The man nodded and turned back to the road. "Heard about the place. Maggot's nest of sin, nightclubs and bars, fast women." He scowled at the highway.

Nothing looked more closely at the driver. He seemed very white. His face was unlined and pale, with a kind of crazy exalted beauty to it, but the hair that hung in it was the color of flat, hard-packed ice. The man's hands were as spindly as two white spiders on the steering wheel, and the pale wrists disappeared into folds of cloth as white as milk. Was he wearing robes?

The white hands skittered on the wheel. "Have you been saved?"

"Shit," said Nothing softly.

"What was that?"

Nothing looked out the window at a graying landscape. Born-agains made him into a smartass. "Yeah. I was saved once, at a party. I was almost sober, and my friend gave me another drink."

One of the hands shot off the wheel. Nothing flinched, thinking he was about to get smacked, but the hand only crawled through the clutter on the front seat and came up with a smeary purple-inked tract clutched in its fingers. Saved by the Blood of the Lamb.

The man dropped the tract in Nothing's lap. A long white finger touched Nothing's leg through a rip in his jeans. "You read that," he said.

"Yeah, sure. I will." Nothing started to stuff the tract into his backpack.

"Now." The voice was ice-edged. Nothing thought of frozen milk, of shattering crystal. "You read me them words now.

Sing it loud and clear."

"No way. Fuck that." Nothing pushed himself back against the door. "Let me out."

"I could tell you were a sinner from the minute you climbed in. Christ shows them to me, and it's my duty to save them. I got to do it. I got to do it." The driver's voice sounded almost frightened now. "You got to read, it's my duty to make you."

The needle of the speedometer was jittering, climbing. Sixty. Eighty. The Lincoln slipped on the shoulder, sprayed gravel, righted itself.

Nothing unfolded the tract. The last fiery sliver of sun was just slipping down behind the pines. The tiny violet letters squirmed and blurred before his eyes. "I can't read it," he said. "Too dark."

The driver touched a button. Dull light flooded the car. The man glanced sideways at him, and Nothing saw that the irises of his eyes were red. No, not red. Pink. Bright jewel -pink. Nothing was so intrigued that he forgot to be afraid. "Can you see?" he asked.

A kind of radiance suffused the man's face, lighting up that crazy horrible beauty, making it glow. "My affliction," he said.

"They call me albino. I call it the hand of Jesus upon me. I am stricken, and I walk with Him."

"They're pretty," said Nothing. "I wouldn't mind having pink eyes."

The radiance disappeared. The speedometer trembled up to ninety-five. "God-given affliction ain't pretty. You go on.

You got to read."

Nothing picked up the tract again. As he shifted in his seat, his foot crushed something on the floor. Now he could see where the sour smell came from: dozens of empty milk cartons littered the floorboards, some fresh, some faded with age.

Missing children smiled sunnily up at him, refusing to acknowledge that now they were probably just scattered bones in a culvert somewhere.

Nothing took a deep breath and opened the tract. The paper felt slick and cheap between his fingers. " 'What is eternal life?' " he began.

"Go on," the driver told him. His breathing had begun to quicken.

An hour later it was full dark outside the dusty windows. The Lincoln was cruising at eighty. The albino had made him read four more tracts, and between that and the sour-milk odor, Nothing's throat felt as if someone had poured hot sand down it.

" 'Don't let Satan deceive you, for he lies. BEING SAVED IS THE ONLY WAY INTO HEAVEN....' " Nothing faltered. His voice was as hoarse as if he had just smoked a whole pack of Luckies. If the albino was going to kill him and dump him in a ditch somewhere, they might as well get it over with. If he stopped now, maybe he'd still be able to scream.

"I can't go any more," he said, afraid to look at the albino. Instead he stared out the window. The countryside was dark.

Rain had begun to speckle the windshield, streaking down through a patina of dust and highway grit. There was no light anywhere, not by the side of the road, not on the horizon. Heavy clouds blotted out the moon.

The Lincoln's one working headlight picked out a line of bright orange cones by the side of the road. Highway work. The cones (lashed by slower... slower. Gravel crunched beneath the wheels. The car came to a full stop.

The albino cut the ignition and turned to Nothing. The only light came from the glowing green Jesus on the dash, a ghostly light, faint and phosphorescent. The painted eyes stood out like holes in the tiny mournful face. The albino stared at Nothing, his face shadowed, his own eyes glittering flatly. When the craziness in his face was not showing, he looked like a sick child. One of the white spiders touched Nothing's leg.

