"Check it out if you don't believe me," said Doug. "Look it up. Behind all that patriotic rah-rah-rah about community brotherhood and peaceful gardens, it's all about capital gains. Most people don't like to think about funerals or cemeteries because, to them, it's morbid. That leaves funeral directors free to profiteer."

"You mean Coggins?" said Joe, giving himself a refill.

"Look, Coggins is a great example," said Doug. "In the outside world, big companies have incorporated most aspects of the funeral. Here, Coggins runs the mortuary, the cemetery, everything. He can charge whatever he wants, and people will pay for the privilege of shunting their grief and confusion onto him. You wouldn't believe the mark-up on some of this stuff. Caskets are three times wholesale. Even if they put you in a cardboard box-which is called an 'alternative container,' by the way-the charge is a couple of hundred bucks."

"Okay, that settles it," said Miguel. When he smiled big, you could see his gold tooth. "We all get to live forever, because we can't afford to die."

"There used to be a riddle," said Doug. "What is it: the man who made it didn't want it, the man who bought it had no use for it, and the man who used it didn't know it. What is it?"

Jacky just looked confused.

His head honeycombed with domestic beer, Doug tried not to lurch or slosh as he navigated his way out of Callahan's. The voice coming at him out of the fogbound darkness might well have been an aural hallucination. Or a wish fulfillment.

"Hey stranger," it said. "Walk a lady home?"

The night yielded her to him. She came not as he had fantasized, nor as he had seen her in dreams. She wore a long-sleeved, black, lacy thing with a neck-wrap collar, and her hair was up. She looked different but her definitive jawline and frank, gray gaze were unmistakable.

"That's not you," he said. "I'm a tiny bit intoxicated, but not enough to believe it's you." Yet. There was no one else on the street to confirm or deny; no validation from fellow inebriates or corroboration from independent bystanders. Just Doug, the swirling night, and a woman who could not be the late Mich.e.l.le Farrier, whom he had loved. He had only accepted that he loved her after she died. It was more tragic that way, more delusionally romanticist. Potent enough to wallow in. A weeper, produced by his brain while it was buzzing with hops and alcohol.

She bore down on him, moving into focus, and that made his grief worse. "Sure it's me," she said. "Look at me. Take a little bit of time to get used to the idea."

He drank her in as though craving a narcotic. Her hair had always been long, burnished sienna, deftly razor-thinned to layers that framed her face. Now it was pinned back to exhibit her gracile neck and bold features. He remembered the contour of her ears. She smiled, and he remembered exactly how her teeth set. She brought with her the scent of night-blooming jasmine. If she was a revenant, she had come freighted with none of the corruption of the tomb. If she was a mirage, the light touch of her hand on his wrist should not have felt so corporeal.

Her touch was not cold.

"No," said Doug. "You died. You're gone."

"Sure, darling-I don't deny that. But now I'm back, and you should be glad."

He was still shaking his head. "I saw you die. I helped bury you."

"And today, you helped un-bury me. Well, your buddies did."

She had both hands on him, now. This was the monster movie moment when her human visage melted away to reveal the slavering ghoul who wanted to eat his brain and wash it down with a gla.s.s of his blood. Her sheer presence almost buckled his knees.

"How?"

"Beats me," she said. "We're coming back all over town. I don't know exactly how it all works, yet. But that stuff I was buried in-those cerements-were sort of depressing. I checked myself out while I was cleaning up. Everything seems to be n place. Everything works. Except for the tumor; that kind of withered away to an inert little knot, in the grave. I know this is tough for you to swallow, but I'm here, and G.o.ddammit, I missed you, and I thought you'd want to see me."

"I think about you every day," he said. It was still difficult to meet her gaze, or to speed-shift from using the accustomed past tense.

"Come on," she said, linking arms with him.

"Where?" Without delay his guts leaped at the thought that she wanted to take him back to the cemetery.

"Wherever. Listen, do you recall kissing me? See if you can remember how we did that."

She kissed him with all the pa.s.sion of the long-lost, regained unexpectedly. It was Mich.e.l.le, all right-alive, breathing, returned to him whole.

No one had seen them. No one had come out of the bar. No pedestrians. Triple Pines tended to roll up the sidewalks at 7:00 pm.

"This is . . . nuts," he said.

She chuckled. "As long as you don't say it's distasteful." She kissed him again. "And of course you remember that other thing we never got around to doing?"

"Antiquing that roll-top desk you liked, at the garage sale?" His humor was helping him balance. His mind still wanted to swoon, or explode.

"Ho, ho, very funny. I am so glad to see you right now that I'll spell it out for you, Doug." She drew a tiny breath of consideration, working up nerve, then puffed it out. "Okay: I want to hold your c.o.c.k in my hand and feel you get hard, for me. That was the dream, right? That first attraction, where you always visualize the other person naked, f.u.c.king you, while your outer self pretends like none of that matters?"

"I didn't think that," Doug fibbed. Suddenly his breath would not draw.

"Yes you did," Mich.e.l.le said. "I did, too. But I was too chicken to act. That's all in the past." She stopped and smacked him lightly on the arm. "Don't give me that lopsided look, like I'm the one that's crazy. Not now. Not after I died, thinking you were the best d.a.m.ned thing I'd found in a long time."

"Well, there was Roch.e.l.le," said Doug, remembering how cautiously they had behaved around her six-year-old daughter.

"My little darling is not here right now," she said. "I'd say it's time to fulfill the fantasy, Doug. Mine, if not yours. We've wasted enough life, and not everybody gets a bonus round."

"But-" Doug's words, his protests had bottlenecked between his lungs. (And for-c.r.a.p-sake why did he feel the urge to protest this?) "I know what you're trying to say. I died." Another impatient huff of breath-living breath. "I can't explain it. I don't know if it's temporary. But I'll tell you one thing I do know: All that s.h.i.t about the 'peace' of the grave? It doesn't exist. It's not a release, and it's not oblivion. It's like a nightmare that doesn't conveniently end when you wake up, because you're not supposed to wake up, ever! And you know what else? When you're in the grave, you can hear every G.o.dd.a.m.ned footfall of the living, above you. Trust me on that one."

"Jesus . . . " he said.

"Not Jesus. Neither Heaven nor h.e.l.l. Not G.o.d. Not Buddha, not Allah, not Yahweh. Nothing. That's what waits on the other side of that headstone. No pie in the sky by and by when you die. No Nirvana. No Valhalla. No Tetragrammaton. No Zeus or Jove or any of their buddies. Nothing. Maybe that's why we're coming back-there's nothing out there, beyond. Zero. Not even an echo. So kiss me again. I've been cold and I've been still, and I need to make love to you. Making love; that sounds like we're manufacturing something, doesn't it? Feel my hand. There's living blood in there. Feel my heart; it's pumping again. I've felt bad things moving around inside of me. That happens when you're well and truly dead. Now I'm back. And I want to feel other things moving around inside of me. You."

Tomorrow, Doug would get fired as a no-show after only one day on the job. Craignotti would replace him with some guy named Dormand R. Stowe, rumored to be a loving husband and a caring father.

One of the most famous foreign pistols used during the Civil War was the Le Mat Revolver, a cap and ball weapon developed by a French-born New Orleans doctor, unique in that it had two barrels-a cylinder which held nine .40 caliber rounds fired through the upper barrel, and revolved around the lower, .63 caliber barrel, which held a charge of 18 or 20-gauge buckshot. With a flick of the thumb, the shooter could re-align the hammer to fall on the lower barrel, which was essentially a small shotgun, extremely deadly at close range, with a kick like an enraged mule. General J.E.B. Stuart had carried one. So had General P.G.T. Beauregard. As an antique firearm, such guns in good condition were highly prized. Conroy Gudgell cherished his; it was one of the stars of his modest home a.r.s.enal, which he always referred to as his "collection." His big mistake was showing his wife how to care for it. How to clean it. How to load it. How to fire it, you know, "just in case." No one was more surprised than Conroy when his loving wife, a respected first-grade teacher in Triple Pines, blew him straight down to h.e.l.l with his own collectible antique.

Ellen Gudgell became a widow at sixty-one years of age. She also became a Wiccan. She was naked, or "sky-clad," when she burned the braided horsehair whip in her fireplace after murdering Conroy. Firing the Le Mat had broken her right wrist; she'd had to make up a story about that. With her left hand she had poured herself a nice brandy, before working herself up into enough lather to phone the police, in tears, while most of Conroy's head and brains were cooling in various corners of his bas.e.m.e.nt workshop. A terrible accident, oh my lord, it's horrible, please come. She kept all the stuff about Earth Mother religious revelations to herself.

She treated Constable d.i.c.key (Triple Pines' head honcho of law enforcement) as she would one of her elementary school charges. Firm but fair. Matronly, but with just the right salting of manufactured hysteria. Conroy had been working with his gun collection in the bas.e.m.e.nt when she heard a loud boom, she told the officer. She panicked and broke her wrist trying to move what was left of him, and now she did not know what to do, and she needed help.

And the local cops had quite neatly taken care of all the rest. Ellen never had to mention the beatings she had suffered under the now-incinerated whip, or that the last fifteen years of their s.e.x life had consisted mostly of rape. When not teaching school, she used her free time-that is, her time free of Conroy's oppression-to study up on alternate philosophies, and when she found one that made sense to her, it wasn't long before she decided to a.s.sert her new self.

After that, the possibilities seemed endless. She felt as though she had shed a chrysalis and evolved to a form that made her happier with herself.

Therefore, no one was more surprised than Ellen when her husband Conroy thumped up the stairs, sundered head and all, to come a-calling more than a year after she thought she had definitively killed the rotten sonofab.i.t.c.h. His face looked exactly as it had when Coggins, the undertaker, had puttied and waxed it back into a semblance of human, dark sub-dermal lines inscribing puzzle pieces in rough a.s.sembly. The parts did not move in correct concert when Conroy spoke to her, however. His face was disjointed and broken, his eyes, oddly fixed.

"Time for some loving," is what Conroy said to her first.

Ellen ran for the gun cabinet, downstairs.

"Already thought of that," said Conroy, holding up the Le Mat.

He did not shoot her in the head.

Despite the fact that Lee Beecher's death had been inadvertent, one of those Act of G.o.d things, Constable Lon d.i.c.key had always felt responsible. Lee had been a hometown boy, d.i.c.key had liked him, and made him his deputy; ergo, Lee had been acting as a representative of the law on d.i.c.key's behalf, moving a dead deer out of the middle of the road during a storm. Some local a.s.shole had piled into the animal and left it for dead, which const.i.tuted Triple Pines' only known form of hit-and-run. If you'd had to guess the rest of the story, d.i.c.key thought, you'd say and another speeding nitwit had hit Lee. Nope. Struck by lightning, for Christ's sake. Hit by a thunderbolt out of the ozone and killed deader than snakes.h.i.t on the spot, fried from the inside out, cooked and discarded out near the lumber yard which employed about a quarter of Triple Pines' blue-collar workforce.

Lee had been buried in his uniform. A go-getter, that kid. Good footballer. Instead of leaving Triple Pines in his rearward dust, as so many youngsters ached to do, Lee had stuck close to home, and enthusiastically sought his badge. It was worth it to him to be called an "officer," like d.i.c.key. Death in Triple Pines was nearly always accidental, or predictable-no mystery. This was not the place where murderers or psychos lived. In this neck of the woods, the worst an officer might have to face would be the usual rowdiness-teenagers, or drunks, or drunk teenagers-and the edict to act all authoritative if there was a fire or flood or something naturally disastrous.

Beecher's replacement was a guy named James Trainor, s.h.i.t-hot out of the academy in Seattle and fulminating to enforce. Too stormtrooper for Triple Pines; too ready to pull his sidearm for a traffic stop. d.i.c.key still had not warmed up to him, smelling the moral pollution of citified paranoia.

Feeling like a lazy lion surveying his domain, d.i.c.key had sauntered the two blocks back to the station from the Ready-Set Dinette, following his usual cheeseburger late-lunch. (The food at Callahan's, a block further, was awful-the burgers as palatable as pucks sliced off a Duraflame log.) Time to trade some banter with RaeAnn, who ran the police station's desk, phones and radios. RaeAnn was a stocky chunk of bottle-blond business with multiple chins and an underbite, whose choice of corrective eyewear did not de-emphasize her Jimmy Durante nose. In no way was RaeAnn a temptation, and d.i.c.key preferred that. Strictly business. RaeAnn was fast, efficient, and did not bring her problems to work. Right now she was leaning back at her station with her mouth wide open, which seemed strange. She resembled a gross caricature of one of those mail-order b.l.o.w.j.o.b dolls.

