"Jilly's dead." It was shockingly easy to say it so soon. "It-that thing, it-"

"I know. And I know you think me and Ormly is up to something, squirreled away up here, that we're somehow responsible. We ain't. I'd never hurt a little girl, and Ormly's never harmed no person nor animal. It's just . . . there's a certain order of things, here."

I had begun watching the ugly shed skin, still yielding, relaxing. It might reinflate and attack.

"Primmy and I kept a henhouse. We loved fryers and fresh eggs. One day I went out and all our chickens had been killed." The drama replayed behind his eyes. "You know how chickens run around after you cut off their heads, too dumb to know they're dead? Christ almighty. Twenty chickens, and half of them still strutting around when I got there. Without heads. It came down that night to eat the heads. And left the chickens. We'd been living in Point Pitt about two months."

My brain dipped sickeningly toward blackout. It was an almost pleasing sensation. Ebb tide of the mind; time to go to sleep. I sat down hard in the chair next to Dunwoody's and swallowed some schnapps without even tasting it.

"I had two hounds, Homer and Jethro, and an old Savage and Fox double-barrel, not as fancy as that pumpgun you got, but mean enough to stop a runaway truck dead. I laid up in the chicken coop the next night. 'Long about two in the morning, it stuck its head in and I let it have both barrels in the face. It was as close as you are to me. It yowled and ran off into the woods, and I set Homer and Jethro on it. Next morning, I found them. That thing took two loads of double-ought buckshot in the face and still gutted both my dogs. Ormly loved them old mutts."

I remembered the sound it made, the ground-glass screech. I didn't have to ask whether Dunwoody's dogs had been found with their heads intact.

Dunwoody cleared his throat phlegmatically and hefted himself out of the chair, to pry open a stuck bureau drawer behind the TV set. "Next night, it came back again. Walked into my home bold as you please and took my baby Sarah. It was slow getting out the window. Sluggish, with its belly full. I shot it again like a fool. Didn't do no good. Let me show you something."

He handed across a brown-edged, fuzzy piece of sketchbook paper. "Careful with it. It's real old."

It was a pencil rendering of the Dunwoody house, done in a stark and very sophisticated woodcut style. The trim and moldings stood out in relief. The building was done in calm earth tones, complimented by trees in full bloom. The forest shaded up the hillside in diminishing perspective. The strokes and chiaroscuro were assured. The drawing deserved a good matte and frame. I tilted it toward the light of the television and made out a faded signature in the lower right, done with a modest but not egocentric flourish.

O. Dunwoody.

He handed me a photograph, also slightly foxed, in black-and-white with waffled snapshot borders. A furry diagonal crease bisected a robustly pregnant woman packed into a paisley maternity dress. She had the bun hairdo and slight bulb nose that had always evoked the 1940s for me-World War II wives, the Andrews Sisters, all of that. Hugging her ferociously was a slim, dark-haired boy of nine or so, smiling wide and unselfconsciously. He had his father's eyes, and they blazed with what Dunwoody would call the smarts.

I tried to equate the boy in the photo with Ormly's overgrown, cartoonish body, or to the imbecilic expression on his face as he stood placidly in his corner. No match.

"Night after it took baby Sarah, it came back. We were laying to bushwhack it outside. It flanked us. Ormly came in for a drink of water, and there it was, all black and bristly and eating away on his mamma. He couldn't do nothing but stand there and scream; all the starch had run right out of him. He looked kinda like you do right now. I ran back in. That was the first time it bit me."

I extended my wrist for him to see, and his eyes lowered with guilt.

"Then you know that part already," he said.

Ormly stood parked like a wax dummy while his father went to him and looked over the wasteland of his son, hoping, perhaps to read a glimmer of the past in the dull eyes. There was no light there, only the reflected snow of the TV set, now tuned to nothingness.

"Ormly was crazy with fear and wanted to run. He loved his mamma and his little sister and the dogs, but he knew the sense in running. I was full up with ideas of what a man should do. A man didn't go beggin' to the police. The police don't understand nothing; they don't care and don't want to. A man should settle with his own grief, I thought, and Ormly wanted to be a man, so he hung with me."

Brave kid, I thought. Braver than me.

