There were limits, Billy Smith told himself within the confines of that cold, empty jail cell, to what a mind could take. And there were checks and balances, a cosmic scale. If something especially good happened, then something equally bad would return the favor, and vice versa. It was a theory that had been with him all his life, and though he supposed it wasn’t the best way to live, always looking over your shoulder if you were happy, it had served him well when things had gone sour; he always had something to hope for.

But now hope eluded him. The theory simply did not hold any water. He had suffered much, and just when he thought he had a chance at happiness again, he discovered that someone had played a cruel joke. There were no limits after all, this joker said with a smile and a shake of the head. You just roll the dice, buddy, and whatever comes up, you get. But it’s house rules here, and house dice too, and guess what, they’re loaded. Nothing we can do about that, sorry.

Last night, the dreams had been the worst he could remember. He dreamed of death coming home, in the flesh. One long, continuous dream that was so clear and vivid it might have been real.

As the sky in the east began to turn the color of lead with the approaching dawn, the dead of White Falls clawed their way out. They pushed up through layers of heavy earth, their bony hands grasping the sides of muddy graves like misshapen children fighting their way from the womb. They returned to their husbands, their wives, their lovers, their children, seeking life that they had given freely, and now wanted back. They came in waves, stumbling through empty, rain-washed streets, mouths gaping, blind and hungry and united by a single voice; return what is mine.

He watched it all happen. And then, just as he thought it could not get any worse, he had been granted a look from the other side.

The world went dark. Color bled out of it like a shirt running in the wash. His limbs grew cold and lost all feeling. He began to float within himself as the ground faded away beneath his feet. He was offered a glimpse of the void beyond; blackness there, emptiness, horrible, maddening, endless space without light or warmth or taste or smell. He heard the noiseless screams of the walking dead, and screamed with them, suddenly filled with a mindless hunger. Life had been cruelly snatched from his grasp; he wanted it back. He wanted it back.

When he awoke, sobbing, the hunger was still very much with him, its bitter taste lining the inside of his mouth like the morning after an especially rough bender. The jail cell in which he lay was cold and gray, full of the stench of stale human sweat. He had gained a new perspective. His body was a frail shell made up of dead and dying cells, a mortal thing that would fail soon enough and leave him floating in the horrible emptiness of the void. No amount of human company would ease this pain. If he looked into human faces, searching for understanding, he would see instead the number of years they had left, months, days. Perhaps he would even be able to see them slowly dying, hair turning gray, skin wrinkling and sagging by degrees as the structures underneath dried up and cracked and dissolved.

And there’s more to this game, pal. We ain’t done with you yet. He felt as if a great battle was being waged for his soul, but he had no weapons with which to fight. The dream and the hunger had revived the thirst again, and now it raged on. His throat ached for the burn, his fingers longed to feel the cool smooth glass of the bottle.

Roll the dice. Sometimes the dice go sour. Sorry, nothing we can do about that. House rules.

He sat in the empty cell, his head cradled in his hands, and wondered. His life seemed to lay itself out for inspection. He realized that everything that had happened, everything he had done, had been leading him to this place. His adoption, his adopted mother’s death, his drinking, the accident, his isolation, his guilt and obsession. And then the dreams, providing the final push. Perhaps they were some kind of trace memory, living on in brain cells inherited from Frederick Thomas, operating instinctively to carry out the man’s poisonous plan, like a homing pigeon returning to the nest, bringing its cargo to the required drop spot without the slightest conscious intention of doing so.

If so, he had been a fool. They had all been pawns in the hands of a man who had been dead over one hundred and fifty years. The dreams hadn’t come to warn him at all; they had come to bring him home. He had found his way home, all right. But first he had gone and collected his long-lost sister, kidnapped her, and locked her in handcuffs until she agreed to go along with his crazy scheme. They had managed to fall in love, which perhaps was more of the game; then, finally, he had driven her away when he needed her most.

Had no choice there, though, did you, pal? Not if you wanted to hang on to what’s left of your sanity. True. He could not face her and tell the truth. He did not want to hurt her that way. Why not keep the secret and hold it deep inside where it couldn’t do any more real damage? Besides, something told him that the best thing she could do now was leave, take the car and run, as far away from him and this town as she could get.

Except it wasn’t going to work out that way, and he knew it. The game wasn’t over yet.

