'A little,' he said cautiously.

Lemke nodded. 'You take weight now. But in a week, maybe two, you start to fall back. Only this time you fall back and there won't be no stopping it. Unless you find someone to eat that.'

'Yes.'

Lemke's eyes didn't waver. 'You sure?'

'Yes, yes!' Billy cried.

'I feel a little sorry for you,' Lemke said. 'Not much, but a little. Once you might have been pokol – strong. Now your shoulders are broken. Nothing is your fault … there are reasons … you have friends.' He smiled mirthlessly. 'Why not eat your own pie, white man from town? You die, but you die strong.'

'Get out of here,' Billy said. 'I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about. Our business is done, that's all I know.'

'Yes. Our business is done.' His glance shifted briefly to the pie, then back to Billy's face. 'Be careful who eats the meal that was meant for you,' he said, and walked away. Halfway down one of the jogging paths, he turned back. It was the last time Billy ever saw his incredibly ancient, incredibly weary face. 'No poosh, white man from town,' Taduz Lemke said. 'Not never.' He turned and walked away.

Billy sat on the park bench and watched him until he was gone.

When Lemke had disappeared into the evening, Billy got up and started back the way he had come. He had walked twenty paces before he realized he had forgotten something. He went back to the bench, his face dazed and serious, eyes opaque, and got his pie. It was still warm and it still pulsed, but these things sickened him less now. He supposed a man could get used to anything, given sufficient incentive.

He started back toward Union Street.

Halfway up the hill to the place where Ginelli had let him off, he saw the blue Nova parked at the curb. And by then he knew the curse really was gone.

He was still horribly weak, and every now and then his heart skittered in his chest (like a man who has stepped in something greasy, he thought), but it was gone, just the same – and now that it was, he knew exactly what Lemke had meant when he said a curse was a living thing, something like a blind, irrational child that had been inside him, feeding off him. Purpurfargade ansiktet. Gone now.

But he could feel the pie he carried throbbing very slowly in his hands, and when he looked down at it he could see the crust pulsing rhythmically. And the cheap aluminum pie plate held its dim heat. It's sleeping, he thought, and shuddered. He felt like a man carrying a sleeping devil.

The Nova stood at the curb on its jacked back wheels, its nose pointing down. The parking lights were on.

'It's over,' Billy said, opening the passenger door and getting in. 'It's ov . . .'

That was when he saw Ginelli wasn't in the car. At least, not very much of him. Because of the deepening shadows he didn't see that he had come within an inch of sitting on Ginelli's severed hand until a moment later. It was a disembodied fist trailing red gobbets of flesh onto the Nova's faded seat cover from the ragged wrist, a disembodied fist filled with ball bearings.

Chapter Twenty-five

'Where are you?' Heidi's voice was angry, scared, tired. Billy was not particularly surprised to find he felt nothing at all for that voice anymore – not even curiosity.

'It doesn't matter,' he said. 'I'm coming home.'

'He sees the light! Thank God! He finally sees the light! Will you be flying into La Guardia or Kennedy? I'll pick you up.'

'I'll be driving,' Billy said. He paused. 'I want you to call Mike Houston, Heidi, and tell him you've changed your mind about the res gestae.'

'The what? Billy, what … ?' But he could tell by the sudden change in her tone that she knew exactly what he was talking about – it was the scared tone of a kid who has been caught filching candy, and he suddenly lost all patience with her.

'The involuntary committal order,' he said. 'In the trade it's sometimes known as the Loonybin Writ. I've taken care of the business I had and I'll be happy to check in wherever you two want me to – the Glassman Clinic, the New Jersey Goat Gland Center, the Midwestern College of Acupuncture. But if I get grabbed by the cops when I get to Connecticut and end up in the Norwalk state asylum, you're going to be a very sorry woman, Heidi.'

She was crying. 'We only did what we thought was best for you, Billy. Someday you'll see that.'

Inside his head Lemke spoke up. Nothing is Your fault … there are reasons … you have friends. He shook it off, but before he did, goose flesh had crawled up his arms and the sides of his neck to his face.

'Just . . .' He paused, hearing Ginelli in his head this time. Just take it off. Take it off. William Halleck says take it off.

The hand. The hand on the seat. Wide gold ring on the second finger, red stone – maybe a ruby. Fine black hair growing between the second and third knuckles. Ginelli's hand.

Billy swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat.

'Just have that paper declared null and void,' he said.

'All right,' she said quickly, and then, returned obsessively to the justification: 'We only … I only did what I thought … Billy, you were getting so thin – talking so crazy . . .'

'Okay.'

'You sound as if you hate me,' she said, and began crying again.

'Don't be silly,' he said – which was not precisely a denial. His voice was quieter now. 'Where's Linda? Is she there?'

'No, she's gone back to Rhoda's for a few days. She's … well, she's very upset by all of this.'

I bet, he thought. She had been at Rhoda's before, then had come home. He knew, because he had spoken to her on the phone. Now she was gone again, and something in Heidi's phrasing made him think that this time it had been Lin's idea to go. Did she find out that you and good old Mike Houston were in ' the process of getting her father declared insane, Heidi? Is that what happened? But it didn't really matter. Linda was gone, that was the important thing.

His eyes strayed to the pie, which he had placed on top of the TV in his Northeast Harbor motel room. The crust still pulsed slowly up and down, like a loathsome heart. It was important that his daughter got nowhere near that thing. It was dangerous.

'It would be best for her to stay there until we have our problems worked out,' he said.

On the other end of the line, Heidi burst into loud sobs. Billy asked her what was wrong.

'You're wrong – you sound so cold.'

'I'll warm up,' he said. 'Don't worry.'

There was a moment when he could hear her swallowing back the sobs and trying to get herself under control. He waited for this to happen with neither patience nor impatience; he really felt nothing at all. The blast of horror which had swept through him when he realized the thing on the seat was Ginelli's hand -that was really the last strong emotion he had felt tonight. Except for the queer laughing fit that had come on him a bit later, of course.

'What kind of shape are you in?' she asked finally.

'There's been some improvement. I'm up to a hundred and twenty-two.'

She drew in her breath. 'That's six pounds less than you weighed when you left!'

'It's also six pounds more than when I weighed myself yesterday morning,' he said mildly.

'Billy … I want you to know that we can work all of this out. Really, we can. The most important thing is to get you well, and then we'll talk. If we have to talk with someone else … someone like a marriage counselor … well, I'm game if you are. It's just that we … we. . .'

Oh, Christ, she's going to start bawling again, he thought, and was shocked and amused – both in a very dim sort of way -at his own callousness. And then she said something that struck him as peculiarly touching, and for just a moment he regained a sense of the old Heidi … and with it, the old Billy Halleck.