Summer of Night by Dan Simmons.

[midnight_birth]

Title: Summer of Night.
Author: Dan Simmons.
Genre: Fiction, horror, mystery,.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1991.
Summary: It's the summer of 1960 and in the small town of Elm Haven, Illinois, and five twelve-year-old boys are forging the powerful bonds that a lifetime of change will not break. From sunset bike rides to shaded hiding places in the woods, the boys' days are marked by all of the secrets and silences of an idyllic childhood. But amid the sun-drenched cornfields, their loyalty will be pitilessly tested. When a long-silent bell peals in the middle of the night, the townsfolk know it marks the end of their carefree days. From the depths of the condemned Old Central School, a hulking fortress tinged with the mahogany scent of coffins, an invisible evil is rising. Strange and horrifying events begin to overtake everyday life, spreading terror through the once-peaceful town. Determined to exorcize this ancient plague, Mike, Duane, Dale, Harlen, and Kevin must wage a war of blood-against an arcane abomination who owns the night...

My rating: 7/10.
My review:


♥ Old Central School still stood upright, holding its secrets and silences firmly within. Eighty-four years of chalkdust floated in the rare shafts of sunlight inside while the memories of more than eight decades of varnishings rose from the dark stairs and floors to tinge the trapped air with the mahogany scent of coffins. The walls of Old Central were so thick that they seemed to absorb sounds while the tall windows, their glass warped and distorted by age and gravity, tinted the air with a sepia tiredness.

Time moved more slowly in Old Central, if at all. Footsteps echoed along corridors and up stairwells, but the sound seemed muted and out of synch with any motion amidst the shadows.

The cornerstone of Old Central had been laid in 1876, the year that General Custer and his men had been slaughtered near the Little Bighorn River far to the west, the year that the first telephone had been exhibited at the nation's Centennial in Philadelphia far to the east. Old Central School was erected in Illinois, midway between the two events but far from any flow of history.

By the spring of 1960, Old Central School had come to resemble some of the ancient teachers who had taught in her: too old to continue but too proud to retire, held stiffly upright by habit and a simple refusal to bend. Barren herself, a fierce old spinster, Old Central borrowed other people's children over the decades.

Girls played with dolls in the shadows of her classrooms and corridors and later died in childbirth. Boys ran shouting through her hallways, sat in punishment through the growing darkness of winter afternoons in her silent rooms, and were buried in places never mentioned in their geography lessons: San Juan Hill, Belleau Wood, Okinawa, Omaha Beach, Pork Chop Hill, and Inchon.

Originally Old Central had been surrounded by pleasant young saplings, the closer elms throwing shade on the lower classrooms in the warm rays of May and September. But over the years the closer trees died and the perimeter of giant elms which lined Old Central's city block like silent sentinels grew calcified and skeletal with age and disease. A few were cut down and carted away but the majority remained, the shadows of their bare branches reaching across the playgrounds and playing fields like gnarled hands groping for Old Central herself.

..But even as the picture was being snapped, an observant viewer would notice that the tall windows were great, black holes-as if they were designed to absorb light rather than admit or reflect it-and that the Richardsonian Romanesque, Second Empire, or Italianate touches were grafted onto a brutal and common style of architecture which might be described as Midwestern School Gothic, and that the final sense was not of a striking building, or even of a true architectural curiosity, but only of an oversized and schizophrenic mass of brick and stone capped with a belfry obviously designed by a madman.

♥ So Dale and the other twenty-six sixth graders sat in the summer heat and high humidity as a storm darkened the skies outside and the already dim air in Old Central grew darker and summer itself seemed to recede as the clock froze its hands and the musty thickness of Old Central's interior lay on them like a blanket.

♥ The pair had been the Mutt and Jeff, the humorless Abbott and Costello of Old Central-Mrs. Duggan thin and tall and twitchy, Mrs. Doubbet short and fat and slow, their voices almost opposite in timbre and tone, their lives intertwined-living in adjacent old Victorian homes on Broad Avenue, attending the same church, taking courses in Peoria together, taking vacations in Florida together, two incomplete persons somehow joining their skills and deficiencies to create one well-rounded individual.