"Ormly came up with the idea of setting it on fire. He'd seen some monster movie where'd they'd doused the monster with kerosene and touched it off with a flare gun. We set up for it. We knew it was coming back, because it knew we didn't like it and would try to kill it. It knew how we felt. We were the ones that had intruded on its territory, and when you do that, you either make peace or you make a stand. Or you run. And that's what we shoulda done, because we were prideful and we didn't know what we were up against. We shoulda run like hell."

Dunwoody was stoking his own coals now, like a stump revival preacher getting ready to rip Satan a new asshole.

"Sure enough, the son of a bitch came down after us that night. You couldn't have convinced me there was another human soul in Point Pitt. All the houses were dark. They all knew, that is, everyone but me. When I spotted it crossing the backyard, in the moonlight, it was different than before. It'd dropped its hide, just like a bullsnake." He indicated the rancid leftover on the floor with a weak wave of his hand, not wanting to see it.

He did not look at Ormly, either, even as he spoke of him.

"The boy was perfect, by god. He stepped out from his hiding place, exposed himself to danger just so he could dump his pail of gasoline right smack into that thing's open mouth. I set my propane torch to it and it tagged me on the back of the hand-just a scratch, no venom. Or maybe the gas all over my hand neutralized it. We watched it shag ass into the hills, shrieking and dropping embers, setting little fires in the bushes as it ran. We hooted and jumped and clapped each other on the back like we were big heroes or something, and the next morning we tried to find it. All we turned up was a shed skin, like that one. And when the sun went down again, it came back. For Ormly. I swear to you, Mister Taske, it knew who had thought of burning it. But it didn't kill Ormly." The memory shined in Dunwoody's swelling eyes. He had witnessed what had happened. "Didn't kill him. It took a big, red mouthful out of the back of his head, and . . . and . . . "

He extended his scarred arms toward me, Christ-like, seeking some absolution I could not give. Bite marks peppered them everywhere, holes scabbing atop older holes.

"You get so you can't go without," he said dully. "You won't want to. You'll see."

I was aware of speaking in an almost sub-aural whisper. "Why didn't you leave?"

He shook his head sadly, ignoring me. "One day it just showed up. That's all anybody knows. Whether it came down out of the hills or crawled out of the ocean don't really matter. What matters is it came here and decided to stay. Maybe somebody fed it."

The speed maxed out in my bloodstream, hitting its spike point. The murky room resolved to sharp-edged clarity around me in a single headlong second. I'd broken through, and rage sprang me from my chair, to brace Dunwoody so he could no longer retreat into obfuscations or babble.

"Why the hell didn't you leave?" I screamed in his face.

He flinched, then considered his ruined arms again, and avoided the easy answer. "We don't like the city."

I remembered Suzanne, browsing the house. All her remarks about getting back to nature, slowing down, escaping the killer smog, hightailing it from the city as though it was some monster that had corrupted us internally and conspired to consume us. The big, bad neon nightmare. What penetrated now was the truth-that the state of nature is the last thing any thinking being would want. The true state of nature is not romantic. It is savage, primal, unforgivingly hostile. Mercy is a quality of civilization. Out here, stuck halfway between the wilds and the cities, a man had to settle his own grief. And if he could not . . .

My father, the guy who'd taught me to keep all guns loaded, had another adage I'd never had to take seriously yet: If you can't kill it with a gun, son-run.

"You've squared off with it," Dunwoody said. "That choice was yours. Believe me when I say it knows you don't like it." The provincial superiority was seeping back into his tone. "Have you figured it out yet, or has all that toe-food crap turned your brain to marl?"

Near the nub of his right elbow, the old man had sustained a fresh bite. It was all I could see. The thing had bitten Dunwoody recently-and Dunwoody had let it.

He sighed at my thickness. "It's coming back. Might even come back tonight. You're new here, after all."

I bolted then, with a strangled little cry. It was a high sound, childish, womanish. A coward's bleat, I thought.

Ormly had left my shotgun on the kitchen table, and I snatched it up as I ran, hurdling the demolished door, heedless of the stabbing pains in my hand, or the blood I could feel welling from the ruptured wound on my foot. My shoe had turned crimson. I ran so fast I did not see Dunwoody nodding to himself, like a man who has made the desired impression, and I missed his final words to his huge, dullwitted son.

