Then it is yours.

"Always?"

For the rest of your life.

McNeely shuddered when it said that, even though there was no trace of malice in the tone. Almost immediately he felt something change within him. It was not a great change; no epiphany that showed him whirling clouds and suns that blazoned "heteros.e.xual" across the sky in letters of fire. Rather, it was a subtle reorganization, a s.h.i.+fting of things inside him, lasting only a second. But afterward he knew he could love Gabrielle the way he had loved her before. A thrill went through him as he thought of her body opened beneath him.

She is beautiful.

McNeely drew up with a start as he realized that it had seen precisely what he had. "You read my mind?" he asked in a tense voice.

We see thoughts.

"Always?"

When we wish.

The face began to form then, the same gentle, peaceful, G.o.dlike face that he had seen in the kitchen. It was smiling benignly. "I can see you now," McNeely said.

We did not wish to frighten you again, it said by way of explanation.

"I'm not frightened," he said, thinking as he did so that it already knew that. "Thank you. Thank you for doing ... whatever you did."

You are welcome.

"Is there-" He paused, thinking that he could not ask it after all. It seemed too Mephistophelean.

You wish to know if there is anything you can do for us in return.

He swallowed, then nodded.

Perhaps there is something. In the future.

Jesus, he thought. Why did it suddenly sound like Marion Brando in The G.o.dfather? And with a strange glee he realized that even if it was reading his mind, it could not grasp the allusion. Perhaps that was the way to keep thoughts private-think in symbols: contemporary archetypes.

"Who are you?" he asked.

Friends.

"Are you ghosts?"

It did not answer. We can do much for you.

"But what are you?"

We can give you power.

"You gave Seth c.u.mmings power," he said, surprised at his own boldness.

The thing was silent for a while, its face expressionless. We erred with Seth c.u.mmings.

He laughed shortly. "Erred? d.a.m.n right, you erred!" He slapped his mouth shut then as the thought hit him that he should not antagonize this thing, that whatever it was, it had proven itself powerful beyond his comprehension.

Seth c.u.mmings was weak. He had no strength of will. No image of himself as anything great. He thought only in terms of what we could do for him. He could not hope to cope with the power we gave him. He abused it for his own petty urges.

"And what about me? When I killed c.u.mmings with that kick? Did you give me the power to do that?"

We did. Else he would have killed you all.

"He did kill Neville."

He was inessential.

A chill went through McNeely. It was as if he had been waiting for it to say something like that, to expose, if not its evil, its G.o.dlike insensitivity to human affairs. "Inessential to whom?" he asked, sounding braver than he felt.

To anyone. Surely he was inessential to his wife. She desired you. And if a man is inessential to those closest to him, does it not follow that he will be inessential to others as well?

"I asked you before. Who are you?"

Why do you wish to know?

"To . . . to call you by name, maybe. Do you have a name?"

We have many names. Millions of names.

(We. Millions of names. What the h.e.l.l was this?) "Are there millions of you, then?" he asked.

The face moved up and down. Nodding. Yes. All in one.

"You mean you're composed of many. . . intelligences?"

Oh yes. There was pride in the tone. Many.

He made a connection, hazarded a guess. "The lights in the sky . . . the lights at night . . . are they from you?"

They are to us. New ones. New ones coming all the time.

"Then Gabrielle was right. This place is a lodestone. Drawing what? Souls?"

Souls. What are souls? Some things survive, others do not. What needs to survive survives. What is content to sleep sleeps.

"But you're not content to sleep?"

No.

"Why not?"

There are things to be done.

McNeely felt suddenly weary, drained of vitality. Yet he did not feel he should sit down in front of the thing that confronted him. "Now, let me . . . let me clarify this if I can. Do you mean to say that you-and by you I mean all the . . . the people that create you-that you are all dead?"

We are. We were.

"And that those of you who have survived come here?"

Yes.

"You come here of your own free will?"

We are drawn here.

The lodestone again, McNeely thought. "Can you leave?"

The thing started to say something. McNeely could hear the vibrations in his head preliminary to a "word"-but nothing happened. Then came a long sigh and a single word accompanied by an almost pleading look from the pale eyes.

Perhaps.

McNeely swallowed, but his throat still held a shapeless lump dead center. "I can help you," he said softly.

You can.

"You want to leave?"

We do.

"Why?"

There are things to be done.

"You said that before!" McNeely was starting to lose control now, starting to break. "What kind of things?"

Things not for your knowing.

"If I'm going to help you, don't you think I'd better decide that?"

You are growing frightened. Think of what we have said and done. Think of what we can give you still. It smiled benignly. We will speak again.

The face faded. In less than three seconds it had vanished. McNeely listened, but the voice was gone. "Are you there?"

