"Yeah, that's where Weaver found her. We'd been having some pretty bad forest fires that summer, what with all the dry weather. A bunch of volunteer firefighters down from Georgia had just spent two days out on Eleanore Road, and Weaver was out there to be sure there weren't any hot spots left, you know. Well, about sunrise, he comes across Miss Dancy Flammarion walking right down the middle of the road, barefoot and dragging along this big ol' duffel bag, her clothes scorched to rags, like she walked straight through that fire. But there wasn't a burn, not so much as a blister, Mr. Silvey, anywhere on her. Or the d.a.m.ned duffel bag, for that matter.

"Well, sir, Weaver, he pulls over to see what's up, you know, and she takes one look at him and starts screaming b.l.o.o.d.y murder. Crazy s.h.i.t about monsters and angels and lights in the sky. You name it, man. He finally had to hand-cuff the kid just to get her into the patrol car. And then she bit him," and the detective points to a spot just below his left temple.

"Took a plug out of the guy's cheek. Weaver was bleeding like a stuck pig when he brought her into the station."

"But you guys already knew who she was?"

Toomey leans back against the bench, tugs at his yellow tie and his eyebrows arch like excited caterpillars.

"Oh, yeah. Everyone in town knew about the Flammarions. There aren't too many bona-fide swamp folks left around these parts. And the Flammarions have been living out there in Shrove Wood since G.o.d was in diapers. I understand they gave the Feds a lot of trouble back during Prohibition, shooting at anyone who came near the place, and when alligators went on the endangered species list in the seventies, we almost had a civil war on our hands. Two of the old man's boys finally wound up in the state pen for poaching gators. Anyway, by the time this happened, this business with the albino girl, they'd all pretty much moved away or died or gone to jail. No one was left out there but the old woman and her daughter, Julia. That was the girl's mother, you know, Julia Flammarion. She went off to Pensacola at some point and got herself pregnant."

"So Dancy's illegitimate?" Deacon asks, and Detective Toomey shakes his head and barks out a dry, thin laugh.

"Kind of adds insult to injury, wouldn't you say? But we're getting a little off the subject."

"Yeah," Deacon says, and he looks down at his hands, the sweat standing out on his palms. "I guess we probably are. This Officer Weaver, was he the one that drove Dancy back home, the one that found the burned cabin?"

"Oh, h.e.l.l no. After she bit him, Al Weaver swore he wasn't getting anywhere near that child. Said he'd resign before he ever got within spitting distance of her again. We had a doctor look the girl over, make sure she wasn't injured, and then Ned Morrison and someone from Child Welfare took her back, and they're the ones found the cabin and the bodies and all."

"And then you went out there yourself?"

"Yep, soon as they brought her back. And I don't mind telling you, Mr. Silvey, this job doesn't get much worse than having to deal with bodies that have been through a fire. Except maybe the floaters. You know, someone that's been in the water a good long while. Either way, the stink gets up your nose, into your sinuses, and it stays there for days."

"Yeah, I know," Deacon says, almost whispering, those smells too easy to remember, all the stink of death and decay that came along with the things he once did for Vincent Hammond, and Detective Toomey stares at him a moment without saying anything at all. No need to say anything out loud because the questions are all there in his eyes.

"Well, anyhow," the detective says, and he clears his throat, spits into the gra.s.s. "Like I was saying, after they brought the girl back, after Morrison called in the bodies, that's when this thing landed in my lap." And he stops, takes half a roll of peppermint Life Savers from his shirt pocket and offers one to Deacon before taking a piece of the candy for himself. "No thanks," Deacon says, and Toomey shrugs, drops the roll back into his pocket and sucks thoughtfully for a moment on his Life Saver.

"We had to use dental records to get the official IDs on the two women. We all knew who they were, of course, but not by looking at what was left of them. At first, when I talked to Morrison on the radio, I a.s.sumed the forest fire got the cabin and for some reason they weren't able to get away."

"That's not what happened," Deacon says, not meaning to sound so certain, only meaning to ask, and he gets another long and wary look from Detective Toomey.

"You sure you need me to tell you what happened out there, Mr. Silvey?"

"I'm sorry," he says, and the detective nods his head, uses his tongue to move the Life Saver from one side of his mouth to the other and back again.

