"Shit," he said.

Indeed, the sawdust that had been coming toward him was on fire. It burned furiously, creating a swirling fireball in the air, the orange and red and yellow and blue flames mixing together as if by the hand of a mad painter.

He watched, oddly fascinated, as the sawdust then turned into swirling patches of blank black embers, glowing only here and there with the remains of the fire. And the red and gold demon inside him protected him from the heat, creating a cold buffer zone between him and the fire. It was as if an invisible sheet of ice had been cast up into the air by the demon.

Then the charred embers of the sawdust fell, dropping back into the maelstrom of winds beneath him. The storm of sawdust was calming down, he saw, turning into more of a settled mass than a storm front.

And the war continued underneath him. A head spiraled into the air, the ends of its braids whipping up a storm of otherwise quiet air. The sounds of war grew in volume. One woman shrieked the word "Columbo!" over the din, before being once again quieted into a soft gurgling.

"I'm a lumberjack," his wife's body said again, nearer to his ear than he would have imagined.

Bill released the tree.

"It's done," he said.

The noise of the saws, or whatever they were that his wife had conjured, had ceased. The sawdust settled over the armies, lit up by the lights of the strands and the light from his wife's body. The streamers of white light pulled back from the trees.

And the trees fell.

One by one, starting with an oak near his wife's floating body. Constance grinned and flapped her arms like a little kid pretending to be a bird. She floated far above the trees, the white light stabbing into the night.

The oak tree collapsed where she had been, in a great rushing of leaves and splintering branches and snapping wood. It landed squarely on top of a small knot of the combatants. All of them shrieked, their voices interlacing in harmony for a moment, before being snatched back into silence.

"First one down!" his wife's body shrieked.

The next one to fall was a smaller tree, some type of pine. The needles hissed through the air as it fell.

Some of the combatants actually looked up for this one. A woman who had been digging out her enemy's eyes saw it, even though there were trails of blood running down her cheeks and one of her eyes had been popped out and hung from the socket by the optic nerve.

"Tree!" the woman screamed.

She scrambled to one side, flailing her limbs like she was swatting a swarm of attacking bees. She ran into a tremendously fat woman, wearing white sweatpants and a white sweatshirt. Bill thought of Mary but he knew her name was Goldie Forza, aged twenty-three, who had started her own restaurant in Providence, Rhode Islanda*

Goldie and the woman with her eye hanging out fell to the ground, embracing each other like lovers, as the tree toppled over them. They disappeared under a rush of pine needles and snapping limbs and a vomited fountain of sawdust. Bill heard Goldie screaming to someone named Gamma, and something about a kitten.

"Isn't this wonderful, Bill?" came Constance's voice.

Bill looked up to see her hovering directly above the field of battle. She had her hands on her hips.

Another crash.

Another pine had fallen sideways, sweeping aside a bunch of people as if it were a gigantic broom. One of the bodies flew up into the air like an action figure tossed by an angry kid. Bill caught a glimpse of a pair of white high-heels over black stockings, and he knew instantly that it was someone from his army: Geri Holden, from Portsmouth, Maine. She was seventy-three years old, and had worked for three years as a prostitute in Nevada. She had been sixty years old at the time, and something of a novelty among the girls who worked there. Surprisingly men had paid well for her services. She had been thinking about plying her trade again before the blue knife had been slid into her right eye.

Then Geri fell again to the ground, slamming hard against someone who looked like a midget. Both of them tumbled through the sawdust and disappeared into the remaining forest.

"Isn't this wonderful? Maybe you should do something," said his wife's body. She was applauding.

More trees fell over, the sound of their trunks splintering just as loud as the sound of the saws that had cut them down.

Terris had cast the spella"or whatever it wasa"over a hundred or more trees, which made up a good acre of forest.

Then Bill felt himself moving from the tree.

His wife was right. He needed to do something.

