(I want-)

He realized the words were not passing through his frozen vocal cords and tried again.

“I want to see the manager. I… I don't think he understands. My son is not a part of this. He… ”

“Mr. Torrance,” Lloyd said, his voice coming with hideous gentleness from inside his plague-raddled face, “you will meet the manager in due time. He has, in fact, decided to make you his agent in this matter. Now drink your drink.”

“Drink your drink,” they all echoed.

He picked it up with a badly trembling hand. It was raw gin. He looked into it, and looking was like drowning.

The woman beside him began to sing in a flat, dead voice: “Roll… out… the barrel… and we'll have,… a barrel… of fun…”

Lloyd picked it up. Then the man in the blue suit. The dog-man joined in, thumping one paw against the table

“Now's the time to roll the barrel-”

Derwent added his voice to the rest. A cigarette was cocked in one corner of his mouth at a jaunty angle. His right arm was around the shoulders of the woman in the sarong, and his right band was gently and absently stroking her right breast. He was looking at the dog-man with amused contempt as he sang.

“-because the gang's… all… here!”

Jack brought the drink to his mouth and downed it in three long gulps, the gin highballing down his throat like a moving van in a tunnel, exploding in his stomach, rebounding up to his brain in one leap where it seized hold of him with a final convulsing fit of the shakes.

When that passed off, he felt fine.

“Do it again, please,” he said, and pushed the empty glass toward Lloyd.

“Yes, sir,” Lloyd said, taking the glass. Lloyd looked perfectly normal again. The olive-skinned man had put his. 32 away. The woman on his right was staring into her singapore sling again. One breast was wholly exposed now, leaning on the bar's leather buffer. A vacuous crooning noise came from her slack mouth. The loom of conversation had begun again, weaving and weaving.

His new drink appeared in front of him.

“ Muchas gracias, Lloyd,” he said, picking it up.

“Always a pleasure to serve you, Mr. Torrance.” Lloyd smiled.

“You were always the best of them, Lloyd.”

“Why, thank you, sir.”

He drank slowly this time, letting it trickle down his throat, tossing a few peanuts down the chute for good luck.

The drink was gone in no time, and he ordered another. Mr. President, I have met the martians and am pleased to report they are friendly. While Lloyd fixed another, he began searching his pockets for a quarter to put in the jukebox. He thought of Danny again, but Danny's face was pleasantly fuzzed and nondescript now. He had hurt Danny once, but that had been before he had learned how to handle his liquor. Those days were behind him now. He would never hurt Danny again.

Not for the world.

44. Conversations at the Party

He was dancing with a beautiful woman.

He had no idea what time it was, how long he had spent in the Colorado Lounge or how long he had been here in the ballroom. Time had ceased to matter.

He had vague memories: listening to a man who had once been a successful radio comic and then a variety star in TV', infant days telling a very long and very hilarious joke about incest between Siamese twins; seeing the woman in the harem pants and the sequined bra do a slow and sinuous striptease to some bumping-andgrinding music from the jukebox (it seemed it had been David Rose's theme music from The Stripper); crossing the lobby as one of three, the other two men in evening dress that predated the twenties, all of them singing about the stiff patch on Rosie O'Grady's knickers. He seemed to remember looking out the big double doors and seeing Japanese lanterns strung in graceful, curving arcs that followed the sweep of the driveway-they gleamed in soft pastel colors like dusky jewels. The big glass globe on the porch ceiling was on, and night-insects bumped and flittered against it, and a part of him, perhaps the last tiny spark of sobriety, tried to tell him that it was 6 A. M. on a morning in December. But time had been canceled.

(The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shurring sound/layer on layer…)

Who was that? Some poet he had read as an undergraduate? Some undergraduate poet who was now selling washers in Wausau or insurance in Indianapolis? Perhaps an original thought? Didn't matter.

(The night is dark/ the stars are high/ a disembodied custard piel is floating in the sky…)

He giggled helplessly.

“What's funny, honey?”

And here he was again, in the ballroom. The chandelier was lit and couples were circling all around them, some in costume and some not, to the smooth sounds of some postwar band-but which war? Can you be certain?

No, of course not. He was certain of only one thing: he was dancing with a beautiful woman.

She was tall and auburn-haired, dressed in clinging white satin, and she was dancing close to him, her breasts pressed softly and sweetly against his chest. Her white hand was entwined in his. She was wearing a small and sparkly cat'seye mask and her hair had been brushed over to one side in a soft and gleaming fall that seemed to pool in the valley between their touching shoulders. Her dress was full-skirted but be could feel her thighs against his legs from time to time and had become more and more sure that she was smoothand-powdered naked under her dress,

(the better to feet your erection with, my dear)

and he was sporting a regular railspike. If it offended her she concealed it well; she snuggled even closer to him.

“Nothing funny, honey,” he said, and giggled again.

“I like you,” she whispered, and he thought that her scent was like lilies, secret and hidden in cracks furred with green moss-places where sunshine is short and shadows long.

“I like you, too.”

“We could go upstairs, if you want. I'm supposed to be with Harry, but he'll never notice. He's too busy teasing poor Roger.”

The number ended. There was a spatter of applause and then the band swung into “Mood Indigo” with scarcely a pause.

Jack looked over her bare shoulder and saw Derwent standing by the refreshment table. The girl in the sarong was with him. There were bottles of champagne in ice buckets ranged along the white lawn covering the table, and Derwent held a foaming bottle in his hand. A knot of people had gathered, laughing. In front of Derwent and the girl in the sarong, Roger capered grotesquely on all fours, his tail dragging limply behind him. He was barking.

“Speak, boy, speak!” Harry Derwent cried.

“Rowf! Rowf!” Roger responded. Everyone clapped; a few of the men whistled.

“Now sit up. Sit up, doggy!”

Roger clambered up on his haunches. The muzzle of his mask was frozen in its eternal snarl. Inside the eyeholes, Roger's eyes rolled with frantic, sweaty hilarity. He held his arms out, dangling the paws.

“Rowf! Rowf!”

Derwent upended the bottle of champagne and it fell in a foamy Niagara onto the upturned mask. Roger made frantic slurping sounds, and everyone applauded again. Some of the women screamed with laughter.

“Isn't Harry a card?” his partner asked him, pressing close again. “Everyone says so. He's AC/DC, you know. Poor Roger's only DC. He spent a weekend with Harry in Cuba once… oh, months ago. Now he follows Harry everywhere, wagging his little tail behind him.”

She giggled. The shy scent of lilies drifted up.

“But of course Harry never goes back for seconds… not on his DC side, anyway… and Roger is just wild. Harry told him if he came to the masked ball as a doggy, a cute little doggy, he might reconsider, and Roger is such a silly that he…”

The number ended. There was more applause. The band members were filing down for a break.

“Excuse me, sweetness,” she said. “There's someone I just roust… Darla! Darla, you dear girl, where have you been?”