♥ The only other noise was the constant trickle of water in the urinals and a soft gurgling in the overhead pipes, like the damned school was talking to itself.

♥ With a whoop and a holler the band of boys left the school-grounds, loped under the elms, bounded across the crowned asphalt of Depot Street, and ran toward freedom and summer.

♥ This was the Bike Patrol, formed two years earlier by these five boys when the oldest were in fourth grade and the youngest still believed in Santa Claus. They didn't call it the Bike Patrol now because they were self-conscious about the name, too grown up to pretend they patrolled Elm Haven in order to help people in distress and to protect the innocent from evildoers, but they still believed in the Bike Patrol. Believed with the simple acquiescence to the reality of now which once left them lying awake on Christmas Eve with pulses racing and mouths dry.

♥ Duane McBride had known that he wanted to be a writer since he was six years old. Duane's reading-he had read complete books since he was four years old-had always been another world for him. Not an escape, since he rarely sought escape... writers had to confront the world if they were going to observe it accurately... but another world nonetheless. One filled with powerful voices relaying even more powerful thoughts.

♥ "Others don't seem to notice the smell here, or if they do, they don't talk about it: a smell of coldness, meat-locker taint, faint hint of corruption like the time the heifer died down behind the south pond and the Old Man and I didn't find it for a week.

"Light is odd in Old Central. The time the Old Man took me to the abandoned hotel in Davenport when he was going to salvage all that stuff and make a fortune. Thick light. Filtered through dust and thick drapes and memories of former glory. Same musty, hopeless smell, too. Remember shafts of light from a high window to the parquet floor in that abandoned ballroom-like the stained-glass windows above the stairways in Old Central?

"No. More a sense of... foreboding? Evil? Too melodramatic. A sense of awareness to both places. That and the sound of the rats in Old Central. Wouldn't think the county health people would be too thrilled with an elementary school with rats, rat droppings everywhere, rats running on top of the pipes down in the basement where the restrooms are."

♥ Duane had listened to the radio late at night since he was three years old. The Old Man used to, but had given it up some years before.

..Sometimes Duane imagined that he was the single crewman on a receding starship, already light-years from Earth, unable to turn around, doomed never to return, unable even to reach his destination in a human lifetime, but still connected by this expanding arc of electromagnetic radiation, rising now through the onionlike layers of old radio shows, traveling back in time as he traveled forward in space, listening to voices whose owners had long since died, moving back toward Marconi and then silence.

♥ Dale smelled Death before he saw it.

♥ It was summer.

The thought of summer, the warmth-in-the-face, smell-of-warming-pavement-and-moist-crops reality of it, filled Mike's spirit with energy and seemed to expand his chest with air even as the truck arrived, even as he unbundled the papers and folded them-sticking notes in some and setting those in the extra pocket of his delivery bag, even as he rode the morning streets, tossing papers, shouting good mornings to the women getting their milk bottles and the men getting into their car for the commute elsewhere, and the reality of it, the lessened-gravity of summer, continued to buoy him up even as he leaned his bike against the wall of St. Malachy's and rushed into the cool shade-and-incense interior of his favorite place in the world.

♥ Mike had been nine when Memo had her first stroke. He remembered the confusion in the household as the old woman ceased to be the verbal presence in the kitchen and suddenly became the dying woman in the parlor. Memo was his mother's mother, and while Mike did not know the word matriarch, he remembered the functional definition: the old woman in the dotted apron, always in the kitchen or sewing in her parlor, the problem-solver and decision-maker, the thickly accented Irish voice of Mary Margaret Houlihan lilting up through the heating grille in Mike's floor as she jollied his mother out of one of her cynical depressions, or scolded his father out of another evening of drinking with his friends.

