He did not notice these things, however. He was too busy looking.

In the four or five days between his after-bedtime talk with Laurie and the day he found what he was looking for, he went through every closet in the big old house at least three times; through the crawls.p.a.ce above Lew's study five or six times; through the big old cellar half a dozen times.

It was in the cellar that he finally found it.

This was not to say he hadn't found peculiar things in other places; he most certainly had. There was a k.n.o.b of stainless steel poking out of the ceiling of a second-floor closet. A curved metal armature of some kind had burst through the side of the luggage-closet on the third floor. It was a dim, polished gray . . . until he touched it. When he did that, it flushed a dusky rose color, and he heard a faint but powerful humming sound deep in the wall. He s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand back as if the armature had been hot (and at first, when it turned a color he a.s.sociated with the burners on the electric stove, he could have sworn it was). When he did that, the curved metal thing went gray again. The humming stopped at once.

The day before, in the attic, he had observed a cobweb of thin, interlaced cables growing in a low dark corner under the eave. Trent had been crawling around on his hands and knees, not doing anything but getting hot and dirty, when he had suddenly spied this amazing phenomenon. He froze in place, staring through a tangle of hair as the cables spun themselves out of nothing at all (or so it looked, anyway), met, wrapped around each other so tightly they seemed to merge, and then continued spreading until they reached the floor, where they drilled in and anch.o.r.ed themselves in dreamy little puffs of sawdust. They seemed to be creating some sort of limber bracework, and it looked as if it would be very strong, able to hold the house together through a lot of buffeting and hard knocks.

What buffeting, though?

What hard knocks?

Again, Trent thought he knew. It was hard to believe, but he thought he knew.

There was a little closet at the north end of the cellar, far beyond the workshop area and the furnace. Their real father had called this 'the wine-cellar,' and although he'd put up only about two dozen bottles of plonk (this word had always made their mother giggle), they were all carefully stored in crisscrossing racks he had made himself.

Lew came in here even less frequently than he went into the workshop; he didn't drink wine. And although their mother had often taken a gla.s.s or two with their dad, she no longer drank wine either. Trent remembered how sad her face had looked the one time Bri had asked her why she never had a gla.s.s of plonk in front of the fire anymore.

'Lew doesn't approve of drinking,' she had told Brian. 'He says it's a crutch.'

There was a padlock on the wine-cellar door, but it was only there to make sure the door didn't swing open and let in the heat from the furnace. The key hung right next to it, but Trent didn't need it. He'd left the padlock undone after his first investigation, and no one had come along to press it shut since then. So far as he knew, no one came to this end of the cellar at all anymore.

He was not much surprised by the sour whiff of spilled wine that greeted him as he approached the door; it was just another proof of what he and Laurie already knew - the changes were winding themselves quietly all through the house. He opened the door, and although what he saw frightened him, it didn't really surprise him.

Metal constructions had burst through two of the wine-cellar's walls, tearing apart the racks with their diamond-shaped compartments and pushing the bottles of Bollinger and Mondavi and Battiglia onto the floor, where they had broken.

Like the cables in the attic crawls.p.a.ce, whatever was forming here - growing, to use Laurie's word - hadn't finished yet. It spun itself into being in sheens of light that hurt Trent's eyes and made him feel a little sick to his stomach.

No cables here, however, and no curved struts. What was growing in his real father's forgotten wine-cellar looked like cabinets and consoles and instrument panels. And, as he looked, vague shapes humped themselves up in the metal like the heads of excited snakes, gained focus, became dials and levers and read-outs. There were a few blinking lights. Some of these actually began to blink as he looked at them.

A low sighing sound accompanied this act of creation.

Trent took one cautious step farther into the little room; an especially bright red light, or series of them, had caught his eye. He sneezed as he stepped forward - the machines and consoles pushing across the old concrete had stirred up a great deal of dust.

The lights which had snagged his attention were numbers. They were under a gla.s.s strip on a metal construct which was spinning its way out of a console. This new thing looked like some sort of chair, although no one sitting in it would have been very comfortable. At least, no one with a human shape, Trent thought with a little shiver.

The gla.s.s strip was in one of the arms of this twisted chair - if it was a chair. And the numbers had perhaps caught his eye because they were moving.

72:34:18.

became 72:34:17.

and then 72:34:16.

Trent looked at his watch, which had a sweep second hand, and used it to confirm what his eyes had already told him. The chair might or might not really be a chair, but the numbers under the gla.s.s strip were a digital clock. It was running backward. Counting down, to be perfectly accurate. And what would happen when that read-out finally went from 00:00:01.

to 00:00:00.

some three days from this very afternoon?

