“Take it easy, Roy,” he said. “Be cool. I’m going to call for help. It’s going to be okay.”

But Roy shook his head, the movement causing snot and tears and black blood to spray Jerry’s face and shirt. Again, he tried to form words, but they wouldn’t come, and then he was jerking and spasming, like something was trying to burst out from inside of him. He fell to the floor, his head banging against the boards with enough force to dislodge his dead nephew’s toys from their shelves. His hands scraped at the wood, wrenching the nails from the tips of his fingers. Then, as Jerry watched, the tumors on his face began to spread, colonizing the last fragments of untainted skin, rushing to meet one another before their host died.

And as the last trace of white disappeared from his face, Roy Benson stopped struggling and lay still.

Jerry staggered away from the dead man. He stumbled to the door, found the bathroom, and vomited into the sink. He continued retching until only spittle and bad air came up, then looked at himself in the mirror, half expecting to see that terrible blackness erasing his own features, just as it had consumed Roy Benson.

But that was not what he saw. Instead, he turned and looked at the cigarette in the ashtray by the toilet. The ashtray was filled with butts, but this one was still smoking, the last tendril of nicotine dissipating as Jerry watched.

Nobody in this house smoked. Nobody smoked, or drank, or swore. Nobody did anything except work and pray and, over the last few days, rot away like old meat.

And he knew then why the Bensons had not called for help.

Someone was here, he realized.

Someone was here to watch them die.

II

T en days later, and two thousand miles to the east, Lloyd Hopkins said the words that nobody wanted to say.

“We’re going to have to replace that plow.”

Hopkins was wearing his new uniform trousers, which seemed to him to be fitting a little more snugly than they should have. He was wearing new pants because one change of clothes was in the wash, while the second had been ripped to shreds during a recent search for a pair of hikers. The hikers were reported missing by Jed Wheaton, the owner of Easton ’s sole motel, after they failed to return from a scoot around Broad Mountain two days earlier. As it turned out, the couple-from New York, wouldn’t you know it-were apparently overcome by lust for each other while on the trail, and had checked into a lodge under assumed names because they thought it would spice up the occasion. They didn’t bother to tell Jed Wheaton, so when they didn’t come back to their room that night he called the station house, and Chief Lopez rounded up the rescue team, which included Lloyd Hopkins, his only full-time patrol officer, to begin searching first thing next morning. They were still out on the mountain when the couple, their appetites under control again, turned up at the motel to settle their bill and collect the rest of their stuff. Under instructions from the chief, Jed had refused to let them leave until Lopez got back to town and gave them the kind of dressing-down that stopped just short of beating them to a pulp and hanging them from the town’s WELCOME sign as an example to others.

Now, Hopkins, Lopez, and Errol Crisp, Easton ’s new mayor, were all standing in the garage of the municipal building, looking at the town’s sole, ancient snowplow.

“Maybe we could get someone to patch it up,” said Errol. “That worked before.”

Lopez snorted. “Yesterday, it bled oil like someone had just stabbed it with a spear. Today we can’t even get it started. If it was a horse, you’d shoot it.”

Errol gave one of his long sighs, the ones he used whenever the idea of spending money was raised. He was the first black mayor Easton had ever elected, and he was trying to step lightly in his first month on the job. The last thing he wanted was people complaining that he was spending money like a freed slave. At sixty, Errol was the oldest of the three men in the garage. Lopez, who didn’t look even the one-sixteenth Spanish that he claimed to be, was twelve years younger. Lloyd Hopkins, meanwhile, looked like a teenager. A chubby teenager, maybe, but a teenager nonetheless. Errol wasn’t even sure if the kid was legally allowed to drink.

“The council’s not going to like it,” said Errol.

“The council’s going to like it a whole lot less when its members can’t see the town for the snow,” said Lopez. “The council’s not going to like it when businesses start complaining that nobody can park on the street, or that folks are falling off the curb and breaking their legs because they can’t tell where the sidewalk ends and the road begins. For crying out loud, Errol, this thing doesn’t owe us anything. It’s older than Lloyd here.”

Lloyd shifted his thighs, trying to work some space between the fabric of his pants and his skin. When that didn’t work, he tried to discreetly extract the material from the crevices into which it had lodged itself.

“The hell is wrong with you, son?” asked Errol. He took a couple of steps back from the young policeman, just in case whatever was ailing him could jump.

“Sorry,” said Lloyd. “These trousers don’t fit right.”

“Why are you wearing them, they don’t fit right?”

Lopez answered. “He’s wearing them because he was too vain to admit that he’d put on a little weight since the last time he had to buy new pants. Thirty-four inches, my ass. I told you when you were ordering them that you ought to get measured up. Errol here will see thirty-four again before your waist does.”

Lloyd reddened but didn’t reply.

“Don’t worry,” said Lopez. “We’ll get you another pair. Put it down to experience.”

“You better put it down to ‘miscellaneous expenses,’ ” said Errol. “I don’t want people asking how come we buying pants like they’s a shortage on the way. Shit, son, I got a two-year-old grandson don’t need two pairs of pants in a month, and he’s growing like grass in summertime. Two years old, even he knows when a pair of pants ain’t going to fit him.”

Lopez grinned and let the mayor ride on Lloyd for a while. He knew what was going on, even if Lloyd didn’t. Errol would get himself worked up in a lather over a forty-dollar pair of blues so he could feel better about spending one hundred times that amount on a new plow. Once he’d finished, Lopez would walk with him back to his office and they’d work out the details of the purchase. There would be a new plow in the garage in a week. Lloyd might even have trousers that fitted him by then. Still, the young patrolman could be forgiven his little idiosyncrasies. He was honest, diligent, smarter than he looked, except when it came to his weight, and he didn’t claim overtime. Lopez would have a talk with him about his diet. Lloyd tended to listen to his superior on most things. Who knew, maybe those trousers could end up fitting him after all. It might take a while, but Lopez viewed Lloyd as a work in progress in any number of ways.

Easton was a typical New Hampshire town: not quite pretty, but not ugly either; a little too far away from the big winter playgrounds to enjoy much of a tourist trade from them, but close enough for the locals to hop in a car and spend a day on the slopes, if they chose. It had a couple of bars, a main street on which more than half of the businesses made a reasonable income year-round, and one motel, which was as much a hobby as a business for its owner. Its school had an adequate football team and a basketball team that most people preferred not to mention. It also had a sense of civic pride out of all proportion to its apparently modest aspect; a conscientious, if frugal, town council; a police department that consisted of just two full-time cops and a handful of part-timers; and a crime rate just slightly below the average for a town of its size. All told, the chief sometimes reflected, there were better places to live, but there were also far, far worse.