"Fireflies?"

"Fireflies in a windstorm," Pollard said.

Then he vanished. One second he was sitting in bed, as real and solid as anyone Hal had ever known, and the next second he was gone as inexplicably and neatly as a ghost abandoning a haunt. A brief hiss, like air escaping from a punctured tire accompanied his departure.

Hal swayed as if he had been stricken. For a moment his heart seemed to seize up, and he was paralyzed by surprise when Nurse Fulgham stepped into the doorway.

"No sign of him in any of the rooms off this corridor. He might've gone up to another floor-don't you think?"

"Uh...."

"Before we check out the rest of this level, maybe I'd better call security and get them moving on a search of the entire hospital. Mr.

Yamataka?" Hal glanced at her, then back at the empty bed.

"Uh.

yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea. He might wander off to.

G.o.d knows where." Nurse Fulgham hurried away.

Weak-kneed, Hal went to the door, closed it, put his back against it, and stared at the bed across the room. After a while he said, "Are you there, Frank?" He received no answer. He had not expected one. Frank Pollard had not turned invisible; he had gone somewhere, some how.

Not sure as to why he was less wonder struck than frightened of what he had seen, Hal hesitantly crossed the room to the bed. He gingerly touched the stainless-steel railing, as if he thought that Pollard's vanishing act had tapped some elemental force leaving a deadly residual current in the bed. But no spark crackled under his fingertips; the metal was cool and smooth He waited, wondering how soon Pollard would reappear wondering if he ought to call Bobby now or wait until Pollard materialized, wondering if the man would materialize again disappear forever.

For the first time in memory, Hal Yamataka was gripped by indecision; he was ordinarily quick to think and quick to act, but he had never come face to face with the supernatural before.

The only thing he knew for sure was that he must not allow Fulgham or anyone on the floor, or anyone else in the hospital to find out what had really happened.

Pollard was caught up in a phenomenon, afraid that word of it would spread quickly from the hospital staff to the press. Protecting a client's privacy was always of Dakota & Dakota's prime objectives, but in this case it was even more important than usual. Bobby and Julie had said that someone was hunting for Pollard, evidently with violent intentions; therefore, keeping the press out of the case might be essential if the client was to survive.

The door opened, and Hal jumped as if he'd been stuck with a hatpin.

In the doorway stood Grace Fulgham, looking as if she had just either guided a tugboat through stormy seas or chopped and carried a couple of cords of firewood that Pa had been too lazy to deal with.

"Security's putting a man at every exit to stop him if he tries to leave, and we're mobilizing the nursing staff on each floor to look for him. Do you intend to join the search?"

"Uh, well, I've got to call the office, my boss.

"If we find him, where will we find you?"

"Here. Right here. I'll be here, making some calls." She nodded and went away. The door eased shut after her.

A privacy curtain hung from a ceiling track that described an arc around three sides of the bed. It was bunched against the wall, but Hal Yamataka drew it to the foot of the bed, blocking the view from the doorway, in case Pollard materialized just as someone stepped in from the corridor.

His hands were shaking, so he jammed them in his pockets.

Then he took his left hand out to look at his wrist.w.a.tch: 1:48.

Pollard had been missing for perhaps eighteen minutes, except, of course, for the few seconds during which he had flickered into existence and talked about fireflies in a windstorm. Hal decided to wait until two o'clock to call Bobby and Julie.

He stood at the foot of the bed, clutching the railing with one hand, listening to the night wind crying at the window and the rain snapping against the gla.s.s. The minutes crawled past like snails on an incline, but at least the wait gave him time to calm down and think about how he would tell Bobby what had happened.

As the hands on his watch lined up at two o'clock, he went the rest of the way around the bed and was reaching for the phone on the nightstand when he heard the eerie ululation of a distant flute. The half-drawn bed-curtain fluttered in a sudden draft.

He returned to the foot of the bed and looked past the end of the curtain to the hallway door. It was closed. That was the source of the draft.

The flute died. The air in the room grew still, leaden.

