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tap it with a hammer. Took me less than fifteen minutes to find it.”
    To Harst, the Assistant Chief Deputy seemed to be babbling with excitement, with greed . Harst gently laid Jack on the floor. As Marty turned to say more, Harst reached out, seized his shoulder, and flung him sideways. Plucked his feet right off the floor, sent him tumbling over and over, punishing his knees and elbows on the concrete.
    “SHUT YOUR FUCKING PIE-HOLE! SHUT IT!”
    As stunned by the strength of the doctor’s voice as he was by the strength of his arms, Marty gaped up from the floor. The old man towered trembling over him. “You smug little snot-nose, I read you like a book. You think your time is coming and mine is over. Maybe that’s true, maybe it’s not. But what you have no conception of, and what you will grasp, is the awe, is the reverence that you owe this man. This is a great man who has faced a Reality that you would shit your pants to face. From this moment, as long as you are in his presence, you will say absolutely nothing. You will humbly, mutely do your work like the acolyte, the altar boy you are, or I will snap your spine.” Harst’s voice had grown almost quiet. He pointed at the jack-hammer.
    Marty rose and obeyed. He had his ankle-rig, a snub-nose .38, and a reflexive voice in him said cap the old motherfucker and send him down after Jack … but Harst’s power had reminded Marty that he was working towards a kind of miracle here and that the old man was its only surviving gatekeeper. Marty’s time was coming— he had provided enough brown victims to Jack Fox to pay his way, but until that way was opened, he must walk the line.
    The jack-hammer’s hysterical clatter filled the great chamber— how could the whole town not hear it?— but almost at once, deep cracks branched from the bit. He probed them here and there, and a shard of concrete vanished into underlying blackness. He circled the hole and larger chunks sank away… .
    He killed the compressor. The floodlight fell through the ragged aperture and down the dank throat of a rocky fissure in the earth. A cold fetor of subterranean water welled up from it. He heard Harst, behind him, unzipping the body-bag, and stepped aside.
    The old man approached the brink, Jack Fox’s nude corpse cradled in his arms. The ragged-crowned head with its addled eyes and blown-in mouth rested against the Doctor’s shoulder. Harst made as if to speak, but only a noise of strangled weeping came out of him. He kissed Jack’s broken brow, knelt, and eased him head-first down the fissure.
    Jack slid down… and got jammed in the earth just at the limit of the light’s reach. A whisper seemed to rise from the narrow chasm. Jack’s head turned, or sagged, his averted eye glinting as if he glanced below. The earth made a slick sound of acceptance and Jack Fox slithered down and out of sight.

VI
    The sun set as Karen drove back up to the house, with a lidded jar of apricot brandy on the seat beside her. Out her open window, she declaimed, “How quickly the shadows gathered between the trees of the vast Foxxe estate! Soon the crickets’ song would start to rise, leaking up here and there at first, like some strange subterranean gas, till the sound of night would be everywhere, chirring, chirring… .”
    Karen laughed, delighted with her eloquence, her anesthesia. She parked at the side of the house, got out and looked up at it. The smooth eroded siding was, as the light turned violet, as expressive as wrinkled skin. And how wonderful to see it through glass like this, through the thick membrane of brandy. There was pain in every eave and molding, there was unbearable defeat in the gable-darkened window of Mom’s sewing room up there… but Karen could laugh! She could shake her fist at it and mock it in the prose of a bodice-ripper.
    Still, once inside, she felt her buoyancy colliding with the weight of all the dark rooms around her, all the years they held. So she went