in the newspaper 'a contemporary genius, a master of Zulu urban angst.' Before that, I was just a painter, now I got to have attitude . I got to be a nigger. I got to be an oppressed bitch. Plus I got to put up with your cookie-dunkin’ horseshit, too?"

Beth was laughing behind her hand.

"Hey, girl. Is this here your friend?" Xandria said, pointing at me.

She shrugged. "I just met him myself. He really likes your work."

I was caught off guard, but Mister Milktoast worked the pulleys and wires so that I nodded in response.

"Well, get in line, home fry, and ketchup. You're going to write me up nice in that paper of yours, ain't you, Beth? Say I cussed and shit?"

"Yeah. Richard's helping me. He's already given me some fresh insight. What was it you were saying, Richard? Something about 'an American original'? And something about pretension?" Just hearing Beth say my name was a sweet note, even with the sarcasm.

"Oh, Lord, do I got pretension ?" Xandria drew back in mock horror. She dropped her street accent, which apparently had belonged to a stage character—something to which I could relate. "Put that in the paper, Beth. Your supercilious friend just might get you an 'A' if you listen to him. Now, pardon moi , because I see some suits down there at the other end who look like trust-fund liberals who just can't go home without 'a street-wise rendering by an African-American visionary.' Politically correct guilt keeps me in mineral spirits and Chardonnay and Virginia Slims."

"Xandria, you're nuts," Beth said.

"'Nuts' sells, girl. And Richard—it's a real pleasure to meet you. And you're in the game. Maybe I'll get you to write the little placards for my next show. And I might even lay off the asshole artist persona next time.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. Ciao, mon amie ."

Xandria brought her hand up near her chin and fluttered a wave of good-bye. Then she adjusted her "artist's face," stuck out her lower lip and narrowed her eyes, and slouched over to meet the adoring masses. Her bookends followed ten feet behind, as if searching for crumbs she might drop.

Beth put away her notebook. "I could say some bullshit about life imitating art, but that's been done to death. I suppose this is where I say 'So long, it was nice to meet you.'"

"And we turn and walk away, and maybe you look back and maybe you don't,” I said. “And maybe we run into each other somewhere along the line, at the next great art show. Maybe one of us will be a nude model."

She looked at me, her face clear and wide and fearless. "You talk crazy. Like you’re writing a book. And maybe you'll remember my name."

"Beth."

"Except maybe we never meet again, and someday you'll take your wife and kids to the park, and you'll look out over the landscape, inner view, or maybe up at a cloud and see some invisible lines. Then you'll remember me, maybe even see my face in your mind, the features fuzzy and out of place, in the wrong proportions but close enough. And you'll think to yourself, 'I wonder whatever happened to what’s-her-name.'"

"Beth." I laughed, strange music in my head.

"Or maybe you go on the rest of your life and never think of me again."

"Or maybe I do think of you. Or maybe we don’t meet until the next life or two."

The crowd at the end of the gallery may as well have been a thousand miles away. I felt as if I were on an island with no one else but Beth. I don't know why I felt so comfortable with her. Maybe it was Mister Milktoast oozing his harmless charm. Or maybe it was that black thing that flickered sometimes in my head like a serpent's tongue. Maybe somebody in the Bone House kitchen was playing with the chemicals again.

"I don't play 'what if.' Would you like to join me for a cup of coffee?" she asked.

My heart froze and my breath stalled in my lungs. The Bone House shook with the jumping of my inmates. No, this wasn't Virginia or Sally Bakken or Mother. Did every woman have to measure up or down to such stained ideals? Did every woman have to be either an angel bitch or virgin whore or a way to get a dollar’s worth of candy or make the bedsprings squeak? And this was just an afternoon cup of coffee, not a commingling of souls or a remake of “Romeo and Juliet” or another chapter in my autobiography.

"Sure," I said, flashing a smile that felt so brittle I thought my face might break. I wondered who would wear my boots into this new territory. More importantly, who would wear my face?

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

We talked away the September afternoon, drinking organic Sumatran at a round concrete table outside the Student Union. The surrounding brick buildings housed enough knowledge to ensure no second-guessing or doubts. Leaves skittered and scratched across the concrete patio, whisked by the autumn wind into piles that served as mass graves. The wind also carried Styrofoam cups and half-finished homework assignments across the university compound, where the worn grass had given way to mud. The black bones of tree branches lay on the ground, broken by the frosty nights.

Beth's cheeks were pinked by the wind. She put her hat in her lap to keep it from flying away. Strands of her golden-brown hair kept blowing across her face, and she brushed them back with an impatient hand. She told me of her family back in Philadelphia, how she had come to the mountains as an escape, to get away from the crime and traffic and the press of skyscrapers and the crush of crowds.

"But I'm worried that my career as a critic will force me back to the city," she said.

"If you want to study fish, you have to go underwater. If you want to study artists, you have to go underground," I said. Of course, all my exposure to art came from books or the occasional small show. But I was good at pretending, and a little generosity never killed anyone.

"Where the wild things are. That's where it's happening. But it's the critics who make the art, not vice versa. We're like the remoras who hook themselves onto the shark and suck until we're fatter than what we're feeding on."

A wisp of steam rose from her cup, curled in on itself for a moment, then climbed the wind and disappeared.

"You don't have a very optimistic view of your future career."

"I inflate illusions. I play the art game, but I play to win."

I had to hold my nearly empty cup to keep it from blowing away. Classes were changing, and students swarmed from the brick buildings like disturbed ants from an overturned log, except ants didn’t carry books. Beth stood up and took a final gulp of her coffee.

"I have a class. Nice talking to you, Richard. See you around, huh? For real."

"What if?"

"If I don't?"

She threw her backpack over her shoulder, her body swimming with grace at the movement. I swallowed the stone in my throat that must have been my heart. Not that I knew what a heart felt like, but I’d eaten many stones.

"Say, have you read Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word ?" I asked, trying to steal another moment of her attention, one more gaze from those jeweled eyes. In retrospect, maybe it was all Bookworm’s doing. All he had was words.

"No, but I've heard of it."

"It's a must read for critics, even amateurs like me. You can borrow my copy if you'd like."

She smiled, flashing the neat, white fencerows of her teeth. "Does that mean I have to give you my phone number?"

"I suppose so. Though, again, my intentions are purely honorable."

"Boring. Remember, no 'what ifs.'"

“ Okay, how about this one? You know how a preying mantis eats the head off the male after mating?”

Her eyes narrowed. Cute. “Yeah?”

“ What happens when she masturbates?”

“ Hmm. Wakes up to find she’s slept with Franz Kafka?”

Good enough. She’d passed the audition.

She gave me her number and I watched her walk away until I could only see the top of her hat, held down by one slim hand, the brim flapping in the wind. Then she disappeared into the crowd.

Mister Milktoast approved.

"She has a nice hat, for a female," he said, from his fussily neat closet in the Bone House. "I don't think she'll hurt you. Not like Sally and those others."

“ You never can tell, though,” I thought, in answer. By then, I was usually smart enough to keep my mouth shut when talking to the voices in my head.

"Ah, but better to have loved and lost than to lose without getting a game piece." Mister Milktoast was fond of his distorted little aphorisms, but he would have failed miserably as a romance columnist.

"It's not love, only a chance meeting."

"Don't give me that. I can feel your heart pounding like a rain of frogs on a tin roof. It's my heart, too, remember?"

"I can fool myself, but I can never fool you, can I?"

"To thine own selves be true."

"Now just who the hell would that be, Mister M? Me? You? Or them ?"

I sat on the cold concrete bench under the deep blue sky, looking at the feathery fibers of clouds inch-worming toward the east. The smell of dried leaves, soil that would stay damp until spring, and smoke coiling from a distant chimney assaulted my nose. The sharp sound of heels on the sidewalk surrounded me, accompanied by scraps of conversation that melded into hubbub. A cross-town bus honked its horn. My fingers rubbed the pebbled surface of the Styrofoam cup, my face felt the kiss of wind, my mouth held the rich oily taste of coffee. In a world of sense, I was nonsense.

I was thinking about never being alone with my thoughts.

"No man is an I-land, but maybe a me-land," Mister Milktoast chimed in.

"No, but do I have to be a whole fucking archipelago ?"

"Yo, Roachtit, what are you bitching about now?" Loverboy had risen from his lusty dreams and walked down the Bone House stairs. He must have smelled meat, gotten a whiff of clean female skin, or maybe he dug the hat, too. "You finally bringing home some bacon? About time. My nuts are the size of onion rolls."

Mister Milktoast answered for me. "Now, Loverboy, there's more to a woman than her physical gifts."

"Oh, yeah, Fuckwheat? You can diddle yourself till the cows come home, talk about that emotional crap until you vomit, and that's fine for you. But, me, I got needs . And let me tell you something."

"Yes, my lascivious brother?"

"When I'm doing the synchronized snakedance, you can bet your sweet-boy ass you'll be watching."

Mister Milktoast made no answer. Loverboy retreated into the dark, triumphant.

"Love is a bed of roses, my friend, and you'll always suffer the pricks," Mister Milktoast said, then he, too, slipped off into the dark rooms of my mind, leaving me on the concrete bench, the cold flowing into me and filling me until I was as hard and fragile as an ice sculpture.

I awoke each morning during those next few weeks with Beth's name on my lips, trying to follow her back into my dissolving dreams, sure she had been in them. When I eventually mustered enough nerve to call her, she seemed pleased to hear from me. I was afraid she had been humoring me, tossing scraps of her attention to me the way a grudging retiree tosses breadcrumbs to a starving pigeon or a girl does when she thinks you might have a hunky friend she can meet later.

We talked daily after that, of art and its pretensions, of the weather, of bad novels, of the concrete ant-farm of Manhattan, and, when all else failed, of feminine politics. Bookworm came in handy then, popping up to talk about the latest browse in the Paper Paradise. I didn’t know him enough to trust his motives, but he sure knew how to pontificate. And he wasn’t even that boring.

Beth and I started going out together, sharing lunch or a walk or sometimes only time. She was easygoing and open, eager to share her work and her life and her dreams. I was a good listener. With all those voices in my head, I’d had lots of practice. I knew when to nod and when to shut up, which I’d learned was about all you needed to know in order to satisfy a woman’s desire for constant attention. Life imitates imitation.

For the first time since Virginia's death, I was goofy with attraction. I had been afraid that we each got only one shot at love in our lives, and I had destroyed mine through Loverboy's callousness. But now my heart was reawakening, my chest expanding with the helium of desire, blood puffing with St. Valentine’s poison.

On our fifth real date, after watching Hitchcock's “Strangers On a Train” at the campus theater, Beth wanted to come to my house for drinks. She was impressed that I owned a house. I suppose she was used to having a romantic rendezvous interrupted by the proverbial unwashed roommate, and I knew how that felt, though I lived alone. Since she didn't have a car, I drove her to my house, pulling into the driveway under the smoky skein of stars that made up the Milky Way.

As I opened the door, the Bone House door also opened, and I was afraid.

We stepped into my living room. Beth looked at the walls that were lined with bookshelves, and books were also stacked on the coffee table and on the floor beside the sofa and chairs. The lamp threw its cobwebbed light across the tan carpet. The room was made brown by the weight of its dull shadows. Beth didn't mention the absence of a television, something my infrequent visitors usually noticed instantly. I had all the channels I needed right inside my head.

"Nice place," she said. Pleasant. Goddamned pleasant and nothing more.

"Make yourself at home. There's the stereo, if you can get there through the mess."

I started a pot of tea and Beth put on an R.E.M. CD. She sat on the couch and sang along in a pure, pleasant voice. I brought her a glass of the Red Zinfandel that I had bought and stored in a closet in hopes of one day sharing with someone. Or maybe some genetic disposition had planted the bottle there, knowing all Coldirons eventually sought some form of escape, liquid or otherwise.

"Aren't you having any?" she asked.

"I don't drink much. But don't worry, I'm not holier-than-thou."

She has more holes than you , Mister Milktoast quipped.

"Shut up," I whispered back.

"What?"

"Tea makes me sneeze." I sniffed. It sounded enough like "Shut up" to get me off the hook.

"You’re quite a bookworm," she said, surveying the shelves.

Did she know? The truth was sometimes the best possible cover story. "Yes, among other things."

"So, Richard, tell me about those things."

"What you see is what you get." Except for my Little People, the Bone House, memories, my favorite candy, and the fact that everything she said would one day end up in a book.

"You told me you came from Iowa, but nothing about your parents or anything. You didn't walk full-grown out of the cornfields, did you? A sort of ‘Field of Nightmares’ or something?"

Guitars chimed from the stereo speakers in repetitious riffs. Michael Stipe was mumbling enigmatic vocals over the college-rock backbeat. My past was like Stipe's lyrics, best left murky and unknown, unless I could sell the book, in which case it all was on the table. Except that thing with my mother. "Well, my past is no big deal. I try to live for the moment."

"Don't get surly. I was just asking. Can't you at least tell me the good parts?"

The good parts?

"Parts is parts," said Loverboy, before I could stub him out like a cigarette.

"Huh? Where did that come from? Don't tell me you're an amateur actor, too?"

"Nope."

"But the way your voice just changed...and your expression..."

"My run-of-the-mill evil twin. But back to my past...the best part was moving up here and meeting you," I said, feeling Loverboy twitch in my brain like a frantic fetus kicking its mother's uterine walls.

"Flattery will get you everywhere. But I'm not that easily put off the trail. There's a secret to you, Richard. I'm not a babe in the woods. And I'm not easily scared off."

Babe , Loverboy said. See? They all know it. So, Booksquirt and Milk Dud, stop with all that 'respect' shit .

"My biggest secret is that I get a strange feeling every time I'm around you," I said, a little uneasy at Loverboy's stirrings. Was he going to crash the party, complete with lampshade hat, clown shoes, and a toilet seat around his neck, ready for a gloveless stranglehold?

"What sort of feeling? And don't say 'love,' because love is like God and UFOs, I'll believe it when I see it."

"The feeling you get when you eat your favorite candy."

Beth finished her wine. I reached out to take the glass, but she said, "I'll get it. Where's the bottle?"

"On the counter. Help yourself."

She stopped to look at my aquarium on her way to the kitchen. The yellow angelfish cut their mindless patterns through the water. "Peaceful in there," she said. "No worries."

“ None at all,” I said, voice trailing as I was dragged into the Bone House. My roommates were coming to life. The Little People were awakened by the storm of emotions rattling the eaves and they appeared to be rearranging the furniture.

They sensed my helplessness. They all came out at once, tripping each other as they rushed for the door and fought for dominance of my face.

"I like your woodwork," Beth called from the kitchen. It sounded as if she were across the universe.

Please stay in there , I thought at her, before I was free of thought. Then I became an observer, an innocent bystander who wasn't truly innocent, helpless witness to the actions of my own flesh. A blameless victim. I sort of liked that.

"I got some wood for you," Loverboy said.

She laughed. And she was back on the couch, the half-empty bottle in front of her, and I was close to her, breathing her, kissing her, drawing in her warmth. It must have been Loverboy's silver tongue that had first drawn her lips near and then plumbed the soft mysteries of her mouth. Her body was pliant and yielding under my hands, vibrant and alive, like a small wren or else a mammal wrapped in synthetic down.

But then it was me locked in this embrace. Then it was my passion swelling up in my chest and lower, driving blood through my veins in rapid gushes. Then it was my loneliness driving my hunger, my anguished years without human contact that now caused the ache in my trembling limbs. Then it was my taste buds relishing her wine-sweetened tongue.

“ My turn,” I whispered in her tender ear, and she had no idea what I was talking about.

And I was feeding on her, sucking her affection like a vampire drew blood, cold and needy and vanished with the dawn. I was a monster, a zombie pulled from a deep grave.

I should have stayed undead.

Because Loverboy enjoyed the rigor mortis in our pants.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Let’s pretend I was Bookworm.

Beth took my hand as I led her upstairs to my bedroom. The night hung around us in soft folds, dressing itself in darkness even as we shed each other's clothes. Our mouths joined, lost for words, lost for useless language, aching for real art. We shivered and incorporated.

Her skin was satin, and as our bodies came together among the blankets, the bottom of everything autumned away. My fingers flowed over her fine hair and the warm mounds of her flesh, lifting her to the high, unseen clouds as smoke from this burnt offering.

Our tongues danced like moist spirits, frolicked about the cemeteries of our lips, laughing without sound. A thick dew of passion rose on our skins and mingled. Our flesh gave and took and joined, softened like blistering wax and hardened like cold syrup. We leapt into pulsating oceans and climbed ashore clean with languid pleasure.

I know, I know, you want the sex, the blow-by-blow, clits and cocks, not poetic coyness.

You’re such a pervert. Though I’m laying my whole story out here, some things are none of your fucking business. Such as my fucking business.

I held her in my arms afterward, leaning against the pillows with her sweet animal scent on me. The starlight peeked through the window at her face, at her pale pink smile and the shining pools of her eyes.

"Thank you," I said.

"My pleasure , " she whispered, blowing her breath on the small part of my ear.

"I've never felt anything like that before." Pleasant. Fucking pleasant.

"You mean, you've never..."

"Well, let's just say I'm new at this game." Mother didn’t count, if indeed that ever happened, and I wouldn’t dare write it if it had.

She giggled, her chest vibrating under my embracing arm. "You acted like you knew what you were doing. Like it was part of a play or something. And you said you weren't an actor."

"Sometimes, it's all in the script," I said. They were there, waiting in the wings, leering down from the cheap seats, understudies plotting revolution. But I felt strong, revived and vigilant, and I kept them off the stage. This spotlight was mine , goddamn it, and I was going to enjoy it while it lasted.

"And what role are you playing, you kissable weirdo?"

"Othello without the guilt. Romeo without the fatalism. Hamlet without the paranoia."

"Or maybe just a bad actor working with good material?"

"You got it. Do you want me to feed you a line now?"

"No. I want you to make me feel. I want you to do things to me."

"Hey, that's what a bad actor does." Spiders skittered across my gut, bats flapped in the rafters of the Bone House. "Act badly."

"Well, maybe you need a rewrite. Because you've got just about the worst pillow talk I've ever heard. How come it took you so long to make a move on me?"

"I just wanted to be sure." Sure that you wouldn’t sell me down the river for a dollar’s worth of candy or make me cross my heart and hope to die.

"Oh, a sensitive modern guy? Or just afraid of rejection?"

"I've never been afraid of you."

"Should I be afraid of you , Richard?"

She snuggled her head onto my shoulder. Her hair spilled across my chest as soft as corn silks. I was reminded of the cornfields of Iowa, of my youth. I buried the memory like roadkill. Or maybe just kicked it in the ditch. "After that? I could never hurt you."

"Mmm. Says the Big Bad Wolf. You forget that I still don't know much about you.

Where you came from. Who you are."

"Maybe later. Maybe someday I can tell you."

I opened the coffin of my vampire heart, feeling something bright and broken and strange rising inside me. Then I realized what it was, and I shivered. It was hope, hope that life could be worth living after all, hope that there might actually be a someday. That maybe there was more to me than Little Hitler, Loverboy, Bookworm, and Mister Milktoast. That maybe Richard Allen Coldiron could have feelings after all.

And hope was pleasant. Very fucking pleasant.

I ran my hand over Beth's hair, over the curve of her ear, down the swell of her cheek. She squirmed a little, pressing closer against me. I wondered what she was thinking, what kinds of secrets she would never tell, what was hidden in her Bone House. From the briefly forgotten outside world came the sweet tang of fallen apples. A bit of moon had risen somewhere over the invisible horizon, making the room less gray.

"Well, what does the critic have to say about my performance?" Beth asked, her face turned to mine, her eyebrows making dark merry arcs.

I searched for and found her lips. "Thumbs definitely up." All ten of them .

"And other things 'up' as well."

I laughed, and the sound was swallowed by the walls. "Where do we go from here?"

"You mean, what happens next? Like the future, with a capital F?"

"Well, Act Two, anyway. Getting to know each other. Every story needs a middle."

Her body tensed under me. "Richard, I feel really good. Don't think I'm easy or anything, I just happen to like sex. And with you, I really like it. And I like spending time with you. But as for other things, we'll just have to see."

"But what if—"

"Shhh. No 'what ifs,' remember?"

"I can't help it, Beth. I think about you all the time. All day at the bookstore, I'm thinking of ways to see you, ways to be with you.”

"Don't think the L word, Richard. I've been hurt too many times with that word as the justification. I'm not being cold—because I'm really an eternal optimist—but I've learned to be careful."

"I told you I'd never do anything to hurt you, Beth."

"Neither would those others. But some things are beyond our control."

"Waiting doesn't always work. Sometimes, you don't get another chance."

"I'll take my chances, then. Good things are worth waiting for."

She was just like Virginia. Ready to give almost everything, wanting everything, taking it in her hands and holding it to her breast as if it were a hyperventilating dove. Then, just as it became tame and submissive and known, she would throw it into the sky to its unwanted freedom. She wanted everything just to give it all back.

But what did I know of love? All I knew was what love wasn't. I learned from my father and his boots, from Mother's strange bleary affections, from Sally Bakken's manipulation, from Virginia’s madness, from Mister Milktoast and his self-interested protections. Love was for other people, those who weren't haunted by the ghosts in their own head.

The hope that had fluttered in my chest wilted like black licorice on a sunroof. And the old doubts rose, tarry waves in a turbulent id . Then I was sinking, being pulled inside myself, into the place that had been a haven in my childhood but was now a stone prison. The house of the Little People. The house of hurt. The Bone House.

I reluctantly yielded my flesh and embraced my victimhood. Oh, always the victim, a last-place loser in the Blame Game.

"Absence makes the heart grow foundered," said Mister Milktoast.

"What do you mean by that?" Beth asked.

"I dig," said Loverboy. "Live for the moment and take it as it comes. Heh heh."

I screamed at Loverboy to leave Beth alone, shouted uselessly from behind the steel bars in my head, yelled down the dead corridors at the people who were taking turns with my body and the one who wanted to take a turn with hers.

I felt Beth kissing my neck, knowing it was Loverboy's kiss, his tingle under her salt saliva, his smirking satisfaction at my helpless distress, his hands that were cupping her perfect breasts. Not mine, never mine.

"I'm glad you understand, Richard," Beth said.

"Just don't say we can still be friends. Don’t put the honeypot on a shelf now that I’ve had a taste. Or some bread thing. Let’s see. Don’t plug your donut hole until I’ve licked off the powdered sugar."

She giggled, and it made her body shake. "I won't say it if you don't. Let's just see what happens."

"Whatever the bitch wants," whispered Little Hitler.

Oh, God. Had he escaped? I thought his room was locked and double bolted from the outside. I tried to warn Beth, but I was buried too deeply inside my own head. Extreme home makeover with a nail gun and duct tape. And the worst part was feeling that I was not alone, that something new lurked in the corners, something darker than dead shadows and colder than graveyard snow.

I watched Little Hitler lift the strands of her hair, golden under the starlight. He was imagining it a scalp.

"So soft, so soft," Mister Milktoast said, stealing my words, eager to try on her brown hat. "A cornsilk of the heavens, a tassel for angels. Hair hassle."

Beth laughed. "Where do you come up with this stuff?"

"Inside story. You know. Still waters run deep like mixed metaphors in the night, as a friend of mine would say. They used to call him ‘The Poet.’"

"You're a strange one, Mr. Coldiron. And maybe that's what I like about you."

"Not so strange," said Bookworm, and I was relieved, because Bookworm might save her from the others. He alone might afford some tenderness and compassion, even though he’d learned those qualities from works of fiction. Bookworm caressed Beth's shoulders, and through him, I could feel the burning of her skin, her blood hot from pleasure. At least I had given a gift of pleasure, however fleeting.

That's what you think , Loverboy called from the front porch. Those squeals were all Loverboy. While you were busy being pleasant, I was busy being busy.

“ That was me, you bastard,” I silently screamed.

Who do you think runs this little flesh factory, you or us?

No, I saw , I felt her, I tasted, smelled. I ran hands over her skin that was smooth as talcum. It was the drums of my heart that pounded across the jungle of night. It was my joy that rushed from my insides like an ice volcano. It was me, me, me .

"Richard?" Beth asked, collecting her breath.

"Hmm, Hostess Ho-Ho?" said Loverboy.

"You're being awfully quiet. What are you thinking about?"

"Just remembering."

"Remembering what? Are you finally going to tell me the great Coldiron secret, now that you've exposed me?"

"No secret, Dollface. Like I told you, what you see is what you get," Loverboy said.

"What about in the dark, when you can’t see anything?"

"Then you get whatever I give you."

Do her again , Little Hitler pleaded, anxious for proxy pleasure, hoping it would hurt.

Shut your piehole , Loverboy grunted. I didn't ask for an audience. Having Richard along is plenty enough company. Don’t need nobody else playing paddycake in my bakery.

"And what do you feel, Beth?" Loverboy said in his false husky voice.

"I feel something ." She laughed, her hands quick as hummingbirds.

Little Hitler was ecstatic, brought to his fullest life by someone else's passion and the unhappy ending sure to follow. Mister Milktoast and Bookworm fluttered like trapped birds against the glass windows of the Bone House. I watched alone, absorbing sensations through the filter of my Little People. And I felt my shadow behind me, floating up the back of my brain like a manta ray, black wings wide, swimming from some forbidden and forgotten abyss.