A door opened somewhere near the front of the building. Up to this point, he hadn’t really thought why the deputies hadn’t shown up with his breakfast; now, almost despite himself, he felt his stomach growling. Bodily functions don’t care much about all that self-pitying romantic bullshit, he told himself grimly. They just go about their business. You ought to take a lesson from them.

Another door opened, closer this time. He heard footsteps, which stopped abruptly nearby; a muffled oath and a long moment of silence; then the steps resumed, and Harry Stowe appeared outside his door. Stowe’s hair was plastered wetly to his scalp and his face was grim.

“He’s taken her,” Stowe said. He held a ring of keys in his hand. “There’s no time for your bullshit. We have to go.”

Harry Stowe had arrived at work as usual that morning, planning to take a half-day. He hadn’t slept well, but that was to be expected. He couldn’t let that interfere with his life. He still had a job to do. Jackie Marshal was coming in for a check-up; Lester Pritchard wanted some painkillers for his tooth. But when the time rolled around for his first appointment, Jackie Marshal never showed. Lester Pritchard didn’t come in either, but by that time, Stowe had begun to get an uneasy, burning sensation in his gut. He tried the Marshal house, and got no answer. Same at the Pritchard garage. Finally, he tried the police station, and when the phone continued to ring emptily against his ear, that nervous feeling turned itself up a notch. Not sure why, he dialed the number for the Old Mill Inn. No answer there, either.

You didn’t listen to her, did you? She told you that time was running out.

He picked up the phone again, but this time the line was dead. The wind must have taken it down somewhere. He climbed into the car and drove down the street through the rain, and when he saw her car was gone from the Old Mill parking lot the nervous feeling upgraded itself to serious fear. He thought about Jeb Taylor, the way the boy had looked on the stairs the morning he had found Ruth’s body. Jeb Taylor was no longer himself. Something had taken hold of him. Had it infected everyone else in town as well?

He was driving past the high school when he spotted Angel’s car parked in front of Sue Hall’s place. He got out into the rain and stood hunched at the door, ringing the bell again and again. No answer. Finally he returned to the car to figure out what to do next, and that’s when he spotted Jeb’s car parked in back, partially concealed by the garage.

Did Jeb have Angel? There was no real reason to think so, and yet the feeling would not leave him. Time was running out.

Filled with a sudden fear he turned around and drove to the police station. When he got there he found the door wrenched open and the front room empty. It smelled strange in here, a smell he recognized but couldn’t quite place. A line of muddy footprints led beyond the door into the back.

He grabbed the ring of keys from a hook behind the desk and followed the footprints, not sure what he would see. Pat Friedman’s cell was empty. Bits of blood, bone, and matted hair clung to several of the bars. Almost as if he squeezed right through. But that would shatter his skull…

He wiped the unsettling image from his mind. When he stopped in front of the next cell, Billy Smith was already staring up at him from the cot along the wall. He looked terrible. Huge dark circles ringed his eyes, and his usually intense features had gained another dimension, producing the haunted, skeletal look Stowe had seen only a few times before in his worst patients. People who had witnessed a great tragedy, or were told they had a month to live.

“Ironic,” Smith said. “That I end up in here again, after all that’s happened. Locked up in another cell. I guess it’s where I belong.”

In answer, Stowe fumbled through the ring of keys. They made a faint jingling sound as they tumbled together. He tried one, then another. The third one threw the bolts, and he slid open the cell door. “Not anymore,” he said. “Now, let’s go.”

“Where?”

Stowe paused. Jesus, he was acting like a lunatic. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “But Angel’s gone. We have to find her.”

“I told her to get away from this place,” Smith said. He didn’t wait for a reply. His face seemed to waver a moment, though it was hard to tell whether he was distressed, relieved, or a little of both.

“She didn’t run because she’s pregnant,” Stowe said bluntly. “I tested her myself.”

“Oh, my God.”

“She wanted to tell you…”

Smith wasn’t listening. Sudden understanding washed over his face. “He wants the child,” he whispered. “That’s what he’s always wanted.”

“Who?”

As if in answer, Smith closed his eyes. His body went rigid, then relaxed. He sat there for a minute, perfectly still, slumped against the wall. Expressions played about his face, not quite his own and yet strangely familiar. Then he opened his eyes.

“I know where she is,” he said.

His mind flexed and reached and then joined, two becoming one, two halves of the same mind. A feeling of completion, unity, satisfaction. Her essence flowed within him, the wings fluttering in his hands, the taste of candy apples filling his mouth, the color blue washing over his sight like ocean water.

