PART ONE - The Door in the Wall

One

It was a modest three-bedroom frame house with its basement dug a little deeper than was customary in this part of the country, pleasant but overgrown with bush and ivy and miles away from town.

It had been empty for years, the real estate agent said, and the property backed onto a cedar swamp. "Frankly, I don't see a lot of investment potential here."

Tom Winter disagreed.

Maybe it was his mood, but this property appealed at once. Perversely, he liked it for its bad points: its isolation, lost in this rainy pinewood—its blunt undesirability, like the frank ugliness of a bulldog. He wondered whether, if he lived here, he would come to resemble the house, the way pet owners were said to resemble their pets. He would be plain. Isolated. Maybe, a little wild.

Which was not, Tom supposed, how he looked to Doug Archer, the real estate agent. Archer was wearing his blue Bell Realty jacket, but the neat faded Levi's and shaggy haircut betrayed his roots. Local family, working class, maybe some colorful relative still logging out in the bush. Raised to look with suspicion on creased trousers, which Tom happened to be wearing. But appearances were deceptive. Tom paused as they approached the blank pine-slab front door. "Didn't this used to be the Simmons property?"

Archer shook his head. "Close, though. That's a little ways up the hill. Peggy Simmons still lives up there—she's nearly eighty." He raised an eyebrow. "You know Peggy Simmons?"

"I used to deliver groceries up the Post Road. Came by here sometimes. But that was a long while ago."

"No kidding! Didn't you say—"

"I've been in Seattle for most of twelve years."

"Any connection with Tony Winter—up at Arbutus Ford?"

"He's my brother," Tom said.

"Hey! Well, hell! This changes things."

In the city, Tom thought, we learn not to smile so generously.

Archer slid the key into the door. "We had a man out here when the property went up for sale. He said it was in fairly nice shape on the inside, but I'd guess, after it's been closed up for so long—well, you might take that with a grain of salt."

Translated from realty-speak, Tom thought, that means it's a hellacious mess.

But the door eased open on hinges that felt freshly oiled, across a swatch of neat beige broadloom.

"I'll be damned," Archer said.

Tom stepped over the threshold. He flicked the wall switch and a ceiling light blinked on, but it wasn't really necessary; a high south-facing window allowed in a good deal of the watery sunshine. The house had been built with the climate in mind: it would not succumb to gloom even in the rain.

On the right, the living room opened into a kitchen. On the left, a hallway connected the bedrooms and the bath.

A stairway led down to the basement.

"I'll be damned," Archer repeated. "Maybe I was wrong about this place."

The room they faced was meticulously clean, the furniture old but spotless. A mechanical mantel clock ticked away (but who had wound it?) under what looked like a Picasso print. Just slightly kitschy, Tom thought, the glass-topped coffee table, the low Danish Modern sofa; very sixties, but immaculately preserved. It might have popped out of a time capsule.

"Well maintained," he said.

"You bet. Considering it wasn't maintained at all, far as I know."

"Who's the owner?"

"The property came up for state auction a long time ago. Holding company in Seattle bought it but never did anything with it. They've been selling off packets of land all through here for the last year or so." He shook his head. "To be honest, the house was entirely derelict. We had a man out to evaluate these properties, shingles and foundation and so on, but he never said—I mean, we assumed, all these old frame houses out here—" He put his hands in his pockets and frowned. "The utilities weren't even switched on till late last week."

How many cold winters, hot summers had this room been closed and locked? Tom paused and slid his finger along a newel post where the stairs ran down into darkness. His finger came away clean. The wood looked oiled. "Phantom maid service?"

Archer didn't laugh. "Jack Shackley's the listed agent on this. Maybe he was in to tidy up. Somebody did a phenomenal job, anyway. The listing is house and contents and it looks like you have some nice pieces here—maybe a little dated. Shall we have a look around?"

"I think we should."

Tom circled twice through the house—once with Archer, once "to get his own impression" while Archer left his business card on the kitchen counter and stepped outside for a smoke. His impression was the same both times. The kitchen cupboards opened frictionlessly to spotless, uniformly vacant interiors. The linen closet was cedar-lined, fragrant and bare. The bedrooms were empty except for the largest, which contained a modest bed, a chest of drawers, and a mirror— dustless. In the basement, high windows peeked out at the rear lawn; these were covered with white roller blinds, which the sun had turned brittle yellow. (Time passes here after all, he thought.)

The building was sound, functional, and clean.

The fundamental question was, did it feel like home?

No. At least, not yet.

But that might change.

Did he want it to feel like home?

But it was a question he couldn't answer to his own satisfaction. Maybe what he wanted was not so much a house as a cave: a warm, dry place in which to nurse his wounds until they healed—or at least until the pain was bearable.

But the house was genuinely interesting.

He ran his hand idly along a blank basement wall and was startled to feel . . . what?

The hum of machinery, carried up through gypsum board and concrete block—instantly stilled?

Faint tingle of electricity?

Or nothing at all.

"Tight as a drum."

This was Archer, back from his sojourn. "You may have found a bargain here, Tom. We can go back to my office if you want to talk about an offer." "Why the hell not," Tom Winter said.

The town of Belltower occupied the inside curve of a pleasant, foggy Pacific bay on the northwestern coast of the United States.

Its primary industries were fishing and logging. A massive pulp mill had been erected south of town during the boom years of the fifties, and on damp days when the wind came blowing up the coast the town was enveloped in the sulfurous, bitter stench of the mill. Today there had been a stiff offshore breeze; the air was clean. Shortly before sunset, when Tom Winter returned to his room at the Seascape Motel, the cloud stack rolled away and the sun picked out highlights on the hills, the town, the curve of the bay.

He bought himself dinner in the High Tide Dining Room and tipped the waitress too much because her smile seemed genuine. He bought a Newsweek in the gift shop and headed back to his second-floor room as night fell.

Amazing, he thought, to be back in this town. Leaving here had been, in Tom's mind, an act of demolition. He had ridden the bus north to Seattle pretending that everything behind him had been erased from the map. Strange to find the town still here, stores still open for business, boats still anchored at the marina behind the VFW post.

The only thing that's been demolished is my life.

But that was self-pity, and he scolded himself for it. The quintessential lonely vice. Like masturbation, it was a parody of something best performed in concert with others.

He was aware, too, of a vast store of pain waiting to be acknowledged . . . but not here in this room with the ugly harbor paintings on the wall, the complimentary postcards in the bureau, pale rings on the wood veneer where generations had abandoned their vending-machine Cokes to sweat in the dry heat. Here, it would be too much.

