'You don't know why I'm losing weight.'

'Nope.' Houston seemed pleased by the fact. 'But my guess is that you may actually be thinking yourself thin. It can be done, you know. We see it fairly often. Someone comes in who really wants to lose weight. Usually they've had some kind of scare -heart palpitations, a fainting spell while playing tennis or badminton or volleyball, something like that. So I give them a nice, soothing diet that should enable them to lose two to five pounds a week for a couple of months. You can lose sixteen to forty pounds with no pain or strain that way. Fine. Except most people lose a lot more than that. They follow the diet, but they lose more weight than the diet alone can explain. It's as if some mental sentry who's been fast asleep for years wakes up and starts hollering the equivalent of “Fire!” The metabolism itself speeds up … because the sentry told it to evacuate a few pounds before the whole house burned down.'

'Okay,' Halleck said. He was willing to be convinced. He had taken the day off from work, and suddenly what he wanted to do more than anything else was go home and tell Heidi he was okay and take her upstairs and make love to her while the afternoon sunlight shafted in through the windows of their bedroom, 'I'll buy that.'

Houston got up to see him out: Halleck noticed with quiet amusement that there was a dusting of white powder under Houston's nose.

'If you continue to lose weight, we'll run an entire metabolic series on you,' Houston said. 'I may have given you the idea that tests like that aren't very good, but sometimes they can show us a lot. Anyway, I doubt if we'll have to go to that. My guess is your weight loss will start to taper off – five pounds this week, three next week, one the week after that. Then you're going to get on the scales and see that you've put on a pound of two.'

'You've eased my mind a lot,' Halleck said, and gripped Houston's hand hard.

Houston smiled complacently, although he had really done no more than present Halleck with negatives – no, he didn't know what was wrong with Halleck, but no, it wasn't cancer. Whew. 'That's what we're here for, Billyboy.'

Billy-boy went home to his wife.

'He said you're okay?'

Halleck nodded.

She put her arms around him and hugged him hard. He could feel the tempting swell of her breasts against his chest.

'Want to go upstairs?'

She looked at him, her eyes dancing. 'My, you are okay, aren't you?'

'You bet.'

They went upstairs and had magnificent sex. For one of the last times.

Afterward, Halleck fell asleep. And dreamed.

The Gypsy had turned into a huge bird. A vulture with a rotting beak. It was cruising over Fairview and casting down a gritty, cindery dust like chimney soot that seemed to come fro beneath its dusky pinions … its wingpits?

Chapter Seven. Bird Dream

'Thinner.' The Gypsy-vulture croaked, passing over the common, over the Village Pub, the Waldenbooks on the corner of Main and Devon, over Esta-Esta, Fairview's moderately good Italian restaurant, over the post office, over the Amoco station, the modern glass-walled Fairview Public Library, and finally over the salt marshes and out into the bay.

Thinner, just that one word, but it was a malediction enough, Halleck saw, because everyone in this affluent upper-class-commute-to-the-city-and-have-a-few-drinks-in-the-club-car-on-the-way-home suburb, everyone in this pretty little New England town set squarely in the heart of John Cheever country, everyone in Fairview was starving to death.

He walked faster and faster up Main Street, apparently invisible – the logic of dreams, after all, is only whatever the dream demands – and horrified by the results of the Gypsy's curse. Fairview had become a town filled with concentration-camp survivors. Big-headed babies with wasted bodies screamed from expensive prams. Two women in expensive designer dresses staggered and lurched out of Cherry on Top, Fairview's version of the old ice-cream shoppe. Their faces were all cheekbones and bulging brows stretching parchment-shiny skin; the necklines of their dresses slipped from jutting skin-wrapped collarbones and deep shoulder hollows in a hideous parody of seduction.

Here came Michael Houston, staggering along on scarecrow-thin legs, his Savile Row suit flapping around his unbelievably gaunt frame, holding out a vial of cocaine in one skeletal hand. 'Toot-sweet?' he screamed at Halleck – it was the voice of a rat caught in a trap and squealing out the last of its miserable life. 'Toot-sweet? It helps speed up your metabolism, Billy-boy! Toot-sweet? Toot -'

With deepening horror Halleck realised the hand holding the vial was not a hand at all but only clattering bones. The man was a walking, talking skeleton.

He turned to run, but in the way of nightmares, he could seem to pick up no speed. Although he was on the Main Street sidewalk, he felt as if he was running in thick, sticky mud. At any moment the skeleton that had been Michael Houston would reach out and he – it – would touch his shoulder. Or perhaps that bony hand would begin to scrabble at his throat.

'Toot-sweet, toot-sweet, toot-sweet!' Houston's squalling, ratlike voice screamed. The voice was drawing closer and closer; Halleck knew that if he turned his head, the apparition would be close to him, so very close – sparkling eyes bulging from sockets of naked bone, the uncovered jawbone jerking and snapping.

He saw Yard Stevens shamble out of Heads Up, his beige barber's smock flapping over a chest and a belly that were now nonexistent. Yard was screeching in a horrid, crowlike voice, and when he turned toward Halleck, he saw it was not Yard at all, but Ronald Reagan. 'Where's the rest of me?' he screamed. 'Where's the rest of me? WHERE'S THE REST OF ME?'

'Thinner,' Michael Houston was now whispering into Halleck's ear, and now what Halleck had feared happened: those finger bones touched him, twiddling and twitching at his sleeve, and Halleck thought he would go mad at the feeling. 'Thinner, so much thinner, toot-de-sweet, and thin – de-thin, it was his wife, Billy-boy, his wife, and you're in trouble. oh-baby, sooo much trouble. . .'

Chapter Eight. Billy's Pants

Billy jerked awake, breathing hard, his hand clapped across his mouth. Heidi slept peacefully beside him, deeply buried in a quilt. A mid-spring wind was running around the eaves outside.

Halleck took one quick, fearful look around the bedroom, assuring himself that Michael Houston – or a scarecrow version of him – was not in attendance. It was just his bedroom, every corner of it known. The nightmare began to drain away … but there was still enough of it left so that he scooted over next to Heidi. He did not touch her – she woke easily – but he got into the zone of her warmth and stole part of her quilt.

Just a dream.

Thinner, a voice in his mind answered implacably.

Sleep came again. Eventually.

The morning following the nightmare, the bathroom scales showed him at 215, and Halleck felt hopeful. Only two pounds. Houston had been right, coke or not. The process was slowing down. He went downstairs whistling and ate three fried eggs and half a dozen link sausages.

On his ride to the train station, the nightmare recurred to him in vague fashion, more as a feeling of deja vu than actual memory. He looked out the window as he passed Heads Up (which was flanked by Frank's Fine Meats and Toys Are Joys) and for just a moment he expected to see a half-score of lurching, shambling skeletons, as if comfortable, plushy Fairview had somehow been changed into Biafra. But the people on the streets looked okay; better than okay. Yard Stevens, as physically substantial as ever, waved. Halleck waved back and thought: Your metabolism is warning you to quit smoking, Yard. The thought made him smile a little, and by the time his train pulled into Grand Central, the last vestiges of the dream were forgotten.