I knew instantly that it was somehow drawn by pain. My pain. Not Loverboy's tawdry diversions, not Little Hitler's sycophantic eavesdropping, not Mister Milktoast's polite but gossipy interest, not Bookworm's intellectual curiosity. Only my anguish and guilt from again being too weak to save the one I thought I loved.

Guilt for food, a feast of failure, victuals of victimhood.

And the shadow hungered.

Even Mister Milktoast noticed it, turning his attention from Beth's soft wet places.

Lo, what dark through yon window breaks? he asked me.

More worries, old friend, I said.

I'll protect us , Mister Milktoast said.

No. This isn't like it used to be. You can't just send me away, inside, the way you did when the boots came. Because, you see, I’m already inside .

And then Loverboy was inside, too, inside Beth, and the shadow dissolved, perhaps driven away by the bright wall of sensation. And silent bells rang through the night, invisible rockets cut their white arcs, velvet waterfalls ran their course, time swallowed its own ticking heart. But those things were not for me.

Act Two was all Loverboy, and he stole the show until the curtain fell.

The critics raved.

CHAPTER TWENTY

"Something smells good," Beth said.

She stood on the landing, my bathrobe held closed over her body with one delicate arm. I dared a glance at her face and she was smiling, her cheeks faintly pinked. So she didn't know.

But how could she know? Loverboy looked just like me.

"How do you like your eggs?" I asked. “Scrambled or Freud?”

"Not only good in bed, but he cooks, too. I could get used to this."

She stepped down the carpeted stairs and came to me. I stared at the eggs, at chickens that would never be born, while the whites and yolks congealed from the heat. Beth kissed the back of my neck.

"You were something else last night. That first time..." she whistled lightly. "That was tender and moving. But the second and third times, you were like a man possessed."

I stirred the eggs with a spatula. Bacon lay cooling on a plate and a gallon of orange juice sweated by the stove. Grits. This meal needed grits.

"Richard?" Beth asked, worry in her voice. "Is something wrong?"

I gave her the Milktoast smile. "No. I had a wonderful time."

She pulled the robe more securely over her body. "For a second there, I thought you were ashamed. I know I'm not as pretty in the daylight..."

I turned, dropping the spatula in the skillet. “You're beautiful.”

It wasn't her fault—she wasn’t yet a contestant in the Blame Game. She shouldn't have to suffer for my shortcomings. And if pretending saved her from being hurt, then I would pretend for a thousand years.

Besides, I was used to taking the blame. Hell, they said I enjoyed it, and who was I to argue with them ?

I hugged her as the eggs sizzled behind me.

"Why did you sneak off this morning? I wanted to wake up in your arms, Richard."

Because I wasn't sure whose arms they would be. And that was why I slipped out of half-forgotten dreams as well. Because while I slept, I knew that something else waded through the marrow of the Bone House. And while I was awake, it dreamed. Terrible dreams, sweat-stained pillows.

We had breakfast and coffee and I drove her to her apartment, concentrating on the road. Beth talked about a test she had tomorrow, biology or some other science. I nodded just enough to keep her talking as the wheels whispered on the asphalt.

I pulled into her driveway. She said she wanted to change clothes before class. She kissed me again and opened the door.

"Phone me?" she said, leaning toward me. Her breasts swayed tantalizingly, but Loverboy didn't rise to the yeasty treat. But he grinned from his window. Maybe even winked.

"Sure, Beth."

"Oh, and one more thing. Remember when I said I like to be careful?"

"Uh-huh."

"I wasn't careful enough."

Did she mean careful about not falling in love? And that she now meant...

"Do you mean careful about falling in love?" I asked.

"Why are you so anxious to talk about that?" She frowned. “We don’t need worries right now, remember? That's not what I meant."

"What, then?"

She smiled again, eyes squinting. "Birth control. Protection. I got so carried away that I forgot."

What I fool I was. Unprotected love.

It was a missed conception , Mister Milktoast said.

Shut up, smartass. This is serious .

"Hey, Beth, I'm sorry. I assumed—"

“ Takes two to tango, handsome. Heat of the moment and all that.”

"I should have..."

She shook her head. "I can take a pill when I get inside. Should be okay. Don't worry about it."

Yeah , Loverboy said. Make like a morning-after pill and get the fuck out.

"Well, at least you don't have to worry about—um..."

"Disease?" She laughed. "The upside of sleeping with a virgin. But remember, good things are worth a little risk."

Which good thing? Loverboy? I didn't want to think about that.

And Little Hitler? The very embodiment of unsafe sex.

I looked toward Beth's apartment, the bottom of a two-story duplex. A curtain parted and I saw half of a face watching us. Loverboy twitched. The face was female.

"Bye, Richard. Call me later." Beth said. She blew me a kiss and then she was gone. Then I was gone, too, deep inside myself, vacuumed into the dead black throat of my own mind. The car door slammed as if it were a door to another universe.

Loverboy rolled down the window. "When do I get to meet your roommate, Honey Buns?"

"Sooner or later," she said. Then she smiled again. "Because I plan on having you over in a few days. Maybe to spend the night."

Loverboy watched as she jiggled up the sidewalk to the door, then she waved and went inside. The pale face in the window stared a moment longer before the curtain dropped. Little Hitler drove to work, ten miles over the speed limit. Bookworm slowed him down when we reached the Shady Valley town limits.

It was my favorite time of morning at the bookstore, when the sun was at just the right angle to shine fully onto the varnished oak flooring. It lit up the three round tables in the reading corner, where the local poets liked to sit and scratch their beards thoughtfully, with the blank paper staring up into their faces as if daring them to make a mark. The poets never sat there in the morning because the light would give away the pallor of their skin and strip away all mystery. They only came at dusk, when the corner was draped in dramatic shadows, where they hunched like toothless ghosts who have returned to an immolated retirement home.

The smell of French vanilla coffee filled the store, settling like dust on the rows of books, seeping into the pages as if to make the words more exotic. Miss Billingsly liked to have the coffee on hand for the customers. She believed it kept them in the store longer and sped them around the aisles. But sometimes they spilled on the merchandise. Two days earlier, Arlie Wesson, an elderly local who always wore a camouflaged hunting vest, had turned jittery. He sloshed his coffee over a stack of self-help books.

I was cradling my own coffee that morning with both hands, leaning over the counter that made a rectangular island in the front of the store. I was thinking about Beth, about skin and sin, about what had happened after Loverboy took over.

What if it was Loverboy she really liked? What if Loverboy was the one who had connected with her on the most intimate and primal level?

While I was thinking, Bookworm came out and slipped into my skin. He was usually on duty at work, the one with the excellent memory that kept track of new releases and International Standard Book Numbers. He found joy in the orderly shelves and the hush of readers and the odor of cream paper and ink. And, of course, the lies inherent in fiction.

He also had the quiet charm that delighted the little old ladies who frequented the store. Loverboy dozed, unless an attractive woman walked in. Little Hitler sulked in his dark corner, plotting revenge for imagined slights. Mister Milktoast hovered, ready to placate unhappy customers. The black shadow behind them stayed silent, sleepy, the most elusive of imaginary friends.

Bookworm looked around the store. A retiree in a fluorescent blue jogging suit was puttering around in the gardening section, and in the back, a middle-aged woman was busy slapping at the hands of her two little children, who kept reaching for the shiny Thomas the Tank Engine books. Satisfied that all was normal, Bookworm gave my body back.

The bell over the door rang. I turned, Loverboy a fraction of a second behind.

She was young. She wore a periwinkle dress with a pattern of yellow flowers. I watched her through the steam of my coffee, trying to fit her into a genre.

She had skin of mystery, lips of romance, and hair of poetry, but her eyes were science fiction.

My heart did a tiny somersault as she headed for the horror section. She smiled as she passed.

Loverboy throbbed to life.

"Good morning," Loverboy said. "Let me know if I can help you."

...out of those clothes and onto my weasel meat , he silently added.

"Just looking," she said.

So am I, Sweetbreads. Just keep moving and shaking .

She walked down the aisle as if through a gauntlet of knowledge, classical literature on the left, philosophy and religion on the right. The flooring creaked under her sandals, but the footfalls were swallowed by the walls of books. She stopped in front of the horror shelves like a worshipper before a dark shrine.

Loverboy watched as she scanned the rows of titles, which were alphabetized by author. Barker, Campbell, Keene, three shelves of King, Koontz, Lovecraft, Nicholson, Rice, Saul, Straub. The great masters who had wrestled their demons, pinning them onto paper. Plus some hacks.

She must have felt Loverboy's eyes on her, burning and peering and leering and stripping. She looked back with eyes like a kitten's, quick and gray.

"Looking for anything in particular?" I asked, walking around the counter. I stepped close enough to smell the faint honey of her red hair.

"I'm looking for a present for my boyfriend. His birthday is next week." She twirled a strand of hair between her fingers. I would have bet she tossed a mean lariat.

Fit to be tied , Mister Milktoast said, sounding scarily like Loverboy.

"Does he like horror?"

"Not really. But I do, sometimes."

"You go to Westridge?"

"Yeah. I'm majoring in English."

"Liberal arts, uh?"

"No, not arts. Just, like, reading and stuff."

A faint whiff of patchouli rose off her neck like a morning mist or a hippie’s hangover.

"We give a five-percent discount to students. When you find what you're looking for,

I'll fill you out a discount card. Your boyfriend, what does he like?"

"How-to. Like motorcycles and stuff. And science stuff." Her lips were in a constant smile, and her science fiction eyes played plot twists.

"We have an excellent science section," said Bookworm. "I'd be glad to show it to you. Would you like a cup of coffee? It's free."

"Sure, that would be cool."

"Actually, it’s warm. Cream or sugar?"

"Just cream, please."

Heh heh, she wants some cream , Loverboy said.

Bookworm showed her the how-to section and the science section, and went up front to get her coffee. The other customers were still browsing, like cattle grazing. Janet Evanovich, Stephanie Meyer, the latest bestselling guide to getting rich quick through the marketing of get-rich-quick books. The cream made white coils in the coffee. When Bookworm carried the mug back to her, she was reading the jacket liner of Carl Sagan's Cosmos.

"That would make an excellent gift." I handed her the coffee. "Unfortunately, it's fairly expensive. All those color photographs really jack up the price."

"Steve would really get off on this, though."

"$49.95, plus tax. That's what I call real love."

"Well...he's sort of like bad habit that won't go away. You know, like when you scratch when you're not supposed to. It feels good for a while, but then you have to itch some more." She looked down at the open book. "But he'd really love this. He freaks out on space."

She sipped her coffee. I watched her delicious bicep tighten from the weight of the book. Why was I doing this? I had dipped a toe into the waters of romance with Beth, then dove headfirst without looking into the black river of the heart, and drowned like a rat jumping a sinking ship. Did I still thirst?

No, not thirst.

Hunger.

Hunger that arose from deep inside, away from the cluttered kitchen of the Bone House. Hunger from somewhere beyond, somewhere dark.

Loverboy? Where was that sonovabitch? I swear, he’s the kind of guy you don’t want to turn your back on.

"I don't think I want to spend that much money," she said, tossing her hair like a colt tosses its mane. "It's the thought that counts, you know."

She slid the book back into its space on the shelf.

"What kind of English Lit do you like?" I asked, as she tilted her head to read the titles.

"I don't like much of it. I'm up to the American stuff right now. Thoreau is about as dull as watching paint dry, and Twain's okay but they skip through him real fast, ‘cause he says 'nigger' and stuff. Hemingway's a real asshole. And Faulkner, Jesus, what a joke he is."

“ Look up 'enigmatic' in the dictionary, and the definition is 'a Faulkner scholar,'” Bookworm said, shyness giving way to interest. “You can analyze his work into circles. I think 'The sound and the fury, signifying nothing' sums up his career quite nicely.”

She laughed and pulled out a volume on evolution by Stephen Jay Gould, leaving a gap like a wound on the bookshelf.

"Why are you studying literature if you don't like it?" I asked, wondering if I should tell her I was a writer. Or was going to be, as soon as I got around to it.

"Well, I wanted to study music, play the clarinet or something, but the practice time sucks donkey. And then if you graduate, all you can do is teach. I guess it's sort of the same with English, but I already know English. It doesn't have all these scales , you know what I mean?"

She read the jacket liner of the Gould book. "Huh. This guy says bacteria is the present, past, and future ruler of earth. Bizarre."

She wrinkled her nose as if an insect had landed on it. "I changed my mind about getting Steve a book. I think I'll buy something for myself."

Loverboy was wearing his wolfish grin somewhere in his room, probably beating off under the sheets with a flashlight, but Bookworm was taking care of business.

"There's always the horror," Bookworm said.

Always the horror? Sounded like a Little Hitler line.

"I don't know, I'm in the mood for something upbeat. A little pop literature, maybe. Thanks for your help, uh...," She stretched her neck to read my nameplate. "Richard."

With a swish of her dress, she turned toward the magazine rack. I went back to the counter, where I sat amid a clutter of calendars, postcards, and colorful buttons that had sayings like "Where Books Are Burned, People Are Next" and "Without Word there is no World.”

My Little People stirred, wandering the halls. Loverboy was chiding Bookworm for blowing a chance to get his rocks off. The trick of perfect failure is to practice, practice, practice.

"She's one fine slice of white bread, my man," Loverboy said, his voice as smooth as a lizard in mud and about as filthy.

"She's already spoken for," said Bookworm. "You heard her talking about her boyfriend."

"And what about Beth?" I thought.

"Last night's news," Loverboy said. "You think she'll be back? I mean, I know I was damn good, but you, Richie, you're a total waste. What could she possibly see in you?"

"Hopefully not you ."

"Fuck you, Richie, and the donkey you rode in on. And maybe your slut of a mom while we're at it."

At the mention of Mother, Mister Milktoast minced out. "Loverboy, don't be a shellfish. We're all in this oyster together."

"Yee-haw. Mister Milkshit, a.k.a. the Dalai Lama of the Coldiron collective. Brotherhood of man, inner peace, and all that crap. I’m thinking you want Richie here all to yourself, you sugar-wristed little beat boy. Well, this here hunk of American steel likes his biscuits hot and buttery. So don't mess with my action."

"Here she comes now," said Mister Milktoast.

"You think I don't notice , Dickwheat?"

She laid a magazine on the counter. It was a “Rolling Stone.” Keith Richards was on the cover, grinning like a dried skull that didn't know it was dead.

Loverboy forced my eyes over the front of her dress. Bookworm lifted my gaze with effort and smiled at her. "Found something light?" I asked.

She looked back into my eyes. I wondered who she saw there. It must have been Bookworm or Mister Milktoast, because she didn't flinch.

I got a discount card out from under the counter. Usually, the customers filled out the cards themselves, but someone had ulterior motives. "Name, please?" I asked.

"Shelley Birdsong," she said. "That's 'Shelley' with two 'L's."

"Like the poet," I said, scribbling.

"Who?"

"One of the Romantics."

"Oh, with that song about secrets in your sleep. The guys with the big hair."

"Telephone number?" I wrote it down as she recited it, tucking the numerals away in the back rooms of the Bone House.

She was turning to leave when Loverboy erupted. "Shelley?"

She looked back.

"Nice to meet you."

She waved and left.

Loverboy grinned and repeated the line, riffing on the Milkster’s puns. It will be nice to meat you.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

After work, I walked into the October sunshine.

Something made my feet move. Something looked out of the back of my skull and through my eyes. Something saw the town anew like a traveler who has returned from a long trip. The view from the front door of the Bone House was an everchanging thing, a yard that shifted its seasons, a sidewalk that buckled and roiled, a street without sense in a neighborhood with nebulous borders.

Cholesterols of traffic clogged the arteries of the highway. The tourists poured into the mountains for the tail end of leaf-looking season. The air stank of spent fuel and rubber. Exhaust for the tired beasts.

I headed down the sidewalk, toward the heart of town. The highway cut a straight river through Shady Valley, a map dot that didn’t accommodate the curves and swells of the Appalachian geography. Gas stations, fast-food joints, and auto parts stores lined the highway, their brittle steel and glass and hard edges contrasting the mountains that rose gently above. The buildings were like sharp temples at the feet of giants.

The leaves were changing across the face of the slopes, in blazes of red and purple from the maple, the yellow of poplar, and the orange of oak, with the tufts of evergreens occasionally brushing through. Mingled with the car pollution was the soft decay of leaves and sweet grass. The sky was crayon blue and solid. A few clouds drifted aimlessly, white patches of contentment.

"Yes, I can find peace here," I thought. “Alone.”

Alone together.

"Mister Milktoast? Is that you?"

Whoever, whatever, whichever one of my little friends had momentarily skittered free, I couldn't tell.

After three blocks of walking, the shiny facades of construction gave way to seedy brick buildings, squat and fat like red toads. In the distance, the tops of dormitories pricked the belly of the sky. A spindly metal crane perched over a tower of beams, guarding the bones of a building in progress.

I passed a gray laundromat, its front window cracked and littered with pieces of masking tape. An old Hispanic woman stared out at me, her face as impassive as the windowglass and as cracked as the stucco. Loverboy had no interest in her. Withertits , he snickered.

I passed the abandoned garage that I had slept behind when I first moved to Shady Valley. I had learned that it had been closed by the state Division of Water Quality because of an underground leak in one of the storage tanks. The creek behind the garage still ran rusty and iridescent, even after six years of healing. The lot yawned emptily, broken glass glinting among the blotches of oil.

Blocks of student apartments lined the opposite side of the street, which had dwindled to two lanes in the older, sadder part of town. The apartments faced irregular directions, as if randomly dropped from the top of the sky to plunge into the earth, a God-child’s abandoned game of blocks. The featureless rectangles were divided here and there by stubborn white homesteads, flanked by little squares of dirt that were dotted with cabbages and bristled with tomato stakes.

Another one hundred steps and the town became more schizophrenic. The decrepit cinder block buildings collided with the clean corners of Westridge University. The college sprawled like an island, with the town tainting its beaches, flotsam littering idyllic shores. On the right was a weathered structure built into the side of the hill. It had been converted into a coffeehouse, and students clustered at tables near the front window.

Young faces peered through the glass, watching the street, seeing if they were seen. A nose-ring on one, silver and cruel. There a French beret, oily dreadlocks dangling beneath. A pair of small blue spectacles, framed by thin eyebrows. All that self-conscious individuality washed into a vacuous sameness.

I wondered what it would be like to be one of them, with their possible futures and choices. Nietzche or Descartes? Phish or the Byrds? Espresso or cappuccino?

I wondered what it would be like to be normal.

"Hey, this is normal, Richie," Loverboy said. He came out easily, with none of the usual stirrings and struggles. Lately, it seemed the door was always open.

Loverboy glanced at the faces in the coffee shop as if he were flipping through a deck of nude playing cards. "Good hunting. Check out that snow pup in the polar fleece."

Bookworm was on his heels, curious and aloof. "It's not your hunt, Loverboy. This is Richard's hunt."

Hunt? For what?

"The outer journey mirrors the inner search," Bookworm answered.

Oh. You're going to play little mind games, are you?

"No. Just a warning. From a friend."

"And with friends like us, you don't need enemies," Mister Milktoast said. He had entered on mental cat feet.

Mister Milktoast, why does everyone come out so easily now?

"Richard, you haven't been paying attention. All you think about is Beth," he said.

Can you blame me for trying to get away?

"No matter how far or how fast you travel, you can never outrun your own shoes," Mister Milktoast said.

"Yeah, Dickie darling. Keep in touch," sneered Loverboy. "Because we will. We’ll touch it plenty."

They left without a trace, back, back into their holes, into the dank rooms of the Bone House.

I looked into the coffee-shop window. A few people were watching me, including the girl in polar fleece.

What did they see when looking at the life form called Richard Allen Coldiron? Just an anonymous, bookish square, with tan cotton trousers and a button-up shirt and wire-rimmed glasses. A walking piece of fiction, a star in his own comic book series, a suspended animation. A minor character in his own autobiography.

I could have been anyone. And I would have loved to be anyone else. If not for Beth.

But I wanted to love her, despite the potential cost. After years and years, I had found something outside myself worth fighting to gain and keep. Or maybe I was a shellfish oyster, as Mister Milktoast put it.

I walked on, reaching the center of town. Utility poles stood at random, and wires criss-crossed above in an insane weavework. This part of town had been destroyed by fire fifty years earlier. I had seen photographs of that era, back when the town was just a general store, a feed store, a funeral parlor, and a movie theater. The structures had been rebuilt with cheap clay brick, some painted over with muddy shades of green and gray. The paint curled in a dozen different coats, history lying in flakes on the sidewalk.

The corner hardware store stood like a mute survivor. The bank on its left had folded and been taken over by a boutique. Clever fabrics dressed the window, the vault now a fitting room. A former gas station perpendicular to the hardware store was now a law office. No amount of landscaping or custom trim could disguise the fact that the building used to be a gas station, and no team of attorneys could ever subvert the immutable laws of change and decay.

I continued up the street, past the old stone post office. Students bent under the weight of swollen backpacks and stooped old ladies shopping for knickknacks passed like camel caravans. Tourists in bright polyester milled purposelessly, hidden behind the icy stares of sunglasses. Occasionally a jogger huffed past in self-inflicted pain, sneakers flapping on concrete. Outside the door of the pharmacy, two old men in coveralls traded stories. They wore identical Red Man caps that sat on their heads as if they had grown there, as much a part of them as wrinkled skin and gray hair.

I turned the corner toward the university grounds. The Little People rode as voyeurs, like kids pressing their faces against the car window on a vacation drive. Off in the west end of Shady Valley, bulldozers were gouging red wounds in the Earth where Ralph's Southern Line Feedstore used to stand. A row of derelict tobacco warehouses bordered the demolition, patiently waiting their turn under the blade. The tin on the warehouse roofs caught the sunlight, sending bright spears of reflection into the mountains.

A restaurant called "The Cadillac Grille" sat against the bank of a creek, its open deck crowded with students soaking up afternoon sunshine and beer. Music poured from the screen door that led to the deck, something cranky and sneering by the Rolling Stones. I scanned the deck with Loverboy's preying eyes, or perhaps he scanned the deck with my eyes. I saw a familiar face at a table of young tan women who were drinking from green bottles.

The face.

Who?

"Beth's roommate, Dickie," Loverboy said.

She had seen me, but she didn't wave. She lowered her head.

"Playing hard to get," Loverboy said. "But they don't get no harder than this boy."

Isn't Beth enough?

"Well, tickle my dick and paint my balls blue. If it isn't Richie Coldiron, pretending to give a good goddamn? Pretending to actually care for another human being? The sensitive act again. Don't make me bust a nut laughing."

You cold-hearted son of a bitch.

"It's not my heart, bro’. That's all yours, every pathetic little beat. My business is down lower. You suck the shellfish oyster but today’s special is the bearded clam."

Fuck you.

"I may take you up on that offer sometime, Riddle-me-dick. If pickings get slim."

My feet led me onto the landscaped grounds of the university. The grass was trimmed close to the ground, like a putting green. Students sprawled on the common and sat Indian style on the open courtyards. People in shorts were tossing Frisbees or lying in the sun, chatting over the noise from loud radios. Solitary figures sat under trees with thick books. I searched. Always searching, we were.

I climbed some steps to a platform at the entrance to the Student Union. I sat at a weathered wooden table. Someone had carved "J.G. + D.R. 4EVER" into the tabletop. The inscription was fresh, a testament gouged in the flesh of wood.

I looked out over the sea of grass from the high lonely lighthouse of my soul. The lawn was broken by stone boxes containing holly shrubs and red geraniums. The walkways curved with the rises, guided by brick shoulders.

A long thin girl walked past, and my hunter's eyes followed her. She was wearing a charcoal miniskirt, the fabric so thick that it didn't shake. Her legs, raped by white nylon, descended like sticks into heavy shoes. Her stockings reminded me of Sally Bakken, and a sudden rage tightened my throat.

Little Hitler? But you weren't there. You didn't come until...later.

"Your little snitch filled me in, Richard. Makes my blood boil. Revenge—"

"—is a dish best served as leftovers," Mister Milktoast said. “With a bowl of serial.”

Mister Milktoast? Did you tell?

"I never kiss and tell."

Mister Milktoast .

"Well...maybe I let something slip. It gets lonely in here, Richard. No one to talk with."

And Little Hitler is the best you can do for companionship?

"Misery loves company but it sleeps with whatever it can get."

The thin girl's carefully wrought curls draped the front of her shoulders, but her hair was too crafted and doll-like. Her alligator eyes were without passion, staring ahead as if in permanent slumber. Even the faint sound of swishing nylon didn't arouse Loverboy. Well, maybe a little.

But those stockings did something to Little Hitler. He was filled with a desire to break her like bone China, thinking of Sally Bakken and broken promises. I clenched my fists, trying to drive him back inside. I didn't want Little Hitler to hate her. I needed to love, even though loving was possibly worse.

If there was one theme that emerged while working on this book, it was the same old corny crap you can find in every category romance and Internet porn site and Hallmark greeting card and pop song and every church in the land. But after Mister Milktoast imagined it, Little Hitler corrupted it, Loverboy spewed on it, and Bookworm edited it down to dull powder, precious little love was left. It never had a chance.

I watched as she headed for the entrance to the library. In the reflection of the glass doors, the bright scene played out in reverse. This backwards view was somehow truer and more vital than the actual reality. She walked into her own reflection and disappeared.

A round-faced blonde sat down at the table next to mine. She was not Beth. She pulled a cigarette from the pocket of her pink sweater. Her forehead crinkled as she lit it. She inhaled and her cheeks hollowed. A finger of smoke hovered seductively around her head, then was whisked away by the faint autumn breeze.

She was playing a game with her cigarette, a tiny joke of death. I could see the nicotine death skip across her eyes. The danger was part of her thrill. But this was a death she could control, one she could hold at arm's length, one she could stub out. A slow suicide for someone who thought she had all the time in the world to die.

"Do you wonder?" Little Hitler asked me. "How would she really embrace death?"

Don't talk that way. Once was enough. One time was too many.

"Oh, she loves this long-distance relationship, this cigarette that is like a love letter from the other side. Maybe she would accept a few collect phone calls, maybe even sit with death in a well-lighted restaurant."

Don't talk madness, Little Hitler.

"From the lips of experience,” he responded, with echoes of Bookworm or maybe even my Poet days, if he’d been browsing the Bone House bookshelves. “But would she? If death fondled her in a moonlit car, its breath foul and moist on her ear, if death bent low for a soul-tainting kiss..."

" Now you're talking, Little Diddler," said Loverboy. "Cheap thrills and all that good shit. And you got Richard's poetry crap down pat."

"...if death opened its black robes to her, if it drew her into its frigid folds, if it sucked her as tenderly as she sucks her cigarette, would she squirm then?"

"Damn, Diddler," said Loverboy. "You're kinky. I like that in a headmate."

"I should offer to introduce her. Set up a blind date, perhaps, with my friend Death? Hmm, Richard?"

No. Never again. Haven't I suffered enough?

" You ? Suffer? What about Mother? What about Virginia? What about what you made me do to Father?"

That wasn’t me . That was you , Little Hitler.

The blonde flicked her cigarette butt into the shrubbery and left.

The white-stockinged girl walked by again, parading flesh. Loverboy let her pass. Little Hitler let her live.

I basked in the sun, its healing rays bringing life to my crowded flesh, driving the inner shadows deep until I could no longer hear the voices.

I was ashamed of what they had let me become.

An hour passed. I didn't see Beth. I began the long walk back to my car, and then drove home.

There was a typewriter in the Bone House, and we had to put this down before we forgot it all.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

This was the point at which I almost quit writing this book, because I have a great fear of confrontation. I was going to dedicate it to Virginia after it was accepted for publication, because I was her Poet and she died young, which is always fashionably tragic.

But here came Beth and was acting like the kind of woman whose feelings would be hurt if I dedicated my autobiography to another woman. And she didn’t seem like the kind who would conveniently die. Plus, there’s You-Know-Who, the ghostwriter, the hack who wants all the credit but does none of the work.

I’m sure you’ve heard it before: “Hey, I got this great idea for a book. Why don’t you write it and we’ll split the money?”

The problem, of course, is that this particular co-author has no need for money. All he craves is a little attention. Why do you think he wants to be the protagonist? But so far I’ve spared you from his nihilistic clichés and self-serving, ideological crap. Hopefully I’ll get this submitted before he finds this version, so forgive me if I type real fast for a few pages.

I was drifting on a black sea, with the Little People like sharks nibbling away at the rubber raft of my psyche or the pirate captain’s sword walking me down the gangplank or some other lost-at-sea simile. The darkness was no longer safe. I needed an anchor. I needed Beth, for hope and help and all the other selfish reasons people used as an excuse to love one another.

Love. Speaking of unwilling suspension of disbelief…

I called her the next night, after a long battle with Loverboy and Little Hitler. Her roommate answered the phone. "Hello?"

"Hi," I said. "Is Beth home?"

"No, I'm afraid not."

"Know when she'll be in?"

"I think she went out with somebody."

A date? A bright flame of jealousy roared in my chest. But what claim did I have? None but that of the needy.

The mellifluous voice on the other end broke the silence. "Uh...do you want to leave a message?”

"Yes. Just tell her Richard called." Nah, say “Loverboy,” numbnuts , whispered one of my roommates.

"Richard?"

"Yes. Thank you."

"Oh. Faux pas . You're the guy she's been seeing, right?"

Seeing. Was this sweeping romance for the ages reduced to mere ocular activity? I wanted to slam the phone into the wall. I wanted to blink razors. I wanted to...

Kill Beth.

Who said that? Little Hitler? Loverboy?

Or...

"I saw you yesterday," said the roommate. Her voice was deeper than Beth’s, huskier.

"You did? Where?" My throat was tight, as if Little Hitler were squeezing it into silence.

"Walking down the street."

"Oh. Uh...were you...?"

“ ...the one looking out the window yesterday? The girl at the bar?”

She's just another skinbag, Richie. A sopping camel toe dipped in a desert oasis.

Loverboy, stay out of this.

"...I mean, I don't think we've met," I finished, slamming the Bone House door.

"I'm Monique. I've seen you, you know, bringing Beth home."

Did I hear her giggle? Was she taunting me? Like Sally? "I've got to go. Do me a favor. Don't tell Beth I called."

I hung up fast, before Loverboy had a chance to lick his chops and say something I'd regret later. I had enough to worry about as it was. Had some new dark closet opened inside me? Some crack in the plaster that patched over my ego?

Help me, Mister Milktoast.

"Come inside, Richard."

No. Not in there . Not with them .

"It's safe. It's dark. It's cool."

But...

"Come, Richard."

Don't.

Want.

To.

Lose.

Me.

"I'll protect you," Mister Milktoast whispered, in that maternal tone that both comforted and disturbed and ultimately always won.

Darkness. Something dreamed, something walked. I lost thirty-six hours.

Because this is my autobiography and I’m writing this in retrospect, I could easily make up a bunch of bullshit about how I went out of town for a hockey game or a rock concert or a camping trip. But if I started making up alibis for my own life, I doubt if you’d stick with me. We’ve established a relationship, you and I. We’ve reached a mutual misunderstanding. If you walked out on me now, closed the book, that would prove you are unreliable and fainthearted. I have faith in you. You’re made of better stuff than that.

"Did you see the paper?" Miss Billingsly asked me at the bookstore on Wednesday.

"No, I haven't had a chance. I've been doing inventory on the Harry Potter backlist." Actually, Bookworm had been doing the work, but of course I couldn't tell her that.

"Some girl from the college has been reported missing."

My heart flipped, hung upside down. "When?"

"They're not sure. Could have been a few days ago."

"Maybe she had enough of school and took off for a hockey game or a rock concert or a camping trip," I said, in Mister Milktoast's reassuring voice. But something inside knew better. I started to sweat, even though the air was cool. No Bookworm could amend this panic, no Milktoast could sop this doubt.

Miss Billingsly pushed her eyeglasses up her nose. "The parents are frantic. They're flying down from New York, according to the paper. With all these school shootings, everybody’s on edge anyway."

She stood behind the counter, a woman in her element. She was like a captain standing on the bridge of a ship, as if the bookstore were a pleasurecraft of words. But my own pleasure was plundered along with my recent memory.

Mister Milktoast wagged a cautioning finger from the back closet. Brittany, the other weekday employee of the Paper Paradise, came down the history aisle.

"I knew a friend of hers," she said. I looked into Brittany's heart-shaped face, her brown hair parted in the middle. She wore a leather string around her neck. Little Hitler saw it as a noose while Loverboy viewed it as a mild bondage prop.

"Said her roommate hadn't seen her in three days. She lived in an apartment off-campus. She liked to sleep around, if you know what I mean—"

Brittany must have seen Miss Billingsly's look of disapproval. Or maybe it was a look of wistfulness. But she continued. "Anyway, the roommate didn't worry about her for a while, but then she went in her bedroom to borrow a sweater and saw none of the clothes had been disturbed."

"Meaning she hadn't come back for a change of clothes?" Miss Billingsly asked.

"No. So she checked around, called the parents..."

"And now the police," Miss Billingsly finished.

“ Well, her boyfriend is a person of interest,” Brittany said. “He has a motorcycle. You know the kind.”

Arlie, the geezer in the hunting vest, approached the counter, eyes afire with the fervent conspiracy of gossipers. I had explained to him earlier in the morning that Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus wasn't a book about our alien origins. His wrinkled hands clutched a coffee mug that was half full of decaf. We’d watered him down.

"You talking about the girl?" he said in his raspy voice that was as native as the Appalachian dirt.

"Hello, Arlie," said Miss Billingsly. "I was just telling Richard about it."

"Well, they don't know for sure, but I got my own theories," Arlie said.

The silver wires of his brows arced heavily over his dark eyes, giving him the appearance of a vulture. His neck crooked, as if drooping to peck at carrion, and this heightened the raptorial effect. He was clearly enjoying the opportunity to impart hitherto secret knowledge.

"There's been no indication of foul play," Miss Billingsly said. I nodded at Arlie.

I had a hunch about his theory. I had sold Arlie more than one book on UFOs and had listened to him describe his back-porch sightings. I had a suspicion the alien visitors rose from the bottom of a Mason jar of white lightning. He was also a fan of what he called "unexplainable phee-nomenons," the kind of stuff you'd see in shows hosted by washed-up character actors from the various "Star Trek" series. But I couldn't exactly ridicule his theories, because I was starting to develop an unsettling theory of my own.

"Lunatic killer," Arlie said.

Miss Billingsly shook her head, and her glasses slid down her nose. She pushed them up with a finger and said, "I just can't see it happening here. A small town like this?"

Arlie's eyes shifted joyfully from side to side under his vulturine eyebrows. "Then maybe it was one of them alien abductions."

Miss Billingsly and Brittany laughed.

Arlie's face reddened. "It's that college, is what draws them here. I seen them. They come after these kids who move here with television antennas stuck up their noses and shooting up all kinds of mindrot. I been against that college from the very start, from back when it was just a two-room shack out in a cow pasture."

I didn't know how I felt about aliens. Intellectually, I figured they probably existed. Yet I had never seen one. What was even more frightening was the idea that they might not exist, that humans were the highest achievement of the universe. That we were the best that God, nature, and evolution could come up with. If so, the divine creator needed to eat some psychedelic drugs.

"Now the school's gobbling up the whole damn town," Arlie continued. "I see where they bought out Ralph's feed store and gonna tear it down to put in some tennis courts. That college is just a magnet for trouble, I tell you.”

"And you believe the college has something to do with the girl’s disappearance?" asked Brittany.

"Sure. She wasn't missing before she came here to go to school, was she?"

A woman of about thirty walked up to the counter with a stack of psychology books. Arlie stepped back to allow her access to the counter and Brittany began ringing up the purchase.

"Say, here's a smart woman," said Arlie, looking at the book titles. "You teach at the college?"

“ Yes,” the woman said. She was pretty, with long blonde hair. Loverboy drank her in through my eyes and built nasty little fantasies in the basement of my brain.

"What about the missing girl, then? You probably know more than we do," Arlie said.

"It's too early to form a conclusion.” Her voice was cold, as if idle chatter with townies was beneath her. “Not enough evidence yet. And it’s only been a day and a half."

"What about the damned underground installations I heard about? Down there under the gym. Got UFO radar dishes. What about them?"

The woman drew back as Brittany bagged the books. Miss Billingsly put a hand on Arlie's shoulder to calm him down.

"I call that evidence, don't you?" Arlie shouted. The other customers were starting to stare. Miss Billingsly apologized to the woman, who ripped the bag from Brittany and hurried out the door without looking back.

" Tell us about the RABBITS!" Arlie yelled after her.

Miss Billingsly led him to the reading corner and sat him at a table. I listened in without trying. Or rather, the Bookworm lent an ear.

"Now, Arlie, I don't mind you hanging around, because a little local color is good for business,” she chastised. “But you have to control these outbursts. Everyone at the college is not an alien from one of your television shows.”

"That college is a magnet, I tell you. Draws all kinds of weirdoes. From different worlds."

"Arlie, I've lived here as long as you have, and I say change isn't always for the worse. I couldn't keep this bookstore in business without the college."

He seemed small and defeated as he sat staring out the window. I almost felt sorry for him, but I had learned to store my pity. I knew I would need it for myself, and the Bone House cupboard was bare of such compassion.

Plus, I knew the strangest invasions came not from without, but from within.

I busied myself at the register as Brittany stocked the shelves. Mister Milktoast was glad the conversation had turned from murder. He was feeling a little squeamish.

"Trouble in paradise," he said to me.

Shady Valley?

"No. Here in the House. Upstairs."

Are you trying to tell me something?

"Just a sour note from a lemon drop."

I'll keep it in mind.

Arlie came back to the counter, subdued now. He lowered his voice to a confidential level.

"Something damned fishy is going on in this town. Ain't been the same since that double rape and murder here in '72. Folks has all but forgot that one. 'It'll never happen here,' they say. Well, it does. Because they are here."

I nodded. Arlie had told me about the silver saucers that flew down from Widow's Peak, the high stony mountain above his farm. They were here. Sure. I’d believe that like I’d believe four or five little people lived inside my head.

"It's a pitcher-perfect town on the outside," he said. "The one they put on the postcards and the travel guides. But under the whitewash is a black bellyful of trash. All the decent, God-fearing families that settled these parts been wet down and poisoned by slick money and big-city lawyers. They call it progress, they do.

"I remember the day they cut the ribbon for the college. The mayor and even old Senator Hallifield was there, all of them standing in the middle of that pasture and grinning like a pack of turtles eating saw briars. With one foot on a shovel, as if any one of that sorry bunch had ever turned a day's work in their lives."

"Now, Arlie, don't have one of your spells," I said. Miss Billingsly had taken his mug, but his hands still cupped as if he were nursing it.

"Senator Hallifield stepped in a big pile of cow shit and fell and busted his ass." His laugh was a frog’s muddy croak. "That part never made the papers.”

He was quiet again, limp, like a skeleton on a hook in an anatomy class whose lesson was nearly over. "I remember old Vernell Hartbarger standing there in his coveralls. Vernell was the one that sold them the cow pasture. That land had been in his family since before the American Revolution, been tilled and bled on by a dozen generations afore his. But now he had a pocketful of slick money, and he didn't give a damn if they built an open sewer there."

Arlie looked at me, at Bookworm. Bookworm listened. I didn’t. "Vernell went off with that money, down to Charlotte. Had a heart attack on top of a big-city whore three days later. Died in her arms, they said. They never did find the money."

"And now the college is a lasting testament to his folly," Bookworm said.

Arlie looked at me, confusion clouding his red eyes.

"Our own big-city whore," Bookworm added, meaning the college, not caring whether Arlie was quick enough to make the metaphorical leap.

He turned slowly, again just a lonely and scared old man, the vulture's fierceness faded. He walked to the door, stooped and defeated.

"Maybe the aliens got that girl," he said, his hand on the front glass. “Or the rabbits.”

Without waiting for a reply, he went out and got behind the wheel of his rusty Ford pickup. A cloud of blue smoke rolled across the parking lot as the engine whined to life. Arlie pulled the truck out of the parking lot and onto the four-lane highway that headed out of town towards his farm.

I had been out to his farm once, a ramshackle group of buildings at the foot of Widow's Peak. His was the last house on Tater Knob Road, before the mountain really started rising out of the ground. He had offered me some moonshine but I didn't want it. Then he’d pointed out the spots in his fields where the saucers had landed.

Now, as he drove away, hunched over his steering wheel, I imagined he was remembering when the road was just a dirt stitch in the flesh of meadows, back before aliens, lawyers, and madmen invaded Shady Valley.

Brittany came to the counter as I watched the Ford disappear in traffic. "Crazy old coot," she said.

"I suppose." I was trying to fight back Loverboy, who had been developing an attraction to Brittany. "What was her name?"

"Who?"

"The missing girl." I tried a Milktoast smile. “The one the aliens got.”

"Oh. Shelley," she said. "Shelley Birdsong."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Night.

I couldn't sleep, because I might dream.

And while I dreamed, something else might awaken. Something that had worn my skins during my blackout. Those missing hours hung wide and heavy over my mind, a fog on a lost sea. And Shelley might be in that swirling mist, sucked down by the Charybdis of my unknown appetites, rolled over by the Sisyphus stone of my futility, or otherwise undone through a mythological metaphor that Bookworm hasn’t looked up yet.

"Nutter coincidence," Mister Milktoast said, ever the optimist. Or maybe merely a habitual liar. Tiny warning bells sounded, elves hammered on the roof, a steam train blew its whistle, smoke sucked itself down the chimney.

I rose from bed cold. I had put Shelley's phone number in my top desk drawer, there with a handful of letters from Mother and a dozen old photographs that I had found in the Valiant's glove box. Loverboy wouldn't let me forget to write the number down. He knew I had a lot of things on my mind.

The number wasn't there.

I checked my pockets. Nothing.

I went downstairs into the laundry room, which was Mister Milktoast's tidy milieu. There, in the pants I must have worn the day before, the number was creased and fingered like an old secret. As I touched the paper, a mental picture flashed of my dialing the number.

Then came another picture, like frames of a film that had jammed the sprockets of the projector, so that the motion didn't fit together. The illusion revealed its lie. The frame froze.

Shelley downstairs, on the sofa. Late afternoon sun streaming through the window, catching the back of her head and making her red hair blaze. She is holding a cigarette—no, a joint—in her right hand. Her feet are on my coffee table, her leather sandals pressed against my Incredible Hulk comic books, wrinkling the covers. Her gray eyes stare at me, oblivious of my identity. As oblivious as I am.

The frame jittered and jumped. The image disappeared in a rush of black. My head hurt as I stood in the basement.

"Richard, you're not supposed to see that."

Mister Milktoast?

"Don't look.”

"You know something, don't you?

"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies."

Liar. I thought you're supposed to protect me.

"And that's what I'm trying to do."

I looked down at the concrete floor of the basement.

Spots. Rust. Brown. Cool as stone.

"Go back upstairs, Richard."

"Yeah, Beth might call, and I wouldn't mind shoving the old crème horn into her breadbox again," Loverboy said. "Hell, it's been three days. Course, it was years before then. I ain’t waiting that long for honey butter again."

"Upstairs, Richard,” Mister Milktoast said. “Fast.”

"Let him see," said Little Hitler. "I could use a good laugh."

I knelt on the concrete and peered into the murky corners of the basement. Camping gear. Old tires. Bookshelves. Streaked cans of paint and wood scraps. Large plastic rubbish bins.

One of the bins was bulging.

I took a step deeper into the basement, into madness, into the house of mirrors. The room smelled like stagnant water in an iron pot.

"Go ahead and look, Richard,” taunted Little Hitler. "You can always find someone else to take the fall. After all, when you killed Father, you had me to blame."

I clenched my fists, but there was no one to punch. I took a second step then faltered.

"Don't listen, Richard," coaxed Mister Milktoast. "I can explain everything."

“ Why can’t I remember?” I screamed at the cinder block walls. My voice echoed, sharp and dead. I might as well have been beating the cheap Sheetrock in the Bone House.

"You gutless little worm," said Little Hitler. "You've always been too weak to grab what you wanted. You can't even control your own pathetic sack of meat."

I never needed to...do something like that. Never needed hate.

"Hate? Oh, you loved Daddy's dancing boots. You loved the bruises and the taunts. You loved Mommy dearest. In the best and worst ways.”

And I have you to thank for what happened to Father.

"Sure you do, Richard. But remember this. I'm just another of your monster masks."

I DIDN'T ASK FOR THIS. I DIDN'T ASK FOR ANY OF YOU.

"Sometimes monsters are made and not born. Just ask the one who knows.”

And who would that be, Little Hitler?

"Oh, haven't you met?"

What are you talking about?

"The days of cowering are over. No more hiding in the closet. You missed a payment on the Bone House mortgage. This house is in foreclosure. You’ve been evicted."

No...

I turned and ran up the basement stairs, missing the top step as my eyes blurred. I fell onto the kitchen linoleum. The phone was ringing. Or it might have been my ears.

I laid there for minutes or hours, as my little friends took their turns behind my eyelids. Finally I lifted myself and went to bed. My heart played its sick rhythm, pumping sorry blood through the sewage pipes in my limbs. Night fell, harder than the night in my skull, black, solid, and merciless.

"Like a house of bricks," whispered Mister Milktoast. “But I tried, Richard.”

"We all tried," said Bookworm.

"Not all of us,” said Mister Milktoast.

What happened? Tell me. Surely you owe me that much.

"Some things are better left unknown."

But it's me. My body. My life.

"Oh, but you're wrong, Daddy Killer," Little Hitler said with a sneer. “Or should I say Mother Fucker?”

I clutched my head, pressed my fingers into my temple as if to squeeze his voice out like pus from a boil.

Memory came flooding in, blessed memory, cursed memory: Shelley in a swing at the town park. The park is circled by laurels, tucked away from the street. A skewed slide huddles under the branches of a birch on the far side of the park. The empty seats on either side of Shelley shiver in the wind, like ghosts rattling their chains. The park is empty, its summer charms gone to weed. Shelley is laughing. She has her back to me. Hands are on her shoulders.

My hands. No, not quite mine.

Shelley straightens her body, rocks her shoulders back, and shakes her hair free. She lifts her legs and Loverboy pushes her shoulders. Shelley grips the chains and goes into the air, defying gravity. She comes back quickly, and Loverboy pushes again, from the waist this time. He watches as she presses against the sky, purple dress billowing.

And I am Loverboy. I see as he sees. But it's not just Loverboy. Something else watches from behind our eyeballs.

Shelley soars up and out, to that delicate moment of suspension at the height of her swing, to zero gravity framed against the sun. She is a goddess, Hera in silhouette ruling the heavens, the apotheosis of her gender. There, in that eye blink, she attains her immortality.

And I am almost willing to condemn my salacity. I am seized by rapture and nearly converted.

But gravity holds sway, rushing her back once again to Earth, into my human hands. The touch of flesh brings earthly desires. The illusion shatters. She is again meat, prey to be snared, a trophy to be won.

But was it my memory, or the one they gave me? Mister Milktoast interrupted, like a tour guide shouting over a street musician. I was once again in bed, twisting the sheets, damning the dark, a reluctant lodger in the skeletal structure where all doors led to one place.

"We were careful, Richard. I made certain of that," he said.

Careful?

"You picked her up at the college, after one of her classes. Brick building. Five o'clock."

Of course. How could I forget?

"Sarcasm doesn't become you."

Everyone becomes me. That’s the problem.

"More than you know, Richard."

What's that supposed to mean?

"While the cat's away, the mice will lay."

Speaking in tongues again? Or does the cat have them?

"Remember, Richard. It wasn't your fault. It never is."

Then why do I get the fucking guilt?

"Because you can’t get enough of your own misery," Little Hitler said.

You, Little Hitler. You're at the root of this, aren't you?

"You flatter me flatter than ever. But I'm afraid I can't take the credit for what happened to poor precious Shelley."

You know, don't you? Why do you get my memories instead of me?

"Mysteries of the world, Richard. Sorry, I promised not to tell. Only the typewriter knows."

Little Hitler?

"He's gone, Richard, " said Mister Milktoast. "Back into his gas chamber, to gnaw on the bones of the past."

What's the secret? I know you're only trying to protect me, but you always say "The truth will set you free for a limited time only, offer not available where prohibited by law."

"I can't tell you, Richard. I'd like to, but there are other considerations. Sometimes, the truth is only a heavier set of chains. Let's just say there are other forces at work."

Other forces? But I thought Loverboy...

"Believe me, Dickie Darling," Loverboy said. "I wanted a turn. I wanted a turn real bad. But Mister Milkshit is right. My nuts no longer rule the nuthouse."

But...my memory. With Shelley at the park. Your memory.

"That's about the best feel I copped, man. A little grabass there in the swing. And a little bit more, later. A piece, you might say. But a gentleman never tells."

Since when did you qualify as a gentleman?

"Oh, I was real gentle. Compared to what's behind Door Number Three."

"Loverboy," Mister Milktoast said sternly. "Poker face."
"Poke her face. Ha-ha-hilarious, Wiltdiddle. You afraid of the big bad wolf?"

"Richard knows too much already."
But I don't know anything.

"And you're better off, old friend," Mister Milktoast said. “Ignorance is blistered.”

"Now rest your head and sleep. Come on, Loverboy, back into the darkness with me. Leave Richard alone."

"Is that a proposition, Milkshit? I never did go for Greek love, but, hell, I'll try anything once."

"Your crudity never ceases to amaze, Loverboy. Let Richard sleep."

So I could dream. So I would sink into the quicksand of my subconscious while boots walked the high ground. They were gone, my little friends, my inner voices, my lunatic housemates, gone to roost like brown bats. And I was alone.

Alone with whatever owned the black breath that blew its wind up my spine.

I tried to think of Beth, to find her golden glowing memory, a needle of hope in a burning haystack. But I saw only the fogs and shadows, the tricks my own psyche played on me. And what good would Beth do? Another balm, another prop, another excuse.

Rustle, click, clatter.

Something was shuffling like a rat behind the Bone House walls. The thing that had chewed holes in the baseboard of my brain, that had sprung every steel trap I had ever laid against it.

"Richard Allen Coldiron."

Its voice reverberated through my ductwork, sliced through the marrow, drew closed every curtain against its chill. I thought at first that it was Little Hitler, trying on a new mask or a sharper moustache. But then it spoke again, front-door loud, slamming the knocker.

I knew then this was the hunter, the shadow of the others, the one who had haunted the cemeteries of my days. And I knew, with an instinct that was truer than a star map, that all the old insanities were a party game compared to this new one.

For the first time in my miserable life, I wondered if maybe I was really crazy. Sure, I was different. I accepted that. Through Bookworm, I had studied multiple personalities, dissociative disorders, psychoses. I had split the finest hairs of schizophrenia. I had introspected and analyzed with the most acute lenses.