Then the fear began. He was seeing through her eyes, feeling her emotions. She was scared all right, and confused, like a bird cupped in a giant hand, heart beating like a jackhammer. Dark now and dead so many dead his face oh his face…

A jumble of images, flipping by so fast. Memory. An empty house, a dark hallway, a set of stairs leading down. Darkness, fear growing, gaining a voice. We have been waiting for you. A face leering out of the dark overhead, a demon’s face, twisting and churning, liquid features. Touched by ice-cold hands; darkness and confusion; then the cold wet rain, moving through the gates and up to the door of a monstrous house, and through, and more darkness.

Then he felt her pause, questioning, and he knew she had felt him. He withdrew carefully, slowly, before she could sense anything else. He was open and vulnerable now; she could read him too easily. He did not want her to discover his secret.

When he returned to himself and opened his eyes, the sudden emptiness made him gasp. He felt incomplete, torn in two. He had never fully realized how close two people could be, sharing the same breath, the same blood, the same mind. He had never been a hardcore drug user, alcohol had always been enough for him. Only once had he tried anything stronger, and that was during his freshman year in college, when he had dropped a single hit of acid. Now he was reminded of that feeling, a disassociation that brought on a whole new perception of the world. It was as if someone had opened the door to another dimension and given him a peek before slamming it rudely in his face.

Harry Stowe was staring at him with a mixture of wonder and apprehension, and he realized he must have spoken. “Where?” Stowe asked. “Where are they?”

The last image remained with him. The black gates, the narrow walk, the huge house looming over them. “The Thomas mansion,” he said. “At least, that’s where they were. I don’t know how long ago. It felt like a memory.”

“You were with her just now, weren’t you? I could see it in your face, some of her expressions…eerie.” He shook his head. “Like there were two of you.”

“We’re connected, somehow.” He waved his hand. Suddenly he felt almost helplessly angry. All the pieces had fallen into place. A child. The fruit of their passion growing even now inside her. The product of years of crossbreeding the damned, incest upon incest. New life tainted with old blood, pure blood. That was what Frederick Thomas was after, all along, why he had reached across the years and dragged them thousands of miles to this town.

New life.

Harry had crossed the small cell and was holding his arm, lifting him to his feet. “He’ll kill her,” Smith whispered. “When he’s gotten what he wants.”

“Then let’s get going.”

He was muttering to himself now; his dream of the night before had snuck stealthily back into his head. Not exactly the dream, but the feelings it had invoked. He remembered the awful emptiness of that place, the way his body felt after he awoke, a frail shell, already dying.

New life.

Harry stood firmly, holding both his arms now and keeping him upright, looking into his face. He could see every pore in Harry’s skin, dead cells clinging to them in a dull-gray film of biological waste. Dead hair and nails, dead eyes. Decay, happening even as he watched.

Harry was talking to him. “I don’t know what’s happened to you over the past few days,” he said, “what’s made you lose your faith. But you have a chance to help her now. Help all of us. But we have to move.”

“You might not like what you see. What we find out there.”

“I can handle it,” Harry said. The hard glint was back in his eyes. “I can handle whatever that bastard throws at us.”

Maybe so, Billy Smith thought. But can I?

They returned to the front room of the empty police station. Several rifles stood behind glass on a rack on the back wall. Stowe broke the glass and reached through.

There were blue raincoats in the closet. Some sort of automatic pistol lay in the top right-hand drawer of the front desk, unloaded, along with a pair of handcuffs. Smith pocketed them both. It took them a few minutes to find the ammunition, but they finally located it in the locked bottom drawer of the file cabinet. Three boxes of shells for the rifles (they emptied these into their pockets) and two clips for the handgun. Then Smith went through the desk again, looking for a flashlight. The Thomas place would be dark. Finally, he found a heavy-duty model with a steel grip winking at him from the back of the middle drawer.

The wind screeched and battered them as they climbed into Stowe’s Volvo. Little raging rivers ran down the pavement, carrying leaves and twigs and bits of trash. They could see part of the square between the backs of houses, and even through the blowing rain the destruction was clearly visible. Bits of color clung to the treetops, pieces of tattered decorations. The booths were nothing more than shattered boards sticking up from the ground.

They made it out of the parking lot. On the way past the church cemetery, Stowe suddenly clamped both feet down on the brake pedal. The big car came to a shuddering, sliding stop in the middle of the road.

