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  He nodded slowly, solemnly. "Yes," he said, "I think you do." And he withdrew a small, white, unsealed envelope from his shirt pocket. He studied the envelope quietly for a long moment, as if there was something holy in it. Finally, he passed the envelope to Janice. She took it. He said, "I sent the original of this letter on to Rachel's mother, right after the fire, but I made this copy, first." He paused briefly, then explained, "Rachel and Paul Griffin were special people, Mrs. McIntyre. They had special dreams. And when that fire happened, when they died, I told myself I had to have a small piece of those dreams. We didn't find much, pokin' through the ashes of the house, but that was one thing we did find." He paused; Janice hadn't yet opened the envelope. "Go ahead," he coaxed. "You said you wanted to know Rachel Griffin. Read that letter and you'll know her as well as anyone."

  She opened the envelope, withdrew the yellowed Xerox copy, unfolded it, spread it out on her lap. She read:

  Dear Mother,

  This will be my last letter before we see you again. We'll be leaving in two days. I'd like to explain everything to you here and now, sort of get it all off my chest. But, to be truthful, I don't believe I'll ever be able to understand it, let alone explain it.

  Are we running? Yes. That's a fair assessment, I'd say. I can't tell you precisely what we're running from; Paul's word for it is "ghosts," and I don't think I could do any better than that.

  The important thing, the necessary thing, for both of us, is that we are running. This is going to sound terribly melodramatic, Mother, and you're going to ask me about it when I see you, and I'm going to have to plead ignorance, but, if we don't run now, we won't be able to run later. I'm sure of that. This is a matter of survival.

  I want to ask you a favor. When we get back, when you see us again, please don't ask any pointed questions. You'll be burning to ask them, I know, and I'll be burning to answer, but, well, both of us, Paul and I, have a lot of questions to answer between ourselves first, and we've got a lot of time to make up for, a lot of things to put behind us.

  For now, let me assure you that we are both well, though a little tired—emotionally—and that unless something unexpected happens we should see you within the week. Paul sends his love. And so do I.

  Rachel

  Janice found that her hands were shaking, that her eyes were watering again. The letter said so much, and it said so very little. It showed her Rachel's torment, and something of her hopes, and her humanness, and desperation.

  Janice's gaze returned automatically to those cryptic phrases—"The important thing, the necessary thing, for both of us, is that we are running." . . . "This is a matter of survival." And to the shrill irony of that one word, "ghosts."

  She reread the entire letter once. And again. And again. At last, she knew what Rachel had been telling her—what Rachel was trying to tell her even now.

  "I'd like to be alone, Mr. Marsh," Janice said. She handed the letter and envelope back to him.

  "Yes," Marsh answered quickly. "I understand." He stood, left the room. Janice listened as he got his coat from the coat tree near the door, listened as he put it on, and opened the front door.

  "Mrs. McIntyre?" he called.

  "Yes?"

  "I've seen her, too," he said. And he left the house.

  From The Penn Yann Post Gazette, November 15:

  SEARCH HALTED FOR MISSING GRANADA BOY

  The search for eleven-year-old Robin Graham, missing since November 4 from his home at 26 Morningside Way, Granada, has been called off, according to Penn Yann Police Chief John Hastings. "We have, with the aid of the National Guard, local, and state police, engaged in the most thorough and exhaustive search ever conducted in this county," Chief Hastings said. "And we must now, with deep regret, conclude that any further search would be futile." The case, however, Hastings continues, is "far from closed. It is entirely possible that Robin was picked up by a passing stranger, kidnapped, or even that he simply ran away from home and may soon show up again. No possibility is being left unexamined, and it is conceivable that, in time, this case will come to a happy conclusion."

  The $5,000 reward for information leading to Robin's safe return has been increased, says Hastings, to $15,000. All leads will, upon request, be kept strictly confidential.

  Chapter 22

  November 22

  The creature had fallen seventy feet to the bare earth from the upper branches of an aged honey locust. The creature had climbed the honey locust for no other reason than it could climb it; and it had fallen because it knew nothing about old trees and decayed branches. It knew only about itself—what pain was, and what cold was—and how to protect itself from the cold—and it knew about heat, and hunger, and about desire. It knew what the earth said it must know.

  The creature did not know it was dying. Since its birth only weeks before, it had killed, and it had seen death, and it had experienced life. But it could not give names or meanings to anything—its brain was not set up for clutter.

  The fall from the honey locust—which would not have been fatal had the creature jumped instead of fallen wildly out of control—had broken the creature's back. One lower rib, as well, had pierced its heart. And so it was dying. Very painfully and slowly.

  Its eyes followed the subtly changing patterns of light and shadow all around. That changing pattern was what it had first seen, weeks before, when the earth was done giving it life.

  The creature could not smile. If it were human, it might. But it wasn't. So, blankly, it watched the changing patterns of fight and shadow; it experienced the pain. And, in time, life stopped within it.

  Forever.

  The new creature pushed itself up to a half-sitting position. It stood. It felt the soft creepers of the hard wind that was pushing the tops of the trees about; it heard the busy, quick noises of squirrels and rabbits and raccoons, and a thousand others, making ready for the winter. It saw the changing patterns of light and shadow all around.

  And it felt its muscles moving gracefully over its bones; the air swelling its lungs.

  The others present at the birth touched and prodded the creature. Wonderingly. Because the creature was alive, and warm. As they were. And because they could see. And hear. And taste. And smell. And also touch.

  Because they had sprung from the earth. And were alive.

  Lorraine Graham thought she recognized the man, though, in her Valium-induced fog, she wasn't sure. "Yes?" she said, being certain to keep the door open only a couple inches.

  "Hi," the man said. "I'm Norm Gellis. I live in back of you." He nodded to indicate his house.

  "Hello, Mr. Gellis."

  "Hi," he said again, obviously nervous. "I thought we could have a talk, Mrs. Graham."

  "I don't know if I'm up to a talk, Mr. Gellis." She began to close the door.

  "It's about your son, Mrs. Graham."

  The door was open only a crack; Lorraine held it there. "My son is gone," she said.

  "Why? Because they couldn't find him? I think he's still alive, Mrs. Graham."

  "Why would you think that, Mr. Gellis?"

  "Why would you say he's dead?"

  "I didn't say that. I said he was gone."

  "Which is my point exactly, Mrs. Graham—"

  "He's been swallowed up, Mr. Gellis. This place just . . . swallowed him up." Her tone was one of resignation; her voice cracked as she spoke. "It'll swallow us all up, Mr. Gellis. You, me, everybody—"

  "I got a theory, Mrs. Graham—"

  "He was a good boy, Mr. Gellis. Not a saint. But a pretty good boy. And he was very bright."

  "You see, Mrs. Graham, the country kids got this gang—sorta like Hell's Angels, only without the motorcycles—"

  "Too bright, really." Her mood had become contemplative. "That's why he was swallowed up. Because he wasn't about to stay close to home with me, as he should have—"

  "And these kids, this gang of kids, these country kids, Mrs. Graham, are set to terrorize the whole community—"

>   "My husband was swallowed up, too."

  "And it's up to each and every one of us to fight them, Mrs. Graham. These are our homes, Mrs. Graham." He had practiced this speech and, listening to himself now, he thought it sounded good. "It's where our children will grow tall." He wondered, briefly, if that was inappropriate; he went on, "It's a place we must protect—"

  "Stan was swallowed up by a heart attack, Mr. Gellis. My mother was swallowed up by a stroke. It's the same sort of thing. It has to do with the blood. It all has to do with the blood." And she slowly closed the door. "Goodbye, Mr. Gellis," she said, when the door was closed and she was making her way into the living room.

  Robert Graham wished the kid in the seat behind him would shut up. He wished Timmy Meade and Sam Wentis hadn't stayed after school to play soccer. He wished the bus driver would slow down, and he wished he didn't have an erection (why in hell did he always get an erection just before he got off the bus?); and that he didn't have to go home and watch his mother wander around the house like some freakin' zombie. But most of all, he wished his brother was in the seat beside him, jabbing him in the ribs, making an ass of himself, being a general pain in the butt. But here, anyway. With him. In the bus. Not out there. Lost. In the cold!

  And he wished he could stop crying. "You cryin', Robert?!" he heard, followed by a burst of giggling. "Don't cry, Robert."

  "You shut up," Robert said.

  "What'd you say, Robert? I can't hear you."

  Robert turned his head very slowly and stiffly. The boy behind him was two years older and twenty pounds heavier and he was grinning a challenge.

  Robert felt the anger welling up inside him, felt his eyes narrow and his mouth tighten, felt his hands clench into fists. He hissed, "You shut up or I'll knock your fuckin' teeth outa your fuckin' ugly head!"

  The older boy's grin froze. Then, slowly, it dissipated. "Okay," the boy said, his voice trembling slightly. "Okay, don't get all bent outa shape!"

  Robert turned his head back. The anger was still with him. It was, in fact, building.

  The bus driver, a man nicknamed Hog (because he looked something like a hog), glanced at the speedometer; it read 50. He thought about slowing down, then decided his driving skills were more than a match for Reynolds Road, narrow as it was, and rough as it was. (A year, he remembered; everyone said the road would be widened and paved in a year. In the meantime, it was sure going to be a hell of a winter.)

  He checked the rearview mirror. Jesus H. Christ! The Graham kid was crying again. Damn, they just didn't build kids the way they used to. Of course, take the kid away from his mother and he'd straighten around in no time; better a boy had a father and no mother than the other fucking way around.

  He looked back at the road:

  Jesus Damn! he thought frantically. I already been through this turn, ain't I?

  And he hit the brake pedal hard; the brakes caught; the bus started sliding to the left, off the road.

  Get your foot off the brake, asshole! he thought then. You get your license from a Sears Catalogue? And he found that panic had riveted his foot to the pedal.

  The bus shimmied to the right, as if doing a huge, awkward two-step. The front sideswiped an oak just off the road, at the edge of an embankment halfway through the turn.

  Hog screamed abruptly.

  The back of the bus swung around 180 degrees and, for a split second, the bus hung motionless at the edge of the road. Then it flipped once and slid, on its side, down the embankment. It stopped within moments, held in place by the front edges of a small stand of white birch trees.

  Hog lay with his belly on the steering wheel, his face mashed against the side window. He was dimly aware that he was urinating spontaneously and he hoped the kids in the bus couldn't see that. "Okay," he grunted, though his voice was barely audible, even to himself, "everyone stays calm, right?—'cuz everything's gonna be A-okay if we just—"And he died.

  Trudy Wentis made an effort to look as if she were actually thinking over what Janice McIntyre had just told her, that she hadn't merely rejected it out of hand. She wondered how convincing she was. Janice pursed her lips and shook her head slowly—Trudy realized she hadn't been very successful at all. "Damn!" she said. "I'm sorry."

  "Me, too," Janice said. She shook her head more quickly and smiled a small, self-condemning smile. "I really didn't expect you to accept any of that, but it was good to let it come out."

  They were in Janice's living room, Janice in a huge, oval-backed, brown wicker chair —she looked very small in it—and Trudy across from her on a dark, oriental-print love seat. Trudy leaned forward in the love seat and said, as if repeating a confidence, "And you've already asked Miles about leaving Granada?"

  "Yes, I have. He says, 'Let's wait and see,' and that's fair enough. I mean, what reasons can I give him?—'Hey, Miles, there's this ghost that's trying to tell us to leave'?" She harrumphed. "I can't say that."

  "Then what did you tell him?"

  Janice waved at the air as if waving away a bothersome insect. "I don't know—something about being pregnant and maybe it'd be better if we lived closer to the city."

  "That's plausible, anyway."

  "More plausible than a ghost in the breakfast nook, you mean?"

  Trudy sat back in the love seat. "Yes," she said without hesitation. "More plausible than that." The doorbell rang.

  Janice pushed herself out of the big, wicker chair; she looked Trudy squarely in the eye. "You're a good friend," she said. "You don't lie to me. I like that."

  "I try not to lie to anybody, Janice."

  Robert Graham sat down hard on the embankment and studied the dark underside of the overturned bus for a long while. Jees, he thought, what is all that stuff? He knew, from mechanics class, what the transmission was, and the drive shaft, and the muffler and tailpipe. But there was so much other stuff, too—wires and springs and little iron wheels. What was it all for?

  He looked about. To his right, the embankment gave way to gnarled underbrush. To his left, erosion had begun—the result of poor drainage from the road bed—and there were twenty yards or so of bare, red soil. Close to him, the heavy, sliding bus had gouged into the dark brown clay just inches beneath.

  He shivered and, for the first time, wondered how, exactly, he'd gotten out of the bus, and what he was doing here, in back of it. He had a fleeting glimpse of kicking the emergency window open and pulling himself out. That glimpse showed him Hog's body, as well, and the folded-up body of the smart-assed kid behind him. And he thought, obliquely, that they were both probably dead, though not the little girl in front, he realized. Because he could hear her crying even now.

  The "right thing" (a phrase, he remembered wistfully, that his mother had often used) would probably be to go back inside the bus and help that poor little girl somehow. Pull her out the same window he'd come out of, maybe. Or make sure she was comfortable. Not too badly hurt. Or, if she was hurt, to soothe her. That would be the "right thing."

  He stood. "Hey, little girl in the bus," he called, hands cupped around his mouth. "Hey, little girl there in the bus!"

  He heard her crying slowly stop. She called back, "My name is Loretta!" as if being called "little girl" offended her.

  "Yeah, Loretta. Are you hurt bad?"

  Silence.

  "Loretta, I said are you hurt bad?"

  "No. I don't know. I cut my finger on something. On the seat, I think. I cut my finger on the seat."

  "Is your finger bleeding?"

  Silence again.

  "I said is your finger bleeding, Loretta?"

  "I don't know. You think I wanta look at it?"

  "Jesus!" Robert whispered. "Loretta?" he called.

  "I'm going away now. I'm going to go and find Robin." He started around the front of the bus, through the twenty-yard slice of erosion.

  Loretta called shrilly, "Who's Robin?"

  Robert called back, "He's my brother," and his tone lowered, became smooth and conversational. "My tw
in brother." He smiled. "Yeah. I'm gonna find him." He called. "I won't be a minute. You stay there, Loretta."

  "Don't go away," Loretta pleaded. "Oh, please don't go away! There's something wrong with the bus driver. What's wrong with the bus driver? Oh please don't go away!"

  Robert made his way quickly around the front of the bus, his arms high to balance himself on the eroded embankment.

  "And so," Norm Gellis explained; he had seated himself next to Trudy Wentis on the love seat. "My theory is—there's a gang. A gang of country kids. And these kids"—his head bobbed as he talked, caught up as he was in what he was saying, and his wide-eyed gaze flitted from Trudy to Janice—"have got this initiation. Like an initiation in school. And a part of this initiation is to terrorize us. All of us."

  "In what way?" Janice asked.

  "Ha!" he exclaimed, and he jabbed at the air with his forefinger for emphasis, "that's where they've got us, because, up till they snatched the Graham kid all they did was diddly-shit stuff—pardon my French. You know, runnin' 'round naked, tryin' to scare the daylights outa people. Diddly-shit stuff. But when they snatched the Graham kid, hell, that was a declaration of war! No doubt about it!"

  "You think the Graham boy was kidnapped, Mr. Gellis?" Trudy asked, turning her head slightly to hide her flickering, nervous smile. "Why would someone kidnap him?"

  Norm Gellis looked as if the question had taken him by surprise. "Hey," he said, "you think I should know? You think I can get inside these kids' heads?" He paused and looked from Janice to Trudy. "Huh?" he went on. Both women stayed quiet. He was vaguely aware that they both seemed very ill at ease. He continued, "I'll tell ya—I was a security agent at a kids' detention home for twenty-five years before I retired." Which was partially true; he had been a security agent for six months, many years before, until being fired; cruelty was alleged, but not proven. "And I seen all kindsa kids—kids that'd stab you in the back for your last quarter, and I could never figure out one of 'em. Not a one. And you want me to get inside the heads of these kids around here?! Fat chance. You go and try. All I'm doin' is sounding the alarm, that's all—just sounding the alarm!"