♥ Sandy had said that Mrs. Duggan had been buried in her finest silk dress-the green one she had worn to the Christmas party on her last day of teaching. She was wearing the dress now. It had rotted through in several places, and the phosphorescence shone through.

The old lady's hair was still carefully combed back, held in place by tortoiseshell barrettes Harlen had noticed in class, but much of it had come out in patches, and areas of bare scalp glowed whitely. There were holes in the scalp, just as there had been holes in the silk dress.

From three feet away, Harlen could see Mrs. Duggan's hand on the table-the long fingers, the loose gold ring, the soft gleam of bone.

Mrs. Doubbet leaned closer to the corpse of her friend and said something. She looked puzzled, then glanced toward the window where Harlen crouched, his knees pressed against the ledge.

He realized in that last instant that he must be visible-that the glow would illuminate his face against the pane as easily as it illuminated the exposed tendons gleaming like spaghetti strands through the cracks in Mrs. Duggan's neck as the parchment-skin there folded and vertebrae visible shifted like white stones moving beneath rotted cloth.

Mrs. Duggan turned and looked at him. From two feet away, the phosphorescent glare burned through the dark pool of deliquescence where her left eye had been. Teeth gleamed in a lipless smile as she leaned over as if to give Harlen a kiss through the windowpane. No breath fogged the glass.

Harlen stood and turned to run, not remembering that he was on a thin ledge twenty-five feet above stone and concrete. He would have run even if he had remembered.

He did not cry out as he fell.

♥ He would include that in his confession next time under the general category of Several times I've not told the truth to adults, Father. As Mike god older, he realized the real reason why priests couldn't marry-Who would want to live with someone you had to confess to regularly?

♥ Lawrence was tough with that kind of quiet physical courage that sent him ripping into bullies half again as tall as him, his head down, fists pummeling even while he was taking a beating that would send an older kid fleeing in tears. Lawrence loved daredevil stunts-he would jump his bike from the highest ramp they could build, and when it came time in their backyard daredevil show for someone to lie down in front of the ramp while others jumped their bikes over him, Lawrence was the only one to volunteer. He played tackle football against mobs of kids bigger than him, and his idea of fun was to be taped up in a cardboard box and thrown off the strip-mined cliffs of Billy Goat mountains. Sometimes Dale was sure that Lawrence's lack of fear would get him happily killed someday.

But he was afraid of the dark.

..Once, as they were falling asleep wit the night-light on, Dale had asked him why he hated to do that... what exactly was he afraid of? It was their room. At first, Lawrence wouldn't answer, but finally he'd said sleepily, "Somebody might be in here. Waiting."

"Somebody?" Dale whispered. "Who?"

"I dunno," Lawrence had sleepily whispered back, "somebody. Sometimes I think I'll come into the room and be feeling around for the light cord... you know, it's sorta hard to find... and instead of the cord, I'll feel this face."

Dale's neck went cold.

"You know," continued Lawrence, "some tall guy's face... only not quite a human face... and I'll be in here in the dark with my hand on his face... and his teeth'll be all slick and cool, and I'll feel his eyes wide open like a dead person's... and..."

"Shut up," Dale had whispered.

..Dale had reasoned with his brother for years. "Look, stupid," he'd said, "there's nothing under your bed but dust-balls."

"There could be a hole," Lawrence had whispered once.

"A hole?"

"Yeah, like a tunnel or something. With something in it waiting to get me." Lawrence's voice had been very tiny.

♥ "And the soldier guy," said Dale.

Duane cleared his throat. "The uniform's consistent with what doughboys were back during the First World War."

"What's a doughboy?" asked Mike.

Both Dale and Duane began to explain. Duane nodded and Dale finished the explanation.

"And when was that war?" asked Mike, although he knew from Memo's stories.

Duane told him.

Mike swiveled in the doorway and slapped the doorframe. "Great. What's a guy dressed like a World War One soldier doing wandering around here?"

"Maybe he's taking a stroll near where he resides," said Kevin in his mocking tone.

"And where's that?" asked Dale.

"The cemetery."