He was pretty sure he knew. Every American boy knows one of two things happen when a backward-running clock finally reads zeros across the board: an explosion or a lift-off.

Trent thought there was too much equipment, too many gadgets, for it to be an explosion.

He thought something had gotten into the house while they were in England. Some sort of spore, perhaps, that had drifted through s.p.a.ce for a billion years before being caught in the gravitational pull of the earth, spiraling down through the atmosphere like a bit of milkweed fluff caught in a mild breeze, and finally falling into the chimney of a house in t.i.tusville, Indiana.

Into the Bradburys' house in t.i.tusville, Indiana.

It might have been something else entirely, of course, but the spore idea felt right to Trent, and although he was the oldest of the Bradbury kids, he was still young enough to sleep well after eating a pepperoni pizza at 9:00 P.M., and to believe completely in his own perceptions and intuitions. And in the end, it didn't really matter, did it? What mattered was what had happened.

And, of course, what was going to happen. When Trent left the wine-cellar this time, he not only snapped the padlock's arm closed, he took the key as well.

Something terrible happened at Lew's faculty party. It happened at quarter of nine, only forty-five minutes or so after the first guests arrived, and Trent and Laurie later heard Lew shouting at their mother that the only G.o.ddam consideration she had shown him was getting up to her foolishness early - if she'd waited until ten o'clock or so, there would have been fifty or more people circulating through the living room, dining room, kitchen, and back parlor.

'What the h.e.l.l's the matter with you?' Trent and Laurie heard him yelling at her, and when Trent felt Laurie's hand creep into his like a small cold mouse, he held it tightly. 'Don't you know what people are going to say about this? Don't you know how people in the department talk? I mean, really, Catherine - it was like something out of the Three Stooges!'

Their mother's only reply was soft, helpless sobbing, and for just one moment Trent felt a horrible, unwilling burst of hate for her. Why had she married him in the first place? Didn't she deserve this for being such a fool?

Ashamed of himself, he pushed the thought away, made it gone, and turned to Laurie. He was appalled to see tears pouring down her cheeks, and the mute sorrow in her eyes went to his heart like a knife-blade.

'Great party, huh?' she whispered, scrubbing at her cheeks with the heels of her palms.

'Right, Sprat,' he said, and hugged her so she could cry against his shoulder without being heard. 'It'll make my top-ten list at the end of the year, no sweat.'

It seemed that Catherine Evans (who had never wished more bitterly to be Catherine Bradbury again) had been lying to everyone. She had been in the grip of a screaming-blue migraine for not just a day or two days this time but for the last two weeks. During that time she had eaten next to nothing and lost fifteen pounds. She had been serving canapes to Stephen Krutchmer, the head of the History Department, and his wife when the colors went out of everything and the world suddenly swam away from her. She had rolled bonelessly forward, spilling a whole tray of Chinese pork rolls onto the front of Mrs. Krutchmer's expensive Norma Kamali dress, which had been purchased for just this occasion.

Brian and Lissa had heard the commotion and had come creeping down the stairs in their pajamas to see what was going on, although both of them - all four children, for that matter - had been strictly forbidden by Daddy Lew to leave the upper floors of the house once the party began. 'University people don't like to see children at faculty parties,' Lew had explained brusquely that afternoon. 'It sends all sorts of mixed signals.'

When they saw their mother on the floor in a circle of kneeling, concerned faculty members (Mrs. Krutchmer was not there; she had run for the kitchen, wanting to get some cold water on the front of her dress before the sauce-stains could set) they had forgotten their stepfather's firm order and had run in, Lissa crying, Brian bellowing in excited dismay. Lissa managed to kick the head of Asian Studies in the left kidney. Brian, who was two years older and thirty pounds heavier, did even better: he knocked the fall semester's guest lecturer, a plump babe in a pink dress and curly-toed evening slippers, smack into the fireplace. She sat there, dazed, in a large puff of gray-black ashes.

'Mom! Mommy!' Brian cried, shaking the former Catherine Bradbury. 'Mommy! Wake up!'

Mrs. Evans stirred and moaned.

'Get upstairs,' Lew said coldly. 'Both of you.'

When they showed no signs of obeying, Lew put his hand on Lissa's shoulder and tightened it until she squeaked with pain. His eyes blazed at her out of a face, which had gone dead pale except for red spots as bright as dimestore rouge in the center of each cheek.

'I'll take care of this,' he said through teeth so tightly clamped they refused to entirely unlock even to speak. 'You and your brother go upstairs right n - '

'Take your hand off her, you son of a b.i.t.c.h,' Trent said clearly.