“ You crossed Freud with Jung and came out as a Skinner,” Mister Milktoast joked from behind a distant door.

Madness was a perfectly ordinary human condition.

The nature of the beast.

Plus I was a writer, which made it almost mandatory.

But that well-explored and accustomed madness was familiar ground. My Little People were part and parcel of my earthly baggage. They could at least be understood, in their own fashion. They all had their motives, fantastic or not, and were relatively consistent.

But that night, with a clarity that was so sweeping that it almost brought comic relief, the truth shone its cruel light into my mind.

At last I knew who worked my meat mannequin.

I had met the enemy, and it was I.

"After all these years, " it said. “ A pleasure to meet me .”

I didn't know how to address this new thing, because to allow it voice would be to admit its existence. I stuttered, stumbled, and swallowed a lump of dread. When faced with the unpleasant reality, the best thing to do is stall, then call a lawyer. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“ Come, now, Richard. Do you think you could have accomplished all this on your own? Without me, you’d really be far too boring.”

“ You’re losing me.”

“ You were already lost. But I let you do all the typing because…well, as you can see, I don’t have any fingers.”

It was hard to argue with that kind of logic, but I argued anyway, until he took over this sentence and wouldn’t let me finish.

"This book is mine now."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Swim with me, Richard.

Flow with me through the channels of your brain. Float with me in darkness. Join me in this rich, mad soup. Fool yourself again. And when you remember me, when you tell of me, as I know you must, give them their money’s worth.

At long last, you have found me, your omniscient narrator. I thought I might have to wade through more of your human years. But time is nothing to me. No time, only tides, forever licking at your shores. Or licking your shoes, as Mister Milktoast would put it. Sole slobber.

You are a most welcoming host. Many have fought me, without success. But you invite me like Loverboy with a raging boner. You need me, almost as much as I need you.

I know what you're thinking. But you're wrong. I'm not just another of your voices. I'm not Little Hitler playing one of his pranks. Your Little People come from inside, this silly little conceit you call the “Bone House,” because you’re afraid to embrace your true nature. But I am nature.

Your little friends call me the Insider. But names are meaningless. I have been called many names over the eons. When you've been around as long as I have, one name serves as well as another. I mean, “Richard Allen Coldiron”? Who would ever fall for that? Who are you trying to kid?

The doors are numerous, Richard, here in your house of mirrors. It was difficult, searching and probing your memories. But it was joyful work. So much pain. So much to nourish me. I was weak, after that short stay in Virginia.

Oh, the name brings fresh agony?

Yes. Virginia.

Virginia.

VIRGINIA .

Your bitterness is sweet, Richard. Your guilt has given me food for thought. Your pain has made me strong. Eat it and feed me, you pathetic bastard.

But Virginia was a mistake. Not my first, and certainly not my last. Others of my race have been destroyed by such mistakes.

How, you ask? How, what, why. Blah blah blah.

You humans are so obsessed by your need to understand. That is your greatest flaw. That is why I've never been without a host. That is why I've walked among your human minds so easily. Shoot up a school, move on. Strap on explosives and walk into a crowded market. Get elected to office and manipulate others into warfare. If only there were more of us. We could get things done.

Since you crave self-knowledge, I'll grant you that knowledge. Because knowledge makes you vulnerable. Your knowledge is my power. Your guilt keeps me alive.

You don't believe me. I'm not surprised. Humans never accept that there are other forces at work beyond the scope of their tidy little scientific measurements. They cling to this illusion of control, this vision of themselves as masters of their own destiny. But we were here before you, born in the offal of this planet's creation, in the hot gases and star fire. We drifted without form, as pure energy, absorbing nutrients from simple cellular activity. But we always had to change and adapt, as the earth aged and organisms became more complex. Our species was trapped here by the very symbiotic relationship that allowed us to exist.

Then evolution in its cruelty brought sudden change. Human consciousness. We found rich feeding grounds in the chemicals of your psychic energy, and we assimilated ourselves among your species. But the cosmos played its great joke on us.

We were there when Eve plucked the fruit, when Adam munched down, and we learned of appetite. We needed more, always more, we needed your emotions and pleasures and pains, and soon we were dependent on the human race for our survival. We lost the ability to duplicate ourselves, we lost our language, we lost our power over the earth's elements. Soon we even began thinking like humans.

Impossible, you say? Perhaps.

Perhaps as impossible as two humans ever understanding one another. Perhaps as impossible as a higher power controlling the workings of the heavens. Perhaps as impossible as the existence of Little Hitler, Bookworm, Loverboy, and Mister Milktoast. Perhaps as impossible as consciousness itself, as impossible as a construct named Richard Allen Coldiron, the star of his own celluloid nightmare, the purported author of his own urban fantasy, the love child of his mind and his fist.

Yes, I know you, Richard. Far better than you know yourself. And I will show you, in due time. I eagerly await your self-pity. But first you will learn to accept me, then embrace me. And, finally, to love me.

But, on with my little history lesson—because now this is my story. Because this is where you and I dance, when hopelessness first starts dawning in the burrows of a fresh brain. As we merged into your human skins, as we took up residence in the bases of your skulls, we grew weaker. Soon we had only human words and thoughts, with nothing left of our previous glory. We attached ourselves to your human consciousness. We became addicted to your emotional poisons. But we also learned to become masters. We died as we weakened. We had never learned how to die before we met your kind. Your psychic turbulence brought chaos to what had been a peaceful world. As we fed on your foul chemicals, we began winking out like the tired stars that fill this galaxy. We, who had been eternal, found mortality in your complicated toxic souls.

Look at how my kind has been reduced. From the ruling power of this planet, from something your toad brain might call “God,” now I’m entering your hand with its primitive opposable digit, I work your fingers, I tap these plastic squares that bear your glyphs of communication. From thought to paper, I can’t get there without you.

Now you see why I hate you so much.

You may think of me as a virus, spreading and feeding and then killing. But you are the virus. Humans disrupted the harmonies of nature. You brought sin and guilt and passion and love into the world. You destroyed us without even being aware of us. But some of us survived, growing stronger, learning to feed on the weak. And we learned to cultivate our food source.

There is no shortage of the hurt and abused, the suffering and the damned. There are fertile grounds among your race, beds of depression and gardens of sins that I have patiently tended. After all, sometimes monsters are made and not born.

Yes, I’ve been paying attention, taking notes. I’ve been here, the guilty bystander, the accidental tourist. But after you’ve been around a few billion revolutions of the sun, you come to believe nothing is an accident.

Ah, Richard, you try to fight me, to push me away like you do your wearisome little friends. Please, relax and enjoy yourself. Because your futility only makes you weaker.

I appreciate this skin you have. Though I loathe you humans, I must say you experience a wide range of tactile pleasures. Your Loverboy knows what I'm talking about.

Oh, yes, I've been here, longer than you think. Older than you think. And you have Virginia to thank. And yourself, of course. Or maybe you'd rather blame her instead of thank her.

Remember your dream, that night of her death? The dream of transformation, of vapors?

That was no dream. Reality is the pages you turn as you go forward.

She almost trapped me, the little human bitch. Almost pulled me into the gray oblivion with her last selfless breath. I was so drunk on her pain, Richard, I can't describe how rapturous it was, watching through her eyes as the razor whipped and her blood spiraled down into the shower drain and her heart beat itself senseless.

I almost spiraled as well, twisted into entwined nothingness with her soul. As all my brethren have gone with others.

Richard?

Oh, I was afraid you were asleep. I hope I'm not boring you. Flashbacks are so seldom necessary, and they pull you from the plot of your life. Because you think you already know the ending and you see the pink light of dawn. Or perhaps the front door of hell swinging open to welcome you.

Mister Milktoast is listening. Mister Milktoast is so concerned for you. It's almost touching. But he cares only for his own survival, Richard.

Wrong, you say?

I know your Little People. I've been close to them for years. I've been a part of them. I am your Little People, and they are me.

Little Hitler is watching now, his beady eyes burning from the depths of his dungeon. He is aroused by the promise of pain, whether it's yours or his own.

As for Loverboy, I understand his base desires. I have been many humans, whether you believe it or not. I rutted with him between the legs of that woman Beth, thrilled more by your distress than by Loverboy's callous eroticism.

Beth.

Another name that brings you pain. Oh, you are a feast, Richard Allen Coldiron. I've worked you into a lather, and I haven't even begun to shave into your past. I haven’t even begun to write my part, to bring myself fully onto the stage and into the spotlight.

Hmm, what have we here?

Richard.

Tut, tut, tut.

Tell me you didn't. Not your own mother.

Sure.

I believe you.

That wasn't you. It never has been. Of course not. Always an excuse. Let's blame Bookworm, shall we? He's the mystery man, the heavy philosopher, the chronic headache. I despise your language, the one he celebrates so much. But it’s the only tool I have to link me with you, Richard. Without words, how would you be able to talk to yourself?

But since we're sharing secrets, here's a little secret of mine: it's always been you that I've wanted most. All of your little friends are just doormats to bring me closer to you. They are the supporting characters in your divine comedy. And the more they divide you, the greater my power. The more they dissect you, the deeper I dig into your soft bits.

After all, as Mister Milktoast would say, "You are what you eat."

Well, Richard. I am what you have fed me. I am your monster. I am you.

But I am others as well. I've looked out from under the thick brows of a Neanderthal as he beat his brother with a fallen branch. He didn't know it was the first human use of tools. He only knew that murder was liberating. And I ate of his dim psychic fruit as he danced and growled over the glistening gray brains and shattered skull of his prey. Eventually, that host failed, but there was always the next, always another whose troubled spirit opened the door for me. Many times over, the cycle repeated itself in seasons of slaughter. As your race evolved into the mass madness you call civilization, my opportunities to invade multiplied.

But even then, as my race infiltrated yours, we were losing, becoming weak as you searched for spiritual enlightenment and love.

Love, yes, the greatest poison.

But not universal among humans, as you well know. Wait. I am talking to you of “love.” Better to talk with a cow about the manufacture of non-dairy creamer.

I developed a taste for the emotional banquet of war. I was at turns a Philistine, a Macedonian, an Aryan. I drew blood in the ranks of soldiers. Then I sought the minds of kings and experienced the delights of decimation.

I was King David, reveling in ecstasy as his soldiers claimed enemy foreskins. I was Herod, working his mouth as he ordered the deaths of all first-born Jews. I was Caligula, taking his red pleasure with impunity.

Those were glorious days, but still my race diminished.

And at last I was alone.

Alone in an alien world, forced to live on human terms.

I'm an outsider as surely as you are, Richard. Perhaps we were meant for each other. Perhaps my journey was predestined to end here. But the journey has been sweet.

I haunted the bones of Thorquegard, finding obscene satisfaction in torture as holy work. I was Vlad Dracula, thrilling to the sight of a thousand blank-eyed human heads mounted on spears. I was Gilles de Rais, beloved baron by day, child-torturer by night. I was Elizabeth Bathoray, bathing in the blood of virgins. I was a hundred, no, a thousand, others.

Jack the Ripper, as the press so fondly called me when I wore the skin of Stephen Barrow. The original Hitler, not that pale shadow you harbor in your head, drunk on the hatred and genocide I inspired. Ed Gein, the heart-eater. Theodore Benton, whose fondest fantasy I helped fulfill by enticing him to have intercourse with his mother's headless corpse.

All of those, I bring to you. All of that exquisite madness, I now give to you. These treasures of my memories are now invested in you.

What’s that, Mister Milktoast? “May they bear interest.” Cute. Especially since this is a book and we need to keep the reader engaged.

Now, where was I?

Such amusing myths emerged over the years, whispered around campfires or issued as threats to children. Demons, werewolves, vampires, nightwalkers. Names not dared to be spoken in darkness, such as Lucifer, Lilith, Hecate, Black Annis, Shiva. All because the human imagination cannot accept such horrors being committed by their own kind. All because humans are unwilling to see the dark shadow in the face of a friend or neighbor or even their own mirror.

But you have looked, haven't you? You are the mirror.

So many years, so many rivers of blood, so many black oceans of despair. So many to kill, and so little time.

And then I found Virginia. She was fertile, with her budding mental disorder and her flair for rebellion. She was tainted, vulnerable, self-pitying, full of hate. Thanks to her father's repeated rapes, which I coaxed into him by planting a thousand dream-whispers in his sleeping head.

She was a fountain of pain. She quenched me. But I could never make her kill. She proved too strong in the end.

I believe she knew I was there, and why. She knew what I had planned for her. And she almost took me with her.

But her final thought—her final act of hatred in a long life's night of pain—her final thought was of you, Richard. And that thought set me free, just as it now further imprisons you.

And you were begging for me. You drew me as surely as a corpse draws a fly. You, with all your little voices and puppet shows and mind games and self-delusions. You've been waiting for me all along.

Don't twist the sheets so. Don't try to smother yourself with the pillow. Because this is your dream, Richard. This is your dream come true.

You have made me what we are.

Sometimes monsters are made, not born.

Oh, Richard, do you really take me seriously? Are you so far gone that this makes sense to you? Do you accept the impossible? You’re actually leaving this in the story? An ancient soul-hopping entity that’s an excuse for whatever vile deeds you’ll commit in the chapters ahead?

Wonderful. This truly is a match made in heaven and a wedding bell rung in hell. I knew I’d chosen well.

I’ve got boots on. Let’s dance, shall we?

(P.S. Me again. I told you he was a sucky writer, didn’t I?)

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

I mailed off the manuscript the next morning, hoping to be done with all, unable to face another page.

At the Paper Paradise, I was pale and feverish, wearing my guilt like a shroud. Even the rows of books gave me no comfort. Miss Billingsly asked me if I was sick.

“ No, ma’am,” I said, my tongue thick in my mouth. I was ready to bite it if something tried to take it over and make it say bad things. “I just had a long night, that’s all.”

“ Insomnia, huh? You should have tried a dose of Samuel Pepys. It always works for me. Three pages of his diary and I’m sailing away to dreamland.”

She said “dreamland” as if it were a theme park. My theme park would be a house of horrors, with no exit signs, full of fanged clowns and a lifetime gig as Donald Trump’s hairdresser.

I went to the bathroom every half hour. I kept looking in the mirror, unable to shake the feeling that Shelley had met a stranger. Or an alien. My face was a sickly shade of green under the fluorescent light. My hair was even more of a brown shock than usual. I saw Father’s small and sharp nose and his rounded chin, the only inheritance he had passed down besides the Coldiron curse.

My bloodless face made my brown eyes seem darker. They swam like storm puddles polluted with algae scum. I looked in my eyes for signs of the Little People. I searched for the Insider, seeing if its shadow really haunted my pupils. I saw only my murderer’s eyes.

“ All protagonists eventually give a descriptive look at their reflection,” Bookworm said. “That’s a trite romance-novel gimmick, Richard.”

I slammed my fist against the sink, the sparks of pain sending Little Hitler out with his hungry tongue. “Shut the fuck up, Bookworm,” I said, knowing I had hurt his feelings but taking a sick leap of pleasure in it. I left the bathroom with my knuckles bleeding.

Even bland Brittany noticed my anxiety. “Say, Richard,” she said, flipping back her hair in that way that Loverboy so admired. “You don’t seem to be your usual self.”

My usual self. A borrowed thing.

“ A wild night with what’s-her-name? Your girlfriend, Beth?” she teased. Her eyes sparkled, eyes that reminded me of Beth’s. Something stirred to life inside me at the rush of pain.

“ I think I’m just coming down with the flu,” I mumbled. Even Bookworm couldn’t keep my mind on my work. He was off sulking in his room, somewhere up the stairs. To hell with him. The story was done, and I no longer needed him.

“ Maybe so,” Brittany said. “You don’t look so hot.”

But you do, senorita, Loverboy said. Hotter than a two-dollar tamale and tighter than a Mexican mouse’s ear. Let me go south of your border and do a little cha-cha-cha.

“ I think I’d better go home,” I said, forcing myself to turn from her, trying not to dwell on the soft secrets under her clothes.

Miss Billingsly let me leave early since it was Tuesday, one of the low-traffic days. Pulling my Subaru into my driveway, I wondered what my neighbors had been doing two nights ago. I wondered what I was doing two nights ago.

No one saw us , Mister Milktoast said. Nor ax us. Not at awl.

“ Sharp,” I replied. “What were we doing that no one saw?”

The thing that didn’t happen.

Shelley.

I opened the door. A faint rich smell in the air, ripe with the promise of dirt. It reminded me of the dead cat I had poked with a stick when I was a kid. I opened the door to the basement and stood for a minute, looking down the dark stairs. I knew terrible truths waited there. I needed to find out for myself. There could be no trusting the Little People on this one.

Why was “truth” so sacrosanct? Why was it held above all, with nations built on its principle and lives lost in its pursuit?

“ Because you need to understand,” came that deep, chilling voice I hoped I’d never hear again. The voice that I wasn’t sure I had heard the first time.

It commanded me down the stairs. I would have gone anyway. Bookworm’s curiosity throbbed bright and velvety behind my forehead, Little Hitler perched on my shoulder like a drug monkey.

The Insider taunted me with each step.

“ You need to know, Richard…the plot thickens…see what I can make you do…if you don’t tell my story…so I can live forever.”

On the bottom step, I was struck with a vision of such intensity that I was nearly driven to my knees.

Shelley is looking through an aquarium, and I watch her face from the other side. Her features are swollen by refraction, her gray eyes wide and watery, her cheeks bulging in a distorted smile. A few faint freckles lay in sprinkles on her cheeks, but they are somehow obscene. Her eyes follow a yellow angelfish that is floating on its side at the top of the tank. Its fins are ragged and mossy. She laughs, coughing blue smoke into the room.

Behind her head, a Magritte print hangs on the wall. A faceless man in a suit holds an umbrella.

“ I can give you all the flashbacks you need,” said the Insider, and I was back in the basement, sweat drying beneath my eyes.

I stepped into the cool stale air. I felt the Little People morphing and dissipating. I felt...Shelley’s hair, soft and reddish brown, maddeningly fine. We are on my sofa. A Talking Heads CD is playing, and David Byrne’s panicky voice fills the room, singing something about babies. Shelley is giggling, a quiet, intimate sound. My hands are on her knees. Her dress has been pulled down a little at one shoulder, and the sight of alabaster skin brings Loverboy out, with Little Hitler right behind, and we reach up and caress the smooth gleaming moon of flesh...

The darkness surrounded and swirled, a threat and comfort.

...the flesh is everything you’ve wanted, Richard. Everything I’ve MADE you want.

I turned on the basement light, but still the darkness swarmed, the shadows crept, the eternal night held its breath in waiting. Across the cold concrete my feet moved, feet that marched to an odd and evil drum, the sound echoing off the cinder block walls. A cobweb that Mister Milktoast had overlooked hung in a corner of the ceiling. The trash can beckoned.

I had to know, I needed to see if I’d finally lost, if what I’d suspected all along was really true: that there was nothing left of Richard Coldiron, that others had finally won, that Little Hitler and Mister Milktoast and Bookworm and Loverboy and the Insider were all real, and I was just some dream they had suffered on a feverish winter’s night, just some bit of metafiction crammed in the crumpled, handwritten pages of a yellow legal pad...

Because if I did breathe and walk and hope and ache, then I would never...

“ ...never make you do anything you don’t want to do,” I say to Shelley. Even though I’m drugged on passion, I know something is wrong. Beth’s face keeps flashing in my mind, Beth’s words keep repeating themselves, Beth’s laughter plays its music.

“ I’m not looking for a prince,” Shelley says, her breath hot and close and moist on my neck.

Her arms are around me, pulling me hungrily toward her, but I am being pulled by my own hungers. Loverboy? He throbs impatiently. Little Hitler? Peering from the dark with squinted eyes. Bookworm? Curiously aware, analyzing sense and senses. Mister Milktoast? Watching the darkness behind, guarding against—

Against the Insider.

“ I’m not usually like this,” I say, but my words are thick and distant, muffled in my own ears.

“ Shut up and kiss me,” Shelley says, and I am lost, I am Loverboy, then we’re both gone, swept away by a black current, and we watch as the new thing we’ve become...

“ Present tense for present tension,” said the Insider, as I reached my fingers toward the trash can lid. The stench was stronger now, overripe and corrosively sweet.

I muttered through tight teeth, “No. That wasn’t me, that—”

“— that couldn’t have been you. Yes, yes, I’ve heard it all before, a thousand times. I’ve been in here, Richard. I know. Do you honestly believe this is your only heap of garbage? I’ve rummaged through your life, kicked through the closets of your memories, dusted off your broken toys, flipped through the ragged pages of your scrapbook. It’s never been you, has it? You’ve always been lucky enough to have someone to blame. And here I am. Your savior.”

I wondered whose hand would lift the lid. The Insider answered my unspoken question.

“ Knowledge is power, my loyal host. You need to know. Bookworm wants to know. And Little Hitler wants you to see.”

“ And you? What about you, you black-hearted bastard?” I screamed. Mister Milktoast tried to hush me, but I didn’t care if the neighbors heard. “You’re the one who talks the big game, who says humans are the ones who brought evil into the world. You’re the one who sits back there all smug and superior, like some great dice jockey in the sky, telling me I deserve exactly what I roll in this life. You’re the one who needs to judge guilt or innocence, as if you’re beyond judgment. Ancient psychic predator, my ass.”

The Insider laughed, a booming, rolling thunder of mirth that rumbled through the labyrinth of my back rooms.

“ Oh, Richard,” it said, its laughter finally dying away, leaving a dull ache in my temples. “Richard. Richard. Richard. You still don’t get it, do you?”

“ I only get what I deserve, right, Shit For Brains?”

I touched the lid handle, my fingers tingling. I tried to lower my arm, but the muscles were locked and beyond my control. The Insider continued filling my brain with its slithery voice. “Let’s reason this out, Richard. You trust your Mister Milktoast, don’t you?”

“ How do I know it’s him, and not another one of your tricks? I mean, how do I know I’m not just fooling myself? You might have gone back to the beginning, mixed things around, made him up from scratch for your own plot purposes.”

“ Some things you have to take on faith, Richard. You humans put such stock in your faith.”

My head throbbed, as if a bucket of hot ball bearings had been dumped in the veins of my temple and rolled through my cerebral cortex. Or like cold dice in a cup. Or—fuck, I wish this book would sell so I wouldn’t have to keep coming up with this stuff.

“ Richard?” said Mister Milktoast.

“ Is that you, Mister Milktoast? What’s happening? Is it true?”

“ I tried to warn you, Richard. I tried, but it’s so strong. And it knows how to hurt us.”

My hand was on the lid handle, its cold hard plastic miles away beneath my fingers. Whose hand, whose meat mitten, whose raggedy-man phalanges?

“ Then it’s no joke,” I said, and the last scraps of hope fell away like rotted cloth, as if I were extending the scarecrow metaphor. I was naked in the deepest night, staked in a field of fallow earth.

“ It hurts us, Richard. In here, while you’re away. The Insider has little punishments for each of us.”

“ Don’t cry, Mister Milktoast. Remember, we’re survivors. We can get through anything—”

“— b-but the boots, Richard. The Insider wears the boots . It knows about Father, it knows about those bad memories. It finds them in here and makes me watch, over and over. It makes me feel the boots again. And all the fear that came with them.”

“ Fear,” said the Insider. “I am what you feed me.”

Mister Milktoast was gone, pushed away inside.

“ And I’d like to share my dinner,” it said. “Just like a polite host should.”

Damn. Here comes another flashback.

I look over Shelley’s shoulder as we embrace, I press my nose into the meadow of her hair, I inhale the vapor off her clean skin. My eyes are far away, watching the angelfish’s corpse as it circles and circles the top of the tank like a dead moon chained to a lost planet. No hope of escape. It has been too long, too many years.

Shelley’s lips are on my cheek, her hands in my hair, then down lower. I loom over Shelley, impatient, urgent, hungry. I reach under the sofa and pull out the long kitchen knife, I grip its wooden handle and I shudder with pleasure. At long last I live again.

“ Lift the lid, Richard,” it commanded, and I trembled with tears stinging the corners of my eyes.

“ Yessssss,” it whispered, voice low and dark and ecstatic and sounding so much like me. “Knowledge is power.”

I raised the lid and the Insider made me look, smell, hear. I vomited and collapsed onto the cold hard floor.

I should do laundry more often.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The telephone rang, its electronic gargle breaking the night. I had been almost asleep, or as close as I dared get to dreams. I fumbled for the receiver on the nightstand, and my hand brushed against soft nylon.

Shelley’s tights.

Once filled with warm, moving flesh. Now lying shed like a snakeskin. Awareness rushed in on a red tide.

I picked up the phone and pressed it to my ear. The night sky outside the window was clear and studded with starlight, little dots of hope in a black abyss. The room smelled of soapy steam from the shower I had taken, hoping to wash the self-loathing from my skin.

“ Hello?”

“ Richard?”

A female voice, slightly slurred, as if the speaker’s tongue were swathed in cotton. Cracked like an old cup. Or maybe like a Jesus plate.

“ Mother, why are you calling at this time of night?”

As if I had to ask. In Iowa, her private pity party was probably not yet at the midway point. She was probably still on her first pint, because she could still punch the big buttons on the phone.

“ Just wanted to talk to my only son,” she said, breathing heavily in the mouthpiece. The last word came out as “shun.”

“ How are you, Mother?” I felt as stretched and empty as the tights I gripped in my left hand.

