"All right," said Mr. Logic.

The demon walked to the desk. Gently, he placed the black book in front of Bill.

"Read this," said the Devil, and took a step back.

"That's all?" Bill said. "Just read this fucking book? That's all?"

He turned around.

Mr. Logic was gone.

"Dammit," said Bill.

Bill stared into the room for a moment. His door had appeared, blocking off the hallway to Hell and the river of blood. Hanging from a hook on it was his old camouflage print backpack, with its black straps and reflective strip. He's been proud of that backpack, on the first day of fifth grade.

He looked back to the desk.

He hadn't paid much attention to the book when it was in Mr. Logic's hands. Now, up close, he saw that the cover was made from a highly reflective material, smooth under his hands like vinyl. There were no identifying marks on the thing, no title or writing on the spine. It was about two feet high and half as wide.

"Read this book," Bill said to himself. "Read this fucking book. That's all I have to fucking do is read this book. Oh god the pain and how I wish I didn't have to read this fucking book."

Bill opened the cover. The book's spine crackled. The first page dropped into place against the interior cover.

"Oh great," said Bill. "I don't even read this fucking language. Ha ha. It's all Greek to me, assholes. All of it. All...."

Bill trailed off as his eyes caught some of the first words. The lettersa*or the symbols that passed as thema*were looped and angled and whorled elegantly.

He felt his eyes dragging across the text, taking in every word although their meaning was alien. Despite himself, he began to become fascinated with the words, as if they were telling him a story that only an animal-insane part of his brain could possibly understand.

"Wow," said Bill.

And he felt a weight in the back of his head. It started out relatively light, as if there were a couple of pebbles duct-taped to his skull.

He felt himself getting closer and closer to the page, leaning toward the thin onionskin and the densely packed writing.

"Wow," said Bill again. He felt woozy, but not unpleasantly.

And the words began to move on the page. They crawled like caterpillars, tumbling into one another, using the serifs of the font like cilia, scrambling on the onionskin like microscopic germs over a laboratory slide.

And the weight in the back of his head grew larger and larger. It now felt like a large soft animal was lying there, licking the back of his skull with a rough tongue.

Before he could stop himself, Bill had pressed his face onto one of the pages of the book, feeling the smooth texture of the sheet against his forehead.

It was more comfortable than any pillow he'd ever had, and conformed to his head like the softest piece of memory foam.

Though he was closer to the words, and they should have been blurred, he saw the individual letters and words and phrases and sentences as clearly as if they were printed on the other side of a magnifying glass. They had begun to make sense.

Bill's eyes fluttered closed. He felt them scanning the inside of his eyelids, going over lines and paragraphs and pages. He felt his hands reach up and push the first page, sliding it out of the way, and felt his head rest on the second one.

Drowsiness consumed him.

"Is this how...." he muttered. "This how it works?"

Then the weight on the back of his head became like a boulder.

He heard rustling, as if someone were crumbling up one of the book's pages in an angry hand. Then a sharp pain added to the pressure of the boulder resting in his mind.

"Oh, fuck," he said. A small part of himself panicked, but the calmness in the rest of his brain stifled it, like a campfire put out with a truckload of damp clay. And the pain diffused through the remaining parts of his skull, fusing with his nerves, causing them to glow red and white.

And the book came into him.

As the words passed his mind, he lost consciousness again. A thought bounced through the madness churning through his mind like a rubber ball in a dryer: What happens when you pass out in Hell?

Where do you wake up?

He supposed he was about to find out.

Thirty-Two.

Constance took the blue knife away from his neck and he collapsed to the pavement. His skull bounced and all of his bones rattled but he knew he was uninjured.

"Your body looks great," said Constance. "Just the same."

Bill kept his eyes closed for a moment. He watched the bright autumn sunshine coat his lids with red and gold.

He was alive.

He was out of Hell. He was back in the parking lot, next to the truck full of the dead. And he was lying on the pavement.

"Open your eyes," Constance said.

"Tired...." Bill said.

But he wasn't. He only supposed he should have been. An energya*something he instantly visualized as red and golda*vibrated through his nerves.

"How long were we there?" he asked, concentrating on the energy. Red and gold. Blood and jewels. It swirled around his groin, through his legs, and up back through his chest.

"Get up," said Constance. "Come on."

Bill felt the energy dissipate, flowing into his limbs. His fingers stiffened, then curled into fists. His toes scrabbled at the inside of his boots, scraping the rough fabric of his socks. He imagined Constance in a white dress, dancing in his arms at the chapel where they'd held their wedding....

"God, Bill, why'd you do that?"

