I did the dishes and went off to watch I Married Joan. The TV was in the den. After laughing at Joan Davis's antics for a quarter of an hour or so, I went to the front of the house and spied on Grandpa. He was reading. He seemed about halfway through the book. I cleared my throat. He didn't look up. "I'm going down to the park," I said. He didn't look up. I went back to watching TV. Maybe his senility had entered a new peaceful stage.

When Mom came that day, Grandpa was talkative and cheerful. He told Mom what a great job I did with the lawn, how much he liked my food, his opinion of the mayor and otherwise talked like an adult human being. I didn't know what had happened, but I thought it was the greatest thing ever!

Mom gave me some money so that I could walk down to the Ice Palace and buy cones for Grandpa and myself later that day. I knew she was happy. She had been through so much grief watching her dad rot, and she thought that maybe, just maybe this time, G.o.d had listened to our prayers. I thought it was my cooking. Okay, I really didn't think that. I thought it was the book.

It was on the walk down to the Ice Palace that greed filled my soul. What if really and truly the book was making Grandpa well again? If it could fix up his tore-up mind, what might it do for mine? I mean, my mind was good; I made As in math and English, and I could always outsmart people in game shows. I would get the book. Not take it from Grandpa, because I didn't want to stop his miracle, but read sometime when he was asleep and get my own benefit. I would begin junior high as a genius!

The first logical time would be afternoon nap. I watched the old Seth Thomas clock on the living room mantel with X-ray eyes. Grandpa read. It became three.

"Don't you want to take your nap?" I asked.

I had to repeat myself a couple of times before he looked up.

"I'm giving up naps in the afternoon," he said. "I think I've slept enough in my long life. But I bet you sure are sleepy."

The moment he said it, all I could think of was sleep. The great white bed filled my mind. Big and solid and soft. It seemed huge and inviting. The bed was in my head and I needed to be in the bed. I started to speak, but I just yawned. I got control of myself and said, "A nap does sound good."

I went to the bedroom and lay atop the thick white bedspread. Usually I had to lie still for a long while, staring at the round gla.s.s light fixture that Granny had put in. I would watch the center bra.s.s nut and focus on it while my thoughts drained away into the milky white gla.s.s around it. But today sleep came the moment I lay on the pillow. I slept until Grandpa woke me.

"Get up," he said. "I've made supper."

I couldn't figure out what had happened. My brain was all logy. I drifted into the kitchen, where the small brown dining table was. He had made dinner. Fish sticks and lima beans. He had poured milk for both of us. We prayed and ate.

"I thought it would be nice to make dinner for you. You're always making it for me."

"This is nice," I said. I hated lima beans. Still do.

"I've been thinking a lot about exchange lately. Too many things only go one way. You know what I mean?"

"I don't follow."

"Well it's like this. You do all this work for me and I don't do anything for you. That's supposed to be fair because I brought up your mother and her brothers. I bet that doesn't seem right sometimes, does it?"

I thought about being hit by the cane. I thought about not answering. But maybe this really was the time G.o.d was answering prayers.

"No sir, sometimes that does not seem fair."

"Or books. Do you ever think about books, Billy? We spend our whole lives reading them, but they never get a chance to read us. Would you like that, Billy, if a book read you sometime?"

"I don't know. I mean, I don't know what it would be like."

"Well you've heard the expression, 'He can read a man's character.' Haven't you?"

"Yes, but I don't really know what it means."

"Well, Billy, being read by a book is about the finest experience there is. Not everyone has it when they grow up, but maybe you will."

G.o.d wasn't answering prayers. He was crazy, but in a new way. I cleaned the table after dinner and we went to watch The Carol Burnett Show.

Sleep hit me hard again that night. I woke up to sounds from the living room. I don't know how long Grandpa had been talking. He was arguing. I couldn't make out the words, but it scared me. I didn't know what I was supposed to do if Grandpa went crazy by himself in the middle of the night. Finally I heard one statement clearly: "No, I won't do it. It's not a fair exchange."

I got out of bed. I was wearing just my underwear, so I got dressed. I didn't want to confront Grandpa partially dressed. As I put my clothes on I heard him get up out of his rocker and make his way toward his bedroom. I lay back down on the bed. Even though Grandpa was pretty deaf, I didn't even dare breathe.

I would have bet a million bucks that I was not going to go back to sleep that night, but sure enough sleep hit me like a ton of bricks.