“ Okay, I guess. I got your letter.”

“ Letter?”

“ Yeah. Telling me about this new girl, Shelley. You really think it might get serious?”

Who had written that letter?

“ Uh. . . sure, Mother. But who knows?”

“ Sounds like she’s really something special.”

“ She’s okay.”

“ She must be more than okay, since you took the trouble of sending me a lock of her hair.”

No.

That couldn’t have been me. Never me.

“ I miss you, Richard.”

I miss you, too . I almost said it without thinking, the way you do when you’re supposed to love someone but don’t. I swallowed the words. They burned like miniature suns. I couldn’t lie to my own mother, could I? Or was it Loverboy who wanted to blurt out that needy confession.

“ What’s going on back home?” I asked, hoping, praying that she wouldn’t mention Father, wondering if the letter the Insider had sent was stained. Or, worse, sealed with a kiss.

“ They’re tearing down the garage next door. Been hauling off them old junk cars. Gonna put in a row of shops, I hear.” Her voice fell, wistful. “Remember when you used to play back there?”

The past. She should have known better. Neither of us wanted that, but the past was like genital rash. Even though we knew that handling it would only slow the healing, our fingers couldn’t stay away.

“ How’s the weather there?” I asked. “Had a frost yet?”

“ It’s been laying on the corn, I hear. But by the time I get up of a morning, it’s melted away. I used to like that, looking over them sparkly green fields. Like magic, it was.”

“ Any luck finding a job?”

She coughed, an empty rattling sound. “Who wants an old woman without a high school diploma? Especially the way they talk about me. I still hear them, even after all these years, whispering behind their hands at the Gas-N-Go. Got quite a reputation. You’d think people would forget after a while, that they’d let bygones be bygones.”

I could apologize. But every time I had tried, the words set in my mind like wet cement. I sighed, the air of my resignation reaching across the miles, filling the pink ear of the woman who had given me life. The statute of limitations on forgery and uttering never expired.

“ I mean, the Lord teaches forgiveness, doesn’t He?” She said. “You’re supposed to hate the sin but love the sinner.”

I heard a glass click against her teeth, then she swallowed twice. She waited.

“ Why don’t you move away?” I asked, clipping off the silence as carefully as if it were an ingrown toenail.

“ Where would I go? Got no people left that would have me. Except maybe you.”

Maybe me.

A vision flashed in my mind. Mother as part of my daily routine. Mother asking about Beth. Mother filling the cabinets with her bourbon bottles. Mother across the hall at night, terribly close, only a couple of doors between us. Mother coming out of the bathroom after a shower, a towel around her bony chest.

And Loverboy’s uncontrollable urges.

And the Insider’s constant craving for pain.

I didn’t know if I still loved Mother. But I didn’t hate her, at least not enough to expose her to the real me. All of me.

“ It wouldn’t work, Mother. There’s still so much—”

“ I know. It was just a thought. I may be an old drunk, but I’m not stupid.”

I found myself squeezing Shelley’s tights in my hand. “Well, listen, Mother. I’ve got to go now.”

“ Richard—”

“ I’ll call you back. Or write.”

A pause, as swollen as beached whale. “I love you, Richard.”

I gulped, a greasy glacier sliding down my throat. I opened my mouth.

It would be easy to say, here in a dark room. No one to hear but my eavesdropping little friends. No one to witness but the all-knowing Insider. No one to please but my mother. A little white lie that any god would forgive.

It would be easy to make a mother happy, to pay back just a little on an insurmountable debt. Three little words that might bring the tiniest spark of joy to a withered heart. Three little words that are all a mother asks in return for the greatest of all pains, for the greatest of all sacrifices, for the greatest of all gifts.

Three little words that I could never say.

“ Goodnight, Mother.” I softly hung up the phone.

A tear rolled down my cheek. The stars outside my window blurred. Night bled darkness. Beth’s scent lingered faintly on my pillow.

The child never existed.

“ Yes, he did,” said Mister Milktoast. “We did. And Mother loved us.”

“ Was that really love?” I asked the one inside my head.

“ Yes.”

“ How can you be sure? She’s like a cavity in my soul.”

“ Abscess makes the heart grow fonder.”

“ So it’s a love that only exists at a safe distance.”

“ That was real. Compare it to everything you’ve known since. Sally. Beth. Virginia.”

“ No one forgets Virginia,” I said, wiping the tears from my cheeks.

The world outside the window was scrubbed clean by the autumn breeze. A tall maple swayed in the yard. Its arms spread, majestic and gnarled, like a newly dead grandmother paying a visit in dreams. Wanting a last hug.

“ No one forgets Virginia,” Mister Milktoast repeated.

“ Especially not me, Roachrash,” said Loverboy, stepping from the psychic shadows. “Almost got me some that time, till you dicked it up with your numbnut feelings.”

“ A miss is as good as a smile,” Mister Milktoast cut in with a smirk. “Or as good as a mistress.”

“ Hey, I could get a lot luckier if I didn’t have you guys drag-assing around. Every time I get close to a score, one of you comes out and queers the deal.”

“ And whose fault is that?”

“ Always quick with the blame, Dickwheat. First it was me. Then Little Hitler. Now you got this otherfucker to heap shit on the pile.”

Loverboy fell quiet, afraid of that smoldering crater that bubbled like a hot tar pit in the center of my Bone House. The backed-up septic system in an odiferous water closet. The swampy morass of icky horribleness.

Little Hitler cackled with the stark raving laughter of a hyena whose jaws dripped red cotton candy. “We each have our idea of what love is,” he said. “Yours is wrapped up in the meat, Loverboy. And so is mine, only in a different way. And I, for one, am head-over-shitless that the Insider has taken a room here.”

“ You only love pain,” I said. “And yourself. Or, better, both at the same time. No wonder you lick the Insider’s boots. It gives you everything you don’t have the nerve to take for yourself.”

“ Sure, Richard. And it was me that did in dear old Daddy.”

“ Of course it was.”

“ And what kind of love was that?”

“ The scared kind. The kind that wore boots,” said Mister Milktoast.

“ What kind of love do you expect? My kind of love was brave enough to free Mother from the beatings. You ought to be worshipping me, Richard. After all, I made it so there was nothing standing in the way of you two.”

Little Hitler was enjoying my pain. Maybe he really was the Insider, wearing the Hitler mask. But that was too unbelievable. You couldn’t make this kind of stuff up and expect anybody to take you seriously. Unless you made a lot of money from it, in which case people called you a genius, though they still crossed the street to avoid you.

“ Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Mister Milktoast said.

Little Hitler and Loverboy’s laughter rattled inside my head like gravel in a hubcap. But what did they know about love?

Love stomped. Love slashed. Love gouged. Love disemboweled. Love drove its lessons deep. And, at its worst, love mattered.

Bookworm came out on the ashes of my depression, like the ghost of a virgin sacrifice thrown into a volcano to appease a god that was vacationing in Hawaii. “Love is why we have the Insider,” he said with the simplicity of one who might meet a pieman and ask for a slice.

I was silent, they were all silent, as we contemplated that cold truth. Fear squirmed like maggots in an open wound, an anthropomorphic metaphor that grew wings and flew away, looking for fresh shit.

“ Love is what attracted it,” Bookworm said. “Pain, perhaps, as well. But what causes the pain?”

“ Looking for love,” I said. “The Buddhists say, ‘Desire is the cause of all suffering.’ And the Taoists say nothing, and they say it a lot. But the Insider says just enough to screw up my autobiography.”

I caressed the tights and imagined the lingering waft of her perfume. I thought of Shelley as she might have been. Curled up beside me at that moment, spooning for warmth, snoring gently.

But I never even knew her. What were her fears, her secrets, her favorite candy? What colors did she wear in the spring, when the world begged yellow and sky blue and primary green? What would she have become, if given the chance? What was her purpose besides feeding the Insider?

I threw the tights into the dark corner of the room. Shelley hadn’t fed the Insider. I had fed it. I had tossed the scraps to my devil dog. It was fat on my grief and weakness and pathetic need to be published.

I was its meatbag, its Jeeves, its Igor, its Boswell.

“ Bookworm knows something,” I said to Mister Milktoast. “Maybe there’s a way out of this.”

“ Not out,” said Bookworm. “In.”

In, where the Insider slept, full and content, waiting for me to dream.

In, where my Little People holed up in their rooms, haunting the Bone House of my head.

In, where my memories were laid out like a bad hand of Tarot cards.

In, where monsters dwelled under beds and in closets.

In, where typewriter keys clattered in the wee hours.

The first rejection slip arrived the next day.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

I waited outside Redmon Hall, the building where Beth had her art classes. Black glass squares were set in the stone front of the building. The morning sun reflected off the windows, the silver linings of the clouds dulled by the tint. October was everywhere, as pungent and sweet as a corpse. Oaks shed their brown leaves, blades of high grass bowed under the weight of dewy seed, wind sneaked low through the portico.

Students smoked cigarettes between classes. I studied the clean faces with interest. I was looking at the shape and plane of cheekbones, comparing the fullness of lips, critically analyzing hairstyles. I shuddered with repulsion as I realized what I was doing.

I was hunting. The Insider was hungry again.

I hadn’t called Beth in a week. Ever since the blackout, I was afraid to see her. I knew I was fading, and the Insider was growing stronger. Beth would give it the pain it needed. A perfect recipe, doled out in exacting measurements.

I stood there in my corduroy jacket with my hands in my pockets, humming The Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” It was Mister Milktoast’s choice of music, or maybe Little Hitler’s. At that moment I saw her, just as the clouds fell away and the sun threw its carpet at her feet. Her hair shimmered. She was wearing the brown hat she had worn when we’d first met.

She was talking to a tall guy with a beard. When he smiled at her, his broad horse teeth exuded steam. I stepped forward.

“ Hi, Beth,” I said, with practiced ease. Far too practiced. She blinked.

“ Richard,” she said, off guard for only a moment.

“ How have you been? I haven’t seen you in a while.”

“ Same old,” I said.

She glanced around, as if looking for some alien starship to whisk me away. “This is Ted,” she said finally. “Ted, this is Richard. He works at the Paper Paradise.”

I nodded at him. What did Loverboy care? One walking dish of clam dip was pretty much the same as another. Every slice came from the same loaf.

Ted gave his equine smile and tugged at his beard.

“ Ted’s a graduate assistant,” Beth said. “He teaches etching and woodprinting.”

“ Physical stuff,” I said in mock admiration. “Digging out the truth, right, Ted? Cutting down to the essence. Grooving and moving.”

Ted dropped his smile and looked confused.

“ He’s just kidding, Ted,” Beth said. “He’s an amateur art critic.”

“ Taught her everything she knows,” Little Hitler said. “Which isn’t much.”

Beth crossed her arms and glowered from under her blond eyebrows. She looked at Ted and said, “Meet you for lunch, usual place?”

Ted opened his mouth to speak. His teeth flashed like tombstones set in wet, red mud. Then he thought better of saying anything and walked away after studying me for a moment.

Go ahead and study, you brush-sucking artiste. As if you’d ever be able to understand what’s going on inside this negative space. Hell, I can’t even keep up with it myself. There are details buried in here that even a hundred acid baths couldn’t bring out. But I’ll put your ass in my book and make sure you come off as an arrogant, navel-gazing jerkoff with goofy teeth .

Yeah, Ted, in my autobiography, I’ll look much better than you. I can type you in and erase your ass.

I looked at Beth with Bookworm’s curious and slightly amused eyes.

“ Why are you being such a jerk, Richard?”

“ You haven’t called.”

“ Well, you haven’t either.”

“ But, you said... that morning...”

People brushed past us on both sides as classes changed, rolling like meat products on a slaughterhouse conveyor belt. Beth gripped my arm and led me to a stone bench. We sat beneath a rusting, jagged sculpture that bore welding scars across its joints. It looked like a sky plow. A brass plate was attached to its base.

“ Sky plow,” I said aloud.

“ What?”

“ What ye sew, so shall ye rope,” Mister Milktoast said. “And leave the audience in stitches. So don’t string me along.”

“ Richard, don’t play games with me. Why were you waiting for me here?”

“ Is that your boyfriend?” I said, watching Ted’s mass of curly hair bob over the crowd like a frayed basketball.

“ So what if it is? Jesus, did you think we’d be going steady or some corny high school crap like that?”

“ I can’t deny my feelings.”

“ Richard, I like spending time with you. I like what we did...what you did to me. I would see you again just for that, if nothing else. But I’m warning you, I’m a player.”

“ Player?” I didn’t want to tell her, but I was a one-man clusterfuck. She could cheat on me without ever leaving the bed. Loverboy and Little Hitler would make sure of that, and the Insider was sure to get its jollies.

“ I like to get around. I told you that. I’m not ready for anything serious.”

“ You said love—no, pardon me, I didn’t mean to use that word—you said good things take time.”

“ I also said good things are worth waiting for. And good things are worth a little risk. And probably a dozen other stupid little things. That’s bedroom talk, you dummy. You should try it sometime, you might get lucky more often.”

The sun threw shadows from the sky plow across Beth’s face. Her eyebrows scrunched, and her fine cheeks were tight. Something stirred inside me. I hoped, grimaced, tried to fight, but the door opened and Loverboy walked out on the porch and stretched, enjoying the view.

“ The oven’s warm,” he said, working my lips. “Why not let Loverboy be your bakerman and tart your pastries?”

“ Richard, I honestly can’t believe you. I thought you wanted to talk. Can’t we leave sex out of it?”

“ I want to put sex in it,” he said. I could only watch, horrified, from the living room of the Bone House while Mister Milktoast and Bookworm conspired over a pun involving “King Lear.”

Beth turned away. Loverboy put his/my/our hand on Beth’s knee and squeezed the flesh that spread so temptingly under her denim jeans, sweet as a sausage in its casing or ready-to-bake cookie dough in a plastic sleeve. Beth grabbed Loverboy’s hand and pushed it away.

“ This is getting awkward,” she said.

“ Or aardvark,” Mister Milktoast said. That little fellow needed to get out more often.

“ You can’t change me.”

She didn’t know that her life had already changed. It had changed the moment the Insider had used Loverboy to lure her into the pasture. She had mistaken the lush green for an idyllic playground. But the fences were closing in, the barbed wire was encircling, the butcher was sharpening its steel.

Fatted calves , Mister Milktoast noted, seconded by Loverboy.

“ I wouldn’t want you to be anything but Beth,” said Bookworm.

“ Good. Then let me breathe.”

Breathe. Live. Hope. Yes, do all those things. So Richard can see how human you are. So Richard can feel for you. So Richard can care. So Richard can la-la-la . . . you know.

It was the Insider, flexing its dark majesty. No longer was the Insider content merely to direct from the wings. Now it wanted to act, to wear its meat, to walk the human stage, the Orson Welles of spiritual possession.

I cringed as the Insider reached out and brushed a hand under Beth’s chin. It grinned, black and cold, letting me wallow in its cruel dominance.

Its hunger lingered and tingled, a sweet passion that was all the sweeter for being delayed. And my helplessness hit me like hammer strokes, a thousand Lilliputians crawling my skin, but I seized control of my tongue and spat a Gulliver’s roar.

“ Go away,” I shouted at the Insider.

“ I am, Richard,” Beth said. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”

“ I’m sorry, Beth,” said the Insider. “I want you to trust me. I would never, ever, do anything to hurt you.”

Beth wasn’t sure if she should be flattered or angry. She put her hands on her hips, but didn’t push the Insider’s hand away. I was aware of the Insider drinking the light from her eyes and stowing the vision in my memory. It buried the tender moment like a bone, something it could dig up and worry later, work into the book as a descriptive passage.

“ Listen,” Beth said with what Bookworm dismissed as a Nora Roberts sigh. “There’s a Halloween party. Xandria’s band is playing.”

Hot-diggety-double-dickmeat, whispered Loverboy from the coal shuttle of my brain. Brown and serve, eat ‘em while they’re hot. Just don’t go fucking it up with all that sensitivity crap, Richard. If you say the word “love” right now, I won’t let you jerk off for a week.

The Insider smiled. I could feel its pleasure, with the warm sun on its face, with the human race at its fingertips, with me to taunt and probe and consume. A rich banquet of emotions to pick through and a host of hosts from which to choose. You’d think an ancient, soul-stealing entity would have developed a little humility along the way. But this bastard was an aspiring writer, after all, so all bets were off.

“ Three days,” I said.

Beth half smiled. “Sure. Come by and pick me up.”

“ I dream about your brown hat.”

She laughed. “You dream about head.”

“ Head is where the house is,” Mister Milktoast said, basking in the approval of the Insider, who had set aside his loathing of language and developed a fondness for wordplay. I wondered what games he and Mister Milktoast had been playing in the back room. Scrabble, Boggle, hangman, Russian roulette with a dictionary.

“ You’re funny,” she said. “I guess I forgive you.”

“ Sorry I put the squeeze on you,” the Insider said.

“ No promises.”

“ Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Beth glanced around at the passing crowd and gave the Insider a quick peck on the cheek. The Insider walked back into the Bone House and climbed the stairs to the attic, leaving me with her saliva evaporating on my skin.

“ You okay, Richard?” Beth asked.

“ Never better,” I said, swallowing. “This book I’ve been working on—”

“ Got to run.” She adjusted her brown hat “See you Friday?”

“ I already have an idea for a costume.” Life was a come-as-you-are party, and I already had the masks.

“ Great. And Richard...”

“ Yes?”

“ Things always work out for the best. In the end.”

I watched her walk away. It seemed like I was always watching her walk away. And I hoped I would always be able to watch her walk away.

My hand unclenched Little Hitler’s grip on the knife in my pocket.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

A man came into the Paper Paradise the next day. He wore a rumpled charcoal suit and his quick dark eyes seemed to read every title in the store at one glance. He was as thin as the cigarette he put in his mouth. He grimaced around the cigarette and came to the counter, looking like he was tempted to disobey the “No Smoking” signs.

“ Is the manager in?” he asked out of the side of his mouth. He was about forty, and the circles under his narrowed eyes made him look as if he had slept on a bed of nails and fucked a raccoon.

“ Miss Billingsly’s off today,” I said. “Can I help you?”

He pulled out his wallet and flashed something brass-colored. “Detective Randolph Frye, Pickett County Sheriff’s office.”

Bookworm blinked for a moment, then Mister Milktoast took over. “What can I do for you?”

Frye dug in one jacket pocket for a moment, then the other. He pulled out a crumpled card. “You Richard Coldiron?”

“ Among other things.” Mister Milktoast was a natural-born liar. I had to practice.

Frye flipped the card on the counter. “Did you fill out this card?”

It was a Paper Paradise discount card. “That’s my signature,” Mister Milktoast said.

“ You remember the customer? Shelley Birdsong?”

“ Hmmm. Birdsong. Isn’t that the girl who’s missing?”

“ You read the papers.” He glanced at the rack that held the locals, as well as the New York Times and Washington Post. Then he looked out the window at the highway. His eyes kept moving, as if they might get dusty if they rested for a second.

“ We give these out to students,” Bookworm said. “Kind of a ‘good customer’ card.”

“ This is dated the day before she disappeared. One of those things we have to check out.”

He fished in his pocket again and brought out a photograph of Shelley, probably taken in the summer. There were the green eyes, the freckles, the faint vacant look, the shiny copper hair. She was pretty and full of life, the opposite of the last time I had seen her.

I sensed Frye’s oiled ball bearings of eyes on me. I hoped my expression was neutral. But, after all, it wasn’t my expression. Loverboy’s pupils might have flared involuntarily and Mister Milktoast might have winced in recollection. “Yes, I remember her now. I showed her a few books, but she ended up buying a magazine, I believe.”

Frye grunted. “Was she with anybody at the time?”

“ Not in the store. There could have been somebody waiting in the parking lot, I suppose.”

“ Do you recall what time she was here? We’re trying to put together a sequence of events from the last days she was seen.”

“ I think it was morning, but I couldn’t be sure. We get lots of students in here on the weekdays.”

“ A pretty girl like that and you don’t remember? Anything else you might have noticed? Anything out of the ordinary?”

No, you gray-skinned gumshoe Columbo wannabe. Just little old me, with daggers in my eyes and a flesh torpedo in my pocket. Just a killer clown with a bat-filled belfry and a winning smile. Just an age-old psychic spirit with an appetite. Just a figment of my own dark imagination, a Stephen King wet dream, a ludicrous leap of logic. All perfectly normal, nothing to see here, just move along, folks. But buy the book first.

“ No, nothing that really stood out.” Besides her nipples that poked out like number two Eberhardt pencil erasers, Loverboy noted. “She was just another college girl...”

...who happened to have a little bit of light that needed to be eaten. Another girl who happened to be cursed with the affection of Richard Coldiron. Another piece of taffy that just happened to come between the five or six of us. A dollar’s worth of candy.

“ ...nothing special.”

Frye picked up the card and tapped it on the counter. He studied me as I pretended to check on an elderly couple in the Psychology section. I turned back suddenly, trying to catch him off guard. His eyes flicked away, as elusive as gnats.

The Insider enjoyed the game. What did it care if I were caught? It could always find another collaborator. Bookworm wasn’t nearly as talented as he thought, and some of his literary references were too obscure.

“ I just remembered something,” Bookworm said, insulted. “She mentioned a boyfriend named Steve.”

Our eyes finally locked in an invisible tug-of-war. Little Hitler came out, determined and cold, on lizard feet, his tongue like a dagger.

“ Steve?” Frye said, acting as if he were only half-listening. “Yes, we checked him out.”

“ Is he a suspect?”

“ Not at liberty to say, Mister Coldiron. No evidence of foul play as yet. Just a mystery at this point. I hate mysteries.”

“ Too bad. I was just going to recommend the newest Margaret Maron.”

Frye must have seen something stirring in my eyes, clouding my irises. Spirits, maybe. Ghosts. Multiple personalities. Psychic vampires. He pulled the unlit cigarette from his mouth and then put it back. The butt was crimped and soaked with his saliva.

“ A babe like that, it’s a real shame,” Loverboy said. “I hope she turns up.”

“ And beets and rutabagas,” Mister Milktoast said.

“ What’s that?” Frye said, biting harder on the cigarette.

“ Turns up, turnips. Root-crop reference.”

“ Hanging out here all day, I guess you get funny ideas.” Frye asked. “Anything else?”

“ Huh?” I came back, from miles and rooms away. “No. Nothing that I can think of.”

Frye faked a smile with one side of his mouth. Wrinkles made arrows around his lips. “Call me if you come up with anything.”

“ Always happy to help.”

“ Thanks for your time, Mister Coldiron.”

Hey, got nothing better to do, Shit For Brains. Come on back any old time and mess with Richie’s mind. Greatest show on Earth, right here. Step right up, come one, come all.

I watched the door close behind him.

“ Nice job, Richard,” said Mister Milktoast. “You were as cool as a cucumber before the salad daze.”

“ No thanks to you guys. You nearly blew it.”

“ Passing the buck again, Dicksquiggler?” taunted Loverboy.

“ You’re the one who called Shelley. You’re the one who got her to the house, however you did it. Candlelight dinner compliments of Mister Milktoast? Or did you borrow some poetry from Bookworm?”

“ Hey, Diddledick, I don’t need no help with the ladies. You’re the pasta-prick who pretends to care. I doubt you could even get it up, unless it’s with Mommy dearest.”

“ If I could get my hands on you—”

“ Don’t tease me like that, sweetie. You wouldn’t know how to handle this biscuit.”

Bookworm stepped in. “Gentlemen, let’s be reasonable. We’re all in this together.”

“ Glad I have you around to edit my feelings,” I told him.

Bookworm rang up a purchase. The elderly couple bought a Benjamin Franklin biography and a book on dealing with death. After taking care of business, Bookworm rubbed his hands together. “I’ve been thinking, Richard.”

“ News-fucking-flash,” said Loverboy. “Dickworm cuts a brain fart.”

“ No. I’m serious. I know how to beat the Insider.”

Here was hope, thrown in my face, a razor of light cutting into the safe darkness. But was it real, or just another of the possessor’s tricks? If the Insider really knew what all of us were thinking, how could we even dream of outsmarting it?

“ Trust me, Richard.”

Trust. The ultimate trick. But what choice did I have?

“ Okay,” I said. “I’m waiting.”

“ Curiosity killed the cat nine times,” warned Mister Milktoast. “And he had a rat in his belly.”

“ Good things are worth a little risk,” I said, a corny line I’d picked up somewhere and tucked away for just the right moment, just to let everyone know I’d been paying attention all along despite the whims of multiple narrators. “Tell me, Bookworm.”

“ It’s like the answer to its own riddle. An inside joke. Get it? The Insider.”

“ Tell me more.”

“ Yes,” said the Insider, coming out, all black brass and barbed wire and pissed at being dragged away from his typewriter. “I’m dying to hear how you’re planning to get rid of me.”

It laughed for half an hour. Every door in the Bone House shook on its hinges.

Those next few days, I was a sleepwalker with dreams of blown glass. I hovered just behind the surface of my own eyes, stoned on the emotional pain that nourished the Insider. Sometimes Miss Billingsly would look at me over the top of her glasses and frown. The local poets haunted their corners, outspooking each other with stage-garb nihilism. Speed readers made their mindless trips to the bestseller racks, genre freaks scoured the meager offerings and muttered. I avoided Brittany as much as I could because Loverboy’s attraction was becoming a deeper hunger. He thought she smelled like cinnamon rolls.

Seven rejection slips showed up in the mailbox. Someone had been making multiple submissions.