"That fire never reached the Flammarion place. We found a couple of empty twelve-gallon gas cans at the edge of the woods. And there was plenty of residue from the expedient in the ash and timbers, and on the girl's hands and clothes. So we were pretty sure how the fire began, even if we didn't know why. Later on, after she was locked up in that hospital in Tallaha.s.see, when she started talking again, Dancy denied the whole thing. Said it was a lightning strike started the fire."

"So she killed them?"

"Now, that's not what I said, is it?"

"But you're saying she started the fire," and a fat and stinging drop of sweat runs down Deacon's forehead, down the bridge of his nose, and into his left eye.

"The one thing does not necessarily lead straight to the other. Sure, that was the first thought popped into my head, until I actually saw the bodies and the coroner started working on them. Turns out, they both died before the fire even started. The old woman . . . well, we wrote her up as an animal attack. Something out there tried to tear her apart. We never did find one of her arms. The ME said maybe it was a bear or a panther. We still have a few of those around, so maybe that's all it was.

"And Dancy's mother, Julia, she drowned, Mr. Silvey, probably two or three days before the cabin burned. I don't think I would have believed that one if I hadn't been there myself when they opened up her chest and seen the water in her lungs. There's a place where Wampee Creek widens out, where it runs through an old sinkhole, not too far from the cabin. We figure that's probably where she died."

The detective pauses and spits out the half-dissolved Life Saver, makes a face, and "d.a.m.n, I hate those things. But I'm trying to quit smoking, you know."

"So Dancy was only burning their bodies, like a funeral pyre."

The detective turns and glares at Deacon. "Listen, son. I'm about to tell you some stuff, and for the record, you absolutely did not hear any of this s.h.i.t from me, and you didn't hear it from anyone else connected with me, you understand that? The only reason I'm doing this is because someone in the department owed someone in Atlanta a favor. If a single word of this turns up in the press or on the G.o.dd.a.m.n Internet-"

"That's not going to happen," Deacon says, still rubbing his sweatstung eye, still blinking, and "This is personal. I'm trying to help some friends, that's all. Some people that got a little too close to Dancy for their own good."

"Yeah, well, you just remember what I said."

The detective glances towards the bronze Indian statue again, takes out his roll of Life Savers and frowns at them. "G.o.dd.a.m.n it, I need a cigarette for this," he says, and then Deacon listens quietly while he talks about the other things that were found in the ashes, the third body and the footprints in the swamp, and all the stories people tell their children to keep them far, far away from the old Flammarion place.

North and then west of the city of Milligan, where the meandering Blackwater River wraps itself like a cottonmouth around the cypress swamps and pines, and Deacon hasn't pa.s.sed another car since he turned onto Eleanore Road. More potholes than asphalt out here, and there have been stretches where he suspected there was nothing between the car and the sandy earth but a few shovels' worth of carelessly strewn gravel. The Chevy bounces and rattles as Deacon tries not to think about the flat spare tire in the trunk, watching for the turnoff, and he should have come to it by now, wonders if maybe he's pa.s.sed it, too worried about the car to pay attention. Just a dirt road, no name or sign, but Toomey said there was an old mailbox on a post, rusty old mailbox full of holes from kids using it for target practice, but if you look hard enough, he said, you can still read FLAMMARION painted on the side.

Never mind that he's managed to spend his whole life without ever once leaving the South, the wooded desolation of this place is almost as alien to Deacon as the surface of the moon, the bottom of an ocean; always more comfortable lost in the brick and steel and gla.s.s mazes of cities, straight lines and right angles to keep the world in order, rats and pigeons and if he ever needed anything more exotic, there were always zoos. This wild place only makes him feel more alone, the loneliness that's followed him all the way from Birmingham and a growing, almost tangible, sense of genuine isolation, this city boy in a borrowed junkheap car wandering around out here alone, chasing ghosts as the day winds down and the sun throws treelong shadows across Eleanore Road.

After Toomey was finished talking, when Deacon was sure he was done so it didn't matter anymore whether or not the detective thought he was crazy, he took a deep breath and told him about what had happened in the car, a stretch of road he might have driven twice and the hitchhiker with the tarot cards. Just getting it off his chest, the dim hope that telling someone might effect an exorcism, at least take the edge off the creepiness; when he was finished, Toomey stared at him a while, tugged at his yellow tie one last time, and "If I was you, son, I'd get back in that ugly little car of yours and go home," he said. "Sometimes what we're looking for, it don't want to be found, and sometimes, we don't really want to find it." And then he shook Deacon's hand again, said good-bye and walked back up the marble steps into the courthouse.

