DOUGLAS CLEGG

GOAT DANCE

PROLOGUE

WHAT KIND OF SMOKE

ARE YOU?

News item from The Westbridge County (Va.) Sentinel, January 3, 1985:

THE LITTLE GIRL WHO CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD

Her name is Theodora Amory, her friends call her Teddy, and the doctors at the Westbridge Medical Center are calling her a modern-day miracle.

Teddy, who is all of 7 years old, was ice skating with her older brother, Jake, late yesterday afternoon on Clear Lake, when the ice gave way beneath her. Teddy went through the ice, while her brother struggled in vain to reach her. Several Pontefract Preparatory School students witnessed the accident from the football field and went out onto the ice, forming a human chain to try and aid in Jake Amory's rescue attempts of his sister. But it was Teddy's own father, Riland "Riley" Amory, who arrived shortly upon the scene and dove into the icy water to bring the little girl out of the freezing water just as an emergency unit arrived.

According to Mr. Amory, his daughter was beneath the water's surface for the better part of forty minutes. "But she's an Amory, and her mama's a Houston," he is reported to have told one of the paramedics, "and that means, she'll come through." Teddy was presumed dead by many of the witnesses, but after she'd been covered in warm towels and laid in the back of the ambulance, Mr. Amory administered some good old mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and within seconds, she was breathing again.

Upon Teddy Amory's arrival at Westbridge Medical, Dr. Walter Scott told Mr. Amory, "There's nothing wrong with this little girl. What's she doing in Emergency?"

Teddy, who will remain at the medical center for observation until Tuesday, told the Sentinel, "It was kind of scary and real cold. You know, the kind of scary that gets inside you? I guess I drank a lot of water, too, and my mommy says it's good for you. Lots of water. Maybe scary's good for you, too. Because I guess I knew it would be okay. My daddy says it's in my blood. And maybe it is."

Her father, Riley, Director of Buildings and Grounds at the Pontefract School, added, "My little baby's something else, ain't she?"

Obituary from The Westbridge County (Va.) Sentinel, August 27, 1986:

RILAND "RILEY" AMORY

PONTEFRACT - Riland "Riley" Amory died August 21 in Pontefract.

A lifetime resident of Westbridge County, Riley was Director of Buildings and Grounds at the Pontefract Preparatory School for Boys.

He is survived by his wife, Odessa Houston Amory, and two children, Jacob and Theodora.

Services were held at Gethsemane Baptist Church on August 26.

But what the obituary didn't say:

A man by the name of Riley Amory, a family man, a man who loved his work, a man who once upon a time took his wife to the Gethsemane Baptist Annual Potluck Supper, took his son skeet shooting, in other words, a regular guy; this man found a clearing on a hillside a few miles outside his hometown. He put a shotgun into his mouth, stroking the barrel lightly against his tonsils, savoring mat rusty coldness as the last thing he would ever feel. He shut his eyes and sent out a prayer for his family and squeezed the trigger.

If you could've been there to ask him, before he did it, he might've told you about the funny smell he noticed in the air. A smell that meant for most folks sweat, lakewater, dying fish, and the end of summer, but which for him was a terrible, sweet smell. One that he'd inhaled one winter with a couple of friends. It was a smell that had gotten him high that night, and he'd never felt that young or strong since. That night when all hell broke loose.

Riley might also tell you that one of those friends had come back. That friend was talking to him in his dreams, and recently, when he was awake, too. But always late at night.

That friend told Riley about his daughter.

The power she wielded.

What had crawled inside her underwater.

Riley's little girl.

Teddy.

Something inside her, the thing that was causing her epilepsy, as well as her communion.

But on that lone hillside there was no one for Riley Amory to tell all this to. The blast from his gun was probably not even heard - there was no one within a three-mile radius to listen for it. The last thing Riley saw were some sparrows in the oak tree that he leaned against as he squeezed that trigger.

In the next second, the birds would fly out of the oak's branches into the fair morning air.

PART ONE

DISTURBANCES

IN THE FIELD

Can these bones live?

- Ezekiel 37:3

CHAPTER ONE

BONES

December 2, 1986

1.

Something snapped inside Jake Amory that morning. He felt his brain flexing, cracking like a whip. Driving him on. He knew that it was all building to this night, this one night. All the digging, all the bones, all the shit he'd been putting up with all his life.

He stepped up onto the front porch of his mother's house. It was three A.M., his usual hour of arrival. Jake might've joked that he still managed to get his eight hours sleep a night because he always slept straight until noon. But he didn't joke about too many things and he didn't talk to too many people. And lately he had not been getting more than three hours sleep a night.

Jake was swinging a gas can in his left hand. The weight of the can felt good to him, and he liked the way the gas sloshed around inside it, splashing him like a light rain. They'd told him no fire, but he figured that he could do it his way, and if it worked that would be all that mattered. The muscles in his left arm ached and even that felt good. He set the can down on the splintery gray boards of the porch and fumbled in his pockets for his housekeys. As he pulled the keychain out of the back pocket of his jeans, he felt the heat rising in his hand. Like friction against blisters, the keychain burned and froze his palm at the same time.

And man, it hurts so good. Jake grinned.

It was his good luck charm that caused the weird glowing in his hand. He clutched his fist about it. The keys dangled out from the opening between his thumb and forefinger. It seemed to wriggle in his fist like a worm.

Jake relaxed his fist. He looked down at the thing in his hand.

The human-bone charm possessed a glowworm-like phosphorescence. Just as it had the day Teddy almost drowned two years before (did drown, my man, and something else crawled inside her and came back just like the Creature From The Black Lagoon). That day that Jake opened Teddy's fist while his father bent over her, and there was the bone. How it had shone then like a beacon in the darkness of his life. It was just a fragment of a bone, maybe a toebone, Jake didn't know; but he did know that it gave him power. He was invincible. And he knew that he would always keep that bone with him. He drilled a small hole at its thickest edge and looped his keychain through it.

And he was never separated from it.

Oh, de toebone connected to de footbone, and de footbone connected to de - what the hell was it connected to, anyway? He jingled the keys in his hand.

Jake sought out the housekey, but tried the doorknob first. If his mother had been drinking, she would have left the front door open. She was always doing stupid things like that when she hit the bottle. When he nudged the door with the back of his hand it slid open as if it were greased. Inviting him in. Jake wanted to laugh out loud; this was turning into quite an amusing morning.

What's it matter? Ma's gonna say. No Manson family living in the woods. Them schoolboys got a hell of a lot more money and nice things than us. And if somebody wants to break in, well, god help 'em if they can find anything worth taking, and no lock's been invented's gonna keep 'em out. That's just what she's gonna say.

Why lock your door in a town like this?

Who was even going to hear you scream?

Jake rarely laughed these days, but standing on his front porch like this, gas can at his feet, door open, he wanted to break out in the biggest hyena cackle he had in him. Instead, he blew an imaginary feather out from between the gap in his front teeth: got to stay in control, man, chill out. But he couldn't help thinking his ma shouldn't do that - shouldn't forget to lock her doors. It was downright dangerous. Anybody could just walk right in. Anybody. Murderer. Rapist. Thief.

Even her own son on a crazy winter morning after he'd spent the past three nights camping out in the field. Just doing some fieldwork, Ma, that's all. Talking with some old friends, if you know what I mean. De armbone connected to de shoulderbone. Having heart-to-hearts with the dead. The dead, he considered, over and over, awestruck that he himself had been chosen by them, the beyond, the out there. The what-will-come. Picked me. Jake.

Jake Amory was six feet tall, just turned sixteen, and skinny. He was skinny by default: he'd never found any food he particularly liked. He combed his hair back away from his forehead, greasing the thick red strands with Brylcreme where it fell over his ears. He liked his ears. They were pointy. Devil ears, his ma called them, and he took this as an indication of his being special. Marked. Born to some purpose.

And this was it.

He covered his bloodshot, yellowish eyes with sunglasses. Jake had become sensitive to light this winter, and just that thin shaft of lamplight sketched across the porch hurt his eyes. His shades were the coolest things going, the kind with mirrors so that any jerk looking at you only sees himself reflected back.

Jake knew how intimidating that could be. To only see yourself everytime you look at somebody.

It was like he'd told his girlfriend the other night when she met him at the cemetery. They were making out on top of a flat gravestone. It was freezing but it felt kind of good, the cold stone against his back. "You want to become me," he told her, and she looked at him like he was crazy, "I can see it, inside you, like The Man With The X-Ray Eyes." But he knew that Maggie wasn't listening. Nobody listened yet, but they would. Not just another pretty face, oh-ho, my friends, not just another pretty face. I am the herald of the Pocket Lips, dig?

They'd all listen, and very soon. Those assholes at that snotfaced prep school, too. Just because his pa had been some Bozo at Buildings and Grounds the tuition was free and Jake was forced to go to that private zoo called Pontefract Prep. PeePee.

But Jake Amory was not part of that prep school bullshit. Jake was a townie and proud of it, a rebel when you came right down to it. Not a backwoodsman, either, like you, Pa, although he respected the hell out of his old man for what he'd done. It was the best thing his father could've done given the way things were.

Jake was made of sterner stuff. Sure, everything was a slimy joke in this Virginia backwater, but Jake knew how to fix that. Oh, yes. The end of the world is coming, the Apocalypse, what Teddy called the Pocket Lips. It's all coming, Soon to a Theater Near You! And when that shining moment arrived, Jake Amory intended to be wired for sound. He could feel it. Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones.