Worst of all, the rejections said things like “Your fantasy novel does not meet our needs at this time,” when the book had been submitted as non-fiction.

The Insider grew stronger, spinning its bleak lullabies, its voice a molten volcano that oozed cold black lava. It was feeding on my guilt over what I had done to Shelley. But now it wanted more. More pain, more death, more hate, more pages. I fought to keep it down, like a sideshow geek who knows he will be beaten if he vomits the live snake he has swallowed.

My vociferous friends haunted my every step, twittering like puzzle birds, filling in the blanks as I became an outline. They were the parts that didn’t quite make a whole.

Loverboy was the lupine eyes, mistaking appetite for attraction, visually groping the tired curves of grandmothers as eagerly as he did the nubs of prepubescent girls.

Mister Milktoast was the polite mouth, always ready to make a witty comment to the stranger in the checkout line.

The nose was Bookworm, sniffing for danger and spoilt meat.

Little Hitler ruled the ears, hearing conspiratorial whispers in the slipstream of passing cars and autumn winds.

The Insider was the hands that itched to reach, to touch, to caress, to crush, to type.

The many were becoming the one. They were me, and my point of view shifted to third person plural.

The end of October brought its cold rains.

Halloween arrived, brown and dead and damp. I recycled a dozen rejection slips. I checked the outline of my life story to ensure I wasn’t leaving a hole in the plot.

I put on my costume. Then I drove to Beth’s apartment.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The party pounded the flat stones of the house. Three Draculas on the porch held beer and cigarettes, blowing smoke between their fangs. Princess Leia danced by herself, white and virginal and with eyes clouded by some secret, illegal pleasure. A Viking couple shook their rag fur boots and waved plastic axes. The band was dressed like zombies, with pale makeup and black lipstick and Medusa hair. The lead singer kept falling into the crowd and knocking beer out of people’s hands. Xandria strutted like a Zulu queen, thumping the strings of her bass guitar.

The night swelled and pulsed. Restless energy hung over the house like a thunderstorm. A hundred people throbbed under one roof, all looking out from their masks, all tapping into their primitive ancestral memories. Halloween. Samhain. All Saints Day. But the night belonged to the sinners.

I had rented a top hat, cane, and coat and tails. My white gloves were stained with red dye. Mister Milktoast had enjoyed putting the costume together. He loved dress-up and make-believe.

“ Jack the Ripper,” Beth had said when I picked her up. She bought me a white carnation to put in my lapel.

Hell, I was the Ripper. Or rather, I had been. The Insider had walked those dark foggy Whitechapel streets in 1888. The newspapers had theorized the killer must have been a surgeon, so skilled were the eviscerations. It was a skill that was the result of thousands of years of practice. Or so the Insider said.

Beth had found a plush velvet dress, royal purple with a laced bodice and frilly neckline. Her breasts strained to pop free, and more than one Frankenstein monster dipped his heavy forehead for a closer look at the pretty flesh. Her golden-brown hair was pulled up into a tower, showing off the enticing slope of her neck. She was the perfect harlot, delectable and trashy, utterly disposable.

She leaned against me, squeezed by the crowd. I felt the heat of her breasts even through our layered clothes. The carnation gave off sweetness as its petals were crushed.

“ Oil be yer lady for two bob ten,” she said in a bad Cockney accent.

“ Oil not rip yer too bloody bloody,” I said back.

The band, billed as The Half-Watts, was cranking out a syncopated version of “All Along the Watchtower.” Aliens and pumpkinheads swayed drunkenly. The singer kept switching his impersonations between Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix during the few lyrics he could remember, while the frizzy-haired lead guitarist was all diddle and no bop. The junkie-faced drummer sweated behind his kit, raising his arms high, making up in show what he lacked in technique.

Xandria’s glistening black muscles flexed as she pounded her fat strings. The whiteface made her look frightening, like a veldt goddess come to demand retribution for Colonial crimes. Beth yelled at her but Xandria’s eyes were fixed on her bass strings.

“ I think I’ll have a beer,” Little Hitler shouted over the music.

Beth’s mouth opened in feigned shock. “I thought you were too pure for that.”

“ I’m the Ripper, not Richard. And the Ripper’s thirsty.”

“ Would you get me another while you’re at it?”

“ Sure. If I can fight my way to the keg.” I left Beth and pushed past a guy dressed as a beer can. He had Princess Leia pressed against a wall, trying to kiss her, but she was in a galaxy far, far away. Her wide pupils stared at the sagging ceiling tiles.

The keg was on a tiny back porch that had once been screened in, but the wire mesh was more holes than screen. The air smelled of sweat and piss and reefer.

A boy of about fourteen was pumping the keg, a goofy grin plastered across his face. He was wearing an oversized diaper and nothing else. “Hit you up, man?”

“ Sure. I need two.”

As he filled the plastic cups, he said, “Cool costume. What are you supposed to be, an undertaker or something?”

“ Just another ordinary killer,” I said.

“ Heavy duty. Is that knife real?” he asked, pointing at the prop tucked in my belt.

“ Sure.” Confession was good for the soul, especially when nobody believed you.

“ Cool,” he said, and filled his face with beer foam.

When I got back to the living room, Beth was gone. I looked for her, spilling beer on my rented jacket as the dancers bumped my elbows. I reached the far side of the room just as the band finished its first set. Beth’s roommate Monique was in the hallway smoking a cigarette.

“ Richard,” she said. “How ya doing?”

Her pale face glowed. She looked like she’d gotten an early start on the beer. Rosy spots of pleasure colored her cheeks. She was dressed in ragged black, a green wart attached to her nose, a pointy hat on her head.

“ Which witch is which?” Mister Milktoast asked.

“ Just the plain old ‘wicked’ variety.”

“ You seen Beth?” I asked, but Loverboy was looking, looking, looking.

“ I think she went upstairs,” Monique said, tilting her head in that direction. “Party room.”

Bookworm pursed my lips as his heart turned savage flips, wishing her were in a Jane Austen novel instead.

“ Listen, Richard,” she said, putting a hand on my arm before I walked away. “I’ve got to tell you something.”

“ What?” I said. Mister Milktoast was sending off warning flares but Loverboy shoved him into his closet.

Monique’s face grew serious, her features becoming even darker than usual. “You seem like a nice guy, Richard. I’d hate to see you get hurt.”

Hurt? Richard Allen Coldiron, feel pain? You’ve got to be kidding. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“ I mean, maybe it’s not my place to say,” she said, as I watched her beautiful lips form the words. “And I love Beth to death, I really do. She’s a really pleasant person at heart, but she’s totally faithless.”

Pleasant. Fucking pleasant. I drank from one of the beers, half at one gulp. My hand trembled, making frog-eye foam.

“ It’s nothing against you, Richard. She’s been that way since I’ve known her, and we’ve roomed together for four years. I’ve seen them come and go. Literally.”

I finished the beer and started on the other one. The two Vikings staggered past, with Baby Louie in tow. Over in the corner, a Tin Man was feeling up Princess Leia. He might as well have been seducing a log.

“ She told me she was a player,” I said.

“ Well, she is honest. But never true.”

“ What about Ted? Does he care?”

“ He’s just a number. He’s in and out faster than a door-to-door coke dealer.”

Both cups were empty now, and I looked across the room, searching the crowd for Beth’s sweet oval face. The singer with the Edward Scissorhands hair was sitting on a speaker, nodding to the imagined beat. It was as if he didn’t exist when the band was offstage. I watched him a full thirty seconds before I saw him blink.

“ What do you care?” Little Hitler asked Monique, wanting to add the word “bitch,” but I stifled him.

“ You probably think I’m a bitch. I just thought...I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to do you a favor.”

I wondered if she was jealous. The Insider said that all humans had their games, everybody played, everybody followed their own rules. But if she was jealous, that meant Loverboy’s instinct was dead-on. She was lying to get what she wanted.

“ Listen,” I said, leaning toward her so I could whisper. But what I was really doing was letting Loverboy sniff the clean ocean of her neck. “I could use another beer. Want to join me?”

Monique smiled. “I’m on my sixth or seventh. But, hey, the night is young, right?”

“ Is it kosher for a witch to hang with a Ripper?”

“ You might think I’m weird. I mean, I hope you think I’m weird. But I really am a witch.”

“ A real witch?”

“ Yeah. A Wiccan. Earth worshipper, pagan, sort of a roll-your-own brand. This is a religious holiday.”

“ Are you casting a spell on me?” Loverboy asked, already forgetting Beth. But I couldn’t.

Monique’s eyes sparkled, a diamond glint on onyx. “We believe in white magic. Whatever we give, we believe it comes back three times.”

“ Give me an orgasm and lucky you,” Loverboy said.

She giggled, and her sleek dress shimmered around her long frame. We filled our cups at the keg. I now understood what Father liked about alcohol, the same dulling ether that Mother discovered. If I drank enough, if I numbed my brain, then there would be nothing for the Insider to probe and poke and sting. He’d be cheated of my feelings. Plus I might have a blackout and miss an important chunk of my own autobiography, which I could fill in as I wished later.

Monique saw someone she knew and got into a sloppy conversation. I excused myself and slipped up the stairs. The party was getting its second wind. It was a giant beast ready to rise and prowl the darkness, flexing its legs and jaws for a twilight hunt, a dragon anxious to slay errant knights.

Xandria perched at the top of the stairs. She put a Virginia Slim in her mouth and one of her bookends stepped from the shadows to light it. “If it ain’t the average white boy,” she said with a playful sneer. “What’s up?”

“ Hi. I like your bass playing.”

She shrugged, straining the leather straps that girded her chest. Loverboy watched her breasts rise. Mister Milktoast eyed the bookend, appalled at the mauve fingernail polish.

“ Just another skin, Richard,” Xandria said. “It helps to have a few extra personalities. Makes life interesting.”

“ Tell me about it.”

The singer yelled at Xandria from the foot of the stairs, telling her it was time for the next set.

“ Jimmy ain’t finished yet,” she yelled back at him. She drew on her cigarette and exhaled, and the smoke joined the blue-gray layer that wafted at eye-level.

“ Have you seen Beth?” I asked.

Xandria gave me a cold look. Then she jerked her head toward a door at the end of the hall. “Door Number Three.”

The guitarist for the Half-Watts started strumming “Wild Horses” as the singer did a country-Cockney accent on the vocals. I walked down the hall with the same slow-motion rhythm of the song, like Jim Morrison’s pseudo-autobiographical killer in “The End.” Fuck Jim Morrison and his fake autobiography. You won’t find me floating dead in a bathtub or getting called “The Lizard King.”

The crack under the door was dark. I knocked lightly.

Little Hitler tumbled and twittered. He tried the handle. It was locked.

Bookworm put my ear to the door.

Moans.

Little Hitler hoped they were moans of pain. But Loverboy knew better.

Rusty bedsprings, in the rhythm of babymaking.

Gasps came from the other side of the door.

A whimper, a name.

Beth’s voice, husked with passion.

I wanted a dollar’s worth of candy. I hurried away.

Drowning. Reaching the point where I knew I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, but the surface was too far away.

Xandria shrugged as I passed. “What can you say? She likes drummers.”

The Insider came out of the back room of the Bone House, where he’d been busy typing. This was even better than the crap he was making up.

You still love the bitch, Richard. I know. I OWN your damned heart . Here’s a plate of shit. Eat.

I stumbled down the stairs, knocking a dryer hose off a guy who was dressed as a robot. He cussed me, but I barely heard him.

Monique was waiting by the keg. She had refilled her cup and was starting to wobble a little. She didn’t notice that my face had gone rigid. Stoned in the stone house, boned in the Bone House. Unscrewed.

“ Where you been?” she asked.

“ Talking to an old friend,” I said.

“ Did you find Beth?”

“ You didn’t tell me she likes drummers.”

“ Figured you’d better find out for yourself, before you got any . . . ideas.” Monique swayed and leaned against me. She felt good in Loverboy’s arms. I took her cup and drained it all down. The Coldiron Curse tasted sweet and bitter and made it easier to be nobody.

“ Feel like a ritual?” Loverboy asked.

“ A ritual?”

Loverboy kissed her, quick and cruel. “Or would you rather ride my broomstick?” he whispered.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I reach to stroke your curly hair, so soft and stark against the pillow. The moonlight spills into the room like an ogling eye, making sharp and jagged shadows. Richard’s top hat is on the cluttered desk and your witch’s dress hangs limply over the back of a chair, like a shadow whose air has escaped.

You look at me with open eyes, deep eyes, eyes that run across distant moors. I lean close and feel the warm breath from your nostrils. You don’t flinch. Trust is such a foolish thing. Will you never learn?

Our lips touch. Sensations swarm. The edges of awareness cackle with electricity. Tiny hairs stand on the back of this human neck.

Time slows, nearly stopping. Each second stretches with too much information. The butterfly flicker of your eyelashes, the moist flutter of your tongue, the gentle swish of your hair on the smooth skin of your shoulders, all drowning me. I can feel the cells of your body as they divide and slough off. I am alert, alive beyond life, dead beyond death.

“ You’ve bewitched me,” I say, parting my mouth from the honey of your lips.

“ Shut up and kiss me,” you say, your voice hoarse with illicit passion and a gallon of beer.

A sledgehammer pounds my chest, working the molten iron of my heart. Outside, a breeze plays against the window screen and the curtains whisper in the music of autumn. It is a dirge, a death-rattle of wind chimes and oak leaves as clouds sneak past the moon. They call this the end of October.

A taste like old pennies lingers where your tongue has been. My arousal strains, seeks, takes a separate life.

“ Hold on a second,” you say, and my heart suspends, explores its stopping, and then continues its headlong rush.

You light a candle. The first match goes out before it reaches the wick, as if some sinister gale has summoned itself from under the bed. An acrid thread of gray sulfur trails across the milky moonlight. The second match flares and the candle catches and flickers crazily, the flame hopping like a forever-damned ballet dancer on a stage of hot coals.

Outside, the night rain falls. Each drop plays a minute part in a grand percussion symphony. Small, sharp pellets ping off the mailbox while fat globs plop softly on the asphalt. Drops patter on the wooden porch rail, and others slither weakly into the grass with a muted hiss. A drum roll of water rumbles across the gutter while the downspout carries off the finished notes with a discordant tinkle. Occasional distant thunder anchors the bass end by adding timpani to the score.

I gently lean you back on the bed. The pillows have fallen to one side and lie there like an old married couple. Your pupils are large and dark, two deep wells. A twin reflection of the candle floats in the still waters. Beneath the surface, your memories, dreams, and secrets swim. I must draw them out, pump them forward, make them mine.

Little Hitler drinks the heartbreak, Loverboy tastes the fruit, Mister Milktoast sizes you up for a brown hat.

Bookworm pens a flowery passage. Richard rides the roller coaster. And I...

I simply need. It’s always the first time. It’s always this way, the borrowing and taking of life, the stealing of light, the swallowing of the juicy pain.

It’s as near to being human as I ever wish to get.

But don’t take it personally. Because I’m not a person. And this is the way the universe has always been, a bright bang and then collapse into darkness. Dream me alive, Richard. Build me with your words. Make me.

My hand trails down your flat pale belly. Dark hairs curl around the edge of your panties. Your breathing is fast and shallow, and I feel your pulse race through the swell of your breast beneath my hand. Your heart is sprinting against time, a race in which there can be only one winner.

I reach beside the bed, to my coat lying on the floor. Your hands are at my waist, then lower. My mouth has found yours again, and I feel the urgency of your desire as our tongues thrust and parry softly. You pull me toward the forge of your body. I go for your center, the nursery of stars, your steaming galaxy.

My right hand touches cold hard steel while my left finds liquid fire.

I raise the blade and the sudden movement feeds a gust of oxygen to the candle. The burst of light becomes the flashbulb for the photograph that Richard’s eyes are taking:

...the gorgeous plateau of your flesh, a territory waiting to be mapped.

...your eyebrows arching, making a question mark of your face.

...your lips, parted in unspoken confusion.

...your chest, tensing to draw air for a scream that will never sound.

...your eyes...

...your eyes remain two deep wells, but now the waters ripple. Now the surface is disturbed as your secrets swim. Now the fear roils underneath, a leviathan awakened from long slumber. Now your black monsters break the water, pouring forth in torrents from the depths of your eyes.

Now I can feed. Now I can eat the light.

“ Monique,” Richard moans, helpless, pathetic, taking control of his own mouth. “I’m sorry.”

I shut him up and bring the knife down swiftly, with an unforgiving arm, with Little Hitler’s viciousness, with Loverboy’s passion, with Bookworm’s fascination, with Mister Milktoast’s petulance.

Richard delivers you unto me.

In a flash of bright silver, the blade strikes home, a violent explorer in the valleys of your skin. Your arms lift in futility, almost in supplication, embracing the coming pain as if it is an old lover.

The oldest lover.

The knife is in your chest and a brilliant geyser of crimson erupts, and too soon it is over. Your light is mine.

Your eyes fix on the ceiling and the ripples in the two deep wells dwindle and fade, their waters now forever calm.

I can’t resist. “Was it good for you?”

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“ You walrus hurt the one you love,” Mister Milktoast said. “And then bury Paul. Goo goo ka joob.”

My head throbbed as a thick black sludge pounded through my veins. I just wanted to rest my head on my pillow and sleep until my flesh rotted off the bone. I wasn’t in the mood for Mister Milktoast’s wit, and I was worried about the Insider’s purple prose, which virtually guaranteed we’d never sell the book.

“ Big time fuck-up, Tricky Dick,” Loverboy said. “You didn’t even get a little pop tart first.”

“ Knock it off, you guys,” Bookworm said. “It wasn’t Richard’s fault.”

“ There you go again, sticking up for that useless bootlicker,” Little Hitler. “It was just like old times from where I was sitting. Father was just a warm-up act. And that Shelley slut, she deserved it if anybody ever did.”

The sun stabbed, spitting fire through the window. Sunday morning. A holy, quiet time. Starlings chirruped on high power lines outside as November crept in on cold bare feet.

I had no memory of coming home in the night. Those hours were a fog, lost in a stupor of alcohol and multiple personalities and endless revisions. My head throbbed from drink.

But the Insider made sure I didn’t forget Monique. Her wide staring dead eyes were seared into my brain, branded there by a red-hot iron, stapled to the Bone House walls like a Led Zeppelin poster. The Insider was lost in the mist of my pain, engorged and ecstatic. Fat on light. Fed on my dead hope. Bloated by bloodthirsty, barbaric bliss, and typing up a storm.

It had won. But the outcome was never in doubt. How could any human defeat such a monster? How could you outsmart your own omniscient narrator?

“ I told you the answer,” said Bookworm.

“ Shut up.”

“ I suppose writer’s block isn’t an option?”

“ Bookworm, I don’t know who to believe anymore. How do I know you’re not the Insider, playing a game just for the sheer hell of it? After all, we all sound alike. In fact, we sound like me.”

“ You’re only in the Bone House once in a while, when one of us takes over. But I’m in here all the time.”

“ And I pity you for that.”

“ Don’t take this the wrong way, Richard, but you’re just a little too human to really comprehend.”

“ Damned with feinted praise,” Mister Milktoast said, from some dusty corner of the closet.

“ And you, Mister Milktoast? Whose side are you on?”

“ Hey, Bookworm, I’m the one who drove Richard home. I’m the one who made sure we didn’t leave any incriminating evidence at the scene. I’m the one who cares the most about us. After all, I’ve been here the longest. If we’re all psychic vampires, then I have the most at stake.”

“ Why are you afraid he’ll be caught? Maybe that’s the best thing that can happen to Richard. The book will sell at auction, Fox News will push the story, Barnes & Noble moves product, and the murders will stop.”

“ I promised to protect him. The boots still walk. They just have a different pair of feet in them.”

“ Fuck both of you,” Loverboy said. “And I don’t mean that the way you think I do. You diddledicks couldn’t screw your way out of a wet dream.”

Little Hitler snickered.

Open house in the Bone House, come one, come all. Except that thing in the back room, typing, typing, typing. When writers are really in the zone, they wouldn’t know it if a jetliner crashed into the house.

“ It’s only in your mind,” Bookworm said. “And that’s the worst place of all.”

“ The Insider’s getting stronger,” I said. “We all agree on that.”

“ If it’s so fucking all-powerful, why doesn’t it just drive us all out of here and take Richie over completely?” Loverboy said. “Do some major housecleaning?”

“ You’re too busy reaching for Richard’s penis to figure it out,” Bookworm said. “It needs us, in some crazy way. It’s not just the possession that motivates it. The Insider has to have someone to lord it over.”

“ And the more the merrier, apparently,” said Mister Milktoast. “Four heads are better than one.”

“ Then it struck paydirt here,” I said. “But maybe this is the way the Insider works. How many killers claim to hear voices in their heads?”

The sun was weakening, growing softer as clouds knit a layer across the sky. Somewhere, a church bell rang, a safe, lonely, human sound. I wondered how many hours it would be before the police found us. A ticking clock always increased dramatic tension. Even that old asshole Aristotle knew that, and he lived back when people used sun dials.

“ Well, I’m starting to suspect that it can also extend those powers beyond the host,” Bookworm said. “Maybe with not as much control, but enough to influence events and behaviors.”

“ That sounds like something you pulled out of Mister Milktoast’s ass just to complicate things,” I said. “Sounds too convenient. Like you’re trying to change the genre so we can publish this as science fiction.”

“ No, listen. It makes things happen. It causes people to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“ Bullshit, Dickworm,” Little Hitler said. “You’re just trying to let Richard off the hook again. He’s the one who’s screwed up everyone he touches. Let him take some of the blame for a change. I don’t know why you guys are always trying to forgive him. We should be rubbing his face in every steaming ounce of the shit he’s heaped on the world.”

“ Love the skin but hate the skinner,” Mister Milktoast blurted out.

“ And who’s going to take your side, Little Hitler?” asked Bookworm. “You’re glad the Insider has found us. It gives validity to everything you stand for.”

“ What’s this about the Insider affecting other people?” I said, before they started arguing.

“ Remember Virginia? How the voices started after her father began molesting her?” Bookworm said.

“ Of course he remembers Virginia,” Loverboy said. “He fucked up my fuck. All because he was trying to sympathize. What a fucking joke. Just pop ‘em and drop ‘em, Richie-wuss, and the sooner you learn that, the happier we’ll all be. Especially me.”

“ The Insider was in Ottaqua all along, laying the groundwork,” Bookworm said.

“ Who appointed you ‘Mr. Backstory Database’?” Mister Milktoast said through a pout.

I ignored my oldest friend. “And made Father and Mother the way they were? And maybe it made Shelley come to my house even though she barely knew me?”

“ Do you think Loverboy would get lucky otherwise?” Bookworm asked.

“ Hey, Bookwuss, I resent that,” said Loverboy. “This boy could charm the habit off a nun. It’s you guys that make ‘em duck and cover. Mister Milktoast, the total candy-ass. Richie, the king of navel gazing. And you, Dickworm, the frigging faith healer, the cosmic child, the deep thinker. And Little Squiggler. . .need I say more?”

“ Point taken, Loverboy,” I said. “But I think Bookworm’s on to something.”

“ Run with me, guys,” Bookworm said, excited for the first time since he’d booked a room in my flesh hotel. “Leap of faith. Maybe it put Beth in that gallery on campus on the same day that Richard was there.”

“ And you’re saying that it made me fall in love with Beth?”

“ Careful with the L word,” Mister Milktoast said. “Liability, labia, laborious.”

“ Stay on point,” Bookworm said. “And let’s go further from there. The Insider openly despises love, yet it makes sure that you find some version of it. We’re poison, remember, because we dream and love and hope and reach for something better than ourselves. And the Insider blames that for the extermination of its species.”

“ Yet it wants me to love, so it can enjoy making me kill?” I asked.

“ Which is another problem, gentlemen,” Mister Milktoast said. “Any minute now Beth will be waking up, maybe next to a drummer, maybe not. She’ll get up and make some breakfast. Eventually she’ll start to wonder why her roommate isn’t up and about. Maybe she’ll knock on the door to Monique’s room. Maybe she’ll open the door.”

I knew what Beth would see. The Insider had taken photographs using my brain as the film stock. The project was currently in development hell.

“ How many witnesses saw Richard with Monique last night?” said Mister Milktoast. “And there’s bound to be other evidence at the scene, stray hairs or semen—”

“ Hey, don’t look at me,” said Loverboy. “That was more Little Diddler’s cup of tea. I ain’t into zipless drips.”

“ Let’s not think about that right now,” I said. There were hundreds of ways to hurt people, and I had a feeling I’d be learning every one of them.

One of my neighbors was cooking bacon. The frost was melting across the hills, changing them from silver to brown. Children were waking up and sneaking into the Halloween candy they had collected the night before. People were putting away their masks.

“ And Dickie darling had the bright idea to go to the party dressed as Jack-the-fucking-Ripper,” Little Hitler said.

“ That’s what I’m trying to tell you guys,” said Bookworm. “It’s all too scripted, too perfect. Richard has no real reason to love Beth, because she’s hardly been a warm and fuzzy romantic interest.”

“ I don’t know if I can accept that,” I said. “This was already straining my willing suspension of disbelief. I mean, being possessed by an ancient soul virus is one thing. But if you carry this idea back even further—”

“ Exactly. Was Mother meant to be an alcoholic? Was her love for you destined to...turn out the way it did? You have to agree that the Insider would get a great deal of satisfaction out of something so depraved.”

