More inviting.

Shiverful, spineful.

Mia Jenner gave her younger husband Bonn a look, then tossed barbs at Pelf, who sat cozy in his favorite armchair, pooled in lamplight.

"I can't believe you're doing that," she scolded. "Really, Pelf."

The older man peered over his gla.s.ses, one finger stuck in the library book. "Doing what?"

Exasperated eyes. "Reading."

"I read every night."

Bonn chimed in. "This is Fido's prom night. He'll be down soon in his tuxedo. Bowser will be showing up in his tuxedo. Look at you, sitting there in your robe and slippers."

"Like this was any old weekend," added Mia, snaking an arm around Bonn's waist.

"To h.e.l.l with Bowser McPhee." Pelf's familiar grin slung above his jowls. "I luxuriate on Sat.u.r.day nights: a soothing bath, a good book, a tumble in the hay and a perfect lobesuck with you two fine folks." He brushed aside the world. "People make too much of prom night. Let Fido and Bowser have fun, let blood be spilt, but for gosh sakes, let lovable old Pelf read his thriller."

Mia turned to Bonn. "He's begging for it."

"I think so too." Bonn eyed the instruments of pleasure on the coffee table.

"Isn't he begging for it?" asked Mia.

Bonn reached to retrieve.

A pair of stiff riding crops stuck out from between his fingers like black leather drumsticks. "Yes honeybunch, no question."

He handed Mia her weapon of choice.

"I'm not begging for it," Pelf insisted, grinning as he closed his book.

He probed deep into the cushion crack and coaxed out a hand-tooled, vegetable-tanned, sharkskin beauty, the riding crop his spouses had given him on his fiftieth birthday. Despite eleven years of wear, the thing had staying power and a humming thwack that sang of quality. It shone with crusted weltflow. Pelf gripped its handle and hunched forward.

Bonn said, "Let's get him," and charged in.

Mia followed, raising her l.u.s.tiest yowl to the rafters. Her crop whistled down hard on Pelf's terryclothed b.u.t.tocks as he rose to meet his attackers.

Back into the armchair they drove him, riding its floorward arc but not missing a battering beat as they tumbled across the carpet.

Mia lost herself in gaiety and torn clothing, ending up in her favorite position: cushioned by soft pillows, plugged below, her crop hand free to punish her lovers.

Bonn crouched to rouse her as his lickables bobbed hot against her lips.

Their laughter stopped when Fido yelled, not for the first time, "Dad, Mom, Dad. Bowser just drove up."

Mia, unBonning her mouth, angled toward her son. Spiffed and slicked to steal the heart of any youngster, Fido, cla.s.s clown, stood there waiting for his special night to begin.

Door chimes rang out bing-bong-bing-bong, followed at once by Bowser McPhee's irritating shave-and-a-haircut rap.

The skin on Pelf's shoulder was red and raw. He slipped out of her, pulled about himself the tatters of his bathrobe, cinched it, and said he would get the door.

Mia righted the armchair and sat down.

She'd be d.a.m.ned if she would bother getting up to greet a belligerent little no-account like Bowser McPhee.

She touched the gaping flesh of one welt and made sizzling-lips sound and a face of pain. As the door opened, her fingers shot up to check her left lobe.

No problem, nothing showing, bag in place. But it never hurt to be sure.

Bowser McPhee was as fleshy and dark as ever. "Good evening, sir. Good evening, sir." He waved at Mia and she nodded. "Ma'am."

Fido came into the creepy kid's arms as they traded perfunctory right-lobe kisses.

Her husbands engaged in small talk, half-nods and smiles in her direction, until her son and his date were out the door. Mia crossed her legs. Her fingers fidgeted on the chair's arms.

Bonn misinterpreted. "Worried?"

"Nope," she said. "My son's from a charmed line. Fido will come home with a choice slice of flesh in his Futterware. But my G.o.d, he could do so much better than Bowser McPhee."