♥ -and now there were more fireflies visible beyond the door and windows, glowing like embers in the dark. Like eyes.

♥ That night, Mike O'Rourke lay awake counting fireflies out his window. Sleep was like a tunnel, and he had no intention of going in.

♥ Oak Hill was more than three times as large as Elm Haven, boasting almost 5,500 people. It had a small hospital as well as a library bigger than a chicken coop, a small factory on its outskirts, a county courthouse, a black of suburbs-everything.

♥ They'd caught up to him two days later and kicked the shit out of him. Despite what fathers say and mothers don't understand; there's no escaping bullies.

♥ Cordie was crazy. Fact. If she'd seen Dale, she could easily be hunting him with murder on her mind.

Dale flattened himself in the weeds, trying not to breathe, trying not even to think, since he had a theory that crazy people were telepathic.

♥ Dale's breathing simply stopped. His chest was frozen. He wanted to raise his hands in front of his face, but he saw the image of the bullet passing through his palms before smashing into his mouth. Dale realized for the first time what death was: it was not walking any farther on the railroad tracks, not eating dinner tonight or seeing his mom or watching Sea Hunt on TV. It wasn't even being allowed to mow the lawn next Saturday or help his dad rake the leaves come fall.

It was having no choice at all except lying dead here on the cinders beside the railroad tracks, letting the birds pluck your eyes like berries and the ants stroll across your tongue, it was no choices, no decisions, no future at all. It was like being grounded for all eternity.

♥ Duane knew why he was going to the library. He'd grown up searching out things there-answering the many private mysteries that arose in the mind of a kid too smart for his own good. The library was a no-questions-asked, private source of information. There had to be many intellectual puzzles that could not be solved by a visit-or many visits-to a good library, but Duane McBride hadn't found one yet.

♥ Dale lay with his left hand holding Lawrence's, feeling how small his brother's fingers still seemed. When he closed his eyes, he saw the muzzle of C.J. Congden's .22 pointed at his face and he lurched awake, his heart pounding.

Dale knew that there were still darknesses he was afraid of. Only these were real fears, real threats.

♥ Beyond the screens on the two windows, leaves rustled on the big oak and crickets played their mindless tunes in the grass. The last of the evening glow was long gone from the window, but a few fireflies sent signals against the blackness of branches.

As Dale dozed off, he thought he could hear his mother ironing in the kitchen downstairs. For a while there was no sound in the room except for the regular breathing of the two boys. Outside, an owl or a dove made swallowing sounds. Then closer, in the closet in the corner, something scrabbled and clawed, paused, and then scratched a final time before falling into silence.

♥ Art worked at the Caterpillar plant near Peoria when he needed money. Although he had degrees in engineering and business administration, he preferred the assembly line.

Duane had decided that a tendency toward ironic resignation and the ability to handle responsibility didn't necessarily go together too well.

♥ The first thing Duane learned was that almost everything he knew about the Borgias from "common knowledge" was wrong or badly distorted. He paused a minute, chewing on the stem of his glasses and looking at nothing, recognizing that this initial fact of the unreliability of general knowledge had been consistent with most of the serious learning he'd done on his own over the past few years. Nothing was as simple as stupid people assumed it to be. Duane wondered if this was a basic law of the universe. If so, it made him tired to think of all the years ahead of him trying to unlearn before he could begin learning. He looked around at the basement stacks, thousands of books upon thousands of books, and felt dispirited that he would never read even all these books... never encounter all the conflicting opinions, facts, and viewpoints just in this basement... much less everything in the libraries of Princeton, Yale, Harvard, and all the other schools he wanted to visit and absorb.

♥ On the command and behest of his Pope...

Duane checked to make sure that this was Alexander, aka Rodrigo Borgia. It was.

On the command and behest of his Pope, this deaf and undersized little artist...

Duane skimmed to make sure Cellini was talking about Pinturichio, Borgia's artist. He was.