He padded down the carpeted hallway, bought a Coke so he could add his own white ring to the furniture.

The phone was buzzing when he got back. He picked it up and popped the ring-tab on the soft-drink can.

"Tom," his brother said.

"Tony. Hi, Tony."

"You all by yourself?"

"Hell, no," Tom said. "The party's just warming up. Can't you tell?"

"That's very funny. Are you drinking something?" "Soda pop, Tony."

"Because I don't think you should be sitting there all by yourself. I think that sets a bad pattern. I don't want you getting sauced again."

Sauced, Tom thought, amused. His brother was a well-spring of these antique euphemisms. It was Tony who had once described Brigitte Nielsen as "a red-hot tamale." Barbara had always relished his brother's bon mots. She used to call it her "visiting Tony yoga"—making conversation with one hand ready to spring up and disguise a grin.

"If I get sauced," Tom said, "you'll be the first to know."

"That's exactly what I'm afraid of. I called in a lot of favors to get you this job. Naturally, that leaves my ass somewhat exposed."

"Is that why you phoned?"

A pause, a confession: "No. Loreen suggested—well, we both thought—she's got a chicken ready to come out of the oven and there's more than enough to go around, so if you haven't eaten—"

"I'm sorry. I had a big meal down at the coffee shop. But thank you. And thank Loreen for me."

Tony's relief was exquisitely obvious. "Sure you don't want to drop by?" Brief chatter in the background: "Loreen's done up a blueberry pie."

"Tell Loreen I'm sorely tempted but I want to make it an early night."

"Well, whatever. Anyway, I'll call you next week." "Good. Great."

"Night, Tom." A pause. Tony added, "And welcome back."

Tom put down the phone and turned to confront his own reflection, gazing dumbly out of the bureau mirror. Here was a haggard man with a receding hairline who looked, at this moment, at least a decade older than his thirty years. He'd put on weight since Barbara left and it was beginning to show —a bulge of belly and a softness around his face. But it was the expression that made the image in the mirror seem so ancient. He had seen it on old men riding buses. A frown that announces surrender, the willing embrace of defeat. Options for tonight?

He could stare out the window, into his past; or into this mirror, the future.

The two had intersected here. Here at the crossroads. This rainy old town.

He turned to the window.

Welcome back.

Doug Archer called in the morning to announce that Tom's offer on the house—most of his carefully hoarded inheritance, tendered in cash—had been accepted. "Possession is immediate. We can have all the paperwork done by the end of the day. A few signatures and she's all yours."

"Would it be possible to get the key today?"

"I don't see any problem with that."

Tom drove down to the realty office next to the Harbor Mall. Archer escorted him through paperwork at the in-house Notary Public, then took him across the street for lunch. The restaurant was called El Nino—it was new; the location used to be a Kresge's, if Tom recalled correctly. The decor was nautical but not screamingly kitschy.

Tom ordered the salmon salad sandwich. Archer smiled at the waitress. "Just coffee, Nance."

She nodded and smiled back.

"You're not wearing your realty jacket," Tom said.

"Technically, it's my day off. Plus, you're a solid purchase. And what the hell, you're a hometown boy, I don't have to impress anybody here." He settled back in the vinyl booth, lean in his checkerboard shirt, his long hair a little wilder than he had worn it the day before. He thanked the waitress when the coffee arrived. "I looked into the history of the house, by the way. My own curiosity, mainly."

"Something interesting?"

"Sort of interesting, yeah."

"Something you didn't want to tell me until the papers were signed?"

"Nothing that would change your mind, Tom. Just a little bit odd." "So? It's haunted?"

Archer smiled and leaned over his cup. "Not quite. Though that wouldn't surprise me. The property has a peculiar history. The lot was purchased in 1963 and the house was finished the next year. From 1964 through 1981 it was occupied by a guy named Ben Collier—lived alone, came into town once in a while, no visible means of support but he paid his bills on time. Friendly when you talked to him, but not real friendly. Solitary."

"He sold the house?"

"Nope. That's the interesting part. He disappeared around 1980 and the property came up for nonpayment of taxes. Nobody could locate the gentleman. He had no line of credit, no social security number anybody could dig up, no registered birth—his car wasn't even licensed. If he died, he didn't leave a corpse." Archer sipped his coffee. "Real good coffee here, in my opinion. You know they grind the beans in back? Their own blend. Colombian, Costa Rican—"

Tom said, "You're enjoying this story."

"Hell, yes! Aren't you?"

Tom discovered that he was, as a matter of fact. His interest had been piqued. He looked at Archer across the table— frowned and looked more closely. "Oh, shit, I know who you are! You're the kid who used to pitch stones at cars down along the coast highway!"

"You were a grade behind me. Tony Winter's little brother."

"You cracked a windshield on a guy's Buick. There were editorials in the paper. Juvenile delinquency on the march."

Archer grinned. "It was an experiment in ballistics."

"Now you sell haunted houses to unsuspecting city slickers.

"I think 'haunted* is kind of melodramatic. But I did hear another odd story about the house. George Bukowski told me this—George is a Highway Patrol cop, owns a double-wide mobile home down by the marina. He said he was up along the Post Road last year, cruising by, when he saw a light in the house—which he knew was unoccupied 'cause he'd been in on the search for Ben Collier. So he stopped for a look. Turned out a couple of teenagers had broken a basement window. They had a storm lantern up in the kitchen and a case of Kokanee and a ghetto blaster—just having a good old party. He took them in and confiscated maybe an eighth-ounce of dope from the oldest boy, Barry Lindell. Sent 'em all home to their parents. Next day George goes back to the house to check out the damage—the kicker is, it turns out there wasn't any damage. It was like they'd never been there. No matches on the floor, no empties, everything spit-polished."

Tom said, "The window where they broke in?" "It wasn't broken anymore." "Bullshit," Tom said.

Archer held up his hands. "Sure. But George swears on it. Says the window wasn't even reputtied, he would have recognized that. It wasn't fixed—it just wasn't broken."

The waitress delivered the sandwich. Tom picked it up and took a thoughtful bite. "This is an obsessively tidy ghost we're talking about."

"The phantom handyman."

"I can't say I'm frightened."

"I don't guess you have any reason to be. Still—" "I'll keep my eyes open."

"And let me know how it goes," Archer said. "I mean, if that's okay with you." He slid his business card across the table. "My home number's on the back."

"You're that curious?"

Archer checked out the next table to make sure nobody was listening. "I'm that fucking bored."

"Yearning for the old days? A sunny afternoon, a rock in your hand, the smell of a wild convertible?"

Archer grinned. The grin said, Hell, yes, I am that kid, and I don't much mind admitting it.