“Holy fuck,” Stowe said in awe. The cemetery looked like a battlefield. The ground had erupted, spilling mud and hunks of sod everywhere. Stones had been tipped up and overturned, and now lay every which way in the grass like broken teeth. Empty graves loomed here and there like black, open sores in the earth. The cemetery gate swung back and forth in the storm, making a cracking sound like a bone breaking as it clipped the posts and rebounded, again and again.

The windshield wipers whined. At the far end of their line of sight, where the church building met the cemetery plots, there was movement, barely visible through the sheet of rain. Something gray and naked and obscenely human slipped around the corner of the building and disappeared.

They drove on, skirting the edge of the ravaged square, and pulled up in front of the Thomas mansion. It crouched among the trees like a huge and twisted animal ready to spring. Most of the upper windows were shuttered, but one on the right was bare, and gave him the unsettling feeling that the house was winking at them.

Stowe was pulling the rifle out of the back seat and popping shells into it, one by one. “Used to go deer hunting with my uncle up in the hills when I was a kid. Never killed anything before. Once I had one in my sights, and I froze up. Just froze up. Damn thing looked at me, turned tail, and hopped away.” He gave Smith a look that was almost a grimace. “Sorry, I was rambling. I do that when I’m nervous.”

“Harry—”

“What are we hunting? Can you tell me that? Anything that can be killed?”

The question seemed to hang in the air. We both know damn well what we’re hunting, he thought, but didn’t say it. Finally, he shrugged. “We’ll know when we see it.”

Stowe was looking at him again. “Those graves,” he said. “Nobody dug them up, did they?”

“Not exactly.”

“Oh, hell. Night of the living dead.” He sighed and wiped a hand across his face. “I told you I can handle it.”

Smith was thinking about the child again. His child. Nothing more than a collection of cells at this point, clinging to the wall of her womb. But Frederick Thomas was reaching out from the void even now, with the help of Jeb Taylor, wanting to claim those cells for himself, wanting to create…what? A lifeless husk to inhabit? A walking, breathing vehicle for another soul? And if he succeeded, what would he bring with him into the world? Such a resurrection surely had a price.

Stowe had opened the door, and the cold wet rain blowing across the car and into his face brought him back. Smith pulled the gun from his pocket and slapped a clip into the butt, the way he’d seen it done. The back of his throat itched for a drink. He shut it out of his mind and stepped out of the car. He had to act now, or the town and everyone in it would be lost. And he knew Angel would not survive whatever was supposed to happen. He would be responsible for her death, above all others. His sister. A surge of conflicting emotion washed over him. God, he still loved her, still wanted desperately to be with her. He couldn’t shut the feelings off like that, no matter how hard he tried.

They crossed in front of the car and trotted up the walk. Rain dripped down around his ears, into the collar of the slicker. It slid like cold hands down his back to his waist. He stared at the house. The anger was growing, and now the fear came too, and he welcomed it. Fear, he could handle. Fear was natural.

The door was wide open, the same side door he had entered a few evenings before in pursuit of Jeb Taylor. Beyond it, darkness beckoned. Smith wrestled the big silver flashlight out of his pocket and switched it on.

Inside the smell hit him at once. He played the light around the floor and saw a number of muddy, incoherent tracks leading off in the direction of the hall. There were signs of a struggle; bloody splashes on the white sheets.

Then the light fell upon the body hanging beneath the arch. It was a young man in greasy overalls, tall and well built. His hands had been nailed to the frame on each side of the arch, and he hung crucified, his body slumped forward, his legs splayed wide apart and bent at odd angles below the knee, his feet nailed to the floor. Blood ran down the overalls in a dark, dripping stain, and pooled on the floor below his crotch. There was something else odd about the body, but it took him a second to realize what it was. The boy’s head had been turned around to face backwards.

He heard a sharp intake of breath from behind him, and then Harry hurried forward. But there was nothing that could be done to save this patient. Harry touched the head, turning it back towards the light. It wobbled loosely on its stalk of a neck, and Smith felt a greasy sickness in his belly. “Broken,” Harry said. “Arms and legs, too.” His voice held the barest tremor. “It’s Dick Pritchard, Lester’s boy. About Jeb’s age. One of the ones who picked on him when they were kids. Poor son of a bitch.”

