Harlen was trying to use the top of his sling as a mask. His face above the black silk was very pale. "You've known about this and haven't told anyone?"

Cordie turned the flashlight on Harlen. "Who's I supposed to tell?" she said flatly. "Our ol' school principal maybe? That dipshit Barney? Maybe our justice of the peace, heh?"

Harlen turned his face away from the light. "That'd be better than telling nobody, for Chrissakes."

Cordie began walking down the row of carcasses, shining the powerful flashlight first on ribs and flesh, then on the rusted and blood-coated trough beneath. The blood looked black and thick as molasses in the flashlight beam. The trough was so coated with flies that it looked as if the metal were moving. "I told you, didn't I?" said Cordie. "It's what I found here today made up my mind to tell somebody."

She had come to the end of the line of carcasses, far in the rear of the warehouse space. She moved the flashlight up.

"Jesus fuck!" said Harlen, jumping back.

Mike had been carrying the pistol at his side since coming through the door. Now he lifted it and moved forward.

The man hanging there had been strung up like the animals-legs tied together by a wire looped over an old iron hook-and at first glance his body was very similar to the sheep and calves: naked, ribs outlined against white flesh, throat cut so thoroughly that the head had come close to being severed. Dale thought that the neck looked like the mouth of some great white shark with ragged bits of flesh and cartilage in place of teeth. The underside of the man's chin was so streaked that it looked like someone had upended bucket after bucket of thick red paint on him.

Cordie walked up to the trough and, while still keeping the light steady on the corpse, grabbed it by the hair and pulled the dangling head forward.

"Jesus," gasped Dale. He felt his right leg begin to vibrate of its own accord and he set a hand on his thigh to steady it.

"J. P. Congden," whispered Mike. "I see why you couldn't tell the justice of the peace."

Cordie grunted and let the head hang free again. "He's new," she said. "Wasn't here yesterday. Come here an' look at somethin' though."

The boys shuffled forward, Harlen holding the sling to his face, Mike still keeping the gun high, and Dale feeling as if his legs were going to fold under him. They lined up along the trough like thirsty men at a bar.

"See here?" said Cordie, grabbing J. P. Congden by the hair again and pulling forward until the corpse was leaning out into the light and the wire creaked above them. "See?"

The man's mouth was open wide, as if frozen in a shout. One eye stared blindly at them but the other was almost closed. The face was streaked with caked blood from the throat wound, but there was something else. It took Dale a minute to see it.

The former justice of the peace's temples were flecked with wounds and his scalp was half-dangling, as if Indians had started to scalp him and then thought better of it.

"Shoulders too," said Cordie, still speaking in flat but vaguely interested tones, sort of the way Dale imagined Digger's dad or a pathologist talking during an autopsy or embalming. "See on the shoulders there?"

Dale saw. Holes. Cuts. It looked like someone had poked him a few dozen times with a sharp, perfectly round blade-certainly not enough to kill him, but terrible all the same.

Mike understood first. "A shotgun," he said, looking at the other two boys. "He just caught the edge of the pattern."

It took Dale a minute. Then he remembered. One of the men running from the campsite directly at the spot where Mike had been hidden. Then the blast of Mike's squirrel gun. The man's cap flying off and him going down in the grass.

Dale felt sick again and he walked back to the window, hanging on to the dusty sill to steady himself. Flies whizzed by ... more on their way inside.

Cordie let the corpse hang free again. "I just wondered if his own people done that, or if someone else is fightin' these things."

"Let's go outside," said Mike, his voice suddenly shaky. "We'll talk."

Dale had been staring outside at the dark trees, taking long, deep breaths and letting his eyes adapt to the darkness there, when suddenly the night exploded with light and noise. He threw himself away from the window, landing on the rough boards and rolling.

Mike grabbed the flashlight from Cordie, killed the light, and dropped to one knee, pistol raised. Harlen started to run, hit the trough, and almost fell into it, his good arm going deep into the caked blood. A million flies took wing.

The room was suddenly illuminated by the flare-bright bursts of light from outside-first phosphorous white, then bright red, then a green that made the dangling carcasses look covered with a brilliant mold. The burst of light would come through the dusty panes and then the sound of the aerial explosion, forcing its way through the pane Dale had opened. Only Cordie Cooke remained precisely where she had been-her round face scrunched up as she squinted at the light. Outside, her dogs were going crazy.

"Aw, shit," breathed Harlen, rubbing his hand on his jeans. The blood came off in brown smears. The explosions outside redoubled in number and intensity. "It's only Michelle Staffney's goddamn fireworks."

There was a general sighing and slumping. Dale got to all fours, turning to look into the shadows and watch the carcasses as they came into existence and then disappeared with the vagaries of light from the skyrockets-green and red, pure red, the naked flesh and protruding ribs and slit throats, blue, blue and red, white, red, red, red ... Dale knew that he was seeing something that he would never forget as long as he lived. And something that he would want to forget as long as he lived.

Saying nothing to each other, resetting the metal bar and padlock behind them, they went back out into the night and took the road back to town.

THIRTY-TWO

Friday the fifteenth of July had no dawn. The overcast was low and heavy and the cloudy sky merely paled to a lighter shade of gray as night turned to morning. While the clouds stayed low and threatening all day, the promised storm did not arrive. The moist heat lay over everything.

By ten a.m. all the boys were congregated on the low slope of Kevin Grumbacher's front lawn, staring at Old Central through Mike's binoculars and talking in low tones.

"I'd like to see it myself," Kevin was saying. His expression was dubious.

"Go ahead," said Jim Harlen. "I'm not going. There may be more corpses there by now. Maybe yours'll be added to the lineup."

"No one's going," Mike said softly. He was staring at the boarded windows and doors of the old school.

"I wonder what they use the blood for," said Lawrence. He lay on his stomach, head down the slope. He was chewing on a piece of clover.

No one ventured a guess.

"It doesn't matter what they use it for," said Mike. "We know that thing in there ... the thing disguised as a bell. . . needs sacrifice. It feeds on pain and fear. Read them that part in the book you got from Ashley-Montague, Dale."

Harlen snorted. "Stole from Ashley-Montague is more like it."

"Read it, Dale." Mike did not lower the binoculars.

Dale thumbed through the book.. "Death is the crown of all," read Dale, "so sayeth the Book of the Law. Agape equals ninety-three, seven one eight equals Stele six six six, sayeth the Apocalypse of the Cabbala. ..."

"Read the other stuff," said Mike. He lowered the glasses. His eyes were very tired. "The stuff about the Stele of Revealing."

"It's sort of a poem," said Dale. He tugged his baseball cap lower to shade his eyes.

Mike nodded. "Read it."

Dale read, his voice falling into a faint singsong rhythm: