Whoever it was knew where the doomed couple would be sitting and who they were.

Even now, as she signaled them on, this pair of tuxedo'd boys blowing kisses at her might, in a little while, be lying, gutted open, at the base of the towering fiend she had helped construct.

Jenna knew she should feel frightened.

But she didn't.

Not even for Dex and her sister. They'd be safe. And her own prom night was an entire year away.

Besides, maybe she'd be a finalist for prom queen. Sure, she wasn't the best looking girl in the junior cla.s.s. She wasn't claiming she was.

But Rocky Stark had flirted with her once, a smile and a smart slap across the face. As flirts go, it wasn't much. But it was enough of one that Sandya"who had let it be known that their twosome would be looking for male completion onlya"felt compelled to give Jenna a public dressing-down.

Even if a nomination wasn't in the cards, her birthdate would make her a tender on prom night. For three days on either side of one's birthdate each month (in Jenna's case, the twenty-third), any sort of physical harm was strictly forbidden.

Well, okay, except for about to give anybody a free ride from birth. Still, she had a fifty-fifty chance of being sent by lottery to the girl's gym, thereby escaping all possibility of slaughter.

If that were true, Pish Balthasar, the brainy beauty with the smoky eyes and a growing interest in her, would almost surely want to be her date.

Horn blips from the street.

Dexter drove, Tweed in mid-wave beside him.

Jenna's coat rustled as her arm shot up. She waved them on, blowing a kiss.

Dex stopped, roll down. "Don't let the Ice Ghoul get you!"

Roll up as Jenna's big sister said, "And have a good time ata"" The window cut Tweed off, but Jenna saw her lips form Pumper's house.

"I will," she yelled, "and you keep away from the Ice Ghoul too!" Tweed looked grand in pink, and Dex would make a darling brother-in-law.

It wouldn't be long now.

Another quarter hour, and Mrs. Gosler or one of her husbands would drive Jenna and Pumper home for a sleepover. Jenna waved at Pumper across the lot, fingers captured by her flashlight beams, and Pumper waved back.

Later in Pumper's bedroom, they would listen, mock shock on their faces, to the Goslers watching the electrocution on Notorious. All the while, the two girls would keep the radio low, listening intently to the Midwest returns, heaving sighs of relief and bursting into giggles as Corundum High's victims were announced and it became clear that their older siblings had been spared.

Another car arced in.

An increase in frantic frowns meant the eight o'clock deadline must be drawing near.

Stay on the ball, Jenna told herself.

She had to concentrate, these last minutes, lest her fumbling lose someone their lobes.

Where before had been free highway, cars clogged in backup. Tough times ahead. Behind her, the ten minute bell sounded.

A wrench in her gut.

Get it on, she thought, relax the wrist, stay alert, give Tweed's cla.s.smates every fair chance.

Over driveway and blacktop, Jenna's fragile cone of light moved in deadly earnest.

Tweed walked arm in arm with Dex to the band room. In the empty hallways, her dress rustled an unbearable rustle.

Silent lockers serried by.

In her free hand she held the sealed envelope Wattle Murch's brother Daub had given Dex at the front table. It had grown sticky with palm-sweat.

The band room door wasn't locked.

They ventured in.

No one there.

A dim bulb on a lamp pole with a pullchain struggled to throw light over the wooden risers where the French horn section sat. Dark shadows choked the rest of the fan-shaped room, and Tweed had to trust to sense memory to know when to step up and when not.

"You see okay?" asked Dex. He had reached the cache of saxophones in back, set midway in the tall gray doors angled polygonally about the outer edge of the room.

He fumbled out his key.

"Yes, if I don't look at the lightbulb."

Tweed threaded through a tangled forest of stands, shoving the black nuisances aside. She touched the leather thong of her key, unpursed it, and felt for the right orientation.

The trombone closet unlocked.

Musty odor inside always, like the inside of a ventriloquist's dummy's mouth. There stood her trombone case.

Tweed hesitated, an irrational fear gripping her that someone was hiding a few feet inside the closet. She and Dex had once knocked on its back wall. Knowing that the slasher's secret byways wrapped around the band room, they had heard then the hollow reverb and wondered if this very panel had ever afforded him entry for the kill.

Eight years past, a couple had been butchered by Mr. Dunsmore right where the trombone players sat. Just yesterday, Tweed had emptied her spit valve upon a painted-over blood patch.

But fear was absurd.

It wasn't yet time for the kill, nor was it likely that she and Dex had been a.s.signed to sit in the band room. Still, this might be the place again. Preparations may have been underway before they had interrupted them.

Something touched the back of her hand. A sound strained in her throat.

"Hey, it's okay, it's just me." Dex squeezed her hand.

"Don't scare me like that," she said.

"Sorry," he said. "Here." He lay down his alto sax case and snapped it open, flan flan, right-angling the lid. "I'll put the envelope in my case. Get your axe and let's go. Mr. Jones will start worrying about us."

Swooping her instrument out of the closet, Tweed walked cautiously with Dex to the band room door, breathing easier when it had swung-to behind them.

Rather than circle back past the front table to get to the gym, they continued counterclockwise along the first floor corridor.

On the left, science labs gloomed by, site of the hillside creep and the polar creep in geology, memorable goads-to-learning, and the place as well where chem, bio, and physics had been crammed into their skulls.

On the right, thick gla.s.s doors to the barn and the slaughterhouse areas made a valiant effort to hold in the stench. Not so long ago, that area of the school had terrified Tweed, despite the gradual progression from primary school petting zoo, to junior high's dissection of frogs and pig embryos, to high school's more demanding course of instruction in slaughter, rendering, meat-packing, tanning, butchery, and taxidermy. But now these skills were old hat. She felt as if part of her life was over. She would miss the down-to-earth Lily Foddereau, her loamy wisdom, her steady hand, her lethal axe-blade.

They turned left at the water fountain.

Far ahead, by the gym door nearest the front of the school, a clump of seniors congregated, the boys high-fiving and lobe-tugging as though they were wearing jeans and jerseys and topsiders, not tuxes and ruffed shirts.

No reason not to go in. They were waiting, it seemed, for the lights and the music to draw them out of the hallway.

That's us, she thought.

"My G.o.d, Tweed, look at it!" said Dex as they reached the entrance to the gym.

She paused beside him, her eyes at once drawn to the Ice Ghoul. Even with the lights not yet low, he seemed suddenly larger and more menacing. Fog swirled about him from pedestal vents, a low white roll of guile and menace.

"Jenna told me over dinner that they'd filled in detail." The vast gymnasium seemed to swallow her voice.

"Yeah I know. You mentioned it," Dex said. "Some brushwielder, some real sicko, understands what high school is all about. That face really captures the feeling."

It made her shiver. She wondered, once they survived the stalking, whether it would seem less horrific. "Why's it . . . oh look, Dex, the roof must be leaking."

"Too bad," he said. "But when the lights change, it'll look like just another effect."

A voice called to them from the bandstand, off to the right. Festus Targer at his drumset softened a cymbal and twirled a brush at them. The ba.s.s drum thumped.

Farther along the same top riser, Butch and Zinc were de-belling low furious arpeggios from their down-directed trumpets. They were seniors, a couple in the throes of breaking up on account of being college-bound in different directions, Butch to the east coast, Zinc to the west.

Zinc had the blush-pink look of a tender, unflogged for days, and it was clear, had been clear since last week's lottery, that Butch felt guilty piggybacking his salvation on his lover's monthly reprieve from beatings and the luck of the draw. Some students resented those who escaped the slasher's knife that way, but Butch was much harsher on himself than were any of Tweed's friends.

Tweed took her seat on the middle riser. Dex sat below and to the left, next to Wyche Fowler, ego insufferable, but man could he blow Dex out of the water on the sax.

Tweed snapped open the case and threaded her horn together. Colored lights toggled at random. As she sprayed mist along the length of her cold-creamed slide, Tweed glanced up and saw, at the far end of the gym, Gerber Waddell by the light bank struggling to recall, with his genial feeble half-mind, the precise combination intended for this part of prom night.

