"I called him while you were at school. Actually, I'd just hung up the phone when you . . . you know," and he doesn't want to say When you plowed your car into the house, so he just jabs his left thumb over his shoulder at the bedroom window, in the general direction of the front porch.

"Right," Chance says. "I know."

"I haven't talked to that son of a b.i.t.c.h in for f.u.c.kin' ever. I thought he was gonna have a heart attack when he heard my voice."

"You called him about Dancy," Chance says, and Deacon nods, keeps his eyes on the floor.

"I told him everything I thought I could, without him thinking I was totally whacked. It was that finger. Regardless of what she believed it was, regardless of what I felt when I touched it, I figured if she's really been killing people and hacking them up like that, then maybe somebody was looking for her. Maybe someone out there might know something that would help."

"You saw a monster, too, didn't you?" Chance asks him, and the Lortab is making her slur; her eyes are closed again, and "When you touched it," she says, "that's what you saw."

"Yeah, that's what I saw. But I learned a long time ago that some of the stuff I see when I touch these things, some of it can be influenced by other people who touched them before me, by what those people believed. If those beliefs are strong enough, Chance, it's like they can leave impressions behind, the same way that actual events can.

"So, when I found that marked-up copy of Beowulf and realized that's where she was getting all of this stuff, it started me thinking-maybe the things I saw when I touched the finger, and the things I saw at the tunnel, maybe they had as much to do with what Dancy believed was happening as what really has been happening."

"Yeah, well, what about the things I saw?" Chance asks him. "What about the things Sadie said she saw?"

"Like I said, this is complicated. I'm not saying you guys didn't see anything. At the very least, I know you think you saw something. But neither of you had these experiences until after you met Dancy, and maybe some of the things you saw, maybe you saw them because of what she said to you."

"You think we imagined it all."

"Chance, have you ever wondered why those folks who claim to have been abducted by s.p.a.ce aliens all tell more or less the same story? Why their stories tend to have so much in common? I know you, so I know d.a.m.ned well you don't think it's because they've all been abducted by extraterrestrials with the same idea of how to go poking around inside people's b.u.t.ts," and she laughs, then, a clean, sane laugh, laughing just because she thinks something's funny. It's almost enough to lift some of the weight from Deacon's shoulders, from his mind, the simple sound of her laughing, and he can look at Chance again instead of the floor.

"The UFO nuts like to say it's impossible that all these people could have concocted such similar stories, that the similarities between the reports are proof that the stories must be accounts of real abductions. But you know that's bulls.h.i.t, because all those people, I don't care if they're in f.u.c.king Kansas City or Kathmandu, all of them have been contaminated by everything from Close Encounters to supermarket tabloids to the stories they've heard other abductees tell on talk shows."

"And you think Dancy contaminated me and Sadie," Chance says. She rubs at her eyes like they're sore, rubs them like a sleepy child trying to stay awake just a little longer, and then glances back towards the open window. The nightwarm breeze ruffling the curtains smells faintly of kudzu and car exhaust.

"Maybe. And maybe me, too," he says. "She was trying, as hard as she could, to convince all three of us that she was telling us the truth. She needed to convince us, to reinforce her own beliefs. Personally, I think Dancy was a h.e.l.l of a lot more afraid of her own doubt than she ever was of monsters."

"So, what did your detective friend have to say, anyway?"

Deacon sighs and rocks his chair back onto two legs, scuffs at the floor with the heel of one shoe.

"Some pretty wild s.h.i.t. More than I expected, that's for sure. Dancy told me she was from Florida, down near Fort Walton somewhere, so Hammond called this guy he knows who's Florida State Patrol, and then he talked to the Feds in Tallaha.s.see. And they told him that a sixteen-year-old albino girl named Dancy Flammarion escaped from a state mental hospital a few months ago."

He pauses, then, but Chance doesn't say anything, keeps her head turned towards the open window; she flares her nostrils slightly, once, twice, as if searching the breeze for some particular odor. An animal kind of a thing to do, almost like a dog, and that makes him think of things he'd just as soon not remember, and he starts talking again.

"She'd been there about a year, ever since she was picked up last summer wandering along the highway near a place called Milligan. Turns out she was living somewhere back in the swamps with her mother and grandmother. The cops that found her knew who she was, but they couldn't get her to talk, so they just a.s.sumed she'd run away from home. But when they tried to take her back, turns out the cabin her family was living in had burned down to the ground. Her mother and her grandmother were both dead, and, as far as anyone in Milligan knew, she didn't have any other family. So Dancy became a ward of the state-"

"Since when do they put you in the nuthouse for that?"

"They don't. Hammond said he wasn't precisely clear on why she was committed, though she evidently gave the Milligan PD a h.e.l.l of a lot of trouble before they shipped her off to Tallaha.s.see.

"Anyway, when Dancy finally started talking, whatever she had to say to those shrinks must have sounded an awful lot like the sort of stuff she was telling us, because no one intended to let her out anytime soon. About a month before she escaped, she attacked another patient and an orderly and wound up in isolation, on some sort of high-security suicide watch."

"Jesus," Chance murmurs, and Deacon leans forward and the front legs of his chair b.u.mp gently back down to earth again.

"No one seems to know exactly how she escaped, or if they do they wouldn't tell Hammond, or he wouldn't tell me, but in the process she a.s.saulted another orderly. Some poor f.u.c.ker that must have been trying to stop her, and she bit off his finger, Chance, bit it off and took it with her. Since then, the police in Florida and Georgia have kinda been looking for her, but no one had seen hide nor hair, not until the day you saw her at the library."

"What does this mean, Deacon?" and she sits up slow, braces one hand against the headboard to steady herself. "Even if we know where the finger came from, it doesn't explain how she knew about my grandmother, or the water works tunnel, or Elise, or the trilobites-"

"There's a whole h.e.l.l of a lot it doesn't explain, Chance. I know that. But it's a start. It's someplace to begin. And we have to start somewhere. We have to do something. Right now, I got you and Sadie both goin' f.u.c.king loony toons on me, and I don't think I'm far behind you myself. This is the only thing that makes sense to me, figuring out what the h.e.l.l was up with Dancy, because that's where this began, that day you met her at the library," and Deacon stops then, because he can hear the way he's starting to sound, scared and angry, desperate, everything that he doesn't want Chance to know he's feeling, everything that can only make it worse. He takes a deep breath, and "I never said I had all the answers," he says and stands up.

"That's not where this began, Deacon," she says, "You know that's not where this began," looking up at him, and her eyes are wet and bright, her green eyes, and he'd almost forgotten how deep those eyes are, how there was a time when he could lose all the ugly parts of himself in them.

"What are you talking about?"

"The night we broke into the tunnel. Whatever happened to us that night, whatever happened to you and to me and Elise. That's where this started. Elise knew. She tried to get me to talk, to remember, and I wouldn't because I was too scared, and then it killed her. And it killed my grandmother, and Dancy, too. And all we do is talk and try to think of ways not to accept what's going on. I think maybe that's what it wants."

And then she's crying too hard to say anything else, and Deacon turns away, stares at a bookshelf on the other side of the room. Whatever miserly sc.r.a.p of courage he has is no match for her breaking down like this, and he wants to tell her to stop it, stop it right now, wants to grab her and shake her until she shuts up. There are still too many things he has to do, too many questions left to answer if they're going to come out of this sane.

"I have to go to Florida, Chance," he says. "I've got to try to find out more about Dancy. Maybe then, maybe if I can understand how she fits into what's going on, I can make you see this isn't about monsters and it doesn't have anything to do with Elise's death-"

"Deacon, no, please, just once talk to me about that night. Sit down and tell me what you think happened to us in there."

But Deacon doesn't sit down, keeps his eyes fixed on Chance's bookshelf, the incongruous mix of children's picture books and natural history, On Beyond Zebra and Stephen Jay Gould. Neat and sensible rows of books to keep him from following Chance wherever she's gone, the black and devouring places he's spent his life running from, the places that his visions would have dragged him off to a long time ago if he'd let them.

"I've asked Soda to loan me his car for a day or two. I won't be gone any longer than that, I promise."

"Please," she says, "if you ever gave a s.h.i.t about me," and he shakes his head, only shakes his head no, because he can't do more, can't tell her that he's never given much of a s.h.i.t about anything else but her.

"I'm not leaving until daylight, and I won't be gone long," he says and starts to turn around, takes his eyes away from the sanctuary of the bookshelf, and there's Sadie standing in the doorway, watching them and holding the ledger.

A few awkward minutes, and then Deacon went downstairs, left Sadie and Chance alone in the attic, and now Sadie's standing in the door, staring down the darkened stairs after him. She might still call him back, she thinks, if she tried, might even be able to talk him out of driving away to Florida on some bulls.h.i.t wild-goose chase. But she doesn't. And she wonders if it's because of Chance or because she knows that he would try to stop her from going back to the tunnel to find Dancy.

"I'm sorry," Chance says, trying to stop crying, sounding more asleep than awake, and Sadie turns and looks at her.

"Why? What do you mean?"

"I'm sorry for getting you into this. I'm sorry for getting both of you into this mess. I know she only went to you to get to me," and that's just one more thing to make Sadie want to tell Chance how full of s.h.i.t she is. But it's exactly the sort of thing she should have expected, too; that arrogance, the whole wide world spinning around Chance Matthews, the whole universe, and Sadie's only some dim, inconsequential satellite unfortunate enough to get caught up in her gravity.

"It's not your fault," Sadie says. "Really. None of this is your fault." And she walks over, sits down in the chair beside the bed, the chair still warm from Deacon sitting there before her.

"I wish I could believe that," Chance says. "Just for a little while," and she wipes at her eyes. Sadie looks around for a box of Kleenex, but there isn't any to be seen. She considers going downstairs and getting Chance some toilet paper, a little extra effort to seem more sincere, but Chance has already started talking again.

"I told him not to go, Sadie. He won't listen to me. Maybe if you asked him, maybe he'd listen to you."

"Maybe, but you know Deke. When he gets something in his head, there's not much anyone can do."

Chance leans back against the wall. "I'm so tired," she whispers and starts crying again. "I'm so G.o.dd.a.m.n tired."

"You need to lie down and try to get some rest. You've been through an awful lot today," and that's when Chance notices that Sadie's holding the ledger, and she points at it.

"Oh yeah, you left it downstairs. I thought you might want it up here with you," and she lays it on the bed near Chance. "I know it's important to you."

Chance picks up the book and glares at it, kaleidoscope tumble of emotions across her teardamp eyes, anger and regret and confusion, something that Sadie thinks might be fear, and then Chance lays it down again and wipes her snotty nose with the palm of her right hand.

"I don't . . . I don't know what's important to me anymore. I should throw this G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing out the window."

Sadie opens her mouth and quickly closes it again. Tell me what it means, she wants to say. Tell me what's wrong with the tunnel, the words almost out of her mouth, and then she thinks it might be too soon, that Chance could get suspicious and she might not ever get a second opportunity.

"I don't know," Sadie says. "Usually, whenever I throw something away I wind up wishing that I hadn't later on."

And Chance looks up at her, a sudden, furious expression like Sadie has just told her to go to straight to h.e.l.l, do not pa.s.s Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, and Sadie instinctively scoots a couple of inches farther away from the edge of the bed.

"What was that supposed to mean?" Chance asks her, and Sadie shakes her head.

"Nothing. It didn't mean nothing at all. Just that I think you shouldn't throw that book away, because it belonged to your grandmother and tomorrow you might wish you hadn't."

"You don't know about this book, Sadie," and now Chance is almost snarling, brandishes the ledger like a Baptist minister brandishing a Bible at a tent revival, something in her hands full of d.a.m.nation and secrets, and she can make a weapon of it if she wants. "You don't know what it means, this book, the things in here," and now Chance is stabbing at the cover with an index finger, stabbing the book as she speaks, and a few drops of saliva and the tears that have run down her face to her mouth fly from her lips and speckle the front of Sadie's T-shirt.

"So tell me, Chance," and There, she thinks. It's out. Whether this was the right time or not, it's out. "I'm right here, and you can talk to me. It's not like I haven't been going through all this right along with you. It's not like I'm not going to believe whatever you say."

"I don't even believe me," Chance says, and she drops the ledger. It lands loudly on the floor, and Sadie stares at it a moment, trying to find the words she can trust, the correct words, that can't be taken the wrong way or brushed aside.

"Chance, do you think Dancy is dead?"

"Why don't you go ask Deacon? These days he seems to be doing a better job of coming up with answers than me," and then Chance lies down, head towards the foot of the bed, and she curls herself into a fetaltight ball, a smaller target for whatever Sadie's going to say next; she sniffles and buries her face in the patchwork squares of the quilt.

"Because," Sadie says and bends over, retrieves the ledger from the floor, "we both already know what Deacon thinks about Dancy, that she's some kind of psycho. That she's dead, or she's run off somewhere. But he doesn't think that she's in trouble."

"My head hurts, Sadie. Leave me alone now. My head hurts, and I just want to go to sleep."

But Sadie has opened the ledger, flips through it until she finds the first page with the drawing of the star and the seven-sided figure inside the star, and she turns the book towards Chance.

"Just answer one question for me, Chance. Just this one little question, and then I'll go away and I won't bother you again. I f.u.c.king promise."

Chance is watching her or the book with one bloodshot, weary eye, just her right eye because the left is still buried in the quilt. The side of her face that struck the steering wheel, and that eye is turning the purpleblackred of a ripe plum.

"Tell me what this is. This design that your grandmother drew over and over again. Tell me what it means, and what it has to do with the water works tunnel."

"I don't know," Chance says so softly that Sadie can barely hear her. "I don't know what it is."

"Dancy isn't dead, Chance. I swear to G.o.d I know she isn't dead, and I can find her, but someone has to help me. You have to help me, because Deacon won't."

Chance's bruised eyelid flutters and slips closed as slowly as a theater curtain coming down after a show. But she opens her mouth, her lips parting just far enough that Sadie can glimpse white teeth and her pink tongue, and the corner of her mouth stretches back into what that might be a smile, or something else entirely.

"Please, Chance. Just this one thing," Sadie whispers, and downstairs Deacon's calling her, shouting her name from the kitchen or the living room, and she shuts the ledger and leans closer to Chance. Leaning close so there's no danger that Chance won't hear her.

"I know he still loves you. Help me, and I'll leave you both alone, if that's what you want. But I can't let her die down there, not if there's any way to save her."

"What makes you think I want the b.a.s.t.a.r.d anymore," Chance says, flimsy ghost of her voice filtered through pain pills and half her mouth covered by the quilt. "Don't be so presumptuous, Sadie."

And Sadie is already getting up from the chair, ready to tell Chance to go screw herself, and if she has to do this alone that's fine. She's spent most of her life figuring things out for herself, but Chance moves, then, reaches out and touches the back of Sadie's hand with her fingertips, and "Wait," she says.

"Why? You don't know anything, remember? I'm wasting my time talking to you."

But now Chance is watching her with both eyes open, more alert than she's seemed since Deacon pulled her from the car, and Sadie sits down again.

"Soda's car is a piece of s.h.i.t," Sadie says, and Deacon shrugs his shoulders and stares at the television.

"Beggars can't be choosers."

"I can just see you broken down in the boonies," but that's the last shred of anything like resistance or disapproval that she's willing to risk; just enough to make it all seem real, enough like herself so that he doesn't get curious and start asking questions. She glances across the room at the clock hanging on the wall, cheesy sunburst clock from the 1950s or '60s, and it's almost four in the morning. She fiddles nervously with the pocket of the b.u.t.ton-down shirt that Chance gave her to wear before she came back downstairs, a big crusty bloodstain on her T-shirt, blood from the cut on her foot; the shirt's the color of lime sherbet, and Sadie thinks that it looks like something an old man would wear. First the clompy boots and now this shirt, and maybe it's like being a.s.similated by pod people, becoming Chance one piece at a time.

"Shouldn't you at least get some sleep?" she asks him, and Deacon nods, but doesn't stop watching the television.

After what Chance said to her upstairs, what she said about the things that happened when she drew the design on the blackboard, the things that might have happened, Sadie's having trouble sitting still, trouble waiting. Hours to go before she'll be able to leave the house, before Deacon is on his way and no one will try to stop her. She realizes that she's tapping her fingers impatiently on the arm of the sofa, impatient tap tap tap tappity tap, and she makes herself stop.

"You know, maybe I should go home in the morning," she says, "just to make sure everything's okay. I didn't even shut the door when I left last night," because it's too d.a.m.n quiet in the house, even with the television on, and she has to say something, too anxious to just sit there watching Deacon watch television, watching the tacky old clock tick off the seconds, trying not to think about Dancy and the tunnel.

"No, baby. I'll have Soda go by and have a look. Anyway, Mrs. Schmidt probably shut the door. You know how she gets about doors. Don't worry about it."

"But my computer's in there, Deke. My book's in there."

Deacon turns his head towards her, and the shifting, salt-and-pepper TV light makes him look older than he is, his eyes so tired, the stubble on his chin and cheeks, but he looks sober and she wonders how long since he's had a drink; for a second, he's more important than Dancy, more important than being brave or strong, than anything else ever could be, and even the thought of losing him is almost more than she can bear.

"I need you to stay here with Chance," he says. "Just in case she needs help. And I think maybe you're safer here. I'll be back as soon as I can."

"Right," she says. "Whatever you say," and there's just a hint of sullen in her voice, a realistic touch that isn't that hard if she thinks about how Deacon's probably a lot more worried about Chance than he is about her, how in case she needs help came before you're safer here. A sharp little jab of reality to restore her perspective. Deacon turns away from her again, looks back at the television screen, and in a few minutes he closes his eyes and falls asleep sitting up on the sofa. Sadie waits until he begins to snore his ragged-loud Deacon snore, until she's certain that he's deep enough asleep that she isn't likely to wake him, and then she takes the piece of paper from the shirt pocket, the page she tore out of the ledger after Chance finally stopped talking, stopped crying, and dozed off.

She lays the folded, slightly crumpled piece of paper on her knee and smooths it flat with one hand, stares at the thing that Chance's grandmother drew there when Sadie Jasper was only twelve years old, sixth-grade Sadie still afraid of the branches scratching the window at night and the things that hid beneath her bed waiting for the light to go out, and "There's no such things as monsters, dear," her mother would say. "Even if there are, G.o.d would never let them eat little girls," and maybe her mother even believed those things. Her mother believed a lot of things, comforting, light-of-day things, but now Sadie knows better; the panting, gaunt apparition outside Quinlan Castle that wasn't a stray dog, that stopped her from helping Dancy, that and this piece of paper are all the testament she needs.

"When I shut my eyes," Chance said upstairs, "every time I shut my eyes, I see it again. I'll never be able to stop seeing it," and Sadie held her hand and said rea.s.suring words she didn't mean.

"All of this, it's all about what we know," Chance said. "They don't want to be known, Sadie."

