The cleaver flew out of his hand. It skittered across the humped and faded linoleum, blade and handle swiftly changing places as it whirled. It struck the baseboard with a thin clang and slid under the refrigerator.

Jud realized that he had been fooled again, and the only consolation was that it was for the final time. The cat was on his legs, mouth open, eyes blazing, hissing like a teakettle. And then Gage was on him, grinning a happy black grin, eyes moon-shaped, rimmed with red, and his right hand came out from behind his back, and Jud saw that what he had been holding when he came in was a scalpel from Louis’s black bag.

“Oh m’ dear Jesus,” Jud managed and put his right hand up to block the blow. And here was an optical illusion; surely his mind had snapped because it appeared that the scalpel was on both sides of his palm at the same time. Then something warm began to drizzle down on his face, and he understood.

“I’m gonna fuck with you, old man!” the Gage-thing chortled, blowing its poisoned breath in his face. “I’m gonna fuck with you/I’m gonna fuck with you all want!”

Jud flailed and got hold of Gage’s ‘wrist. Skin peeled off like parchment in his hand.

The scalpel was yanked out of his hand, leaving a vertical mouth.

“All… I… WANT!”

The scalpel came down again.

And again.

And again.

59

“Try it now, ma’am,” the truck driver said. He was looking into the engine cavity of Rachel’s rented car.

She turned the key. The Chevette’s engine roared into life. The truck driver slammed the hood down and came around to her window, wiping his hands on a big blue handkerchief. He had a pleasant, ruddy face. A Dysart’s Truck-Stop cap was tilted back on his head.

“Thank you so much,” Rachel said, on the verge of tears. “I just didn’t know what I was going to do.”

“Aw, a kid could have fixed that,” the trucker said. “But it was funny. Never seen something like that go wrong on such a new car, anyway.”

“Why? What was it?”

“One of your battery cables come right off. Wasn’t nobody frigging with it, was there?”

“No,” Rachel said, and she thought again of that feeling she’d had, that feeling of running into the rubber band of the world’s biggest slingshot.

“Must have jogged her loose just ridin along, I guess. But you won’t have no more trouble with your cables anyway. I tightened em up real good.”

“Could I give you some money?” Rachel asked timidly.

The trucker roared with laughter. “Not me, lady,” he said. “Us guys are the knights of the road, remember?”

She smiled. “Well… thank you.”

“More’n welcome.” He gave her a good grin, incongruously full of sunshine at this hour of the morning.

Rachel smiled back and drove carefully across the parking lot to the feeder road. She glanced both ways for traffic and five minutes later was back on the turnpike again, headed north. The coffee had helped more than she would have believed. She felt totally awake now, not the slightest bit dozy, her eyes as big as doorknobs, That feather of unease touched her again, that absurd feeling that she was being manipulated. The battery cable coming off the terminal post like that.

So she could be held up just long enough for.

She laughed nervously. Long enough for what?

For something irrevocable to happen.

That was stupid. Ridiculous. But Rachel began to push the little car along faster nonetheless.

At five o’clock, as Jud was trying to ward off a scalpel stolen from the black bag of his good friend Dr. Louis Creed, and as her daughter was awakening bolt-upright in bed, screaming in the grip of a nightmare which she could mercifully not remember, Rachel left the turnpike, drove the Hammond Street Cutoff close to the cemetery where a spade was now the only thing buried in her son’s coffin, and crossed the Bangor-Brewer Bridge. By quarter past five, she was on Route 15 and headed for Ludlow.

She had decided to go directly to Jud’s; she would make good on at least that much of her promise. The Civic was not in their driveway, anyway, and although she supposed it might be in the garage, their house had a sleeping, unoccupied look. No intuition suggested to her that Louis might be home.

Rachel parked behind Jud’s pickup and got out of the Chevette, looking around carefully. The grass was heavy with dew, sparkling in this clear, new light.

Somewhere a bird sang and then was silent. On the few occasions since her preteenage years when she had been awake and alone at dawn without some responsibility to fulfill as the reason, she had a lonely but somehow uplifted feeling-a paradoxical sense of newness and continuity. This morning she felt nothing so clean and good. There was only a dragging sense of unease which she could not entirely charge off to the terrible twenty-four hours just gone by and her recent bereavement.

She mounted the porch steps and opened the screen door, meaning to use the old-fashioned bell on the front door. She had been charmed by that bell the first time she and Louis came over together; you twisted it clockwise, and it uttered a loud but musical cry that was anachronistic and delightful.

She reached for it now, then glanced down at the porch floor and frowned. There were muddy tracks on the mat. Looking around, she saw that they led from the screen door to this one. Very small tracks. A child’s tracks, by the look of them. But she had been driving all night, and there had been no rain. Wind, but no rain.

She looked at the tracks for a long time-too long, really-and discovered she had to force her hand back to the turn bell. She grasped it… and then her hand fell away again.

I’m anticipating, that’s all. Anticipating the sound of that bell in this stillness. He’s probably gone to sleep after all and it will startle him awake.

But that wasn’t what she was afraid of. She had been nervous, scared in some deep and diffuse way ever since she had found it so hard to stay awake, but this sharp fear was something new, something which had solely to do with those small tracks. Tracks that were the size-Her mind tried to block this thought, but it was too tired, too slow.

–of Gage’s feet.

Oh stop it, can’t you stop it?

She reached out and twisted the bell.

Its sound was even louder than she remembered, but not so musical-it was a harsh, choked scream in the stillness. Rachel jumped back, uttering a nervous little laugh that had absolutely no humor in it at all. She waited for Jud’s footsteps, but his footsteps did not come. There was silence, and more silence, and she was beginning to debate in her own mind whether or not she could bring herself to twist that iron-butterfly shape again, when a sound did come from behind the door, a sound she would not have expected in her wildest surmises.

Waowf… Waow!… Waow!

“Church?” she asked, startled and puzzled. She bent forward, but it was of course impossible to see in; the door’s glass panel had been covered with a neat white curtain. Norma’s work. “Church, is that you?”

Waow!

Rachel tried the door. It was unlocked. Church was there, sitting in the hallway with its tail coiled neatly around its feet. The cat’s fur was streaked with something dark. Mud, Rachel thought, and then saw that the beads of liquid caught in Church’s whiskers were red.

He raised one paw and began to lick it, his eyes never leaving her face.

“Jud?” she called out, really alarmed now. She stepped just inside the door.

The house gave back no answer; only silence.

Rachel tried to think, but all at once images of her sister Zelda had begun to creep into her mind, blurring thought. How her hands had twisted. How she used to slam her head against the wall sometimes when she was angry-the paper had been all torn there, the plaster beneath torn and broken. This was no time to think of Zelda, not when Jud might be hurt. Suppose he had fallen down? He was an old man.