"Who are you?"

"I'm asking the questions here," Clyde's voice said.

"Please . . ." she said.

"Last time, for all the apples, do you love this s.h.i.t?"

"Yes, yes."

"Got a proposition," the Clyde voice said. "I'll let you go if you'll tell me to cut him instead of you."

She looked up at him.

"That's right," the Clyde voice continued. "You say: Cut him, Clyde, cut him up, cut him to pieces, and I'll let you go. Just like Brian made the Beaumont c.u.n.t do."

"No . . . No," Angela said.

"Get her up,"

Stone just looked at Brian for a moment; the Clyde voice, the way Brian was posturing ...it was almost too much.

"Has everyone gone f.u.c.king deaf around here, get her up."

Stone pulled her by the hair.

"Put her hand on the table, please." The voice was still Clyde's, but oddly gentle, almost kind. Stone recognized that tone; meant something nasty was going to happen, Clyde always did that when he was about to get nasty.

"No, let go," Angela begged.

Stone grabbed her wrist, jerked her hand on the table.

Brian went to the table, moved behind Angela, ran his hand down the length of her long black hair. Angela trembled.

He leaned over and whispered in her ear: "I've got something for you. Something long and hard and pretty."

There was a long pause, then he said sharply: "This!"

He jerked a fist in front of her face; a knife was clutched in that fist.

"Not what you wanted, huh?" Brian said.

Then the knife was gone, and Brian came around and grabbed her, pushed her face down across the table. He pulled her arm out beside her, and she heard a thunking sound.

This was followed by pain.

She twisted her face to see. He had cut off her index finger at the knuckle with one swift chop. He leaned down to look at her face. He had her finger in his hand, pretending to pick his teeth with her fingernail.

She screamed and the scream tapered off to a sob. She pa.s.sed out. Unfortunately, only for a moment.

When she hazed into awareness, Brian had her middle finger positioned on the table.

Stone was helping him by holding her wrist.

Brian leaned his face down to hers again. Her finger was between his teeth, being rolled about in his mouth like a tyc.o.o.n with a cigar.

"Quick now," Clyde's voice said, "let's hear what you have to say about your sweetheart."

The moon hit Brian/Clyde's eyes and they were as bright and sharp as the knife he held, and behind those metal-bright eyes something bad moved.

"Cut him," she said. "Don't hurt me anymore. Cut him!"

Brian smiled. "Take his pants down," he said to Loony. "Wake him up."

"Yeah, Clyde . . . Brian, whatever the h.e.l.l," Loony said.

Stone and Loony rolled Jimmy over and unfastened his pants, pulled them down to his knees.

Loony took hold of Jimmy's feet and Stone settled at his head, used the palm of his hand to slap him awake, slow and easy, building rhythm.

"Get his underwear down," Brian said, but it was still Clyde's voice.

"By the Blessed Virgin," Angela said, and she began to sob.

Brian stared at her. He hardly looked like himself. His face appeared harder, thicker, darker, the brows looked lower. "There's still time, spick." He showed her the knife. Her blood still dripped from it. "You or him, baby?"

"Him," she said softly, and put her face against the table.

Jimmy was awake now, and aware of what was about to happen. "For G.o.d's sake, no.

Don't do this, Brian. Please, I'm begging you."

Brian, who looked and walked even more like Clyde now, moved around Loony and stepped between Jimmy's legs.

"G.o.d, don't. G.o.d, please don't." Then he abruptly began praying. "Our Father, who art in heaven . . . ?"

Brian reached down, clutched with his left hand, and the knife in his right flashed briefly in the moonlight.

SIXTEEN.

They heard Jimmy's screams, followed by those of a girl, and though they did not understand them, they felt them to be an echo of their future.

"Monty . . ." Becky began, but if there had been a thought behind the opening, it had died at birth.

"Heat some water," Monty said.

Becky looked up from the chair where she was sitting; she was clutching the axe and there was a sunburst of blood on her forehead, a few rubies of it beneath her nose.

"Heat some water," Monty repeated.

"A little coffee, I suppose?" Her voice rode the line between hysteria and sarcasm.

"Just boil the G.o.dd.a.m.n water. Get the biggest pots you can find. Fill them, get them boiling. I saw this done in a movie once. They threw water on these guys that were breaking in. Now get with it. I've got to barricade the place."

Becky stumbled into the kitchen area, set to work.

Monty checked the cabin out, made sure all the outside doors were locked. He blocked off the bedroom door with the couch in case they came through the window in there.

They'd have a h.e.l.l of a time pushing the door open with the couch against it.

Certainly it would take them long enough that he could defend the area.

He was trying to figure how to blockade the doors that led into the bedrooms when he remembered that one of them contained paneling and carpentry tools.

He went in there and came out with a mouthful of nails, a hammer in one hand and some narrow strips of paneling in the other hand. He stacked it, went back for the rest. It took several trips. He nailed the bedroom doors shut, cutting them off from the rest of the house. He used the rest of the paneling to nail over the windows facing the drive.

Only the two large side-by-side windows facing the lake and the one in the kitchen were unbearded now. But at least he would have less to defend, and the kitchen window, being high up and narrow, would be relatively easy to protect.

He retrieved the frog gig, and for a moment felt quite pleased with himself, but the pleasure dissolved when the unprotected lake window exploded and a leathery object came hurtling along with gla.s.s shards to land on the living room floor. A voice followed it, yelling, "Trick or treat, a.s.sholes."

Becky came out of the kitchen, a hand to her mouth (thinking to herself even as she did it: What a girly mannerism), and saw the gla.s.s fragments on the floor and what lay among them.

Even as Monty kicked the object across the room in disgust, she recognized what it was.

b.l.o.o.d.y t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es.

SEVENTEEN.

"The lights," Monty said. "Cut the lights." He ducked, moved close to the window, peeped out. He felt for all the world like one of those second-string movie stars in a Western B movie. Next he'd need to finish breaking out the rest of the window with his gun barrel so he could get a good clear shot at the Indians. Only he had no gun barrel- the guns were out there.

A crazy thing was happening out back, between the shed and the cabin. There was this kid and he was capering. He was a strange-looking kid and his body was doing things that were somehow graceful, yet somehow foreign. He had a knife in his hand (flashing from time to time in the moonlight just like his smile) and he was spreading his arms like a heron spreading its wings for flight, closing them, spreading them, and then he would stand on one leg, then two, then switch and stand on the other leg, then two again, and he was laughing.

The kid began to dance toward the cabin, moving at first from side to side, but gaining a bit of ground forward every now and then.

Monty clutched the gig until his knuckles were white.

He looked at Becky. She had picked up the axe and was standing near the front door.

The kid capered closer, stopped: "Teacher," he yelled, "remember me?"

Monty heard a thud. He looked at Becky. She had dropped the axe, she was shaking her head.

"It's him," she said.

"Him? Who's him?"

"Clyde . . . the one who raped me."

"Get your s.h.i.t together, Becky."

"It's him, I know that voice. It's-"

"Pick up the axe," Monty said calmly.

"Teacher," came Clyde's voice again. "Want to go another round? It sure did feel good inside you. You got a hot box, baby. I can tell your old man that-"

"Shut up! Shut the f.u.c.k up!" It had jumped out of Monty's mouth so fast he could not believe that he had said it.

The kid capered some more, spun around on his heel and stretched the hand with the knife and let the light of the moon dance on its tip.

Then he stopped, looked at the cabin, pointed with the knife. "We're waiting, teacher,"

Clyde's voice said, and Brian's voice continued with: "Hey, buddy, we're going to cut the pretty teacher's heart out."

Monty saw the kid's posture change with sudden drama, and even from a distance, he could see that the expression on his face had altered considerably.

Clyde spoke now: "We're gonna cut her c.u.n.t out too, a.s.shole. Hear me! Hear me!

But not before we f.u.c.k her G.o.dd.a.m.ned brains out, and I wanta be first!"

Brian laughing, his voice saying: "We'll be first."

More laughter. (Had it been the stereo sound of dual chuckles?) Monty blinked.

He was losing his grip. What was the point of all this- A sudden pounding from the front of the cabin explained it. He had been duped by the oldest trick in the book. The others had come up from the other side.

He glanced angrily back at the kid.

He was gone.

Grabbing the frog gig, he advanced toward the hammering, the front door.

Becky, trembling with remembrance of the voice from beyond the grave, picked up the axe.

Monty crept to the door, put his ear to it. He heard a dripping sound, as if great globs of water were falling off the eave of the roof and splattering on the front steps.

Easing over to the window, he bent and found a narrow place the paneling hadn't quite covered. He put his eye to it and peeked out.