“We’ll have to get him down,” Smith said. “We have to go through.” He set the handgun and flashlight on the sheet-covered table, moved forward and grasped the cold, dead flesh of the boy’s right arm, as Harry grabbed the left. “Pull,” he said. There was a terrible, wet, tearing sound as the nails jerked through flesh, and then they lowered the body gently to the floor. As it fell forward, the nails came free from the boy’s feet, leaving two small, nearly bloodless holes.

“That was bad,” Smith said. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, feeling his belly begin to churn again. Only the beginning, he thought, if you can’t stand up to this much, then you might as well go home. There were worse things ahead. The back of his throat began to itch again, as if in reply.

Just as they reached the study the voices began again. At first they were nothing more than a whisper, almost inaudible over the muffled howl of the wind. Then they gained strength like a radio tuning itself in, floating through the cavernous rooms, echoes drifting down across the years. “Do you hear that?” Stowe asked. He had stopped dead in his tracks at the study door, listening.

“I hear them,” Smith said grimly. “Don’t pay any attention.”

But it was difficult. The voices had taken a distinctively nasty turn. They ranted and raved incoherently. There were screams of pain, a woman sobbing. Sounds of a struggle; the screams began again. Another voice, male, spoke in a tongue Smith had never heard before. The words were guttural, corrupt, obscene.

The footprints led to the basement door. Smith shined the light down the first few steps. “This may be the end of the line,” he said. “I was in this cellar the last time, and it doesn’t seem to have any way out.”

The voices went on, ranting louder now. They looked at each other. There didn’t seem to be anything else to say. Smith began down the steps, the gun and flashlight held out against the dark, one in each hand.

When he reached the cold stone floor he swept the light along the walls and was relieved to find the carved earth chamber empty once again. He let out a deep breath. The heavy, rotten beams seemed to breathe with him, and he thought, quite clearly, if this house is alive, I am standing in its lungs.

“Jeb Taylor disappeared down here once before,” he said. “There must be another way out. We have to find it.”

They began to search the big, empty room. The voices continued above them, muffled now like the storm, shrieks of agony, screams of rage and violence, and then the shrieks slowly dissolving into a woman’s racking sobs. You bastard, Smith thought as he worked his way around the room, searching for cracks in the solid earthen walls. You raped her. Raped your own sister. Henrietta had had three children by him. Had the rape happened again, and again? Or had she finally given in, her spirit broken, willing to submit if only to avoid the physical pain Frederick inflicted?

The majority of muddy tracks seemed to congregate in one corner of the room, and that was where they finally found what they were looking for. A corner of one of the big stone slabs was a little out of place, and when they tried to lift it they found it was just a thin, flat piece of rock that concealed an old rotten trapdoor underneath. They raised the heavy trapdoor together, with some difficulty, the edges of the wood crumbling in their hands and making it almost impossible to gain a solid grip.

Below it, a square, black hole, descending deeper into the earth. From this rose a stench that made all the others pale in comparison. Stowe stumbled away from it, holding a hand across his nose and mouth. “My God,” he breathed softly, through his fingers.

The flashlight revealed the remains of a wooden ladder clinging to one side of the hole, its rungs streaked with fresh blood. Smith put the gun in his pocket and stepped down on the first rung carefully, feeling the spongy wood give under his shoes, and then lowered himself to the next. Incredibly, the wood held. He felt dirt pressing in close on all sides, and kept going, knowing that to stop would be to give in to claustrophobia.

Thankfully, the ladder was no more than six or seven feet long. From the bottom rung there was another drop of a few feet, and then he was standing on the packed earth floor of a narrow, black tunnel, perhaps three yards across at its widest point. He flashed the light around and saw crumbling wooden beams bracing the low ceiling at intermittent intervals. Dirty water dripped down the walls. A faint breath of noxious air touched his face, and was gone.

His hackles rose. He drew the gun. There was a cracking sound, a muffled curse, and Harry Stowe dropped on all fours beside him, the rifle clattering to the earth. “That last rung gave on me—” he began, and then looked up. “Incredible,” he whispered, gaining his feet and staring down the empty tunnel. “How long has this been here, do you think?”

Billy Smith wasn’t listening. He had gotten a sudden clear picture in his head of oily black water stretching out below a midnight sky. It was as if he had been holding a pair of binoculars before his eyes and someone had just adjusted the focus, so that the two blurred images joined and became one. The Thomas mansion was only a diseased limb; it was in another place where the sickness had begun, and where, God-willing, it would end. A place where dead gray trees rose like ghosts through the mist.