...mean in person and appearance as he was, set about painting the murals which filled the Torre Borgia with such bizarre effect, culminating in the Room of the Seven Mysteries in the dismal Borgia Apartments.

Duane called time-out from Cellini's passage to crosscheck the Torre Borgia. A guide to Vatican structures said that it was the massive tower Pope Alexander VI had ordered added on to the Vatican palace. A previous addition by Pope Sixtus had been a dark and drafty warehouse called the Sistine Chapel. Pope Innocent had opted for a lovely summer house in the far reaches of the Vatican gardens. Borgia built a tower. A note in an 1886 architectural tome mentioned that the Borgia Torre had been designed with a massive belfry at the apex of the columnar fortress, but no one other than the Pope and his illegitimate children were allowed to ascend that high in the tower through the maze of locked doors and passages.

Duane returned to Cellini's notes:

Pinturicchio, upon his Pontiff's command, descended into the Dead City beneath the City for his inspiration and models for the Borgia Apartment murals. There lay not the Christian Catacombs with their sanctified bones, but the random excavations of Heathen Rome in all its decayed glory.

It was said that Pinturicchio led apprentices and curious colleagues on these subterranean expeditions: imagine then the torchlight through these tunnels fulled with the rubble of the Caesars, entry into chambers, corridors, entire dwellings, entire streets of the Roman dead, lying like forgotten arteries beneath the weed-choked lanes of our living but lessened city... imagine the exclamations when Pinturicchio, after bravig the giant rats and hordes of bats which fed on offal and darkness there, raised his torch to illuminate the pagan decorations set there by men dead fifteen centuries and more.

This little man and ungodly artist brought these designs and heathen images to the apartments of the Borgia Pope in his Tower. Within the most private of the Corrupt Pope's secret chambers, these pagan images prevailed-covering walls, arches, ceilings, and even the massive iron bell which was said to be the Borgia talisman high in the Torre.

To this day, the lost paintings are called, by the ignorant, grotesques, because they were found and copied from the unholy subterranean caverns, or grotte, in the darkness beneath Rome.

..He found only one more mention of the bell, and again it related to the art of the wizened muralist named Pinturicchio:

But in the chamber which led from the Room of the Seven Mysteries to the locked staircase ascending to the belltower were only the Borgias might tread, the painter had reproduced the essence of those buried and forgotten murals which he had studied by the light of torches while water dripped from broken stone. Here, in what later would be called the Room of the Saints because of the seven great murals there, Pinturicchio had fulfilled his commission by filling every space between the paintings, every arch, nook, and column, with hundreds-some experts say thousands-of images of bulls.

The mystery is not that bulls should appear in his work or this hidden place; the bull was the emblem of the Borgia family; the benevolent ox had long been the metaphor for the papal procession.

But these bulls, as repeated almost endlessly in the dark hallways and grottos and entrance to the forbidden stairway above the Room of the Seven Mysteries, were neither of these emblems.

These were not the noble Borgia symbol, nor the peaceful ox. Reproduced countless times in these apartments was the stylized but unmistakable figure of the sacrificial bull of Osiris, the Egyptian god who ruled over the kingdom of the dead.

♥ There was a moment of respectful silence followed by three salvos of clods. At least six or seven hit home. Lawrence had turned his face away at the last second, but his grimy clothes actually puffed dust as he was hit, the impact stitching across his back and legs like machine-gun rounds, knocking the eight-year-old's baseball cap flying.

"Hey!" shouted Dale, waving the others to a cease-fire. Lawrence was frozen in the posture he'd been hit in, and Dale knew that if he started crying he was really hurt.

Lawrence pirouetted slowly, gracefully, dust still rising on him and around him from the impact of clods, and then he fell forward.

Actually he didn't fall forward; he threw himself into the air with the dying-swan grace of a cowboy stuntman completed a full loop in the air before hitting the slope, and then jackknifed upward again in another dying tumble. His limbs were flying wide, boneless, limp with death. The other kids stepped back as the flying, tumbling body bounced by them, rolled out onto the flat by the edge of the pond, and came to a stop with one arm draped over the water.

