He drove the combined four-lane to where it divided into a pair of one-ways, Fourth Street going west into town, Third Street coming east. He pa.s.sed several fast-food joints, a liquor store, a pak of gas stations, Quik Dry Cleaners, Rock River Valley Printers, and an electrical shop. Traffic was light. The heat rose off the pavement in waves, and the leaves on the trees that lined the sidewalks hung limp in the windless air. The men and women of Hopewell were closeted in their homes and offices with the air conditioners turned on high, going about the business of their lives with weary determination. Unless summer school had claimed them, the kids were all out at the parks or swimming pools, trying to stay cool and keep from being bored. At night the temperature would drop ten to fifteen degrees and there might be a breeze, but still no one would be moving very fast. There was a somnolence to the community that suggested a long siesta in progress, a dullness of pace that whispered of despair.

Old Bob shook his head. Well, the Fourth of July was almost here, and the Fourth, with its fireworks and picnics and the dance in the park, might help take people's minds off their problems.

A few minutes later he pulled into a vacant parking s.p.a.ce in front of Josie's and climbed out of the cab. The sun's brightness was so intense and the heat's swelter so thick that for a moment he felt light-headed. He gripped the parking mirror to steady himself, feeling old and foolish, trying desperately to pretend that nothing was wrong as he studied his feet. When he had regained his balance sufficiently to stand on his own, he walked to the parking meter, fed a few coins into the slot, moved to the front door of the coffee shop, and stepped inside.

Cold air washed over him, a welcome relief. Josie's occupied the corner of Second Avenue and Third Street across from the liquor store, the bank parking lot, and Hays Insurance. Windows running the length of both front walls gave a clear view of the intersection and those trudging to and from their air-conditioned offices and cars. Booths lined the windows, red leather fifties-era banquettes reupholstered and rest.i.tched. An L-shaped counter wrapped with stools was situated farther in, and a scattering of tables occupied the available floor s.p.a.ce between. There were fresh-baked doughnuts, sweet rolls, and breads displayed in a gla.s.s case at the far end of the counter, and coffee, espresso, hot chocolate, tea, and soft drinks to wash those down. Josie's boasted black cows, green rivers, sarsaparillas, and the thickest shakes for miles. Breakfast was served anytime, and you could get lunch until three, when the kitchen closed. Takeout was available and frequently used. Josie's had the best daytime food in town, and almost everyone drifted in to sample it at least once or twice a week. Old Bob and his union pals were there every day. Before the mill was shut down, only those who had retired carne in on a regular basis, but now all of them showed up every morning without fail. Most were already there as Old Bob made his way to the back of the room and the clutch of tables those who had gotten there first had shoved together to accommodate latecomers. Old Bob waved, then detoured toward the service counter. Carol Blier intercepted him, asked how he was doing, and told him to stop by the office sometime for a chat. Old Bob nodded and moved on, feeling Carol's eyes following him, measuring his step. Carol sold life insurance.

"Well, there you are," Josie greeted from behind the counter, giving him her warmest smile. "Your buddies have been wondering if you were coming in."

Old Bob smiled back. "Have they now?"

"Sure. They can't spit and walk at the same time without you to show them how you know that." Josie c.o.c.ked one eyebrow playfully. "I swear you get better looking every time I see you."

Old Bob laughed. Josie Jackson was somewhere in her thirties, a divorcee with a teenage daughter and a worthless ex-husband last seen heading south about half a dozen years ago. She was younger-looking than her years, certainly younger-acting, with big dark eyes and a ready smile, long blondish hair and a head-turning body, and most important of all a willingness to work that would put most people to shame. She had purchased Josie's with money loaned to her by her parents, who owned a carpet-and-tile business. Having worked much of her adult life as a waitress, Josie Jackson knew what she was doing, and in no time her business was the favorite breakfast and lunch spot in Hopewell. Josie ran it with charm and efficiency and a live-and-let-live att.i.tude that made everyone feel welcome.

"How's Evelyn?" she asked him, leaning her elbows on the counter as she fixed him with her dark eyes.

He shrugged. "Same as always. Rock of ages."

"Yeah, she'll outlive us all, won't she?" Josie brushed at her tousled hair. "Well, go on back. You want your usual?"

