I threw some withering scorn at her: "What happened to the indefatigable optimist?"

"You're smothering her."

She had lobbed the scorn back at me so fast that my face was flushed and burning with it before I fully realized I'd taken the hitting two stories under the evil streets and surrounded 'by the evil earth of Snow Village, we watched Honker, Crinkles, and the nameless maniac plant explosives at key structural points and plug timers into the charges.

You might think that our terror sharpened by the minute. I speak from much experience when I say that it isn't possible to sustain terror at a peak for long periods of time.

If monstrous misfortune can be called a disease, terror is a symptom of it. Like any symptom, it is not expressed continuously to the same degree, but waxes and wanes. Sick with the flu, you don't vomit every minute of the day and are not in the throes of diarrhea from dawn to dusk.

That may be a disgusting analogy, but it's apt and vivid. I'm glad I didn't think of it while chained to those chairs with Lorrie, because in my eagerness to patch things up with her and break the frigid silence between us, I probably would have blurted it out just to have something to say.

I soon discovered that Lorrie wasn't one to gild an offense or nurse her anger. In perhaps two minutes, she broke the silence and became my chum and co-conspirator once more.

"Crinkles is the weak link," she said softly.

I loved her throaty voice, but I wished that she would use it to say something that made sense.

At that moment Crinkles was packing plastic explosives around the base of a ceiling-support column. He handled the boom clay with no more trepidation than a child playing with Silly Putty.

"He doesn't look like a weak link, but maybe you're right," I said by way of conciliation.

"Trust me, he is."

Now with both hands busy shaping explosives, Crinkles held a detonator in his teeth.

"Do you know why he's the weak link?" Lorrie asked.

"I'm eager to hear."

"He likes me."

I counted to five before replying, the better to ensure that my voice was free of an argumentative tone. "He wants to kill you."

"Before that."

"Before what?"

"Before he asked the grinning feeb if he could kill me, he very distinctly expressed a romantic interest."

This time I counted to seven. "The way I remember it," I said in a tone that I hoped might be taken for cheerful reminiscence, "he wanted to rape you."

"You don't rape someone you don't find attractive."

"Actually, you do. It happens all the time."

"Maybe you would," she said, "but not most men."

"Rape isn't about sex," I explained. "It's about power."

She frowned at me. "Why do you find it so hard to believe that Crinkles might think I'm cute?"

Only after I got to ten did I say, "You are cute. You're beyond cute.

You're gorgeous. But Crinkles isn't the kind of guy who falls in love."

"Do you mean that?"

"Absolutely. Crinkles is the kind of guy who falls in hate."

"No, I mean the other part."

"What other part?"

"The cute-beyond-cute-gorgeous part."

"You're the most amazing-looking person I've ever seen. But you've got to-"

"That's so sweet," she said. "But I'm not sensitive about my looks, and though I like compliments as much as any girl does, I prefer honesty in the long run. I'm aware of my nose, for instance."

Honker lumbered in from the adjacent room, slouched to the explosives-laden handcart, looking like nothing so much as a troll brooding over whether he'd added enough sage and butter to the child currently cooking in his oven.

Still holding the detonator in his teeth, Crinkles blew his nose in his hand and wiped his hand on the sleeve of his jacket.

The maniac prepared the last of the detonators. When he noticed me looking at him, he waved.

"My nose is pinched," Lorrie said.

"It's not pinched," I assured her because in truth it was no more pinched than the nose of a goddess.

"It's pinched," she insisted.

"All right, maybe it's pinched," I agreed, to avoid an argument, "but it's pinched in a totally perfect way."

"Then there's the problem with my teeth."

I was tempted to seize her wonderfully full lips, pull them apart, inspect her choppers as a vet might examine a racehorse, and declare them fit in no uncertain terms.

Instead, I smiled and kept my voice calm. "There's nothing wrong with your teeth. They're white and even, as flawless as pearls."

"Exactly," she said. "They don't look real. People must think I have false teeth."

"No one will think a woman as young as you has false teeth."

"There's Chilson Strawberry."

No matter how often I put it through the mill wheels of my mind, that statement wouldn't process. "What is Chilson Strawberry?"

"She's a friend of mine, my age exactly, she does bungee tours."

"Bungee tours?"

"She puts together travel packages, takes groups of people all over the world to bungee jump off bridges and stuff."

"I wouldn't have dreamed you could make a living packaging bungee tours."

"She does quite well," Lorrie assured me. "Though I don't like to think what all that taunting of gravity is going to do to her breasts in ten years."

I didn't know what to say to that. I took some pride in having found something to say throughout the conversation so far, regardless of its mystifying turns. I figured I had earned a time-out.

Barely pausing for breath, Lorrie said, "Chilson lost every one of her teeth."

Interested in spite of myself, I said, "How did she do that-did a bungee break?"

"No, it wasn't work-related. She screwed up on her motorcycle, flipped, rolled, smacked her face into a bridge abutment."

My teeth throbbed with sympathy pain so bad that for a moment I couldn't speak.

"When they rebuilt her jaw," Lorrie said, "they extracted what teeth hadn't been broken out in the accident. Later they implanted fabrications. She can crack walnuts with them."

"Considering that she's a friend of yours," I said with complete sincerity, "I'm wondering what happened to the bridge abutment."

"Not as much as you might think. They had to hose the blood off. There were a few chips, a little crack."

Her face was guileless. Her limpid eyes were not evasive. If she was putting me on, she gave no clue of it.

"You've got to meet my family," I said.

"Uh-oh," she said. "Something's happening."

Blinking, mildly disoriented, I looked around, as though coming out of a trance. I had all but forgotten about Honker, Crinkles, and the grinning feeb.

Although at least half the bricks of plastic explosive remained on the handcart, Honker pulled it out of the room, through the alcove door, into the tunnel by which he had arrived.

Having synchronized the final detonator, the nameless maniac presented it to Crinkles, along with the handcuff key, and gave him instructions: "When you've finished here, bring the babe and the ox with you."

Ox. The feeb was my size, and I'm sure that he didn't think of himself as an ox.

He followed Honker into the tunnel.

We were alone with Crinkles, which was like being alone with Satan in the sadomasochism wing of Hell.

Lorrie waited a minute to be sure those in the tunnel had gone too far to hear, and then she said, "Oh, Mr. Crinkles?"

"Don't do this," I pleaded.

Crinkles had gone to the distant end of the room to insert the last detonator in the charge that he had packed around another column. He appeared not to have heard Lorrie.

"Even if he thinks you're cute," I said, "he's the kind of guy who'd be as happy to rape you after he's killed you as before, and how does that help us?"

"Necrophilia? That's a terrible thing to say about a person."

"He's not a person. He's a Morlock."

She brightened. "H. G. Wells. The Time Machine. You really are a reader. Of course you could have seen the movie."

"Crinkles isn't a person. He's Grendel."

"Beowulf," she said, naming the work in which the monster Grendel lurked.

"He's Tom Ripley."

"That's the psychopath in some books by Patricia Highsmith."

"Five books," I said. "Tom Ripley is the essential Hannibal Lecter thirty years before anyone had heard of Hannibal."

Having finished his work at the distant end of the long room, Crinkles returned to us.

As our Grendel approached, I expected Lorrie to tell him she had a female emergency. She smiled at him and batted her eyelashes, but hesitated to speak.

Crinkles's mouth was puckered strangely. He appeared to be rolling something on his tongue as he unlocked the second set of handcuffs that secured our cuffs to the chair.

As we got to our feet, still tethered to each other, Lorrie tossed her head to fluff her hair. With her free hand, she undid a button at the top of her blouse to better reveal her lovely throat.

Trouble.

She was making herself look more seductive before announcing that she had a female emergency.

Being seductive with Crinkles made no more sense than trying to unwind a coiled rattlesnake by kissing it. He would see through her even quicker than had the nameless maniac, and he would be so pissed by her attempt to manipulate him that he'd put the nail file through her eye.

Apparently, my credentials as a reader and the analogies I had drawn between Crinkles and various monstrous fictional characters gave her reason to pause. She glanced at me, hesitated.

Before she could speak, Crinkles spat into his hand the object he had been rolling on his tongue. It was round, the size of a large gum ball gray and glistening with saliva.

The ominous glob might have been something other than a wad of the plastic explosive, but that's sure what it appeared to be.

Maybe he got a thrill from holding in his mouth a couple ounces of concentrated death so potent that if detonated it would turn his head into a spray of mush.

Or maybe this was a good-luck ritual, the equivalent of kissing the dice before throwing them across the craps table.

Or maybe he just liked the taste. After all, some people enjoy creamed Spam. He might really have a festival of flavor if he first rolled the round treat in crushed spiders.

Without a comment about it, he put the gray wad on the chair in which I had been sitting, and he said, "Let's get out of here. Move it."

On our way to the alcove that waited behind the secret door in the bookshelves, we walked by the table on which stood Lorrie's purse. She boldly picked it up as we passed. Behind us, Crinkles raised no objection. bout eight feet in width, the limestone-clad tunnel. featured a low barrel-vaulted ceiling but straight walls. Underfoot, the rectangular paving stones had been laid in a herringbone pattern.

Cast off by fat yellow candles in bronze sconces, draft-stirred light shimmered lambently along the walls and, with shadows, wove an ever-changing tapestry across the curve of the ceiling.

This forbidding passageway appeared to be long, dwindling into a confusion of shadows and sinuous sylphs of light before an end could be glimpsed.