A wide place in the road up ahead, and now he's almost certain he's missed the turn somehow, is already slowing down to double back, when he sees the shotgun-peppered mailbox sitting on its post on the left side of the road, almost invisible in a clutching tangle of blackberry vines. And there's the dirt road, too, hardly even as wide as the Chevy, a weedy, rutted redbrown path leading away into the place that Toomey called Shrove Wood. As if this could be a place of absolution, as if the trees themselves, standing straight and tall and close together, have a.s.sembled to hear the paltry sins of man.

"This is it," Deacon says. "Last chance, buddy," but he knows that's a lie. That his last chance to avoid whatever's at the end of this dirt road was somewhere else, sometime else entirely-before he and Sadie walked out of the laundromat Sat.u.r.day night, perhaps, or maybe it's been inevitable since the moment he first saw Dancy Flammarion. Maybe it was always inevitable, but he knows d.a.m.n well he isn't going to turn back now, even after all the things that Toomey said. Stupid or stubborn or just too afraid of what might happen to Chance and Sadie if he does chicken out, so he turns off Eleanore Road and the car b.u.mps over a particularly deep pothole and stalls.

"It's more of a driveway than a road," what Toomey said when Deacon asked him directions to the burned cabin. "h.e.l.l, these days it's probably more like a deer trail." Sitting in the Chevy, staring down the narrow path winding through the trees and brush, Deacon wonders if even the deer would bother now. The forest is taking it back, has laid waist-high saplings and fallen branches, deep wash-outs he'd never get the car across, so he doesn't bother cranking the engine again. Through the pines, the sun is huge and red, and Deacon wishes he wore a watch, or that the car's clock worked, wishes he knew exactly how long he has before sunset. Not long enough, surely, an hour maybe, hour and a half if he's lucky, before it's pitch black out here.

What do you think you're gonna find at the end of this road, Deacon?

Aren't you getting thirsty?

Aren't you getting scared?

Questions that Chance asked him in a dream, the bright and dazzling dream where he wandered through these woods and watched impossible things through Dancy Flammarion's eyes, and it seems as if everything he's seen and heard since leaving Birmingham has only raised more questions; if there have been answers, they're certainly not the ones he came looking for, the ones to explain away, to ravel the mysteries and set the world on course again. Instead, only answers that cast as much shadow as light, answers to leave him jealous of lost ignorance. "Just get out of the car," he says. "Just get out the car and see whatever the h.e.l.l there is to see."

Aren't you getting scared?

Deacon glances over at the glove compartment, a fat silver piece of duct tape to keep it from coming open because the latch is broken, and maybe there's a flashlight in there, at least. He pulls back the tape, and at first all he sees are two old copies of Hustler magazine crammed into the s.p.a.ce, Soda's p.o.r.n stash and a big, rubber dinosaur the color of a tangerine; he pulls the magazines out, lets them fall to the floorboard, and the dinosaur lands feet-first on top of one of the glossy covers, hiding the smiling face of a woman with b.r.e.a.s.t.s almost as big as small watermelons. No flashlight, though, which figures, but at the very back of the glove compartment is something wrapped in an oily rag, most likely a baggie of marijuana or mushrooms, knowing Soda, and Deacon reaches in and takes it out.

It's surprisingly heavy, so probably not dope after all, and he unwraps the oily rag and then sits staring at the gun in his hand.

"Soda, you dumb-a.s.s son of a b.i.t.c.h," he says, picturing what might have happened if some cop had pulled him over and found the thing. But they didn't, and now there's no denying that the weight of it, the way it glints dull in the late afternoon sunlight, is a comfort; Deacon doesn't know s.h.i.t about guns, has never touched anything but a BB rifle, and that was when he was a kid, but he figures even he knows enough to point it and pull the trigger. He finds a small switch on the right side of the revolver, just above the grip, and pushes it; the cylinder swings open, and there are five bullets inside and one empty chamber. He checks the glove compartment for extra ammo and finds nothing else but a map of Arkansas and four moldy Fritos.