All those preppies with their pretty boy smiles and shiny hair and Daddy's credit cards. Nasal southern accents. Jake could only stomach so much of those squirrels at school before he felt like puking his guts out all over them.

And that night, lying on the cold gravestone with Maggie McBean, he'd told her, "I don't just hate them, babe, you know, Ma, Teddy, the fucking school, prepdipshits. Hate ain't enough. I want them destroyed. Kiss 'em with my Pocket Lips." He dreamed of the sky raining fire and snowing fallout down on Pontefract. Anything would've been better than the way things were: dull, stagnant as a swamp, like a sewer. "They're all dead now, only nobody told 'em." Jake grunted as he dry-humped Maggie against the stone. As he continued his tirade against the town, punctuated by heavy breathing, Maggie gave him that look. The look that meant she knew he'd been dusting or speeding or snorting. That look meant she was scared of him, what he might do.

Jake loved that look.

But these days he was into heavier junk than you could get if you hopped a bus to Richmond once a month. Junk made him think more clearly, and it pushed his soul to the limit. It made him potent, focused him. Like a magnifying glass on an ant, frying that sucker to a crisp at high noon. But he didn't need the kind of junk you bought from some two-bit pusher in an alley. Now he had dem bones dem bones dem dry bones.

Jake wiped his nose as he ground his crotch into Maggie's. "It's gonna be judgment day, Mags, and they're gonna see. Who they are."

He squeezed Maggie's right breast through her Coors sweatshirt.

"Ow!" she cried out and slapped him, leaving a crimson handprint across his pale face. "Jeez, Jake, that hurt!"

He didn't even feel the slap. "You know I could do it to you right here, Mags. I did it to a stiff this morning, and I could do it to you, too. If you lie real still I can pretend that you're dead, too."

"You're gross, Jake, stop it, will ya?"

He continued bucking his denimed hips into her corduroyed thighs. "You know what this town is, babe? It's a scraping. A scraping from the asshole of hell." And Jake thought, what a beautiful image, what a clear way of looking at things. It turned him on.

But now Jake Amory stood on the front porch of his mother's house at three AM. and heard the voices in his head. They were getting louder, more insistent, like hunters' drums driving the beast that was within him out into the front hall light.

The voices seemed to be just under the skin of the world. He felt like if he reached out and scratched the surface of things with his dirty fingernails, beneath would be the veins and arteries and the yellow fat of the world.

Just like when you skin a rabbit.

You ever skin a little girl, son? The voices curdled into this one voice, buzzing around his head. Now Jake could almost see his pa standing in the half-light of the front hallway. His pa looked none the worse for having shot half his face off, because it was like a mask had been pulled off to reveal another face behind the one Jake had grown up with. A face that sizzled with red tendons stretched across a shattered yellow skull, and skin torn back to his ears as if a wild animal had eaten into it. Jake might've wondered how he could speak at all, given that he had no lower jaw. But there he stood, clear as day now, in his bib overalls that he wore to work, his hands tucked tidily in his pockets, acting like he was just giving Jake another talk on the birds and the bees. It ain't so hard a thing to do, you know. You just hang her upside down, heat yourself a good sharp blade. Your Boy Scout knife'll do. Then you start down at her ankle - it's real tender and thin there - and it's just like peeling potatoes. Only most potatoes don't scream, I guess, but it can't be helped. You got to ignore her screams. She's only tricking you. She's only after one thing and it's a blasted thing for a sister to want from her brother, you know, it, boy. But you always knew what she wanted from you, didn't you, boy? You was always a smart one. You know your shit, son, you ain't just another pretty face. You been kissed by the Pocket Lips. And now you just got to peel that skin off her so you can show the world what she really is.

Somekindamonster. Somekindamonster.

She ain't your sister and she ain't no little girl. She ain't human. Why, you know your real sister drowned in that lake two years ago and what that water sent you up was this monster in your sister's skin. But it's just skin, son, and you got to remove it. She'll scream, boy, but don't you pay her no never mind. 'Cause under that skin it's just laughing its nasty little head off at you. You know what it really wants from you, dontcha?

But his pa stopped speaking as Jake entered the house. We'll be waiting for you, Jake, and we will be waiting for the skin and the blood. We will be waiting for you, too, though, so don't fuck up. We don't take kindly to fuck ups. The image of his pa burned away reminded Jake of the time he was at the movies and one of the picture frames got stuck and burned and bubbled on the screen. That was how his pa went - he just bubbled and blistered until all Jake saw was the staircase behind him. The voices were also gone.

Jake climbed the stairs. His left arm ached from carrying the gas can, so he changed it over to his right hand. Gasoline sloshed across his wrist. When he reached the landing he set the can down. He was sweating.

Jake reached up to wipe his hand across his forehead, careful not to knock his sunglasses off. He coughed from the smell of gasoline. He rubbed his bone keychain but felt no heat. He was on his own.

2.

Jake's sister Teddy sat up in bed.

She thought she'd heard a noise in the hallway.

She'd been dreaming of gas stations, of having to use the "facilities," which her mother kept telling her was more polite than "I gotta go to the can, man." In the dream a stranger was driving her somewhere in his car. They pulled over at a gas station. She got out of the car and went toward the restroom. The gassy smell grew stronger. She thought she might faint.

Teddy knew that if she passed out she'd be drowning in that cold blue water again, that clutching water where that thing had touched her, tried to get inside her; she had been dying, she even had wanted to die in that water, it was so peaceful, but that thing had grabbed her, tried to pull her back. And she knew that the thing in the water had been bad. The way the gas station smell was bad.

Teddy, in her dream, did not faint. She went into the restroom. She was determined not to give in to that weak feeling. And even as the gas grew more intense and smothering when she opened one of the toilet stall doors, she felt all the more powerful for not giving in to that collapsing feeling inside her. No, she would not faint.

That was her dream. And this was also her dream: within the toilet stall of that gas station she knew she was safe. But just beyond its four walls she sensed its presence. The thing in the water. The thing that smelled of gas and swampy decay.

Teddy awoke from this dream just as she relieved herself in her pajamas.

Wet the bed.

Whenever she dreamed of going to the bathroom, she usually did. As her mother would say with a disappointed look, "It came to pass."

It came to pass, she imagined Mommy whispering in the darkness, and passing it draws near. The kiss of the Pocket Lips.

Teddy shuddered, but knew that it was her imagination speaking to her in the blackness. It was only her imagination that pressed against the side other face like her mother's lips kissing her goodnight.

Teddy was now wide awake. Her eyes began adjusting to the dark. She smelled something strange. Something besides the gas station smell and the odor from the damp yellow stain on her bed. She thought she smelled . . . something burning. But when she sniffed the air again, nothing.

Do dreams smell?

3.

Jake stood over his mother's bed and gazed curiously at the sleeping figure as if she were an alien. Through the purple darkness, Jake could see her dirty blond hair stuck greasily along her face with sweat, her flimsy nightgown barely covering her flabby body, her sagging breasts beneath the robe's sheer material, heaving with each snore, exhaling putrid air. He smelled the bourbon all around him. Drunk as a skunk, just like every night since Pa bit the big one. The sight and smell other nauseated him.

Then Jake heard his pa's voice rise like a gust of wind in his head. Her first, boy, and then the little monstergirl. But you be careful with that fire, hear? The voice came and went with Jake's own deep breathing.

Jake lifted the gas can and began pouring its contents around the edge of the sleeping woman's bed. Like warmed-up Karo syrup on a stack of pancakes.

Odessa Amory stirred in her sleep. Her eyes remained closed as she sniffed dreamily at the air.

Jake reached into his breast pocket for the book of matches. Boy Scout motto was Be Prepared. Even though Jake was kicked out of the Scouts when he was still a Tenderfoot for painting swastikas on gravestones, he still went along with it. He was always prepared.

His mother's head twitched as if in a spasm. She smelled the gasoline. She smelled him.

"Who's there?" she whispered, slurring her words so that it became "Whooshere?" like wind escaping from a balloon.

Jake flipped open the matchbook. His hands were trembling. He hadn't expected her to wake up, not if she was on one of her drunks. He expected her to be like one of the corpses he'd been digging up - to just lie there and be still. To allow him to get his job done right. Jake plucked a match from the book and struck it against a bedpost.

The match gave off a brief puff of smoke and a spark. It did not catch fire.

"Jakey? Zhat you?" his ma asked. "Whatshallthish?" She rubbed her eyes. When she turned onto her side, trying to sit up, a bottle of Virginia Gentleman rolled out from the bed and thumped to the floor.

Maybe if you were cold sober you'd figure it out, stupid bitch. Jake tossed the bad match down on the bed. "Shit," he hissed. He tore another match from the pack and struck it against the bedroom wall, but it bent in two and he dropped that one, also. "Goddamn it, sucker, light up!"

Odessa Amory sat bolt upright in bed. She clutched her hands to her breasts, holding her robe together. "Jake?" Fear curdled in her voice.

He gave no response.

"What are you - ishat you, Jakey?" Her voice was meek and pleading, and he knew that she wanted him to answer, yeah, Ma, just me, no Manson family in these woods, no boogeyman gonna jump out from under the bed, Ma, just your boy, and I got something here for you, too.

His ma began coughing violently, her smoker's hack.

