Stone, who still thought Larry was behind the patrol car, had glanced neither left nor right, and the mask he was wearing did little for his peripherial vision.

Larry, who had been raised by a father who knew the woods and knew how to hunt, crept slowly toward Stone's position without so much as snapping a twig.

"The goblins," Monty said. "The mask. It all makes sense."

But before Becky could respond, they heard a tinkling of gla.s.s. A knife blade slid between the sill and the paneling of one of the windows on the driveway side. The blade moved briskly up and down, from side to side, prying the paneling loose.

Monty laid the gig on the floor. He took the axe from Becky. Trembling, moving quietly, he crossed the room and swung the flat end of the axe against the knife blade.

He hit the blade solidly, but the knife did not break. Instead, the paneling sagged, struck the floor on the left-hand side. Through the opening, Monty could see the kid, his masked face pressed against one of the unbroken panes. The kid giggled, started to jerk away.

Monty made a wild swing with the axe, hurled it through the gla.s.s. It shattered the window and hit Loony in the forehead, bounced away. Loony made a short barking sound, stumbled backward two steps, wavered a moment, clutched the crown of the mask with a shaky hand and ripped it off.

A huge saucer of blood widened on Loony's forehead. He made another two steps backward and fell flat on his back. The knife dropped from his hand and he lay still.

"Gotcha!" Monty screamed.

Then he heard a shotgun roar.

Larry crept up slowly, cautiously, until he pinpointed Stone in the sniper position.

After a moment he took in that the kid was wearing a Halloween mask. That made him think with a smile: trick or treat? He lifted the riot gun. The weapon was loaded with alternating slugs and double-ought buckshot; Highway Patrol theory being the slug took out the window and the double-ought took out the man.

No windshield here. Just a kid in a tree with a mask on.

It was a bit of a distance for the riot gun, but with the slug as the first load, Larry felt confident.

He eased the trigger, shot Stone through the neck. The slug tumbled at such velocity it snapped the neck bone in two and nearly tore Stone's head off. The Halloween mask went sailing, and the blast launched Stone from the tree and carried him for a Peter Pan dive into the pine needles. His legs thrashed and his left heel beat an unrhythmic tattoo against the ground before body functions ceased and he lay completely still.

Larry was contemplating the surprising fact that the sniper had been white when he heard a sound behind him.

He turned, lifting the riot gun. As he raised it, his eyes took in the bore of a revolver which seemed as big as the mouth of a subway tunnel. The tunnel belched. And a train went into his mouth, took his lips and gums with it as it made its exit out the back of his neck.

As he fell, his right hand dropped and his finger reflexively jerked the riot gun trigger, causing him to shoot off his own kneecap. It went rolling out down his pants leg like a runaway tire.

The worst part about it, Larry thought, is I'm not dead yet.

Brian remedied that. He bent over the cop, put the barrel to Larry's right eye and made pudding of it when he pulled the trigger on the .357.

That finished, Brian crept toward the patrol car.

Nothing happened.

No one moved and no one took a shot at him.

He looked inside the car. A cop lay against the dash. His head had been turned to grease and gristle.

Brian bent, looked beneath the car. There were no ankles or squatting knees to shoot at.

Creeping to the front of the patrol car, he eyeballed around the edge of. the hood.

No one was there. That was all for the law.

He began to trot down the lengthy drive toward the cabin. He didn't bother with Stone. He had seen the patrolman fire and he had seen Stone's neck go to pieces. Even a snake dies without a head.

Moses had eased back into the pines and made love to the shadows. From his hiding place, he heard Larry fire the riot gun, and from the same position, he saw Brian come out of the woods on his side and cross over to the other. Then he heard a pistol shot, the shotgun again, followed by another pistol shot. Then he saw the kid again, creeping around the patrol car, and finally back toward the cabin.

He could have killed the kid when he first saw him, he had time, but he was deathly afraid he might miss, and he had a family, and some lost hunting dogs (Christ, he'd just left them running about loose) to worry about. If he had missed, the kid might not have.

Then where would he be? Under some G.o.dd.a.m.n pine tree with his brains blown out, that's where.

Besides, he was scared. So scared, he had s.h.i.t his pants.

When he heard the shotgun, Monty looked out the window and saw only the car lights.

He ducked down, pulled the paneling back into place, and pushed the nails into their loose holes. It wasn't much, but it obscured outside vision, made them less of a target.

He wondered about the shooting that followed the first shotgun blast, but didn't come up with any concrete ideas. Only one nebulous thought circled about in his head- the kids had reinforcements and were shooting wildly, blowing off steam before they blew off heads.

He looked down at his hands. They were shaking.

If Monty had looked again, he would have seen Brian, running toward the house with the pistol, bounding like some sort of demon in the moonlight, the grotesque Halloween mask with the rubber knife in the skull flopping and wriggling like an absurd antenna.