"Just get out of the car," he says again and opens the door. "Just keep moving." And he takes a deep breath as he snaps the cylinder closed, locks all the Chevy's doors before he climbs out. Deacon tucks the gun into the waistband of his jeans, feels stupid doing it, like playing Dirty Harry or Charles Bronson out here in the middle of nowhere, and he wonders if anyone's ever blown his d.i.c.k off carrying a gun around like that, if he'll be the first. In the trees there are crows and mockingbirds, and the incessant thrum of insects and frogs from every direction. Deacon wipes sweat from his forehead, looks at the car one more time, and then starts off down the trail.

Something more than deja vu, standing in the clearing at the other end of the dirt road. The knowledge that he has stood here once before, and it doesn't matter if that first time wasn't real, only a vision, because this is the same place, exactly the same, only the ruin of the cabin and the blackberry and ferns reclaiming the clearing to make it any different at all. Dusk coming down on him instead of a scalding midday sun overhead, and that still doesn't change a thing. The hulks of rusting cars balanced on concrete-block crutches, bare wheels where there should be tires, and then the charred remains of the cabin. Deacon walks past a rose garden gone wild, two or three heavy canary-yellow blooms among the thorns, a line of rocks whitewashed to mark what was once a path to the porch, something fallen over and shattered in the weeds, and it takes him a moment to realize it used to be a cement birdbath.

The blackened bones of the cabin like a skeleton that has surrendered and collapsed in upon itself, roof timbers for the charcoal ribs of a defeated giant or dragon, and the tall chimney of soot- and smokestained limestone blocks and mortar rising defiantly above the wreckage. There are ferns and wildflowers growing among the bones, a carpet of new life in death, green and specks of brighter colors on a grave, and Deacon doesn't have to imagine what that last day was like, has seen enough himself to know.

Just past the birdbath, and he finds a large rack of antlers still attached to a piece of deer skull, the points scorched and cracked from the heat of the fire, and there's a big ten-penny nail still sticking out of the skull cap. He looks again, and the antlers are everywhere, scattered across the ground and among the burnt wood, some burned almost beyond recognition, others untouched. Something else from his vision, and the dream of the vision, the antlers, and something else from Dancy's dog-eared copy of Beowulf, as well: the walls of King Hrothgar's hall, Hart Hall, Heorot, adorned with antlers, and whether this is coincidence or design, it's not a pleasant thought, something to send a shiver along Deacon's spine.

And he knows there's nothing important left here for him to see, just like Toomey said, everything carted away and buried or locked up tight where it might never be seen again. The bodies of Dancy's mother and grandmother and the heavy cast-iron disc found nailed to a nearby tree, metal engraved with a pentagram and a seven-sided figure set inside the star. Something that Toomey said gave him the heebies just to look at, that disc, and someone finally sent it away to an archeologist at the university in Gain-seville. Deacon didn't tell him about the drawings from Esther Matthews' journal, the man already clearly f.u.c.ked-up enough by the things he knows, the things he's seen, and Deacon saw no point in sharing fresher nightmares.

But the worst of it, the third body found in the ashes, and the police reports wrote that up, wrote it off, as the corpse of a black bear, the bear that must have killed Dancy's grandmother. Half its face blown off by a shotgun blast, but Toomey leaned close to him, and "If that was a bear, Mr. Silvey, then I'm a G.o.dd.a.m.n Chinaman," he said and then flatly refused to say anything else about the beast.

Deacon bends over, and his fingertips brush a scorched plank, what might once have been a step or part of a windowsill, door frame, and he half-expects the sudden smell of oranges, the pain behind his eyes, but there's nothing. No visions of the fire, of Dancy pouring gasoline or striking a match to hide whatever really happened here. Only the droning symphony of frogs and insects, the faintly spicy aroma of pine sap and ferns.

And Chance's voice again, the memory of the dream of her so strong and clear that he looks over his shoulder; We both know what really happened that night. This doesn't change a thing. There's nothing behind him but the watchful trees, the dwindling day, and "No," he says. "I guess it doesn't."

Deacon turns back to the cabin, the guardian chimney, and on the other side of the clearing, past a pile of sc.r.a.p iron and rotting, moss-scabbed stumps, he sees the path that leads through the woods and down to Wampee Creek, to the deep pool where Dancy's mother drowned.