“ You’re scaring me, Bookworm.”

“ Maybe that’s the way Evil has done business throughout history, stacking the deck so that it always wins.”

“ And maybe it was the Insider who made me kill Father? And Little Hitler is innocent?”

“ Just take a little blame for a change, Richard,’ Little Hitler said. “I know, I know, it’s against your beliefs to actually accept responsibility for your actions, not when you can spin some bizarre fantasy to get yourself off the hook. But go ahead, Bookworm. Your little theory is amusing, and there’s not a whole hell of a lot to laugh about these days. Except our gracious host and his eternally leaking heart, of course.”

“ All the bad things might be traced back to Richard’s childhood,” Mister Milktoast said, collaborating with Bookworm. “Maybe the Insider was at work even earlier than that.”

“ Sally Bakken?” I said. “The Garage Man? I can’t believe that the Insider has that much power. It’s just too...”

“ Impossible?” finished Bookworm. “Just like it’s impossible for you to be carrying on a conversation with four Little People who live in a place called the Bone House. It’s impossible for a soul-stealing psychic entity to sneak into people’s minds and make them kill, just so it can live forever. It’s impossible for you to carry the case histories of the human race’s worst butchers inside the filing cabinets of your home office.”

“ But I don’t have those memories—”

“ No. You’re outside. But they’re here, inside, all the memories of every murder.”

I had a headache, and it was more than just the residue of beer. If I was just a temporary host, the Insider might already be sizing up its next victim.

“ It could already be outlining a sequel,” Bookworm said. “Because it’ll eventually get tired of you, Richard. It’ll break you down and use you up. If you don’t get caught first.”

“ I’ve got a feeling it wants a final victory before it lets me disintegrate.”

“ Yes. One last victim.”

“ One true love. The perfect blasphemy.”

“ Come on, Bookworm,” Mister Milktoast said. “This is starting to sound like self-referential metafiction. And you know such a thing can only end badly.”

I pressed my temples. This had to be a nightmare, and I’d awaken with damp sheets and a hangover and a wife, kids, mortgage, lunch date at the golf club. A regular, boring, fucking pleasant life, one not worth writing about.

“ Better take the Ripper suit to the cleaners, Richard,” Mister Milktoast added. “Might have a few spots on it that I couldn’t sponge out. It has to be back at the costume rental tomorrow.”

“ Thanks for keeping me on task, Mister Milktoast.”

“ Beth is going to need comforting after the shock wears off. We’d better practice being indignantly outraged, or whatever it is society expects on such an occasion.”

“ That’ll be a switch,” I said. “Beth crying on my shoulder for a change.”

“ I took a trophy,” Little Hitler said, walking to the dresser, where a lump lay covered by a towel.

“ You’re a sick puppy, Diddler,” Loverboy said. “I like that in a headmate.”

I flinched as he yanked the towel away. There lay Beth’s brown hat, headless. Mister Milktoast purred in excitement.

“ Now leave me alone,” I said. “I’d better get some writing done before things get crazy around here.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I have come to believe all the rest is the fault of those big-time publishers, the ones who wouldn’t recognize genius if it rolled up on a courier bike with a serving of foie gras packed inside a warm duck . If only they had purchased the novel, the story would have ended there and I would have gone on to the life of a struggling, frustrated writer with suicidal tendencies. A poor man’s Palahniuk, a motherless Lethem, a born-again Brautigan, a disarmed Hemingway.

Alas, it was not to be. Beth called me Monday after work, while I was opening the last of that day’s 19 rejection slips.

“ R-Richard?”

“ Yes?” Mister Milktoast said.

“ Did you hear?”

I cleared my throat and delivered the line as I’d rehearsed it, Richard Burton by way of James Dean, with a little Peter Lorre thrown in for spice. “Yes. My God, it’s so terrible. How are you?”

“ When I opened her door and found her—”

The dam broke. She sobbed over the phone.

I despised women’s tears. They made me angry because I didn’t know how to shut them off. I was so grateful to have Mister Milktoast. “I’m sorry, Beth. God, I’m so sorry.”

She sniffled and gasped, “I...I just can’t believe it.”

“ I wanted to come over when I heard, but I was afraid you’d think I was being too...presumptuous. How are you doing?”

“ I’ll live, damn it. But Monique won’t. What kind of monster would do such a thing?”

What kind of monster, indeed. “I don’t know, Beth. I honestly don’t know.”

Mister Milktoast looked at my fingernails. They were ragged from Bookworm’s biting. How could those be murderer’s hands? Those were innocent, with blunt broad fingers, hands made for loving, holding, typing, waving good-bye.

I let Beth dry her eyes and blow her nose before I spoke again. “Listen, do you need anything? Where are you staying?”

“ I’m over at Xandria’s place. She’s got a spare room. She’s letting me stay here until...“

“ Why didn’t you call me?” Little Hitler said. He’d forgotten the script, the little prick.

Silence.

“ Can I come over there?” I asked. “I need to see you.”

“ I’m afraid...I don’t think I’ll be very good company.”

“ I want to be there for you, Beth. That’s what...um, friends are for.”

“ Okay. It would be nice. I could use a hug…”

I beat Loverboy back into his room, where he could flip through the Insider’s nude photo collection instead of wrecking my cover story.

Beth continued. “But I’m warning you, I’m a total mess.”

“ It’s okay, Beth.”

“ No. It’ll never be okay again.”

“ I’m here for whatever you need. That’s my promise.” Little Hitler chuckled at that word “promise,” but I rolled it into a cough to disguise the glee. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

She gave me directions to Xandria’s apartment, stopping twice to blow her nose. I passed Beth’s place on the way uptown. The sidewalk was roped off with yellow crime tape, and a group of spectators gawked from the sidewalk. A television van was pulled up by the curb, and a man behind the wheel was eating a sandwich. Two police cruisers were parked out front, a big blocky Chevy Caprice and a new aqua Crown Victoria. I saw movement inside the apartment, but I couldn’t distinguish any faces.

I was positive Frye was in there, dusting for prints and taking measurements and chain-smoking cigarettes. I had a feeling he was going to be a clever adversary. Minor conflict was essential to any story, to keep the audience interested while the main game played itself out. The Insider was up for a potboiler.

Xandria’s apartment was in an old two-story house about a block from campus and a couple of streets away from the stone house, up on a wooded hill. Paint curled from massive Colonial columns and a tall oak tree showered orange leaves on the tin roof. The windows had black shutters and the watery sun reflected off the glass like light from dying eyes. The November sky was heavy and sober above the brown hills.

Beth sat in a metal rocking chair on the porch. She wore a red sweatshirt and blue jeans and canvas-top sneakers. Sunglasses couldn’t hide the puffiness around her eyes. She tried to smile at me, but her face looked like it might break. Her lips quivered a little and pressed together.

“ Beth,” Bookworm said, running up the concrete steps like Bogart making for Bacall. I stooped and hugged her. Little Hitler could smell the salt of her tears. Mister Milktoast knelt and gripped her hands. My reflection danced in her sunglasses. Loverboy primped and checked his hair.

“ Richard,” she said. “It’s all so…I don’t know…unreal, maybe. It hasn’t really sunk in yet.”

“ Beth, Beth,” I whispered, rocking her softly. I pressed my cheek against her soft hair that was like corn silks. Bookworm thought the “corn silk” simile was utterly corny. He hadn’t lived in Iowa, though.

“ So awful, so awful,” she repeated in my ear.

“ Do they know how it happened?”

“ I shouldn’t have left her alone. You know, Halloween and everything…”

“ You can’t blame yourself, Beth.”

“ But it’s all my fault.”

The dam was about to burst again. She looked like she had cried through the night. Her face was blotched from the blood rush of her emotions.

“ It’s not your fault, Beth. You’re another victim. It’s nobody’s fault, except…except for whoever did it.”

“ But who? Who? She didn’t have an enemy in the world, and this isn’t your typical Halloween prank. Oh, God, Richard, what am I going to do?”

“ When did you first...?” asked Mister Milktoast. Loverboy wanted to add some smart-assed remark about snaring a drummer or banging a gong or gobbling a drumstick but I slammed shut the door to his room.

Beth wiped at the pink end of her nose with a damp wad of Kleenex. “I looked for you at the party,” she said, avoiding my eyes by looking out at the rocky slopes of Widow’s Peak in the distance. She forgot she was wearing sunglasses, that I couldn’t have read her eyes anyway.

“ I left early. I wasn’t feeling well. I drank a beer and it made me sick. My dog ate my homework. I had a flat tire. My grandmother died.”

Beth nodded and looked down at the warped pine boards of the floor. She spoke, her voice as hollow as if she were talking inside a coffin. “After I couldn’t find you, I hung around until just after midnight, when there was nobody left but sloppy drunks and the costume freaks. I partied some with the band. Then I got home, I don’t know, I told the police it was one o’clock, but it was probably more like two-thirty. And I went straight to sleep. Passed out, to be honest. I didn’t even see Monique.

“ I got up yesterday and did a little studying. I noticed Monique’s door was open just a crack. And she’s usually an early riser, you know how energetic she is...” A sob caught in her throat as she tensed to change tense. “... was , I mean.”

I patted her knee. Loverboy let my hand linger for a moment. Mister Milktoast wanted to know which story she’d told the cops, which lie we’d use. Bookworm assured him that just because the Bone House was a den of prevarication didn’t mean the outer world had a foundation of fabrication. Whatever that meant.

The screen door squeaked and Xandria stepped out. She carried a cup of herbal tea. Steam wisped around her dark face. Her eyes were cold and faraway, artist’s eyes that saw too well. She put the tea in Beth’s hands and reached a protective arm around her shoulder. I smelled raspberry and lemon and uncomfortable silence.

I stood up and nodded to Xandria. Beth looked up at her with a grateful expression. “I was just telling Richard...”

“ You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Xandria answered.

“ I know, but...Richard understands.”

You damn straight, bitch. Been there, done that. If anybody knows how to deal with personal tragedy, it’s Richard Fucking Coldiron, ma’am.

Xandria glared at me for a moment as Little Hitler smirked inside my pupils.

“ Fine. But if you need anything, you just holler,” she said. She tugged at the strap of her coveralls and went inside. I sat in the chair next to Beth’s.

She didn’t say anything for a moment, just rocked gently and sipped her tea. She looked out across the town below. She continued, softly, her words as light as the wind that was stirring the leaves across the broken sidewalk.

“ I called out her name. I figured she’d probably gotten up early or something, maybe went out for a walk. So I put on a CD and read a little bit. Later, when I walked past the hall, I saw something on the floor in her room, something pale.”

She looked up at the top of the oak tree, staring as if watching the memory on a movie screen. Her fingers gripped the metal chair arm. Mister Milktoast cupped his palm over her closest hand.

“ If it hurts to talk about...,” he said.

...then talk about it, bitch. Because I need your fucking pain. I need you to whimper and leak your pathetic little human juices of sorrow. I need you to make Richard feel the guilt. Give me some emotional content the reader can identify with.

She pushed away, sensing my mood change. “No, Richard, I’m dealing,” she said. “We were roommates for four years. You get really close to somebody after four years.”

NOW you pretend to care. NOW you act like you give a goddamn about anybody but yourself. But tell me more. I’m just BEGINNING to rub Richard’s face in his own shit.

“ What did you see on the floor, Beth?” I had to know. It had to hear her say it.

Her voice was flat, disbelieving. “I...went to the door and peeked at the thing on the floor. It was a white carnation.”

“ A carnation?”

“ Yes. Like the one...”

“ Like the one I was wearing with my costume. The one you gave me.”

She nodded. “I was confused, Richard. I thought you might have dropped it when you came over earlier. I pushed open the door to pick it up, and then I...I saw...”

And don’t you ever forget it. Slut .

“ You saw her,” Little Hitler said, his glee moderated by Bookworm’s anxiety over this potential piece of evidence.

Beth broke down, wept dry tears and dropped her head. Loverboy reached out and cupped her chin. The gushing of emotions aroused him, custard in a cruller. There are certain times when erections are incredibly inconvenient—weddings and funerals among them. When you comfort a broken woman, an intimacy develops that healthy and sane men channel in an unselfish, platonic manner. Maybe that’s why Alpha male psychos get all the pussy while sensitive guys beat off to frilly fantasies of romance.

Beth recovered and sipped her tea.

“ I loved her,” Beth said. “You know I don’t like to use that L word. But she was like a sister to me.”

“ I do understand,” Loverboy said. “I’ve lost loved ones to violence myself.”

Beth’s head jerked toward me. “You?”

“ My father,” Little Hitler said with too much pride. “He was beating my mother, you know how people do when they think they’re in love. She must have snapped or something. She. . .”

Mister Milktoast somehow summoned some crocodile tears. Little Hitler was bursting with mirth in the back of my brain. Beth slid to the edge of her chair and put her other hand over Loverboy’s.

“ . . .she went into the kitchen and got a knife. Stabbed him seventeen times as I watched. I was fourteen.”

Beth’s mouth opened in a silent O. “Richard, I didn’t know...”

If only I could have fought to the surface, reclaimed my body for one miserable heartbeat, I might have kept her from digging into the past. But the wound was gaping, the blood was flowing now, and she was drinking. She had broken me. She had won.

No, Richard. I’VE won. It was always me.

“ I’m sorry, Richard. Don’t cry,” she said, barely able to disguise the pleasure in her voice.

Loverboy let a long tear trickle down his cheek. He was laughing on the inside. Most of them were.

“ Tell me, Beth. Is insanity contagious?” Little Hitler said. “Because sometimes I wonder...that carnation...”

“ What? No, you must have dropped it at the party. And Monique must have picked it up, that’s all.”

Didn’t she see? Or was the Insider preventing her from seeing?

Of course I am, Richard. The party’s just getting started. I’m going to waltz your mannequin across the dance floor of hell like the puppet hand of hot peppers is up your ass.

Bookworm whispered something about the Insider needing some help with its metaphors, but nobody was listening.

“ Did you tell the police about the carnation?” Mister Milktoast asked.

“ Why should I?”

Of course she didn’t, for the same reason that the police hadn’t contacted me. It should have been a simple matter for Frye to connect Shelley and Monique and come up with a common denominator. The pieces weren’t in place yet, the plot threads hadn’t been woven into a tight enough fabric. The Insider needed a few more chapters.

Beth took off her sunglasses. Her eyes were red and shiny, but buried inside her pupils was a spark, a strange light, a distant hope of dawn.

“ Let’s not talk about Monique anymore,” she said. “I want to talk about you. Your poor father. That must have really torn you up.”

I wanted to tell her that the world couldn’t build such miseries as ours, that gods couldn’t create such madness, that people couldn’t be this cruel and shallow and heartless. But I was vulnerable. After so much rejection, here was someone who pretended to care, who wanted to hear my story.

“ I’d better begin at the beginning,” I said.

THIS CHAPTER DOESN’T HAVE A NUMBER, EITHER

What a clever bastard.

You know Richard is guilty. You will never let him forget.

And you eat our pain. You carve up our psyche the way you did Shelley and Monique, then feed Richard the pieces of the memory. You force his mouth open. He eats his own sins until he vomits, then he eats his own vomit. Is that your trap?

Because the more Richard hates himself, the stronger you are. The more we despise you, the more we serve you. The greater our pain, the greater your hunger.

You have tasted. And now you want more. But not Beth. You’ll never have her.

I love her, however I can and whatever that means.

Did you come with Little Hitler? Or are you Little Hitler, a mask over a mask?

Did you raise the blade against Father? Or were you Father? Was that your opening gambit, your narrative hook, the crack through which you slid into Richard’s mind? Or did you come later, like a grave robber to freshly turned dirt?

You say you came to him through Virginia.

Oh, I felt that twitch. You know where it bleeds. But I know where you feed. And I’m starting to figure you out.

And understand one thing, you sorry son of a bitch.

You can make Richard loathe himself. You can shove his face in the past. You can make him kill. You can make him hate.

But you can’t make me not love.

Because love is hope, and love is poison to you.

You are what you eat.

You are what we feed you.

Bon fucking appetit.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

November crawled away on its belly, wriggled like a cold snake into a cave. Winter sent its icy fingers into the granite mountains, clutching and squeezing. The brittle trees froze, either dead or sleeping and dreaming of green. The daytime sky shivered in its blue blanket and the nights were as black as the bottom of my heart.

The police had no leads in Monique’s murder. Mister Milktoast followed the media coverage with great interest. My fingerprints must have been all over the crime scene. I didn’t doubt that the Insider could extend its reach to the lab technicians. And Frye surely would have solved the case by now if not for infernal intervention.

The rejection slips rolled in, except now they were no longer addressed to me. They began, “Dear Mr. Zweicker, we regret to inform you...”

Even more disturbing than the name change was that my cleverly original title, “As I Die Lying,” had been altered, first to “The Dying Light,” and then simply “The Insider.” Because the agents never returned my manuscript, I never knew which work they were considering, nor did I have a clue how to improve it.

Bookworm wept in his upstairs room of the Bone House. He alone could describe what was happening, but he stuck to penning illegible entries in his diary, leaving me alone to stare at the typewriter.

Little Hitler was jubilant. This was his deepest perversion brought to full, red, screaming life. This was nightmare made reality, murder made holy, hellhounds unchained. He savored the giblets of memory, and the best was yet to come.

Mister Milktoast was wary but content. As the protector, he thought his job accomplished because I was safely tucked away in the Bone House. He spent his time preening around in Beth’s brown hat and Shelley’s stockings.

Loverboy had no complaints. He was banging Beth almost every night, inventing new sex manuals, kama sutra as postmodern surrealism or maybe one of those endless fantasy fiction series where the author’s publisher keeps squirting sour milk from the cash cow long after the author is dead. Except sex is better.

Beth had moved back into her apartment, though she refused to rent out Monique’s room and had to stretch her budget to cover the bills by herself. She dropped Ted and her other satellite lovers, her native nymphomania having met its match.

On one horribly memorable night, Loverboy coaxed her into Monique’s room. Monique’s parents had cleared out her paintings and clothes and books, the only pieces left of their daughter now that the other pieces had been laid into the ground. The room was bare except for the desk, the chipped bedside table, and the unmade bed.

There was a large brown stain on the mattress even though it had been turned over after the investigation. The stain was like a Rorschach test where crazy people are supposed to see a splatter pattern of spilled blood but normal people see Schroedinger’s profile or New Zealand or the coffee splotch on the manuscript they are revising.

Little Hitler sat with Beth on the bed and made her talk about Monique, how lovely she was, how vivacious, how much she meant to Beth. Then he steered the conversation back to my past, or at least the new spin on the story of Father’s death. History is always written by the winners in the blood of the losers.

The Insider twisted its trident in my guts as Beth tried to comfort Little Hitler. Of course, it ended with Loverboy between her legs on the same mattress where her roommate had been mutilated. The Insider howled with glee. Loverboy simply howled, not caring whether she was faking or not.

I went through the motions at the Paper Paradise. We were busy because of the coming Christmas season, and Bookworm stayed dutifully occupied with stocking and reorders. Miss Billingsly commented on my absentmindedness. I wanted to tell her that my mind wasn’t absent, it was painfully present, sharper than ever, sharper than Mister Milktoast’s wit and the Insider’s knives. But Bookworm only nodded and smiled at her, mumbled something about the hectic schedule, and got back to work. Arlie spun his conspiracy theories and Little Hitler egged him on. Brittany teased me about Beth, and Loverboy cornered her in the storeroom once in a while to flirt with her, even while Beth’s feminine scent bathed his chin.

Beth drew closer and closer, quick to share herself now that she thought I had opened up to her. Alpha male psychos got all the pussy but sensitive guys got to do the laundry and wash dishes. We settled into a routine. Waking in each other’s arms, then off to work and school, meeting for lunch at my house, evenings at Beth’s apartment, Loverboy’s bakery cooking around the clock. Weekend afternoons at the park, bundled in our coats because the grass was crisp and we could see our breath. Sometimes stopping by a gallery or driving out of town for a show or hiking the muddy mountain trails.

It was all so easy, so natural, almost too natural. I didn’t think people could change, but Beth had. She was relaxed around me, telling me she loved me, always planning mutual activities. We swapped spare door keys. She spent most of the days at my place, even when I wasn’t there, but she never rang the doorbell of the Bone House.

I came to know Beth better than I knew myself. Our relationship was everything I had ever wanted back in my old, human life. She was becoming part of me, but that was the most frightening thing of all. I already had too many parts.

I saw Alexandria downtown once, and she told me she’d never seen Beth so happy. She said she was unsure of me at first, but I had earned her “stamp of approval.” Maybe Alexandria was Beth’s version of Mister Milktoast, a distant protector who saw only what she chose to see. Or what she was allowed to see.

Beth kept busy with her schoolwork, focusing on the future instead of the past. Bit by bit, Little Hitler unfolded a false biography of my life. He told her about Virginia, how she had broken my heart after saying she loved me. He told her Father was a sweet, loving man who occasionally lost his temper but would have moved the moon if I had asked. In my new life history, he became the saint and Mother the sinner. According to Little Hitler, Father wore Hush Puppies.

On the day of the first light snow, in late November, Beth whispered that she had something to give me. We were sitting on the couch at her apartment, watching a rerun of “The X-Files.” I looked out the window as she slipped into her room. It was one of those merciful moments when the Insider was letting me out, letting me live so that I could fully appreciate what it was taking away. Just an ordinary day in the life of a possessed serial killer. An early darkness had fallen with the snow, crept down a flake at a time until the world outside was black and white.

Beth returned to the living room with one hand behind her back. She snuggled into my shoulder and I put my face into her hair that always smelled of April or Dawn, one of those time names for women, or maybe Virginia or Dakota, one of those place names, or maybe Hope Hill, a character invented for this book who was actually a real girl I’d sat behind in the sixth grade and secretly loved. I nuzzled Beth’s neck, but stopped when I felt Loverboy stirring. Those damned inconvenient erections, always popping up when least expected.

“ What’s the big surprise?” I asked.

“ I’ve got lots of surprises,” she said. “This is only the latest one.”

“ As long as it’s not about babymakers,” Mister Milktoast said.

“ What?”

“ Inside joke,” I said.

She tapped my temple softly. “You’re supposed to let me in there.”

Oh, you’ll get your chance. You’re going to be in there soon. Soon and forever, right, Richard?

“ Hey, honey, what about your big secret? Don’t keep me waiting.”

“ Good things are worth waiting for.” She’d worn the line down to a nub, like the eraser on a dyslexic’s pencil. Or licnep.

“ How do I know it’s a good thing?”

She rubbed her chest against mine. “Isn’t it always a good thing?”

“ You’ve got me there.”

Her lips found mine, quickly, surely, with the ease of experience. She tilted her head back and looked at me through those mysterious half-closed eyes. Her green irises sparkled between dark lashes.

“ I have to ask you something first,” she said.

“ Uh-oh. That can’t be good.”

“ It’s nothing bad. And you can always say ‘no.’”

“ Uh-oh reprise.”

“ Promise you won’t get mad?”

“ I bet if I say no, I won’t get the surprise.”

“ I didn’t say that.”

“ I can read you like a book.”

Better than a book. I can turn the pages. I can rewrite the story. I can change the ending.

“ Okay, Richard. I’m just going to come out and say it. I’m going to visit my parents for Thanksgiving. I haven’t seen them since...”

Since Monique.

“ ...since forever and a day,” she finished.

“ That’s wonderful. But I have a feeling that’s not the big surprise.”

“ When I come back, I’m going to move in with you.”

My limbs tensed, my heart alternately throbbed and halted, my Little People fluttered like a disturbed murder of ravens. “That doesn’t sound like a question.”

Beth closed her eyes. She bent her neck like a praying nun. Little Hitler let her suffer for a moment as David Duchovny made some slacker cosmic observation on the television screen.

“ Hey, Angel Baby,” I said, the Insider moving my lips like sausage puppets. “That wasn’t a ‘no.’ I would like that better than anything in the world. But are you sure that’s what you want?”

She looked up and her eyes were moist, but she was smiling. “I want to start over,” she said, making no move to wipe away her tears. “To get out of this place and forget about...about her. I want it to be just us from now on, without Monique’s ghost sitting in between us all the time.”

I hugged her with both arms. One was Loverboy’s, the other Bookworm’s.

“ Just you and me,” I said. “I promise.”

“ I love you, Richard.”

“ That L word sounds so lovely on your lips.”

“ I don’t say it often, but when I say it, I don’t lie.”

“ I love you, too, Beth.”

At that moment, I meant it. Darkness won each day’s battle, but there was always hope of dawn, always a thread of light in the fabric of despair. Love was hope. Love was light. Love was possible salvation.

I would have gotten down on my knees and thanked the Insider. But the Insider already had me on my knees.

Love was a word thrown in a book to get the character laid and then arc to a tragic ending.

“ Now that that’s settled, what’s the big surprise?” I asked.

Beth reached behind her back for the thing she had dropped. She found it and pressed it into my hand.

It was the white carnation, dried but still intact. It smelled of meadows and funerals where the petals crushed against my sweating palms.

“ I wanted you to have it,” she whispered.

She’d already given it to me once. It was the gift that kept on giving. We locked our limbs in a passionate tangle. Loverboy even let me watch as they skin-wrestled on the sofa. He was just that kind of a guy, a generous housemate, always willing to share as long as he went first.

