"So what'cha gonna do with all that stuff," she asked.

"Cast a magic spell."

"Really? Like a love spell or something?"

"Don't know."

Tammy's mother called her away, much to Duke's relief. He'd always made fun of Earl for complaining about the attentions of nubile young girls. Now he finally understood Earl's dilemma. The human portion of Duke's soul didn't want to take unnecessary advantage of Tammy. The raging beast simmering just below the surface had no such constraints. It saw Tammy as a potential and all-too-willing mate. The beast threw p.o.r.nographic flashes across his consciousness. He pushed them back.

"Is this enough, son?"

"Huh?"

Mary shook a plastic bag with a few ounces of dried raven's eye. "Is this enough? It's all we got."

"Uh. Yeah. That'll do."

"Anything else?"

"Got any belladonna?"

Bill, who now stood beside Mary, was a short, stocky man who looked as if his skin had been left to tan in the desert sun for the last four hundred years. "Don't think we got any."

Mary jabbed an elbow in his ribs. "Why don't you go check?"

" 'Cuz I'm pretty sure we don't got any."

"Well, why don't you make sure?"

He shot her a hard glare. She shot back a harder glare. Bill withered and shuffled into the back room, mumbling.

While Duke and Mary waited for his return, Tammy and her mother went about their shopping. Duke tried not to watch Tammy as she bent to retrieve Liquid-Plumr or stretched on her tiptoes to reach the canned goods on the really high shelves. He couldn't help himself. The beast grew stronger as the moon grew fuller. By the month's end, he doubted he could resist her. Hopefully, she'd be bored with him by then. Or his business with the diner would be done, and he'd leave Rockwood and temptation behind.

If not . . .

Well, if not, then it was only a matter of time.

Tammy caught him staring at her. She smiled in a way that was both full of girlish innocence and seductive allure. Mary caught him staring, too, and shook her head in a most disapproving fashion. Bill was too busy staring himself to catch anyone else.

He tore his eyes from Tammy's jeans just long enough to toss a paper bag on the counter. "Belladonna. Anything else you wantin' there, son?"

"No. That's it."

Duke paid the bill, dipping deep into his nearly empty pockets. Freeing Earl's girlfriend was draining their limited resources. Duke hoped she was worth it. Cathy was bound to find out what an a.s.shole Earl was. If she could see the positive traits buried beneath his avalanche of character flaws, then they might stand a chance. If she didn't, and Duke didn't reckon she would, she'd take off. Earl would take it hard. The poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d had it bad for the girl. If things went south, he'd be a real son of a b.i.t.c.h for the next couple of months. Duke wasn't looking forward to it.

In the parking lot, Marshall Kopp's cruiser pulled up. The sheriff rolled down his window and stuck out his head. "Mornin', Duke."

"Sheriff."

"How are things at the diner?"

"Gettin' worse."

"I was afraid of that. I been pretty busy myself, lately. Rained h.o.r.n.y toads over at the trailer park, and I found Curtis Mayfair running 'round last night, covered in green sludge, rambling about alien abductions. And the shrieking yucca at Lover's Grove has stopped screaming and started laughing. That ain't never a good sign. Sumthin's brewing. Sumthin' bad." The sheriff ducked his head in the cruiser just long enough to take a drink of soda.

"I've been checking all the cult hot spots: Sander's Mill, the old Robertson place, Canin Field. Every place that's lonely and deserted that a bunch might be able to get together and practice black magic."

"Any luck?"

"None so far. My guess is they know we're lookin' for 'em and are keepin' a low profile. But it's only a matter of time before they slip up. And you know what they say, it's always the last place you look."

"Yup." Duke tossed his sack of magical supplies in his pickup's cab. He climbed in after it.

"See ya' 'round, Duke."

The cruiser took off.

Duke started the truck. He glanced back at the store. Tammy waved from the doors and blew him a kiss. He caught her scent lingering in the breeze. She smelled good. Young, eager, and fertile. A perfect mate. Every muscle in his body tightened. The steering wheel bent in his grip. The impression of his large hands was left in the imitation leather.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n."

Drawing on his dwindling reserves of self-control, he fled from Rockwood General Supply and Auto Sales at a leisurely forty miles per hour.

Reality is like a fruitcake; Pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface. Ancient things, older than time itself, smothered beneath the crushing interdimensional weight of what mortals, in their limited understanding, would call existence. These are the dark things: forgotten shadows of what once was but no longer is, malign dreams of what might have been yet should never be, and twisted phantoms of ent.i.ties that never truly lived but nonetheless cannot die. Most horrible of these nightmares, if such a value could truly be measured, are the old G.o.ds. Locked away in the deepest, darkest pit like the hideous, redheaded stepchild of Creation shoved to the back of the cosmic closet to be ignored.

Some things refuse to be ignored.