Sadie stares at the design while Deacon snores and the television talks to itself in too many voices to be sane. Later, when she begins to feel sleepy, she folds the paper carefully and puts it back into her pocket. She lies down on the sofa, her head in his bony lap, first dishwater light outside, watergray light leaking through the drapes, and Sadie tries to pretend that nothing has changed, and nothing ever will, until she falls asleep.

And when she opens her eyes he's gone and the sun is very bright outside. Bright morning sun, and at first she can't remember where she is, only that Deacon was here a moment ago and now he's gone. Dreams she can't quite recall, dim and subterranean dreams, dripping water, and Sadie squints at the ugly clock until her eyes focus and she can see that it's almost noon.

She sits up, and Chance's house, she reminds herself. I'm in Chance's house, and I should have been up hours ago. Too soon to let herself think about the tunnel, so she only thinks about how badly she needs to p.i.s.s, how she's thirsty and needs to p.i.s.s and wants a cigarette.

Walking as quietly as she can, the clumsy, too-big boots heavy against the squeaky, old hardwood floor, down the hall to the bathroom, and she stops on the way, pauses to peer up the stairs towards Chance's attic bedroom. No sign that she's awake yet, or at least that's what Sadie hopes. Pretty sure that Chance isn't in any shape to try and stop her from leaving, but, all the same, she'd rather not have to find out.

The bathroom smells like Ivory Soap and Pine-Sol, a whiff of something more exotic, lavender or roses, maybe. Sadie flushes the toilet, watches the pee-colored water swirling away and "Our drinking water comes through that place," she says out loud. The words from the journal and not much point in trying not to remember, now that she's up and moving, now that she can't simply close her eyes and let the world slip mercifully away from her again.

She looks back at herself from the mirrored medicine cabinet door hanging over the sink; a few streaks of eyeliner smudged all the way down to her cheekbones, hardly any left on her eyelids at all, her black lipstick wiped away, and the cold frostblue eyes that she's always been so proud of, a part of her she didn't have to make strange because they came that way, and if they truly are the windows to her soul then nothing could be more seemly, more appropriate. Like Dancy Flammarion's rabbitpink irises, Sadie's blue eyes faded almost white to mark her for life, I'm not like the rest of them. See? Inside, I'm not like you at all, and Sadie starts to wash her hands, remembers the words from the ledger again, and so she settles for wiping them with a dry hand towel.

On her way out of the bathroom and headed for the kitchen when she thinks to check her shirt pocket, just to be sure. And it's still there, the page she tore from the ledger still folded up safe until she needs it. The page she stole so she could get the design exactly right, and now she wonders if she could possibly ever forget it; a hundred years, and she would probably still remember. But always better to be safe than sorry, Deke would say. Better too much than not enough, every G.o.dd.a.m.n time.

Sadie finds a mostly empty pack of Marlboros on the kitchen counter, doesn't remember leaving them there so maybe Deacon did. There are still two cigarettes in the pack, and she lights one off the stove, sits down and takes a deep drag, letting the nicotine fill her lungs and work its way into her bloodstream, waking her the rest of the way while she watches the smoke float lazily towards the ceiling. A cup of coffee would be nice, strong black coffee with lots of sugar, but she doesn't know how to use Chance's old-fashioned percolator, so the Marlboro will have to do.

"What are you doing, Sadie?" Dancy says, her voice as clear as the angry blue jay squawking somewhere in the backyard, clearer even because Dancy's voice is coming from right behind her. Sadie turns around quickly, but there's only the oven, the refrigerator, and the fog of her own cigarette smoke.

"Dancy?" she whispers. "Was that you?" and Sadie's heart is beating like she's just run a marathon, sweat on her palms and upper lip, a sick feeling deep inside her belly; she waits a moment and calls Dancy again, speaking as quietly as her shaky, adrenaline-dabbed voice will allow because she's still afraid of waking Chance.

"Can you hear me?"