"What?" said Bill. The red and gold ball rolled into his head, crushing his brain under its weight. But he didn't mind the intrusion. When it left, his mind felt as if it were gilded, electroplated. "I feel very very strange."

"Open your eyes," said Constance. "Look. You can do pretty much whatever you want to right now."

Bill focused his attention on his eyelids. They opened only reluctantly, like rocks rolled back away from tombs.

"That is a very apt metaphor," said his wife. "You've been reborn."

"How?" asked Bill, but he knew.

He stared at the sky, the translucent blue searing his eyes. The color was supersaturated, as if it was being viewed in one of Constance's beloved B monster movies on the crappy old TV with the picture tube that was about to burst. A cloud passing over the face of the sun transformed into a devil's face, its blue sky-eyes staring through him and its white-vapor teeth grinding.

He sat up. Any residual pain in his head or back had fled back to his nerves, whimpering in defeat. Like his brain, his bones felt like they were shining inside his body. Golden. Everything had turned golden.

He brought his feet to the pavement and pushed. His body hauled itself upward. He gave little to no effort to the gesture. He felt like he could jump over the casino, smashing through its windows without a cut.

Beside him was the truck, containing the bodies of Constance's gruesome army. Blood soaked his feet and his back, drying to a dark brown. Behind them stood the casino, a building of gray windows and black bricks and reflective surfaces.

And Constance wore her wedding dress.

"What has happened?" asked Bill.

Constance idly flicked at the hem of her dress with the blue knife, slicing off pieces of white lace ruffle. Her veil sagged like the wing of a dead insect.

"You happened," she told him.

Bill stared at his wife. The white of her dress blazed through his eyes, as if he were staring into the sun at midday. But as he watched the fabric melted away, dripping onto the tar in front of her like candlewax. It flowed away down the stream of blood, bashing against the beleaguered bed of flowers.

Once again she wore only her pink hooded sweatshirt, white pants, and filthy Converse sneakers.

She smiled.

"All the book is yours," she said. "How do you feel?"

Bill looked down on himself. No change in his appearance. For some reason he touched his face, and found his flesh to be the same. Stubble on his chin and more grease than usual on his nose and smears of blood. Other than that, there was no change.

"What happened?" he said.

"I should not have to explain that to you," said Constance.

Bill took a step forward. Nothing had changed in his body. He mentally felt around for the energy that had been shifting through him, but did not feel it. If it was still present it had retreated back into his brain, shunning his nervous system to hole up deep within his mind.

"I think I know," he said.

"Of course you do." She tapped the blue knife against the ground.

"I can do pretty much whatever I want now," said Bill.

"That's right. You can."

"And we must perform a ritual..."

"That's right."

"...and you're not you."

Constance smiled. "You're catching on," she said. "Already your perceptions sharpen."

The energy came back to Bill. This time it rolled through his stomach, making a smashed mess of his guts. Nausea, a feeling he thought he'd never have again, made puke burn at the back of his throat.

"You're not you," he said again.

Where the realization came from, he had no idea. It was a simple mental operation, as easy as connecting a name with a face. He knew, as he stared at his wife, that something had changed. Something he'd missed with his duller perceptions, that would change everything forever.

"That's right," she said. "Take it to its logical conclusion."

He knew his wife would not have killed all those people. She would have killed herself first. She would have curled into a ball and cried, no matter what power she had received from any source on this world or off of it.

He looked to his left, his flesh feeling as tight as if a demon had skewered it with hooks and chains and now attempted to yank it from his bones. Terris Smith's pathetic body hung against the side of the trailer, blood still flowing from his exposed brain and oozing down his jowled face. His tongue stuck out like a snail peeking from its shell.

He stared at this body.

"That's you," he said, feeling his hand moving toward the body, as if it were sliding through transparent syrup. His fingers landed on Terris' lapel, and gripped the smooth fabric. The daisy in his lapela*so like the flowers in his wife's wedding bouqueta*disintegrated at his touch, scattering their petals into the blood pooled at his feet. "You did this to your own body to fool Septimus. He should have known. If I did not know, how could have he?"

"It's not that complicated," said his wife.

But he knew it wasn't her.

"No," said Bill. "Somehow. You took her body. She'sa""

He felt a sledgehammer strike the back of his skull. Tears blurred his vision. Bill collapsed to his knees, feeling his bones crack against the pavement. The pain shot through his nerves but he ignored it.

"You're not my wife," he said.

"Bingo!" said Terris Smith, out of Constance's mouth.

Thirty-Three.

"This is so much fun!" shouted Terris, jumping up and down with Constance's legs.

Bill wiped his face with the back of his hand. His despair paralyzed him, despite the occult energies flowing within his body.

Again he looked to the body hanging from the truck, which had once been Terris Smith.