This man enjoys life, Tom thought.

Heartening to believe that was still possible.

Before he drove out to the house Tom stopped at the Harbor Mall to pick up supplies. At the A&P he assembled a week's worth of staples and a selection of what Barbara used to call bachelor food: frozen entrees, potato chips, cans of Coke in plastic saddles. At the Radio Shack he picked up a plug-in phone, and at Sears he paid $300 for a portable color TV.

Thus equipped for elementary survival, he drove to the house up along the Post Road.

The sun was setting when he arrived. Did the house look haunted? No, Tom thought. The house looked suburban. Cedar siding a little faded, the boxy structure a little lost in these piney woods, but not dangerous. Haunted, if at all, strictly by Mr. Clean. Or perhaps the Tidy Bowl Man.

The key turned smoothly in the lock.

Stepping over the threshold, he had the brief but disquieting sensation that this was after all somebody else's house . . . that he had arrived, like Officer Bukowski's juvenile delinquents, without credentials. Well, to hell with that. He flicked every light switch he could reach until the room was blisteringly bright. He plugged in the refrigerator—it began to hum at once—and dropped the Cokes inside. He plugged in the TV set and tuned the rabbit ears to a Tacoma station, a little fuzzy but watchable. He cranked the volume up. Noise and light.

He preheated the ancient white enamel stove, watching the elements for a time to make sure everything worked. (Everything did.) The black Bakelite knobs were as slick as ebony; his own fingerprints seemed like an insult to their polished surface. He slipped a TV dinner into the oven and closed the door. Welcome home.

A new life, he thought.

That was why he had come here—or at least that was what he'd told his friends. Looking around this clean, illuminated space, it was possible—almost possible—to believe that.

He took the TV dinner into the living room and poked at the tepid fried chicken with a plastic fork while MacNeil (or Lehrer, he had never quite sorted that out) conducted a round-table discussion of this year's China crisis. When he was finished he tidied away the foil plate into a plastic bag— he wasn't ready to offend the Hygiene Spirit just yet—and pulled the tab on a Coke. He watched two nature documentaries and a feature history of Mormonism. Then, suddenly, it was late, and when he switched off the set he heard the wind turning the branches of the pines; he was reminded how far he had come from town and what a large slice of loneliness he might have bought himself, here.

He turned up the heat. The weather was still cool, summer still a ways off. He stepped outside and watched the silhouettes of the tall pines against the sky. The sky was bright with stars. You have to come a long way out, Tom thought, to see a sky like this.

Inside, he locked the door behind him and slid home the security chain.

The bed in the big bedroom belonged to him now . . .

but he had never slept in it, and he felt the weight of its strangeness. The bed was made in the same Danish Modern style as the rest of the furniture: subdued, almost generic, as if it had been averaged out of a hundred similar designs; not distinctive but solidly made. He tested the mattress; the mattress was firm. The sheets smelled faintly of clean, crisp linen and not at all of dust.

He thought, I'm an intruder here . . .

But he frowned at himself for the idea. Surely not an intruder, not after the legal divinations and fiscal blessings of the realty office. He was that most hallowed institution now, a Homeowner. Misgivings, at this stage, were strictly beside the point.

He switched off the bedside lamp and closed his eyes in the foreign darkness.

He heard, or thought he heard, a distant humming . . . barely audible over the whisper of his own breath. The sound of faraway, buried machinery. Night work at a factory underground. Or, more likely, the sound of his imagination. When he tried to focus on it it vanished into the ear's own night noises, tinnitus and the creaking of small bones. Like every house, Tom thought, this one must move and sigh with the pulse of its heat and the tension of its beams.

Surrounded by the dark and the buzzing of his own thoughts, he fell asleep at last.

The dream came to him after midnight but well before dawn —it was three a.m. when he woke and checked his watch.

The dream began conventionally. He was arguing with Barbara, or bearing the brunt of one of her arguments. She had accused him of complicity in some sweeping, global disaster: the warming of the earth, ocean pollution, nuclear war. He protested his innocence (at least, his ignorance); but her small face, snub-nosed, lips grimly compressed, radiated a disbelief so intense that he could smell the rising odor of his own guilt.

But this was only one more variation of what had become the standard Barbara dream. On another night it might have ended there. He would have come awake drenched in the effluvia of his own doubt; would have rinsed his face with cold tap water and staggered back to bed like a battle-fatigued foot soldier slogging to the trenches.

Tonight, instead, the dream dissolved into a new scenario. Suddenly he was alone; he was in a house that was like this house, but bigger, emptier; he was lying on his back in a room with a single high window. There was a diffuse moonlight that illuminated only his bed and left the margins of the room in cavernous darkness.

Hidden in that darkness, things were moving.

He couldn't tell what sort of things they were. Their feet ticked like cat's claws on the hard floor and they seemed to be whispering to one another in a high, buzzing falsetto—a language he had never heard. He imagined elves; he imagined immense, articulate rats.

But the worst thing was their invisibility—compounded by what he recognized suddenly as his own helplessness. He understood that the room had no door; that the window was impossibly high; that his arms and legs were not just stiff but paralyzed.

He strained forward, peering into the darkness . . .

And they opened their eyes—all at once.

A hundred eyes all around him.

A hundred disks of pure, pupil-less, bone-white light.

The whispering rose in a metallic, clattering crescendo—

And he awoke.

Woke alone in this smaller, brighter, but still moonlit and unfamiliar room. Woke with his heart pounding wildly in his chest.

Woke with the sound still ringing in his ears: The hiss of their voices. The clatter of their nails.

Of course, it was only a dream.

The morning house was clean, hollow, blank, and prosaic. Tom paced from bedroom to kitchen listening to the unfamiliar shush of his feet against the broadloom. He put together breakfast, fried eggs and a bagel, and stacked the dirty dishes in the sink when he was finished. Bachelor housekeeping. Maybe the Genius Loci would clean up.

Yesterday's overcast had spilled away across the mountains. Tom opened the screen door at the back of the kitchen and stepped out into the yard. The lawn had been slashed down to stubble but was starting to grow back, as much weed as grass. No housekeeping elves out here. A stand of tall pine rose up beyond the margin of the yard, enclosing ferns and fallen needles in its darkness. An overgrown trail led away from the corner of the yard and Tom followed it a few paces in, but the trees closed out the sun and the air was suddenly chill. He listened a moment to the drip of water somewhere in this spongy wilderness. Archer had said the forest ran a long way back, that there was a cedar swamp behind the property. (Archer would know, Tom thought. Archer the car-stalker, trailblazer, rock-climber, truant . . . these childhood memories had begun to freshen.) A damp breeze tickled the pale hair on his arms. A hummingbird darted up, regarded him querulously, and darted away.