"Bowser is a bucket of slime, isn't he?" said Pelf. "But our boy is young. He's testing the waters. I don't believe the McPhee kid will be his final choice."

"We shouldn't have picked a dog's name," said Mia.

Bonn spoke up. "Something more normal may have helped."

Easy for Bonn to say, thought Mia, since he had had nothing to do with the decision.

"Dog names were all the rage back then," said Pelf in their defense. "Mia and I had no way of knowing. Besides, we've met plenty of Rexes and Spots, even another Fido our son's age, who have all been super kids. Nope, I don't think his name's the problem."

After a glum pause, Bonn offered, "At least he has a date. The school didn't have to pair him up."

"Small favors," Mia said. Her younger spouse was a handsome brute, juicy with pa.s.sion, but his mind was as limp as week-old lettuce.

"Don't worry," said Pelf, ma.s.saging her shoulders. "He'll turn out fine."

"Once he dumps that walking embarra.s.sment."

Pelf gave Mia's right cheek a resounding swat, raising a blush there. "For the love of Christ, sweetie, relax. Fido has more sense than people credit him with. Sure he's in tight with Bowser McPhee now. But it's more a buddy-buddy thing than love, from what I can see."

Mia took the hand that had struck her. "You think so?" She raised it to her mouth and bit deep into Pelf's thumb. Blood welled bitter upon her lips.

Pelf winced. "I'm betting that Fido goes into the prom with his eyes open and scavenging. Jesus, honey, that hurts."

Mia reseated her jaw and hit the nerves, again, again.

Bonn, having stripped off his lobebag, now fumbled at the drawstrings of Mia's.

Pelf seethed upon a savage in-breath. He lifted his wife's hand toward his face so that her fingers claimed the dangle of his lobebag, a taut tug and rustle as it shimmied down and off.

For as long as their dalliance lasted, all thoughts of Mia's son, and what might happen to him at the prom and beyond, quite deserted her.

Peyton "Futzy" b.u.t.tweiler, for thirty years the princ.i.p.al of Corundum High, sat alone in his office.

The rolltop desk, his bookshelves, the stark paneling that covered the office walls, were all a dark delicious rosewood. This place was Futzy's arena of shame. So it had been for twenty years, since his daughter's prom.

That year, Kitty's final year of high school, Futzy had refused all knowledge of who the victims would be. The handful of teachers in the know had displayed nothing but impenetrable pokerfaces.

Futzy had had them dismissed or transferred, the image of Kitty, slain and futtered, burning into his brain.

Propped on his desk blotter, Kitty's senior picture was framed in fake-gold. The velvet fuzz at its back bore a shine from frequent handling.

Funny how, when her portrait lay facedown in his desk drawer, Futzy's office hummed with academic concerns. But as soon as he raised it into view, this place became a sanctuary of guilt, a quiet confessional, all of his administrative woes momentarily set aside.

It wasn't the dark dress, angled tastefully between shoulders and cleavage, that caught his attention. Neither was it her matching lobebag, the firmness of her young flesh, nor the sweet innocence of that hope-filled gaze into a future she would never live.

No, it was the knockout impact of the whole, the way it brought back a world of promise taken from him in one vicious night. Kitty had been its linchpin, her natural vibrancy infusing him and his wives, Freia and Keech, with what had seemed a deep and abiding commitment to their marriage.

When Kitty and her date were carried lifeless to the Ice Ghoul at the center of the gym, Futzy had borne for hours the sight of her slain body.

At midnight, the cleavers had come out.

Futzy b.u.t.tweiler sat among the chaperones a destroyed man, watching in disbelief the mayhem.

When he came home that night, it felt as if their house were kept together with spit and baling wire. Worse, his gradual drift away from Freia and Keecha"long unsuspected beneath their shared happiness in Kittya"made itself plain.

Two weeks later, they left him.

His new wives Futzy had found lurking outside the bereavement clinic waiting to snag some guilt-eyed m.a.s.o.c.h.i.s.t. They had pounced, Futzy had let them pounce, and from that moment his house had become an abattoir of love.