To mix metaphors, the closet door in Gil's All Night Diner opened just a crack, and a nasty walnut slipped through. A nasty, rotten walnut eager to chip the tooth of all that was good and decent.

At the moment, Loretta was blissfully unaware of this fact. Just as she was unaware of the spectral terrier sitting in the corner of the kitchen, watching her clean the grill.

Napoleon did not fully understand his current state of existence. He only knew that most people could not see him anymore. He vaguely remembered chasing a jackrabbit across a street and getting squashed by a pickup. He remembered floating over the flattened body of a dog that looked very much like him, but obviously couldn't be. Then there was the light. It called to him in a chorus of playful barks and howls. The glorious scent of raw hamburger and sausage drew him closer. His canine mind knew that on the other side of that light was a paradise of unending mountains of liver-flavored treats and things in constant need of being peed on and slow rabbits. Though not too slow. He drifted into the light, but something made him stop. The jackrabbit that had led him to his untimely demise sat by the road. A rabbit was a rabbit, and Napoleon decided that this one was not getting away so easily. He descended to earth, and the light disappeared. He didn't notice.

He caught his quarry though he quickly discovered there wasn't much his immaterial body could do to it. Still, it had been a good chase, and that was enough.

Loretta sc.r.a.ped at a stubborn greasy blob with a spatula. Grunting, she shifted her immense weight from one side to another. Her ample b.u.t.t shook as she chipped away at her ch.o.r.e, one stubborn, brown fleck at a time.

Napoleon studied the trembling rear end. Cheeks tightened and unclenched rhythmically, much like a pair of sumo wrestlers struggling beneath a cotton tarp. The dance stopped just long enough for Loretta to wipe the sweat from her face and take a long drink from the soda beside her. Then it was back to work.

Napoleon could have watched her for hours. Since dying, he'd become something of a people watcher. They were fascinating creatures, and he had yet to understand much of anything they did, except for eating, mating, and relieving themselves. And even the way they did that last thing was odd. But not understanding humans made them all the more interesting. Of course, there were other interesting things besides people. Slimy, green tentacles slithering from beneath refrigerators for example.

The dog jumped to alert and bounded between the thing under the refrigerator and Loretta. He growled as the tentacles slipped forward. When that didn't work, he barked furiously in an effort to show he meant business and to alert her to the danger reaching for her ankles.

She just ignored him.

Finally, he snapped at the end of a tentacle. He didn't expect to actually bite it and was pleasantly surprised when his teeth connected.

Dogs, even ghostly ones, understood very little of the true workings of the universe. Less than even human beings, if such a thing can be possible. Napoleon didn't know that the thing under the refrigerator existed in a cross-dimensional state, simultaneously dwelling across two dozen or so planes of existence. And that one of those planes happened to be the ectoplasmic sphere, thus allowing ghosts to interact with the thing. He only knew that he could bite this, and so he bit harder. He sank his teeth in the squishy flesh. It tasted horrible, but it'd been a long time since he'd tasted anything, so he relished it.

The thing under the refrigerator squealed.

Loretta turned to see a ma.s.s of tentacles whipping about in a twisting dance. It lashed violently from side to side. Napoleon's jaws slipped loose, and he was sent flying into a wall with enough force to crack the spine of a material terrier. Napoleon just kept going, pa.s.sing out of the kitchen.

The thing under the refrigerator rumbled. The rusty Frigidaire rocked to one side, nearly tipping over. Tentacles grayed and shimmered as if they might fade away. They probed the floor and felt along the counters. A limb s.n.a.t.c.hed up a blender and tossed it away. It shattered against the floor.

Something about the thing under the refrigerator scared Loretta, and she had never been easily scared. Regular battles with the walking dead had only made her more stubborn. The thing was unpleasant to look at, a slithering, slimy ma.s.s of unnatural horror, but she'd seen worse. It wasn't the form of the thing that bothered her. It was the almost psychic realization that this thing, whatever the h.e.l.l it was, was completely alien. As far beyond mortal comprehension as anything could be.

And just as she knew this without knowing, she knew that this was just a tiny piece of the thing. Its whole body would smother the Earth, and there was nothing the thing under the refrigerator wanted more than this.

"Not in my kitchen, you heathen demon."

Pushing away her terror, she grabbed a hanging cleaver and hacked at one of the writhing tendrils. The blade sliced through greenish, boneless flesh. The thing screeched. The bit of severed tentacle fell to the floor and burst into flame even as a new tip grew for its damaged limb.

"d.a.m.nation."

Something moved beneath the floor. The tile rose and fell in liquid waves. The cabinets opened all at once. More tentacles poked their way through the back of the cupboards that, by Loretta's reckoning, had become blackened portals to h.e.l.l. This was entirely wrong. h.e.l.l was a Candy Land compared to the dark void the thing hailed from. Eyes and tongues and bleeding orifices covered the tentacles in no particular pattern other than chaos. Boils grew and popped, dripping a thick, yellow syrup.