Old Bob nodded, and Josie moved away. If he'd been younger and unattached, Old Bob would have given serious consideration to hooking up with Josie Jackson. But then that was the way all the old codgers felt, and most of the young bucks, too. That was Josie's gift.

He eased through the cl.u.s.tered tables, stopping for a brief word here and there, working his way back to where the union crowd was gathered. They glanced up as he approached, one after the other, giving him perfunctory nods or calling out words of greeting. Al Garcia, Mel Riorden, Deny Howe, Richie Stoudt, Penny Williamson, Mike Michaelson, Junior Elway, and one or two more. They made room for him at one end of the table, and he scooted a chair over and took a seat, sinking comfortably into place.

"So this guy, he works in a post office somewhere over in Iowa, right?" Mel Riorden was saying. He was a big, overweight crane operator with spiky red hair and a tendency to blink rapidly while he was speaking. He was doing so now. Like one of those ads showing how easy it is to open and close a set of blinds. Blink, blink, blink. "He comes to work in a dress. No, this is the G.o.d's honest truth. It was right there in the paper. He comes to work in a dress."

"What color of dress?" Richie Stoudt interrupted, looking genuinely puzzled, not an unusual expression for Richie.

Riorden looked at him. "What the h.e.l.l difference does that make? It's a dress, on a man who works in a post office, Richie! Think about it! Anyway, he comes to work, this guy, and his supervisor sees the dress and tells him he can't work like that, he has to go home and change. So he does. And he comes back wearing a different dress, a fur coat, and a gorilla mask. The supervisor tells him to go home again, but this time he won't leave. So they call the police and haul him away. Charge him with disturbing the peace or something. But this is the best part. Afterward, the supervisor tells a reporter - this is true, now, I swear - tells the reporter, with a straight face, that they are considering psychiatric evaluation for the guy. Considering!"

"You know, I read about a guy who took his monkey to the emergency room a few weeks back." Albert Garcia picked up the conversation. He was a small, solid man with thinning dark hair and close-set features, a relative newcomer to the group, having come up from Houston with his family to work at MidCon less than ten years ago. Before the strike, he set the rolls in the fourteen-inch. "The monkey was his pet, and it got sick or something. So he hauls it down to the emergency room. This was in Arkansas, I think. Tells the nurse it's his baby. Can you imagine? His baby!"

"Did it look anything like him?" Mel Riorden laughed.

"This isn't the same guy, is it?" Penny Williamson asked suddenly. He was a bulky, heavy-featured black man with skin that shone almost as blue as oiled steel. He was a foreman in the number-three plant, steady and reliable. He shifted his heavy frame slightly and winked knowingly at Old Bob. "You know, the postal-worker guy again?"

Al Garcia looked perplexed. "I don't think so. Do you think it could be?"

"So what happened?" Riorden asked as he bit into a fresh Danish. His eyes blinked like a camera shutter. He rearranged' the sizable mound of sweet rolls he had piled on a plate in front of him, already choosing his next victim.

"Nothing." Al Garcia shrugged. "They fixed up the monkey and sent him home."

"That's it? That's the whole story?" Riorden shook his head.

Al Garcia shrugged again. "I just thought it was bizarre, that's all."

"I think you're bizarre." Riorden looked away dismissively. "Hey, Bob, what news from the east end this fine morning?"

Old Bob accepted with a nod the coffee and sweet roll Josie scooted in front of him. "Nothing you don't already know. It's hot at that end of town, too. Any news from the mill?"

"Same old, same old. The strike goes on. Life goes on. Everybody keeps on keeping on."

"I been getting some yard work out at Joe Preston's," Richie Stoudt offered, but everyone ignored him, because if brains were dynamite he didn't have enough to blow his nose.

"I'll give you some news," Junior Elway said suddenly. "There's some boys planning to cross the picket line if they can get their jobs back. It was just a few at first, but I think there's more of them now."

Old Bob considered him wordlessly for a moment. Junior was not the most reliable of sources. "That so, Junior? I don't think the company will allow it, after all that's happened."

