Not that far, Jessie; she is in the path of the eclipse, too.

For one moment, the upper hallway of the house of Dark Score Lake seemed to be gone. What replaced it was a tangle of blackberry bushes, shadowless under the eclipse-darkened sky, and a clear smell of sea-salt. Jessie saw a skinny woman in a housedress with her dark hair put up in a bun. She was kneeling by a splintered square of boards. There was a puddle of white fabric beside her. Jessie was quite sure it was the skinny woman’s slip. Who are you? Jessie asked the woman, but she was already gone “if she had ever been there in the first place, that was.

Jessie actually glanced over her shoulder to see if perhaps that spooky skinny woman had gotten behind her. But the upstairs hallway was deserted; she was alone.

She looked down at her arms and saw they were rippled with gooseflesh.

You’re losing your mind, the voice that would one day be Goodwife Burlingame mourned. Oh Jessie, you’ve been bad, you’ve been very bad, and now you’re going to have to pay by losing your mind.

She waited for a moment in a kind of horrified suspension to see if any of the voices-or the image of the woman kneeling by the splintered boards with her slip puddled on the ground beside her-would come back, but she neither heard nor saw anything. That creepy other who had told Jessie some she had pushed some he down some well was apparently gone.

Strain, toots, the voice that would one day be Ruth advised, and Jessie had a clear idea that while the voice didn’t exactly believe that, it had decided Jessie had better get moving again, and right away. You thought about a woman with a slip beside her because you’ve got underwear on the brain this afternoon, that’s all. I’d forget the whole thing, if I were you.

That was great advice. Jessie quickly dampened her shorts and shirt under the tap, wrung them out, and then stepped into the shower. She soaped, rinsed, dried, hurried back to the bedroom. She ordinarily wouldn’t have bothered with the robe again for the quick dash across the hall, but this time she did, only holding it shut instead of taking time to belt it closed.

She paused in the bedroom again, biting her lip, praying that the weird other voice wouldn’t come back, praying that she wouldn’t have another of those crazy hallucinations or illusions or whatever they were. Nothing came. She dropped the robe on her bed, hurried across to her bureau, pulled on fresh underwear and shorts.

She smells that same smell, she thought. Whoever that woman is, she smells the same smell coming out of the well she made the man fall into, and it’s happening now, during the eclipse. I’m sure-

She turned, a fresh blouse in one hand, and then froze. Her father was standing in the doorway, watching her.

Jessie awoke in the mild, milky light of dawn with the perplexing and ominous memory of the woman still filling her mind-the woman with her dark hair pulled back in that tight countrywoman’s bun, the woman who had been kneeling in the blackberry tangles with her slip puddled beside her, the woman who had been looking down through broken boards and smelling that awful bland smell. Jessie hadn’t thought of that woman in years, and now, fresh from her dream of 1963 that hadn’t been a dream but a recollection, it seemed to her that she had been granted some sort of supernatural vision on that day, a vision that had perhaps been caused by stress and then lost again for the same reason.

But it didn’t matter-not that, not what had happened with her father out on the deck, not what had happened later, when she had turned around to see him standing in the bedroom door. All that had happened a long time ago, and as for what was happening right now-

I’m in trouble. I think I’m in very serious trouble.

She lay back against the pillows and looked up at her suspended arms. She felt as dazed and helpless as a poisoned insect in a spider’s web, wanting no more than to be asleep again-dreamlessly this time, if possible-with her dead arms and dry throat in another universe.

No such luck.

There was a slow, somnolent buzzing sound somewhere close by. Her first thought was alarm clock. Her second, after two or three minutes of dozing with her eyes open, was smoke detector. That idea caused a brief, groundless burst of hope which brought her a little closer to real waking. She realized that what she was hearing didn’t really sound very much like a smoke detector at all. It sounded like… well… like…

It’s flies, toots, okay? The no-bullshit voice now sounded tired and wan. You’ve heard about the Boys of Summer, haven’t you? Well, these are the Flies of Autumn, and their version of the World Series is currently being played on Gerald Burlingame, the noted attorney and handcuff-fetishist.

“Jesus, I gotta get up,” she said in a croaking, husky voice she barely recognized as her own.

What the hell does that mean? she thought, and it was the answer-Not a goddam thing, thanks very much-that finished the job of bringing her back to full wakefulness. She didn’t want to be awake, but she had an idea that she had better accept the fact that she was and do as much with it as she could, while she could.

And you probably better start by waking up your hands and arms. If they will wake up, that is.

She looked at her right arm, then turned her head on the rusty armature of her neck (which was only partially asleep) and looked at her left. Jessie realized with sudden shock that she was looking at them in a completely new way-looking at them as she might have looked at pieces of fiirniture in a showroom window. They seemed to have no business with Jessie Burlingame at all, and she supposed there was nothing so odd about that, not really; they were, after all, utterly without feeling. Sensation only started a little below her armpits.

She tried to pull herself up and was dismayed to find the mutiny in her arms had gone further than she had suspected. Not only did they refuse to move her; they refused to move themselves. Her brain’s order was totally ignored. She looked up at them again, and they no longer looked like furniture to her. Now they looked like pallid cuts of meat hanging from butchers” hooks, and she let out a hoarse cry of fear and anger.

Never mind, though. The arms weren’t happening, at least for the time being, and being mad or afraid or both wasn’t going to change that a bit. How about the fingers? If she could curl them around the bedposts, then maybe…

… or maybe not. Her fingers seemed as useless as her arms. After nearly a full minute of effort, Jessie was rewarded only by a single numb twitch from her right thumb.

“Dear God,” she said in her grating dust-in-the-cracks voice. There was no anger in it now, only fear.

People died in accidents, of course-she supposed she had seen hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of “death-clips” on the TV news during her lifetime. Body-bags carried away from wrecked cars or winched out of the jungle in Medi-Vac slings, feet sticking out from beneath hastily spread blankets while buildings burned in the background, white-faced, stumble-voiced witnesses pointing to pools of sticky dark stuff in alleys or on barroom floors. She had seen the white-shrouded shape that had been John Belushi toted out of the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Los Angeles; she had seen aerialist Karl Wallenda lose his balance, fall heavily to the cable he had been trying to cross (it had been strung between two resort hotels, she seemed to remember), clutch it briefly, and then plunge to his death below. The news programs had played that one over and over as if obsessed with it. So she knew people died in accidents, of course she knew it, but until now she had somehow never realized there were people inside those people, people just like her, people who hadn’t had the slightest idea they would never eat another cheeseburger, watch another round of Final jeopardy (and please make sure your answer is in the form of a question), or call their best friends to say that penny poker on Thursday night or shopping on Saturday afternoon seemed like a great idea. No more beer, no more kisses, and your fantasy of making love in a hammock during a thunderstorm was never going to be fulfilled, because you were going to be too busy being dead. Any morning you rolled out of bed might be your last.