Streaking toward Earth, from a point beyond the Milky Way in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, was a ten mile long vessel shaped like an arrow and as black as space itself.

The ship was on a collision course with disaster, as yet undetected.

Only the absence of tiny star pricks where the ship passed might betray it as something not fashioned by nature; but there was nobody yet on Earth capable of such discernment, and there was nobody awake in the ship. The ship was a space ark containing an entire planet's living creatures suspended in deep sleep.

Nobody knew where their race had originated, and they called no planet home. They were eternal migrants, hopping from world to world, from galaxy to galaxy, appropriating worlds, destroying the natural ecology there, and, in a few centuries rendering those worlds uninhabitable by the sheer waste of their way of survival.

On shipboard, they were economical and led exactly measured lives. Everything on shipboard was about conservation. When they made planet fall, the other side of their nature demanded that they, and the life forms that traveled with them, consume everything that lived, and multiply until the very possibility of life was snuffed out. Everything was geared toward a single purpose: to build more space arks. With each planet fall, the number of these space arks multiplied severalfold. Each time in greater numbers, they would move on, targeting several worlds where they had just destroyed one. They were few in number, but in effect like locusts.

The aliens were nocturnal, shadowy beings, and their eyes glowed a deep, ember-rouge as a form of social interaction; but when they hunted, their eyes were black as buttons, sucking in light and emitted none of their own. Each had either three or five small, crooked horns atop its skull crest. All life on the ark was either three-limbed or five-limbed, binary symmetry not being in their genetic makeup. Their DNA was three-stranded, and they were an odd mix of few or many limbs.

While the 1,000 crew members lay in suspended animation in glassy tubes near the center of the ship, the ship's core brain directed all operations on board, from the slightest, like the wink of a warning light, to the biggest, like turning the ship. The core brain was a room-sized spaghetti of heavy iron alloys looped around each other with more twists than a human brain, although such metaphors meant nothing in 100,000,000 B.C.E.

From the core brain, a nervous system of conduits and cables spread through the entire ship, through the hull, the bulkheads, the control rooms, to every nook and cranny. When the live crew were awake, they moved about their business along dim corridors with dots of soft bronzy lighting along the walls. While the crew were cryogenically suspended, the core brain created a virtual copy of the corridors in its conduits, and shadowy avatars of each crew member moved along these corridors, eyes reddening in greeting as their paths crossed, and dulling back down as they passed each other.

The core's mission was simple: sustain the mission; defend the ship and its cargo; repair any damage to the ship; heal any cargo that was unwell, for they were the link to the future. The success of their race depended on every living member thriving under maximal conditions. Sometimes the ship took along samples of intelligent life, even if it had differently stranded genetic material.

Besides the 1,000 crew, the ark carried another million of their intelligent kind in suspended sleep. The latter's' usefulness would only arise when the mother ship was in orbit, and hundreds of smaller landers took them down to the surface. There, they would subdue and wipe out any native life, replacing it with pet creatures from their own ecosystem. These included millions of insect types, housed in hives that got buzzy and swarmy around planet fall; sea dwellers in various solutions of water; flying animals; and higher-evolved equivalents of Earth's buffalo and gorillas and other land mammals.

The aliens would not be awakened until the mother ship was in orbit and the first landers had scouted the surface. Then the aliens would be eager to embark on their new conquest. Leaving the mother ship in orbit, they would descend upon the Earth in small ships. Bit by bit, they would send down their companion life forms to speed up the process of cleansing the host world of any traces of its native life forms. All the alien species would multiply while the arks were being built. Bit by bit, nuclear and chemical poisons would destroy the host world. Collector specialists would assemble crews and cargo, making sure all species were represented, and the ships would move on, leaving huge numbers of its own life forms to die. Sometimes the ship was a force for killing, at other times for healing, whatever was best for the ship's survival. Having done this for eons beyond memory, they were expert at it. They had slept for a million years, and now their next fruit was ready for the picking.

From a million miles out, Earth had glowed in the solar ecliptic like a tiny bluish ball from. Now, barely 2000 ship lengths away, the planet dwarfed the ark. Earth was a luminous, swathed in rings of cloud, but continents peered through broad, cloud-free swaths. The land was many-colored, promising a lively diversity of opportunities.

Unseen by the ship, a one kilometer chunk of rock approached. It was an asteroid, a tiny planet jostled out of its orbit by a gravitational jostle between Mars and Jupiter. It spun away on its new dynamic, making a long ellipsis toward the sun. Along the way, it was attracted by the twin masses of the Luna and Earth. The asteroid veered sharply inward along its ecliptic, coming around the Earth-Moon system at over 100 miles per second, and headed directly for the intergalactic ark.

In the seconds before disaster struck, the ship functioned as it had for the past million years. The long halls of the ship were dark; they were crammed with tubes and spheres and blocks, vents and machines of many purposes and descriptions. A dull light suffused the ship, kind of amber on the brighter end, like light shining through a beehive; and tending toward a darker brown on the darker end of its spectrum, like the fading of consciousness in the grip of a spider's web. It was starlight, filtered, and just enough for the purposes of maintenance. In long view, some corridors faded into the indecipherable beehive lighting; other corridors faded into equally unguessable darkness colored like chitin on a beetle.

The ark was piloted by an electronic avatar of the Pilot, occupying a virtual bridge that existed in a computer peripheral in the actual command room. The analog's head glowered in the near-darkness of the cockpit. Three small crooked antlers projected from its head.

The ark was on the night side of Earth when, too late, the analog Pilot discovered the unexpected temporary moon that came careening around the Earth to make less than one complete orbit before assuming a new ellipse that would months later end with entry into the sun.

The avatar did all that it could. It tried to guide the ship and turn on force shields and at the same time waken the Pilot. With only minutes to spare, the sand-colored mountain approached at shattering speed.

The ship had a final line of defense: a nuclear weapon that could streak toward the threat, annihilating it. It was a weapon that would incinerate the Earth's surface in the bargain. But it was too late now. The damage would happen. The ship was programmed to rebuild itself. When it did, it had two priorities--the health of the creatures on board, and the reestablishment of its defenses, beginning with the nuclear capability.

The sand-colored asteroid's craters and ice sheets silently grew larger by the second. Though brightly lit by direct sunlight as well as moonlight, it cast a shadow before itself that darkened the space ark to almost pitch black inside as massive death approached. Ship's alarms sounded throughout long murky corridors and coldly steaming bays and pens.

The collision was soundless.

The asteroid never even slowed down. It broke the long arrow-shape of the ark into a hundred pieces that fit along the asteroid's front surface, melding with craters and plains and bumps. It plowed the pieces ahead of itself into space. Nothing on board remained alive.

Only a few pieces survived the collision, all from the massive computer core. With its surface on fire, and its spaghetti melting together, the core broke up into pieces that streaked down and crashed to earth in what would one day be called Africa.