"They'll allow it, all right," Deny Howe cut in. He was a tall, angular man with close-cropped hair and an intense, suspicious stare that made people wonder. He'd been a bit strange as a boy, and two tours in Vietnam hadn't unproved things. Since Nam, he'd lost a wife, been arrested any number of times for drinking and driving, and spotted up his mill record until it looked like someone had sneezed into an inkwell. Old Bob couldn't understand why they hadn't fired him. He was erratic and error-p.r.o.ne, and those who knew him best thought he wasn't rowing with all his oars in the water. Junior Elway was the only friend he had, which was a dubious distinction. He was allowed to hang out with this group only because he was Mel Riorden's sister's boy.

"What do you mean?" Al Garcia asked quickly.

"I mean, they'll allow it because they're going to start up the fourteen-inch again over the weekend and have it up and running by Tuesday. Right after the Fourth. I got it from a friend on the inside." Howe's temple pulsed and his lips tightened. "They want to break the union, and this is their best chance. Get the company running again without us."

"Been tried already." Al Garcia sniffed.

"So now it's gonna get tried again. Think about it, Al. What have they got to lose?"

"No one from the union is going back to help them do it," Penrod Williamson declared, glowering at Howe. "That's foolish talk."

"You don't think there's enough men out there with wives and children to feed that this ain't become more important to them than the strike?" Howe snapped. He brushed at his close-cropped hair. "You ain't paying attention then, Penny. The bean counters have taken over, and guys like us, we're history! You think the national's going to bail us out of this? h.e.l.l! The company's going to break the union and we're sitting here letting them do it!"

"Well, it's not like there's a lot else we can do, Deny," Mel Riorden pointed out, easing his considerable weight back in his metal frame chair. "We've struck and picketed and that's all the law allows us. And the national's doing what it can. We just have to be patient. Sooner or later this thing will get settled."

"How's that gonna happen, Mel?" Howe pressed, flushed with anger. "Just how the h.e.l.l's that gonna happen? You see any negotiating going on? I sure as h.e.l.l don't! Striking and picketing is fine, but it ain't getting us anywhere. These people running the show, they ain't from here. They don't give a rat's a.s.s what happens to us. If you think they do, well you're a d.a.m.n fool!"

"He's got a point," Junior Elway agreed, leaning forward over his coffee, nodding solemnly, lank blond hair falling into his face. Old Bob pursed his lips. Junior always thought Deny Howe had a point.

"d.a.m.n right!" Howe was rolling now, his taut features shoved forward, dominating the table. "You think we're going to win this thing by sitting around bulls.h.i.tting each other? Well, we ain't! And there ain't no one else gonna help us either. We have to do this ourselves, and we have to do it quick. We have to make them hurt more than we're hurting. We have to pick their pocket the way they're picking ours!"

"What're you talking about?" Penny Williamson growled. He had less use for Derry Howe than any of them; he'd once had Howe booted off his shift.

Howe glared at him. "You think about it, Mr. Penrod Williamson. You were in the Nam, too. Hurt them worse than they hurt you, that was how you survived. That's how you get anywhere in a war."

"We ain't in a war here," Penny Williamson observed, his finger pointed at Howe. "And the Nam's got nothing to do with this. What're you saying, man? That we ought to go down to the mill and blow up a few of the enemy? You want to shoot someone while you're at it?"

Derry Howe's fist crashed down on the table. "If that's what it takes, h.e.l.l yes!"

There was sudden silence. A few heads turned. Howe was shaking with anger as he leaned back in his chair, refusing to look away. Al Garcia wiped at his spilled coffee with his napkin and shook his head. Mel Riorden checked his watch.

Penny Williamson folded his arms across his broad chest, regarding Derry Howe the way he might have regarded that postal worker in his dress, fur coat, and gorilla mask. "You better watch out who you say that to."

"Derry's just upset," said a man sitting next to him. Old Bob hadn't noticed the fellow before. He had blue eyes that were so pale they seemed washed of color. "His job's on the line, and the company doesn't even know he's alive. You can understand how he feels. No need for us to be angry with each other. We're all friends here."

"Yeah, Derry don't mean nothing," Junior Elway agreed.

"What do you think we ought to do?" Mike Michaelson asked Robert Roosevelt Freemark suddenly, trying to turn the conversation another way.

Old Bob was still looking at the man next to Howe, trying to place him. The bland, smooth features were as familiar to him as his own, but for some reason he couldn't think of his name. It was right on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn't get a handle on it. Nor could he remember exactly what it was the fellow did. He was a mill man, all right. Too young to be retired, so he must be one of the strikers. But where did he know him from? The others seemed to know him, so why couldn't he place him?

His gaze shifted to Michaelson, a tall, gaunt, even-tempered millwright who had retired about the same time Old Bob had. Old Bob had known Mike all his life, and he recognized at once that Mike was trying to give Derry Howe a chance to cool down.

"Well, I think we need a stronger presence from the national office," he said. "Derry's right about that much." He folded his big hands on the table before him and looked down at them. "I think we need some of the government people to do more - maybe a senator or two to intervene so we can get things back on track with the negotiations."

"More talk!" Deny Howe barely hid a sneer.

"Talk is the best way to go," Old Bob advised, giving him a look.

"Yeah? Well, it ain't like it was in your time, Bob Freemark. We ain't got local owners anymore, people with a stake in the community, people with families that live here like the rest of us. We got a bunch of New York bloodsuckers draining all the money out of Hopewell, and they don't care about us." Derry Howe slouched in his chair, eyes downcast. "We got to do something if we expect to survive this. We can't just sit around hoping for someone to help us. It ain't going to happen."

"There was a fellow out East somewhere, one of the major cities, Philadelphia, I think," said the man sitting next to him, his strange pale eyes quizzical, his mouth quirked slightly, as if his words amused him. "His wife died, leaving him with a five-year-old daughter who was mildly r.e.t.a.r.ded. He kept her in a closet off the living room for almost three years before someone discovered what he was doing and called the police. When they questioned the man, he said he was just trying to protect the girl from a hostile world." The man c.o.c.ked his head slightly. "When they asked the girl why she hadn't tried to escape, she said she was afraid to run, that all she could do was wait for someone to help her."

"Well, they ain't shutting me up in no closet!" Derry Howe snapped angrily. "I can help myself just fine!"

"Sometimes," the man said, looking at no one in particular, his voice low and compelling, "the locks get turned before you even realize that the door's been closed."

"I think Bob's right," Mike Michaelson said. "I think we have to give the negotiation process a fair chance. These things take time."

"Time that costs us money and gives them a better chance to break us!" Derry Howe shoved back his chair and came to his feet. "I'm outta here. I got better things to do than sit around here all day. I'm sick of talking and doing nothing. Maybe you don't care if the company takes away your job, but I ain't having none of it!"

He stalked away, weaving angrily through the crowded tables, and slammed the door behind him. At the counter, Josie Jackson grimaced. A moment later, Junior Elway left as well. The men still seated at the table shifted uncomfortably in their chairs.

"I swear, if that boy wasn't my sister's son, I wouldn't waste another moment on him," Melvin Riorden muttered.

"He's right about one thing," Old Bob sighed. "Things aren't the way they used to be. The world's changed from when we were his age, and a lot of it's gotten pretty ugly. People don't want to work things out anymore like they used to."

"People just want a pound of flesh," A! Garcia agreed. His blocky head pivoted on his bull neck. "It's all about money and getting your foot on the other guy's neck. That's why the company and the union can't settle anything. Makes you wonder if the government hasn't put something in the water after all."

"You see where that man went into a grocery store out on Long Island somewhere and walked up and down the aisles stabbing people?" asked Penny Williamson. "Had two carving knives with him, one in each hand. He never said a word, just walked in and began stabbing people. He stabbed ten of them before someone stopped him. Killed two. The police say he was angry and depressed. Well, h.e.l.l, who ain't?"

"The world's full of angry, depressed people," said Mike Michaelson, rearranging his coffee cup and silver, staring down at his sun-browned, wrinkled hands fixedly. "Look what people are doing to each other. Parents beating and torturing their children. Young boys and girls killing each other. Teachers and priests taking advantage of their position to do awful things. Serial killers wandering the countryside. Churches and schools being vandalized and burned. It's a travesty."

"Some of those people you talk about live right here in Hopewell." Penny Williamson grunted. "That Topp kid who killed his common-law wife with a butcher knife and cut her up in pieces a few years back? I grew up with that kid. Old man Peters killed ail those horses two weeks back, said they were the sp.a.w.n of Satan. Tilda Mason, tried to kill herself three times over the past six months - twice in the mental hospital. Tried to kill a couple of the people working there as well. That fellow Riley Crisp, the one they call 'rabbit' lives down on Wallace? He stood out on the First Avenue Bridge and shot at people until the police came, then shot at them, and then jumped off the bridge and drowned himself. When was that? Last month?" He shook his head. "Where's it all going to end I wonder?"