He turned back to the house.

Tony called after lunch with another dinner invitation, which Tom could not gracefully decline. "Come on over," Tony said. "We'll stoke up the barbecue." It was an order as much as an invitation: tribute to be paid.

Tom left the dirty dishes in the sink. At the door he paused and turned back to the empty house.

"You want to clean up, go ahead." No answer. Oh, well.

It was a long drive to Tony's place. Tony and Loreen lived in the Seaview district, a terrace of expensive family homes along the scalloped bay hills south of town. The neighborhood was prestigious but the house Tony lived in wasn't especially flashy—Tony was very Protestant about overt displays of wealth. Tony's house, in fact, was one of the plainer of these homes, a flat white facade which concealed its real, formidable opulence: the immense plate glass windows and the cedar deck overlooking the water. Tom parked in the driveway behind Loreen's Aerostar and was welcomed at the door by the entire family: Tony, five-year-old Barry, Loreen with cranky eight-month Tricia squirming against her shoulder. Tom smiled and stepped into the mingled odors of stain-proofed broadloom, Pine-Sol, Pampers.

He would have liked to sit and talk a while with Loreen. ("Poor Loreen," Barbara used to say. "Playing Tony's idea of a housewife. All diapers and Barbara Cartland novels.") But Tony threw an arm over his shoulder and marched him through the spacious living room to the deck, where his propane barbecue hissed and flamed alarmingly.

"Sit," Tony said, waving a pair of tongs at a deck chair.

Tom sat and watched his brother paint red sauce over steaks. Tony was five years older than Tom, balding but trim, the creases around his eyes defined more by exercise and sunshine than by age. It would be hard, Tom thought, to guess which of us is older.

It was Tony who had come roaring out to Seattle like an angry guardian angel—six months after Barbara moved out; five months after Tom left his job at Aerotech; three months after Tom stopped answering his phone. Tony had cleared the apartment of empty bottles and frozen food wrappers, switched off the TV that had flickered and mumbled for weeks uninterrupted, scolded Tom into showering and shaving—talked him into the move back to Belltower and the job at the car lot.

It was also Tony who had offered, as consolation for the loss of Barbara, the observation "She's a bitch, little brother. They're all bitches. Fuck em."

"She's not a bitch," Tom had said.

"They're all bitches."

"Don't call her that," Tom had said, and he remembered Tony's look, the arrogance eroding into uncertainty.

"Well . . . you can't throw your life away for her, anyhow. There are people out there going on with their business —people with cancer, people whose kids were smeared over the highway by semi trucks. If they can deal with it, you can fucking well deal with it."

This was both unanswerable and true. Tom accepted the chastisement and had been clinging to it since. Barbara would not have approved; she disliked the appropriation of public grief for private purposes. Tom was more pragmatic. You do what you have to.

But here he was in Tony's big house beside the bay, and it occurred to him that he was carrying a considerable load of guilt, gratitude, and resentment, mostly directed at his brother.

He made small talk while the steaks charred over the flames. Tony responded with his own chatter. Tony had bought the propane barbecue "practically wholesale" from a guy he knew at a retail hardware outlet. He was considering investing in a couple of rental properties this summer. "You should have talked to me about that house before running off half cocked." And he had his eye on a new sailboat.

This wasn't bragging, Tom understood. Barbara had long ago pointed out Tony's need for physical evidence of his worth, like the validations punched into bus tickets. To his credit, he was at least discreet about it.

The problem was that he, Tom, had no such validation of his own; in Tony's eyes, this must render him suspicious. A man without a VCR or a sports car might be capable of anything. This nervousness extended to Tom's job performance, a topic that had not been broached but which hovered over the conversation like a cloud.

Tony's own reliability, of course, was unquestioned. When their parents died Tony had staked his share of the estate on a junior partnership in an auto dealership out on Commercial Road. The investment was more than financial: Tony had put in a lot of time, sweat, and deferred gratification. And the investment had paid off, handsomely enough that Tom sometimes wondered whether his own use of the same inheritance—for his engineering degree, and now the house—was ultimately frivolous. What had it bought him? A divorce and a job as a car salesman.

But he was not even a salesman, really. "For now," Tony said, carrying the steaks in to the dining room table—Topic A surfacing at last—"you are strictly a gofer, a lot boy, a floor whore. You don't write up sales until the manager says you're ready. Loreen! We're gettin' hungry here! Where the hell is the salad?"

Loreen emerged dutifully from the kitchen with a cut-glass bowl filled with iceberg and romaine lettuce, sliced tomatoes, mushrooms, a wooden spoon and fork. She set down the bowl and went about tucking Tricia into a high chair while Barry tugged at her dress. Tony sat down and poured himself iced tea from a sweating jug. "The steaks look wonderful," Loreen said.

Tom spent the salad course wondering what a "floor whore" was. Loreen fed Tricia from a jar of strained peas, then excused herself long enough to install the baby in a playpen. Barry didn't want the steak even after she cut it for him; Loreen fixed him a peanut butter sandwich and sent him out into the back yard. When she sat down again her own steak was surely stone cold—Tony had just about finished his.

A floor whore, Tony explained, was a novice salesman, viewed mainly as a nuisance by the older hands at the lot. Tony shook his head. "The thing is," he said, "I'm already getting some flak over this. Bob Walker—the co-owner—was very much opposed to me putting you in this job. He says it's nepotism and he says it frankly sucks. And he has a point, because it creates a problem for the sales manager. He knows you're my brother, so the question becomes, do I handle this guy with kid gloves or do I treat him like any other employee?"

"I don't want any special treatment," Tom said.

"I know! Of course! You know that, / know that. But I had to go to the manager—Billy Klein, you'll meet him tomorrow —I had to go to him and say, Hey, Billy, just do your job. If this guy fucks up then tell him so. If he doesn't work out, you tell me. This is not a featherbed. I want the maximum from this man."

"Sure enough," Tom said, inspecting the greasy remains of the steak on his plate.

"There are basically two things I want to make clear," Tony said. "One is that if you screw up, I look bad. So as a favor to me, please don't screw up. The second is that Billy has a free hand as far as I'm concerned. You answer to him from now on. I don't do his job and I don't look out for you. And he is not always an easy man to please. Frankly, he wouldn't piss down your throat if your guts were on fire. If it works out, then fine, but if not—what the hell are you smiling at?"