Or drowned herself, he thinks, remembering the story that Dancy told him about Pensacola, her mother and the ocean and the fishermen who rescued her. No idea whether that was the truth or the truth disguised, Dancy's way of dealing with how her mother really died, making it more distant and inventing a happy ending.

He can see from where he's standing that the path through the woods is overgrown, briars and saw gra.s.s up to his knees, up to his a.s.s, and maybe this is as far as he should go. Maybe he's gone too far already, abandoning Chance and Sadie and driving two hundred and fifty miles just to listen to Toomey tell him spooky stories and poke through a burned-out cabin. He glances down at the b.u.t.t of the pistol sticking out of his pants, feeling ridiculous and lost and scared, all those things at once.

The sound of wings overhead, then, mad flutter of a dozen or a hundred wings, and he looks up, stares amazed at the flock of crows rising from the trees around the clearing. A storm of cawing, featherblack bodies to blot out the sky for a moment, frantic, living cloud moving in unison, responding to some signal too subtle for his dull human senses to perceive.

Psychopomps, that word something lost for years in the dustier corners of his memory and the recollection triggered by the sight of these birds, something he read when he was in college, before he gave up trying to understand the things he saw. Conductors of the souls of the dead, blackbirds and crows and ravens especially, and the bird-shadow is already breaking up, dissipating above the trees.

"What did you think you'd find?" she says, and he isn't even surprised to see Dancy standing there by the chimney, standing in the ferns growing up through the charred and broken skeleton of the cabin floor. Her face is dirty, but she isn't sunburned the way she was that night outside the water works tunnel.

"The truth," he says, and she smiles, sad smile that's more regret than anything else, and kicks at the ferns.

"Is that how you think this is all going to end, Deacon? Like in a book or a scary movie? You discover the truth and save us all?"

"I don't have a clue how this is going to end," he says, and the crows are already far away, just a distant commotion fading like the sun. "But that would be nice, don't you think, like an old s...o...b.. Doo episode?" But from the way she looks at him, he can tell she's never heard of s...o...b.. Doo, no television out here, no Sat.u.r.day-morning cartoons.

"Some stories don't have endings," she says. "In some stories, there aren't even answers."

"What are you trying to tell me, Dancy?"

"I've looked into their faces. Their real faces. The holes they have for eyes that go on forever, a longer forever than the stars, Deacon. You can stare at them until time ends and starts itself all over again, and you'll never know any more than when you began."

"Whose faces? What are you talking about?" and Deacon takes a step towards her, and she takes a step back, a cautious, warning flash in her pinkred eyes and then it's gone, and Deacon stays where he is.

" 'Land-dwellers in the old days named him Grendel.' "

"Grendel? Dancy, do you know what you've done to Chance and Sadie?"

"Yeah," she says and looks away from him, watches her feet down there somewhere among the fronds and rubble. "I should have stayed away from Sadie. But they would have found Chance, sooner or later. I just made it sooner, that's all."

"Because of what her grandmother knew, is that what you mean? The journal and that box full of rocks?"

"They are afraid of us, Deacon. They were already old when those rocks were mud and slime, and they are terrible, but they are as afraid of us as we are of dying. Sometimes we come too close-"

"Just tell me what I'm supposed to do, Dancy. Just tell me, and I'll f.u.c.kin' do it," and at first he doesn't think she's going to answer him this time, the expression on her face like a teacher who's growing tired of lecturing a student too stupid to ever comprehend the basics. Her time wasted on him, and then she holds out her left hand and there's something small and black crawling across her palm. Something alive that glistens wet and iridescent in the twilight, its needle spines and bulging compound eyes, and she looks from the trilobite to Deacon and then back to the trilobite.

" 'You'll go to see the mere, because you've come this far. They're waiting for you down there, the ones that took my mother. That which has held the flood's tract a hundred half-years, ravenous for prey, grim and greedy-' "

"You're just quoting f.u.c.king Beowulf," he says, not wanting to sound angry, but sounding angry anyway. "I know that's what you're doing."

And she smiles again, but a different smile from before, a wider smile to show that he's beginning to see at last, a smile to show she's proud.