Nothing glanced at the door. The button was pushed down. Locked. Would he be able to open it and jump out before the driver could grab him? The man was bigger, though his body looked sickly and loose-jointed under the white robe. Rain dashed against the window. Nothing peered out through streaks of dirt and swashes of clean black night. What was out there?

If he made a dash for it, would anybody help him, or would the albino run him down? He stared at the milk cartons, saw again the eyes of the missing children. Little dark smudges in a sea of red and white, utterly helpless.

The white spider was crawling up his thigh, squeezing.

"Now we're gonna go over what you learned," the man said again. Suddenly Nothing wasn't scared anymore. This situation was familiar.

"Why didn't you just tell me what you wanted, instead of making me read all that crap?"

"It's my duty," the man said, but his voice shook, and his hand tightened on Nothing's leg.

Nothing didn't care what he had to do. Whatever it was, it would be worth it to get away from this sour -smelling car, those lonely cardboard smiles. The albino's jewel-pink eyes slipped shut as Nothing bent over his lap and pulled his robes aside. This was clumsy magic, but it was so easy; he had learned it in a hundred drunken backseats, in Laine 's bedroom on lazy afternoons laying out from school. Sometimes older men in fancy cars would cruise past the schoolyard and park near the curb, out behind the cafeteria Dumpsters. Some of the boys, if they were saving up for a guitar or hurting for a bag of pot, would go out there and blow them for twenty dollars a throw. That was what the sour-milk odor reminded him of. Nothing had done it a couple of times back then, and he guessed he could manage now.

The albino had a huge erection that pulsed vivid red against all the whiteness. Even his pubic hair was like coarse cotton.

Nothing had to stretch his mouth open until he thought his jaws would crack. The white spiders twined in Nothing 's hair and stroked Nothing's throat and shoulders with a careful, psychotic tenderness. "I got to do it," he said as he came. "I got to do it."

His sperm was thin and milky, and burned Nothing 's raw throat as it went down. But Nothing had never minded swallowing come. Something about it settled his stomach and made his whole body feel good.

The albino gave Nothing five dollars-five lousy dollars, Nothing amended silently. But the night air refreshed him as he pushed open the heavy door, and he got out fast, before the man could decide that he wasn 't quite saved yet, that another round of tract-reading and blowjobbing might do the trick. The salmon-pink Continental rolled slowly away, the stained rope trailing from its rear bumper, leaving Nothing alone on the roadside. The albino had forgotten to turn his single headlight back on, but as the car crested a hill and disappeared, Nothing glimpsed a tiny green phosphorescence through the back window.

The red-eyed plastic Jesus, lighting the way through the night.

Nothing licked his lips. The taste of the man's sperm, still fresh and raw, reminded him of something Laine had once told him. Did you know, Laine had asked with innocent lasciviousness, that come has almost exactly the same chemical makeup as human blood?

The countryside was hilly, sodden, absolutely black. Nothing tore the back of his hand on a barbed-wire fence. Tears of pain made his eyes glisten as he sucked at the blood. I'm alone now, all right, he thought. Nobody in the whole world knows where I am. His sneakers were soaked with cold rain, and his toes ached to the bone. Long slick grass squeaked under his feet. At last he staggered into an abandoned barn. Great pronged shapes loomed around him-abandoned farm machinery, heavy and rusted. It might fall on him in the night, pin him to the musty floor, leave him to struggle and die alone. He didn't care.

The rain raised dust and cobwebby chaff in the barn. Nothing sneezed once, twice, three times-hard, choking spasms that bent him double. The third sneeze turned into a loud sob. He curled up beneath the loft and sucked at the blood on his hand. His tears soaked into the dirty wooden floor.

During the night, while Nothing dreamed uneasy dreams, a small spider climbed delicately through his wet black hair. It let itself down along the smooth line of his jawbone, lingered briefly on his lips, and ran away over the damp red -streaked fingers that Nothing pressed to his mouth, his tongue darting out to lick the blood away as he slept.

CHAPTER 14

It was still hot when Christian drove into Missing Mile.

He did not know he was in Missing Mile, not yet, for the road he came in on had no town limits sign. The sign, a splintered pine plank with its painted letters aged to translucence, had been knocked down twenty years ago by a man who decided to take two lovers that night; his head lay against Vodka's breast and his hand was on Whiskey's thigh when he lost control of his car. The sign lay several feet from the road, swathed in kudzu, stained brown with blood long dry.

So Christian did not know he was in the town, not yet. He knew only that he was almost out of money somewhere in North Carolina, that his fuel gauge was hovering on empty, and that all day the sun had threatened to emerge from low - hanging clouds. This, then, was where he would stop for a while.