There was only silence. He sighed, turned, and left the room.

As he crossed the stone floor to the staircase, there was a faint sound on the edge of hearing that he could have sworn came from the wine cellar. Rats, he thought, and frowned at the picture of what they might be doing to the two bodies behind the door.

But then he remembered there were no rats in The Pines, no animal life at all, and paused mid-stride, looking with narrowed eyes toward the door. If not rats, then what?

Don't be a fool. They're dead, both of them.

Still, he did not step nearer to the door. He only listened, and heard nothing more. Isn't it enough? he asked himself. Isn't what you've already seen here enough? Must you reanimate corpses too?

He laughed at himself, a small warm laugh that drove some of the chill from the damp cellar as he started to climb the steps, started to go back upstairs to Gabrielle, carrying his newfound s.e.xuality like a trophy.

The cellar light went out, the kitchen door closed, and in the darkness from behind the wooden door came the sound once again, a light pattering of fingers on stone beneath a stained tablecloth. Unheard by living ears, the fingers continued their spastic chattering, then fell silent all at once, as if a larger, stronger hand had come down atop them.

She was sleeping when he climbed into the bed, and the close warmth of her aroused him. He moved her into a moaning wakefulness with his hands and they made love, she leisurely, contentedly, he a.s.suredly and forcefully, driving her climax before him like a dog drives a sheep. They came together and drifted back into sleep. Later he had a dream that his s.e.m.e.n had turned to blood, and he awoke in a damp sweat, confused and alarmed at first by the wet stickiness on his thighs. Then he remembered his first nocturnal emission. He had been eleven, and had awakened in a sleeping bag next to his father's. They were camping with the Scouts and were sharing a pup tent. McNeely had awakened as the spasm pa.s.sed, to find his pajamas and sleeping bag sopping wet. His cry of fear woke his father, and he'd whispered, "Blood, blood, Dad, I'm cut, oh, I'm cut!" and his father had grabbed a flashlight and opened the sleeping bag.

In the light that reflected off the mud-brown canvas walls, he'd seen his father's expression turn from one of alarm to a puckered look of disgust. "Oh, Christ," he'd said. "Go clean yourself up." The boy had gone down to the creek and washed, confused and scared. When he'd returned to the tent, his father was feigning sleep, his back to McNeely. The sleeping bag was stiffening where his father had wiped most of the fluid away with a handkerchief. He said nothing to McNeely about it that night, the next day, or ever again. For weeks the boy thought he'd been bleeding white blood and was going to die, until a friend a year older told him what it really was.

And now so many years later he lay in another bed, feeling the stiffness like starchy paste against his legs, like the blood he'd spilled and had had spilled on too many humid battlegrounds, and thought of his father and the Boy Scouts and the damp sleeping bag for the first time in twenty years, and wondered why, why did the memory come back now?

When he awoke again, Gabrielle was looking down into his face, her b.r.e.a.s.t.s nudging his forearm.

"You were s.h.i.+vering," she said. "I thought it was another bad dream."

He smiled. "If it was, I don't remember it." He touched her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and joyed in the turgid response he felt. "Sorry I woke you up earlier."

"I'm not," she said, and kissed him. "I am anxious for a shower though. We smell like a wh.o.r.ehouse."

"When did you ever smell a wh.o.r.ehouse?"

"Hmm. How do you think I got rich?"

He laughed and smacked her lightly on the bottom as she stood up.

"Come on," she said, "I'm starved."

"Insatiable, aren't you?" he growled as she giggled her way to the bathroom. He sat up and stretched. Good G.o.d, but he felt good. Whole again. Though he couldn't see outside, he was certain the sun was s.h.i.+ning, the sky was the blue of lovers' eyes, birds were singing.

Birds. No, there would be no birds, would there? There were no birds at The Pines, no rats either.

So what had scuttled on the floor behind the oaken ...

Stop it. That was not a worry now. He had no worries, only happiness. He was with Gabrielle again, really with her, and that was all that mattered. He heard the water in the shower blast into life, and thought how good it would feel to join her under the spray. It . . . they had done it, had restored to him what he had hungered for. But through the joy, the thought kept beating like a tinny drum high up in an attic room-what will I have to do for them?

No such thing as a free lunch-there was nothing new in that. Deals, everybody made deals. The heroine of Rumpelstiltskin made a deal-her firstborn for the ability to spin straw into gold. Only she had welshed and gotten away with it. He wondered if he could be so lucky. And even so, could there be that much harm in helping them leave?

But he would play it safe, find out why they wanted out, and what those "things to be done" really were. They couldn't buy him with power. The only bargaining point they had was something they'd already given him, something they wouldn't take back. So what did he have to lose?

He began to smile again as he walked toward the bathroom.

Chapter Sixteen.