"Yeah, I am," she says. "Did you ever think there was more than one story? One's as good as the next. They're in all our stories, all the ones that matter. The path will lead you to the mere, Deacon. Stay on the path and don't believe the things they want you to believe, and you might still be the hero in this story. Or, if Chance has to be the hero, you might keep her from falling. But there aren't any answers, and this will never make sense, not the way you want, so stop trying to force it to.

"Watch your step, Deacon. There are serpents in these woods, and hounds," and then she's gone, if she was ever there. Nothing left but the chimney and the rustling pine needles and all the patient, eternal voices of the forest.

Deacon pushes aside the last tangled veil of creeper and wild muscadine vines, and he's standing on a crumbling chalksoft boulder at the edge of the pool. The noise of his shoes against the ground sends dozens of tiny frogs leaping from the rushes and bamboo thickets that line the water's edge, and they splash and vanish beneath the gently rippling surface of the pool. On his left, there's a small waterfall, the place where Wampee Creek leaves its bed and tumbles down a low vertical outcrop of the yellowwhite limestone, the algae- and moss-slicked rocks, and if Chance were here she could tell him how old these rocks are, could put her scientific names to the imprints of ancient snails and clams that cover the stones at his feet.

The pool is wide, forty or fifty feet across, and the water so clear that he can see all the way to the bottom. The undulating forest of eel gra.s.s, flash and dart of silverfish shapes, and this late in the day there are strange shadows down there among the drowned logs and watchful turtle eyes. A sinkhole, Toomey said, and Deacon imagines this was once a small cave in the rock with the creek flowing over it, and one day its roof grew too thin, finally, too thin for the weight of the forest floor, the millennia of fallen leaves and pine straw. There must have been a violent, decisive moment when the earth opened up and the water rushed in to fill the void.

Deacon kneels on one knee at the edge of the pool, stares across it at the silent trees on the opposite sh.o.r.e, their snarled and crooked roots like lichengray knuckles, thirsty fingers abandoning the soil to gladly decay beneath the cool and crystal waters.

The mere . . . The stream down under the darkness of the hills, the flood under the earth.

There's a big snake over there, a copperhead, he thinks, stretched out to catch the last warmth of the day, and it's keeping a mindful eye on him. Autumn-colored snake, viperchain of dusky browns and reds and golden scales, and Deacon nods at it respectfully, silently promising to keep his distance if the snake will exchange the favor.

"Don't you sweat it, Mr. Snake," he says. "I'll be out of here before you even know it," silly words to keep himself company because this is the loneliest place he's ever been, a loneliness that seems to rise out of the ground and drip down like syrup from the branches overhead. Not so much a bad place, a place where the things that people have done have left a stain or a bruise; he's seen more than his share of bad places, working for Hammond and just being the unlucky f.u.c.k that he is, the houses and alleys and vacant lots that some people might call haunted. But this is different. This is worse, whether he could ever explain exactly why or not, and Deacon dips his fingers into the pool, breaking the surface, the transparent membrane between two worlds, and the water is as cold as ice.

And the pain carves its way through his head like a knife, bullets through his eyes and the back of his skull splattered across the ground. The acrid, bitter stink of dead fish and rotting oranges, and Deacon pulls his fingers back, pulls his hand away from the water, as if he doesn't know it's too late for that. His eyes squeezed shut tight, but that doesn't stop him from seeing, never has before and won't this time, either. The pool still right there in front of him, but the sun swallowed whole by a starveling night sky, midnight come to Shrove Wood in a single, timeless instant.

Somewhere very close he can hear a woman crying, close but this night so dark, just the faintest glimmers off the water, the dim forms of the trees and not much else. No moon, so no light but the glow from the distant star-specked sky. And sometimes she's only screaming, not words, just the sound of being that afraid turned loose and pouring out of her, wild and inconsolable, and other times she's calling for her mother, Momma, please, Momma make it stop now, or she's calling Dancy, or she's praying. There's another voice, breathless, animal grunt past the impatient twigsnapping, vinetearing noises, something vast and heavy driving headlong through the dense underbrush, crushing anything that gets in its way.

Off towards the cabin, back the way he's come, Deacon can hear two more voices, Dancy and the old woman, both of them shouting frantically; "Julia, Julia where are you, child?" and "Momma! We're coming," and Deacon opens his eyes wide, the pain pressing at the backs of them like thumbs so it's a wonder they don't pop out and go rolling down his cheeks. He stares and stares into the dark, searching the velvet folds of the night for her.