I felt the bed below me melt. I was sinking into half-melted vanilla ice cream, although it wasn't cold. As it pa.s.sed my eyes, the scene lit up with a terrible whiteness. There was nothing but white, a great white blindness, a great white dark. I could feel myself pulled lower and lower. I couldn't struggle, couldn't swim. For a moment I wished I were one of my rich friends who was hanging out at the pool this summer. They would know what to do. They didn't have to take care of their G.o.dd.a.m.n grandfathers. The down-drift took forever, and it gave me time for a lot of thoughts and none of them were very good. Maybe I was in a children's story where bad thoughts made you sink.

Then suddenly it stopped. Although the non-landscape hadn't changed and all I could see was the thick whiteness; I felt something looking at me. Something big. I tried to a.n.a.lyze what it felt like. I mean, I had watched Star Trek and Night Gallery. But I couldn't get any feelings for old or young, human or alien, alive or undead. All of those charts were two-dimensional schoolbook ideas and this was floating above the white page of the book about nine inches. I felt it wasn't going to get bored staring at me, and that scared me. It could look at me forever and not blink. For a brief while I wanted to see it, but then I was glad I couldn't.

Slowly I felt something congeal under me. I wasn't floating anymore. Then a tiny speck formed a few feet above my head. It turned out to be the bra.s.s nut in the center of the light fixture. I was staring at the white gla.s.s of the fixture. The sun was up. I could hear Grandpa making coffee. The bed was dank with sweat. My nightmare had soaked the thick bedspread. I was already dressed, so I went on into the kitchen.

"Good morning," I said to Grandpa.

He just looked at me with hatred. The light and life had gone out of his eyes. We didn't talk during breakfast. I mowed the lawn afterward even though it didn't need it. I just didn't want to be around him. I don't know if he read his book. Or if the book read him.

Lunch was worse. He was still not talking, and Mom was so upset to see him regress she actually broke down in tears. After lunch she went out to her car and just sat in it and cried.

I went out to comfort her. I was thirteen and it was the manly thing to do. She rolled down her window to talk to me.

"Mom, are you okay?" I asked. I know it was a dumb question.

"What happened, Billy? Did you do something to him?"

I couldn't believe her response. I knew she was upset, but I wasn't some kind of miracle worker, some kind of genie that could make Grandpa better or worse by blinking my eyes. I got really mad, so I turned away from her car and began running to the park. I knew she was late to work and didn't have time to follow me. She managed an office and everything depended on her. There were some cedar bushes in the park, about six feet tall. Underneath the green, make-out artists had hallowed and hollowed a s.p.a.ce over the years. I dove into the cool dry dark to cry. I knew no one would be making out at twelve-thirty in the heat of the summer. I cried a long time. I messed up my clothes. Great-now I had laundry to do as well as the additional job of hating my mom and feeling guilty. I didn't give a d.a.m.n about Grandpa at this moment.

I headed back to his house. This was going to end today. I would tell my mom and my uncle that I couldn't do this anymore. That I wanted some regular summer job like sweeping out a barber shop, which my friend Jerry had. I was going to tell things I had never told before, like the cane. I didn't think I would tell them about the book. That was probably Grandpa's craziness.

Sure enough, when I got back to his little brick house he was reading his book. He was almost to the end. I had been gone for nearly two hours. I hadn't cried that much since my grandmother died two years ago. I thought crying was supposed to purge you, make you feel better, but I felt all raw and sticky like parts of my soul had been through a blender and were hanging outside of my body. I didn't talk to the old man. I just went to bed.

To my initial relief the same magic that had brought sleep the last two times worked again. I was out like a light.

However, the world changed from a fabulous formless darkness to a great white thickness. I knew I was sinking into the world of the great white bed. The down-drift made me sick this time like a too-long downward ride in an elevator. Of course in those days growing up in Doublesign I had never even seen an elevator, but you can't enter a memory without carrying later memories in with you. Down, down, down.

It was an abrupt and unpleasant stop. I could hear my Grandpa saying something. It was a precise but m.u.f.fled voice. The kind of voice you use giving a phone number. I began moving sideways. Slowly at first and then at a pretty good clip. Then the movement stopped again and I was lying next to someone.

I could move my head a little. It was Granny. She was dead and very, very white. I knew the great Whatever had been watching her for a couple of years, and had never got bored.

Then I felt the little knives.

Something was slicing through my feet. I couldn't raise my head enough to see it, but I could hear it and of course it hurt like h.e.l.l. About an inch was being cut off. I didn't think I could stand it. Why didn't I wake up? Why didn't I black out?

Then after that section had been cut clean another cut started about an inch higher. I figured loss of blood or shock would get me. I kept telling myself it was just a nightmare, but that doesn't really help with that much pain.