"Where the f.u.c.k's b.u.t.tweiler?" Bongo asked in her right ear, an unruly low F struggling to speak at the end of his arm.

"Um." Tweed looked around. No sign of their princ.i.p.al. Not at the punch bowl where the other chaperones cl.u.s.tered. Not at the longer stretch of table near the janitor, where the seniors would pig out and glug down.

A blue vision crossed the gym on a diagonal.

Nurse Gaskin.

She stopped on the sawdust to stare up at the Ice Ghoul bore continuing toward the other chaperones.

Tweed and Dex had a crush on Delia Gaskin. If only she weren't so old.

"I don't see him yet," said Tweed. "Maybe he's doing paperwork in his office."

"Yeah, or in the bafroom." Dimbulb Bongo. Still some years of growing to do, and he was n.o.body's genius.

"Tweed." Dex caught her eye, his neckband a shiny black against the white tux. He glanced at the nurse, then back at Tweed.

Tweed nodded, resigned.

The lights took on harsh red and green casts. At the far door, fluff and fine lines of clothing began to drift in.

Warming the mouthpiece with her hand, Tweed set it into the horn, tried for saliva she seemed not to have, bobbled a few notes, licked her lips and the rim of the mouthpiece cup, woodshedded the opening riff for "I'll Be Around," opened the spit valve, and shook out not a drop.

She was scared out of her wits. Half the band was a wreck pretending not to be. They would try to lose themselves in the charts, and maybe they would succeed.

But maybe they'd just have to wait for the prom kill to be over before they would find any kind of groove tonight.

Jiminy Jones glanced this way and that.

The lights at play in his thinning hair lent him weirdly shifting coronas. He held the light-tipped baton tight in one chubby hand.

A last look at the score, smiles darting into the band, a "Hi there Dex, easy on the triplets," his bowtie blue-sequined like his suitcoat edging, like his lobebag, his head raised to the air like a bull sensing slaughter as the eight o'clock bell sounded, the lights clicked precisely into place, and Jiminy Jones' baton came down upon the first terrified note of the evening.

7. Violence, Sweet Violence.

w.i.l.l.y w.a.n.ker, President Gilly Windf.u.c.ker's Secretary of Cultural Impoverishment, had slipped his lobebag off and was idly stroking his s.e.xlobe as he watched the video feed.

In this, he was no different from any other cabinet member around the conference table. Even the President's lobebag lay limp on the polished tabletop, his slim wooden hand chop-cutting the air below his left ear in a semblance of stroking.

His manufacturers had made him a majestic s.e.xlobe. Its bold presence suggested great power, though the general public would only be privy to its implied heft when bagged. They had even stained it with cedar blush, though they must have knowna"the protocol long established and drooled over in the mediaa"that prom night was the only time it came into view and then only for members of the cabinet and their staff.

Up until tonight.

w.a.n.ker kept his counsel.

Close to the chest was his nature, a mode of being accepted by the others. But it also helped him keep confidential his role on the Committee to a.s.sa.s.sinate the President, which issued periodic updates, under strictest wraps and with the utmost anonymity, to the press.

Secretary w.a.n.ker had served on that committee in many past administrations, but this one posed a special challenge.

Would clipping Gilly Windf.u.c.ker's strings and snapping his limbs for kindling, duly videotaped for the national archives of course, do the trick? Or would they need to murder Cholly Bork as well? Kill the brains or simply the brainless twit of a figurehead?

In committee, w.a.n.ker had argued long and with great gusto that it was their patriotic duty to do them failing to do so would surely throw the government into a Const.i.tutional crisis from which it might never emerge unscathed. And his arguments, lo these many months, had eaten their way toward persuasion.

As to when the a.s.sa.s.sination would occur, w.a.n.ker had been convincing on that front as well. This very private moment in a president's tenure, the annual viewing of a hand-picked high-school slaughter, would at last be made public.

By G.o.d, thought w.a.n.ker with a wicked grin, I'll go down in history.

This, in part, fueled his lobestrokes, as the roomful of suited men, and one pants-suited woman, watched Karn Flentrop sharpen her blade in the machine shop and sashay through dusty backways that had hosted scores of slashers before her.