"Julia Flammarion," he says, reaching for the revolver tucked into his jeans. "I can't see you. I can't see f.u.c.king s.h.i.t," and there's a loud splash, then, somewhere off to his right, and struggling from the pool. The woman has stopped screaming, nothing from her now but a choking sputter, all the futile, strangling sounds that a drowning person makes.

"No, Grandmomma!" Dancy screams. "You might hit her, instead," and Deacon turns away from the pool. Back there where the trail from the cabin makes one last turn and begins its gentle slope down to the water, there's a bobbing yellow will-o'-the-wisp, a kerosene lantern gripped in Dancy's hands to light her face, and the old woman's aiming the twin barrels of a shotgun straight at him.

"It's too late, Grandmomma! They're in the lake now," Dancy says. "It's too late," and Deacon slowly takes his hand off the b.u.t.t of the pistol, turns towards the pool again. And now he can see something moving through the water, nothing he could ever put a name to, nothing he would ever want to try to name, those taut ebony muscles and skin that glistens like oil, eyes that shine bluegreen fire, and the woman in its arms, still fighting as it drags her under.

And then the old woman squeezes the trigger and the big gun rips the Florida night apart, belching fire and gun-powder thunder, its killing load of buckshot, and Deacon braces himself for the blast. No way it can possibly miss him, except the night is dissolving, melting rapidly away in greasy strips to show the twilight that was waiting all along on the other side of his vision, this day that's ending instead of a night that was over a year and a half ago.

"Oh," he whispers as the last of the darkness leaks from the air. "Oh, G.o.d," and Deacon's on his hands and knees, vomiting all over the limestone boulder; there's nothing in his stomach to speak of, and after the first hot rush of bile, he's only dry heaving, cramping and his eyes full of tears, the pain in his head swelling. And maybe this time it'll just f.u.c.king kill him, he thinks. Maybe this is the last time and n.o.body's ever going to find his body, his bones gnawed clean and white, bleached by the sun until they crumble into dust, and the merciful rain will wash him bit by bit into the welcoming, forgetful pool.

"Is that all you want, Mr. Silvey? A little trip down the Lethe," and Deacon looks up, blinking, and the hitchhiker is standing on the other side of the pool. He smiles his too-wide smile and squats down on the bank among the roots, slips his long fingers below the surface. "You should've just said somethin' before. h.e.l.l, I got all kinds of connections, you know."

Above him, the copperhead is draped across a low limb, dead snake bleeding from its crushed skull, venom and drops of blood, stickywet drops of life and death wasted on the water which is neither alive nor dead. The man stirs the pool with his hand and shakes his head.

"She told you there ain't no answers here, didn't she? I swear, that little wh.o.r.e has a mouth on her. Worse than her G.o.dd.a.m.n momma. Of course, that ain't nothing I hadn't already tried to tell you, if you'd half a mind to listen."

"You . . ." Deacon croaks, his throat raw, and he gags again before he can say anything else. "You're the one, aren't you? The one that killed her mother."

The hitchhiker scratches thoughtfully at his chin, takes his other hand from the pool and holds it a few inches above the water, watches the crystal beads forming at the tips of his fingers and falling, one by one, back into the lake.

"No sir," he says. "That wasn't me. There are no answers here, Deke. No answers anywhere. That's what she said, and she was right. No motherf.u.c.king answers."

Deacon's drawn the pistol and is pointing it at the man, but his hands are shaky and his eyes still watering so it's hard to see. He pulls the hammer back, and "Maybe I'm losing interest in answers," he says.

"If I was you, I wouldn't go waving that thing at people unless you mean to go all the way," and the man stands and wipes his wet hand on his pants. "You're just not a killer. Not unless you count your own hopes and dreams, and maybe a pint bottle of Kentucky bourbon here and there."

Deacon stares down the pistol's stubby barrel and blinks, trying to clear his eyes, his mouth sour with the taste of vomit.

"Now, if it was the albino girl, if it was her pointing that thing at me, I might be worried. Say what you want about her, toys in the attic and all, but that little girl had the courage of her convictions. And you wanna know what else?"