Then another cut.

Then another.

And so slowly forth until my knees had been reached. All I was at this point was tears and pain.

Then a dark rope dropped down from above. I can't tell you what a relief it was to see something black in that great white s.p.a.ce. It hit my face, snaking over my eyes and mouth, finally it touched my ears.

"Billy. Billy can you hear me?"

It was my uncle's voice. I woke up on the great white bed and then pa.s.sed out from blood loss.

The rest of the summer and the fall and the winter and spring were physical therapy.

I had lost both of my legs up to my knees. This is not a euphemism. There was nothing there. There were no traces of my feet and lower legs anywhere in Grandpa's house.

But there were a set of feet and lower legs on his bed in his room. They were cold and embalmed and a couple of years old. They belonged to my grandmother.

I didn't find that out until just before my mother's death last year. It had been decided not to tell me everything, as though knowledge could make it any worse. There was no trace that my grandmother's grave had been disturbed in any way. They had dug up her coffin and put the legs in, burying it as well as any gossip with her. They put Grandpa in a mental ward afterward. Mom never went to see him again as long as he lived, but that turned out to be only three months anyway. When Mom got cancer she decided to tell me everything.

My uncle had dropped by that day because Mom had called him. She felt bad about what she had said to me. She couldn't leave her office, but her brother got off early. Mom told me that she felt guilty about what had happened to me every day of her life.

I live in a special home for people with mental and physical disabilities. When she was alive, Mom would come see me every day at noon. We always ate together just like she used to eat with her father. About two months before she died she got too sick to come, but they took me to see her in the hospital a couple of times, that was when she told about Granny's legs and so on.

I read and watch TV a lot. It hasn't gotten better in the last forty years, I can tell you that. I am kept here because I can't give an explanation of what happened to me that makes sense to anyone. I didn't get to finish school and I regret that. So I hobble around on my two fake legs. I even keep a little garden. Just flowers, no tomatoes this time. I never learned that internet thing either; they don't like us looking things up. The only thing that some people would find odd about me is that I won't sleep on white sheets or have a white blanket or a white bedspread.

Mom told me that she searched every inch of Grandpa's house for the book. She told me that she never believed my story fully, but knew it had to have some truth. She didn't find the book. Maybe Grandpa found it at the park or bought it in a garage sale. I tried researching occult matters once, but the people running the home thought it was a bad idea for me. One time I had a dream, about ten years ago, of Grandpa lifting the thick white bedspread and looking under the bed for something and just finding the book. That still doesn't answer the question of where it came from.

Sometimes in my dreams I smell geraniums and find myself in the great white s.p.a.ce. I can't scream in my dreams and I've never woken up my roommate with any odd sounds. I don't tell my doctor about it, as it seems to upset her. But the dreams are rare. I think they're really not dreams at all, I think it's just how things are. I think the great Whatever is always watching us.

And It's never bored.

-For Basil Copper.

G.o.d knows it was not of this world-or no longer of this world-yet to my horror I saw in its eaten-away and bone-revealing outlines a leering, abhorrent travesty of the human shape; and in its mouldy, disintegrating apparel an unspeakable quality that chilled me even more.

"The Outsider" H.P. Lovecraft (1926).

* LESSER DEMONS *

Norman Partridge.

Down in the cemetery, the children were laughing.

They had another box open.

They had their axes out. Their knives, too.

I sat in the sheriff's department pickup, parked beneath a willow tree. Ropes of leaves hung before me like green curtains, but those curtains didn't stop the laughter. It climbed the ridge from the hollow below, carrying other noises-shovels biting hard-packed earth, axe blades splitting coffinwood, knives sc.r.a.ping flesh from bone. But the laughter was the worst of it. It spilled over teeth sharpened with files, chewed its way up the ridge, and did its best to strip the hard bark off my spine.

I didn't sit still. I grabbed a gas can from the back of the pickup. I jacked a full clip into my dead deputy's .45, slipped a couple spares into one of the leather pockets on my gun belt and b.u.t.toned it down. Then I fed sh.e.l.ls into my shotgun and pumped one into the chamber.

I went for a little walk.

Five months before, I stood with my deputy, Roy Barnes, out on County Road 14. We weren't alone. There were others present. Most of them were dead, or something close to it.

I held that same shotgun in my hand. The barrel was hot. The deputy clutched his .45, a ribbon of bitter smoke coiling from the business end. It wasn't a stink you'd breathe if you had a choice, but we didn't have one.

