"Wilkins killed Swanson and buried him in here," Michael said. "Then he dug him up. Why?"

"We don't know Wilkins dug up the body," Valenti pointed out. "That's just guesswork."

"Want to bet against me?"

"No." Valenti probed the cavity in the wall with the flashlight. Spiderwebs filled the space, but they were old and covered with dust. "Spiders lived in here for a while." He played the beam over the dead spider bodies cluttering the floor space at the bottom of the cavity.

"Something killed them?" Michael asked. "Maybe the ghost-thing that was trapped in here with the dead guy?"

Valenti knelt. "No. This wasn't sudden, like through an electrical surge. They starved to death."

Michael stared at the hundreds of bodies inside the makeshift crypt. "Why would Wilkins wall up so many spiders with the corpse?"

"There probably weren't many spiders at first," Valenti said. "The few that got locked up inside the wall had babies." He shone the light on the desiccated corpse at their feet. "They had food. At first."

"Okay," Michael said, edging toward a gross-out meltdown. "That's plenty of bug food chain stuff for me. If somebody like you were teaching biology at the high school, more people would stay awake and lunch wouldn't be such a big draw."

A piece of silver glinted on the dead man's clothes. The material still sustained glowing embers from the lightning strike.

Valenti knelt and took a folding pocketknife from his jeans. Carefully, he speared a delicate network of wires that looked like a bit of shredded aluminum foil. Black stains showed on it, offering mute testimony to the fact that the lightning had hit it.

Michael looked at the metal piece. "What's that?"

"That," Valenti said, "is what I'd call a clue." Then he directed the flashlight beam over stacks of plates containing half-eaten food, beer bottles with cigarette butts floating in them, and a thick book. "So are those."

Michael took in all the dishes and abandoned food, the beer bottles holding cigarette butts. "Somebody put in a lot of time down here."

Valenti studied the food. "None of the food looks more than four or five days old."

"So what?" Michael asked. "Wilkins sat down here spending time with his old, murdered buddy?"

Valenti reached in among the plates and took out the book. He showed the thick tome to Michael.

"The Bible?" Michael asked.

Valenti opened the book at the marked sections. "Yeah. And judging from the areas Wilkins was reading, he was studying how to perform an exorcism."

Staring at the pile of bones lying in the basement floor and remembering the ghost he saw at the Crashdown, Michael said, "Yeah, well, I guess he didn't learn enough."

"It's okay," someone shouted in Kyle's ear. "We've got him. Back off."

Feeling the throbbing pain in his injured arm, Kyle remembered how the room on the remodel job crackled with static electricity before the dead man showed up. He gratefully moved back from the old man lying in the bed.

"He's coming for me!" the old man yelled, fighting against the team of nurses and two doctors that piled on him in an effort to keep him in the bed. "He's dead! Do you hear me? He's standing there with half his head missing! God, it was an accident! It was an accident!"

Kyle walked backward, bumping into Quinlann, who took charge of his injured arm and applied one of the antiseptic compresses the nurses had given him to slow the bleeding.

"What's going on?" Quinlann asked.

Kyle watched the old man struggling against the doctors and nurses. The old guy had surprising strength.

"He thinks he sees a ghost," Kyle said.

"Where?" Quinlann asked.

"In here," Kyle whispered, gazing around the darkened room, looking for the dead man he'd seen earlier. "Somewhere in here with us."

The explosive lightning bolt had taken out the primary power inside the emergency room, but the battery-operated auxiliary lights came on. Some of the darkness went away. There was no sign of the ghost.

"Trank him," one of the doctors told the other. "Get him sedated before we have a riot on our hands."

The doctor rushed past Kyle, heading for the medicinal supplies.

The old man continued to yell fearfully and fight against the hospital staff in an effort to get out of the bed. A moment later, the doctor returned with the hypodermic and injected the sedative into the IV shunt in the back of the patient's hand. Another moment of hoarse yelling ensued, then the old man went limp.

Quinlann guided Kyle back to the bed. "You moved really fast when that old guy started screaming," the construction foreman said.

"Yeah," Kyle said, taking a seat on the bed. He scanned the emergency room, noticing Liz and Max for the first time. Figures. Any weirdness that goes on around here, they gotta be somewhere close by. He wondered where Isabel and Michael were.

Kyle balanced his throbbing arm across his chest, supporting his wrist with his other hand. He glanced at the old man, seeing him sleeping now. A nurse hovered nearby, checking the machines hooked up to the patient.

Liz and Max approached Kyle.

"What are you doing here?" Liz asked, staring at Kyle's arm.

"Accident," Kyle said. "They tell me it looks worse than it is."

"Are you okay?"

"I will be. What are you doing here?"

"Checking on another patient," Liz said. "Did you hear about what happened at the Crashdown?"

Kyle nodded. "The guy who had the heart attack in the Crashdown is here?"

"Somewhere," Liz acknowledged. "Have you talked to your dad?"

"Not since last night," Kyle said. "I was up and gone this morning before he made it out of bed." That was happening more and more lately, and the whole pattern was really beginning to get aggravating.

"He went somewhere with Michael," Max said. "We were wondering where."

Kyle shook his head. "Couldn't tell you."

Quinlann glanced at his watch, then said, "I got a couple phone calls to make, kid. You'll be in good hands with your friends till I get back?"

"Sure," Kyle said. "Why don't you go ahead back to work? I'm going to be fine."

Quinlann shook his head. "I'm old-fashioned. I always go home with the ones I brought to the dance. I brought you in here, I'll see you out and home."

Kyle waited till Quinlann was out of earshot. He lowered his voice. "So what's going on?"

Liz shook her head.

"We don't know," Max said. "Whatever it is, it's going on out at the Mesaliko reservation even worse than here."

Kyle couldn't believe that. "The ghosts are real. I saw one."

"Did you see this one?" Max asked.

"No," Kyle said. "But I have seen them. They're really out there."

"I know," Max said. "I've seen them."

"More than one?"

"Yeah."

Kyle thought about it. "Did you see this one?"

Max nodded.

"How?" Kyle asked. "I didn't see it."

"I don't know. But they want us out of Roswell."

"What makes you think that?" Kyle asked.

"They've told me. And they told Isabel as well."

The statement, delivered so matter-of-factly by Max, chilled Kyle. If something was there in Roswell and was after the alien trio again, then the chance existed that he and his dad would get sucked up into the situation again.

The lights came back on inside the emergency room.

"So what are you guys doing about it?" Kyle asked.

Max shrugged. "We don't know what to do. We're getting together later at Michael's to sort things out."

"What about my dad?"

Max shrugged. "All we know is that Maria said he was with Michael. Michael knows about the meeting at his house. Maybe your dad will be there."

"Neither one of them is particularly notorious for checking in." Feeling the pain burn along his injured arm, Kyle leaned back against the bed and elevated the limb.