He came in on Highway 42 and took a left, which brought him into town by way of Violin Road. He looked at the trailers and broken-backed shacks, the weed-choked family graveyards, the heaps of rusted scrap metal, as he drove slowly past.

Christian felt no dread, no excitement; it did not really matter where he lived. I might have gone all the way to San Francisco, he thought, and when I saw the Golden Gate Bridge and the glitter of Chinatown, I would feel this way still.

He could not go back to New Orleans, so any other place in the world would do for now.

A small child stood by the side of the road, a girl seven or eight years old but as thin as an old woman, dressed in a blue smock far too large for her. One sleeve dangled, half torn off. The child was swinging something in her hand. Christian drew the car up next to her and rolled his window down. The girl stared up at him. Her eyes were gray, as washed out as the sky.

"Can you tell me where I am?" he asked.

The girl lifted one knobby shoulder, then let it drop. From her hand the object still swung-a rat, its fur matted with the dust of the road, its head and forequarters mangled, dried.

Christian made himself look back at the girl's face. Her pale eyes seemed depthless; he could hardly tell where the irises faded into the whites. He caught the sour brown odor of death from the rat, the faint tang of dried blood. "What's the name of the town?"

The girl regarded him with her bottomless gaze. There was something wrong with the symmetry of her face. Her eyes were unevenly spaced, her forehead too low, the line of her brow crooked. Christian realized he was looking into the face of profound retardation. This was one of the few gazes that could meet his own: it did not fear, because it did not know.

He thought briefly of taking her into the car. The smell of roadkill, dry and fetid as it was, made him edgy with hunger.

The nourishment from the boy at the river's edge was fading out of him. But he disliked the sight of her crooked mouth and the various knobs of her body. Christian had often gone hungry because of his weakness for beauties.

Wanting to leave the little girl behind, he touched the toe of his boot to the gas pedal. But in the rearview mirror he saw her empty eyes staring after him. The mangled rat swung from her hand.

The town was a few miles down the road. In comparison to the trailers and scrubby dirt yards of Violin Road, the buildings here looked square and sturdy. The shops on the main street were colorful in the lethargic heat of the day. A boarded-up storefront cast a baleful blind eye every few blocks, but such things did not bother Christian. He was looking for dark windows, for neon beer signs lit deep within shadowy interiors. There must be a bar. Somewhere in this town must be a place where the townspeople could drink, fight, pass all the long hot nights, spend their paydays away. Any redneck bar would do.

Christian was beginning to wonder whether he might not be in one of the dreaded dry counties of the South when a blue beer light caught his eye at last. The door of the place was a thick slab of pine carved with twisted letters: THE SACRED YEW. He eased the Bel Air over to the curb. There was always work for a good bartender.

Kinsey Hummingbird was an excellent bartender.

He was also the confidant of troubled youth from Missing Mile and surrounding counties. Bad kids, depressed and terrified kids, kids who found themselves adrift in the Bible Belt-all came to Kinsey as if he were some sort of benevolent Pied Piper. Before he opened the Sacred Yew, he had been a mechanic at the garage where his father had worked before him.

It was not unusual to see Kinsey's long thin legs sticking out from under a car while some forlorn teenager sat nearby talking to Kinsey's sneakers. The metalheads, the hippies born decades too late, the sad ones swathed in black-all came. Kinsey Hummingbird was their guru; Kinsey Hummingbird was their oracle.

When his mother died in the terrible fire out at the mill, Kinsey received a substantial settlement and was able to open the Sacred Yew, or as the kids referred to it, "the Yew." Sometimes he looked at his club and felt a twinge of guilt that his mother's gruesome death had paid for it-she had fallen from a blazing catwalk and been impaled screaming on a row of spindles-but the truth was that Mrs. Hummingbird had always disliked her only son and had never troubled to hide it. Kinsey spent most of his own childhood trying to figure out what he had done to make her feel so mean. The Bible she spent all her free time reading said to love your neighbor. Seemed like it would say something about loving your own son too.

Kinsey was a whittled beanpole of a man, well over six feet with that apologetic stoop so many tall thin men have. He always wore a cap with a feather in it pushed back over his stringy hair. The club was his private dream. Frequently he stared around at it in awe, expecting it to disappear before his eyes, hardly able to believe he had made it happen. The insurance money had paid for it, but he had built the stage, he had begun booking the bands, he had concocted the little menu of finger sandwiches and homemade soups so that the club would qualify as a "restaurant" and kids under eighteen would be able to come in without getting carded, though they had to show their IDs to buy beer.

The Sacred Yew was a place for Kinsey's children. After the first precarious year he made money, but that was not why he did it. He wanted the kids to have someplace to go. He wanted them to have someplace where they could be happy for a while.