Abruptly the curtain shivered and rippled, gently rattling the bearings in the overhead track, and a cool breeze swept around the room, ruffling his hair. The music rose again.

With the door shut and the window closed tight, the only possible source of the draft was the ventilation grille in the wall above the nightstand. But when Hal stood on his toes and raised his right hand in front of that outlet, he felt nothing coming from it. The chilly currents of air appeared to have sprung up within the room itself.

He turned in a circle, moved this way and that, trying to get a fix on the flute. Actually, it didn't sound like a flute. He listened closely; it was more like a fluctuation of wind whistling through a lot of pipes at the same time, big ones and little ones threading together many vague but separate sounds that loosely sounded like keening that was simultaneously eerie and, mournful yet somehow... threatening. It faded, returned a third time. To his surprise and bewilderment, tuneless notes seemed to be issuing from the empty air around the bed.

Hal wondered if anyone else in the hospital could hear the flute this time. Probably not. Though the music was louder now than when it had begun, it remained faint; in fact, if he had been asleep, the mysterious serenade would not have been loud enough to wake him.

Before Hal's eyes, the air over the bed shimmered. For a moment he could not breathe, as if the room had become a temporary vacuum chamber.

He felt his ears pop the same way they did during a too-rapid alt.i.tude change.

The strange warbling and the draft died together, and Frank Pollard reappeared as abruptly as he had vanished. He was lying on his side, with his knees drawn up in the fetal position. For a few seconds he was disoriented; when he realized who he was, he clutched the bed railing and pulled himself into a sitting position. The skin around his eyes was puffy and dark but otherwise he was dreadfully pale. His face had a grey sheen to it, as if it wasn't perspiration pouring from him clear beads of oil. His blue cotton pajamas were rumpled, darkly mottled with sweat, and caked with dirt in places.

He said, "Stop me."

"What the h.e.l.l's going on here?" Hal asked, his voice cracking.

"Out of control."

"Where did you go?"

"For G.o.d's sake, help me." Pollard was still clutching the bed rail with his right hand, but he reached entreatingly toward Hal with his left.

"Please, please..." Stepping closer to the bed, Hal reached out -and Pollard vanished, this time not only with a hissing sound, as before, but with a shriek and sharp crack of tortured metal. The stainless-steel railing, which he had been gripping so fiercely, had torn loose of the bed and vanished with him.

Hal Yamataka stared in astonishment at the hinges to which the adjustable railing had been fixed. They were twisted and torn, as if made of cardboard. A force of incredible power had pulled Pollard out of that room, snapping quarter-inch steel.

Staring at his own outstretched hand, Hal wondered what would have happened to him if he had been gripping Pollard. Would he have disappeared with the man? To where? Not someplace he would want to be: he was sure of that.

Or maybe only part of him would have gone with Pollard. Maybe he would have come apart at a joint, just as the bed railing had done. Maybe his arm would have ripped out of his shoulder socket with a crack almost as sharp as that with which the steel hinges had separated, and maybe he would have been left screaming in pain, with blood squirting from snapped vessels.

He s.n.a.t.c.hed his hand back, as if afraid Pollard might suddenly reappear and seize it.

As he rounded the bed to the phone, he thought that his legs were going to fail him. His hands were shaking so badly, he almost dropped the receiver and had difficulty dialing the Dakotas' home number.

BOBBY AND Julie left for the hospital at 2:45.

The night looked deeper than usual; street lamps and headlights did not fully penetrate the gloom. Shatters of rain fell with force, they appeared to bounce off the blacktop streets, as if they were hard fragments of a disintegrating vault that had come through the night above.

Julie drove because Bobby was only three-quarters awake His eyes were heavy, and he couldn't stop yawning, and thoughts were fuzzy at the edges. They had gone to bed three hours before Hal Yamataka had awakened them. If Julie had to get by on only that much sleep, she could do it, Bobby needed at least six-preferably eight-hours in order to function well.

That was a minor difference between them, no big deal.

because of several such minor differences, Bobby suspected that Julie was tougher overall than he was, even if he could whip her ten times out of ten in an arm-wrestling compet.i.tion. He chuckled softly.