Jake reached down to touch her face. He slid his fingers from her earlobe down her cheek to the tip of her nose. His fingers left a slimy gasoline trail.

"Jake," she whimpered, sounding like a thick sponge being squeezed of water.

Jake jerked his hand back. Made a fist. Brought it down in a razor-fine arc. Across the bridge of her nose. He kept his eyes closed. He did not want to think about what he was doing.

When Odessa yelped an image formed in Jake's mind: he saw a bristling rat with blood-red eyes lying on his ma's bed. And he knew that if he was smart, if he wanted to make it through this night, he must hold that image.

Jake could open his eyes now. It was safe.

He saw the rat. Blood spurting out of its snout. Its whiskers bristling as it gnashed its silver, dagger-like teeth. It shrieked in pain, its red eyes widening in feral terror. Dirty, dirty, filthy, the words flooded through Jake as he lifted the gas can over his head, you stuck your fucking whiskers in the wrong mousetrap, you dirty, dirty, and brought it down full force on the rat, oh god no Ma what am I . . .

The rat did not shriek a second time.

Jake hit the rat across its forehead three more times. Each time the can came down, more gas splashed out on the bed.

The rat lay still.

He took a few deep breaths. The gas smell was beginning to make him sick. He reached down and touched the rat's muzzle. He opened its mouth. He poured gasoline down its throat. The rat made some choking noises, spitting up as much gas as went down its throat, but continued to lie very still.

It was beginning to look less like a rat and more like something human. Something familiar. Jake turned away quickly. He went over to his ma's dresser and switched on the lamp. He would not look back at the rat. He was afraid it would start bubbling and melting, that it would pull off its mask. That it would no longer be a rat.

"Yeah," Jake mumbled, as if answering a call within his brain, "got to burn the rat, my man." He opened the top dresser drawer. There among scarves and earrings were a couple of packs of Merit cigarettes and a Bic lighter.

Jake smiled. He lifted the lighter carefully out of the drawer. "Just want to flick my Bic," he said.

Then he returned to that bed where the rat lay unconscious.

4.

Teddy was in the hallway when she saw Jake come staggering toward her. He held a can in his hand. Like her dream, he smelled of gas stations.

He set the can down on the hall carpet.

He did not say anything. She could not see his face clearly in the dim light.

"Something's burning," she said to the dark figure.

She peered beyond him to her mother's bedroom. The door was shut; smoke curled out from beneath it.

"Mommy!" Teddy squealed, "Jake!"

Jake stepped closer to her. He seemed to relax when she cried out, tired, but still able to smile compassionately for his sister. He opened his arms wide to her.

Teddy took a step backwards.

Jake moved forward swiftly and touched her shoulder. A blue spark ricocheted between them; Teddy jerked back as if she'd been hit with a rock. The blue of that spark was like a flashbulb in her face. Jake's hand smelled of gas stations.

"It's under control, Teddy," Jake said, his voice raspy. He patted her on the head, his fingers lingering in her long strands of hair. He began stroking her hair, and she felt shivers inside her. A crackle of static electricity seemed to go through her.

"But, Jake, Mommy," she sobbed.

Jake grabbed her hair in bunches, pulling at her scalp. "Gimme kiss, Teddy, gimme kiss."

"Let me go!" She tried pulling her head back, but it hurt too much. Jake did not let up on his grip.

"C'mon, Teddy, you want it, you need it now - kiss of the Pocket Lips, right? Here it comes, just for you, Teddaroo, the Pocket Lips," and with his free hand, Jake reached into his pocket and pulled something out. He held it up for Teddy to see, forcing her head back. "Behold, the kiss of the Pocket Lips!"

It was a knife.

"Kissy-kissy," Jake cackled.

Teddy screamed. As she cried out, striking at Jake with her arms and legs, she felt the heat rising under her skin. And she knew it was coming. It had been a flash of blue she'd seen, something was shortcircuiting her brain. Unlike in her dream, she would not be able to resist passing out. What her mom called a "gift from God," but what Teddy knew was a curse. What had begun two years ago beneath the ice of Clear Lake. What Dr. Scott called a seizure. Coming. On its way.

Not now, she thought, not now!

Teddy was losing consciousness. The world was becoming pinpoints of blackness. She felt a prickly heat along her arms and legs. She was not even aware of her older brother standing over her as she fell to the carpet; he was singing, "Kissy-kissy, time to dance, baby, dance for the Pocket Lips!"

Behind Teddy's eyes the world became a translucent ice that shattered as she fell into a cold, viscous blue darkness.

5

Excerpt from Dr. Prescott Nagle's First Families of Pontefract, Including a Brief History of the Region ($12.95, Lexington-Jackson Printers. All proceeds to go to The Pontefract Historical Society.):

One particularly bloodthirsty tribe was that of the Tenebro Indians who occupied for various periods modern day Rockbridge and Westbridge Counties. They are best known for having been wiped out by the Catawba on the eve of the Krench and Indian War. The Tenebro were mainly hunters, and lived for a while in peace with fur traders who passed through this ridge of the valley. But they evidently had one habit that the other Indians of the time, the Senedos, Tuscarora, and Shawnee, found repulsive, and so when the Catawba massacred the tribe as they crossed the mountains to the west of the county, no tears were shed, either among the whites or among the Tenebro's Indian brothers.

The Tenebro celebrated a winter festival, when they felt the rebirth of some Great Spirit was imminent, either symbolically or in actuality. Many men died for sport during this festival, when the Shaman would perform his Ghost Dance for the tribe, and the bones of the dead were exhumed for their descendants to carry as they followed the Shaman in his dance. Thus came the nickname among tribes for the Tenebro: Men-Of-Bone. Less obvious is their totem, the maggots which they held sacred for the invertebrates' ability to clean the corpses after the exhumation. But at the end of this week-long dance and feast, the Shaman would choose a maiden and a brave to represent the twin aspects of the deity. It is presumed that a ceremony of sorts, perhaps a fertility rite, took place. A great cannibalistic bloodfeast would follow, in which prisoners, white men in particular, were torn limb-from-limb and eaten without benefit of fire. Of course, these stories come to us primarily through tales from such marginally reliable men as William Parsifal in his 1826 History of the Shenandoah, and we must keep in mind he was writing seventy years after the Tenebro were wiped out completely. Other sources are perhaps even less reliable: supposed unnamed eyewitness accounts appear in the County Register of 1756, but hatred of the Indian was at an all-time high in that year because of the frequent unprovoked attacks upon townships (including the burning of our own first town of Pontefract, not two miles from the present location - an act of arson which apparently was committed by our forefathers themselves because of fear of an outbreak of some cholera-type plague from the use of tainted drinking water).

The Tenebro, and their mysterious rituals which even the most violent tribes feared, are gone from this earth. The present day excavation on the shores of Clear Lake, which was undertaken with a grant from the Virginia Society for Historical Preservation, has not only uncovered relics of the first town of Pontefract, but also evidence of a Tenebro burial mound . . .

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CHAPTER TWO

CUP: THE PAST

1.

From The Nightmare Book of Cup Coffey:

What I remember of December 18, 1974, is not as vague as I'd like it to be. I would like to say I was younger then, only a child, but that is as weak an excuse as any. But I was younger then, and childhood had only visibly turned to adolescence - inside, in my heart of hearts, I was just a boy with a crush on a girl.

And I was willing to protect her from anything.

That winter at Pontefract Prep, before Christmas break, I tried. I know that's what I was doing: trying to protect her. But how foolish and gallant and tragic it became.

The night of my initiation.

You see, we had clubs, we called them tribes, sort of junior fraternities. We took the names of various Indian tribes of the region, and through them, formed our cliques. These were our forums for mild rebellions, getting seniors to buy beer, all the early male bonding rituals. The club I was in took its name from local Indians called the Tenebro, but we were just adolescent white boys out for a good time at a boarding school.

2.

"This winter would be unbearable without you," Lily told him, "but I'm not sure I like this initiation business, I mean, really, Cup, bones and bourbon. Don't you think you and your little friends should grow up?" She kept her voice to a whisper, and she patted the top of his head as if he were a puppy crouched down there behind the kitchen door, spying on the party.

Lily brushed her fingers through her shiny blond hair, and it crackled with static electricity. "That's what I get for rubbing your scalp - now I'll look like Medusa when I take the canapés out."

Cup grinned from where he huddled and winked at her. "Turn 'em to stone." His legs were beginning to cramp from that position and he wished she'd just get out there, grab the bottle and get back with it so he could get the hell out of the Marlowe-Houston House. If he were to be caught . . .

"What can you possibly see from down there, anyway? Women's panties?" Lily headed for the refrigerator. She opened it and pulled out a tray full of hors d'oeuvres, and then nudged the door shut.

"Come on, Lily," Cup whispered.

She put her finger to her lips to shush him and carried the tray into the living room. The kitchen door swung shut behind her. Cup had to push it forward a bit so he could see more than just the back of some teachers' pants as they huddled around the piano while someone, very drunk, played a rather original rendition of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas."

But the music stopped suddenly when a snowball hit the front picture window with a loud mush! and then dropped into the snow-covered bushes below, out of view. Its icy, dirty imprint remained like that of a child's palm pressed against the glass.

Cup saw Gower Lowry, the head of the English Department, duck as if the snowball was meant for him, and then try to make it seem as if he were merely bending over to check his shoelaces. The other teachers around the piano continued their drinking and buzzing conversations. Dr. Cammack, Pontefract Prep's headmaster, raised his glass of sherry to the frosted window, "To the spirit of youth, shall we say?" This was followed by obligatory laughter from the faculty.