Drive to school.

Bark admonitions and orders over the PA system.

Preside at a.s.semblies where he would introduce a speaker and sit there despising the wretched rabble.

Cuff, swat, batter, and smack the foul little s.h.i.ts sent to his office for misbehavior.

The weary round had been enough to satisfy. That and a properly distant commiseration every year with the dead promgoers' parents, a perfunctory few phone calls between the slaughter and the futtering.

As he listened to their sobs, their quavering pride in son or daughter, he wondered if they felt one-tenth of the agony he, in renewal, felt every time he made such a call.

He would go home, post-prom, and let his wives rip into him, savage pain doled out, pain that often involved neither lobes nor gens.

But this year was different.

The Ice Ghoul had somehow fit perfectly into the underseas theme of Kitty's prom. For hours, the creature of tin foil, mesh, and papier-mache had towered over the slain couple. Icicles thrust into his little girl's eyes had capped the hidden mayhem of her death.

Year after year, in deference to Futzy's feelings, prom planners had shied away from the Ice Ghoul as a centerpiece, even as the tradition of using him to scare the vinegar out of incoming Corundum High kids caught hold.

But the world had darkened.

Devolving breeds of senior had turned more cruel.

Futzy peered into Kitty's eyes. Innocence. Kindness. Nothing like that existed any more at Corundum High.

This year, over Brest Donner's objections, the student committee had in defiance chosen the Ice Ghoul. They had even appropriated an area of the cool room, among ineptly butchered haunches of beef and pork, Lily Foddereau's senior projects, to store ice sculptures of the monster for a late-evening contest.

The little s.h.i.ts were not going to get away with this outrage. They would pay in spades for this nose-thumbing.

Futzy had shone no upset. He had remained a miracle of calm. At tonight's prom, he planned to continue in that vein, at least at first.

"Am I doing the right thing, sweetheart?" he asked his daughter's portrait. "Is Daddy on the right track?"

Typhoons of a.s.sent raged in his head, as they did whenever he posed the question. Over Kitty's permed helmet of auburn hair, from the strands of which peered a baby-soft right earlobe, a diffuse halo of light shone.

Yes, he would sour their evening.

Soon, though not soon enough, they would wish they had kept their Ice Ghoul as nothing more than a joke to frighten wide-eyed tenth graders with.

Futzy recalled Kitty's mothers, a rising duet of wincing squeals as he whipped them, the joyous anger that billowed inside him as he meted out their begged-for punishment. Hen scratchings. The nertz of a gnat at the ear. Nothing compared to the rage now astir in him, a rage he thought had dissipated in the years since Kitty's death, but which, it was now clear, had only lay dormant, waiting for its main chance.

He gripped the knot of his tie. Too loose. He tightened it.

This, thought Futzy, was going to be one humdinger of an evening.

Rhythming behind the wheel of her high-tuned piece of c.r.a.p, Altoona tooled down the main drag of Corundum, Kansas.

The radio blasted slap'n'smack, tweedling her ears straight down to the lobes. b.a.l.l.sy Pink Lady rockers scalloped out come-need there. Inside her leather pants, their voices tweedled her gens.

Zipper teeth, sewn along Altoona's l.a.b.i.a at Easter and bunched up now like a slumped toddler's jacket, spit fire across her v.u.l.v.al gap.

She prided herself in being able to sing and sway and pummel the steering wheel with rhythmic slams of her right palm, even as she obeyed every d.a.m.ned traffic law on the books.

Sheriff Blackburn pa.s.sed Altoona going the other way. In response to her cheery wave, he glared and made an abrupt turn-it-down gesture.

Huh. Blackburn.

He was cool though. It didn't tear her. For reasons beyond her ken, Blackburn had chosen to play a stern-daddy role. But inside, he was a good and fair humper of his mother.

Not like some of the geekoids she and Pimlico had had to teach how to behave.