Before he could ask what the h.e.l.l, d.i.c.key saw the bullet hole in the center of her forehead. Oh.

"Sorry I'm a little bit late, Chief," said Lee Beecher. He had grave dirt all over his moldy uniform, and his face was the same flash-fried nightmare that had caused Coggins to recommend a closed-casket service. Beecher had always called d.i.c.key "Chief."

Deputy Trainor was sprawled behind d.i.c.key's desk, his cap over his eyes, his tongue sticking out, and a circlet of five .357 caliber holes in his chest. Bloodsmear on the bulletin board ill.u.s.trated how gracelessly he had fallen, hit so hard one of his boots had flown off. The late Lee Beecher had been reloading his revolver when d.i.c.key walked in.

"I had to shoot RaeAnn, she was making too much bother," said Beecher. His voice was off, dry and croaky, buzzing like a reed.

d.i.c.key tried to contain his slow awe by muttering the names of a.s.sorted deities. His hand wanted to feel the comfort of his own gun.

"How come you replaced me, Chief?" said the late Lee Beecher. "Man, I didn't quit or nothing. You replaced me with some city boy. That wasn't our deal. I thought you liked me."

"I-" d.i.c.key stammered. "Lee, I . . . " He just could not force out words. This was too wrong.

"You just put me in the dirt." The late Lee Beecher shook his charred skull with something akin to sadness. He snapped home the cylinder on his pistol, bringing the hammer back to full c.o.c.k in the same smooth move. "Now I'm gonna have to return the favor. Sorry, Chief."

Constable d.i.c.key was still trying to form a whole sentence when the late Lee Beecher gave him all six rounds. Up at RaeAnn's desk, the radio crackled and the switchboard lit up with an influx of weird emergency calls, but there was no one to pay any attention, or care.

Doug's current home barely fit the definition. It had no more character than a British row flat or a post-war saltbox. It was one of the basic, ticky-tacky clapboard units thrown up by the Triple Pines aluminum plant back when they sponsored company housing, and abandoned to fall apart on its own across slow years once the plant folded. It had a roof and indoor plumbing, which was all Doug had ever required of a residence, because addresses were disposable. It had storm shutters and a rudimentary version of heat, against rain and winter, but remained drafty. Its interior walls were bare and still the same vague green Doug had always a.s.sociated with academia. The bedroom was sort of blue, in the same mood.

He regretted his cheap sheets, his second-hand bed, his milk-crate night stand. He had strewn some candles around to soften the light, and fired up a portable, radiant oil heater. The heat and the light diffused the stark seediness of the room, just enough. They softened the harsh edges of reality.

There had been no seduction, no ritual libations, no teasing or flirting. Mich.e.l.le had taken him the way the Allies took Normandy, and it was all he could muster to keep from gasping. His pelvis felt hammered and his legs seemed numb and far away. She was alive, with the warm, randy needs of the living, and she had plundered him with a greed that cleansed them both of any lingering recriminations.

No grave rot, no mummy dust. Was it still necrophilia when the dead person moved and talked back to you?

"I have another blanket," he said. His left leg was draped over her as their sweat cooled. He watched candle-shadows dance on the ceiling, making monster shapes.

"I'm fine," she said. "Really."

They bathed. Small bathtub, lime-encrusted shower-head. It permitted Doug to refamiliarize himself with the geometry of her body, from a perspective different than that of the bedroom. He felt he could never see or touch enough of her; it was a fascination for him.

There was nothing to eat in the kitchen, and simply clicking on the TV seemed faintly ridiculous. They slept, wrapped up in each other. The circ.u.mstance was still too fragile to detour into lengthy, dissipate conversations about need, so they slept, and in sleeping, found a fundamental innocence that was already beyond logic-a feeling thing. It seemed right and correct.

Doug awoke, his feet and fingertips frigid, in the predawn. He added his second blanket and snuggled back into Mich.e.l.le. She slept with a nearly beatific expression, her breath-real, living-coming in slow tidal measures.

The next afternoon Doug sortied to the market to stock up on some basics and find some decent food that could be prepared in his minimal kitchen. In the market, he encountered Joe Hopkins, from the digging crew. Doug tried unsuccessfully to duck him. He wanted to do nothing to break the spell he was under.

But Joe wanted to talk, and cornered him. He was holding a fifth of bourbon like he intended to make serious use of it, in due course.

"There was apparently a lot of activity in the cemetery last night," he said, working his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. Both ends were wet and frayed. "I mean, after we left. We went back this morning, things were moved around. Some graves were disrupted. Some were partially re-filled. It was a mess, like a storm had tossed everything. We had to spend two hours just to get back around to where we left off."

"You mean, like vandalism?" said Doug.

"Not exactly." Joe had another habit, that of continually smoothing his upper lip with his thumb and forefinger, as though to keep his moustache in line when he wasn't looking. To Doug, it signaled nervousness, agitation, and Joe was too brawny to be agitated about much for very long. "I tried to figure it, you know-what alla sudden makes the place not creepy, but threatening in a way it wasn't, yesterday. It's the feeling you'd have if you put on your clothes and alla sudden thought that, hey, somebody else has been wearing my clothes, right?"

Doug thought of what Mich.e.l.le had said, about the dead hearing every footfall of the living above them.

"What I'm saying is, I don't blame you for quitting. After today, I'm thinking the same thing. Every instinct I have tells me to just jump on my bike and ride the f.u.c.k out of here as fast as I can go. And, something else? Jacky says he ran into a guy last night, a guy he went to high school with. They were on the football team together. Jacky says the guy died four years ago in a Jeep accident. But the he saw him, last night, right outside the bar after you left. Not a ghost. He wasn't that drunk. Then, this morning, Craignotti says something equally weird: That he saw a guy at the diner, you know the Ready-Set? Guy was a dead ringer for Aldus Champion, you know the mayor who died in 2003 and got replaced by that a.s.shole selectman, whatsisname-?"

"Brad Ballinger," said Doug.

"Yeah. I been here long enough to remember that. But here's the thing: Craignotti checked, and today Ballinger was nowhere to be found, and he ain't on vacation or nothing. And Ballinger is in bed with Coggins, the undertaker, somehow. Notice how that whole Marlboro Reservoir thing went into a coma when Champion was mayor? For a minute I thought Ballinger had, you know, had him whacked or something. But now Champion's back in town-a guy Craignotti swears isn't a lookalike, but the guy. So now I think there was some heavy-duty money changing hands under a lot of tables, and the reservoir is a go, except n.o.body is supposed to talk about it, and now we're out there, digging up the whole history of Triple Pines as a result."

"What does this all come to?" Doug really wanted to get back to Mich.e.l.le. She might evaporate or something if left alone too long.

"I don't know, that's the f.u.c.ked up thing." Joe tried to shove his busy hands into his vest pockets, then gave up. "I'm not smart enough to figure it out, whatever it is . . . so I give it to you, see if any lightbulbs come on. I'll tell you one thing. This afternoon I felt scared, and I ain't felt that way since I was paddy humping."

"We're both outsiders, here," said Doug.

"Everybody on the dig posse in an outsider, man. Check that out."

"Not Jacky."

"Jacky don't pose any threat because he don't know any better. And even him, he's having f.u.c.king hallucinations about his old school buddies. Listen: I ain't got a phone at my place, but I got a mobile. Do me a favor-I mean, I know we don't know each other that well-but if you figure something out, give me a holler?"

"No problem." They traded phone numbers and Joe hurried to pay for his evening's sedation. As he went, he said, "Watch your a.s.s, cowboy."

"You, too."

Doug and Mich.e.l.le cooked collaboratively. They made love. They watched a movie together both had seen separately. They made more love. They watched the evening sky for several hours until chilly rain began to sheet down from above, then they repaired inside and continued to make love. The Peyton Place antics of the rest of the Triple Pines community, light years away from their safe, centered union, could not have mattered less.

The trick, as near as Billy Morrison could wra.s.sle it, was to find somebody and pitch them into your hole as soon as you woke up. Came back. Revived. Whatever.

So he finished f.u.c.king Vanessa Billings. "Bill-ing" her, as his cohort Vance Thompson would crack, heh. Billy had stopped "billing" high school chicks three years ago, when he died. Now he was billing a Billings, wotta riot.

Billy, Vance, and Donna Christiansen had perished inside of Billy's Boss 302 rebuild, to the tune of Black Sabbath's "The Mob Rules" on CD. The car was about half gray primer and fender-fill, on its way back to glory. The CD was a compilation of metal moldies. No one ever figured out how the car had crashed, up near a trailer suburbia known as Rimrock, and no one in authority gave much of a t.u.r.d, since Billy and his fellow losers hailed from "that side" of town, rubbing shoulders with an open-fire garbage dump, an auto wrecking yard, and (although Constable d.i.c.key did not know it) a clandestine crack lab. The last sensation Billy experienced as a living human was the car sitting down hard on its left front as the wheel flew completely off. The speed was ticketable and the road, wet as usual, slick as mayonnaise. The car flipped and tumbled down an embankment. Billy dimly recalled seeing Donna snap in half and fly through the windshield before the steering column punched into his chest. The full tank ruptured and spewed a meandering p.i.s.s-line of gasoline all the way down the hill. Vance's cigarette had probably touched it off, and the whole trash-compacted mess had burned for an hour before new rain finally doused it and a lumberyard worker spotted the smoke.

Their plan for the evening had been to destroy a bottle of vodka in the woods, then Billy and Vance would do Donna from both ends. Donna dug that sort of thing when she was sufficiently wasted. When they awoke several years later in their unearthed boxes, they renewed their pleasure as soon as they could scare up some more liquor. They wandered into a roadside outlet known as the 1-Stop Brew Shoppe and Vance broke bottles over the head of the proprietor until the guy stopping breathing. Then Donna lit out for the Yard, a quadrangle of trees und picnic benches near most of the churches in town. The Yard was Triple Pines' preferred salon for dropouts fond of cannabis, and Donna felt certain she could locate an old beau or two lingering among the waistoids there. Besides, she could bend in interesting new ways, now.

Billy had sought and duly targeted Vanessa Billings, one of those booster/cheerleader b.i.t.c.hes who would never have anything to do with his like. She had graduated in '02 and was still-still!-living in her parents' house. It was a kick to see her jaw gape in astonishment at the sight of him. OmiG.o.d, you like DIED! It was even more of a kick to hold her by the throat and f.u.c.k her until she croaked, the stuck-up little c.u.n.tling. Getting Vanessa out of her parents' house caused a bit of ruckus, so Billy killed them, too.

Ultimately, the trio racked up so many new corpses to fill their vacant graves they needed to steal a pickup truck to ferry them all back to Hollymount. Their victims would all be back soon enough, and the fun could begin again.

None of them had a precise cognition of what they needed to do. It was more along the lines of an ingrained need-like a craving-to take the heat of the living to avoid reverting to the coldness of death. That, and the idea of refreshing their grave plots with new bodies. Billy had always had more cunning than intelligence, but the imperatives were not that daunting. Stupid dogs learned tricks in less time.

Best of all, after he finished billing Billings, Billy found he still had a b.o.n.e.r. Death was apparently better than Viagara; he had an all-night hard-on. And since the night was still a toddler, he began to hunt for other chicks he could bill.

The sun came up. The sun went down. Billy thought of that rhyme about how the worms play pinochle on your snout. f.u.c.king worms. How about the worms eat your a.s.shole inside-out. For starters. Billy had been one super-sized organ smorgasbord, and had suffered every delicious bite. Now a whole f.u.c.kload of Triple Pines' good, upstanding citizens were going to pay, pay, pay.

As day and night blended and pa.s.sed, Triple Pines continued to mutate.

Over at the Ready-Set Dinette, a pink neon sign continued to blink the word EAT, just as it had before things changed in Triple Pines.

Deputy Lee Beecher (the late) and RaeAnn (also the late) came in for lunch as usual. The next day, Constable d.i.c.key (recently deceased) and the new deputy, James Trainor (ditto), joined them.