"One of those Indian clubs," someone suggested. "What do they call themselves? Tribes?"

"No, I think the Potomacs or Sioux or something," said a woman, who stood out of Cup's field of vision.

"Tuscarora, Catawba and Tenebro," Dr. Prescott Nagle corrected them, and although Cup could not see Dr. Nagle clearly, only a bit of his reflection in the picture window, he could tell from his voice that he was nervous - as though unsure of his own subject: history. "I believe the Tuscarora make up most of the lacrosse team. And the Tenebro - well, I suppose since the boys consider it their secret, I should leave it at that."

Cup heard Mr. Lowry whisper, "Old Bagel is an expert on everything these days. Always digging around," and a woman chuckled at this. Gower Lowry, whom Cup could see the most clearly, then wagged his head from side to side - although in his mid-fifties, he had already Grecian-formulaed his hair into a peculiar metallic red. He hunched his shoulders up and thrust his hands stiffly into the pockets of his herringbone tweed jacket. Now Cup could see him in profile, and for just an instant Lowry resembled a vulture sitting high on some craggy peak looking down upon a dying animal, waiting for his chance. "I think we know who's responsible for such . . . mischief." Then turning to nod almost defiantly at Dr. Nagle, he continued, "And who encourages it out of an unprofessional and desperate attempt at 'popularity.' This school needs a clean sweep, can't have rotten apples in the barrel, I always say. And inside those that appear shiny and edible lurks the worm of corruption. By that I mean one Mr. Coff -"

Dr. Cammack set his sherry glass down hard upon the side table like a judge hammering his gavel for silence in the court.

Lowry pretended not to notice. "- ffey," he completed his statement, and Cup winced when he heard his own last name mentioned. Cup let the door shut completely and looked up at the ceiling, his eyes welling with tears. This confirmed his fears that the faculty talked about him, about what happened during semester finals. He felt doomed. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and touched the prize he'd wrestled from a dog that evening. No matter what they did to him after Christmas break, he still had this night, initiation.

He took a deep breath and opened the door a crack. He heard the tail end of what Dr. Cammack was saying, "and I think, Gower, you are, perhaps, violating the confidentiality of quite another matter."

Under his breath, Gower Lowry mumbled, "Headmasters should not play favorites." But this comment was lost among the clinking glasses, the intermittent chuckles and "ahems" that punctuated the several conversations going around the room.

From where Cup was crouching, he could only see a vertical rectangle of the Marlowe-Houston House's living room. The back of Dr. Cammack's head, Dr. Nagle's arm when it flailed out as he was telling a story, the back edge of the sleek black piano, five teachers gathered around the piano (he mainly only saw their trouser legs, they were so close to the kitchen door). But he could not see Lily at all. The plan had been that she would go directly to the bar, and when she saw that no one was looking, she'd grab the bottle and walk back to the kitchen with it.

Dr. Cammack looked to his left, out of Cup's range of vision. "Lily, could you bring out some dean glasses? I think we've run through here and Bob Reed seems to think he needs another sip."

Other voices, near the piano:

"I thought you said there'd be a major spread here. I skipped dinner for this hamster food?"

"There's your major spread."

"Cammack's daughter?"

"Odds on she's a virgin?"

"Not the way Lowry is going after her. Look at the way his eyes follow her."

"Don't be ridiculous - he's too busy planning to make the evening miserable for Pres Nagle, did you notice that snippy comment he made about teachers and popularity? Lowry does have it in for the old guy, doesn't he?"

"I saw you, the way you put your hand on that Cammack girl's shoulder . . ."

Cup could not make out who the teachers were that were saying all this, but it made him angry to think they'd talk about Lily the way they did.

Then Lily came back into view, heading toward the kitchen with a tray of empty glasses.

Cup sat back, allowing the kitchen door to shut all the way.

In another moment, Lily Cammack stepped back into the kitchen.

She set the tray with the glasses across a cutting board near the oven. Then she returned to where Cup sat and offered her hand to him; he took it, and repressing a groan, stood up. Neither of them spoke as she led him to the far side of the kitchen. "This is boring, and I can't get to the whiskey," she finally whispered.

"Did you hear Lowry?"

"How could I not? You mean about you, well, he's just an old goat who's always looking to butt heads. He always has it in for somebody, doesn't he?"

"Yeah, only it's my butt he'd like to butt right out of here."

"Keep your voice down. Poor baby," she whispered. She drew Cup's face toward her own. Her lips brushed across his and pressed against his cheek.

"Can we hurry this along?" Cup murmured, and felt suddenly intoxicated, not from the sherry she'd given him earlier, but by her jasmine perfume which seemed so unwinterish and yet fit her perfectly. "I'm - I'm going to be in hot water if -"

She gave him another peck on the cheek. "How hot can it get?" She brought her face back and her mood darkened. "It's this stupid Tenebro initiation. Don't you think your little clubs are silly? They aren't really fraternities, are they? Just excuses for getting drunk and acting juvenile. What's the point of going through with this if you might not even be here next semester?"

Cup shrugged. "Nothing to lose, I guess."

"Life and limb. Really, Cup, digging up bones and stealing liquor. How attractive. How mature. You owe me one. You still want the bottle?"

He glared sarcastically. "What do you think?"

"Well, Daddy will do his little toast number any minute, and then I'll grab it."

"So dramatic. Why can't you just get it now? I got to take a leak."

"Tie a knot in it," she said playfully. She went to the cupboard for clean sherry glasses and Cup helped her arrange them on a silver tray. "Was it your little gang that threw that snowball earlier, Cup? Or do I dare attribute it to your best friend, ha ha, Bart?"

3.

From The Nightmare Book of Cup Coffey:

I was only sixteen and I had never before cheated on a test - God's honest truth. May He strike me dead. I panicked so much over that damn chemistry test and I was caught cheating, stupidly, stupidly, my own mistake, poor execution, "dishonorably," as Lowry put it. Caught by that devil Bart Kinter.

I have a theory now, looking back on that cheating episode of December, 1974: those who get caught at anything only do so because someone is out to get them. A lot of people don't get caught. But I did.

I was aware that more than a few of my fellow students at Pontefract Prep cheated. Constantly. I watched one of my former roommates scribbling notes for an upcoming English Lit. test onto the seat of his desk with a ballpoint pen. No, I take that back, he didn't just scribble, he engraved. I saw my Tenebro Blood Brother with crib notes for the French final. Thad Stamp, III, had even gone so far as to set a whole slew of three-by-five cards on his lap while he took the World History mid-term. He forgot those cards at the end of the test. He stood up from his desk. As he stood, those index cards filled with arcane doodlings about Huguenots and the Hundred Years War flew like a magician's white doves across the classroom. But Thad Stamp, III, was not turned in to the vicious and unyielding Honor Council. Oh, no. Old Bagel, as we called Dr. Nagle, was absorbed in one of his textbooks. He didn't notice those telltale cards scattered across the floor, even while Thad went around and collected them. Thad Stamp, III, aced the World History mid-term and destroyed all hopes the rest of us had for some kind of curve. All it would've taken was one, "J'accuse."

But there were no takers.

I, on the other hand, did get caught. Did get turned in.

What separated me from students like Thad Stamp, III?

What mark of Cain did I bear?

Someone had it in for me. As Lily used to say, my best friend, ha ha, Bart Kinter.

Bart Kinter was a senior, a towhead from the neighboring town of Cabelsville. He was only admitted to Pontefract Prep because he was somehow related to one of its founders (you know, all those backwoodsmen intermarried and created three-toed babies, albinos and the likes of Bart Kinter). He was what you call a legacy student. Wouldn't you know it? He was also "Chief" of the Catawba tribe, a campus club that boasted more bullies than Teddy Roosevelt. He was what guidance counselors politely referred to as a "disciplinary problem," because even teachers, you know, are afraid of some students.

He was the oldest senior the school had, weighing in at nineteen years old. But you'd never know it to talk to him.

And Bart Kinter had it in for me.

I think there are some people in a given lifetime who are natural born enemies. It might have something to do with an incompatible smell, or something rotten you detect in the other guy's eyes. Somehow you know when you meet that you will never get along.

Kinter and I were of this variety. There was nothing I did not loathe about him. Not his pug little nose that was eternally dripping, not his slit green eyes, not those warped apricot ears that burst with fur in the winter when he forgot to clip back the hair. That sniggering, adenoidal way of speaking. He reminded me of one of those little plastic trolls that girls play with and think are so adorable, when we all know they're as ugly as sin.

Oh, and permit me to mention one other thing Kinter possessed: the talent for inspiring fear. I can admit that now. Fear. Plain and simple, with no logic to back it up. Just fear.

Initially when I was just entering my freshman year at school I thought Bart Kinter disliked me because there really was something wrong with me (maybe I did smell bad - I only washed my socks every third week). But you can only believe something like that for so long before you've got to sit back and say, "Fuck it," and get on with life.

And admit if the truth be known, the guy's a creep.

This was a revelation to me.

How it happened, the cheating episode, involving my best friend, ha ha, Bart Kinter. This is as close to a play-by-play as I can come:

I'm in one of the three main examination rooms. A test is usually administered in one of the ordinary classrooms. But for the end-of-term exams, they really like to stick it to you, both physically and psychologically. Every piece of furniture in the designated exam room is dark, hard, wooden. You are forced to sit in the kind of chair that will, in later life, result in hemorrhoids. You are supervised not by teachers but by Proctors. A Proctor is usually a student-teacher from one of the local colleges who is incapable of answering questions that might arise while you take the exam.

Why is it that whenever you take a test, your senses sharpen like the tip of your Number 2 pencil, and you hear people in the world, laughing, perhaps out ice skating on the lake, or making a snowman near the footbridge? And dogs - do they only bark and race across campus during exams? You smell every hickory-smoke fire from every chimney in town. You take time to analyze, for sentence structure, the obscene graffiti about donkey genitalia on your desktop, and read the Braille of dried chewing gum on the desk's underside.

My real best friend, Whit, sits across from me and looks earnest and scholarly. He is prepared. Unlike me.

I scan the exam. It looks like a very bad recipe. Haiku in the original Japanese. Chemistry for me is when two people get together and make sparks: Bogie and Bacall, Catherine the Great and her unholy mule (back to donkey genitals). And Lab? Well, I like to think of Lab as a kind of furry, dark dog with a pleasant personality.

I glance over to Whit for help, but Whit is no cheater, no passer of notes. How could I expect him to be? Had I sunk so low that I would do that to my best friend? How could I even be a cheater, Malcolm Coffey, called "Cup" by one and all? I am an okay student, never honor roll material, but then, hey, who needs it?

No, I'm no cheater.

But I am up against some tough competition here, not only the other students, but also that invisible competition my parents often mention:

Getting into a good college.

I don't have the heart to get Whit to cheat on my behalf. I'd never ask a friend to risk that.

I'd much rather drag down a nodding acquaintance. Or an enemy.

So I look to my left and there is my best friend, ha ha, Bart Kinter. Looking like God's fool. Bart, nineteen years old and here he is in Junior Chemistry for another year. This year, I am sure, Bart has done his homework. He knows what he's doing.

Then, something like seduction occurs. I drop my pencil to the floor.

I wait for my classmates to look up and see what my next move is going to be.

I make no move.

I pretend that I haven't even noticed the missing pencil.

I am still reading the exam. I squint my eyes and drop my lower lip down, slightly, so that it looks like I am intent upon a particular question. Then I glance up to the ceiling as if the question I have just read needs to be rolled around in my brain until it hits something and then, tilt!

So. Now I am ready to answer this question. I reach for my pencil, which Not Two Seconds Ago rested upon the worn horizontal groove at the top edge of my desk.

I look around the desk for my pencil. Not there. Under the blue examination book? Nope. Maybe it's still in my pockets - not there, either. So I look down to my right and then to my left, and - there it is, on the floor!

I reach down for my Number 2 pencil. As I come up, in the arc of my ascent, I cock my head just a bit more to the left and gooseneck it out further to catch the tail end of some chemical equation Kinter has just written down.

I begin to write scrawl for jagged scrawl exactly what Kinter is writing. After two years in this course, he is a good chemistry student. He has even studied for this test.

I forget it is his paper I am looking at. As I copy his work, our papers become one.

Like I said, it's pure seduction.

Only I'm the one who gets screwed because Bart Kinter turns around. He is smiling. He puts two and two together. His curdled ears blaze crimson with delight. He raises his hand to get the Proctor's attention.

And after the wheels are set in motion I am given a stay of execution until after Christmas break.

What I remember most, after the Honor Trial, was that I cried a hell of a lot. Getting caught cheating probably meant no Good College, and worse, public humiliation. I was sure I'd be expelled. Pontefract Prep had a strict honor code. Lying, cheating, stealing. If you were caught, no questions asked.

But when I was done crying, I thought of Bart Kinter. The boy who found it in his evil heart to turn me in. To squeal.

I plotted in my feverish adolescent mind. What would be his punishment? What form of execution? It scares me now, thinking back on all this, retracing my footsteps to that night twelve years ago. Now I know the outcome, where things finally led. I know I planted the seeds that night just as surely as I'd taken that bone from a dog before the Tenebro initiation ritual. The night Lily stole a bottle of Jack Daniels from a faculty party.

What is it about an open field at night that frightens you? Could it be that someone, or something, is waiting in that field for you?

Back when I was sixteen, stealing bones and bourbon and getting myself royally expelled, I didn't worry too much about consequences. I didn't worry about things waiting for me in empty fields.

In those days, all I knew about was revenge.

4.

Cup was shivering behind the snow-covered boxwoods outside the Marlowe-Houston House while the faculty party continued inside. He was trying to keep in the shadows, out of the light from the veranda while he urinated in the snow. He tried to pee in the shape of a heart, but only succeeded in getting it all over his hand. He washed his hands in the fresh snow.

While he was zipping up and adjusting himself, Lily emerged from the back door. She waved the bottle in the air. As she came down the veranda steps, Cup noticed that her royal blue dress was hidden beneath an oversized men's jacket. "Gower Lowry," she said. When she mentioned the names of his teachers, Cup felt that she was a part of that adult world to which he could only spy upon through kitchen door cracks. Lily was twenty, but at times she seemed far more mature than any college girl he had ever met; she seemed comfortably worldly. "Very tweedy," she continued, raising the collar up around her neck. She gently tucked her shoulder-length blond hair into the back of the collar. "He couldn't wait to slip this over my shoulders." She laughed at this, and her delicate laughter created tiny clouds in the cold air.

Lily came over and handed him the bottle of bourbon. "Daddy didn't even notice when I grabbed it. I did my best Lauren Bacall for Gower, who became my unwitting accomplice. He cornered me, Cup, against the bar, like this -" Lily squared her shoulders and came as close to Cup as she could without touching him. The tweed jacket fell open revealing her royal blue dress, with just a suggestion of nipples beneath the fabric. Cup's eyes wandered up the pale skin of her neck, back to her face. His breathing became very slow. He could hear his own heartbeat and was afraid that she might hear it, also.

Her lips barely parted as she said softly, "He told me, 'My dear, you certainly are our winter's blossom, a rare flower indeed.'" Lily reached up with her right hand and began stroking the edge of Cup's face; he became painfully aware of the peach fuzz on his chin that had yet to be replaced by heavy beard. "'A rare flower that blooms in such a cold climate.'" Lily's warm palm remained against Cup's face. "So I picked this ice cube out of my glass and slipped it into his mouth like this . . ."

Lily's fingers were on Cup's lips, parting them. She scraped a fingernail along the bottom row of teeth, and his tongue licked her finger. ". . . And I said to him, 'Gower Lowry, you could melt ice, couldn't you?'"

She laughed and plucked her finger from Cup's mouth. She brought her hand back down and rubbed it with the other as if she'd bruised it. "That old masher."

Cup was praying she would not notice the erection that was straining against the inside of his trousers. He took a step backwards, embarrassed. He tried to pull his jacket further down so as to hide the lump.

But it was no good. She'd already seen the wet spot around his crotch. "Oh, Cup, did I make you do that?"

Cup unscrewed the cap to the Jack Daniels bottle and took a swig from it. His face was red.

"It must be difficult at times . . . being a boy. All that testosterone."

This made Cup feel even more self-conscious. He gulped down more bourbon.

Lily raised her chin and peered at Cup critically as he moved the bottle away from his face. "You better save some of that for your little pow-wow tonight. I don't think I can get away with swiping another bottle. Gower might want more than just an ice cube to help with that."

5.

From The Nightmare Book of Cup Coffey:

There I was, drinking from the bottle I was supposed to be saving for the Tenebro initiation ceremony, while Lily Cammack watched, back from her first year in college, no doubt fascinated by the alcoholic consumption of the average, or in my case below average, preppie. Sticking out from my down jacket's side pocket was some animal bone I'd wrestled away from one of the janitor's dogs, while another, more personal bone pressed against my khakis.

Lily told me that her older sister Clare was getting married and asked me what I thought of that. I told her I didn't think anything of it - Clare was four years older than Lily, and I had never met her. She lived in New York. What did I care about her marriage? But Lily insisted I think about it - not Clare, but the idea of always being there for someone. Not the marriage that ends with "Death do us part," but the marriage that will always be, in this world and the next.

"You know, true love, do you believe in it?" she asked. She had to repeat herself a few times before the question even registered on my drunken adolescent brain. Let's see, I'd had a beer with my friend Whit earlier in the evening, then three plastic cupfuls of sherry while hiding behind the kitchen door in the Marlowe-Houston House, and there, speaking with her in the backyard of the house, I had drunk the equivalent of at least three shots of bourbon. I had a right to fuzzy thinking.

She took my hand at some point. We began walking down to the chapel. If you've never been there, the way the campus is laid out: you've got your Marlowe-Houston House facing Campus Drive and Clear Lake, but behind it, Pontefract Prep just opens up like a flower. To the north, about fifty yards, are the academic buildings along a brief, but impressive colonnade; straight ahead, as you face away from the Marlowe-Houston House, is the new library, the alumni house and the dormitories; and due south is the chapel.

So we took that southern route to the chapel. Our shoes crunched in the snow. I took the bourbon bottle and swept it across the top of a row of boxwoods, with snow scattering like dust from the leaves.

I glanced back at the house where the party continued, half-expecting someone to be following us. I've always had that habit, looking over my shoulder. It is not a good one. You never get anywhere, just back where you started.

