Barnes waved me off. "Not now, boss."

Planting the knife high in the post, he got closer to the girl. Close enough to whisper in her ear. With a red finger, he pointed at the b.l.o.o.d.y inscription he'd pasted to the wall. "Read it," he said, but the woman only growled at him, snapping sharpened teeth so wildly that she shredded her own lips. But she didn't care about spilling her own blood. She probably didn't know she was doing it. She just licked her tattered lips and snapped some more, convinced she could take a hunk out of Barnes.

He didn't like that. He did some things to her, and her growls became screams.

"She'll come around," Barnes said.

"I don't think so, Roy."

"Yeah. She will-this time I figured things out."

"You said that when you read those books."

"But she's a book with a pulse. That's the difference. She's alive. That means she's got a connection-to those lesser demons, and to the things that lord it over them, too. Every one of them's some kind of key. But you can't unlock a gate with a bent-up key, even if it's the one that's supposed to fit. That's why things didn't work with the driver. After he piled up that Chrysler, he was a bent-up key. He lost his pulse. She's still got hers. If she reads the words instead of me-the words she wrote with a knife of her own-it'll all be different."

He'd approached me while he was talking, but I didn't look at him. I couldn't stand to. I looked at the bloodface instead. She screamed and spit. She wasn't even a woman anymore. She was just a naked, writhing thing that was going to end her days cuffed to a pole out here in the middle of nowhere. To think that she could spit a few words through tattered lips and change a world was crazy, as crazy as thinking that dead thing out on County Road 14 could do the job, as crazy as- "Don't you understand, boss?"

"She digs up graves, Roy. She eats what she finds buried in them. That's all I need to understand."

"You're wrong. She knows-"

I raised the shotgun and blew off the bloodface's head, and then I put another load in her, and another. I blew everything off her skeleton that might have been a nest where a demon could grow. And when I was done with that little job I put a load in that wall, too, and all those scarred words went to h.e.l.l in a spray of flesh and wood, and when they were gone they left a jagged window on the world outside.

Barnes stood there, the girl's blood all over his coat, the skinning knife gripped in his shaking hand.

I jacked another sh.e.l.l into the shotgun.

"I don't want to have this conversation again," I said.

After Barnes had gone, I unlocked the cuffs and got the bloodface down. I grabbed her by her hair and rolled her into the boat. Once the boathouse doors were opened, I yanked the outboard motor cord and was on my way.

I piloted the boat to the boggy section of the lake. Black trees rooted in the water, and Spanish moss hung in tatters from the branches. It was as good a place as any for a grave. I rolled the girl into the water, and she went under with a splash. I thought about Barnes, and the things he said, and those words on the wall. And I wished he could have seen the girl there, sinking in the murk. Yeah, I wished he could have seen that straight-on. Because this was the way the world worked, and the only change coming from this deal was that some catfish were going to eat good tonight.

The afternoon waned, and the evening light came on and faded. I sat there in the boat. I might have stayed until dark, but rain began to fall-at first gently, then hard enough to patter little divots in the calm surface of the lake. That was enough for me. I revved the outboard and headed back to the lodge.

Nothing bothered me along the way, and Roy didn't bother me once I came through the front door. He was upstairs in his room, and he was quiet . . . or trying to be.

But I heard him.

I heard him just fine.

Up there in his room, whispering those garbage-disposal words while he worked them into his own flesh with the skinning knife. That's what he was doing. I was sure of it. I heard his blood pattering on the floorboards the same way that rat-spiders' blood had pattered the cement floor in the football stadium. Sure it was raining outside, but I'd heard rain and I'd heard blood and I knew the difference.

Floorboards squealed as he shifted his weight, and it didn't take much figuring to decide that he was standing in front of his dresser mirror. It went on for an hour and then two, and I listened as the rain poured down. And when Deputy Barnes set his knife on the dresser and tried to sleep, I heard his little mewling complaints. They were much softer than the screams of those coc.o.o.ned bloodfaces, but I heard them just the same.

Stairs creaked as I climbed to the second floor in the middle of the night. Barnes came awake when I slapped open the door. A black circle opened on his b.l.o.o.d.y face where his mouth must have been, but I didn't give him a chance to say a single word.

"I warned you," I said, and then I pulled the trigger.

When it was done, I rolled the deputy in a sheet and dragged him down the stairs. I buried him under the swing set. By then the rain was falling harder. It wasn't until I got Barnes in the hole that I discovered I didn't have much gas in the can I'd gotten from the boathouse. I drenched his body with what there was, but the rain was too much. I couldn't even light a match. So I tossed a road flare in the hole, and it caught for a few minutes and sent up sputters of blue flame, but it didn't do the job the way it needed to be done.