" 'Piss down your throat if your guts were on fire'?" "It's a colloquialism. Jesus, Tom, it's not supposed to be funny!"

"Barbara would have loved it."

Barbara would have repeated it for weeks. Once, during a phone call, Tony had described the weather as "cold as the tits on a brass monkey." Barbara laughed so hard she had to pass Tom the receiver. Tom explained patiently that she'd swallowed her gum.

But Tony wasn't amused. He wiped his mouth and slapped the napkin down on the table. "If you want this job you'd better think a little more about your future and a little less about your hippy-dippy ex-wife, all right?"

Tom flushed. "She wasn't—"

"No! Spare me the impassioned defense. She's the one who ran off with her twenty-year-old boyfriend. She doesn't deserve your loyalty and you sure as shit don't owe it to her."

"Tony," Loreen said. Her tone was pleading. Please, not here.

Barry, the five-year-old, had wandered in from the back yard; he stood with one peanut butter-encrusted hand on the armoire and gazed at the adults with rapt, solemn interest.

Tom desperately wanted to be able to deliver an answer— something fierce and final-—and was shocked to discover he couldn't produce one.

"It's a new world," Tony said. "Get used to it."

"I'll serve the dessert," Loreen said.

After dinner Tony went off to tuck in Barry and read him a story. Tricia was already asleep in her crib, and Tom sat with Loreen in the cooling kitchen. He offered to help with the dishes but his sister-in-law shooed him away: "I'm just rinsing them for later." So he sat at the big butcher-block table and peered through the window toward the dark water of the bay, where pleasure-boat lights bobbed in the swell.

Loreen dried her hands on a dish towel and sat opposite him. "It's not such a bad fife," she said.

Tom gave her a long look. It was the kind of bald statement Loreen was prone to, couched in the slow Ohio Valley cadences of her youth. Her life here, she meant; her life with Tony: not so bad.

"I never said it was," Tom told her.

"No. But I can tell. I know what you and Barbara thought of us." She smiled at him. "Don't be embarrassed. I mean, we might as well talk. It's all right to talk."

"You have a good life here."

"Yes. We do. And Tony is a good man."

"I know that, Loreen."

"But we're nothing special. Tony would never admit it, of course. But that's the fact. Down deep, he knows. And maybe it makes him a little mean sometimes. And maybe / know it, and I get a little sad—for a little while. But then I get over it."

"You're not ordinary. You're both very lucky."

"Lucky, but ordinary. The thing is, Tom, what's hard is that you and Barbara were special. It always tickled me to see you two. Because you were special and you knew it. The way you smiled at each other and the way you talked. The things you talked about. You talked about the world—you know, politics, the environment, whatever—you talked like it mattered. Like it was up to you personally to do something about it. I always felt just a little bigger than life with you two around."

"I appreciate that," Tom said. In fact he was unexpectedly grateful to her for saying it—for recognizing what Barbara had meant to him.

"But that's changed." Loreen was suddenly serious. Her smile faded. "Now Barbara's gone, and I think you have to learn how to be ordinary. And I don't think that's going to be real easy for you. I think it's going to be pretty tough."

Tony didn't apologize, but he came out of Barry's room somewhat abashed and eager to please. He said he'd like to see the new house and Tom seized on the offer as an excuse to leave early. He let Tony follow him down the coast in the electric-blue Aerostar. Moving inland, up the Post Road and away from the traffic, Tony became a glare in Tom's rearview mirror, lost when the car angled around stands of pine. They parked at the house; Tony climbed out of his van and the two of them stood a moment in the starry, frog-creaking night.

"Mistake to buy so far out," Tony said.

"I like the place," Tom offered. "The price was right."

"Bad investment. Even if the market heats up, you're just too damn far from town."

"It's not an investment, Tony. It's my house. It's where I five."

Tony gave him a pitying look. "Come on in," Tom said.

He showed his brother around. Tony poked into cupboards, dug a fingernail into the window casements, stood up on tiptoe to peer into the fuse box. When they arrived back at the living room Tom poured his brother a Coke. Tony acknowledged with a look that this was good, that there was no liquor handy. "Fairly sound building for its age," he admitted. "Christ knows it's clean."

"Self-cleaning," Tom said.

"What?"

"No—nothing."

"You planning to have us out for dinner one of these days?" "Soon as I get set up. You and Loreen and the whole tribe." "Good . . . that's good."

Tony finished his Coke and moved toward the door. This is as hard for him, Tom recognized, as it is for me. "Well," Tony said. "Good luck, little brother. What can I say?"

"You've said it. Thanks, Tony."

They embraced awkwardly. "I'll look for you at the lot," Tony said, and turned away into the cool night air.

Tom listened to the van as it thrummed and faded down the road.

He went back into the house, alone. The silence seemed faintly alive.

"Hello, ghosts," Tom said. "Bet you didn't do the dishes after all." But the thing was, they had.

Two

It wasn't long before a single question came to occupy his mind almost exclusively: What was madness, and how do you know when it happens to you?

The cliche was that the question contained its own answer. If you're sane enough to wonder, you must be all right. Tom had trouble with the logic of this. Surely even the most confirmed psychotic must sometimes gaze into the mirror and wonder whether things hadn't gone just a little bit wrong?

The question wasn't academic. As far as he could figure, there were only two options. Either he had lost his grip on his sanity—and he wasn't willing to admit that yet—or something was going on in this house.

Something scary. Something strange.

He shelved the question for three days and was careful to clean up meticulously: no dirty dishes in the sink, no crumbs on the counter, garbage stowed in the back yard bin. The Tidiness Elves had no scope for their work and Tom was able to pretend that he had actually done the dishes himself the night he went to Tony's: it must have been his memory playing a trick on him.

These were his first days at Arbutus Ford and there was plenty to occupy his mind. He spent most of his daylight hours studying a training manual or bird-dogging the senior salesmen. He learned how to greet buyers; he learned what an offer sheet looked like; he learned how to "T.O."—how to turn over a buyer to the sales manager, who could eke out a few more dollars on an offer; who would then T.O. the customer to the finance people. ("Which is where the real money's made," the sales manager, Billy Klein, cheerfully confided.)

The lot was a new/used operation down along the flat stretch of Commercial Road between Belltower and the suburban malls. Tom sometimes thought of it as a paved farm field where a crop of scrap metal had sprouted but not ripened—everything was still sleek and new. The weather turned hot on Wednesday; the days were long, the customers sparse. Tom drank Cokes from sweating bottles and studied his system manual in the sales lounge. Most of the salesmen took breaks at a bar called Healy's up the road, but they were a fairly hard-drinking crowd and Tom wasn't comfortable with that yet. Lunchtimes, he scuffed across the blistering asphalt to a little steak and burger restaurant called The Paradise. He was conserving his money. He might make a respectable income on commissions in an average month, Klein assured him—assuming he started selling soon. But it was a grindingly slow month. Evenings he drove inland through the dense, ancient pine forest and thought about the mystery of the house. Or tried not to.