She said, "What?"

She braked for a traffic light as it phased to red. Its blood image was reflected in distorted patterns by the black, murky like surface of the rain-slick street.

"I'm crazy to give you an advantage by admitting this, I was thinking that in some ways you're tougher than me."

She said, "That's no revelation. I've always known I'm tougher."

"Oh, yeah? If we arm wrestle, I'll whip you every time "How sad." She shook her head.

"Do you really think beating up someone smaller than you, and a woman to boot, makes you a macho man?"

"I could beat up a lot of women bigger than me," Bobby a.s.sured her.

"And if they're old enough, I could take them on two or three or four at a time. In fact, you throw half a dozen big grandmothers at me, and I'll take them all on with one hand tied behind my back!"

The traffic light turned green, and she drove on.

"I'm talking big grandmothers," he said.

"Not frail little old ladies. Big, fat, solid grandmothers, six at a time."

"That is impressive."

"d.a.m.n right. Though it'd help if I had a tire iron."

She laughed, and he grinned.

But they could not forget where they were going or why, and their smiles faded to a pair of matching frowns. They drove in silence. The thump of the windshield wipers, which ought to have lulled Bobby to sleep, kept him awake instead.

Finally Julie said, "You think Frank actually vanished in front of Hal's eyes, the way he says?"

"I've never known Hal to lie or give in to hysteria."

"Me neither."

She turned left at the next corner. A few blocks ahead, beyond billowing curtains of rain, the lights of the hospital appeared to pulse and flicker and stream like an iridescent liquid, which made it look every bit was miragelike as a phantom oasis shimmering behind veils of heat rising from desert sands.

WHEN THEY entered the room, Hal was standing at the foot of the bed, which was largely concealed by the privacy curtain. He looked like a guy who had not only seen a ghost, but had embraced it and kissed it on its cold, damp, putrescent lips.

"Thank G.o.d, you're here." He looked past them, into the hall.

"The head nurse wants to call the cops, file a missing person-"

"We've dealt with that," Bobby said.

"Dr. Freeborn talked to her by phone, and we've signed a release absolving the hospital."

"Good." Gesturing toward the open door, Hal said, "We'll want to keep this as private as we can."

After closing the door, Julie joined them at the foot of the bed.

Bobby noted the missing railing and broken hinges.

"What's this?"

Hal swallowed hard. "He was holding the railing when he vanished... and it went with him. I didn't mention it on the phone, 'cause I figured you already thought I was nuts, this would confirm it."

"Tell us now," Julie said quietly.

They were all talking softly, for otherwise Nurse Fulgham was certain to stop by and remind them that most of the patients on the floor were sleeping.

When Hal finished his story, Bobby said, "The flute, the peculiar breeze... that's what Frank told us he heard shortly after he regained consciousness that night in the alleyway, somehow he knew it meant someone was coming." Some of the dirt that Hal had observed on Frank's pajamas after his second reappearance, was on the bed sheets. Julie plucked up a pinch of it.

"Not dirt exactly." Bobby examined the grains on her fingertips.

"Black sand."

To Hal, Julie said, "Frank hasn't reappeared since he left with the railing?"

"No."

"And when was that?"

"A couple of minutes after two o'clock. Maybe two-oh-t two-oh-three, something like that."

"About an hour and twenty minutes ago," Bobby said.

They stood in silence, staring at the mountings from which the bed railing had been torn.

Outside, a squall of wind that rained against the window with sufficient force to make it so like out-of-season Halloween pranksters pitching hands full of dried corn.

Finally Bobby looked at Julie.

"What do we do now?" She blinked.

"Don't ask me. This is the first case I've worked on that involves witchcraft."

"Witchcraft?" Hal said nervously.

"Just a figure of speech," Julie a.s.sured him.

Maybe, Bobby thought. He said, "We've got to a.s.sume he'll come back before morning, perhaps a couple of times, sooner or later he'll stay put. This must be what happens every night when he sleeps; this is the traveling he doesn't remember when he wakes up."