Lew - and all the party-goers who had arrived early enough to witness this entertaining sideshow - turned toward the archway between the living room and the hallway. Trent and Laurie stood there, side by side. Trent was as pale as his stepfather, but his face was calm and set. There were people at the party - not many but a few - who had known Catherine Evans's first husband, and they agreed later that the resemblance between father and son was extraordinary. That it was, in fact, almost as though Bill Bradbury had come back from the dead to confront his ill-tempered replacement.

'I want you to go upstairs,' Lew said. 'All four of you. There's nothing here to concern you. Nothing to concern you at all.'

Mrs. Krutchmer had come back into the room, the bosom of her Norma Kamali damp but reasonably free of stains.

'Get your hand off Lissa,' Trent said.

'And get away from our mother,' Laurie said.

Now Mrs. Evans was sitting up, her hands to her head, looking around dazedly. The headache had popped like a balloon, leaving her disoriented and weak but at last out of the agony she had endured for the last fourteen days. She knew she had done something terrible, embarra.s.sed Lew, perhaps even disgraced him, but for the moment she was too grateful that the pain had stopped to care. The shame would come later. Now she only wanted to go upstairs - very slowly - and lie down.

'You'll be punished for this,' Lew said, looking at his four stepchildren in the nearly perfect shocked silence of the living room. He didn't look at them all at once but one at a time, as if marking the nature and extent of each crime. When his gaze fell on Lissa, she began to cry. 'I'm sorry for their misbehavior,' he said to the room at large. 'My wife is a bit lax with them, I'm afraid. What they need is a good English nanny - '

'Don't be a jacka.s.s, Lew,' Mrs. Krutchmer said. Her voice was very loud but not very tuneful; she sounded a bit like a jacka.s.s in full bray herself. Brian jumped, clutched his sister, and also gave way to tears. 'Your wife fainted. They were concerned, that's all.'

'Quite right, too,' the guest lecturer said, struggling to extract her considerable bulk from the fireplace. Her pink dress was now a splotchy gray and her face was streaked with soot. Only her shoes with their absurd but engaging curly tips seemed to have escaped, but she looked quite unperturbed by the whole thing. 'Children should care about their mothers. And husbands about their wives.'

She looked pointedly at Lew Evans as she said this last, but Lew missed her gaze; he was marking Trent and Laurie's progress as they a.s.sisted their mother up the stairs. Lissa and Brian trailed along behind, like an honor guard.

The party went on. The incident was more or less papered over, as unpleasant incidents at faculty parties usually are. Mrs. Evans (who had slept three hours a night at most since her husband had announced his intention of throwing a party) was asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow, and the children heard Lew downstairs, booming out bonhomie without her. Trent suspected that he was even a little relieved not to have to contend with his scurrying, frightened mouse of a wife anymore.

He never once broke away to come up and check on her.

Not once. Not until the party was over.

After the last guest had been shown out, he walked heavily upstairs and told her to wake up . . . which she did, obedient in this as she had been in everything else since the day when she had made the mistake of telling the minister she did and Lew that she would.

Lew poked his head into Trent's room next and measured the children with his gaze.

'I knew you'd all be in here,' he said with a satisfied little nod. 'Conspiring. You're going to be punished, you know. Yes indeed. Tomorrow. Tonight I want you to go right to bed and think about it. Now go to your rooms. And no creeping around, either.'

Neither Lissa nor Brian did any 'creeping around,' certainly; they were too exhausted and emotionally wrung out to do anything but go to bed and fall immediately asleep. But Laurie came back down to Trent's room in spite of 'Daddy Lew,' and the two of them listened in silent dismay as their stepfather upbraided their mother for daring to faint at his party . . . and as their mother wept and offered not a word of argument or even demurral.

'Oh, Trent, what are we going to do?' Laurie asked, her voice m.u.f.fled against his shoulder.

Trent's face was extraordinarily pale and still. 'Do?' he said. 'Why, we're not going to do anything, Sprat.'

'We have to! Trent, we have to! We have to help her!'

'No, we don't,' Trent said. A small and somehow terrible smile played around his lips. 'The house is going to do it for us.' He looked at his watch and calculated. 'At around three-thirty-four tomorrow afternoon, the house is going to do it all.'

There were no punishments in the morning; Lew Evans was too preoccupied with his eight o'clock seminar on Consequences of the Norman Conquest. Neither Trent nor Laurie was very surprised at this, but both were extremely grateful. He told them he would see them in his study that night, one by one, and 'mete a few fair strokes to each.' Once this threat in the form of an obscure quotation had been given, he marched out with his head up and his briefcase clasped firmly in his right hand. Their mother was still asleep when his Porsche snarled its way down the street.