I tried a couple more flares with the same result. By then, Roy was disappearing in the downpour like a hunk of singed meat in a muddy soup. Large river rocks bordered the flowerbeds that surrounded the lodge, and I figured they might do the trick. One by one I tossed them on top of Roy. I did that for an hour, until the rocks were gone. Then I shoveled sand over the whole mess, wet and heavy as fresh cement.

It was hard work.

I wasn't afraid of it.

I did what needed to be done, and later on I slept like the dead.

And now, a month later, I tossed and turned in Barnes' bed, listening to that old swing set squeak and squeal in the wind and in my dreams.

The brittle sound of gunfire wiped all that away. I came off the bed quickly, grabbing Barnes' .45 from the nightstand as I hurried to the window. Morning sunlight streamed through the trees and painted reflections on the gla.s.s, but I squinted through them and spotted shadows stretching across the beach below.

Bloodfaces. One with a machete and two with knives, all three of them moving like rabbits flushed by one mean predator.

Two headed for the woods near the edge of the property. A rattling burst of automatic gunfire greeted them, and the bloodfaces went to meat and gristle in a cloud of red vapor.

More gunfire, and this time I spotted muzzle flash in the treeline, just past the place where I'd stacked a cord of wood the summer before. The bloodface with the machete saw it, too. He put on the brakes, but there was no place for him to run but the water or the house.

He wasn't stupid. He picked the house, sprinting with everything he had. I grabbed the bottom rail of the window and tossed it up as he pa.s.sed the swing set, but by the time I got the .45 through the gap he was already on the porch.

I headed for the door, trading the .45 for my shotgun on the way. A quick glance through the side window in the hallway, and I spotted a couple soldiers armed with M4 carbines breaking from the treeline. I didn't have time to worry about them. Turning quickly, I started down the stairs.

What I should have done was take another look through that front window. If I'd done that, I might have noticed the burrowed-up tunnel in the sand over Roy Barnes' grave.

It was hard to move slowly, but I knew I had to keep my head. The staircase was long, and the walls were so tight the shotgun could easily cover the narrow gap below. If you wanted a definition of dangerous ground, that would be the bottom of the staircase. If the bloodface was close-his back against the near wall, or standing directly beside the stairwell-he'd have a chance to grab the shotgun barrel before I entered the room.

A sharp clatter on the hardwood floor below. Metallic . . . like a machete. I judged the distance and moved quickly, following the shotgun into the room. And there was the bloodface . . . over by the front door. He'd made it that far, but no further. And it wasn't gunfire that had brought him down. No. Nothing so simple as a bullet had killed him.

I saw the thing that had done the job, instantly remembering the sounds I'd heard during the night-the sc.r.a.pes and scrabbles I'd mistaken for nesting birds scratching in the chimney. The far wall of the room was plastered with bits of carved skin, each one of them scarred over with words, and each of those words had been skinned from the thing that had burrowed out of Roy Barnes' corpse.

That thing crouched in a patch of sunlight by the open door, naked and raw, exposed muscles alive with fresh slashes that wept red as it leaned over the dead bloodface. A clawed hand with long nails like skinning knives danced across a throat slashed to the bone. The demon didn't look up from its work as it carved the corpse's flesh with quick, precise strokes. It didn't seem to notice me at all. It wrote one word on the dead kid's throat . . . and then another on his face . . . and then it slashed open the bloodface's shirt and started a third.

I fired the shotgun and the monster bucked backwards. Its skinning knife nails rasped across the doorframe and dug into the wood. The thing's head snapped up, and it stared at me with a headful of eyes. Thirty eyes, and every one of them was the color of muddy water. They blinked, and their gaze fell everywhere at once-on the dead bloodface and on me, and on the words pasted to the wall.

Red lids blinked again as the thing heaved itself away from the door and started toward me.

Another lid snapped opened on its chin, revealing a black hole.

One suck of air and I knew it was a mouth.

I fired at the first syllable. The thing was blasted back, barking and screaming as it caught the doorframe again, all thirty eyes trained on me now, its splattered chest expanding as it drew another breath through that lidded mouth just as the soldiers outside opened fire with their M4s.

Bullets chopped through flesh. The thing's lungs collapsed and a single word died on its tongue. Its heart exploded. An instant later, it wasn't anything more than a corpse spread across a puddle on the living room floor.

"Hey, Old School," the private said. "Have a drink."

He tossed me a bottle, and I tipped it back. He was looking over my shotgun. "It's mean," he said, "but I don't know. I like some rock 'n' roll when I pull a trigger. All you got with this thing is rock."