Two possibilities, his mind kept whispering.

You're insane.

Or you're not alone here.

Thursday night, he put three greasy china plates on the counter next to the stainless steel sink and went to bed.

In the morning the dishes were precisely where he had left them—as smooth and clean as optical lenses.

Friday night, he dirtied and abandoned the same three plates. Then he moved into the living room, tuned in the eleven o'clock news and installed himself on the sofa. He left the lights on in both rooms. If he moved his head a few degrees to the right he had a good view of the kitchen counter. Any motion would register in his peripheral vision.

This was scientific, Tom reassured himself. An experiment.

He was pleased with himself for approaching the problem objectively. In a way, it was almost exciting—staying up late waiting for something impossible to happen. He propped his feet on the coffee table and sprang the tab on a soda can.

Half an hour later he was less enthusiastic. He'd been keeping early hours; it was hard not to nod off during commercial breaks. He dozed a moment, sat upright and shot a glance into the kitchen. Nothing had changed.

(Well, what had he expected? Gnomes in Robin Hood hats humming "Whistle While You Work"? Or maybe—some perverse fraction of his mind insisted—creatures like rats. With clackety claws and saucer eyes.)

The "Tonight" show was less than engaging, but he wasn't stuck with Carson: the local cable company had hooked him up last week. He abused the remote control until it yielded an antique science fiction film: Them, featuring James Whitmore and giant ants in the Mojave. In the movies radiation produced big bugs; in the neighborhood of failed fission reactors it mainly caused cancer and leukemia—the difference, Barbara had once observed, between Art and Life. He was nodding off again by the time the ants took refuge in the storm drains of Los Angeles. He stood up, walked to the kitchen— where nothing had changed—and fixed himself a cup of coffee. Now, mysteriously, it felt late: no traffic down the Post Road, a full moon hanging over the back yard. He carried his coffee into the living room. It occurred to him that this was a fairly spooky activity he had selected here: making odds on his own sanity, sometime after midnight. He had done things like this—well, things this reminded him of—when he was twelve years old, sleeping in the back yard with a flashlight or staying up with the monster flicks all by himself. Except that by now he would have given up and found some reassuring place to spend the night.

Here, there was only the house. Probably safe. Hardly reassuring.

He found an all-night Seattle station showing sitcom reruns. He propped himself up on the sofa, drained the coffee, and hoped the caffeine would help keep him awake. It did, or at least it put him on edge. Edgy, he remembered what he had come to think of as his father's credo: The world is a cold, thoughtless place and it has no special love for human beings. Maybe this was a mistake. Maybe he should go to bed, let the elves wash up, wake up bright and early and put the house back on the market. No law required him to become the Jacques Cousteau of the supernatural. That wasn't what he'd signed up for.

But maybe there was nothing supernatural about it. Something odd but entirely explainable might be at work. Some kind of bacteria. Insects (nonmutated). Anything. If he had to bet, that's where he'd put his money.

It was just that he wanted to know—really know.

He stretched out on the sofa. He meant to rest his head against the padded arm. He had no intention of going to sleep.

He closed his eyes and began to dream.

This time, the dream came without preamble.

In the dream he stood up from the sofa, went to the window and raised the sash.

The moon was low, but it cast a clear fluorescence over the back yard. In the dream, it seemed at first as if nothing had changed; there was the starry sky, the deep shadow of the forest, the bleached cedar fence obscure under ivy. Then he saw the grass moving in the wind, a curious sinewy motion— but there was no wind; and Tom understood that it wasn't the grass moving, it was something in the grass—something like insects, a hundred or more, moving in a snakelike column from the house into the woods. His heart gave a startled jump and he was suddenly afraid, but he couldn't look away or leave the window . . . somehow, that choice had been taken from him. He watched as the line of insect-things slowed to a stop and each one—and there were more of them than he had guessed—turned simultaneously to look at him with tiny saucer-shaped eyes, and they pronounced his name —Tom Winter—somehow inside his head, a voiceless chorus. He woke in a drenching sweat.

The TV was showing fuzz. He stood and switched it off. His watch said 3:45.

In the kitchen, the dishes were flawlessly clean.

He slept four more hours in his bedroom with the door closed, and in the morning he showered and phoned Doug Archer—the number on the back of his business card. "You wanted me to get in touch if I noticed anything strange."

"That's right ... is it getting weird out there?"

"Just a little weird. You could say that."

"Well, you called at the right time. I'm on vacation. The beeper gets switched off at noon. I was planning to drive up into the Cascades, but I can put it off a little while. How about if I drop by after lunch?"

"Good," Tom said, but he was troubled by the note of happy anticipation in Archer's voice.

If you talk about this, he thought, you're opening one more door that maybe ought to stay closed—taking one step closer to ratifying your own insanity.

But was silence any better? There were times (last night, for instance) when he felt himself stewing in the sour juice of his own isolation. No: he needed to talk about this, and he needed to talk about it to somebody who wasn't family— obviously not Tony or Loreen. Archer would do.

Dreams aside, nothing threatening had happened. Some inexpensive dinnerware had been surreptitiously cleaned: not quite Ghostbusters material. But it was the dream that stayed in his mind.

He told Archer he'd expect him soon and replaced the phone in its cradle. The silence of the morning house rang out around him. He walked to the kitchen door, opened it and took a tentative step outside.

The air was bracing; the sky was bright.

Tom had brought home a power mower from Sears on Wednesday but he hadn't used it yet; the grass was ankle high. He was briefly afraid to put his foot down off the back step—a vagrant image of metallic insects with brightly focused eyes ran through his mind. (They might be there still. They might bite.)

He took a breath and stepped down.

His ankles itched with anticipation . . . but there was nothing sinister among these weeds, only a few ants and aphids.

He walked to the northern quadrant of the yard where the dream-insects had moved between the house and the woods.

He understood that by looking for their trail he was violating the commonsense assumption that dreams are necessarily separate from the daylight world. But he was past fighting the impulse. Yet another prop kicked from under the edifice of his sanity. (Tom had begun to envision his sanity as one of those southern California hillside houses erected on stilts— the ones that wash into the ocean in a heavy rain.) He examined the deep, seeded grass where the insects had seemed to be, but there was nothing unusual among the dewy grass blades and feathered dandelion heads.

