Then the figure stepped out and it was Larry, dressed in faded jeans and a khaki shirt. Fran relaxed.

"Did I scare you?" he asked.

"You did, just a little." She sat down in one of the swings, the thud of her heart beginning to slow. "I just saw a shape, standing there in the dark ..."

"I'm sorry. I thought it might be safer, even though there's no direct line of sight from here to Harold's place. I see you rode a bicycle, too."

She nodded. "Quieter."

"I stowed mine out of sight in that shelter." He nodded to an open-walled, low-roofed building by the playground.

Frannie trundled her bike between the swings and the slide and into the shelter. The odor inside was musty and fetid. The place had been a make-out spot for kids too young or too stoned to drive, she guessed. It was littered with beer bottles and cigarette ends. There was a crumpled pair of panties in the far comer and the remains of a small fire in the near one. She parked her bike next to Larry's and came back outside quickly. In those shadows, with the scent of that long-dead sex-musk in her nose, it was too easy to imagine the dark man standing just behind her, his twisted coathanger in hand.

"Regular Holiday Inn, isn't it?" Larry said dryly.

"Not my idea of pleasant accommodations," Fran said with a little shiver. "No matter what comes of this, Larry, I want to tell Stu everything tonight."

Larry nodded. "Yeah, and not just because he's on the committee. He's also the marshal."

Fran looked at him, troubled. Really for the first time she understood that this expedition might end with Harold in jail. They were going to sneak into his house without a warrant or anything and poke around.

"Oh, bad," she said.

"Not too good, is it?" he agreed. "You want to call it off?"

She thought for a long time and then shook her head.

"Good. I think we ought to know, one way or the other."

"Are you sure they're both gone?"

"Yes. I saw Harold driving one of the Burial Committee trucks early this morning. And all the people who were on the Power Committee were invited over for the tryout."

"You sure she went?"

"It would look damn funny if she didn't, wouldn't it?"

Fran thought that over, then nodded. "I guess it would. By the way, Stu said they hope to have most of the town electrified again by the sixth."

"That's going to be a mighty day," Larry said, and thought how nice it would be to sit down in Shannon's or the Broken Drum with a big Fender guitar and an even bigger amp and play something-anything, as long as it was simple and had a heavy beat-at full volume. "Gloria," maybe, or "Walkin' the Dog." Just about anything, in fact, except "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?"

"Maybe," Fran said, "we ought to have a cover story, though. Just in case".

Larry grinned crookedly. "Want to say we're selling magazine subscriptions if one of them comes back?"

"Har-har, Larry."

"Well, we could say we came to tell her what you just told me about getting the juice turned on again. If she's there."

Fran nodded. "Yes, that might be okay."

"Don't kid yourself, Fran. She'd be suspicious if we told her we'd come up because Jesus Christ just appeared and is walking back and forth on top of the City Reservoir."

"If she's guilty of something."

"Yes. If she's guilty of something."

"Come on," Fran said after a moment's thought. "Let's go."

There was no need for the cover story. Steady hard rapping at first the front and then the back door convinced them that Harold's house was indeed empty. It was just as well, Fran thought-the more she thought about the cover they'd worked out, the thinner it seemed.

"How did you get in?" Larry asked.

"The cellar window."

They went around to the side of the house and Larry pulled and tugged fruitlessly at the window while Fran kept watch.

"Maybe you did," he said, "but it's locked now."

"No, it's just sticking. Let me try."

But she had no better luck. Sometime between her first clandestine trip out here and now, Harold had locked up tight.

"What do we do now?" she asked him.

"Let's break it."

"Larry, he'll see see it." it."

"Let him. If he doesn't have anything to hide, he'll think it was just a couple of kids, breaking windows in empty houses. It sure looks looks empty, with all the shades pulled down. And if he empty, with all the shades pulled down. And if he does does have something to hide, it'll worry him plenty and he deserves to be worried. Right?" have something to hide, it'll worry him plenty and he deserves to be worried. Right?"

She looked doubtful but didn't stop him as he took off his shirt, wrapped it around his fist and forearm, and crunched the basement window. Glass tinkled inward and he felt around for the catch.

"Here tis." He released it and the window slid back. Larry slipped through and turned to help her. "Be careful, kiddo. No miscarriages in Harold Lauder's basement, please."

He caught her under the arms and eased her down. They looked around the rumpus room together. The croquet set stood sentinel. The air hockey table was littered with little snips of colored electrical wire.

"What's this?" she said, picking up a piece of it. "This wasn't here before."

He shrugged. "Maybe Harold's building a better mousetrap."

There was a box under the table and he fished it out. The cover said: DELUXE REALISTIC WALKIE-TALKIE SET, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED DELUXE REALISTIC WALKIE-TALKIE SET, BATTERIES NOT INCLUDED. Larry opened the box, but the heft of it had already told him it was empty.

"Building walkie-talkies instead of mousetraps," Fran said.

"No, this wasn't a kit. You buy this kind ready to go. Maybe he was modifying them somehow. It sounds like Harold. Remember how Stu bitched about the walkie-talkie reception when he and Harold and Ralph were out hunting for Mother Abagail?"

She nodded, but there was still something about those snips of wire that bothered her.

Larry dropped the box back onto the floor and made what he would later think of as the most wildly erroneous statement of his entire life. "It doesn't matter," he said. "Let's go."

They went up the stairs, but this time the door at the top was locked. She looked at him and Larry shrugged. "We've come this far, right?"

Fran nodded.

Larry bumped his shoulder against the door a few times to get the feel of the bolt on the other side, and then rammed it hard. There was a snapping-metal sound, a clunk, and the door swung open. Larry bent and picked up a bolt assembly from the linoleum kitchen floor. "I can put this back on and he'll never know the difference. That is, if there's a screwdriver handy."

"Why bother? He's going to see the broken window."

"That's true. But if the bolt's back on the door, he'll... what are you smiling about?"

"Put the bolt back on, by all means. But how are you going to draw it from the cellar side of the door?"

He thought about it and said, "Jeez, I hate a smartass woman worse than anything." He tossed the bolt onto the Formica kitchen counter. "Let's go look under that hearthstone."

They went into the shadowy living room, and Fran felt anxiety start to creep up. Last time Nadine hadn't had a key. This time, if she came back, she would. And if she did come back, they would be caught red-handed. It would be a bitter joke if Stu's first job as marshal turned out to be arresting his own woman for breaking and entering.

"That's it, isn't it?" Larry asked, pointing.

"Yes. Be as quick as you can."

"There's a good chance he's moved it, anyway." And Harold had. It was Nadine who had replaced it under the loose hearthstone. Larry and Fran knew nothing of that, only that when Larry pulled the loose hearthstone aside, the book lay there in the hollow beneath, the word LEDGER LEDGER gleaming mellowly up at them in gold-filled letters. They both stared at it. The room seemed suddenly hotter, stuffier, darker. gleaming mellowly up at them in gold-filled letters. They both stared at it. The room seemed suddenly hotter, stuffier, darker.

"Well," Larry said, "are we going to admire it or read it?"

"You," Fran said. "I don't even want to touch it."

Larry picked it out of the hole and automatically wiped the white stone-dust from the cover. He began to flip through it at random. The writing had been done with a felt-tipped marker of the sort that had been marketed under the pugnacious brand name Hardhead. It had allowed Harold to write in a tiny, perfect script-the handwriting of an intensely conscientious man, perhaps a driven man. There were no paragraph breaks. There was only an eyelash of a margin to the right and left, but that margin was constant, so straight that it might have been drawn with a ruler.

"It'd take me three days to read all this," Larry said, and went on flipping toward the front of the book.

"Hold it," Fran said, and reached over his arm to turn back a couple of pages. Here the steady flow of words was broken by a boldly boxed-off area. What had been enclosed seemed to be some sort of motto:

To follow one's star is to concede the power of some greater Force, some Providence; yet is it still not possible that the act of following itself is the taproot of even greater Power? Your GOD, your DEVIL, owns the keys to the lighthouse; I have grappled with that so long and hard in these last two months; but to each of us he has given the responsibility of NAVIGATION. hard in these last two months; but to each of us he has given the responsibility of NAVIGATION.

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER.

"Sorry," Larry said. "It's by me. You get it?"

Fran shook her head slowly. "I guess it's Harold's way of saying following can be as honorable as leading. But as a motto, I don't think it's going to put 'Waste not, want not' out of business."

Larry continued to flip toward the front of the book, coming upon another four or five of the boxed maxims, all of them attributed to Harold in capital letters.

"Whoo," Larry said. "Look at this one, Frannie!"

It is said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I elect to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To vent them is more noble; that is to say the world must change for the good of you. I am on a great adventure.

HAROLD EMERY LAUDER.

"That's the work of a profoundly disturbed mind," Fran said. She felt cold.

"It's the kind of thinking that got us into this mess to start with," Larry agreed. He flipped rapidly to the start of the book. "Time's wasting. Let's see what we can make of this."

Neither of them knew exactly what to expect. They had read nothing of the ledger except the boxed mottos and an occasional phrase or two which, mostly owing to Harold's convoluted style (the compound-complex sentence seemed to have been invented with Harold Lauder in mind), meant little or nothing.

What they saw at the ledger's beginning was therefore a complete shock.

The diary began at the top of the first facing page. It was neatly marked with a 1 in a circle. There was an indent here, the only indent in the whole book, as far as Frannie could tell, excepting those which began each boxed motto. They read that first sentence holding the ledger between them like children at a choir practice and Fran said "Oh!" in a small, strangled voice and stepped away, her hand pressed lightly to her mouth.

"Fran, we have to take the book," Larry said.

"Yes-"

"And show it to Stu. I don't know if Leo's right about them being on the dark man's side, but at the very least, Harold is dangerously disturbed. You can see that."

"Yes," she said again. She felt faint, weak. So this was how the matter of the diaries ended. It was as if she had known, as if she had known it all from the moment she saw that big smudged thumbprint, and she had to keep telling herself not to faint, not to faint.

"Fran? Frannie? Are you all right?"

Larry's voice. From far away.

The first sentence in Harold's ledger: My great pleasure this delightful post-Apocalypse summer will be to kill Mr. Stuart Dog-Cock Redman; and just maybe I will kill her, too. My great pleasure this delightful post-Apocalypse summer will be to kill Mr. Stuart Dog-Cock Redman; and just maybe I will kill her, too.

"Ralph? Ralph Brentner, you home? Hooo-hooo, anybody home?" Hooo-hooo, anybody home?"

She stood on the steps, looking at the house. No motorcycles in the yard, only a couple of bikes parked around to one side. Ralph would have heard her, but there was the mute to think about. The deaf-mute. You could holler until you were blue and he wouldn't answer and still he might be there.

Shifting her shopping bag from one arm to the other, Nadine tried the door and found it unlocked. She stepped inside out of the fine mist which was falling. She was in a small foyer. Four steps went up to the kitchen, and a flight of them went down to the basement area where Harold said Andros had his apartment. Putting her most pleasant expression on her face, Nadine went downstairs, fixing her excuse in her mind if he should be there.