Lily wrapped her right arm casually about my waist as we walked, slipping her hand into my coat pocket. I'd like to tell you that my love for Lily, my enormous crush on her, was pristine and free of animal motivation. Because I did worship her. I was sixteen, clumsy and unpopular, and here was this beautiful girl who, at the very least, enjoyed my company. But at sixteen, my mind was still in the gutter when it came to girls and sex. I was a virgin and like most virgins I cherished any feeling that even came close to sex: my senses were not yet dulled by experience. When Lily slipped that hand into my pocket, I felt a sweatshop heat rising up in my loins. I was afraid that that would be all I needed to send me over the top.

When I glanced at Lily, her pale face and white hair glowed in the scrim darkness like luminescent white sand beneath an ocean wave.

Do you believe in true love? As if she had to ask me. How could I not, Lily? Just looking at you, brushing against you like this. Every moment with you is a constant ecstasy. These are a rough approximation of my thoughts then. I was so naive and romantic that just the touch of her hand made me believe that love could not only be true, but that it could last through all eternity. This meant constant, neverending sexual bliss.

But I said something blasé and non-committal. "I don't know, I think maybe, but who knows. Maybe when your sister gets married you can ask her."

Lily didn't pursue the subject of love any further.

"I guess," I continued with my non-sequiturs, "Bart Kinter's got teachers like Lowry on his side. That fucking brownnose."

"Oh, ha ha, your best friend," Lily said. "He's just -" but she gasped before she could finish her sentence. "Cup, do you have to hang on to that thing?" While we'd been talking, her hand, still in my pocket, had felt the old bone in my jacket.

"It's part of the ceremony, Lily."

"And you can't tell me about it."

I nodded.

At sixteen I thought it was pretty cool to have gotten hold of a bone of that size - all my blood brothers in the Tenebro would think I'd really gone out to one of the cemeteries in town and dug it up. But the truth was: I stole it from a dog. Since it was my second year in the tribe I knew I had to come up with something pretty unusual for initiation. Your first year you are an initiate, but the second year is crucial. You're either a Shaman or a Warrior, and almost every guy was just a Warrior. But a select few got to be Shaman. That's what I was shooting for. I have never been so ambitious since. Most Tenebro brought pigeon feathers and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. One of the guys who made Shaman last year, during my initiation, brought a bottle of Cuervo Gold. Another brought what we figured out was a possum skull, but what he swore was a giant rat's skull. So, here was my chance. I had, not only a bottle of Jack Daniels, but also this huge bone, about as long as my arm from wrist to elbow. Not only that, I had bad karma on my side: I didn't just buy the booze and I didn't just find the bone. I swiped the bottle from the headmaster's party, and I dug the bone out of Christ Church cemetery.

But what really happened (and this is not the story I would tell my blood brothers) was I saw this mutt dragging a bone around in the snow. This was such a good omen I knew I had to get that bone. Who cared if I was going to be kicked out of school after Christmas for cheating? I would go down with flying colors. For the Tenebro initiation ceremony, it would be bones and bourbon all the way!

I had to really wrestle with that dog; the animal growled and shook its head violently. I almost lost my grip. I only was able to get the bone when the dog relaxed for an instant. I pulled as hard as I could, thought its teeth were going to come with it when the bone popped out of its mouth. The dog whimpered after that, and I felt bad. I am a sucker for dogs. I gave it a Baby Ruth bar that had been rotting in my pocket for a few weeks.

And the bone itself! It was the bone to end all bones. That bone even had some maggots on it! How authentic could you get? It never occurred to me to wonder where the dog could've found it.

Lily pulled the bone out of my jacket pocket. She held it with disdain. "Is it one of Bart's?" She swung it back and forth, almost dropping it. Then she slipped it back into my pocket. "What perverted things do you boys do with bones?"

"It's a secret."

"Yes, well, I can tell you what Freud would say about that bone, but I don't suppose you'd want to hear it. You're a lot more like Bart Kinter than you'd like to admit. Cup."

"Right," I said sarcastically, suddenly furious that she would even compare me to Bart. I wasn't anything like him. No way.

Lily hugged me closer. The chapel bells rang the hour: eleven o'clock.

I still wanted this to be a romantic scenario. I wanted it to lead to something. There she'd mentioned love a while back, and now we'd descended into bones and Bart Kinter.

As if reading my thoughts, she said, "No, you're really not like Bart, are you? Whenever he's around me he licks his lips. Like he's just waiting for his . . . moment. You're much more chivalrous, Cuppie. You'd be my knight in shining armor, wouldn't you?"

"Slay all your dragons," I whispered drunkenly.

Neither of us spoke for a few minutes. We continued trudging through the snow - it seemed to take forever to get to the chapel. When we reached the chapel steps, she asked me if I meant it about slaying her dragons. Not realizing what I was getting myself in for, I said yes.

"Sometimes, Cup, dragons are big monsters in stories, and sometimes . . ." Lily seemed very mysterious now, and for the first time since I'd met her when I was thirteen and she was seventeen, practically babysitting me, I realized that there were things about her I didn't know, things she was just now hinting at. It almost scared me to think that Lily Cammack was not just the image I had of her, but that she possessed a life independent of my knowledge. "Cup," she said, "let's play 'Smoke.'"

What Lily liked about this game, silly as it was, is that when you are It you can crawl into someone else's skin and see things through their eyes. Even though you make fun of them, you try to, momentarily, put yourself in their place. You could never just be yourself - the game required that you be the other person, answer as the other.

But all this is in hindsight. When I was sixteen I thought it was a stupid game, a little kids' game actually. But I did love Lily. How easy it is to write that now: I do love you, Lily. She didn't play "Smoke" with anyone else but me.

The way the game goes:

You ask the person who is It, What kind of smoke are you? and she tells you, and in answering this and other similar questions (what kind of animal, vegetable, mineral, fire, wind, water, etc.) she reveals something about the nature of the mysterious It.

And there were other questions if you were wrong with your first guess.

The last question, however, is set. When you ask it, it's a signal that the jig is up, the game is over, you are on to whomever the mysterious It is.

The last question: What kind of monster are you?

6.

The boxwoods that surrounded the front entrance of the small chapel in a precise semi-circle shook off their snow as if shivering from the cold. Wind blew from off the lake. Cup Coffey and Lily Cammack heard it whistle as it came through the trees near the Marlowe-Houston House.

But it wasn't the wind that caused the bushes around them to tremble. Cup first heard a low growling. The noise seemed to surround them. He wished that the chapel door hadn't been locked, initially because he was freezing, but now because of the lurking animal or animals in the hedge.

But Lily saw the dog and pointed it out to Cup. "Have you ever been dogfishing?" The dark, wet dog came lumbering out of the boxwoods, its tail wagging. It was a black labrador retriever, a clumsy, friendly dog Cup had often thrown sticks to. One of the janitor's dogs.

"Here, puppy," Lily coaxed the dog into the chapel floodlights. An aside, she whispered to Cup, "I've never been fond of these campus dogs. But I think it's because of their master."

"You think Riley owns every dog that runs around here?" Cup asked. Riley Amory was the new head janitor; he and his family lived off in the woods "with all the albinos," Lily would scoff.

Lily didn't respond. She picked up the half-empty Jack Daniels bottle that Cup had set down between them. She dipped the bottle down to the dog's level and snapped her fingers. "Come on, girl, that's a good doggie."

"Don't do that."

"Cup, this wasn't the dog you took that femur from?"

"You think it's a femur?"

"Femur, tibia, whatever." She shrugged.

Two other dogs also emerged from the bushes, sheepishly wagging their tails, heads down. "How many dogs does Riley own?"

"I see a certain resemblance to their master," Lily said. "Let's see if they get as drunk as Riley does." She tipped the bottle so that some bourbon splashed onto the lab's muzzle.

One of the dogs, a miniature collie mix, came up to Cup and began sniffing around his jacket. "This is the one," he said. He reached down to pat the dog, but it snarled and backed away.

"Vicious. I'll bet it was some struggle for that bone, Cup."

"Ha."

All three dogs began licking the bourbon-soaked snow.

"Hey." Cup reached over to take the Jack Daniels from Lily, but she was too quick. She pulled it behind her back. "I need some of that for later."

"Come and get it," she told him playfully.

He hesitated and looked into her translucent blue eyes. "Okay." He put his arms around her, pretending to reach for the bottle. Impulsively, he kissed her, and he tried to pry her lips apart with his tongue. No go. He pulled back. He brought his arms back from around her waist. "I should get back to the dorm. The guys are going to wonder . . . it looks like the bourbon's mostly gone, but I still have -"

Lily smiled, settling her left hand down upon his lap. "You still have that bone, don't you?"

Now she played aggressor. Lily brought her face against his and kissed him, licking his lips with her tongue, lightly, before kissing his cheek, his chin, his neck. Cup did not move. She pressed her lips against his ear. Her face seemed sticky, as if from sweat or tears. He felt her breath inside his ear. She exhaled into him. She whispered, "Why couldn't it have been you?"

He said nothing.

She said, "Ask me now."

The world went silent, no wind, no dogs thirstily lapping at the bourbon-stained snow, no strange crunch of branches that Cup might've heard if his senses had not been so totally focused on Lily. It was as if a needle had just been removed from a record. He didn't look at her when he asked.

"What kind of smoke are you?"

7.

She said, "I'll tell you what kind of monster I am."

