Green light enfolded him.

It was strong-stronger than it had been the last time he was here. That big piece of cobbled-together equipment

(the transformer)

was glowing brightly. It was cycling, as it had been before, but the cycles were faster now. Thin green fire ran across the silvery road maps of circuit boards.

He looked around. The old man, floating in his green bath, was looking back at Gardener with his one good eye. That gaze was tortured… but sane.

Use the transformer to save David

“Old man, they are coming for me,” Gardener croaked. “I'm out of time.”

Corner, far corner.

He looked and saw something that looked a bit like a television antenna, a bit like a large coat-hanger mobile, and a bit like those back-yard devices on which women hang clothes, turning them to do so.

“That?”

Take it out into the dooryard.

Gardener didn't question. There was no time. The thing stood on a small square platform. Gardener supposed its circuits and batteries were in that.

Close-up, he saw that the things which looked like the bent arms of a TV antenna were really narrow steel tubes. He seized the central pole. The thing wasn't heavy, but it was awkward. He was going to have to put some weight on his shattered ankle, like it or not.

He looked back at the tank in which Ev Hillman floated.

You sure about this, old-timer?

But it was the woman who answered. Her eyes opened. Looking into them was like looking into the witches” caldron in Macbeth. For a moment Gard forgot all his pain and weariness and sickness. He was held in thrall by that poisoned gaze. In that instant he understood all the truth and all the power of the fearsome woman Bobbi had called Sissy, and the reason Bobbi had fled from her, as from a fiend. She was a fiend. She was a witch. And even now, in her fearful agony, her hate held.

Take it, you stupid man! I'll run it!

Gardener put his hurt foot down and screamed as a savage hand reached all the way up from his ankle to seize the soft double sac of his testicles.

The old man:

wait wait

It rose on its own. Not far; only an inch or two. The green swamplight brightened even more.

You'll have to guide it, son.

This he was able to manage. It wavered across the green shed like the skeleton of a crazy beach umbrella, nodding and dipping, casting weird elongated shadows on the walls and floor. Gardener hopped clumsily after it, not wanting, not daring, to look back into that insane woman's eyes. Over and over his mind played a single thought: Bobbi Anderson's sister was a witch… a witch… a witch…

He guided the bobbing umbrella out into the sunlight.

Freeman Moss arrived first. He swung the pulp-truck in which Gard had once hitched a ride into Bobbi's dooryard and was out almost before the laboring, farting engine had died. And by Christ, chummy, if the cocksucker wasn't right there, front and center, holding onto something that looked like a woman's clothes whirligig. Man looked like a winded runner. He was holding one of his feet-the left-up, like a dog with a thorn in its paw. That sneaker was bright red, dripping blood.

Looks like Bobbi put at least one good one into you, you snake.

Her murdering pal apparently heard the thought. He looked up and smiled wearily. He was still holding onto the whirligig with the platform stand on the bottom. He was supporting himself on it.

Freeman walked toward him, leaving the driver's door of the old truck hanging open. There was something childlike and winning in the man's grin, and in a moment Freeman understood what it was: with his missing teeth, it was the Halloween punkin grin of a little, boy.

Jesus, I sorta liked you-why'd you have to be such a fuckup?

“What you doing out here, Freeman?” Gardener asked. “You should have stuck home. Watched the Red Sox. The fence is all whitewashed.”

You sonofawhore!

Moss was wearing a down-filled vest but no shirt beneath; the vest was simply the first thing to come to hand as he rushed out of the house. Now he brushed it aside, revealing not a gimmick or a gadget but a Colt Woodsman, He pulled it out. Gardener stood looking at him, holding the whirligig's post, foot up.

Close your eyes. I'll make it quick. I can do that, at least.

(GET DOWN ASSHOLE GET DOWN OR YOU'LL LOSE YOUR HEAD WHEN HE LOSES HIS I DON'T GIVE A TIN SHIT WHO GOES SO GET DOWN IF YOU WANT TO LIVE)

In the tank, Anne Anderson's eyes blazed with stricken hate and fury; her teeth were gone but her bare gums ground together ground together ground together and a trail of small bubbles floated up.

The light pulsed faster and faster, like a carousel speeding up. It became strobelike. The hum rose to a low electric moan, and there was a rich smell of ozone in the shed's air.

On the one lit VDT screen the word

PROGRAM?

was replaced with

DESTROY

It began to flash rapidly, over and over again.

(GET DOWN ASSHOLE OR STAY UP I DON'T CARE WHICH)

Gardener ducked. His bad foot hit the ground. Pain leaped up his leg again. He dropped into the dust on his hands and knees.

Over his head, the whirligig began to spin, slowly at first. Moss stared at it, the gun sagging slightly for a moment in his hand. Realization crossed his face during the last instant he still had one. Then the slender pipes spilled green fire into the dooryard. For a moment the beach-umbrella illusion was perfect and complete. It looked exactly like a big green one that has been partially lowered so that its circular hem touches the ground. But this umbrella was made of fire, and Gard crouched below it, eyes squinted, one hand in front of his face, grimacing as if from strong heat… but there was no heat, at least not here, underneath Sissy's poison toadstool.

Freeman Moss was at the edge of the parasol. His pants blazed up, then the down vest. For a moment the flames were green; then they flared yellow.

He screamed and staggered backward, dropping the gun. Over Gardener's head, the whirligig spun faster. The skeletal metal arms, which had drooped comically downward, were pulled more and more erect by centrifugal force. The parasol's fire-hem bellied outward, and Moss's shoulders and face were enveloped in sheeting flame as he backed away. In Gard's head, that hideous mental wailing began again. He tried to block it out, but there was no way-simply no way. He caught a wavery glimpse of a face running like warm chocolate, then covered his face like a kid at a scary movie.

The flames spun around Bobbi's dooryard in a widening gyre, making a black spiral of dooryard dirt fused into a gritty sort of glass. Moss's pulp-truck and Bobbi's blue pickup were both in the thing's final circumference; the shed was barely beyond it, although its shape danced like a demon in the heat-haze. It was very hot at the edge of the circle, if not where Gard crouched; no doubt of that.

The paint on the hood of Moss's truck and on the sides of the pickup first bubbled, then blackened, then burst into flame, burning down to clean white steel. The litter of bark, sawdust, and woodchips in the back of Moss's truck blazed up like dry kindling in a woodstove. The two big trash-barrels in Bobbi's pickup, made of heavy pressed gypsum, also caught fire and burned like sconces. The dark circle at the edge of the fire-parasol's range became a brand in the shape of a saucer. The army blanket covering the torn seat in the cab of Moss's truck sprang alight, then the seat-covers beneath, then the tindery stuffing; now the entire cab was flickery furnace orange, with the skeletons of springs peering up through the glare.