"You use it right, it does the job."

The kid laughed. "Yeah. That's all that matters, right? Man, you should hear how people talk about this s.h.i.t back in the Safe Zone. They actually made us watch some lame-a.s.s stuff on the TV before they choppered us out here to the sticks. Scientists talking, ministers talking . . . like we was going to talk these things to death while they was trying to chew on our a.s.ses."

"I met a scientist once," the sergeant said. "He had some guy's guts stuck to his face, and he was down on his knees in a lab chewing on a dead janitor's leg. I put a bullet in his head."

Laughter went around the circle. I took one last drink and pa.s.sed the bottle along with it.

"But, you know what?" the private said. "Who gives a s.h.i.t, anyway? I mean, really?"

"Well," another kid said. "Some people say you can't fight something you can't understand. And maybe it's that way with these things. I mean, we don't know where they came from. Not really. We don't even know what they are."

"s.h.i.t, Mendez. Whatever they are, I've cleaned their guts off my boots. That's all I need to know."

"That works today, Q, but I'm talking long term. As in: What about tomorrow, when we go nose-to-nose with their daddy?"

None of the soldiers said anything for a minute. They were too busy trading uncertain glances.

Then the sergeant smiled and shook his head. "You want to be a philosopher, Private Mendez, you can take the point. You'll have lots of time to figure out the answers to any questions you might have while you're up there, and you can share them with the rest of the cla.s.s if you don't get eaten before nightfall."

The men laughed, rummaging in their gear for MREs. The private handed over my shotgun, then shook my hand. "Jamal Quinlan," he said. "I'm from Detroit."

"John Dalton. I'm the sheriff around here."

It was the first time I'd said my own name in five months.

It gave me a funny feeling. I wasn't sure what it felt like.

Maybe it felt like turning a page.

The sergeant and his men did some mop-up. Mendez took pictures of the lodge, and the b.l.o.o.d.y words pasted to the living room wall, and that dead thing on the floor. Another private set up some communication equipment and they bounced everything off a satellite so some lieutenant in DC could look at it. I slipped on a headset and talked to him. He wanted to know if I remembered any strangers coming through town back in May, or anything out of the ordinary they might have had with them. Saying yes would mean more questions, so I said, "No, sir. I don't."

The soldiers moved north that afternoon. When they were gone, I boxed up food from the pantry and some medical supplies. Then I got a gas can out of the boathouse and dumped it in the living room. I sparked a road flare and tossed it through the doorway on my way out.

The place went up quicker than my house in town. It was older. I carried the box over to the truck, then grabbed that bottle the soldiers had pa.s.sed around. There were a few swallows left. I carried it down to the dock and looked back just in time to see those birds dart from their nest in the chimney, but I didn't pay them any mind.

I took the boat out on the lake, and I finished the whiskey, and after a while I came back.

Things are getting better now. It's quieter than ever around here since the soldiers came through, and I've got some time to myself. Sometimes I sit and think about the things that might have happened instead of the things that did. Like that very first day, when I spotted that monster in the Chrysler's trunk out on County Road 14 and blasted it with the shotgun-the gas tank might have exploded and splattered me all over the road. Or that day down in the dark under the high school football stadium-those rat-spiders could have trapped me in their web and spent a couple months sucking me dry. Or with Roy Barnes-if he'd never seen those books in the backseat of that old sedan, and if he'd never read a word about lesser demons, where would he be right now?

But there's no sense wondering about things like that, any more than looking for explanations about what happened to Barnes, or me, or anyone else. I might as well ask myself why the thing that crawled out of Barnes looked the way it did or knew what it knew. I could do that and drive myself crazy chasing my own tail, the same way Barnes did with all those maybe's and what if 's.

So I try to look forward. The rules are changing. Soon they'll be back to the way they used to be. Take that soldier. Private Quinlan. A year from now he'll be somewhere else, in a place where he won't do the things he's doing now. He might even have a hard time believing he ever did them. It won't be much different with me.

Maybe I'll have a new house by then. Maybe I'll take off work early on Friday and push around a shopping cart, toss steaks and a couple of six packs into it. Maybe I'll even do the things I used to do. Wear a badge. Find a new deputy. Sort things out and take care of trouble. People always need someone who can do that.

To tell the truth, that would be okay with me.

That would be just fine.

Them things liked human sacrifices. Had had 'em ages afore, but lost track o' the upper world after a time. What they done to the victims it ain't fer me to say . . .

"The Shadow Over Innsmouth" H.P. Lovecraft (1936).

* GRINDING ROCK *

Cody Goodfellow.