Then she told him.

They held each other for what seemed like hours. Lily cried, and her breath was a mist surrounding them. He told her she was the most beautiful woman in the world. He swore undying love, he promised her he would slay all her dragons, now and forever.

Even as he said these words and inhaled the cold night and her jasmine perfume, they were jumped.

"I know what kind of monster I am!" came the high-pitched squeal.

The Jack Daniels Hounds barked and howled all around them.

This occurred one night, December 18, 1974, the night of Dr. Cammack's annual Christmas faculty party at the Marlowe-Houston House, and the night, two days before Christmas break, when certain so-called Indian Clubs held their initiation ceremonies. The boys called it Hell Night.

Just before midnight, a nineteen-year-old boy named Bartholomew Andrew Kinter, Jr., born in nearby Cabelsville, but pretty much a hometown boy in Pontefract, Virginia, fell down the cellar of the Marlowe-Houston House, breaking his neck. An electrical fire also started in that cellar as a result of faulty wiring. The fire was easily extinguished by the Pontefract Fire Department. The fire did not spread beyond the cellar.

The boy's body was burned beyond recognition.

8

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9

Portion of transcript of conversation recorded between Dr. Prescott Nagle of the Pontefract Historical Society and Teddy Amory, February 12, 1986:

Prescott: Let me speak with Virginia now.

Teddy: My, how you do require a lot from this little girl, Dr. Nagle.

Prescott: Am I speaking with Virginia Houston?

Teddy: Yes.

Prescott: Virginia, may I ask you a few questions?

Teddy: Yes.

Prescott: Where are you?

Teddy: In the belly, Dr. Nagle, of the beast. We are all here. Your wife, too. She perverted her calling, you see, just as mine was also perverted.

Prescott: What was your calling?

Teddy: I was the chosen vessel. I was the door. My brother shut the door, Dr. Nagle, and he locked it. And in so doing sealed his own doom, and that of our entire line. He had an unnatural love for me, Dr. Nagle, and that drove him to this desperate act.

Prescott: What desperate act?

Teddy: You know.

Prescott: No I don't, Virginia, please tell me.

Teddy: What your wife did to herself. A perversion of nature. She was not a suitable passage. But this one, this child, shall be.

Prescott: Who is the beast?

Teddy: My brother calls it by the name Goatman.

Prescott: And what do you call it, Virginia?

Teddy: (word is indecipherable - a series of moans and growls) It is ecstasy, its name is unspeakable by human tongue.

Prescott: What do you call it, Virginia?

Teddy: The Eater of Souls.

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CHAPTER THREE

BONES, II

December 2, 1986

1.

Behind Teddy's eyes the world became translucent ice that shattered as she fell into a viscous blue darkness.

Jake Amory watched his sister drop onto the carpet. She was going into one of her fits.

She's a monster, the words buzzed around in his head, don't trust her for a minute, boy. She's laughing at you, too, boy, but on the inside. Just take your knife and open her up and you're gonna see for yourself. But don't cut deep, boy, 'cause you got to save something for the big day of the Pocket Lips, just skin her.

Teddy was twisting, shaking, shivering like she was being hosed down with ice water, arching her back against the floor, slapping her hands up and down as if she were trying to swim. The irises other eyes rolled up under the lids. She was swallowing air like it was liquid.

Jake held his Boy Scout knife high, as if this were a ritual he was about to perform. "Kissy-kissy," he said between clenched teeth. He brought the knife down in a clean slice through the smoky air; the blade flashed in front of his sister's contorted face as she continued to struggle against herself.

He heard the characteristic rumbling coming from Teddy's body, her muscles and bones fighting against the seizure. Now, get her now, give her the kiss, Jake, fast, she's a rattlesnake, she can be anything she wants, she ain't human, she's a monster -

"I got it under control!" Jake shouted, trying to shut out all the damn noise in his mind. He knew what he was doing. He didn't need all that buzzing around his ears, all that static. His head seemed like a jungle, full of howling, screaming things. He thought he was going to explode. Drool gushed down his chin, and he wiped it away. "Shit!" His mouth curled downward, and he said, "Okay, monsterbaby, it's time for the Pocket Lips," and he swung his arm down again, the knife whistling in the air, to his sister's squirming body.

But as he did this, and he was thinking of the sheer beauty of that one movement, his hand clutching the knife, his elbow bent, curving through the air, homing in on its destination - her left ankle, if he could keep her still long enough to peel that tender young skin away from the bone - just as the knife skimmed her foot, it flew out of his hand. It was as if someone had physically wrenched the knife from his fingers. He watched in angry disbelief as the knife sailed down the stairs, clattering to the floor below.

Nervous, just nervous, that's all, you can do it, you can get that fucking door open.

Jake clapped his hands together and laughed. "Under control, my man, still got it under control. Jake's your man, if he can't do it, nobody can!"

He knew what he would do.

He was going to set her on fire. Some vestige of the spirits of the dead he'd been rapping with down by the lake tickled his ear: no, no fire. Mustn't use . . . But he cut that voice off. You didn't have to have gasoline for this monster, oh, no, you just use that long frizzy hair to get the inferno going.

Now that voice was like a mosquito buzzing around his head: not the fire, not her, it's not -

But he swatted at the voices, overriding them with his own thoughts: fire, fire, fire, fire.

Teddy was coming down from her fit. Her eyes were closed. Her pajamas were soaking wet; her bathrobe had flown open beneath her like clipped angel's wings as she lay there, still.

Jake would have to act fast.

He reached into his breast pocket for the Bic lighter he'd used to torch the rat in the bedroom.

He flicked the thing on and a lovely, tiny spark erupted from its heart.

Jake knew one golden moment when he smelled victory through the fire that still raged in the bedroom down the hall, and saw it there in his helpless sister as she came down from her dance.

And then Jake Amory howled in pain as his entire hand burst into flame, while the thought shot through his head like a bullet:

Asshole, you used the wrong hand, you used the hand with all that fucking gas on it -

But even this thought did not seem to make any sense to him as he tumbled down the staircase, screaming, burning.

2.

Teddy Amory was out of the burning house, not even sure how she'd managed to get down the staircase through the smoke, around her brother's screaming, writhing body (she wanted to help him but he looked at her like he was going to throw her back into the flames), around the tongues of fire that shot out at her from all directions. It was something she'd never imagined in her worst dreams.

She ran out into the field that adjoined the house, as far as she could run, and then collapsed in the damp grass, sobbing. She closed her eyes tight, praying that when she opened them again the fire behind her would go away and the nightmare would fade.

But when she raised her head from the ground, opened her eyes and glanced back at the house, fire still vomited from the windows. Her brother was screaming even louder.

"Please God, let it be over, let it be over," she whimpered. Teddy rubbed her fists into her tear-filled eyes.

Then she heard the front door slam.

"Teddy! Teddy, get back here!" Jake yelled. "It's time for a bedtime kiss, it's the Pocket Lips comin' for ya!"

She ducked down and then peered through the tall grass. She watched her brother stomp stiff-legged around the porch, backlit by the inferno. He was clutching one of his hands.

Her first impulse was to run back home. Just to get it over with. It was Jake, and no matter how crazy he was acting, maybe that fall down the stairs had reawakened something human in him.

Because she knew. She knew what had gotten into him.

It was part of that gas station smell. She remembered it, how it snaked around her, pulling her back through the freezing water, trying to suck something out of her. But she had escaped it in the water. Her daddy had saved her.

And the thing was mad she'd gotten away. It wanted her for something. Because of what had gotten inside her, whatever it was that was causing the fits, the thing that she'd brought on herself and on her family.

But her daddy hadn't gotten away, and now her mother, too, was caught.

And Jake.

"You cunt, Teddy!" Jake boomed, his voice raking across the darkness of pre-dawn hours. "I know you're out there! It's just a matter of time, baby sister! Come on back and maybe I'll treat you nice, yeah, real nice!" As he shouted obscenities, Teddy noticed something bright and silver flashing in his hand.

A knife.

Teddy stifled a scream. She hoped her fits wouldn't come on.

3

From The Diary of Worthy Houston, Winter, 1801:

My sister, Virginia, grows weaker by the day and we pray for her recovery. But Father does not seem to notice her troubles. He bids me ignore her falling sickness, her depressions, her auguries of doom. He warns me that I must not mistake the door for the doorway, or the lock for the key. He is more concerned with his digging in the earth beneath our house.

What madness must have possessed him to build this house upon their graves?

We have heard him the whole evening long and into the dawn. In my dreams I can hear his shovel scraping against the rock and earth. He believes, I think, that he is planting them deeper as if in so doing he will allay his fears. As when he sows his fields, the further down in the soil he plants the seed, so shall the grain not rise up against him.

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CHAPTER FOUR

CLARE

January 9, 1986

1.

The Winter Before Jake Amory Torched His House

FOUNDERS DAY

Clare Cammack Terry knew these things about herself: she had wavy black hair that could not be tamed with hairstyles or conditioners, her younger sister, Lily, had shoulder-length blond hair that sparkled. She had an olive complexion that no one envied, whereas Lily had that creamy skin that Clare equated with a tubercular condition but which everyone else thought was a sign of grace and purity. Lily was a woman who in her early thirties could still wear dresses that might be described as "frocks" and still looked as gorgeous as she had at seventeen; Clare was more of a Banana Republic kind of girl, getting most other wardrobe out of catalogs rather than from the local stores - and she always felt she looked out of place in Pontefract, like Annie Hall in John-Boy Walton territory. Clare had failed in marriage and career (failed marriage: to David Terry, Manhattan ad agency man, who thought Clare should concentrate on her femininity more, and who himself concentrated on other women and the occasional accommodating man - but her first roommate had warned her to not get serious with a man who wore bikini underwear. Failed career: nursing, although, ha-ha, as Lily would say, she was certainly nursing her own father now). Lily was a success in marriage and had no desire for a career. But Clare was doing her darnedest to put the screws to her sister's marriage, ha-ha.

