“Stop,” he whispered and shuddered at the sound of his own voice. He would go out into the kitchen, he decided, and make himself breakfast just as if it were any ordinary day. A bachelor breakfast, full of comforting cholesterol. A couple of fried-egg sandwiches with mayo and a slice of Bermuda onion on each one. He smelled sweaty and dirty and cruddy, but he would save the shower for later; right now getting undressed seemed like too much work, and he was afraid he might have to get the scalpel out of his bag and actually cut the leg of the pants open in order to allow his bloated knee to escape. A hell of a way to treat good instruments, but none of the knives in the house would cut the heavy jeans fabric, and Rachel’s sewing scissors certainly would not do the trick.

But first, breakfast.

So he crossed the living room and then detoured into the front entry and looked out at the small blue car in Jud’s driveway. It was covered with dewfall, which meant it had been there for some time. Church was still on the roof but not sleeping. He appeared to be staring right at Louis with his ugly yellow-green eyes.

Louis stepped back hurriedly, as if someone had caught him peeking.

He went into the kitchen, rattled out a frying pan, put it on the stove, got eggs from the fridge. The kitchen was bright and crisp and clear. He tried to whistle-a whistle would bring the morning into its proper focus-but he could not. Things looked right, but they weren’t right. The house seemed dreadfully empty, and last night’s work weighed on him. Things were wrong, awry; he felt a shadow hovering, and he was afraid.

He limped into the bathroom and took a couple of aspirin with a glass of orange juice. He was working his way back to the stove when the telephone rang.

He did not answer it immediately but turned and looked at it, feeling slow and stupid, a sucker in some game which he was only now realizing he did not understand in the least.

Don’t answer that, you don’t want to answer that because that’s the bad news, that’s the end of the leash that leads around the corner and into the darkness, and I don’t think you want to see what’s on the other end of that leash, Louis, I really don’t think you do, so don’t answer that phone, run, run now, the car’s in the garage, get in it and take off, but don’t answer that phone-He crossed the room and picked it up, standing there with one hand on the dryer as he had so many times before, and it was Irwin Goldman, and even as Irwin said hello Louis saw the tracks crossing the kitchen-small, muddy tracks-and his heart seemed to freeze in his chest, and he believed he could feel his eyeballs swelling in his head, starting from their sockets; he believed that if he could have seen himself in a mirror at that moment he would have seen a face out of a seventeenth-century painting of a lunatic asylum. They were Gage’s tracks, Gage had been here, he had been here in the night, and so where was he now?

“It’s Irwin, Louis… Louis? Are you there? Hello?”

“Hello, Irwin,” he said, and already he knew what Irwin was going to say. He understood the blue car. He understood everything. The leash… the leash going into the darkness… he was moving fast along it now, hand over hand.

Ah, if he could drop it before he saw what was at the end! But it was his leash.

He had bought it.

“For a moment I thought we’d been cut off,” Goldman was saying.

“No, the phone slipped out of my hand,” Louis said. His voice was calm.

“Did Rachel make it home last night?”

“Oh yes,” Louis said, thinking of the blue car, Church perched on top of it, the blue car that was so still. His eye traced the muddy footprints on the floor.

“I ought to speak to her,” Goldman said. “Right away. It’s about Eileen.”

“Ellie? What about Ellie?”

“I really think Rachel-”

“Rachel’s not here right now,” Louis said harshly. “She’s gone to the store for bread and milk. What about Ellie? Come on, Irwin!”

“We had to take her to the hospital,” Goldman said reluctantly. “She had a bad dream or a whole series of them. She was hysterical and wouldn’t come out of it.

She-”

“Did they sedate her?”

“What?”

“Sedation,” Louis said impatiently, “did they give her sedation?”

“Yes, oh yes. They gave her a pill, and she went back to sleep.”

“Did she say anything? What scared her so badly?” He was gripping the phone white-knuckled now.

Silence from Irwin Goldman’s end-a long silence. This time Louis did not interrupt, much as he would have liked to.

“That was what scared Dory so badly,” Irwin said finally. “She babbled a lot before she got… before she was crying too hard to understand. Dory herself was almost… you know.”

“What did she say?”

“She said Oz the Great and Terrible had killed her mother. Only she didn’t say it that way. She said… she said ‘Oz the Gweat and Tewwible,’ which was the way our other daughter always used to say it. Our daughter Zelda. Louis, believe me when I say I would much rather have asked Rachel this question, but how much have you and she told Eileen about Zelda and how she died?”

Louis had closed his eyes; the world seemed to be rocking gently under his feet, and Goldman’s voice had the lost quality of a voice coming through thick mists.

You may hear sounds like voices, but they are only the loons down south toward Prospect. The sound carries.

“Louis, are you there?”

“Is she going to be all right?” Louis asked, his own voice distant. “Is Ellie going to be all right? Did you get a prognosis?”

“Delayed shock from the funeral,” Goldman said. “My own doctor came. Lathrop. A good man. Said she had a degree of fever and that when she woke up this afternoon, she might not even remember. But I think Rachel should come back.

Louis, I am frightened. I think you should come back too.”

Louis did not respond. The eye of God was on the sparrow; so said good King James. Louis, however, was a lesser being, and his eye was on those muddy footprints.

“Louis, Gage is dead,” Goldman was saying. “I know that must be hard to accept-for you and Rachel both-but your daughter is very much alive, and she needs you.”

Yes, I accept that. You may be a stupid old fart, Irwin, but perhaps the nightmare that passed between your two daughters on that April day in 1965 taught you something about sensitivity.

She needs me, but I can’t come, because I’m afraid-so terribly afraid-that my hands are filthy with her mother’s blood.

Louis regarded those hands. Louis regarded the dirt under his nails, which was so like the dirt which comprised those footprints on the kitchen floor.

“All right,” he said, “I understand. We’ll be there as soon as we can, Irwin. By tonight, if that’s possible. Thank you.”

“We did the best we could,” Goldman said. “Maybe we’re too old. Maybe, Louis, maybe we always were.”

“Did she say anything else?” Louis asked.

Goldman’s reply was like the toll of a funeral bell against the wall of his heart. “A lot, but only one other thing I could make out: ‘Paxcow says it’s too late.”

He hung up the telephone and moved back toward the stove in a daze, apparently meaning to continue on with breakfast or put the things away, he didn’t know which, and about halfway across the kitchen a wave of faintness poured over him, floating gray overcame his sight, and he swooned to the floor-”swoon” was the right word because it seemed to take forever. He fell down and down through cloudy depths; it seemed to him that he turned over and over, looped the loop, did a dipsy doodle or two, slipped an Immelmann. Then he struck on his bad knee and the chromium bolt of pain through his head brought him back with a scream of agony. For a moment he could only crouch, the tears starting from his eyes.

At last he made it back to his feet and stood there, swaying. But his head was clear again. That was something. wasn’t it?