Old Bob smoothed back his white hair. None of them had the answer to that one. It made him wonder suddenly about Evelyn and her feeders. Might just as easily be feeders out there as something the government had put in the water.

He noticed suddenly that the man who had been sitting with Deny Howe was gone. His brow furrowed and his wide mouth tightened. When had the man left? He tried again to think of his name and failed.

"I got me some more work to do out at Preston's," Richie Stoudt advised solemnly. "You can laugh, but it keeps bread on the table."

The conversation returned to the strike and the intractable position of the company, and the stories started up again, and a moment later Old Bob had forgotten the man completely.

Chapter Four.

The demon stepped out into the midday heat in front of Josie's and felt right at home. Perhaps it was his madness that made him so comfortable with the sun's brilliant white light and suffocating swelter, for it was true that it burned as implacably hot. Or perhaps it was his deep and abiding satisfaction at knowing that this community and its inhabitants were his to do with as he chose.

He followed Derry Howe and Junior El way to the latter's Jeep Cherokee and climbed into the cab with them, sitting comfortably in the backseat, neither one of them quite aware that he was there. It was one of the skills he had acquired - to blend in so thoroughly with his surroundings that he seemed to be a part of them, to make himself appear so familiar that even those sitting right beside him felt no need to question his presence. He supposed there was still just enough of them in him that he was able to accomplish this. He had been human once himself, but that was long ago and all but forgotten. What remained of his humanity was just a shadow of a memory of what these creatures were, so that he could appear and act like them to the extent that his duplicity required it. His gradual transformation from human to demon had driven out the rest. He had found, after a time, that he did not miss it.

Junior turned over the Jeep's engine and switched on the air, blowing a thick wash of heat through the vents and into the closed interior. Junior and Derry rolled down their windows to let the heat escape as the Jeep pulled away from the curb, but the demon just breathed in contentedly and smiled. He had been in Hopewell a little more than a week, not wanting to come any sooner because John Ross still tracked him relentlessly and had displayed a disturbing ability to locate him even when there was no possible way he should have been able to do so. But a week had gone by, the Fourth of July approached, and it seemed possible that this time Ross might prove a step too slow. It was important that Ross not interfere, for the demon had sown his destructive seed deep and waited long for it to grow. Now the seed's harvest was at hand, and the demon did not want any interference. Everything was in place, everything that he had worked so long and hard to achieve - a clever subterfuge, an apocalyptic ruin, and an irreversible transformation that would hasten the coming of the Void and the banishment of the Word.

His mind spun with the possibilities as the Jeep turned off Second Avenue onto Fourth Street and headed west out of town. On his left the long, dark, corrugated-metal roofs of Mid-Con Steel could be glimpsed through gaps in the rows of the once-elegant old homes that ran the length of West Third coming in toward town from several blocks above Avenue G. The air-conditioning had kicked in, and with the windows rolled up again the demon took comfort instead from his inner heat. His pa.s.sion enveloped him, a coc.o.o.n into which he could retreat and from which he could feed, a red haze of intolerance and hate and greed for power.

"Those old boys don't know nothing," Derry Howe was saying, slouched back in his bucket seat, his bullet head shining in the sun. "I don't plan to listen to them no more. All they do is sit around and talk about sitting around some more. Old farts."

"Yeah, they ain't seeing it like it is," Junior agreed.

No, not like you, thought the demon contentedly. thought the demon contentedly. Not with the bright, clear knowledge I have given to you. Not with the bright, clear knowledge I have given to you.

"We got to do something if we want to keep our jobs," Derry said. "We got to stop the company from breaking the union, and we got to stop them right now."

"Yeah, but how we gonna do that?" Junior asked, glancing over uncertainly, then gunning the Jeep through a yellow light turning red.

"Oh, there's ways. There's ways, buddy."

Yes, there are lots and lots of ways.