He should have been reassured. Instead, he felt oddly disappointed. Disappointed because on some fundamental level he was convinced last night's dream had been no ordinary dream. (No—but he couldn't say exactly how it was different.)

He walked to the verge of the woods. In his dream this was where the broad trail of bright-eyed insects had passed into the moon-shadow of the trees.

The sun, this time of morning, did not much penetrate the deep Pacific Northwest pinewoods. There was a trail leading back through this tangle, but it began at the opposite end of the yard. Here there were only these old trees and this fern-tangle undergrowth, the smell of rotting pine needles and the drip of hoarded rainwater. The barrier between the forest and the sunlit yard could not have been more distinct. He braced his hands on a tree trunk. Leaning forward, he felt the cool, mushroom dampness of the forest on his face.

He turned back to the house.

In his dream, the insects had moved to the forest from the house. Tom paced back to the nearest wall. It was an ordinary frame wall sided with cedar, well preserved—the paint hadn't blistered or peeled—but hardly unusual. This was the wall at the back of the master bedroom, windowless at this corner.

But if his dream had not been a dream, there must be some sort of opening here.

He sat on his haunches and pulled away handfuls of high, seeded grass from the concrete foundation where it rose some few inches above the soil.

He held his breath, gazing at what he found there.

The concrete was riddled with small, precisely round holes. The holes were all alike, all approximately as wide as the ball of his thumb.

His foot slipped in the wet grass and he sat back with a thump on his tailbone.

They must be bolt holes, he thought. Something must have been attached here. A deck, maybe.

But the holes in the chalky, water-stained concrete were smooth as glass.

"Be damned," he said.

He plucked a stem of the tall grass and held it to one of the openings.

Like shoving a stick into a hornet's nest, Tom. Real dumb. You don't know what might be in there.

But when he pushed the long grass stem inside there was no resistance ... no response.

He bent down and peered into the opening. He didn't put his cheek hard up against the concrete foundation, because he couldn't shake the belief that one of those tiny saucer-eyed creatures from his dream might be inside—that it might possess claws, teeth, a poison sac, a hostile intent. But he bent close enough to smell the rooty earth odor rising from the damp lawn . . . close enough to watch a sow bug trundling up the latticework of a thistle. No light radiated from the many holes in the foundation. He thought he felt a breath of air sigh out, oily and faintly metallic.

He stood up and backed off a pace.

What now? Do we call Exterminex? Dynamite the foundation?

Tell Archer?

No, Tom thought. None of the above. Not yet.

He explained everything else—the dishes, the dream—meticulously to Archer, who sat at the kitchen table drinking instant coffee and running his fingernail along the grain of the wood.

The telling of it made Tom feel foolish. Archer was sanity incarnate in his checkerboard cotton shirt and Levi's: rooted to the earth right through the soles of his high-top sneakers. Archer listened patiently, then grinned. "This has to be the most interesting thing to happen around here since Chuck Nixon saw a UFO over the waste treatment plant."

He would say that, Tom thought. Archer had been a legend at Sea View Elementary—"a world-class shit disturber," as the gym teacher had declared on one memorable occasion. Maybe that's why I called him, Tom thought: I still think of him as fearless.

"I mean it," Archer said. "You're obviously upset by this. But it's wonderful. I mean, here's this mundane little house in the woods, one more shitty frame house out along the Post Road—pardon me—then suddenly it's more than that. You know the quote from Kipling? 'There was a crack in his head and a little bit of the Dark World came through . .

Tom winced. "Thanks a lot." Kipling?

"Don't misunderstand. I would be disappointed," Archer said, "if you were crazy. Craziness is very common. Very—" He struggled for a word. "Very K-mart. I'm hoping for something a little classier."

"You're enjoying this too much."

"It's my hobby," Archer said.

Tom blinked. "It's what?"

"Well, it's hard to explain. The supernatural: it's like a hobby with me. I'm a skeptic, you understand. I don't believe in ghosts, I don't believe in UFOs. I'm not that kind of enthusiast. But I've read all the books. Charles Fort, Jacques Vallee. I don't believe in it, but I decided a long time ago that I wanted it to be true. I want there to be rains of frogs. I want statues to bleed. I want it because—please don't repeat this —it would be like God saying, 'Fuck Belltower, Washington, here's a miracle.' It would mean the asphalt down by the car lots might break out in crocuses and morning glories and tie up traffic for a week. It would mean we might all wake up one morning and find the pulp mill crumbled into sand. Half the town would be out of work, of course. But we could all live on manna and red wine. And nobody—absolutely nobody —would sell real estate."

Tom said, "When I was twelve years old I used to pray for nuclear war. Not so that millions of people would die. So that I wouldn't have to go to school in the morning."

"Exactly! Everything would be rubble. Life would be transformed."

"Life would be easier."

"More fun! Yes."

"Sure. But would it? I'm thirty years old, Doug. I don't pray for war anymore."

Archer met his gaze. "I'm thirty-two and I still pray for magic."

"Is that what we're talking about here?"

"Something extraordinary, anyhow. Unless you are crazy."

"It's a possibility," Tom said. "Crazy people see things sometimes. I had an aunt Emily who used to talk to Jesus. Jesus lived in the attic. Once in a while he'd move over to the bedroom and they'd have a chat while she combed her hair. Everybody in the family thought this was terrifically funny. Then one day Aunt Emily sliced open her wrists in a warm bath. Her landlord found her a week later. She left a note saying Jesus told her to do it."

Archer reflected on this a moment. "You're saying there are serious things at stake."

"Either way, it seems to me. My sanity. Or sanity in general."

"Screw sanity in general." "My own in particular, then."

"You want me to take this seriously," Archer said. "Okay. Fine. But I don't know you. You're somebody I sold a house to. Somebody who was a year behind me at Sea View Elementary. You seem like a fairly reasonable guy. But let's be clear, Tom. You called me because you want credentials for your sanity. I want more than that."

Tom leaned back in his chair, considering this. Obviously time had not much tamed Douglas Archer. Maybe it was important to remember you could pull a jail sentence and a stiff fine for throwing stones at Buicks, especially if you were old enough to know better. Tom had no love for Belltower, but neither did he especially want to see morning glories tying up traffic down by the car lots (though it would piss Tony off no end).

Still, there was something seductive about Archer's attitude, especially after a night of nervous hysteria. He said, "You know some of the old trails up through here?"

Archer nodded.

"Let's scout the territory behind the house." Tom stood up. "Then we'll talk about what to do."

They followed an old, nearly overgrown foot trail into the dense woods behind the back yard.