Oh, and I know this, too. My episodes. Vertigo, dizziness, call it what you like, I see things. Just these neurotic little dreams while I'm awake. How very New York of me. Hallucinations.

Like this one in front of me.

Clare Terry didn't immediately recognize the woman who gazed at her from the second-story Venetian window of the Marlowe-Houston House. But the woman evidently knew Clare, because she waved and seemed to be trying to say something to her from behind the glass. Then Clare began to understand what the woman was saying. Clare couldn't really hear her, but suddenly the woman's voice was in her head.

Clare felt her own blood turn to ice inside her.

The woman was saying, "Big kiss, Clare, Daddy wants to give you a big kiss, he's right here, with me," and the woman was no longer unfamiliar, with her auburn hair and high cheekbones. It was Clare's mother. Rose Cammack. "Big kiss," her mother repeated from behind the window. "You didn't have to come home," her mother continued, "he would've been fine without you. Nobody wants you here. But since you're here, he has a Big Kiss just for you."

Clare looked away from the window, tried to look away from the house, but she could not escape it. Every way she turned her head, there were its Greek Doric columns, there the white front steps, the molded brickwork, there the thick dead vines snaking about the trellis, all leading her like strands of a spider's web straight to the dark spider at its heart, her mother gazing at her from the window. And the words seemed to froth out of her mother's pincer-like mouth, "Big kiss, Clare, bigkiss - bigkiss - biggest . . ."

"I'm telling you," a more honeyed voice said.

Clare was standing in front other Volkswagen Rabbit, the back door still open. She was staring at the empty, dark Venetian window supported by a false railing, crowned with an arch. It was just like any of a number of windows on houses in Pontefract, nothing special. When she'd been a little girl, she even looked out this particular window, pressed her face right up against the pane, pushing the sash aside. Her mother was dead. This was just the Marlowe-Houston House. No one was staring back at her.

Shelly Patterson, who leaned against the hood of the car, was saying, "The biggest tits yet. Miss Perky Boobs. I'm telling you, Clare, they get bigger every time I see her." Shelly had a round pudgy face that Clare found eternally pleasant, framed by those tight ringlets of carrot red hair. Even if she was overweight, she looked supremely comfortable in that body. Not like me, Clare thought, not like me.

Shelly wore an oversized black sweater and had drenched herself with imitation gold jewelry because she thought it minimized her weight. It didn't; Clare thought Shelly looked even heavier than usual. Shelly held her hands out in front other as if carrying enormous sacks of groceries. "And I am also here to inform you that Cappie's tits were not like that yesterday. Oh, sure, they were big, but they weren't galaxies unto themselves."

Then Clare remembered. All right, this vision from that upper window, mother, is just an episode. All is right with the world. Just another vision, and who are you to have visions. anyway? It's not like you're Joan of Arc, you're the most devout atheist on the face of this earth.

Clare reached in her purse for her version of the double martini: a pack of Salems and a half-Valium, a habit she'd acquired in Manhattan before the divorce became final. She re-oriented herself. She'd just gotten out of her car when Shelly Patterson came down the front steps to help carry the four jugs of wine she'd brought for the luncheon. Shelly had begun gossiping about other people who were already inside: the First Families of Pontefract with their little cliques of whomever was most closely related to the town fathers. Then the dizziness had hit her, and she had clutched the car door for support. Not exactly dizzy; she felt like she was on a different magnetic frequency from the Marlowe-Houston House and had hit its invisible field.

Shelly hadn't noticed any of the signs of her episode.

Clare was getting so used to them that she had learned to disguise the sweating and trembling fairly well. Basically, Clare had taught herself not to freak whenever one of these came on.

Now, listening to Shelly go on and on about Cappie Hartstone's recent increase in breast size (". . . it's like she's trying out for Nursing Mother of the Year when everybody knows she's more like the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg . . .") and looking boldly up into that empty window, Clare felt in control. Stronger, that was it, she was stronger after her episodes.

"It's so cold," Clare said, "let's go inside."

Shelly, lifting one of the grocery bags with the wine in it, went on ahead. Clare stayed back a moment. She lit a cigarette, took several quick puffs, then dropped it in the gutter. She put it out with her heel. She decided against the half-Valium after all. I'll be okay. She took the other bag out of her Rabbit and pressed her back against the door to shut it. I do feel stronger, she told herself.

Yeah, I must be feeling pretty strong to go in there.

The Marlowe-Houston House had always intimidated Clare, even when she'd been a little girl. Because her father had been headmaster of Pontefract Prep, the family occupied the house for several years in the late '50s and early '60s. She never felt that it was home; she was relieved when, at twelve, her family moved into the old Federal-style brick house on Porter Street, while the descendants of the Houston family converted the Marlowe-Houston House into a museum of sorts as well as the site for various Town and Gown functions, like this snobby Founders Day Luncheon.

And Warren Whalen, mustn't forget Warren.

For it was within those walls of the Marlowe-Houston that she had first succumbed to his charms, had allowed him, as Shelly crudely put it, to get into her panties.

2.

Inside the Marlowe-Houston House

Clare made a mental note as she went through the living room: everyone in Pontefract, Virginia, was a First Family. Not that everyone in town was invited to this Invitation Only affair. The Town and Gown Society, which overlapped with the Christ Church Altar Guild to create a hybrid Junior League-cum-Episcopalian Coffee Hour, were very careful with their genealogical research: no alien blood, please. Bill Hartstone was already leaning against the bar, exchanging good-old-boy talk with Ken Stetson, whose son, Rick, was playing bartender and sneaking a swig when the others weren't looking. Another teenager, Tommy MacKenzie, sat in a corner rigidly, wearing a coat and tie, something Clare never saw the kid in when he came over to do yardwork in the summer, she barely recognized him. She felt a great deal of sympathy for him: like him, she didn't want to be here either. Tommy's father and mother stood near the picture window talking quietly among themselves. Mrs. MacKenzie always reminded Clare of a wounded bird, shying away from other people and helplessly gravitating to the safety other own husband. Clare could not relate to wives like that; she didn't believe that any husband could be very safe.

Howie McCormick, possibly the last McCormick left in town since his parents died, tried to talk up a few of the golf set who stood near the piano. Howie was the same mailman who had handed Clare a letter from her ex-husband and at the same time told her pretty much what was in it. Thankfully, today he was not wearing his blue uniform and pith helmet. He wore a bright madras jacket and lime green pants, and he was drunk off his ass and leering at anything and everything female in the room.

Prescott Nagle was trying to plink out a tune on the piano, with Gower Lowry scowling at him from a corner of the room. Ever since she'd been a little girl, Clare had always known about, although never fully understood, the enmity between those two men. But you'd think they'd have outgrown it by now. Clare waved quickly to that group and prayed that Gower would not use the opportunity to come over and talk her up. He didn't. All the good Pontefract "Name" families were well represented, lounging on the sofas, dressed in their suits and overly extravagant gowns, and the conversation that filtered down to Clare as she passed through them centered upon the mild winter they were having, and a comparison of genealogical backgrounds. "It was my great-grandfather Campbell who built the Regency Row Arcade, but then it was just called the Row, and that was before they gutted it," or "When William, the first William in our family, married your great-aunt Jenny, he was able to," or "He took up arms with General Lee, and his wife had to run the farm by herself, even pulling the plow, yes, can you imagine."

Shelly came out of the kitchen's swinging door, and fluttered her eyebrows a la Groucho Marx. "With all this inbreeding I'm amazed you 'Firsts' aren't all twelve-fingered dwarves," Shelly said, reaching for the bag in Clare's arms.

"That's all right. Shelly, I'll get it." Clare didn't understand why Shelly was blocking her way to the kitchen.

"I don't know if I'd want to go in there if I were you," Shelly whispered. "I think you're the hot topic of the day."

"Why am I here?" Clare asked amusedly.

"People are wondering why you're not wearing a big fat scarlet 'A' across your boobs."

"Look," Clare said, indicating the people around the room with a shrewd glance, "I can't just stand here like this. Do you think I could make it out the front door?"

"You slut," Shelly laughed, "give me the wine." She held her hands out again to take the grocery bag. "You go into the dining room and admire the china. I'll find your sister and tell her you're not feeling well. Then we'll sneak you up the stairs to the roof. You can jump."

"I'll be damned if I'm going to give this place more grist for the mill."

"So you're going into the enemy camp?"

"Like Daniel into the lions' den."

"Those lions didn't have the teeth that Georgia Stetson's got, and they didn't know about Thursday night."

"They all know about Thursday night?"

Shelly nodded. "Maybe you'll want a drink before you go in there."

Everybody knows about Thursday night?

How could they? Clare didn't even know for sure about Thursday night.

"Cappie of the ballistic breasts will probably play compassionate and understanding, and the others will just glance at Georgia - who will be full of self-righteous