"Ormly, you go on with Mister Taske, now. You know what you have to do."

Three feet more.

Three feet more, and the world would be set right. Three feet more to reach the hole in the fence, where Brix had died. Then came three more feet to reach the back door, to the stairs, to our bedroom. Three seconds more and I could shake Suzanne awake, pack her into the BMW, and bust posted limits red-lining it out of this nightmare. If the city wanted us back, no problem. We could scoot by on our plastic for months. My life was not a spaghetti western; I did not bash through my degree and get ulcers so I could do symbol-laden combat with monsters.

And Jilly . . .

The south window had been shoved neatly up. The drapes fluttered and there was no hint of broken glass, of the horrorshow trespass my brain had pictured for me. The creature was snuggled between Suzanne's legs on the bed. Eating. It looked very different without its skin.

Thick braids of exposed sinew coiled up each of its legs, filament cable that bunched and flexed. The knobs of its spine were strapped down by double wrapping of inflated, powerful muscle tissue as smoothly grooved and perfect as plastic. It no longer required an envelope of skin. An absurd little triangular flap covered its anus like a pointed tail.

Suzanne's eyes were slitted, locked. She was beyond feeling what was being done to her. Another orgasm hissed past her teeth, gutturally. Nothing more.

The skeleton key dropped from my trembling fingers and bounced on the hardwood floor. The thing on the bed had cranked its blood-slathered muzzle around to dismiss me. I was no big deal.

With a sidelong yank of its head, it worried loose some morsel anchored by stubborn tendons to the chest cavity. It was about halfway to its favorite part. The scraps it had sampled and discarded littered the bed wetly. If it had chanced across any tumors during its methodical progress toward the brain, I was sure it had crunched them up like popcorn. Piggishly, it lapped and slurped.

Suzanne looked at me as she came again, convulsing as much as her sundered body would let her. A thin stringer of frothy lung blood leapt onto her chest.

I kept my eyes in contact with hers as I snapped the trigger of the Remington, thinking how much I loved her.

The Nitro Mag load tore our bed to smithereens. Suzanne's dead arm jerked up, flopped back. Bloodstained goosedown took to the air, drifting. I worked the slide one-handed and fired again. The French doors disintegrated. Rickrack jumped from the bedstands to shatter on the floor.

The creature eased out its caked snout and saw what had just befallen that part of the feast it had been saving for last. Its impossibly wide, hinged maw dropped open to screech at me, as though I owed it something and had reneged. I shot it in the face, as Dunwoody had years ago. It snapped at the incoming shot like a bloodhound at gnats, then obstinately sank its nose back into its grisly dinner.

Suzanne was no longer on the bed. The corpse was not identifiable as anything but dead, butchered meat.

I slammed the bedroom door hard; don't ask why. There was an instant when I might have jammed the barrel between my teeth and swallowed that last shot myself. Instead, a pungent odor hauled me, staggering, to the stair landing.

Downstairs, the floor was wet and sloppy, glistening. Ormly waited for me, a ten-gallon jerry can of gasoline in each massive hand, smiling.

The buffeting heat was so intense that we had to back across the street to avoid getting our eyebrows flash-fried.

I watched the south window of our bedroom grow dreamy behind a sheet of orange flame. There was absolutely no exterior access. The thing had crawled up the front of the house like a fly, and clinging, had opened the window with one paw.

Neither of us saw it jump out, trailing sparks. The expression on Ormly's face frightened me. It was the closest thing to a glimmer of abstract thought I'd yet seen mar his slablike, mannequin countenance. He stared, unblinking, into the skyrocketing licks of fire.

"Hotter," he said. "Stronger. Better this time."

By dawn we were down to smoldering debris. I did not want to scrutinize the wreckage too closely, for fear of recognizing blackened bones.

Ormly stood in the backyard, his face dead with a kind of infinite sadness. I followed his gaze to the ground, and saw a deeply-dug, charred clawprint. The foot that had embossed itself there had been so hot that the grass had been cooked into an unmistakable pattern.

Ormly's mitt-sized hands pushed me toward my BMW, parked past the mailboxes. When I dug in my heels, he plucked me up and carried me. It was too easy to know why.