Tom had forgotten what it was like to walk through these big Pacific Northwest pinewoods, this density of moss and fern and dripping water. He followed the broad back of Archer's checkerboard shirt along the trail, bending under branches or stepping over small, glossy freshets of rainwater. The sound of cars passing on the Post Road faded as they climbed a gentle slope westward. All this talk of magic—his own and Archer's—seemed much more plausible here.

Archer said, "There were Indians living in through here a hundred years ago. Used to be an old totem pole in among the cedars, but they dragged that off to the town museum."

"Who uses this trail?"

"The Hopfner kids down the road, but they moved away a long time ago. Hikers sometimes. There are trails all the way up from the housing development along Poplar. It's mostly overgrown down by your place—I don't suppose anybody goes through that way these days."

He paused behind Archer where the trail banked away through an open meadow full of thistles and fireweed, past an old tin shack overgrown with ivy: someone's long-abandoned store of firewood, Tom guessed, the structure obscured and sagging moss-thick to the ground. Archer pushed ahead into the deeper forest and Tom followed until the tree shadows closed around him again.

They hiked for more than an hour, uphill through pine forest until they reached a rocky knoll. Archer clambered up the pinnacle, turned back and extended a hand to Tom. "We've come up a good height," he said, and Tom turned back and was surprised by a sweeping view not just to the Post Road but all the way to the coast—the town of Belltower clustered around the bay, the pulp mill lofting a gray plume of smoke.

"This is why people come up here," Archer said. "It's not a well-known trail. If we'd followed the other branch we would have ended up in some serious swamp. Up this way, it gets nice."

"Is there a name for this place?"

"Somebody must call it something. Everything's got a name, I guess."

"You come here a lot?"

"Once in a while. I come for the perspective. From here— on a nice day—everything looks good. The fucking parking lots look good."

"You hate this town," Tom said.

Archer shrugged. "If I hated it, I'd leave. Though from what I've seen I doubt I could find anything significantly better. Hate is a strong word. But I dislike it a whole lot— sometimes." He paused and looked sidelong at Tom, shading his face against the sun. "I do admit to wondering what brought you back here."

"You never asked."

"It's not polite. Specially when someone obviously doesn't want to talk about it." He turned back to the view. The sunlight was intense. "So are we still being polite?"

"My wife left me," Tom said. "I lost my job. I was drinking for therapy."

Archer scrutinized him more closely now.

Tom said, "You're wondering whether an alcoholic can be trusted when he sees strange things at night. Fair enough. But it's been more than a month since I touched any kind of liquor. As an explanation, a good case of DTs would be almost comforting."

"How long were you drinking?"

"Seriously? Since the job fell through. Maybe three months."

Archer said, "I can think of a couple of tough questions." "Such as?"

"Lots of people lose their jobs. Lots of people go through divorce. They don't all jump down a bottle."

There were lots of ways to answer that. The most succinct would be, It's none of your business. But maybe he had made it Archer's business; he had raised the issue of his own stability. It wasn't a hostile question.

He could say, / was married for ten years to a bright, thoughtful woman whom I loved intensely, and whose mistrust grew until it was. like a knife between us.

He could explain about Barbara's political activism, her conviction that the world was teetering on the brink of ecological catastrophe. He could explain that his engineering work at Aerotech had divided them, tell Archer that she'd come to see him as a living example of the technological juggernaut: all his schooling and all his ingenuity plugged into a military-industrial machine so hydra-headed in its aspects and so single-minded in its goals that the earth itself was being strip-mined and forested into a global desert.

He could replay, perhaps, one of their arguments. He could reiterate his endless, patient assertion that the engines he designed were fuel-efficient; that his work, while not exactly a pursuit of the ecological Grail, might help clear the air around major cities. Band-Aid thinking, Barbara called this, a piddling solution to an overwhelming problem. A better combustion engine wouldn't restore the rain forests to Brazil or the redwoods to California. To which Tom would reply that it was a damn sight more productive than chaining himself to the gate of a paper mill or sneaking off with some long-haired anarchists to spike trees in the Cascades. At which point— more often in their last year—the conversation would decline into insult. Barbara would begin on his "complacent hick family," particularly Tony; and Tom, if he was drunk or angry enough, would explore the possible reasons for her recent loss of sexual appetite. ("It's not too complicated," she once told him. "Take a look in the mirror sometime.")

But there was no way to explain any of this. No way to explain his nagging suspicion that she was, after all, right; no way to explain the fundamental upwelling of love he still felt, even after their battles, when she was kneeling in the garden or brushing her hair before bed. He loved her with a loyalty that was animal in its mute persistence. He loved her even when he opened his mouth and called her frigid.

He blinked against the fierce blue sky, the curve of the distant bay.

He said, "I loved my wife a lot. I hated it when she left."

"So why'd she leave?" Archer added, "You're allowed to tell me to fuck off at this point."

"It was a political disagreement. I was doing engineering for a little R and D company out of Seattle. Barbara was into the peace movement, among other things. She came home one day and told me the company was about to be handed a big federal grant for weapons research, something connected with SDI. I told her there was no truth to the rumor. The people I worked for were scrupulous, small-scale, community-minded—I knew these guys. I checked out the possibility, asked a few questions, came up totally blank. Stood my ground. Really, it was just one more argument. There'd been more than a few. But it turned out this was the last one. She couldn't bear the idea of being married to a war-economy engineer. As far as Barbara was concerned it was dirty money."

"That's what broke you up?"

"That and the fact that she was seeing somebody else." "Somebody in the movement," Archer guessed. "Somebody who was feeding her a line about government grants." Tom nodded.

"Pretty fucking raw deal. So you started drinking—that's how you lost your job?"

"I started drinking later. I lost my job because the rumor turned out to be true. The company had been asked to bid on a satellite contract—a little bit of congressional pork for the Pacific Northwest. There was a lot of secrecy, a lot of paranoia about corporate espionage. It was all those questions I asked when I wanted to reassure Barbara. They figured I was a security risk."

Tom stood up and brushed the dirt off his jeans.

"Offhand," Archer said, "I would guess you're as sane as the next guy. A little bit bruised, maybe. Aside from what we've talked about, you hear voices?"

"Nope."

"Are you suicidal?"

"Three a.m. on a bad night—maybe. Otherwise no."

"Well, I'm no shrink. But it sounds like you're a long way < from crazy. I think we ought to check out what's been happening in that house you bought."

"Good," Tom said.

He shook hands with Archer and smiled at him, but a new and unwelcome thought had formed at the back of his mind: If I'm not insane, then maybe I ought to be scared.