But sometimes it was a backbreaking job. Long ago he had learned that to make it go smoothly, he had to attend to every detail himself-the booking, the ordering, even the decor. When there was no one else to do it, he also had to make the soup and sandwiches and tote all the kegs and cases of beer. A week ago he had fired his latest assistant bartender for serving beer to a fourteen-year-old, trying to put the make on her. The boy was astonished when mild-mannered Kinsey Hummingbird blessed him out, came within an inch of slugging him, then gave him his walking papers. But the Yew could lose its license for a thing like that. Nobody fucked with Kinsey where the Sacred Yew was concerned.

So he had been tending bar solo for a week. Steve and Ghost from Lost Souls? helped him out sometimes-Ghost, whose grandmother had left him her house and all the money he would ever require to live on, would do it gratis. But just now they were busy practicing a bunch of new songs. They played at the club once a week or more, and they were his biggest draw. People came from as far away as Raleigh and Chapel Hill to see them. They were getting good, and he wanted them to practice.

But Kinsey was tired. So when the guy walked in and said he'd tended bar in New Orleans for twenty years, Kinsey hired him on the spot. He wasn't fazed by the funereal clothes and the cold pale face, or by the fact that the guy was even taller than him and maybe skinnier. When you ran a club, you met plenty of weirdos. This particular weirdo struck him as a good bartender.

"Christian, hm? Were your folks Holy Rollers?" That could drive anybody to a life of bartending.

The guy shook his head. "It's a family name."

"Whatever," said Kinsey amiably.

That same night, Christian fell back into the routine of popping bottle tops, tapping kegs and drawing foamy draft beer into plastic cups, replying to small talk without really hearing it. The bar seemed primitive: Kinsey served no liquor or even wine, only beer, and not many varieties of that. Without shots to set up, without Sazeracs and Hurricanes to mix, Christian felt he was hardly working.

Gradually and gratefully he came to realize that this was no redneck bar. He saw children in black, which he had not expected in a small southern town, and he watched them and began to know their faces. But he would wait. Some of these children might be drifters or flotsam from the state university in Raleigh, but he could not afford to be greedy too soon. He had waited before. Soon someone would come to town, alone and a stranger, someone he could take safely.

His wages from the bar would not be quite enough to pay for the trailer he rented-it was on Violin Road, but it was cheap-and the gasoline to drive to work each night. On his way north he had seen wooden stands by the side of the road.

They sold flowers, fruit, trinkets. Behind his trailer was a scrap heap and a great thicket of roses rioting wild. Christian cut the huge blossoms and wrapped their stems in newspaper. In an overgrown patch of garden he found a few stunted pumpkins, a few gourds gone dry on the vine. He got some sixpenny nails and a hammer from the hardware shop in town, dragged several boards out of the scrap heap, put together a stand and painted a sign.

When the sun was not too bright, he drove around the outskirts of Missing Mile and set up his stand on different corners.

Sometimes people stopped to buy from him; he answered their chatter with the practiced glibness that came from a few centuries of bartending. From behind his dark glasses he watched their faces and their throats, wondering how long it would be until his mouth began to water at the smell of their blood.

Christian would stay in Missing Mile as long as he could, and when he had saved some money, he would fill the tank of his Bel Air and start driving north again. North was where Molochai, Twig, and Zillah might be, and he still thought of finding them. Sometimes at night he would take out the three bottles of Chartreuse he had brought from New Orleans. He read the legend on the green-and-gold foil label again and again, thinking of Wallace Creech and the children of the French Quarter and the dirty slow river, but he never cracked the seals on any of the bottles. He still remembered how the green fire had blazed through him on his last night in New Orleans.

CHAPTER 15

By ten o'clock the next morning, Nothing was so hungry and lonely that he almost cried from sheer relief when the biker stopped and picked him up.

Sleeping in a barn hadn't been any fun. He'd gotten out of the rain for a few hours, but he woke up sore, hunger nibbling at his stomach and the taste of dust and rotten blood in his mouth. When he stumbled out of the barn, morning sunlight blinded him for a moment. Nothing squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them a crack, cautiously. The countryside glistened in green splendor around him. Tendrils of vine crept up the side of the barn, poked inquisitively through a hole in the roof. He closed his eyes again and breathed the smell of sunlight drying up last night's rain.

Back on the highway, not many cars went by. None stopped. He saw some men eating biscuits and drinking coffee in a pickup truck, and saliva rushed into his mouth. He spat on the side of the road; to swallow hunger -spit would only make him hungrier. Experimentally, he put his hand on his stomach. Through the damp cloth of his T -shirt, it already felt more hollow.