"Wow," said Kevin. The others shouted their approval.

Lawrence got up, brushed dust from his clothes and crew cut, and gave a low bow.

From that point on and for the he next couple of hours, as afternoon softened into evening in the woods, the boys died. They took turns standing on the summit while the others threw clods. After being hit, the dying commenced.

♥ Kev had been the only one with sense enough to take off his jeans and t-shirt, wearing only his Jockey shorts and tennis shoes for the plunge.

He bobbed to the surface grinning. The others applauded and shouted and tossed his jeans and shirt and socks into the pond.

♥ Dale was tired, achey from about a dozen bruises and strained muscles, scratched on his arms and legs, itchy from his now-stiff jeans, dehydrated to the point of cracked lips and a headache, and starved because he hadn't eaten any real food since breakfast thirteen hours earlier. He felt wonderful.

The whole sense of bad dreams, and encroaching darkness he'd felt since school had let out, had seemed to lift today. The terror of C.J. and the rifle had faded. Dale was glad that he and Mike and the others had silently decided to drop all this Tubby and Old Central business.

Summer felt the way it should.

..Dale felt happy as they waved good-bye to Mike and pedaled easily down Depot Street for home. This was the way summer should be. This was the way it was going to be.

Dale had never been so wrong.

♥ "Stay to the right, Henry," said Aunt Lena. Duane imagined that the old lady said that every time they had come this way-which is every time that they went to town or almost anywhere else-and how many times would that be over sixty years? A million?

Uncle Henry nodded attentively and stayed right where he was, in the middle of the road.

♥ Dale thought about the long pedal out to Duane's house. He remembered Duane talking about the time the Rendering Truck had tried to run him down. They'd be on the same road. He thought of having to talk to Mr. McBride and whatever other grown-ups were out there. What could be harder to do than visit someone after a death?

"OK," he said. "Let's go."

♥ 11.6.60
Found the passage on the bell Duane's been hunting for! It was in the Apocrypha: Additions to the Book of the Law by Aleister Crowley. I should have realized that it would be Crowley, that self-appointed mage of our age, who would know something about all this.

Spent a couple of hours tonight out on the porch, thinking. At first I was going to keep this to myself, but little Duane's worked hard on researching this local mystery, and I decided that he was a right to know. Tomorrow I'll take the book over and share the whole section on "familiars" with him. The Borgia section makes for weird reading.

A couple of the pertinent sections:

"Where the Medicis favored the traditional animal familiars for their bridge to the World of Magick, it is said that the Borgia family during those most productive centuries of the Renaissance (from the point of view of practicing the Art) chose an inanimate object as their talisman.

"Legend had it that the great Stele of Revealing, the iron Egyptian obelisk in the Shrine of Osiris, had been stolen from its rightful place in the Fifth or Sixth Century (Christian Reckoning) and had long been the source of power for the Borja family of Valencia, Spain.

"In 1455, when a member of that ancient family of sorcerers became pope, a great irony since his political rise had occurred due to the Dark Powers in this pre-Christian symbol, his first act was to commission the construction of a great bell. There is little doubt that this bell-brought to Rome about the time of this Borja pope's death-was the Stele of Revealing, melted down and recast into a more palatable form for the masses of Christians awaiting its arrival.

"This bell was said to be much more than another magical object of the form found in almost every Moorish or Spanish royal household in those days: the Borjas looked upon it as the 'All devourer, All begetter.' In the Egyptian, the Stele of Revealing was known as the 'crown of death' and its transmogrification had been foretold in the Book of the Abyss.

"And unlike organic familiars, which act merely as medium, the Stele, even in its incarnation as a bell, demanded its own sacrifice. Legend says that Don Alonso y Borja offered a newly born granddaughter to the bell before going to Rome for the Conclave of 1455 which-against all odds-elected him Pope. But Don Alonso, now known as Pope Calixtus III, either lacked the stomach to continue the schedule of sacrifices or believed that the Stele's power had been profitably spent by his mere accession to power. For whatever reason, the sacrifices were discontinued. Pope Calixtus died. The bell was installed in the palace tower of Don Alonso's nephew, Rodrigo y Borja, Cardinal of Rome, successor to the Archbishopry of Valencia, and the first true heir to the Borgia dynasty.