Barnes reloaded, and so did I. The June sun was dropping behind the trees, but the shafts of late-afternoon light slanting through the gaps were as bright as high noon. The light played through black smoke rising from a Chrysler sedan's smoldering engine and white smoke simmering from the hot asphalt piled in the road gang's dump truck.

My gaze settled on the wrecked Chrysler. The deal must have started there. Fifteen or twenty minutes before, the big black car had piled into an old oak at a fork in the county road. Maybe the driver had nodded off, waking just in time to miss a flagman from the work gang. Over-corrected and hit the brakes too late. Said: h.e.l.lo tree, goodbye heartbeat.

Maybe that was the way it happened. Maybe not. Barnes tried to piece it together later on, but in the end it really didn't matter much. What mattered was that the sedan was driven by a man who looked like something dredged up from the bottom of a stagnant pond. What mattered was that something exploded from the Chrysler's trunk after the accident. That thing was the size of a grizzly, but it wasn't a bear. It didn't look like a bear at all. Not unless you'd ever seen one turned inside out, it didn't.

Whatever it was, that skinned monster could move. It unhinged its sizable jaws and swallowed a man who weighed two-hundred-and-change in one long ratcheting gulp, choking arms and legs and torso down a gullet lined with razor teeth. Sucked the guy into a blue-veined belly that hung from its ribs like a grave-robber's sack and then dragged that belly along fresh asphalt as it chased down the other men, slapping them onto the scorching roadbed and spitting b.l.o.o.d.y hunks of dead flesh in their faces. Some it let go, slaughtering others like so many chickens tossed live and squawking onto a hot skillet.

It killed four men before we showed up, fresh from handling a fender-bender on the detour route a couple miles up the road. Thanks to my shotgun and Roy Barnes' .45, allthat remained of the thing was a red mess with a corpse spilling out of its gutshot belly. As for the men from the work crew, there wasn't much you could say. They were either as dead as that poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d who'd ended his life in a monster's stomach, or they were whimpering with blood on their faces, or they were running like h.e.l.l and halfway back to town. But whatever they were doing didn't make too much difference to me just then.

"What was it, Sheriff?" Barnes asked.

"I don't know."

"You sure it's dead?"

"I don't know that, either. All I know is we'd better stay away from it."

We backed off. The only things that lingered were the afternoon light slanting through the trees, and the smoke from that hot asphalt, and the smoke from the wrecked Chrysler. The light cut swirls through that smoke as it pooled around the dead thing, settling low and misty, as if the something beneath it were trying to swallow a chunk of the world, roadbed and all.

"I feel kind of dizzy," Barnes said.

"Hold on, Roy. You have to."

I grabbed my deputy by the shoulder and spun him around. He was just a kid, really-before this deal, he'd never even had his gun out of its holster while on duty. I'd been doing the job for fifteen years, but I could have clocked a hundred and never seen anything like this. Still, we both knew it wasn't over. We'd seen what we'd seen, we'd done what we'd done, and the only thing left to do was deal with whatever was coming next.

That meant checking out the Chrysler. I brought the shotgun barrel even with it, aiming at the driver's side door as we advanced. The driver's skull had slammed the steering wheel at the point of impact. Black blood smeared across his face, and filed teeth had slashed through his pale lips so that they hung from his gums like leavings you'd bury after gutting a fish. On top of that, words were carved on his face. Some were purpled over with scar tissue and others were still fresh scabs. None of them were words I'd seen before. I didn't know what to make of them.

"Jesus," Barnes said. "Will you look at that."

"Check the back seat, Roy."

Barnes did. There was other stuff there. Torn clothes. Several pairs of handcuffs. Ropes woven with fishhooks. A wrought-iron trident. And in the middle of all that was a cardboard box filled with books.

The deputy pulled one out. It was old. Leathery. As he opened it, the book started to come apart in his hands. Brittle pages fluttered across the road- Something rustled in the open trunk. I pushed past Roy and fired point blank before I even looked. The spare tire exploded. On the other side of the trunk, a clawed hand scrabbled up through a pile of shotgunned clothes. I fired again. Those claws clacked together, and the thing beneath them didn't move again.

Using the shotgun barrel, I shifted the clothes to one side, uncovering a couple of dead kids in a nest of rags and blood. Both of them were handcuffed. The thing I'd killed had chewed its way out of one of their bellies. It had a grinning, wolfish muzzle and a tail like a dozen braided snakes. I slammed the trunk and chambered another sh.e.l.l. I stared down at the trunk, waiting for something else to happen, but nothing did.

Behind me . . . well, that was another story.

The men from the road gang were on the move.