The two younger kids were standing by the kitchen with their arms around each other, looking to Laurie like an ill.u.s.tration from a Grimm's fairytale. Lissa was crying. Brian was keeping a stiff upper lip, at least so far, but he was pale and there were purple pouches under his eyes. 'He'll spank us,' Brian said to Trent. 'And he spanks hard, too.'

'Nope,' Trent said. They looked at him hopefully but dubiously. Lew had, after all, promised spankings; even Trent was not to be spared this painful indignity.

'But, Trent - ' Lissa began.

'Listen to me,' Trent said, pulling a chair out from the table and sitting on it backward in front of the two little ones. 'Listen carefully, and don't you miss a single word. It's important, and none of us can screw up.'

They stared at him silently with their big green-blue eyes.

'As soon as school is out, I want you two to come right home . . . but only as far as the corner. The corner of Maple and Walnut. Have you got that?'

'Ye-ess,' Lissa said hesitantly. 'But why, Trent?'

'Never mind,' Trent said. His own eyes - also green-blue - were sparkling, but Laurie thought it wasn't a good-humored sparkle; she thought, in fact, that there was something dangerous about it. 'Just be there. Stand by the mailbox. You have to be there by three o'clock, three-fifteen at the latest. Do you understand?'

'Yes,' Brian said, speaking for both of them. 'We got it.'

'Laurie and I will already be there, or we'll be there right after you get there.'

'How are we going to do that, Trent?' Laurie asked. 'We don't even get out of school until three o'clock, and I have band practice, and the bus takes - '

'We're not going to school today,' Trent said.

'No?' Laurie was nonplussed.

Lissa was horrified. 'Trent!' she said. 'You can't do that! That's . . . that's . . . hookey!'

'And about time, too,' Trent said grimly. 'Now you two get ready for school. Just remember: the corner of Maple and Walnut at three o'clock, three-fifteen at the absolute latest. And whatever you do, don't come all the way home.' He stared at Brian and Lissa so fiercely that they looked back with frightened dismay, drawing together for mutual comfort once again. Even Laurie was frightened. 'Wait for us, but don't you dare come back into this house,' he said. 'Not for anything.'

When the little kids were gone, Laurie seized his shirt and demanded to know what was going on.

'It has something to do with what's growing in the house, I know it does, and if you want me to play hookey and help you, you better tell me what it is, Trent Bradbury!'

'Mellow out, I'll tell you,' Trent said. He carefully removed his shirt from Laurie's tight grip. 'And quiet down. I don't want you to wake up Mom. She'll make us go to school, and that's no good.'

'Well, what is it? Tell me!'

'Come on downstairs,' Trent said. 'I want to show you something.'

He led her downstairs to the wine-cellar.

Trent wasn't completely sure Laurie would ride along with what he had in mind - it seemed awfully . . . well, final . . . even to him - but she did. If it had just been a matter of enduring a spanking from 'Daddy Lew,' he didn't think she would have, but Laurie had been as deeply affected by the sight of her mother lying senseless on the living-room floor as Trent had been by his stepfather's unfeeling reaction to it.

'Yeah,' Laurie said bleakly. 'I think we have to.' She was looking at the blinking numbers on the arm of the chair. They now read 07:49:21.

The wine-cellar was no longer a wine-cellar at all. It stank of wine, true enough, and there were the piles of shattered green gla.s.s on the floor amid the twisted ruins of their father's wine-racks, but it now looked like a madman's version of the control-bridge on the Starship Enterprise. Dials whirled. Digital read-outs flickered, changed, flickered again. Lights blinked and flashed.

'Yeah,' Trent said. 'I think so, too. That son of a b.i.t.c.h, shouting at her like that!'

'Trent, don't.'

'He's a jerk! A b.a.s.t.a.r.d! A d.i.c.khead!'

But this was just a foul-mouthed version of whistling past the graveyard, and both of them knew it. Looking at the strange agglomeration of instruments and controls made Trent feel almost sick with doubt and unease. He was reminded of a book his dad had read him when he was a child, a Mercer Mayer story where a creature called a Stamp-Eating Trollusk had popped a little girl into an envelope and mailed her To Whom It May Concern. Wasn't that pretty much what he was proposing they do to Lew Evans?

'If we don't do something, he'll kill her,' Laurie said in a low voice.

'Huh?' Trent whipped his head around so fast it hurt his neck, but Laurie wasn't looking at him. She was looking at the red numbers of the countdown. They reflected backward off the lenses of the spectacles she wore on schooldays. She seemed almost hypnotized, unaware Trent was looking at her, perhaps even unaware that he was there.

'Not on purpose,' she said. 'He might even be sad. For a while, anyway. Because I think he does love her, sort of, and she loves him. You know - sort of. But he'll make her worse and worse. She'll get sick all the time, and then . . . one day . . . '