The avatar did not know the ship was gone. It only knew that it was blinded. Frantically, it sent impulses out to wake the Pilot, to save the ship, to reconstruct the damage. Its frantic messages and protocols streamed out looking for paths and conduits that no longer existed. As long as it could pick up power from the planet's magnetosphere, it would continue to perform its mission as it had been programmed to do. It would be a long 100,000,000 years until the next milestone in that mission.

On Earth, the female T. Rex froze again, still staring out from between kelly green leaves. Directly ahead lay the pond where she'd gone to drink the past few sundowns. Under the murky surface, between floating lily pads and lacy white flowers, she saw the exposed belly of a young diplodocus, a long-necked, herbivorous pond lizard.

He reveled in twilit water warm from being in the sun all day.

She savored his faintly oily life-smell. Parting her jaws and two-inch teeth, she tensed every muscle in her body to strike and kill.

There was a breaking of the surface, a pleasurable snort as the pond lizard breathed.

In the final moment of dusk, fireflies winked. Nocturnal creatures began their barks and bellows.

The pond lizard, smelling his stalker, panicked and dove down in a deep gurgling arc.

Finally she exploded after him, a ferocious grin in front, a mad whirl of white and black and orange polygons behind. The water seethed with pounding fury as she followed him. Her limbs were hammers beating water into foam.

She did not notice that a long silent line appeared in the star-spattered sky. A stutter of smoke puffed at the tip of the line, glowing redder and hotter as it entered thicker atmosphere. There was a flash. Flash and smoke had disappeared, lost in the constellations, unheard, unseen.

Her teeth caught his tough tail. Tasting his blood, his oil, his death fear, she tossed her jaws and shredded his tail and his rear legs. She turned him kicking and struggling pond lizard onto his back, but kept his head under water. The water seethed white with foam, vermilion with blood.

Slowly, the pond quieted as he drowned.

She dragged him ashore, up into the leaves where she could hide with her kill. There, she raked claws through his underbelly, churning up viscera and half-digested vegetable matter. Smelling all this, she groaned hungrily and buried her battery of teeth into him.

At that moment, something struck the earth nearby.

Surrounded by fire, the T. Rex screamed and bolted from her prey. She ran zigzag with her back on fire, but to no avail. The entire forest all around was on fire.

Rolling in water, screaming, she managed to quench her burning flesh.

Then she lay in shock, leaking from her spinal column. She did not know about shock or spinal fluids, of course; she only knew by instinct that she was dying. She lay on her side, trembling. After a pause, her rib cage would expand in a single, labored heave, pulling in air. After another pause, her chest would collapse again, forcing the air out in a shuddering blast. Pause after pause, her body went through his involuntary, autonomic cycle, trying to push oxygen through her system. But her spine lay open, and blood covered the charred skin on her back. Spinal fluid glistened on her blackened vertebrae. The night was closing in, and she closed her eyes. She did not yet smell her enemies, but she jerked her tiny forelimbs helplessly, anticipating their arrival. Her hind limbs and her tail felt numb and cold.

Her panic subsided, and she felt a new presence in her head. It was not an enemy, but something good, like mating. She lay still and let it probe inside her. After a while, she could sense a tingling in the wounds on her back. In what part of the ship are you? something asked, and she could neither understand nor answer the question, but its urgency made her feel submissive and cooperative.

You are hurt. I will repair you.

She felt lines of force surround her, pulsing and healing. She felt warmth returning to her hind quarters.

What part of the ship is this?

After a long silence, the voice said:

Something has happened to the ship. I must repair it.

Even as she drank, she felt that same presence in her head. She saw something...it was as if she looked behind over her shoulder, only it was not behind, it was inside her, in the back of her head: A dark shape, like something that moved in the night. It had three crooked antlers on its head, and its eyes glowed like embers. It was not like mating. It was not like devouring. It was more like danger. Too late, she raised her head with a resounding snort to blow water from her nostrils so she could smell the air, trying to figure out where this new threat came from.

You are not one of us.

She whirled, trying to defend her newly healed back. But there was nobody there. She whirled again. And again. Snarling. But the presence was always behind her, and it said more things whose tone of hate was clear to her:

I must destroy you.

Scene in a blackened Cretaceous Period swamp: A Tyrannosaurus Rex roars in fear and defiance as she whirls this way and that, slamming her tail on the wet earth, showing her teeth through the lightly drifting smoke.

Clumps of blackened grass still smolder here and there, but the dampness in the swamp has moderated the effects of a part of the computer core crashing down just a few yards away.

A rounded thing, black as onyx, shaped like a boulder, protrudes slightly from the mud. Faintly at first, and then more quickly, lines of force play over its metallic surfaces. Waves of cold bluish light crackle back and forth, building in amplitude, until several lines of light crackle through the air. Zigzag fashion, the blue lines dart from the boulder to the pond, reaching an apex of heat, turning from blue to red, then to yellow, and just for an instant, to white. During the instant when the ropes of light are white, the T. Rex explodes in gobs of gore and sticks of bone. In the next instant, the light has disappeared from the air; only smoldering tissue remain of the dinosaur; and, yards away, a few last waves of blue light lick the rounded thing's surfaces before dimming out. For a few hours, millions of fine dry flakes fall, and coat the ground like some accidental white plastic, before blowing away in the wind.

LOMÉ, TOGO (ENS) Fall 1984--Making a surprising detour in his pilgrimage through West Africa, Pope John Paul II visited the capital of this small former French colony. The pontiff made a one-day stopover in the nation's capital, a city of 150,000, many of whom believe in Africa's Animist, or nature spirit, religion. Surprising his entourage, the pope insisted on visiting an island in the middle of Lake Togo. Amid rattles, drums, and shrill pipes, local spirit doctors welcomed him onto this forested island where the pope visited for two hours with animists in ghostly face and body paint. They are said to guard shrines containing evil spirits and devils held captive by magic since the creation of the world. The demons are imprisoned in statues, rocks, and other fetish objects. The witch doctors showed the Pope empty shrines that had been looted of their fetishes during the past century by European and American adventurers. The stolen totems, they said, were now in Europe or America. Those spirits, they told the Pope, had already begun their evil work in the world.

San Tomas, California: Relentlessly, the mocking spirit tormented Dr. Johnathan Smith, D.D. by whispering cruel and dirty things in his head. You have one foot in hell already, it said laughing, you can't beat me and you can't get me out of your head and I'm going to take you to the pit of demons with me!

In the cheap rented room, torn plastic curtains had been drawn. Sunlight angling through made a dance of dust motes striking a tangle of clothes half in, half out of a suitcase. The cover flap of the suitcase lay open like a screaming mouth. Tangled pants suggested disembodied men trying to run away. Rumpled shirtsleeves suggested ghosts waving for help.

In a corner stood the wooden z carved centuries ago in Africa. The statue's scarred face suggested maniacal amusement at Smith's pain. The statue's insides had been hollowed out centuries ago by its Togolese creators; and the core had been filled with a a strange heavy-black substance like iron, which Smith was convinced was a bit of alchemy directly from Satan's retorts. The statue, retrieved by missionaries in Africa, now brought him to San Tomas.

Courage, the aged fundamentalist thought, twining his arthritic fingers together over his ragged shirt and heaving chest.

The telephone rang.

The old man reached out, drew back his hand, then picked up.

"Smith, this is Mulcahy...Hello?...Hello?"

"Thank God, it's you finally."

"Smith, what's wrong?"

"It's tormenting me terribly." Inside his head, a red-eyed demon chuckled.

"Is there some way I can help you?" Mulcahy sounded tired and dubious.

"You don't seem to believe me, but I have a piece of Satan sitting here in the room with me. It's the evidence we need, Mulcahy. We can prove the existence of Satan, therefore of God." ('...Up to your ass in dirty sex,' the devil interjected in Smith's head.)

Mulcahy said after a moment's consideration: "I could walk over and meet you by the Zoo entrance."

"Please! I need a witness."

"It's all nonsense, you know. There has to be a scientific explanation. There is, if we look for it."

"You fool," Smith said, feeling contempt mixed with anxiety to confront Satan. "We're so close. Why do you keep crapping out on me?"

An hour later, as lights winked on in office buildings silhouetted against the darkening sky, Smith shuffled toward the main entrance of the San Tomas Zoological and Botanical Gardens. Under his arm, wrapped in a dirty pillowcase, was the statuette, weighing heavily. The zoo was closed, and the last one or two of its office staff were just leaving. They avoided the old man. He barely noticed them.

A sudden cawing sound; a large bird thing threw itself between branches. Smith looked up into towering eucalyptus trees. "I know you're here," he whispered.

Someone--or something--chuckled in the darkness. A merciless sound. I'm going to kill you! I'm going to tear out your heart! Ha ha ha...

"For God's sake, Mulcahy, where are you? Hurry!"

Something stirred under the trees, something wrapped up in a darkness more total than the blackness of night. Smith's mouth opened, and once again his heart beat wildly. He stepped back, short of breath. He held his hands to his aching chest as though he must somehow relieve the pressure. He felt powerless to run. Where in God's name was Mulcahy?

Oh God, the stars.

The thing he had pursued and that in turn now pursued him, stepped between Smith and the sky. Loomed over Smith. The statuette fell clattering to the sidewalk. The demon pulled back its cowl to reveal its face. It looked...the thing was...what? Ancient, inscrutable, Egyptian...part man, part jackal?...But instead of jackal ears, it had three small crooked horns. Three eyes burned like pools of hot red wax. Its carrion teeth were exposed in a predatory grin.

...Was THIS the face of Satan?

In his final moments, as the hideous demon loomed over him, he had a vision of the end of the world. He didn't understand the pieces of the puzzle, but he understood the vision as a whole for it fit with everything he'd studied in Revelations. There was something under the sea--a huge ship of some kind, long and black, its corridors pearled with strings of lights. Nearby lay a broken airplane with one light on inside, and that light was the engine of a nuclear furnace that would bring the end of the world. The demon face closed on him, and he took his last breath.

San Tomas, California: Gilbert Burtongale, a tall scraggly man of 40 with long dirty hair and beard stubble, sole heir to the town's oldest and greatest fortune, stood in the darkness outside the zoo his family had founded in the 1800's. Gilbert wondered why the red-eyed presence in his head had made him come here. Some old fool shuffled up the walk holding something in a bag. The old man cried out in the windy darkness, and Gilbert only heard part of what he said: "...Mulcahy...are you...hurry!" Gilbert looked about uneasily. The old man cried: "...know you're there..." Gilbert fingered his switchblade knife, ready to open it. But things took care of themselves, as the Thing in his head had promised, not with words, just with feelings.

There! What flew through the air? A large bird. No. Something...furry. A bear? Yes, a flying bear. The old man looked up in horrified, frozen silence as the animal flew over the zoo wall and directly into his face. The old man fell down, and the bear blanketed him. The animal snarled once, briefly, tearing the old man's heart out in one digging motion, one rip of its claws.

Gilbert stared in fascination. But the Thing made him turn his head. Far away on a moonlit path, a figure in black strode along smoking a cigar. The cloud of silvery smoke hovered over Mulcahy's head like a crooked thought. Gilbert brought the knife out, with a snarl of his own. He'd been long wanting to--But No. The Thing did not want...It was most important to...

The bear vanished. Evaporated as Gilbert watched. The old man lay sprawled and broken in a lake of blood. His heart lay yards away where it had landed during the frenzy. Gilbert picked up the statuette, whose battered face smiled wickedly, a blurry and mysterious visage in wood. Its metal core seemed to throb with poisonous love.

Gilbert climbed into the driver's seat of his van. He stashed the statuette under his seat, slipped the door shut, and drove away on quiet cylinders before Mulcahy could probably notice. Gilbert drove up to the zoo entrance a quarter mile away and honked the car horn. As he waited for the night guard to open up, he cherishingly regarded at the old, tattered photograph taped to the roof: A beautiful young woman, smiling with sunny innocence, her hands clasped by her chin in sensuous indolence. I will possess you, Mary-Shane, he thought, and we will die together, yet live forever. Soon, my love. Soon.

"Mom, what's a faloshian?"

Mary-Shane brushed a wisp of hair from her forehead while concentrating on the road ahead. "Not now, honey." A blue van was just cutting into traffic behind her. They had just been to the doctor's office and she was fighting an inner scream of panic. Her son's cancer had been in remission for nearly five years, but now a questionable something had appeared in a leg X-ray. At the same time, life demanded that it be lived from minute to minute. She was late for everything, as usual. A basket of overdue library books bounced on the back seat.

Kippy frowned and pulled in his chin. "There's a dead one outside the zoo. They said so on the news this morning."

She held up her left hand in the slipstream to help the magenta nail polish dry. Traffic was heavy, and she needed to find a way to cut over two lanes. The blue van kept creeping up behind on her right blind spot. "Kippy please, I'm trying not to miss the exit to grandma's house. You can tell me there, okay?"

Serious tone: "Oh, okay."

A pair of young men whistled in Mary-Shane's direction. She barely turned her blonde head and raked them with her Icy Glance. She turned onto a side street. The blue van drifted away. Minutes later, as she pulled onto shaded Mulberry Street, Mary-Shane saw that, once again, her mother was displeased with her. Mary-Shane knew how to read her mother's house. If Mother was pleased, she would be waiting: watering the lawn, smiling, waving. Instead, Mother was inside. Sullen, without any sign of welcome, the house seemed to turn its face away.

Mary-Shane stopped the car and looked at her son. "Want a hand?" The old question.

"Naw." The familiar answer. Kippy pushed the door open with his right arm. With practiced speed and confidence, he swung first one leg, then the other, onto the street. Mary-Shane regarded her son through a thick layer of old love and pain. Wearing his school uniform, he was ten and looked beautiful. She was proud. "Grandma's mad about something," Kip noted with a glance up the hill. "What do you suppose it is this time?"

They had a silent walk up to the house together. He worked hard on his clicking crutches. She, wearing medium heels and businesslike skirt, but gray sweat jacket with dangling hood, matched his pace with hands clasped behind her back.

"Kippy, can you wait here a few minutes?" She indicated the lath gazebo vined with pink and white trumpet flowers. She banged on the door. No answer. She rattled the handle, but the door was locked. She fumbled in her pockets until she found the key. In contrast to her annoyance, Kippy sat patiently. He had one forearm draped over both crutch handles while his interested gaze followed the flight of a butterfly. His name was Christopher, but as a toddler he'd invented the nickname that would follow him through life. As Mary-Shane got the door open, she tried to take along some of Kippy's calmness.

"Mom!" her voice echoed through the house, "Mo-om!"

Mother's house was a dark swirl of silvered mirrors, petulant lace, sullen mahogany.

"Mary-Shane, dear, you don't have to shout and bang around."

Mary-Shane gave a jump. "I--I--you scared me."

Mother smiled ceremoniously while placing pussy willow twigs in a small vase. "I was here in the kitchen the whole time. Where's Kippy?"

"In the gazebo." Mary-Shane threw the envelope down on the table. "Here are the rent checks." She did not apologize that they were three days late.

"Why didn't he come in?" Mother searched for the perfect spot to place a twig she held like a spear.

"I just wanted to drop these off. I'm late for work. Is something wrong?"

Mother circled around the vase. "There." She stabbed the twig into place, then wiped her hands on her apron. "I wouldn't say wrong, Mary-Shane." She put the vase on a high window sill. "There. Tomorrow or the day after I'll cut some marigolds and add them in. That'll look nice, don't you think?"

Mary-Shane took nail polish from the sweat jacket's belly pocket. Sitting at the table, she worked on her right hand. Waiting.

Mother looked through the checks. "Was someone short?"

"No, just late. Davidson forgot to leave his rent money with me before he went on a weekend trip."

"If you're ever short--"

"Naw."

"How did Kippy's doctor appointment go?"

"The doctors found a blip or something on his leg." Her fingers trembled.

"Mary-Shane!"

"They want more time to evaluate the results." She wasn't sure if she could be patient with Mother just now.

"Mary-Shane, I thought..." Mother looked ready to cry. "Five years...remission..."

Mary-Shane snapped: "Doctor Boutros said he's sure Kippy is probably okay but he wants to check with another specialist."

Mother said, "Darling, I know you love him so." Mother rubbed Mary-Shane's back. "Make sure he always gets his rest, and eats right, and..."

Mary-Shane felt herself starting to lose it. "What do you think I have done every day for years, Mother?"

Mother sat down, folded her hands on the table, and looked at Mary-Shane. Mary-Shane felt her looking but did not look up. After a minute or two, Mother sighed. "It's none of my business, Mary-Shane, but Harold Berger has called several times this week."

Mary-Shane closed the nail polish bottle. "I don't believe it." A flush crawled up her cheeks.

"He is trying awfully hard to reach you, darling."

Mary-Shane pictured Howard in her mind, cocked an imaginary elbow back, and punched him into the next country.

"Kippy really likes him."

"Kippy loathes him, Mother. And by now, so do I. I have to go. I have to drop Kippy off at school, and I'm late for work."

"Mary-Shane, the boy needs a man in his life."

"I'm not going to marry Howard."

Mother reproved with a look that said, there you go again, bitch in tight jeans, make all the boys crazy.

Mary-Shane changed the subject: "I asked for a promotion."

"At that job?" Mother made 'job' sound dirty.

Mary-Shane rose. She was glad she'd asked Kippy to wait outside. "Mother, no guy is interested in a widow with a crippled son. I work damn hard and I need something better than life with Howard the nerd. I'm going to be thirty in two years. No Prince Charming is coming along to rescue me, so THAT JOB as you put it is my only hope to make it on my own!"

"He is a wealthy man. A good man. Young. Good-looking. What more could you want?"

Mary-Shane strode away through the house assaulted by dull rumblings of china behind glass. There was something she was walking away from. What was it? A black hole in her past, graying toward daylight with numb time in a women's prison, a threat to lose Kippy if she did not shape up...

Her mother's voice rose to a near hysterical pitch as she invoked Mary-Shane's failed marriage. "For God's sake, Mary-Shane, don't do it again! Remember what happened with you and Frank! Remember what he did to you and Kippy!"

Mary-Shane was glad to get back into the sunshine. "Ready, Kip?"

"Yep." Click of crutch. "How'd it go?"

Mary-Shane knelt and embraced him, remembering the enigmatic darkness in her past. His free hand stole around her neck. She smelled a hint of bath soap in the wet ends of his hair. Nobody was going to take this guy away from her.

They walked to the car. "Grandma wants me to do something I don't want to."

"Oh, is that all?" Kippy tossed the crutches in. "What else is new?"

"Kippee-e," she warned as he climbed in. Tugging her door open, she saw that he was grinning. Driving away unnecessarily fast, she tossed the nail polish bottle in the glove compartment that bulged with paperbacks. "Well, at least I got my nails finished."

"Oh yeah Mom, I almost forgot. They got a dead faloshian at the zoo. Do you think they'll have a picture of it in the paper?"

Mary-Shane breezed into the City Room of the San Tomas Herald, ignoring a dirty look from Managing Editor Mart Willow.

At the Obituary section, tucked in a nook near the newspaper's morgue (library), Mary-Shane let out a big breath and threw down jacket, hair brush, purse, and jangling keys. Terri 'Wiz' Kcikiewicz, her fellow obit writer, was just finishing a midmorning yogurt. Odd duck, Terri; kept a vase in the form of a skull on her desk. Anchored in a sea of paper, Terri looked up and her glasses slid down her nose, as they always did.

"Hi Wiz," Mary-Shane said. She sipped coffee from a foamed plastic cup and brushed her blonde curls.

"Hi kid. How's the boy?" Wiz had a gap between her upper front teeth.

"They found a blip on his right leg. The doctor is going to consult another specialist."

Wiz looked sad. "When do you find out?"

Mary-Shane sighed. "He said a day or two." Pushing aside an overwhelming cloud of dread and grief, she threw her hands up while circling around her desk looking for her stapler. "Why is Mart Willow here? I thought he was on vacation this week."

Wiz cleaned out her cardboard yogurt cup with a paper towel. "He was. They called him back in. Must be something big. He's been growling around like Father Zeus all morning."

Mary-Shane found the stapler and banged on the top drawer handle of her desk, at the same time pulling on the middle drawer. On the third try, the desk unlocked itself. "Don't suppose anyone will ever fix this thing. Everything is going to pieces, Wizzie. My car, my hair, my life."

Wiz nodded. "Well, the main thing is you and Kippy. He's going to be okay. Speaking of old bumble-butt..."

"Oh God." Mary-Shane scrambled into her chair and logged into the newspaper's microprocessor network. She sat brightly and erectly, clicking away at the keys as Mart Willow's sullen redness floated past. The morgue door slammed and Mary-Shane exhaled.

Wiz slipped the empty yogurt container into the huge handbag by her desk. Mary-Shane liked Wiz, eccentricities and all. Used the cups in her garden, Mary-Shane remembered. Sometimes she envied Wiz, even if Wiz was fifteen years older. Wiz had a guy in her life, and she carried a glow. Mary-Shane, after breaking up with Howard Berger three months ago, had zilch for romance. Mary-Shane attacked the first obit: Rocco Balsamo, 89, died in Belgrave Park after a long illness. Mr. Balsamo had been a member of Plumber's Union Local 5679 for fifty-nine years. He was also a past Grand Panjandrum of the Lodge of Oriental Potentates. What was a panjandrum, and was that the right spelling? "Hey Wiz, pass me the dictionary, will you?"

"What are you looking up?" Wiz asked as her glasses slipped down.

"Pan-jan-drum. Why?"

"I was just wondering if you were near the t's someplace."

"I could make a detour." Mary-Shane licked her finger and turned pages. Her left contact was beginning to sting.

"Theologian," said Wiz, whose spelling was legendarily bad. "One ell or two?"

Mary-Shane started to laugh. Wiz looked sheepish. Mary-Shane felt a frown replace her laughter. "Hey, you got a dead one there?"

"That's why we're in the obit department."

"No kidding," Mary-Shane said. "Kippy was saying something about a Faloshian, I thought he was saying. Couldn't figure out what he meant. One ell, Wiz."

"Thanks. Here, check this out. It's a doozy." Wiz tossed a handful of pages across.

Mary-Shane picked up the copy. As she did so, she bit loudly into a large red apple. The morgue door opened. Oh no, she thought, and looked up. There was Mart Willow, looking directly at her. As she looked at him, a dust mote flew up and her eye burned. She blinked at him several times in rapid succession. She hid the offending eye with her hand. Mart huffed off to his office.

"Winking at him now," Wiz observed.

Mary-Shane lowered her head onto the desk and hid under her hands. She shook her head and wondered why she had not called in sick.

"Cheer up," Wiz said. "I'll take you to lunch."

"Oh goody. Maybe I can eat some poisoned mushrooms and posthumously prove to my mother that I really did care about anything. Geez, this is weird." She read the beginning of Wiz's obit: Johnathan Smith, 68, died under mysterious circumstances yesterday evening on Zoo Lane. Dr. Smith, a professor at Whitbread Baptist Seminary in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was a prominent fundamentalist theologian..."Good spelling, Wiz."

"Went through the checker three times."

"Died right near the main entrance to the zoo, sounds like. That's what Kippy was talking about," she repeated in wonderment.

"Note," Wiz said, leaning forward so that her ebony hair dangled lankly. She said in a very soft voice, "Died on Zoo Lane. Right on the Burtongales' doorstep."

Mary-Shane caught the implication. The Burtongale family had founded San Tomas and owned chunks of it, including the zoo. "Do you suppose that's why bumble-butt, instead of shooting elk in Canada, is here shooting the shit with us?"

Wiz nodded. "Afraid so. The old Burtongale mafia rides again. And here comes another one now."

Jules Loomis, City Editor and, like Mart, member of the Burtongale clan by marriage, stopped at Mary-Shane's desk. Jules was short and pudgy, given to wearing un-ironed white shirts and baggy pants with trademark suspenders. He held papers in one hand and an editorial pencil in the other. Hair uncombed, he puffed on a curved-stem pipe. Mary-Shane liked his tobacco; it wasn't aromatic; too much bite in the aromatics, Jules had once explained after coffee and Danish at Vogelmann's; it was more woodsy like a hay barn in the fall. Jules had hired Mary-Shane six years ago, and he liked her, tended to protect her, although Mart was technically Jules's boss, and might have fired her long since.

Jules, not given to formalities, nodded to Wiz while restuffing and relighting his pipe. To Mary-Shane: "See you a moment?"

She took a few moments to tidy up so Wiz could continue obits. Then Mary-Shane walked down the hall where he was already back in his office. She knocked on the door.

"C'mon in."

She let the wood window-door slide shut with a glassy rattle, and eased herself into one of the old-fashioned wood office chairs around his desk. The morning edition lay folded nearby. A sidebar read: "BEAR DEAD IN CAGE. (Special) Andy, a four year old grizzly bear, unexplainedly..."

Jules relit his balky pipe and put his feet up on a desk drawer. "Coupla things. One, just want to let you know Mart Willow was in here this morning sounding me out about why you were late again."

Mary-Shane felt a welling up of anger.

"I told him it was your son's checkup. Then he mentioned you've been out or late a bit more than usual the past week or two and I had to say I suppose that might be true, because it is true."

Mary-Shane banged her fists on her knees. "I'm sorry."

Jules calmly continued: "I also told him, hey look, I seem to remember the same thing happening every three months or so like clockwork and damned if it ain't the week before your boy's checkup. I told him I figure she maybe can't sleep for worrying and why don't he go away and worry about his own problems."

"Thanks, Jules. Honestly."

He added darkly: "There is the other thing too."

She knew what it was and felt a rushing in her ears. A dark, turbulent spot in her memory flicked on, blackwhite blackwhite, censoring, canceling...

"I don't like to bring it up, but of course Mart knows you had some difficulties with the law years back. You know I think the world of you, but from time to time that will come up again."

Blood rushed in her ears, and his voice came across like words filtered through a wall.

"Oh well," he said, that settled. Puffing on his pipe, hands in pockets, he walked around the office. "You've been after me to get on the City Room staff as a reporter. I'm going to send you along with Perry for a while. Let you play assistant police reporter. See how you do."

"Yow!"

"I've pushed it with Mart Willow and he says no. Mary-Shane doesn't have a degree. I said neither do I but I'm city editor. He didn't say anything but his look said, you'll never maker it any higher. Anyway, I was talking with Perry Stein about you. He's willing to take you in the field."

"Jules!" She gripped his arm. "Yowee!!"

"Shh-hh, don't let Mart Willow see you. Seeing you happy always ruins his day."

She clapped her hand on Jules's forearm. "What is it between me and him? Why does the sight of me put him in a rage?"

Jules puffed and gazed far away. "Oh, I don't know. It's only a guess. Chemistry, probably. It happens like that. He's an old office siegheiler from way back, and you're sort of a free spirit."

"Why do you stand up for me, Jules?"

"Because, frankly, my dear...You're almost the only ray of sunshine in this dismal place. Go with Perry. Take a shot at it. I want to give you your chance."

Perry Stein's car was at least a block long and smelled strongly of disinfectant. In the back seat were several mops and buckets. Perry and his wife took night cleaning jobs around town.

"I thought you gave that up," Mary-Shane said as they drove along Canoga Avenue, where flowers bloomed by the shopping mall.

Perry was a tall, curly-haired Samoan with thick-lensed glasses and one wandering eye. "Naw. Matilda and I talked about it some. On a small-town paper like this you don't make enough money. Not if you have five kids like we do."

Mary-Shane watched expensive San Tomas stores glide by in unwavering sunshine that drew the wealthy to this peninsula. "This is exciting, Perry. I love the newspaper. Do I get to do some writing? I'm looking for a real kick-start out of this ditch I've been in all these years."

"For now, you tag along. You'll get your chance."

"Sure, Mart Willow will fall all over himself to promote me."

"You always did have that little bite, like maybe a jalapeno too many. What you need to do, Mary-Shane, is look for a story. Maybe a big story. Something you can put your personal stamp on. Then you'll be on your way."

She sat back dismayed. "It's Mart Willow again, isn't it? What does he think--if they print something I write, the paper will explode in people's hands? What an asshole."

"It's not my idea of a way to break you in," Perry sympathized.

The corridors of the city morgue were shadowy and cool in contrast to the growing heat outside. "I'm trying to act nonchalant, Perry, but this is my first trip to a real morgue, so grab me if I pass out."

The body of Johnathan Smith was not, as Mary-Shane had imagined, in a cruel-looking room whose walls were covered with aluminum doors and whose concrete floors had bloody drains. Instead, it lay under a sheet in a plain, almost cozy, paneled room at one corner of the building. The blinds were drawn, but comforting sunlight peeked through. One of the live men in the room was San Tomas PD Lt. Vic Lara, the primary police investigator on the case. Mary-Shane thought he had beautiful shifting eyes. She felt attracted to him, and yet something about him gave her goose bumps. Had she known him in a dark past life or something?

Perry's wandering eye wandered. She had once, over coffee and Danish at Vogelmann's, heard someone of less sensitivity ask Perry how his eye got to be that way. He had held up one index finger and curled it into a hook. "Childhood fishing accident." That answer always left a silence. ("Actually it's Lazy Eye," Perry had later confessed).

The Medical Examiner pulled back the sheet and there lay Mr. Smith on his gurney. It reminded Mary-Shane of old Frankenstein movies, the way his body had been ripped to pieces and approximately sewn back together. "It would have been a big, quick, powerful, and very violent animal to do this," he said. "There have been no reports of animals missing from the zoo--."

"Except a bear named Andy," Mary-Shane said while Perry nudged her side.

"Well yes, so I hear, but he dropped dead in his cage. Hardly a predator." The M.E. smiled as if speaking to a not so bright child; Mary-Shane was used to that, although it irritated her; consider the source, she always told herself. He continued: "Actually, the only animal I know that fits that description is homo sapiens." He waved a finger over his work. "Miss, er, Mary-Shane," the M.E. said, "the cuts and stitch marks around the neck are from the autopsy, in case you don't know. So are the big cross cuts on the chest. As to the rest of the damage--someone or something kind of tore him apart. They simply reached in and tore his heart out. It was found some distance from the body, partially eaten by a small animal."

Mary-Shane found the sight was neither viscerally horrible nor clinically neutral, but somewhere in-between. She felt sorry for Johnathan Smith. His reattached arms were crossed at the wrists, fingers lightly curved in rubbery repose, awaiting some funeral ceremony.

"...Like Ripper work," Lara said. Lara had a kind of hardboiled way, Mary-Shane thought, talked with his chin cocked sometimes back, sometimes up, hands in pockets. Lara looked lean and mean in his starchy suit.

The doctor sighed. "There's a sick one out there."

Mary-Shane looked more closely at the face. In death, Smith did not look particularly peaceful, given the odd twist of the lips and the faint shine of eyeballs between stiff eyelids.

"Miss MacLemore," Lara said, "sometimes people try to figure out the dead person's expression. There isn't any expression, just the odd way muscles and ligaments shrink and harden."

"Call me Mary-Shane. Thanks for that information, Lieutenant."

"You working with Perry, Mary-Shane?"

"On and off," she said. The way he regarded her gave her the chills. Had they been acquaintances somewhere long ago? Her mind, with a subconscious life of its own, groped: In an earlier life? Beneath the ocean floor? She reached for metaphors and found no perfect one, only a memory of terrible violence, like a private Big Bang. She shrank from the past, glad to return to the warm and sunny present.

Lara's look was penetrating but opaque. "See you around, huh?" His gaze caressed her the way one stroked a cat.

In the car, headed towards the zoo, Mary-Shane asked: "Perry, why are the Burtongales all nervous about this?"

He made a cynical face. "Afraid of the publicity? Paranoid? Who knows. I'd like to leave this town and get on a better paper. One not owned by a ninety year old woman dictator."

When Mary-Shane and Perry arrived near the zoo, they found, still piled to one side, sawhorses and tangled yellow tape marked "Police Line--Do Not Cross." There were stains on the sidewalk, puddles with long thin paint-like runnels going to the gutter. Mary-Shane knew the smell of dead animals in bushes, and these stains had in them the smell of death. The stink invaded her sinuses and hammered her brain, making her feel faint.

"Are you okay?" Perry asked.

"Excuse me," she said and walked away quickly. She made it about a half a block to a sandy area and there blew lunch like a garden hose.

Perry hollered something from a distance but wind tattered his words.

She waved and yelled: "I'll be okay in a minute."

Something gripped her mind and made her walk slowly, as if searching for something. She took small steps. She held her purse in both hands. It was very still there on the sand. A frog burruped nearby. A cricket cricketed. A bird clucked. Something violent had happened here on the sand long ago. It had been covered by blood. By deep sadness. She bent over as though programmed, and picked up the tiniest of things. At first she thought it was a seashell. Then she saw it was a tooth. A human tooth, too big to be a child's; somehow, she knew: an old person's tooth, bronzed with age underneath, bleached by years on top where it had lain on the sand, this beach not of the sea but of time. An echo welled up in her mind: Herself, long ago, drowning in tragedy, something to do with this tooth. She put the tooth in a clean tissue and hid it in the bottom of her purse. Then she gargled from a small bottle of mouthwash.

"...Taking it rather hard," he admonished. "If you want to be a police reporter..."

"Don't talk just now," she ordered.

He fell silent and touched her elbow, and thus they walked to the zoo entrance. There, the whatever that had just roiled the floor of her mind stirred the sand one last time: Her legs tingled, and her heart fluttered in clustered beats. It was as if a cloud had briefly darkened the sun. She became dizzy as she stared up into the elaborate 19th Century scroll work atop the zoo entrance. Bridging several brick and marble pylons was the legend "Wallace Burtongale Memorial Zoological and Botanical Gardens of San Tomas." As she read the legend, its letters began to writhe and wiggle in her mind. A sickness knifed her gut. A knowing of death, a shock of dying. But whose dying, hers? Something, briefly, touched her mind. An elderly man with mussy gray hair and truthful eyes stood inside of her, his lined face shining and finally free of pain. Her inner self turned away in deep guilt and shame and helplessness. Had she helped kill him? What else was there in this deep internal nightmare? But there was no accusation in the man's eyes, only an understanding she knew she did not deserve. He held out his hand as if she had something of his.

"Mary-Shane!" Perry was shaking her.

She held her head in both hands, but her mind was her own again and she let go. "I'll be okay," she said. The feeling had passed, but her legs felt weak.

"You're white as a sea shell," Perry said, looking alarmed.

"Let's go for that big story," she said, heading toward the neo-Egyptian ramparts, jackals, and sun disks, of the zoo portal.

Everywhere inside the zoo, there was evidence of construction (or reconstruction, Mary-Shane wasn't sure which). Small pickups carrying electrical or plumbing supplies crawled on the pebbly paths among the habitats of elephants, giraffes, and wildebeests. Ladders leaned against walls, canvases were thrown over benches, orange cones stood in odd places. Men and women in overalls moved purposefully. Vans were parked in odd places.

The domed hall of the main administration building rustled with footsteps and voices. A receptionist behind an oak lectern directed them down a long hallway. The walls were covered with huge panels showing prehistoric animals. Brontosaurus, ninety tons of him, yachted through a pond. Whatsasaurus shrilled fearfully as T. Rex made salad out of him. At the end of the building was another, smaller domed hall with a tiled floor. A large portal led out into a small parking lot fringed with tropical plants. The air inside the dome was pleasantly cool. There were several office doors, each with its brass name plate. One nameplate read "Dr. Wallace Burtongale VI, Ph.D., Curator." The next door was that of "Dr. Roger Chatfield, Ph.D., Assistant Curator." On this door, Perry knocked.

"Just a minute," a man's voice shouted. The door opened. Dr. Chatfield, a tallish tanned man in his thirties, wore khaki. "Please pardon the mess outside. We're doing some major remodeling." He was good-looking, but Mary-Shane did not like him. Too self-assured, with those serious eyebrows. Perry evidently knew Chatfield, for they shook hands like old friends. Perry introduced Mary-Shane.

With Chatfield was another man, tall, balding, about fifty. He wore a priest's black suit and white collar. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and an expensive gold watch. He waved a banana-sized cigar. Chatfield said: "Mr. Stein, Miss MacLemore, allow me to introduce you to a friend of the zoo and gardens. Bishop Donald Mulcahy."

Mulcahy jammed the cigar between his teeth and energetically seesawed their hands. He had to bend down to do so. "Pleased to meet you." He seemed more a hard, realistic businessman than a priest at first glance. "We're over in the cathedral basilica near the zoo." Mulcahy said, "Church and zoo are old friends."

"Mr. Stein and Miss MacLemore are from the newspaper. They've stopped by to see me about the Smith matter."

"Oh?" Mulcahy sucked thoughtfully on his cigar. A steel-wool tangle of smoke floated away from his changed face. "How interesting. Good, Roger, well, I won't keep you. Been nice visiting. Good day, Mr. Stein. Nice day, Miss MacLemore."

The bishop strode off. He left a shawl of smoke over one shoulder, and Mary-Shane was surprised that she sort of liked the smell. Probably not your nickel stogie. More than likely, from the looks of the bishop, a pampered and humidored delicacy. His smoke had a dry, rare essence that reminded her of the smell of money in bank lobbies.

Chatfield had a high-ceilinged office with book-lined walls and dark furniture. Mary-Shane and Perry sat in sturdy leather-padded chairs making a semicircle before Chatfield's desk. "Can I get you some coffee?" His gaze told her he was interested in her.

Perry nodded. "Please. Given the way the morning has gone."

"Black no sugar," Mary-Shane said, wanting to keep things straight-forward.

"Been a real bear, I take it," Chatfield said as he poured from a ceramic service. They sipped from thick souvenir cups Mary-Shane found pretty: A maroon panda climbed in green bamboo against a creamy off-white background. How nice, Mary-Shane thought, to be able to work in an office with greenish light filtering in overhead.

"It's Miss MacLemore's first day on the police beat, and already she's had to see a dead guy with his heart torn out and visit the scene of his murder."

Mary-Shane flushed, angry that he would be patronizing. If he mentioned anything about her barfing, he would get his head thumped. Chatfield hovered like a boy sitting on a fence rail. "Are you interested in police work, Mary-Shane?" Bright voice.

She nodded. "It's a killer."

Chatfield glowered a moment, then laughed. Perry said: "I tried to reach Wallace Burtongale all morning, but the secretary says he's unavailable for comment."

Chatfield said: "Maybe I can help you?"

Mary-Shane noticed photos all over his desk. A boy and a girl. Were they his? And the brunette with the mysterious smile and the sensuous eyes; his wife? Wow, Dr. Chatfield, you've done well. And now he was interested in Mary-Shane? Whoa, no lipstick of mine will find its way to this man's collar.

Perry said: "This guy just happened to get his ticker ripped out on your doorstep. Come on, Roger, why the zoo of all places to dump a body? The guy was a theologian. Was he on a religious quest? Remember, I'm giving Miss MacLemore the A-ticket tour of investigative journalism."

There was a sudden shaking, a droning that rattled windows and drowned out conversation. They looked up. Mary-Shane glimpsed the silvery fuselage of a military cargo plane modified with all sorts of antennas and listening dishes.

"Perry, we've had bodies dumped here over the years, you know that. All those transients living down in the woods behind the zoo, all the drugs...I had a call from Miss Polly"(the 90-year-old Burtongale matriarch with the world view of an Albanian dictator)"this morning. She wants to downplay speculation. There is absolutely no connection between the body and the zoo."

"Not that the zoo has anything to hide." The question tumbled from Mary-Shane's lips, laden with sarcasm that surprised her. She caught her breath and looked up into Perry's open-mouthed stare. "What about the dead bear?" she blurted.

Chatfield's brow wrinkled. "Andy," he said in wonderment. "I have no explanation," he said honestly. He shrugged. "As Miss Polly has often remarked, what this zoo is all about is the tourist dollar. What's good for the zoo is good for the town. Jobs, Miss MacLemore. I'm asking you and Mr. Stein not to overplay the zoo angle."

Before they left, Mary-Shane pulled the tissue from her pocket. "You are a biologist, right? Would you have any idea what this is? I found it near the zoo entrance." She gave him the tissue.

He unwrapped it with a puzzled face. "Why, it's a tooth." He held it up in the filtered light. "It's a human tooth. From an adult." He smelled it, ready to rumple his nose, then merely shrugged. "It's old." He handed it back to her. "It's some poor alcoholic vagrant's lost tooth." He smiled broadly. "You find all kinds of things at the zoo."

"Jeez Mary-Shane, it's not anything you did or said, but I kind of got the idea you were a bit frosty with him," Perry said when they were outside walking on the zoo grounds.

"You were just imagining things, Perr'. I was wondering, though, why you didn't pump him some more for a crisp story angle."

"Mary-Shane, there's no logical connection between the zoo and this guy's death. We're a family paper, not a tabloid."

"I'm sorry, Perry, I'm just trying to be gung ho here on my first and probably last day as temporary acting assistant police reporter."

"A little less picante please."

"Come on, I'll buy you a root beer at the souvenir shop."

Perry wiped his forehead in the noonday heat. Overhead, the silvery C-130 was doing slow circles over San Tomas Peninsula. "What do you suppose he's doing?" Perry said watching the plane.

She shrugged. "Probably just playing in the sunshine." They walked across the zoo grounds. "Don't you just love this?" "Let's take a short cut," Perry said. "I'll phone in a short piece to make the late afternoon edition." Perry led her along a narrow, grass-choked path hidden in the swarmy shade of ancient magnolia trees. Suddenly she felt again the numb feeling she'd felt outside the zoo. She put her hand to her forehead. Oh no, not again!

"Mary-Shane, what's the matter?"

"I- I'll be all right. It's just--the heat, maybe."

"I hope so." Perry took her elbow and gently guided her along. Her mouth felt dry and her heart beat rapidly. The trees were swarmy with insects. Shade hung in the tree limbs like molasses. They came to an odd little structure. Its roof was of mission tile, pagoda-curved at the edges. On the northward side was a three-foot relief of the sun, rendered as a dreamy dimpled face stippled with moss. The eyes seemed closed. Its smile was at once promising and ominous. Its solar rays were wiggly. The path ran in a broad circle around the Pagoda. There were several benches in the inner edge of the circle.

"Here," Perry said, "sit down."

"Thanks." She was taking quick, shallow breaths. Her skin felt cool, but was wet with perspiration.

"I'll go get you a soda. Stay here."

"No--" she grasped his sleeve.

"It's just a hundred feet away on the main drag," Perry said. "Some ice water maybe and then off to see the zoo nurse, huh?"

Before she could stop him he was gone. She clasped her hands between her knees and sat back. Startled, she leaned forward. propelled by a breeze from the shady canyons, a hot dry wind raked her eyes. There, was there someone standing in the smoky shade just past the utility house? She rubbed her eyes and stared. Frank! No, that's crazy. Frank is dead. Stop it, Mary-Shane. Maybe I need to see my shrink again. When she looked again, the figure was gone, replaced by wavering round leaves.

Something brushed by her leg and she started together, hands upraised, hair standing on edge, drawing in a breath as sharp as an inward scream.

"Sorry to disturb you, Miss." A heavyset, middle-aged black grounds keeper in overalls shifted a curved pipe from one corner of this mouth to the other. He wore leather work gloves and carried a whisk broom and dust scoop, both on long handles to prevent stooping. The pipe smelled woodsy. The Dark Feeling left her as abruptly as it had come over her.

"Oh, please, don't mind me," Mary-Shane said happily. "I was just staring.. at the.."

"That there's an interesting lookin' building, ain't it?" His brush whisked right and left, and the dust scoop jumped like a small dog at his feet, snapping up the flying dust and debris. Whisk, whisk, went the brush; Snap, snap went the dust scoop as if to nip at his ankles.

"That's a utility shed?"

"Yes ma'am. That there's the old central power and gas and water house. They shut it down to put in a whole new power line from the city. That shed there is going to be just a backup. Got a diesel generator in there in case the power goes down. Sorry I disturbed you."

"I'm kind of glad you did, Mr.--"

"Washington. J. W. Washington." He pulled off a dirty glove and shook her hand. His hand was dry and heavy, reassuring somehow, with thick smooth fingers and a fine little gold ring.

"Mary-Shane MacLemore," she said, rising. She couldn't resist: "Not Roger Washington?"

He grinned. "My uncle." Whisk, whisk, he went; Snap, snap went the dust scoop. "You be good now, hear?"

"Oh I will, Mr. Washington. I swear I'll try."

He seemed to hear the sass in her voice and gave a knowing little gurgle of a laugh as his broad back receded along the walk.

She took a deep breath and sat down. One part of her was tempted to run and find Perry as fast as she could. But another part of her wanted to hang on, to stay, to find out just what it was about this day and this place and about herself. She had the deep, turbulent sense that someone or something was trying to communicate with her. And she had the more disturbing feeling that somehow she had changed. Perhaps because someone or something had somehow taken up residence in a dark and little-visited rear corridor of her mind.

"Mary-Shane!" Perry came running, holding a big cup in one hand and wet paper towels in the other. The dear!

"Thanks, Perry. I'm better now." She drank ice water while he held a cool towel to her forehead. "What men don't go through."

She did look back, on the way out. The sun on the pagoda was smiling to itself, perhaps filled with the taste and the memory of her fear. The eyes were still nearly closed, but in a manner that suggested they had been staring after her, and quickly shut when she turned to look.

Gilbert Burtongale stood inside the near-dark Pagoda and watched a blue glow reaching from the hidden places, under the oil tanks and engines, from the underground water tanks.

"Thank you," he whispered out loud to the unseeable demon-force growing under the ground and in his brain. He had always had something lurking in the back of his mind; every first-born male Burtongale did. The glow strengthened in the undefined darkness among tanks and equipment. Gilbert unlocked the Pagoda and pushed the door open a crack. He held his hand up and squinted at the sunlight. His breath caught. His heart missed a beat. She!

He peered out from his hiding place. Mary-Shane sat on a bench facing the Pagoda, not twenty feet away. Had she seen him? Was that why she had that pale, shocked look? Then some old blackie came along and talked with her. Now it was old darkies where years ago it had been Frank MacLemore. He longed to take her curls in his fingers and smell them deeply. She was a bad girl, wild, to run with Frank as she had. Why? when Gilbert had wealth, good family, everything. Once Frank had seen him looking at her, and one look told him what Frank told other men: Touch her, you die. Frank had been nobody to fool around with. Reluctantly, Gilbert had put her out of his mind. After the burglary and the murders in Chicago, Gilbert and Frank had parted ways; Frank had died; and Mary-Shane had gone to prison.

Oh, look at her now. She was not like other women. She was a thing of rare beauty. Look how her face lit up like a little sun as she laughed. Look how saucy that precious mouth was, how quick and bright those eyes. How her beautiful face caught the sun. How her knees tantalized from under the jeans skirt. How her firm thighs flattened slightly on the bench. He saw a flash of the blue mound of her panties...Another man came; another one of them! and Gilbert wanted to kill him. Gilbert, a card-carrying, weapon-bearing member of the master race, hated the scum who had taken over the country. It would not be long now. Once the ship had rebuilt itself, once the something was back in its Pilot seat! Either that or it would destroy the world. Either way, Gilbert would get what he wanted, and most importantly that was Her.

She rose, and Gilbert longed to touch the firmness of her naked legs, the exquisite perfection of her rear end, the gentle and feminine curve of her back. Hungrily, Gilbert watched the cocky gracefulness of her movements. I deserve her, he told himself. His gaze followed her naked calves past hanging boughs. And soon she would be his.