He looked down, and saw that he was at least twenty feet above the ground. Somewhere along the line, he'd lost his shoes. The dead writhed underneath his feet as the trees fell. He saw the face of a man he knew was named Angel Rodriguez, who had changed his name legally to Riggity-Roggity Queue. He was a drag queen, and someone who had performed nightly in San Francisco before he'd been beaten severely by a gang of skinheads. He'd been in the casino thinking about ways to kill himselfa*a difficult task, because of all the brain damage he'd sustained. He'd been thinking about drowning himself in the toilet before Terris had made his decision for him.

Then Bill realized he was looking at Riggity-Roggity's head, held in the hands of some teenaged woman who he'd never seen before in his life. The girl had blue lipstick and a white dress stained with everything it could possibly be stained with. Her legs were fat like hams, although the rest of her body was normal. She was missing her right arm.

The red and gold came back to him, and he felt its frightful joy everywhere in his body. To the demon, this was a trip through the amusement park while on a sugar-high. He was certain he heard it laugh.

"Got to do something," Bill chided it. "She's right...."

But the demon had already thought for him.

Bill didn't know if the idea originated in his brain or from the demon's. They were mixed together now, like two liquids in a same bowl. One was the other, no matter their previous states.

He hovered to within ten yards of his wife's body. Terris grinned with her mouth, watching the carnage below. She said "ooh!" as someone (Gilbert Gerald Normandy, Bill knewa"a writer and poet and all-around asshole) used a snapped branch from one of the trees to club his opponent over the head. Teeth flew from the ex-person's mouth, and scattered into the sawdust and blood slurry that now coated the ground like a carpet.

"Bill, darling, you're going to lose," said Terris, licking his wife's lips. "Unless..."

Bill had closed his eyes. He really didn't need to but it seemed like the right thing to do in the situation. On the inside of his eyelids he saw the red and the gold. It did not speak to him, because now it didn't need to. The two of them moved in concert.

Bill spread his hand, just as Constance had done. The demon leaped through his fingers, slanting outward into the gruesome night.

Bill felt the minds of all his armya*every personality, every name, every man and womena*inside of his brain. The roster of names scrolled downward like he was reading text on a computer screen. All of them, there in black and white in his mind's eye. He felt them give pause somewhere deep in their brains, and pay full attention to what he was doing. Although their bodies continued to fight ferociously, their minds listened to him, awaited instruction.

For the first time since this ordeal began, he felt a moment of glee. It was a drop of emotion, that threatened to turn into a torrential floor. The sense of control intoxicated him. Guilt or regret or sadness or whatever melted away under the heat of visceral thrill. A part of him still protested that everything about this was wrong, but he allowed the pleasure of command to defeat it. He wondered if this was what it was like to lose your soul; to sacrifice everything that you had believed or loved for something like this. Had the demon indeed taken his soul? Was it hiding out somewhere with Constance's soul? Cringing in the backwoods of Hell, waiting for its final judgement?

Constance.

His wife.

As the thrill consumed him, and he felt tendrils of the red and gold tighten around his army, he thought of her.

No, it was more than thinking.

He saw her.

It wasn't her body hovering above hima*that was just her shell, an aspect of her personality. It was the vehicle of her soul, which had been stolen.

The vision caught him as powerfully as the red and gold had, paralyzing his limbs. When the demon seized him it had been like ice, but this was hot as hell.

The image resolved in his mind, invading his sight, blocking out all visions of the night around him. It was blurry at first, only a blob of white and other watery colors, but then became as clear as the sharpest high-definition image. In fact, it looked real. Bill knew that it was real.

Had to be.

He saw the back of her head. She was seated in an office chair, an expensive thing called an Aeron. It had holes in the back of the seat instead of a cushion, really just a thin membrane to support the back. Constance's father had bought it for her, he knew, in hopes that she'd spend more time at the desk studying. But Constance had hated the chair; thought it was the most uncomfortable thing she'd ever sat in. Around Constance's back, Bill saw pink fur. It was from a cushion she used to support her back.

And Bill saw the window in front of the desk. There were three suncatchers on ita"only three. Bill had given them to her for her eighteenth birthday, because he knew that she loved them. Two of them were stylized sunflowers, the petals like fat fingers, their yellow more intense than any yellow Bill had ever seen. One pictured a rock with a ladybug sitting on top of it, its wings spread. The wings looked like tennis rackets to Bill. Constance had made a big fuss about the suncatchers, saying that they were the greatest ones she had ever seen in her life, and putting them up in a place of honor in her window. She'd even taken down all of the other ones, a fact given testament by the rings of the other suncatchers that she had taken down.

To her right was her old bed, with the pink comforter. An old coffee stain covered the lower right-hand corner. Bill knew that this was from the first cup of coffee she'd ever had in her life, and had spilled it because her hands had been shaking so hard.

Bill saw the back of her head.

She wore the same pink hooded sweatshirt, only this version was immaculate. Her white-blonde hair was tied back into a ponytail and spilled across her back like snow. Sunlight pierced her tiny ears, turning them pink, showing the purple lightning-bolt patterns of delicate capillaries. Like the sun catchers.

But Bill knew that the sunlight was false. A look out the window showed no scenery; just a blank white slab, like a fluorescent light fixture from a high school ceiling. No trees, no cars, no neighborhooda*nothing. Bill knew she had pink flamingoes in the front yard. They were a joke at first, put there by her father. But when he found out how much his daughter loved them, he kept them there.

"I know where you are," said Bill. His voice came out a whisper. He swallowed his heart, which now beat in his throat. Each of its pulses was like a punch.

He backed away from his wife, his steps landing softly on the dark blue carpet. He knew what lay behind him, but felt the need to confirm it anyway.

Bill turned around slowly. He saw the poster on her walla*a band he'd never heard of called Sinking in Blue Blood. There was a hole in the lead singer's forehead from where he had shot it with a bb gun one day. Constance had actually laughed, even though she liked the band and the poster was rare.

And a stuffed animal, an old Care Bear, in a fishing net. Tied to the wall. He remembered that. Her keys, which had a clear acrylic picture frame, holding a picture of them that had been taken backstage at one of her awful theater productions. She wore a white dress with x's going up and down the back. Bill remembered the way this dress had felt under his hand: stiff and smooth, like a sheet of sugar frosting puffed out into a garment. The x's of the lace going up her back were like tiny bones from a dead bird.

Then Bill looked to the door. Her bedroom had a white door, with lots of scuff marks at the bottom where she kicked it closed. The same scuff marks had been appearing at the bottom of their doors in the apartment, and Bill had been desperately trying to wean her from the habit. They would lose their security deposit, he told her, if she kept on vandalizing the place....

But all this was memory. There was no door.

The hallway in front of him was dim and dark, and smelled damp. He heard dripping watera*or some other fluida*coming from deep within the hallways. Like a cave. He listened for voices, but heard only the breath of the wind hissing through the cave.

"I know," he said. "Somewhere inside of my mind, I knew that you had taken her here, you fuckin' assholes."

He looked down and saw the blood at his feet. It flowed to the edge of the room, but none of it soaked through the carpet. It was like there was a sheet of glass between the room and Hell, keeping the room preserved for Constance's sake.

It was Constance. This was Constance, this thing staring out of a bright window. She wasn't in the body suspended in white light over a field of the dead. This was her essence here, come to hide after the invasion of her body by another intelligence.

This was her afterlife.

And she had come to Hell.

He turned away from the dank hallway, resisting the urge to spit into the blood river. And before he turned, was that a white face he saw hovering in the darkness, a smile playing on its thin lips? And hair like horns?

"Constance," he told his wife's shade. That was the terma*not ghost, not spirit, but shade. She had taught him the word when she studied Greek dramas in one of her English classes. When their dead descended to the underworld, their shade was left to wander around on the banks of the Styx, with only the palest memories of their previous lives. And there was a river that they drank froma*Lethe, it was called. The waters erased their memories like a fire hose could erase words from a chalkboard.

If Constance turned around, and fixed the eyes of her shade on him, would she know him? Or would she just stare and stare in incomprehension, her gaze going through him as easily as the blue knife through flesh?