He remembered the white face of a ghoul, grinning at them through dirty glass.

“Frederick built it,” he said. “It leads to the old Taylor property on Black Pond.”

They had been moving along in tense silence for perhaps five minutes. The tunnel sloped gently downward for the first hundred feet or so, then leveled off. The earth was soggy and ice-cold under their shoes. The flashlight danced along length after length of dark walls and darker wooden beams that were thicker than his chest. Here and there a minor cave-in had spilled a mound of dirt from the ceiling and they stepped over these carefully, as if avoiding something that might eat the shoes right off their feet.

The tunnel took many small twists and turns, but it always seemed to return to the same general direction. There was only one place where they could possibly end up. All this time, he had believed that the evil in Ronnie Taylor had been responsible for that sour spot of earth below the falls. He realized now that it had been the other way around. Ronnie Taylor had picked the wrong place to build his house, that was all, and over the months the ground had taken its toll on him, and the amulet had done the rest.

But who the hell had dug this tunnel? In the years before machinery it seemed impossible that something like this could have been created. Frederick had had help, of course. But he wouldn’t have been able to turn to the local villagers. Smith didn’t want to think of what kind of help he might have received.

The flashlight flickered and he froze, holding his breath. Something had moved up ahead in the darkness. Terror washed over him now, making his legs tremble and his bladder ache. “Billy,” Stowe hissed. He was pointing to a point about thirty feet ahead, where the tunnel took a sudden turn to the right. Smith flattened himself against the wall, and slapped the flashlight against his forearm. It flickered again, and then came on strong. He raised the beam of light.

Sheriff Claude Pepper was coming steadily toward them out of the shadows. Something had been chewing on his face and throat; the front of his uniform was soaked with blood. One ear was gone, the other hanging by a ribbon of flesh. The fingers of his right hand had been bitten off at the first knuckle, and the mangled stumps wriggled in the air in front of him like fat bloody worms. It took Smith a moment to realize the odd swishing sound came from the sheriff’s two pant legs rubbing together.

A small, trapped noise escaped his mouth. He raised the handgun and tried to pull the trigger, but the gun would not fire. The beam of the flashlight bobbed in his hand and threw monstrous shadows across the walls.

A shot rang out just behind him, deafening in the close confines of the tunnel. Dirt showered down upon his head. The sheriff stumbled back a few steps, and kept going. Stowe’s bullet had taken him in his fleshy stomach; a quarter-sized hole showed near his belt.

The rifle roared again. This time Pepper’s head jerked back on his neck, and he paused, not ten feet away. One hand went to his ruined face, exploring the contours of it as if for the first time. Stowe pulled the trigger once more, and a hole appeared in the back of the hand. The big man twitched like a puppet on strings, dropped heavily to his knees, and then fell face first into the cold black mud.

“There,” Stowe said quietly. His voice was cracking. “There, you bastard.”

Smith looked at him. Stowe was gripping the rifle too hard; his face was flushed, his hair hung wetly across his forehead, and his eyes were hidden in two circles of shadow. Caught in the strange, yellow beam of the flashlight, he looked like a madman.

“Harry…” he said. Stowe jerked his head around and stared at him. His mouth was a thin white line. “Thanks,” Smith finished simply. His legs felt rubbery. Stowe kept staring at him a moment, then he nodded and took a deep, rattling breath.

“Safety,” he said. “Turn off the fucking safety.”

Smith turned the handgun over and found the red button on its side. He felt like he was going to be sick.

At their feet, Pepper’s huge body twitched in the mud, like a landed fish.

They moved on. Twice more, they ran into roadblocks. The first, a big, white ghostly creature who turned out to be a very dead Barbara Trask in a nightdress, had almost gotten her hands on them. She had been waiting around another sharp bend in the tunnel, and although mangled as badly as the sheriff in other ways (her neck was a mess of tangled, red flesh), her face was mostly intact, which made it more difficult to shoot. Smith froze up, finger on the trigger, and her eyes fixed on him. He saw the lust there, as bright and naked as the full moon. He had time to wonder what might happen if she touched him, and then Stowe came to his rescue again, pressing the barrel of his rifle against the side of her head and pulling the trigger, splattering most of her brains against one of the wooden tunnel beams and dropping her, twitching, at his feet. Stowe looked whiter after that, and his hands trembled like a drunk’s after a hard night. But he did not falter.