When night fell, the ground-glass shriek would waft down from the forest, and Point Pitt's new god would return.

Back in the arms of the city, I waited around for fate to come crashing down on my head with charges of murder and arson. Civilized accusations. No one came knocking.

Like I said earlier, this morning I sat and watched a cat disembowel a rail lizard. I watched much longer than I had to in order to get the point. Then my eyelids pushed down to allow swatches of stop-and-go sleep.

The nightmares of my past replaced those of the here and now.

A week after I'd turned thirteen, the school sadist at my junior high decreed that the day had come to pound every last speck of shit out of my pasty white body. Ross Delaney was the eldest son of a local garbageman-to be fair, he took a lot of socially maladjusting crap just for that. He was coasting through his third encore performance at the seventh-grade level. A seventh-grader who had a down mustache, drove his own jalopy to school, smoked, and hung out with peers destined for big things: aggravated assault, rape, grand theft auto . . .

Ross had made me loan him a pen once in study hall and he'd dismantled it after scrawling on the back of my shirt and laughing like I was the world's biggest a-hole. My buddy Blake and I had discovered a bunch of disposable hypodermic needles while scrounging for intriguing goodies in the trash dumpster of a health clinic, reasoning that it was against some law for them to throw out anything really dangerous, right? Those hypos made primo mini-squirt guns, and that's all Blake and I thought of using them for. They were tech, they were cool. They were enormously appealing to Ross, who threatened to put out my eye with a Lucky if I didn't give him one. Right before lunch, Ross was scooped up by Mr. Shanks, El Principal of the humorless specs and full-length gray plastic raincoat. Needles in school were serious business, and I soon found myself being paged for an interview. I denied everything. Ross' eyes, yellow-brown, settled on me like a pronouncement of execution by hanging.

He laid for me in the parking lot. There was no way around him. He loomed above me. I wanted to say something pacifying, babble that might exonerate us both as rebels cornered by an unfair system. Ross' brain lacked the logic links such a ploy needed to work. Trying to appease him had always been a pussy's game with an automatic loser. Guess who.

The next thing I knew, I was catching Ross' hand with my face.

My neckbones popped as my head snapped around, and my hand made the mistake of contracting into a fist. My left eye filled up with knuckles and stopped seeing. He snagged a handful of my hair and used his knee to loosen all the molars on the side of my head nearest the pavement. I bit tarmac and tasted blood. I curled up. He stared kicking me with his Mexican pimp boots, shouting incoherently, his face totally glazed.

My deck was discarded, so I called for my mom. I honestly thought it was my moment to die, and so reverted to instant babyhood, bawling and dribbling and yowling for my mother. Ross' cohorts ate it up. What a queer, what a pussy, he wants his momma. Ross kicked again and I felt a lung try to jump out my throat. He yelled for me to shut up. Something cracked sharply inside me.

Then something burst inside me.

It wasn't my liver exploding. It was something slag-hot, bursting brightly outward, filling me, popping on full bore like sprinkler systems during a fire, or an airbag in a car crash. The only sensation I can compare it to is the time my cardiologist broke an ampule of amyl nitrate under my nose, to test my pump. Only my internal ampule was full of something more like PCP. I was flooded to the brim-WHAM! My fingertips tingled. Both hands locked into fists. I scared the crap out of myself; I think I yelped. Instead of stopping the tip of Ross' next incoming bonebreaker, I rolled out, stood up, and faced him.

Then I kicked the shit out of him, impossibly enough.

Hesitation scampered behind his eyes when he saw me get up. But there was no mystery in it for him. The medulla section of his primate mind saw an opportunity to stomp some serious ass and would not be denied. If I could stand, the massacre would just be more interesting. Ross roared and came in like a freight train. His fist was black and sooty and callused.

I snatched that meteor out of the air and diverted his momentum, planting my elbow in his mouth, then whip-cracking him into a one-eighty snap that left his gonads open to my foot. They decompressed with a squish and he hit the pavement on hands and knees . . . and then I was kicking him, blood flushing my face. Every bullshit, picayune adolescent injustice ever suffered now rushed home, and I went at Ross like a berserk wolverine spiked on crank. Ribs staved inward. Snot and blood lathered his chin.

And I felt good.