One foot in the green, and one in the black, Tim Vowles kept telling himself, but the edge of the burn had got away from him. All he could see was black smoke and shadows, and the eye-frying orange and hungry red of the fire all around him.

A flaming jackrabbit bolted past, and Vowles reflexively smashed it with his shovel before he realized he should have chased it. The suffering b.a.s.t.a.r.ds spread the fire like Roman candles, but they always knew the way out.

A minute ago, he'd been at the end of the twenty-man tool line with the other seasonal volunteer firefighters, cutting a fallback break in the dark, and the crew boss was saying everything was under control. The fire had nowhere to go, the evening breeze was driving it back on itself. But the wind changed and he straggled. When the next tool up shouted to keep his dime, he misunderstood and fell back even further, until the fire cut him off and he ran the wrong way, and now it had him.

The hundred-acre brushfire rallied on this patch of undeveloped land in the center of the city like a rogue cavalry unit, contained, but hardly tamed. It broke his heart, the price the land paid for the stupidity of the people-but mostly, because his own stupidity would probably kill him tonight.

Sweat broke out on his forehead and vaporized in the heat. He tied a dry bandana over his face and tried to get his bearings. To the east, the mountain had been gouged out by the Golden West Concrete quarry, and beyond that lay the Navy golf course and Vowles's own neighborhood. To the north, the ridge joined Mount Fortuna and the Mission Trails Regional Park. The city firefighters were up there, and helicopters had been dumping water and r.e.t.a.r.dant on the park all afternoon. To the south, only a few hundred yards behind the fire line, the red tile roofs of Tierrasanta, upscale pseudo-villas and palatial townhouses, ab.u.t.ted the wild, tinder-dry brush, like an invitation to h.e.l.l.

Vowles could see none of it.

He should at least have been able to see the lights of the fire engines or hear the call-outs and chainsaws of the tool line, but he got turned around by gusts of hot wind freighted with smoke so black, so thick, he felt hands shoving him, and now he was alone, with only the dancing dragon-shapes of fire to see by, and maybe the lights of his own house flickering in the smoke and roiling heat-haze like impossibly distant stars.

He barely heard his own shouting over the wind and roaring fire, but he heard the eerie howl of dogs quite clearly indeed, for it came from just behind him. Whirling and stumbling over beds of glowing coals, he fell down as if to beg for his life.

A pack of coyotes regarded him from a low rise that put them eye to yellow eye, tongues dangling, pelts black with soot. They howled again, and Vowles could hear other packs all down the canyon below picking up the demented, gibbering lament, and even neighborhood dogs joined in. His own Irish setter, Rusty, chained out in the backyard less than a mile from here, was probably adding his voice to the song of the pack that was about to eat his master.

And then, in mid-howl, they leapt at him. He ran screaming from the pack and into the heart of the fire.

He flew over the blasted moonscape, diving blindly through curtains of smoke and th.o.r.n.y blazing brush whipping at his face, but the pack gained on him and flanked to his right. To his left, where he thought the trucks had to be, pillars of flame lashed at the night, cutting off any hope of escape.

The ridge got steeper, studded with ash-dusted rocks and exploding barrel cacti, but a hollow opened up before him, an island of dense brush that the fire had miraculously pa.s.sed over, so he ducked into it. The pack loped along the edge, then stopped and sat above him like a row of judges. They whined, but did not follow.

Flames paced the far rim, licking at the gutted carca.s.s of a widowmaker tree. To linger here invited the fire to circle back and eat him alive, so Vowles ran until he stumbled upon a huge slab of granite.

He recognized it as one of the pitted grinding rocks scattered throughout the area, where local Mission Indians once made edible meal from oak acorns. The ancient bowls and gutters were furred with lichen and filled with beer bottle gla.s.s, and there were bodies laid out on the rock.

A vaguely human shape crouched over them, like another gnarled, lightning-blasted tree. Vowles walked around it, wiping the ash from his eyes, but he did not react at all when the shape uncurled itself to reach for the sky, and he heard it speak.

"Ai ch'ich ah N'Kai naguatl!" The guttural croak cut through the roar of the fire and the keening of the coyotes, creating a bubble of suffocating silence, which trapped Vowles like a fly in amber. "Ai ch'ich ia Ubbo-Sathla ai shu-t'at ai'ul!"

The leaden words hung in the air, heavier than the smoke. The speaker slammed some metal object into the stone, ringing it like a dull, gigantic bell, and beckoned to him. He only wanted to run, but his legs wouldn't move.

Coughing, hacking out strings of liquid smoke, the man on the rock asked, "Is it contained yet?"