Then, just as they turned to continue, the huge dog came at them out of the dark, and this time Billy Smith did not hesitate. He fired five times into the dog’s snarling face. Blood and brain and shards of bone flew up in a bright red cloud, and when it was done, the dog was on the ground next to its owner. The top of its head was gone, but it kept trying to gain its feet. Smith was reminded of a turtle flipped over onto its back. He steeled his stomach, walked up, placed a foot on the big dog’s neck (even now it tried to snap weakly at him), and emptied the magazine into its skull.

Finally only the tips of its paws moved, scraping uselessly against the thick mud. It looked like a dog trying to run in its sleep. Except this dog wore nothing but a red pulpy mess above its shoulders. Oh Jesus, he thought dully, looking at the paws twitch. His throat felt thick and swollen. I’m not going to make it.

Then Stowe’s hand was on his shoulder. He did not say a word; the look in his eyes was enough.

They went on. A few minutes later the tunnel began to rise, and the mud was not as thick under their feet. They began to hear the thunder again, a distant booming sound like artillery. As Smith walked, each step seemed to increase the load he carried around his shoulders, and the terrible doubts and depression that had plagued him since that morning kept creeping back at him. Doubts, he realized, that had never really left; he had simply allowed the urgency in Harry Stowe and his own anger at being played for a fool to carry him through so far. His mind returned to the night he and Angel had investigated the Taylor property for the first time, the way the trees had moved with the passing of something gigantic and dark, and he remembered the way he had turned tail and run like a frightened child from the puffy white face of his dead mother in the dirty window.

He thought of Angel. For a moment, that great shining dam inside his soul groaned under the weight of his guilt, and almost gave way. Why was he here? Was there nothing more to it than an ancient curse, was he doomed from the very beginning, as he had often thought? And if so, would he have a chance to look the darkness in the eye before it sent him tumbling into the void?

Does the devil know who made him? Where he came from? Or is he just like us, constantly questioning his existence, the reason for it all, the meaning?

Light, up ahead. The tunnel was coming to an end. Above their heads they could hear the thundering voice of the unknown.

The tunnel ended abruptly at another ladder. This one was fashioned out of newer wood; it looked as if it would hold their weight easily. Gray, lifeless light filtered down through cracks in the trapdoor above. Smith looked up into the narrow shaft, water dripping onto his face. He listened. All sound had ceased, except the rain and the whistling wind.

“Well?” Harry Stowe whispered. Stowe’s voice did not seem to belong to him. It was high and tight and shaking. But his eyes were still bright and sane, and he stood with both feet braced and ready. He had not hesitated for a single moment. Not when it counted. Smith felt an almost overwhelming gratitude. He hadn’t had to carry the burden alone, after all. Without you, I’d be dead right now, he thought. I’d go into battle with you anytime, my friend.

“Go to her,” Stowe said. “I’ll watch your back.”

Smith closed his eyes, and willed himself to relax, letting that hand inside his mind flex its psychic fingers and come to life. He would have to be careful this time, he knew. There were dangers within this realm as well, false steps that could mean death, if he began to feel around in the wrong place. The darkness was close.

Reaching, he pushed out gently—

—and joined. This time, entering her mind was as easy and smooth as listening to his own thoughts. He almost cried out with joy. So shallow to think that the only closeness between a man and woman came from the physical act. That was simply one way of sharing a mind together, and even then, even during the best of it, the touch was just the barest brushing of mental fingertips. Not like this. Never like this.

There was no fear this time, no conscious thought. She was asleep, or out cold, and dreaming. Her (their) dreams were unfocused, flowing flowerbeds of color. They floated as one through plains of soft white and green and blue smoke, pale shadow shapes slipping close, then away again like little birds. He heard their wings beating, felt their caresses upon his face. Warmth flowed through his limbs, tears ran freely down his face, and the burdens began to lift, he was growing lighter, lighter still, ah, Jesus, the beauty of it…

He was being shaken, hard. “Billy!” someone said against his ear. He came partway back, jolted out of the dream. Cold gray light filtered through his closed lids. He tried to brush the hands away and found them pulling at him again. “Billy, come on, not now, oh, Christ…”

Harry. He opened his eyes and found himself standing in the tunnel again. Real tears flowed down his cheeks. They were cold against his skin.

