It might be seven o'clock, but if I can still see the last of the sunset,it’s probably not even that late. Which means I was only out for an hour,an hour and a half, tops. Maybe it’s not too late to get out of here.Maybe-

This time the dog seemed actually to scream. The sound made Jessie feel like screaming back. She grasped one of the footposts because she had started to sway on her feet again, and suddenly realized she couldn’t remember getting off the bed in the first place. That was how much the dog had freaked her out.

Get control of yourself, girl. Take a deep breath and get control ofyourself.

She did take a deep breath, and the smell she drew in with the air was one she knew. It was like that flat mineral smell which had haunted her all these years-the smell that meant sex, water, and father to her-but not exactly like that. Some other odor or odors seemed mixed into this version of it-old garlic… ancient onions… dirt… unwashed feet, maybe. The smell tumbled Jessie back down a well of years and filled her with the helpless, inarticulate terror children feel when they sense some faceless, nameless creature-some It-waiting patiently beneath the bed for them to stick out a foot… or perhaps dangle a hand…

The wind gusted. The door banged. And somewhere closer by, a board creaked stealthily the way boards do when someone who is trying to be quiet treads lightly upon them.

It’s come back, her mind whispered. It was all the voices now; they had entwined in a braid. That’s what the dog smells, that’s what you smell, and Jessie, that’s what made the board creak. The thing thatwas here last night has come back for you,

“Oh God, please, no,” she moaned. “Oh God no. Oh God no. Oh dear God don’t let that be true.”

She tried to move, but her feet were frozen to the floor and her left hand was nailed to the bedpost. Her fear had immobilized her as surely as oncoming headlights immobilize a deer or rabbit caught in the middle of the road. She would stand here, moaning under her breath and trying to pray, until it came to her, came for her-the space cowboy, the reaper of love, just some door-to-door salesman of the dead, his sample case filled with bones and finger-rings instead of Amway or Fuller brushes.

The dog’s ululating cry rose in the air, rose in her head, until she thought it must surely drive her mad.

I’m dreaming, she thought. That’s why I couldn’t remember standingup; dreams are the mind’s version of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books,and you can never remember unimportant stuff like that when you’rehaving one. I passed out, yes-that really happened, only instead ofgoing down into a coma, I came up into natural sleep. I guess that meansthe bleeding must have stopped, because I don’t think people who arebleeding to death have nightmares when they’re going down for the count.I’m sleeping, that’s all, Sleeping and having the granddaddy of all haddreams.

A fabulously comforting idea, and only one thing wrong with it: it wasn’t true. The dancing tree-shadows on the wall by the bureau were real. So was that weird smell drifting through the house. She was awake, and she had to get out of here.

I can’t move! she wailed.

Yes you can, Ruth told her grimly. You didn’t get out of thosefucking handcuffs just to die off right, tootsie. Get moving, now-I don’tneed to tell you how to do it, do I?

“No,” Jessie whispered, and slapped lightly at the bedpost with the back of her right hand. The result was an immediate and enormous blast of pain. The vise of panic which had been holding her shattered like glass, and when the dog voiced another of those freezing howls, Jessie barely heard it-her hand was a lot closer, and it was howling a lot louder.

And you know what to do next, toots-don’t you?

Yes-the time had come to make like a hockey player and get the puck out of here, to make like a library and book. The thought of Gerald’s rifle surfaced for a second, and then she dismissed it. She didn’t have the slightest idea where the gun was, or even if it was here at all.

Jessie walked slowly and carefully across the room on her trembling legs, once again holding out her left hand to steady her balance. The hallway beyond the bedroom door was a carousel of moving shadows with the door to the guest bedroom standing open on the right and the small spare room Gerald used as a study standing open on the left. Farther down on the left was the archway which gave on the kitchen and living room. On the right was the unlatched back door the Mercedes and maybe freedom.

Fifty steps, she thought. Can’t be any more than that, and it’sprobably less. So get going, okay?

But at first she just couldn’t. Bizarre as it would undoubtedly seem to someone who hadn’t been through what she had been through during the last twenty-eight hours or so, the bedroom represented a kind of dour safety to her. The hallway, however… anything might be lurking out there. Anything, Then something which sounded like a thrown stone thudded against the west side of the house, just outside the window. Jessie uttered her own small howl of terror before realizing it was just the branch of the hoary old blue spruce out there by the deck.

Get hold of yourself, Punkin said sternly. Get hold of yourself andget out of here.

She tottered gamely onward, left arm still out, counting steps under her breath as she went. She passed the guest bedroom at twelve. At fifteen she reached Gerald’s study, and as she did, she began to hear a low, toneless hissing sound, like steam escaping a very old radiator. At first Jessie did not associate the sound with the study; she thought she was making it herself Then, as she was raising her right foot to make the sixteenth step, the sound intensified. This time it registered more clearly, and Jessie realized she couldn’t be the one making it, because she was holding her breath.

Slowly, very slowly, she turned her head toward the study, where her husband would never again work on legal briefs while he chainsmoked Marlboros and sang old Beach Boys hits under his breath. The house was groaning around her like an old ship plowing through a moderately heavy sea, creaking in its various joints as the wind shouldered against it with cold air. Now she could hear a clapping shutter as well as the banging door, but these sounds were somewhere else, in some other world where wives were not handcuffed and husbands did not refuse to listen and night-creatures did not stalk. She could hear the muscles and tendons in her neck creaking like old bedsprings as she turned her head. Her eyes throbbed in their sockets like chunks of hot charcoal.

I don’t want to look! her mind screamed. I don’t want to look, Idon’t want to see!

But she was helpless not to look. It was as if strong invisible hands were turning her head while the wind gusted and the back door banged and the shutter clapped and the dog once more sent its desolate, bone-chilling howl spiralling into the black October sky. Her head turned until she was looking into her dead husband’s study, and yes, sure enough, there it was, a tall figure standing beside Gerald’s Eames chair and in front of the sliding glass door. Its narrow white face hung in the darkness like a stretched skull. The dark, squarish shadow of its souvenir case squatted between its feet.

She drew in breath to scream with, but what came out was a sound like a teakettle with a broken whistle. “Huhhhhaaahhhhhhh.”

Only that and nothing more.

Somewhere, in that other world, hot urine was running down her legs; she had wet her pants for a second record-breaking day. The wind gusted in that other world, making the house shiver on its bones. The blue spruce knocked its branch against the west wall again. Gerald’s study was a lagoon of dancing shadows, and it was once more very difficult to tell what she was seeing… or if she was in fact seeing anything at all.