Ingram jumped over the bar door, slipped, and went down on one knee. His ruined right hand throbbed horribly, and he knew it would never be the same. If it had not been shattered before, surely it was now.

He looked at the stage. Hastur remained standing at the microphone, but now he looked into the smoke in the room, at the ceiling, staring abjectly, unknowing, staring with dead eyes, milky-white. Beside the stage, the Pale Man stood too, looking at Ingram, face still half in shadow, half-obscured by what looked like bruises. But now the white glints were angry, burning with a malevolence that hit Ingram like a blow, rocking him back on the heels of his feet.

Ingram realized his revolver was still in his bloody left fist. He raised it, pointed at the Pale Man, and pulled the trigger. It clicked. Empty.

The Pale Man opened his mouth, and Ingram saw the interior was black like oil. He reached his good hand to his ear, feeling. He'd lost one of his wax earplugs. The pale man's voice was soft when he spoke.

"Turn around, human, and leave this place. You cannot hope to survive any more."

"Human?" Ingram asked. There was no posturing with this man, this thing. There was only the truth and questions, and Ingram meant to have them answered.

Ingram raised his bloody, splinted hand and said, "I seem to be doing just fine. All these poor folk are dead, and I'm still standing."

The Pale Man raised a bone-white hand, mirroring Ingram, and pointed it at Hastur. The movement, so still yet menacing, made Ingram shiver.

"He is coming. I prepare the way. There is nothing you can do to stop us. There will be other reckonings, human." The Pale Man slowly turned his back to Ingram and walked down the hall away from the carnage and what was once a dance floor, down the back hall toward the pier.

The Hellion!

Ingram pushed forward, following.

Hastur opened his mouth again, eyes on Ingram, and sang. Ingram fell, the force of the sound pummeling him, beating at his face, his ears. The obscene harmonies were softer now, pleading, wooing. The force of the music, if it could be called music, had waned. In the war, the sirens on Ingram's transport ships could render strong, grown men helpless, the sound waves traveling through the men's bodies, almost liquefying bowels and "rattling the chassis," they'd joke. But this was worse and easier all at once. While the ship's sirens had a physical affect, this song-for it was a song, speaking of far-away dark shores-affected not so much his body, but his mind. Ingram felt as though there was some fierce raptorial bird beating at his consciousness, trying to get in, clawing and crying out in anger. He understood now the strange words coming from the revenant's mouth.

Rise up from the sodden earth Rise up from Death's black hearse That is not dead can eternal lie And dying know even death can die Have you seen the yellow sign?

Have you found the yellow sign?

The song from the radio station!

Ingram threw his body forward, toward the thing that once had been Early Freeman. He slipped again in blood and viscera, but scrambled to the stage and pulled himself over the lip of the platform and onto his knees. The undead thing kept singing, without breath or life, a siren of madness and despair.

Ingram rose. He stood in front of the dead man and grabbed the microphone stand. Before he'd felt rage when he had been stabbed, a berserk madness that consumed him; now he felt only sadness and exhaustion. He knew this man's wife, his boss, his friends. Somewhere behind Ingram, Rabbit's body lay, abandoned and faceless. Another soldier Ingram had led to his death. The infernal song had to stop now, before it was too late.

With both hands, Ingram raised the microphone stand above his head and brought it down on Hastur, the thing that had once been Early Freeman. The revenant's skull collapsed like an over-ripe melon. The corpse fell to the stage.

Ingram fell to his knees and wept. Hot tears spilled out on his cheeks, his chest wracked with sobs. He cried for himself, for Rabbit, for Early Freeman and his orphaned son; he wept for his hand, now ruined, a living thing of blood and pain. He wept with exhaustion.

A whisper, the slap of wet flesh on floor made Ingram turn, his sobs stopping abruptly.

The dead rose.

They rose in bloody tatters, missing limbs, arms, eyes; the rich integuments of flesh that made them human were gone, but they rose. And they looked at Ingram with hateful eyes.

Ingram scrambled to his feet. He threw himself off the stage and moved into the dim hallway to the pier, following where the Pale Man had gone before. He pushed open doors as he searched for an exit, a weapon, anything to arm himself against the dead that followed. A storage room littered with cleaning agents and crates, a maintenance closet with tins and tanks and mops. A restroom.

At the end of the dark hall, arms outstretched in front of him, he found double doors, and pushed hard. He burst through to the pier, the cool night air washing over him and making him shiver.

Limbs heavy from drink and exertion, he felt like a sponge with all the moisture wrung from it. His mouth was tacky and dry, and he wished he could just fall forward into the bayou and drink, but the dark waters didn't smell wholesome and the dead followed behind.

He looked down the pier and saw the black tug pulling away from its mooring, moving glacially away from the tarred pilings, smoke billowing from its stack.

Behind him the door opened.

A dead man, his throat open, wet and red in the low light, lurched out of the building, arms outstretched to grab Ingram, knocking the door wide as he came through. More dead shambled forward into the light.

God, I'm tired.

Ingram kicked the corpse in the chest, knocking it back into the building and toppling the nearest dead behind it. His limbs felt leaden, and looking down at himself he realized he'd lost quite a bit of blood in the last few days.

The corpse slowly rose again, arms and legs moving in an ungainly, awkward manner. A shard of glass protruded from its eye, and its hair rose away from his skull in a flap. Half-way scalped.

Glancing around, Ingram spotted the guttering light of a kerosene lantern. He lumbered toward it. Snatching it down by the wire handle, he unscrewed the cap to the fuel reservoir, then pitched the lantern through the doors, into the crowd of undead, and nearly screamed in frustration when the lantern hit the front man's chest, shattering, but didn't catch fire. A dead woman, the skin stripped from her lower jaw, kicked the lantern and it spun in a circle, rattling and spreading kerosene in a widening pool.

The corpses moved through the door, walking in strange, stiff gaits, and Ingram backed away, down the pier, toward the remaining boats. He couldn't recall dropping his Morley in the fray, everything was becoming blurred. He looked over his shoulder, spotting an oar in the closest flat-bottom, and turned toward it.

For an instant, the shambling dead were backlit by a yellow light, each ghoul traced in brilliant relief, and then the yellow turned white and expanded to fill all of Ingram's senses, blossoming and thunderous. The building exploded, expanding outward, pieces of wood and glass and tile rocketing past, pushing him forward so that he lost his feet and found himself in the air, flying away from the heat, away from the new sun that had come to life in the night.

There are tanks in there!

Something hard and silver flashed in his eyes, whanged off his skull, sending him spinning. He landed in a twisted heap on the hull of a flat-bottom.

He felt the boat rock, heard the water lap at its sides. Using the last of his strength, Ingram twisted his body to look back at the pier. The first dead man now loomed above him, silhouetted by fire, his hair a burning halo, and then another explosion rocked the night, and the dead man's corpse pitched over as streamers and dark objects-shrapnel-whizzed by it, and suddenly the boat was loose and floating away from the burning ruin of the nightclub and the pier, its mooring severed.

Ingram struggled to rise, but his limbs felt like lead, and, giving up the fight, he slumped back to the bottom of the boat. His breath whooshed out of him, and he passed out of consciousness, borne away from the burning dead on the waters of the bayou.

To the river.

Chapter 10.

"Momma! Momma! There's a dead man at the river!" Lenora raced up the back porch steps, panting heavily with Fisk and Franny quick behind her.

Alice and Sarah were in the middle of their morning ritual; Sarah staring lazily out the window, Alice slowly reading the paper and sipping black coffee.

In the mornings, Sarah usually revisited her translation work of the night before. The work had progressed quite nicely, at least to Sarah's uneducated eyes, until some very strange and unknown words came up in a passage. If only she knew what the subject of the book was, she might be able to figure out some of the more pesky lines through context. Unfortunately, the little town of Gethsemane didn't have a Catholic church, where she could drop by and quiz the priest as to the accuracy of her Latin, and she was worried she'd have to go all the way to Little Rock to the teacher's college or seminary there to find out what Opsculus Noctis had to say for itself. Part of her didn't want to find out; sheltered in the library, late at night, she felt at once alone and part of something larger, a communion with other minds, other hearts, even if through the pages of the old, dry volumes on the shelves. She felt like she'd joined some higher calling, been initiated into some select group, but she couldn't explain this feeling; it pervaded her nights and crept into her days as well. Some of the passages were on her lips, faintly tugging at her, at the strangest of times, like now, with Lenora shouting and Franny wild-eyed with excitement.

Alice half rose from her chair and said, "What's this, a dead man? What you talking bout, Nora?"

Lenora stood in the kitchen doorway with Franny and Fisk behind her, her breath coming heavy in her chest. She swallowed exaggeratedly.

"After breakfast we went walking in the dark wood, looking for Indian arrowheads. Couldn't find none but we walked down to the river to see if we could get some driftwood to make a fort-"

"Driftwood makes the best fort cause it's smooth from the water," Fisk volunteered.

Lenora turned to glare at him for interrupting her story, then, after a suitable length, turned back to the adults.

"When we came to the river, Franny saw a little boat snagged in the branches of a tree, bumping up against the shore. First we thought folks might be fishing or hunting till we looked in it. There's a man. Dead and dried blood all over him. We ran all the way back here to get you."

Alice pushed away from the table. "All right, then. Let's go see this dead man."

Lenora looked down at her mother's slippers and said, "You ain't gonna get very far in them."

Alice frowned, looking over her matronly bust at her nightgown and slippers. Sarah laughed, and Alice turned her frown toward the other woman. Sarah stood and said, "Alice, why don't you get dressed and then go get some of Reuben's boys to meet us at the river. I'll go with the children."

Alice looked at Sarah, as if surprised by her words. Usually Alice made the decisions.

Sarah grinned. "At least I've got on real shoes."

There was a moment when she thought Alice would argue. But, reluctantly, Alice nodded.

Sarah's shoes were heavy with mud a few minutes later as they trudged through the wood behind the house. The sky was overcast, turning the light hazy and casting the wood into a sepia scene of browns and blacks and whites. The day was cool and moist and rich odors burst up as each footstep marred the ground. The children chirped away like earthbound birds, happy with the new adventure.

Sarah smelled the river before she saw it. It smelled like dirt and fish and... yes... dead things.

"Lenora, show me where the man is. Franny, you stay with Fisk, please."

Sarah maneuvered herself over the driftwood logs and down the mud slope toward the bank behind Lenora. She could see a small craft, its rope tangled in submerged branches, its outboard motor caught in the bank's brush. The hull knocked against a log mired in the muddy shore. Climbing to the top of the log, Sarah looked inside the flat-bottom.

There was a giant in the boat. The man streaked with blood and grime lay on the wooden hull. His hand was wrapped with a bandage, and black blood caked the side of his head and spotted his chest and arm. His skin was pale.

Sarah called back to the other children. "Franny, Fisk! Run tell Alice we're gonna need extra men to move him. Jesus, he's massive."

She managed to get herself from the top of the log into the boat, and once it stopped rocking, she perched herself to one side of the giant and tentatively reached out to touch his cheek.

Sarah gasped. "Lenora, run as fast as you can and tell them that he's alive and we need to get Dr. Polk. Hurry!"

In his pocket, Sarah found his wallet and a bottle of pills. The Tennessee license revealed his name to be Lewis Patrick Ingram. A veteran Marine. From Memphis.

Sarah brushed his hair out of his face. She wet her hand in the river and, lacking a towel or bandana, used her wet fingers to wipe some of the grime from his face and forehead.

He moaned and shifted slightly.

"It's all right. Sssh. It's okay. We're gonna get you to a doctor."

With his face clean, he looked somewhat boyish, his face strangely unlined except for small crow's feet at the corners of his eyes. His straight, well-formed features were marred only by the fierce, strange scratches streaking away from his eyes.

Even unconscious, he looked earnest and uncomplicated. Squatting next to him in the unsure balance of the boat, Sarah felt intense compassion for this man, wounded and lost on waters carrying him where he knew not.

"Why are you crying, Mommy?" Franny asked from the shore.

Sarah jumped. She turned, looked at Franny, and wiped her eyes. "What? Oh, honey, you startled me! I thought you went with Fisk."

"I couldn't keep up with Fisk. He runs too fast. So I came back to stay with you. Sometimes the dark woods scare me."

Sarah put a hand on the man's chest, feeling his heart beat.

"This man has wounds all over him. I can't understand how he got them."

"But why are you crying?"

"Oh, honey... I feel sorry for this man. He's lost and hurt, and I don't know if there's anything sadder than that."

She looked at Franny. The girl's luminous face was framed by a bright halo of wild hair.

Franny said, "Oh. That is sad. But what if he's a bad man?"

Sarah looked back at the man's face. That's the question, isn't it? With all men. But he doesn't look bad, he just looks... lost.

Sarah heard field-hands approaching through the wood, their calls muffled by the forest, obscured by the soft gurgle of the river, the knocking of the boat against the driftwood.

Franny turned, looking into the wood.

"Go get them, honey, and lead them back here," Sarah said.

It took six men in all to raise the giant. In the end, two of them had to go back to the farm and get a plank of wood to carry the injured man back to the Big House. They dropped him once, in the wood, when a branch scratched at one of the bearer's faces and he released his corner of the plank, spilling the giant to the ground with a thump. Sarah nearly screeched at the men. They ducked their heads and looked chagrined. The giant was half-mired in mud and leafy debris from the tumble. Sarah worried for the state of the man's injuries, fearing infection.

Alice met them on the steps, waving frantically.

"Dr. Polk's coming! I got the bed ready in the front guest room. You put him there, hear?"

The porters nodded, and among themselves decided it would be better going through the front door, so they carried the man around the house, through the front entryway, and up the grand stairway with Sarah, Franny, Fisk, and Lenora following like acolytes in a procession.

The men rolled the giant into the double bed of the guest room, smearing the covers with dirt. Alice bustled in, bearing towels and a steaming pot of water. Briskly, she took charge of the scene, barking orders at the field-hands.

"Festus, take off his shoe! Mike, start unbuttoning his shirt and mind the covers! Don't get more dirt on them than already there, hear? Sarah, go down and wait for Dr. Polk, should be getting here sometime soon. And take these children with you! Go on, Fisk. Git!"

Sarah, the children, and all the porters except for Festus and Mike fled the guest room. On the way back downstairs, Sarah heard her mother yelling for her.

Sarah poked her head in her mother's door. "Are you alright, Momma?"

Her mother sat upright in bed, her face mottled and angry. "What in the goddamned world is going on out there? What is going on in my house?"

"Momma, I don't have a lot of time to explain but I'll tell you everything later when I bring your sip. The children found a badly injured man by the river, and Dr. Polk is coming to tend to him."

"Do we know this man, Sarah?"

"No. He's a stranger, Momma. And hurt too."

"If we don't know him, why the hell is he in my house? Why didn't you just leave him?"

Sarah looked at her mother and shook her head.