Derry Howe looked over at Junior, smiling. "You know what they say? Where there's a will, there's a way. Well, I've got me a will that won't quit. I just need me a way. I'm gonna find it, too, and you can take that to the bank! Old Bob and those others can go shove their patience where the sun don't shine."

They crossed Avenue G past the tire center, gas station, and west-end grocery and rode farther toward the cornfields. The buildings of the mill were still visible down the cross streets and between the old homes, plant three giving way to plant four, plant five still out ahead, back of the old speedway, the whole of MidCon spread out along the north bank of the Rock River. The demon studied the residences and the people they sped past, his for the taking, his to own, dismissing them almost as quickly as they were considered. This was a breeding ground for him and nothing more. On July fourth, all of it and all of them would pa.s.s into the hands of the feeders, and he would be on his way to another place. It was his world, too, but he felt no attachment to it. His work was what drove him, what gave him purpose, and his servitude to the dark, chaotic vision of the Void would allow for nothing else. There were in his life only need and compulsion, those to be satisfied through a venting of his madness, and nothing of his physical surroundings or of the creatures that inhabited them had any meaning for him.

The Jeep pa.s.sed a junkyard of rusting automobile carca.s.ses piled high behind a chain-link fence bordering a trailer park that looked to be the last stop of transients on their way to homelessness or the grave, and from behind the fence a pair of lean, black-faced Dobermans peered out with savage eyes. Bred to attack anything that intruded, the demon thought. Bred to destroy. He liked that.

His mind drifted in the haze of the midday summer heat, the voices of Derry and Junior a comfortable buzz that did not intrude. He had come to Hopewell afoot, walking out of the swelter of the cornfields and the blacktop roadways with the inexorable certainty of nightfall. He had chosen to appear in that manner, wanting to smell and taste the town, wanting it to give something of itself to him, something it could not give if he arrived by car or bus, if he were to be closed away. He had materialized in the manner of a mirage, given shape and form out of delusion and desperation, given life out of false hope. He had walked into a poor neighborhood on the fringe of the town, into a collection of dilapidated homes patched with tar paper and oilcloth, their painted wooden sides peeling, their shingled roofs cracked and blistered, their yards rutted and littered with ruined toys, discarded appliances, and rusting vehicles. Within the close, airless confines of the homes huddled the leavings of despair and endless disappointment. Children played beneath the shade of the trees, dust-covered, desultory, and joyless. Already they knew what the future would bring. Already their childhood was ending. The demon pa.s.sed them with a smile.

At the corner of Avenue J and Twelfth Street, at a confluence of crumbling sheds, pastureland, and a few scattered residences, a boy had stood at the edge of the roadway with a ma.s.sive dog. At well over a hundred pounds, all bristling hair and wicked dark markings, the dog was neither one identifiable breed nor another, but some freakish combination. It stood next to the boy, hooked on one end of a chain, the other end of which the boy held. Its eyes were deep-set and baleful, and its stance suggested a barely restrained fury. It disliked the demon instinctively, as all animals did, but it was frightened of him, too. The boy was in his early teens, wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and high-top tennis shoes, all of them worn and stained with dirt. The boy's stance, like the dog's, was at once strained and c.o.c.ky. He was tall and heavyset, and there was no mistaking the bully in him. Most of what he had gotten in life he had acquired through intimidation or theft. When he smiled, as he did now, there was no warmth. "Hey, you," the boy said.

The demon's bland face showed nothing. Just another stupid, worthless creature, the demon thought as he approached. Just another failed effort in somebody's failed life. He would leave his mark here, with this boy, to signal his coming, to lay claim to what was now his. He would do so in blood.

"You want to go through here, you got to pay me a dollar," the boy called out to the demon.

The demon stopped where he was, right in the middle of the road, the sun beating down on him. "A dollar?"

"Yeah, that's the toll. Else you got to go around the other way."

The demon looked up the street the way he had come, then back at the boy. "This is a public street."

"Not in front of my house it ain't. In front of my house, it's a toll road and it costs a dollar to pa.s.s."

"Only if you're traveling on foot, I guess. Not if you're in a car. I don't suppose that even a dog as mean as yours could stop a car." The boy stared at him, uncomprehending. The demon shrugged. "So, does the dog collect the dollar for you?"

"The dog collects a piece of your a.s.s if you don't pay!" the boy snapped irritably. "You want to see what that feels like?"