As Bill thought on these things, the visions of her room became indistinct, as if it was dipped upside-down in water. The details blurreda*the suncatchers, the coffee-stains on the sheets, the Care Bear in the fishing neta*until all he could see was the back of his wife's head. Her shade's head, rather. And then that blurred as well, until all detail became a white blur, like staring into a light bulb for too long.

"Constance," he called. "I'm going to get you out of here. If I have to become the Devil himself, I swear to God I'm going to get you out. And get your body back, too, no matter how that shithead has been using it. I swear to God."

And everything became a blur of whites and blacks, as if he were seeing the world through a veil of tears. The white blur that was the back of his wife's head sprouted a kind of growth on the side, and he realized that it wasn't something sprouting, but her face as she turned around.

Then the vision faded, released him from its grip, as a very real tear slid down his cheek and onto the dead below his feet.

Forty-One.

His wife's body stared at him.

"Whatcha doin', Bill?" she asked. "Having a little private time with the wifey-poo? I'm sure her shitty soul is having the time of its life. Has Mr. Logic come in and had his way with her yet? I hear he likes to do that. Used toa*"

Bill tuned out the prattle. Where had the vision originated? In his own mind, from his own powers? From the red and gold demon? Or from someone elsea*maybe the residual influence of Terris?

He glanced at his hand. At first he thought he'd sprouted a hundred more fingers, all drifting off from crazy angles all over his hand. But they were red and gold strands, not his flesh.

And all of the strands led down to members of his army, all of the remaining ones. He felt their names again in his mind.

Trees fell.

Terris was right: they were destroying his army.

And the red and gold made a fast decision. It was pre-conscious, beyond spontaneous. He felt his instructions flooding the red and gold channels, pouring his wishes into the brains of the revenants around him. Of course all of them would obey without question.

"Ooh, Bill, you're getting the idea," said his wife's body. She had floated a little farther back, her white light undiminished. "Nice. Fight back a little bit against us. We're not going to fuck off and die by ourselves, you realize. Ha."

He thought back to when he was a kid, and he'd seen a cartoon, maybe something Japanese, that had featured flying people. Or people wearing rocket packs, or something like that. Close enough. His brain or some force working on his brain dragged the image out of his subconscious.

"All right," he said, "Get up."

Bill jerked his hand upward, as if he were giving the moon a high-five. He felt no pressure on his muscles. But part of hima*his shade?a*felt the pressure pulling at him as sure as gravity affects the tides.

And the bodies flew.

They flew up from the sawdust-strewn forest floor, creating another minor storm. Bill heard someone, not one of his, shout "Fucker Peter Pan fucker! Ha ha ha!"

Bill saw one of the deada*a Mr. Clyde Faroe, from San Francisco, a lifelong football playera*nearly collide with Constance's body. His bare foot kicked the spot where her head used to be as she darted away, nimble as a firefly.

He moved his hand again, and his dead all rested on the same plane before him, lying parallel to the ground, the red and gold strands connected somewhere on their bodies, whether it be a foot or a head or an ear. Geri Holden, the ancient prostitute, hovered close to him. Part of her right ear had been chewed off, and her lips were sagging scraps of flesh. He didn't know if it was the disfigurement or real mirth, but he thought he detected a smile.

Everyone was about twenty feet off the ground, well out of reach of the army below.

Bill felt an agitation in the red and gold, and something like a warning shout shook his nerves. Before he knew what he was doing he jerked his hand, and moved two of his army away from the falling tree. This one was stripped of its branches and rotting, and smashed on the forest floor and disintegrated into splinters.

"Go, Bill!" shouted Constance's body. "Go! Do it! Slam those bitches into the fire!"

Bill looked down. The remaining upright bodies all looked into the air, some of them jumping up and down and pawing for their out-of reach opponents.

Then somebody coughed and a pile of guts spilled down onto the forest floor. Bill felt one of his army weaken and die, and he allowed the red and gold to release its grip.

The person fell down onto the forest floor, landing on top of their entrails.