“Could he be telling the truth?” Nora wondered. “Could there have been something else that escaped from the lab, something that bizarre?”

“If they had a dog as smart as him, I guess they might have had other things even more peculiar. And there was something in the woods that day.”

“But there’s no danger of it finding him, surely. Not after you brought him this far north.”

“No danger,” Travis agreed. “I don’t think Einstein understands how far we came from where I found him. Whatever was in the woods couldn’t track him down now. But I’ll bet the people from that lab have mounted one hell of a search. It’s them I'm worried about. And so is Einstein, which is why he usually plays at being a dumb dog in public and reveals his intelligence only in private to me and now you. He doesn’t want to go back.”

Nora said, “If they find him..

“They won’t.”

“But if they do, what then?”

“I’ll never give him up,” Travis said. “Never.”

8

By eleven o’clock that night, Deputy Porter’s headless corpse and the mutilated body of the construction foreman had been removed from Bordeaux Ridge by the coroner’s men. A cover story had been concocted and delivered to the reporters at the police barricades, and the press had seemed to buy it; they had asked their questions, had taken a couple of hundred photographs, and had filled a few thousand feet of videotape with images that would be edited down to a hundred seconds on tomorrow’s TV newscast. (In this age of mass murder and terrorism, two victims rated no more than two minutes’ airtime: ten seconds for lead-in, a hundred seconds for film, ten seconds for the well-coiffed anchorpersons to look respectfully grim and saddened-then on to a story about a bikini contest, a convention of Edsel owners, or a man who claimed to have seen an alien spacecraft shaped like a Twinkie.) The reporters were gone now, as were the lab men, the uniformed deputies, and all of Lemuel Johnson’s agents except Cliff Soames.

Clouds hid the fragment moon. The kliegs were gone, and the only light came from the headlamps of Walt Gaines’s car. He had swung his sedan around and aimed his lights at Lem’s car, which was parked at the end of the unpaved street, so Lem and Cliff would not have to fumble around in the dark. In the deep gloom beyond the headlamps, half-framed houses loomed like the fossilized skeletons of prehistoric reptiles.

As he walked toward his car, Lem felt as good as he could feel under the circumstances. Walt had agreed to allow federal authorities to assume jurisdiction without a challenge. Although Lem had broken a dozen regulations and had violated his secrecy oath by telling Walt the details of the Francis Project, he was sure Walt could keep his mouth shut. The lid was still on the case, a bit looser than it had been, perhaps, but still in place.

Cliff Soames reached the car first, opened the door, and got in on the passenger’s side, and as Lem opened the driver’s door he heard Cliff say, “Oh, Jesus, oh God.” Cliff was scrambling back out of the car even as Lem looked in from the other side and saw what the uproar was about. A head.

Teel Porter’s head, no doubt.

It was on the front seat of the car, propped so it was facing Lem when he opened the door. The mouth hung open in a silent scream. The eyes were gone.

Reeling back from the car, Lem reached under his coat and pulled his revolver.

Walt Gaines was already out of his car, his own revolver in hand, running toward Lem. “What’s wrong?”

Lem pointed.

Reaching the NSA sedan, Walt looked through the open door and let out a thin, anguished sound when he saw the head.

Cliff came around from the other side of the car, gripping his gun, with the muzzle pointed straight up. “The damn thing was here when we arrived, while we were in the house.”

“Might still be here,” Lern said, anxiously surveying the darkness that crowded them on all sides, beyond the beams from the patrol car’s headlights.

Studying the night-swaddled housing development, Walt said, “We’ll call in my men, get a search under way.”

“No point to it,” Lem said. “The thing will take off if it sees your men returning… if it’s not gone already.”

They were standing at the edge of Bordeaux Ridge, beyond which lay miles of open land, foothills and mountains, out of which The Outsider had come and into which it could disappear again. Those hills, ridges, and canyons were only vague forms in the meager glow of the partial moon, more sensed than Seen.

From somewhere down the unlighted street came a loud clatter, as if a pile of lumber or shingles had been knocked over.

“It is here,” Walt said.

“Maybe,” Lem said. “But we’re not going to go looking for it in the dark, not just the three of us. That’s what it wants.”

They listened.

Nothing more.

“We searched the whole tract when we first got here, before you arrived,” Walt said.

Cliff said, “It must’ve kept one step ahead of you, making a game of dodging your men. Then it saw us arrive, and it recognized Lem.”

“Recognized me from the couple of times I visited Banodyne,” Lem agreed. “In fact… The Outsider was probably waiting here just for me. It probably understands my role in all this and knows I’m in charge of the search for it and the dog. So it wanted to leave the deputy’s head for me.”

“To mock you?” Walt said.

“To mock me.”

They were silent, peering uneasily at the blackness within and around the unfinished houses.

The hot June air was motionless.

For a long while, the only sound was the idling engine of the sheriffs car.

“Watching us,” Walt said.

Another clatter of overturned construction materials. Nearer this time.

The three men froze, each looking a different direction, guarding against attack.

The subsequent silence lasted almost a minute.

When Lem was about to speak, The Outsider shrieked. The cry was alien, chilling. This time they could identify the direction from which it came: out in the open land, in the night beyond Bordeaux Ridge.

“It’s leaving now,” Lem said. “It’s decided we can’t be lured into a search, just the three of us, so it’s leaving before we can bring in reinforcements.”

It shrieked again, from farther away. The eerie cry was like sharp fingernails raked across Lem’s soul.

“In the morning,” he said, “we’ll move our Marine Intelligence teams into the foothills east of here. We’ll nail the damn thing. By God, we will.”

Turning to Lem’s sedan, evidently contemplating the unpleasant task of dealing with Teel Porter’s severed head, Walt said, “Why the eyes? Why does it always tear out the eyes?”

Lem said, “Partly because the creature’s just damned aggressive, bloodthirsty. That’s in its genes. And partly because it really enjoys spreading terror, I think. But also..

“What?”

“I wish I didn’t remember this, but I do, very clearly..

On one of his visits to Banodyne, Lem had witnessed a disturbing conversation (of sorts) between Dr. Yarbeck and The Outsider. Yarbeck and her assistants had taught The Outsider a sign language similar to that developed by the researchers who attempted the first experiments in communication with the higher primates, like gorillas, back in the mid-1970s. The most successful gorilla subject-a female named Koko, which had been the center of countless news stories over the past decade-was reputed to have attained a sign-language vocabulary of approximately four hundred words. When Lem had last seen it, The Outsider boasted a vocabulary considerably larger than

Koko’s, though still primitive. In Yarbeck’s lab, Lem had watched as the man-made monstrosity in the large cage had exchanged complicated series of hand signals with the scientist, while an assistant had whispered a running translation. The Outsider had expressed a fierce hostility toward everyone and everything, frequently interrupting its dialogue with Yarbeck to dash around its cage in uncontrolled rage, banging on the iron bars, screeching furiously. To Lem, the scene was frightening and repellent, but he was also filled with a terrible sadness and pity at the plight of The Outsider: the beast would always be caged, always a freak, alone in the world as no other creature- not even Weatherby’s dog-had ever been. The experience had affected him so deeply that he still remembered nearly every exchange of sign language between The Outsider and Yarbeck, and now a pertinent part of that eerie conversation came back to him: