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had dodged his own run-in with fatal shock, at least so far. But lying under the crush of wreckage and running down Haley's list of symptoms, he was three-fourths of the way there. He stil remembered Mama had been named Beatrice Anne.
    The torn hand was slipping off the broken tip of lumber. A drop of blood hit his cheek. George gritted his loose teeth and flipped the two-by-four onto his chest. He pushed with his stump of a forearm until one end of the board was under the joist that had his left arm pinned.
    He tried not to look at his ruined wrist. Blood ran down the underside of his arm. If he didn't get a tourni-quet on it soon—
    "Don't wait for that weed-brained Haley to swoop down in his Huey, Georgie-Boy. Some things, a man's gotta do for hisself. And a fixer-upper like you, some-body who's a real handyman—course, you're only half as handy as you used to be, ain't you?"
    George wanted to scream at Old Leatherneck to shut up and go away. But George needed him, needed that taunting inner voice as badly as ever. Walking the lonely roads and horse trails of the Korban estate, he'd taken what companionship he could find. Sure, some of the folks down at Stony Hampton's cafe whispered about spooks and such around the manor, but after Nam, George figured the scariest spooks were the kinds that sent their sons into battle.
    So when he'd seen the flicker of pale movement in-side the shed, he hadn't given the whispers much of a thought. He'd figured it was a possum or maybe a screech owl. Nothing that would have caused much damage. But George was paid to keep the place up and the critters out, or, as Miss Mamie said, "Just the way things were when Ephram was still lord and master here." So George had lifted the old metal latch and pushed open the creaking door, hoping that any snakes were scared away by the noise.
    "But it wasn't no possum, nor no screech owl, was it?" whispered Old Leatherneck. George's eyes popped open. He must have drifted off. That was another one of Haley's signs. The two-by-four across his chest rose and fell with his shallow breathing. The sun had slipped low, the dark angles of shadows sharp and thick in the carnage.
    Fear gave him a burst of energy, and he levered the two-by-four. His stub of a wrist screamed in fire-juice red.
    "Hear that? Wasn't no possum, was it, Georgie?"
    Now he wished the old bastard would shut up. He needed to focus, get the job done in a hurry, he didn't need—
    "Might be sssnakes."
    Or it might be—
    — the long white slithery shadow —
    —whatever trick his eyes had played on him as he'd stepped inside the shed. Because if a fellow couldn't trust his own eyes, his days as a to-the-sixteenth-inch handyman were numbered. But right now, all that mat-tered was—
    — that slippery shadow that you could see right through —
    —the next push, prying that ceiling joist off his left arm. His chest erupted in hot blue sparks of pain, hell-blazer blue, a blue so intense it was almost white. But the joist gave a little groan and inched upward, awak-ening the nailed nerves in his biceps.
    "She's moving, soldier! She's a-moving! And the pain ain't nothing, is it? Hell, we been through boo-koos of this kind of hurt. This is like a pansy-assed waltz through the daisies." A waltz. The long white shadow had been doing a waltz. Like a worn linen curtain blowing in the wind, only...
    "Sure wasn't no screech owl's face, Georgie-Boy."
    The shadow had a human face.
    George gurgled and the spit trickled down his cheek. He pried again and the joist lifted another cruel and precious inch. New colors of pain came, pus yellow, electric green, screaming violet, crazed ribbons of agony. A big section of the roof quivered-and the am-putated hand worked free of its wooden skewer, fell and bounced off his forehead and away.
    But George barely noticed, because he was back in the tunnel, riding the miners' rails. And he was round-ing that slow curve into darkness, that final rum away from the bothers