Mr. Shanks, the principal, yanked me off of Ross Delaney, school tyrant. He was too horrified by the damage he saw to wonder how I'd done it. I got my fine white ass suspended.

That school had been my introduction to life in the city. Since then, the city had treated me right. My apartment never got robbed; my car never got boosted. Degree. Master's. Wife. Promotion. Child. Success. Suzanne and Jilly had been excited by our move to Point Pitt; I had been the reluctant one.

Now my city had repudiated me. I'd come crawling back after giving it the finger, and the only thing it would show me was an ugly orange tabby tearing the intestines out of a lizard that wasn't dead all the way yet.

In its reptile eyes, the suffering as it was eaten.

I wanted to file a complaint. To protest that none of this was my fault. I didn't want to leave; they made me do it. That would be like trying to make nice to Ross Delaney. Too late for that.

I had spent the night in a parking lot and there was dry snot on my lace, from crying. Returning to the city had not erased Suzanne or Jilly or poor old goddamn Brix. So much for the snapshot.

The BMW's motor caught on the third try. I noticed blood staining the walnut of the gearshift as I backed out of the alleyway.

I wanted my mommy. But she wasn't around this time, either. Not here.

The blackened garbage dump that, yesterday, had been my new home had cooled. If anyone had come out to investigate, they were gone now. Birds twittered in the forest, above all this folly.

Dunwoody finally spotted me and came out; I have to credit him for having that much iron left. He motioned me into his squalid little home and we sat drinking until the sun went down. I watched Ormly shamble about. Such a waste, there.

The shrieking I expected began to peal down from the woods after dusk. My hands quivered on the arms of Dunwoody's dusty easy chair. They had not stopped shaking since last night.

"You forgot your pumpgun," said Dunwoody. "Had Ormly fetch it. Only two loads innit though." He drained his schnapps glass and burped, half-in, half-out, a state he clearly wanted to maintain.

The clear liquor trickled into me like kerosene. I thought of it as fuel. I noticed the barrels of the shotgun were warm; that seemed odd, somehow.

Clutching the Remington, I left limping, favoring my gashed foot. Breathing was a chore. My eyes pulsed in time to the pounding of my metabolism as I picked my way to the center of my burned-out grave of a home. One end of the barbequed sofa jutted from the debris like the stern of a sinking ship. Here was the banister-fissured, carbonized, its stored heat energy bled free. Over here, smashed shards of terra cotta from Suzanne's conservatory. Skeletal junk, all exuding the reek of an overflowing ashtray. Soft clouds of soot puffed up with each step I took.

On the border of the feeder road, the streetlamp sputtered blue, then white, throwing tombstone shadows down from the row of mailboxes. The residents of Point Pitt had drawn their curtains. The houses on the hillside were dark against whatever might come in the night. Not secure. Just lacking light and any form of human sympathy.

Dunwoody was the exception. I saw his drawn face appear in a crack of drape, then zip away, then return. I'd lost my Cartier watch, so I used Dunwoody's periodic surveillance to mark time. I couldn't recall losing the watch, not that it mattered. Night vapors tingled the hair on my arms. My last bath had been yesterday afternoon, eons ago, and by now I was as aromatic as stale beef bouillon.

"Come on, come on!" I lashed out at a fire-ravaged plank and it crumbled into brittle charcoal cinders. My voice echoed back from the treeline twice.

Lava-colored eyes emerged to assess me from behind the still-standing brick chimney. Chatoyant pupils tossed back the street light in dual crosscut shapes.

A conventional defensive move would draw it out, confident of its own invincibility. I chambered a round as loudly as I could. "This is for you! Come on-it's what you want, right?"

Motion, hesitant, like Ross Delaney, unsure. There was a smear of bright bronze as the eyes darted to a new vantage.

"Come on, bag of shit!" Fuck reaction time. The gun went boom and a mean bite leapt out of the chimney. Pointed chunks of brick flew into the creature's face. It did not blink. The Remington's report settled debris all around.

I dropped the gun into the ashes.

Its outer tissue was pinkish, as though battened with blood from an earlier feed. The alien eyes blazed. When it saw me lose the shotgun, it decided, and in three huge bounds the distance between us was reduced to nothing. I saw it in midair, rippling, its thorny claws extruded from their cowls and coming for my face.