Harry Stowe was staring anxiously into his face. “Don’t,” Smith muttered absently. “Don’t do that. Don’t take me out.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know. She was asleep.” She was still there; he could feel the dreams playing in the back of his own mind. There was a faint, sweet taste in his mouth, the taste of candy apples. He had the odd, disjointed feeling of being in two places at once. The connection between them had been stretched thin, but not broken.

He wanted only to return to the dream. Reality was so hard.

“You want to help her, don’t you?” Stowe shook him again. “He’ll murder her when he’s done. You told me that yourself. Do you want to be a part of it? Do you?”

Smith winced. No. Please don’t ask me to leave her, though. Please don’t ask me that.

Stowe simply pushed him toward the ladder. The rough wood against his hands brought him back a little farther, and he began to climb. The gun was gone; he thought he remembered stuffing it into his pocket.

He reached the trapdoor. The water was dripping faster now, running through the cracks in the wood. He reached up, pushed and felt it give. Colors were still blooming in front of his eyes, greens and soft reds and blues. It was like looking through colored glasses at a dead winter world. Inside was where you wanted to be, inside, where it was warm and you could smell wood from a fire and your feet were stuffed into a pair of soft, comfortable slippers.

Stowe was hitting his legs from below the ladder. He looked up. The trapdoor was open. Had he done that? He couldn’t quite remember. He climbed the last two rungs, grabbed the edges of the frame and lifted himself over.

And stepped into Ronnie Taylor’s domain.

He was standing in the middle of a ruined room. The roof was sagging and there was an open hole above his head, bare and broken rafters pointing up into a splintered gray sky. Rain slashed into his upturned face. There was a gaping hole just to the left of where he stood, where the floorboards had rotted and fallen in. The walls had crumbled in places, plaster giving way to glimpses of the wooden frame and the world outside.

This had been the kitchen in the old Taylor home; the ends of rusted, broken pipes stuck out from the wall below a shattered window, and in the corner sat part of a chipped porcelain sink, half full of brown water. Through the remains of the window he could see the rippling water of the pond and the tire swing flipping crazily in the wind.

He turned toward the door, which now hung crookedly on its hinges. The next room was more or less intact. The floor was solid, the roof and walls closed. This was where it had happened; Ronnie raising the broom handle again and again, bringing it down in a vicious, slashing arc, turning his wife’s face into something unrecognizable, blood thrown in wide, splattering half-moons across the floor, the sofa, the walls. Then taking the knife up from the kitchen and going after the baby in her womb.

Or had that happened first? Had he tried to take the baby from her and failed, and only then taken up the broom handle in a frenzy of rage? Had he realized, too late, that his blood was not quite pure enough? That he was not the one they wanted, after all?

Smith blinked. Rainwater ran freely down his face and mixed with his tears. His nightmarish vision faded slowly, and the woman with the bloody, beaten face changed, but did not disappear.

Angel was lying on her back in the middle of the floor. Someone had drawn a circle around her body with red paint. No, blood; of course it would be blood. She was still whole, thank God, and alive. There was a pile of white bones near her head. He stared, not quite sure what he was seeing. The bones were wriggling like grubs. Frederick’s remains, even now trying to come to life.

Then he knew what was meant to happen, and he recoiled from it as if struck. Jeb would butcher her, as his father had done to his mother years ago, and this time, Frederick and the thing that had taken him long ago would get what they wanted.

Stowe had come up the ladder behind him, and he went forward quickly toward the next room where Angel lay, skirting the edges of the places where the floor had fallen in. No, Smith thought dully, watching him go. He wanted to cry out, but his voice had left him. That’s what he wants, he wants to separate us.

But it was too late. As Stowe knelt beside Angel’s body, knocking the bones away with a cry of disgust, the crooked door picked itself up and slammed shut with a bang, cutting them off. Smith jumped; the noise and sudden movement seemed to break the spell that had fallen over him. He ran forward across the spongy floorboards and threw himself against the door, battering it with his fists. He could hear Stowe shouting on the other side. But the door would not budge.

“What’s happening!” he screamed. He could feel the ground thrumming under his feet, as if the very earth was coming alive. A great gust of wind shook the little shack. For a moment he thought it might go right over and sink into the foul black mud, burying them all forever.

Then the voice spoke up in his mind, dark and dripping with a naked lust that made him shriek with fear. So you’ve finally come. Welcome. Welcome to the void.