His hands were shaking, but Monty felt for the first time in his life as if he had b.a.l.l.s. His father was wrong. He did have b.a.l.l.s. He felt like letting out with some primeval war whoop at the thought of having done in the kid with the axe. It had been ugly and brutal, but he felt good about it and could not make himself feel any other way. He wished good old Billy Sylvester was here today. He'd make him eat a dog t.u.r.d and smile while he ate it.

He glanced at Becky. She had the gig c.o.c.ked open and was holding it before her like a lance. For some unG.o.dly reason pa.s.sion pumped through him and he had an erection. It was the killing and the potential for violence that was doing it, causing him to become feverish with a strange kind of l.u.s.t. Lost in his victory, Monty abruptly realized where he crouched. With the paneled window in front of him, his back was exposed to the unpaneled window behind him. Pimples of ice freckled the back of his neck, made the hair there go p.r.i.c.kly.

He looked behind him.

No face was staring through the shattered window.

He duckwalked over to Becky. "You all right?" he said, rising to touch her.

"Did you kill him?"

"Dead as he can get."

"Good," she said softly. "How many more, you think?"

"No way of knowing."

"I love you," she said.

"I love you too."

"No matter what, I do. Remember that."

"Never doubted it."

Brian found Loony's body and he was very angry. Real angry. He told the giggling sonofab.i.t.c.h to stay put, so what had he done? Just the opposite.

He kicked Loony in the ribs, and in an overwhelming flash of anger, lifted the pistol and shot Loony's corpse in the face-twice.

Or rather Clyde did.

Brian said, "Easy, Clyde, easy, man."

Clyde said, panting, "I'm all right, all right. Just get that teacher c.u.n.t, let me have her. I want her heart."

"I will. We will."

""You've been saying that, G.o.dd.a.m.nit!"

"Now's the time."

"Get the knife. Use the knife. I want it done with the knife. Cut her. Give her to the G.o.d of the Razor-rape her with his d.i.c.k-the knife."

Brian patted the scabbard knife in his waistband. "Right here, Clyde."

"Now!" Clyde said.

Inside, Monty and Becky heard voices. Two distinctly different voices. The crazy kid was at it again, talking for two. Maybe. Monty found that he was beginning to wonder.

Monty moved to the kitchen, found a butcher knife. He could hear the voices outside.

First one, then the other.

Observing Becky out of the corner of his eye, he saw that each time the Clyde voice spoke, she tensed. He knew she was having a graphic instant replay of the rape in her head, and it made him crazy with anger and hate to realize it. He did nothing to control either emotion. He fertilized them, let them grow and blossom.

The voices stopped.

Monty and Becky held their breaths. For a brief moment the world seemed to swing back to normal. The cold night air eased through the broken window and smelled of the lake and the pines. They could hear the lake lapping at the sh.o.r.e, and somewhere, far away, a nightbird calling.

Then came a sound at the front door, like something heavy falling. Monty had a feeling he knew what the sound was. The girl's body being pulled down.

But why?

The answer came immediately with a whacking sound.

The kid had picked up the axe Monty had tossed at Loony, and he was playing Paul Bunyan with it on the door. He had moved the body so there would be room to swing it.

The axe struck with a loud, hollow ring that turned into a squeak as it was withdrawn.

Again and again. Bam! Squeak! Bam! Squeak!

Clyde called with each blow, "Trick or treat, a.s.sholes. Trick or treat!"

The axe rang one last note, flashed silver through a rent in the doorway, squeaked, and was gone.

Silence.

Becky gripped Monty's arm, and Monty gripped the butcher knife until his hand cramped.

Without speaking, he moved away from her, across the room toward the door. He stopped by the boarded window, listened.

Still nothing.

He waited for the axe to start up again, realizing that it wouldn't take much more before the door went. Strips of it had fallen away, and Monty could see the night and the glow of the patrol car's lights through the rips.

But the axe did not start up again.

Then Monty had a horrid suspicion, and even as he was turning, what was left of the gla.s.s in the window across the way blew, and the kid came leaping in (slivers of gla.s.s clinging to his clothes, the axe gripped in both hands), and the force of the leap struck Monty and knocked him back, jarred the knife from his grasp and sent it sliding away into shadows.

TWENTY-ONE.

Monty and Brian rolled across the floor, Monty struggling against the axe with both hands.

Brian worked the weapon loose and slammed a short chop at Monty, but Monty jerked his head to the side, and instead of his face splitting wide open, it took off" half his left ear.

Monty gripped the axe with one hand, pushed his other into Brian's face. His fingers slid up under the mask and knocked it off.

Brian twisted his head away from Monty's fingers just as Becky stepped out of the shadows, the frog gig c.o.c.ked and raised.

And Clyde's voice screamed, "I'll ram that G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing all the way up your a.s.s, b.i.t.c.h."

The voice struck her like a blow, and she remembered it coming out of another face; remembered Clyde in her, his s.e.x exploring her innards like an alien tentacle; the explosion of his seed inside her, the grunts of his savage pleasure as he finished.

She threw the gig with all her might.

Brian ducked.

The gig sc.r.a.ped along his scalp, peeled a strip of hair and flesh away, clattered to the floor.