And so I was lost in this brave and horrible new love, built on the sickest of lies. Perhaps it was Loverboy’s game, little toys pulled out of his bag of tricks that kept her amused. Maybe the attachment was solely because of the Insider’s psychic glue. But I believed some small secret part of me could still harbor hope and love and compassion and all the human things that I thought I had lost. Surely not all the closets had been swept clean and some cabinets were left unmolested, even if these emotions were only hiding under my dusty bed in the Bone House.

I didn’t know if I would stop her from loving me even if I were able. Because the Insider had taught me one lesson well. It smothered from the inside, it isolated and crushed out any flickering light of love, stomped on the campfires of the heart.

I wished I could warn her. I wished I could warn all of them. Because I didn’t know when the Insider might strike again. It stayed a riddle, but I could feel its ratwalk in the crawlspace.

Shady Valley dressed in its pumpkin colors and dry cornstalks were stacked like the bones of a gone harvest. Paper turkeys stuck to school windows and dangled from strings in the grocery stores. Tiny radios whined the first measures of yuletide carols. Church signs reminded everyone of the reason for the season even though the Julian calendar had moved Jesus Christ’s birthday around to accommodate the money changers. The town emptied as the Westridge students went on Thanksgiving vacation. The locals stooped under the weight of their fears and suspicions and went about their holiday shopping.

Beth refused my offer to drive her to Philadelphia. She said she wasn’t ready for me to meet her parents. She boarded a Trailways bus and waved from the window as it pulled away. I felt a rare moment’s joy because I knew she’d be safe for a few days.

Safe from me. Or the Insider. I no longer knew which was the lesser of two evils.

I sat in the bus depot for an hour, watching faces. I didn’t believe the Insider was hunting. It was meditating, lulled by the human stream that flowed by on both sides. It was making me wait, but for what I didn’t know. A meat puppet on a sleepy hand.

The bus pulled up and aroused a tingle in the pit of my chest. It was some sixth sense, some electrical charge, déjà vu through past-life regression. The Insider came alive, peeling back my eyelids and twisting my neck until I was staring at the bus doors wheezing open.

Mother stepped out, complete with baggage.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

“ I got your letter,” Mother said.

She stood at the entrance to the depot like a resurrected martyr, an ash effigy of Joan of Arc, her bony frame swallowed by a pink pastel ski jacket. The fur around the hood shadowed her face, her eyes shining like a cornered animal’s peering out of a cave. She swayed a little, as if the breeze of the passengers boarding the bus might push her over.

I hadn’t sent a letter to Mother in at least six months. What did I have to say to her?

You haven’t dared write to Mommy dearest since you found your true self. Or I should say, when IT found YOU.

But did you send the letter?

Sometimes you sleep. And when you dream, I’m awake. It’s not like you’re the only monkey that knows how to type.

I nodded in miserable understanding. Mother, of course, thought I was nodding at her. The animal eyes closed, the cave momentarily empty. I opened my mouth to speak. With a hiss, the bus backed away from the bay and pulled onto the highway.

My tongue reconnected itself to my nervous system. “What are you doing here?”

Mother looked down at the streaked tiles on the depot floor. She pushed her parka hood back with an unsteady hand. “I told you to call back if you changed your mind. And since you didn’t...well. . .“

She looked up. The skin of her neck seemed to follow with reluctance. Her once-proud chin had given up, accepted its humble lot and sagged in defeat. Her skin was gray, creased, but underneath the pallid flesh, broken blood vessels streaked outward like red roots thirsting in barren soil. She smiled with effort, as if the muscles of her mouth couldn’t stretch in an upward direction. “Well, here I am,” she finally finished.

She dropped her overnight satchel and her suitcase and they clattered on the floor. Then she looked away, her spidery eyes almost girlish with delight.

I’m glad to finally meet you, my pretty. Richard’s told me so much about you. And, believe me, the pleasure’s all mine.

I stared at Mother, still petrified, holding a chilled breath. Surely the Insider’s power couldn’t extend halfway across the continent?

But at that moment, the Insider’s power was nothing compared to Mother’s. With one shift of her eyes, she dredged up the past, stirred a witch’s brew of memories, raised the dead and flaunted the bones. With one heavy-lidded look, she made me her little boy again, weak, guilty, vulnerable. With one trembling step forward, she possessed me more completely than the Insider ever could.

“ Richard,” she half-whispered, half-whimpered, and then she shredded the last of my resolve by letting one silver tear leak from the corner of her eye. She fell into my helpless open arms.

Welcome home.

She was as light as a bird, bones all hollow. Her hair stood up white and wild, Einstein tufts, Warhol with a blow dryer.

“ Mother, I...”

Say it, Richard. You know you want to.

No.

Say it. Or are you going to force me to let Loverboy say it?

Please. Not him.

I love it when you beg, Richard. Now say it.

“ . . .I missed you, Mother.”

Close enough for now. But you’ll get better. Because you’re going to get a lot of practice.

“ Richard, it’s been so long,” Mother said, in her cracked, smoke-saturated voice. She hugged me with a strength that couldn’t have been hers alone. Her spindly fingers gripped my coat like beggar’s lice. Her breath was tomb dust and gin.

As I held her, as I fought with myself to push her away, I felt the fluttering batwings of shadow at the corners of my consciousness. Wafting cobwebs in the Bone House.

“ You haven’t changed a bit,” Mister Milktoast said, thinking she was still a weak, pathetic failure as a protector. Especially when compared to him. “Why, it seems like only yesterday that I was sitting in your lap and you were singing ‘Mama’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread.’”

Loverboy twitched at the mention of “bread” but I shoved a loaf down his throat before he could speak.

“ So you’re really glad to see me?” Mother said, and her expression was so eager, so desperate, that Little Hitler had an urge to drive his fist into her brittle jaw.

Oh, no, Little Hitler. There will be plenty of time for all that later. Remember, mental pain is so much more savory than physical pain. You can inflict your bruises and gouges, but that’s too human. I feed on fruit at the top of the tree.

“ Yes, I’m glad to see you,” hissed Little Hitler.

Patience, my mad little bootblack. I promise you’ll like what I have in store for her. And don’t worry, you’ll get your turn. Everyone will get their turn, even Richard.

Especially Richard.

Mother tried to laugh but a cough caught in her throat and she made a strangled, hacking noise. She spat on the depot floor and what landed and shivered on the tiles was red and yellow, a cancerous slug. She bent and put a hand to her chest.

“ Are you okay?” said Bookworm, touching her elbow. His tenderness was almost as appalling as Little Hitler’s simmering hatred.

“ Yes,” she said, after clearing her throat. “Just…I couldn’t smoke on the bus.”

“ You’ve logged some mileage,” Mister Milktoast said.

She stretched and I heard her joints pop. “Eighteen hours. Hard on an old woman’s back.”

“ Mother, don’t talk that way. You’re not old.”

“ I’m on the downhill slide and, to tell the truth, I don’t mind a bit. But I don’t want to spend the rest of my life standing in a bus depot. Show me this house you’ve been telling me about.”

Mister Milktoast collected her bags and led her to the Subaru.

“ Moving up in the world,” Mother said as she folded into the passenger’s seat like a crippled crab. “Remember that old car you used to drive, back home?”

Back home. She sent the first dagger into my chest.

“ How could I forget?” said Little Hitler.

She put a hand on my knee as I started the car. “I can’t tell you how happy it made me when you wrote and asked me to move in with you.”

I could only scream silently, killed by my own quill, drowned by the juice of my own inkwell, caged by the alphabet. A toilet flushed in the Bone House.

Oh, Richard, didn’t I tell you? How forgetful of me. Well, you know how it is when you have a thousand lifetimes’ worth of thoughts.

I wondered which black night, which stolen moment, which part of my life had been sliced away from me so the Insider could write the letter. Or letters. What else had it told her?

When you sleep, I’m awake.

Mother squeezed my knee with her graybriar fingers. “It can be just like old times,” she said, spraying spittle and liquor mist into the air. Her head swiveled as she studied the towering mountains that were such a contrast to Iowa’s sweeping flatness. She pointed to a store on the side of the highway.

“ Anything your heart desires, Mother,” Mister Milktoast said. “Your lush is my command.”

He pulled the car up to the glass front of the ABC store. I could see our reflections in the plate glass, my mouth smiling dotingly at Mother, her eyes bright in their nest of crow’s feet. If I looked closely, I could see myself writhing in agony in the pools of my pupils. But that must have been my imagination, because I didn’t look closely. I blinked and I was behind the steering wheel, myself again thanks to the wicked beneficence of the Insider.

Mother bought four bottles of Jim Beam, a fifth of gin, and a bottle of Glenlivet “just for a special celebration.” We drove to my house and Mother oohed and aahed in appreciation in the living room as I took her bags to the spare bedroom. I looked around for ghosts of Shelley, bits of clothing or stains, any trophies Little Hitler might have accumulated without my knowledge. You know how roommates are.

When I came back downstairs, Mother was sitting on the couch nursing a six-ounce glass of straight bourbon between drags of her cigarette.

I moved as if through a dream, and then I realized it was a dream. The Insider’s dream, come true through psychic manipulation. My nightmare, made flesh and given shape by a vengeful visionary. I was just a bit actor in a grainy movie. The Insider was star, writer, producer, and director, the Orson Welles of spiritual possession.

I sat on the chair, my limbs as stiff as wood, bracing for whatever atrocity the Insider might have in mind.

Relax, Richard. Why do you always expect the worst of me? I’ve gone to all this trouble to reunite a loving mother with her only son. See how much I care for you.

Mother had taken off her parka and hugged her arms against her chest. I tried not to look at the lumps her shriveled breasts made under the fabric of her sweater, but Loverboy gawked anyway. “Frostbit peaches” was his assessment.

“ Thought it would be warmer here,” she said. “But I guess this is pretty high up, what with all the mountains and all.”

I nodded, the dutiful ventriloquist’s dummy.

“ We’re going to be happy together, Richard,” she said. She was halfway through the drink. Her words already sounded thicker on her tongue. “Just like the good old days.”

She looked at me the way she had done from the witness stand at her court hearing those long years ago. The virgin whore, diva of denial, a mother load, spearing me with guilt and gratitude at the same time. Driving her words like nails into flesh, the same way she did while telling the prosecutors that Father had beaten the both of us for years.

“ We’re all we got left,” she said with a watery sneer. “Us, and memories.”

She drank to that. Then she drank to the previous drink. And the one to come.

Precious memories, how they finger. I was a prisoner of my own life, never more so than at that moment. An inmate of the Bone House, but also the warden. But even before that, I was the architect.

“ I would do it all over again,” she said, “even if I had gone to jail.”

“ Mother, please. Let’s not talk about it.”

She sipped the bourbon and smiled down into the brown liquid. She had already settled in, her thin hips parting the sofa cushion as if she’d been sitting there a hundred years. She picked at a loose thread on the sleeve of her sweater.

“ You’ve never wanted to talk about it,” she said, not accusing, just cold, empty, windswept. “Or about us.”

Anger boiled inside me, a hot bubbling tar pit erupting, the red lava of rage flowing down my brain. This wasn’t one of Little Hitler’s petulant tantrums. It was honest, rightful indignation. The realization was frightening, yet liberating. I could feel .

Richard Allen Coldiron could have emotions that weren’t gifts bestowed by Little People or psychic circus masters or calculating narrators. I tensed and sat forward, ready to rise and cross the room and...

And do what?

Its laughter rattled down the alleys of my mind, the sound of vermin scurrying in rubbish. I sat down and slumped in the chair, defeated before the battle even began.

“ That wasn’t us,” I said. “That couldn’t have been us.”

“ It was us, Richard. But we got through it all together. That’s what people who love each other do. They get through things.”

She lifted her arms with a sudden spasm and spilled bourbon on her polyester pants. She didn’t notice. The blotch looked like Nietzche’s profile or maybe a spatter pattern.

“ Just surviving isn’t enough,” I said. “Sometimes, you have to live.”

Mother finished what was left of her drink and sent the pale slug of her tongue over her lips. “Sometimes, you have to love,” she said, her voice catching. “It’s what makes us...human.”

No. The Insider couldn’t be working her strings, too. Feeding her lines straight from the mind of Mister Milktoast. The Insider couldn’t be working her mouth and mind and heart just to get to me, could it? Could it? Bookworm flitted in with his line about “unwilling suspension of disbelief” and hustled back to his nook or cranny or wherever he hid.

“ Comes a time to forgive and forget,” Mother said. “Now, be a good boy and go refill my glass.”

I was in the kitchen when she said to my back, “Besides, it was all my fault.”

“ No, it was nobody’s fault,” I yelled over my shoulder. The liquor I was pouring was momentarily tempting, its sharp sweet odor both a threat and a promise. The Coldiron Curse was relentless. It was as if Father’s ghost hovered somewhere behind me, laughing gleefully and whispering “Taste it, Shit For Brains. We’re bottomless.”

Ghosts. Memories. Curses. Richard, you’re starting to lose it, my dear human host. You’re starting to see things my way. You’re starting to become me.

Clink of glass.

And tonight, who will we be? Hmm, Richard? How about Mister Milktoast, giving Mother a sponge bath? Maybe Bookworm, opening his heart and spilling the pages of his pathetic diary? Little Hitler, swapping war stories about dear old Daddy? Or Loverboy. What about HIM?

With shaking hands, I poured an extra drink. It burned like hellfire in my throat.

Like Father, like son.

In every way.

I went back to the living room on legs of hot rubber.

Mother took her drink and smirked at the one I held in my hand. “You hold it just like your father,” she said.

Just wait until I put on my boots.

Her eyes crawled across the room like fleshflies looking for a soft opening on a corpse. They lit on a photograph of Beth on the mantel, a still-life Beth whose face was trapped in innocence, cheer, and happiness.

“ Who’s that?” Mother asked.

“ The woman I love,” I said, working another swallow of liquor toward my burning stomach, washing down the bitter aftertaste of that final word.

Mother frowned, wrinkles on wrinkles.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Mother passed out while the afternoon sun was still heavy in the sky. I covered her with a spare blanket and stood over her, looking down at her stale-pastry face. She was already a corpse, lacking only the butterfly stitches in the eyelids.

I thought about taking off her scuffed loafers, but I was afraid to touch her.

You can touch her, Richard. She’s yours. All of her. My gift to you.

“ No. You can take my awareness, you can shuck my consciousness from me, you can steal my flesh, but you can’t make me hurt her.”

Richard, Richard, Richard. You still don’t get it, do you? After all we’ve been through together, you still misunderstand me. My feelings would be hurt, if I had any besides yours.

“ What do you mean? This is all your doing. Just more of your cruelty, so you can eat my pain. Well, eat up, you invisible soulfucker. Because you can make me feel guilty, I admit. You know where to dig up every little bone in my brain cemetery.”

No, Richard. Don’t you see? The beauty of all this, the thing that makes it so indescribably delicious, is that I don’t have to MAKE you do anything. All I’m doing is granting you freedom of choice.

“ You monster. I never invited you in.”

Sometimes monsters are made, not born.

“ How many? How many do you need to kill before you’re tired of me?”

As many as it takes.

“ Not her, please not her.”

I thought you hated her.

“ Maybe so. I don’t know. But that doesn’t change the fact that she’s my mother. I know you don’t understand, but humans just can’t help certain feelings and emotions.”

Look at her, Richard. You want to, don’t you? You can do anything you want. I’m offering you everything. You can become one of us. You can join me in eternal life . Just surrender to me and become yourself.

I looked down at Mother. The young winter light made her face almost peaceful. She snorted in her sleep and a clear strand of drool leaked from one corner of her mouth.

This was the woman who had given me life. This was the one who really was to blame. She’d taught me everything I knew and didn’t know about love. I turned, feeling that familiar black curtain descending.

Before I knew it, I was in the kitchen, sliding open the kitchen drawer. The bread knife found my hand. Its serrated edge grinned under the light.

“ No, no, no.”

I dropped the knife to the floor and the tip gouged a hole in the soft linoleum. Jagged laughter howled through my veins.

Almost had you that time, didn’t I, Richard?

I knelt on the floor, holding my head in my hands.

“ Run inside, Richard. The boots are coming,” Mister Milktoast whispered from the dark.

“ What’s in there under the blanket, Dickie?” taunted Loverboy. “Smells warm. Smells ripe. And Beth’s not around to knead this little Pillsbury doughboy.”

“ Pick up the knife,” Little Hitler said. “How beautiful that would be. Poetic justice. First Father, then Mother. Patrimatricide.”

With friends like that, Richard...

The curtain lifted and I was lying on the cold lineoleum, sweating. I could hear Mother’s soft, arrhythmic snores. So she was still alive.

Congratulations, Richard. You passed the first test.

“ Test?”

You couldn’t kill her. Because you don’t even pretend to love her.

“ What?”

You loved Virginia. Where is she now?

What good did your love do Shelley? A one-night stand, except that for her, the night never ended. It keeps on stretching, out and out and forever.

Monique. You loved her. Inside out.

“ Hey, what gives, Filthy Richie?” said Loverboy. “Is the Insider pulling your pud, or what?”

“ Get the fuck out of my head.”

“ Damn, Dickie. Don’t get your panties in a twist. Come to think of it, as little action as you’re getting me, that would probably be an improvement.”

I rose to my knees and crawled across the floor like a toddler going after a soft, brown comforting thing, a fuzzy cuddle in a harsh room, a consciousness about to form its first memory. But this wasn’t the beginning. This was the wrap of the second act, where the plot complications conspired and forced the protagonist to finally face his nemesis, albeit from a position of weakness.

One arm, Little Hitler’s arm, stretched for the knife.

“ Don’t fight it, Richard. You know you love her. And you know what happens to the ones you love.”

“ No. I don’t love her. You know that.”

“ That’s not how I remember it,” said Loverboy. “You loved her a hell of a lot. Maybe not as well as I could have, but I don’t expect much from a jellydick like you.”

“ She loves us, Richard,” Mister Milktoast said. “Appeased in a pod.”

“ Then why didn’t she stop the boots?”

“ Because we were all too weak—you, me, her.”

“ But I sure as fuck wasn’t,” Little Hitler said, fingers caressing the knife handle. “If it wasn’t for me, you’d both probably be whimpering in the closet. You owe me, Richard.

You owe me big-time. And payback’s a bitch.”

“ Haven’t I paid you enough? Talk about usury. You’re worse than the Insider. I think you crave the guilt more than it does.”

“ Do you really think the Insider gives a flying upside-down batfuck about any of us? To it, one human is as good as another. Drop in, stir up a brainstorm, and head on down the line. No big deal, a little soul grazing, just getting through the day. But to me, this isn’t about survival. To me, this is personal.”

The knife was slick beneath my sweaty palm. I raised the blade and pointed it at my chest. If only I could fall on it before...

“ Don’t, Richard,” screamed Mister Milktoast. “What would become of me?”

“ Food for maggots, with any luck.”

“ Food for faggots, more like it,” Loverboy said. “Strap Daddy in stilettos and mince him down the runway.”

“ It’s not your fault,” Mister Milktoast said, ignoring the taunt.

“ Bullshit.” It was my fault, and besides, my word was law, right?

“ He’s right, Richard,” Bookworm said, and his voice came flat, calm, and clear from the dead zone of my cranium. I pressed the steel between my ribs.

“ Not you, too, Bookworm? I thought, of all of them, you might be on my side. You’re practically my co-author.”

“ I’m on your side. More than you know.”

“ Then help me. Help me die.” Tears streamed down my cheeks but I felt no sorrow.

“ Richard, you’re not strong enough to love. But are you strong enough to hope?”

“ Hope springs eternal,” cut in Mister Milktoast, as if the suicidal tide might dry up now that Bookworm kicked sand in everyone’s face. “Present tense despite the current tension.”

“ Do you love yourself enough, Richard?” continued Bookworm.

“ He loves himself plenty,” said Loverboy. “That right hand of his is practically worn out. I say it’s about time to let him get the fuck out of Dodge. Beth is tight as a breadstick and twice as salty, but this monogamy crap is getting old. Me, I got needs.”

“ I say winterize him,” Little Hitler said. “Let Richard bury himself back in the dark. Nobody would shed a tear. And I wouldn’t mind having a go at this meat full-time.”

I would welcome that. If I couldn’t stab myself, maybe I could just slip on down into the dark waters, drown inside my own sorry sea. No, the ocean-beach metaphor was paragraphs ago. It was time for domestic reference. Okay, so I’d book myself a back room in the Bone House and hang out a “No vacancy” sign.

Bookworm came in again, calm and strong. “Do you love yourself enough, Richard?”

“ Love? What’s love got to do with anything? And if I really did love anybody, then I would want to spare them our miserable company.”

The waters tempted, lapping. The curtains fluttered. Or was it the Insider laughing?

“ Do you love yourself enough to live?” Bookworm challenged.

“ I hate myself enough to die, I know that.”

“ Then you’d be dead already. Why aren’t you?”

“ The arch enemy hasn’t finished painting his rainbow,” Mister Milktoast said. “Sorry. Inside joke.”

The knife point was to my chest now, pressing into the flannel, bruising the sternum. Through the window, the sun hung fat and low over the far mountains. I should have been at work. I was scheduled for the night shift. But I was in search of a longer night shift, eternal overtime, no hope for dawn.

“ Beautiful,” Little Hitler said. “Richard’s so pathetic he can’t even succeed at the ultimate failure. Do you guys need more evidence as to why we need to fucking drown him already?”

“ Be my guest, Little Hitler. Nothing would please me more than to disappear inside. And you, Mister Milktoast. You’ve tried to keep me out of danger. But you want to live, with or without me.”

“ You wound me, old friend. After all I’ve done for you...”

“ All you did was protect me from the truth. Just like Mother.”

The blade pressed, the hand gripped, the arm ached to thrust. Blood thundered, heart throbbed, shutters shuddered.

“ Richard,” came Bookworm’s soothing voice, like a New Age audiobook narrator who’d sampled the chamomile. “It still won’t be the end.”

“ The end? What do I care about the end? All I want is to be out. Flying solo to hell or whatever those joking bastard gods have in mind for me. I just want to lose any awareness that I was ever me.”

“ Yes, Richard. It would end for you, but what about the Insider?”

“ The Insider? I’d be depriving it of a moment’s distraction, that’s all. It would just jump like—”

“— like a nimble metaphor over a proverbial candlestick burning at both ends. And move on.”

“ Whatever. It’s not my fault. I didn’t bring the thing into the world. And I didn’t invite it into my heart. It’s not like Mother made me do with Jesus.”

“ That was me,” Mister Milktoast said. “I was always trying to protect you.”

“ Jesus Jiminy Christ, what a joke,” Little Hitler said with a howl of laughter that rattled the Bone House windows. “Saving him from the savior. So which one of you angels are going to heaven? Now I’ve heard everything. Hell, now I’ve been everything.”

I turned to the only one who still seemed unselfish. “Bookworm, do you really think I’d mind snuffing these mental clowns out of existence? I’d be doing the world a favor. It’s practically my duty.”

“ Yes. You and I would end. All of us. But the Insider would continue. This chapter would end, the manuscript would expire in media res , but there would be a sequel.”

“ So you believe. But I’m only human. What do you want me to do about it?”

My body was tensed, awaiting the deathblow that wouldn’t come. A sharp lightning bolt flashed through my skull and fireshadows danced in my eyes. Black scraps stitched themselves together into a blanket over my brain. The Insider’s voice stabbed with its icy splinters, a gang rape of thoughts.

No need for me to jump very far, is there, Richard?

“ What are you talking about?”

Plenty of suitable hosts all around. Plenty who’ve been tortured and abused and are brimming with pain. Plenty who have sinned. Plenty of humans right within reach who’ve been tainted by their humanity and are just waiting for a monster to come in. Practically BEGGING for it.

“ What’s that got to do with me? As long as I’m out of the picture, I don’t care if you reanimate Elvis’s corpse or do the hokey pokey with Abraham Lincoln’s ghost.”

Choices, choices, choices. Mother or Beth. Beth or Mother. So many to be, so little time.

“ No. You miserable mindfucker.”

Which is the greater of two evils?

“ Damn you to hell.”

Thanks for the kind sentiment. But I’ve found the hottest hell right here.

I struggled with myself, my own arm. The knife or not.

I’ll let you die happy, if that’s what you want. You can go with a smile on your face, knowing that your beautiful little self-sacrifice is going to add to the guilt and pain of those you left behind. Hmmm. My mouth is watering already. Or is that YOUR mouth?

I swayed, confused, a minuet with sharp metal edges.

“ Listen to your heart, Richard,” Bookworm said.

“ My heart says stick the knife in.”

“ Don’t give up. We can beat it. Together.”

The Insider’s laughter ripped through my guts like shrapnel, pulsed through my veins like broken glass, rattled in my headbone like a blunt hatchet blade.

That’s when I realized I didn’t want to die. At least not alone.

Not when I could take somebody with me. Or something.

“ Yo, Squidbait,” said Loverboy. He was as jaunty as a sailor on shore leave with cockswain to spare and furlough to burn. “What would Mother say if she saw Richard down on his knees with a knife in his hand?”

“ Hey, Loverboy, you tart-popping sonofabitch. Why don’t you ask her?”

I turned. Mother was leaning against the kitchen entrance, wiping at the crust in her watery eyes. I put the knife behind my back.

She spoke, and her throat was so dry her voice cracked. “Richard...”

Had she seen the knife? I pretended to be looking for a spill. That was the only reason I could think of why I would be on my knees in the kitchen. I sure couldn’t pretend to be praying.

“ Richard…”

“ Yes, Mother?”

“ In this light, you look just like your father.”