Loretta made her way to the kitchen door, mere feet away. She ducked and wove between the misshapen limbs. One got too close for comfort until she backed it off with a strike of her cleaver. She didn't know what to expect on the other side of the door. She half-expected a giant eye or swirling vortex of nothingness.

Instead, she found Duke. Napoleon stood by his side, though she didn't see the ghost.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"It's in the kitchen."

"What's in the kitchen?"

She struggled to put it in words. There was only one description that came to mind. "Some thing."

Napoleon hopped in front of the door, unleashing a hail of vicious barks. At least as vicious as a terrier was able to bark.

Duke guided her aside with a gentle hand and pushed open the door.

There was nothing there. Nothing but the kitchen, some open cupboards, a broken blender, and a slightly askew refrigerator.

"It was here. Under there. In there. And there. In the floor. Everywhere."

Duke and Loretta searched the room top to bottom. There wasn't a single tentacle or h.e.l.l portal to be found.

"I saw it," she said.

"I believe you, but whatever it was, it's not here now."

"But where could it have gotten to?"

Duke shrugged. He had no answers.

The storeroom door opened slowly, and Earl emerged, sleepy-eyed and sluggish. It was the middle of the day. He should have been sleeping. It took a h.e.l.l of a lot to get the un-dead up before dusk.

"We are in some serious s.h.i.t, Duke."

Earl collapsed, sprawling across a counter. Duke checked him, but he was asleep again.

"Is he okay?" Loretta asked.

Duke tossed the thin vampire over his shoulder and returned him to his trunk.

"What did he mean?"

"We'll have to wait till he wakes up again to ask," Duke replied. "But I can tell you one thing. It ain't gonna be good news."

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, Napoleon spotted a lingering tentacle behind the refrigerator. The swollen, purple eye on its tip and the dog engaged in a short staring contest. Napoleon snarled. The thing behind the refrigerator vanished into a shadow and back into the cosmic bas.e.m.e.nt.

With a virile yip, the terrier trotted back to Duke's side.

When dusk rolled around, Earl climbed out of his trunk and poured himself a cup of coffee that he downed in two-point-four seconds.

"It's evil."

He poured another, which he gulped down in two-point-one.

"Kinda figured that already, Earl," Duke said.

Earl watched the swirling coffee in the pot. "You don't get it, Duke. I'm not talking about plain ol', nasty sort of evil. I'm talking 'bout evil with a capital 'E'. Something so foul and sinister that there aren't even words to really describe it."

"Really, really evil," Duke suggested.

Earl slammed his empty coffee mug against the counter. It cracked in two. "d.a.m.n it, you stupid son of a b.i.t.c.h! You aren't listenin' to me." He grabbed a new, unbroken mug and the coffeepot and sat at the table with Duke and Loretta. "She, at least, saw it. She knows what I'm talkin' about."

Loretta nodded. "He's right."

"Really, really p.i.s.sed off, bada.s.s, evil," Duke said. "I got it."

"No, you don't." Earl sighed. "You know how it works with me, Duke. When I'm sleepin', my mind shuts off with my body, but some part of it is still working." He turned to Loretta. "Sort'a like a supernatural radio. Now most things, even really bad things, don't have enough power to register. When something does, it's always pretty G.o.dd.a.m.n serious."

"Like what?" she asked.

"Well, there was that earthquake in Mexico while back. Radiated enough psychic suffering that I woke up for about ten seconds or so. And then there was that time when the n.a.z.is invaded Poland. I just knew that was going to be trouble." He did his coffee routine again. "And when they canceled The Green Hornet, I couldn't get back to sleep for half-an-hour. Man, I loved that show."

"Kato kicked a.s.s," Duke agreed.

"Anyway, all that stuff is nuthin' compared to the vibe I picked up this afternoon when that thing appeared in the kitchen. If you put all that together with every psychic blip I've ever detected in my sleep of death, you still wouldn't equal the dark evil that thing shoved in my head." He shuddered at the recollection. "Lucky for me, my mind blocked out most of it. Otherwise, I'd be too crazy to talk right now. Maybe ever again."

Duke nodded.

Earl snorted. "Look, you dips.h.i.t. Most people think to be really evil you have to have a choice. That you can't be really bad unless you can be good. They're wrong. Real evil, true evil, not just that kill-everybody-you-don't-like or nuke-a-country-'cuz-you-don't-care-for-the-way-they-spell-its-name kind of evil, comes from not having any good in you. Ever.

"People aren't made like that. Everybody's got some good in 'em. Or had some at some point. But this thing, it never has. It's absolute and eternal . . ." He rubbed his temples, looking in vain for the right word.