"But, legend tells, the Stele, or bell as it was now disguised, had not finished with its own demands."

..The Stele of Revealing, now cast in its disguise as a bell, had been partially activated by the sacrifice of the first Borgia pope's granddaughter. But according to the Book of Ottaviano, the Borgias feared the Stele's power and were not prepared for the Apocalypse which, according to legend and lore, went with the Stele's full awakening. As recorded in The Book of the Law, the Stele of Revealing offered great power to those who served it. But at the same time, when the proper sacrifices were completed, the talisman became the Knell of the Final Days: a harbinger of the final Apocalypse which would follow that Quickening of the Stele by sixty years, six months, and six days.

Rodrigo, the next pope of the Borgia dynasty, had the Bell taken to the tower he had added to the Vatican complex. There, in the Torre Borgia, Alexander-as Rodrigo Borgia called himself as pope-was said to have kept the Stele from its Quickening by the mystical murals of a half-deranged dwarf of an artist named Pinturicchio. These "grotesques"-designs taken from the grottos beneath Rome-served to contain the Stele's evil while allowing the family to benefit from the talisman's power.

Or so Pope Alexander thought.

In both The Book of the Law and Ottaviano's secret books, there are hints that the Stele began to dominate the lives of the Borgias. Years later, Alexander had the Bell moved to the massive and impenetrable Castel Sant' Angelo, but even burying the artifact in that sepulcher of stone and bones did not lessen the thing's power over the human beings who had attempted to control it.

Ottaviano's shortened account tells of the madness that gripped both the Borgias and Rome during those decades: the murders and intrigues terrible even by the brutal standards of the day, accounts of demons roving the catacombs beneath Rome, of things less than human moving through Castel Sant' Angelo and the streets of the city, and tales of the domination of the Stele of Revealing as it worked towards its own quickening.

From this point, after the terrible death of Ottaviano, the legend of the Stele moves into darkness. The destruction of the house of Borgia is record. It is said that a generation later, when the first Medici pope ascended to the Throne of Saint Peter's, his first papal command was to have the Bell removed from Rome, melted down, and the accursed metal buried in sanctified ground far from the Vatican.

Today, no clue to the whereabouts or fate of the Stele of Revealing has survived. The legend of the Stele's power as "All devourer, all begetter" continues in necromancy to this day.

♥ The closet door was open a bit. Dale pushed it shut as he walked toward his own bed.

The door did not click shut.

Thinking a slipper or something was in the way, Dale paused and pushed harder.

The door pushed back. Something inside the closer was pushing to get out.

..Without Lawrence's help, Dale couldn't hold the door. The pressure was unrelenting. He went with it, jumping onto the top of the four-foot-high dresser, pulling his legs up. The dresser lamp and some books crashed to the floor.

The door smashed open against Dale's knees. Lawrence screamed.

Dale heard his mother's footsteps on the stairs, her voice calling a question, but before he could open his own mouth to shout back a response, there was a wave of cold air as if they had opened a door to a meat locker, and then something came out of the closet.

It was very low and long-at least four feet long-and as insubstantial as a shadow, but much darker. It was a blackness, sliding along the floor like some frenzied insect that had just bee freed from a jar. Dale could see leglike filaments whipping wildly. He lifted his feet onto the dresser top. A framed photograph crashed to the floor.

"Mom!" He and Lawrence had screamed in unison again

The black thing moved across the floor in a blur. Dale thought that it was like a cockroach, if cockroaches were four feet long, a few inches high, and made out of black smoke. Dark appendages whipped and scrabbled on floorboards.

"Mom!"

The thing rushed under Lawrence's bed.

♥ Dale had his cot so close to the edge of the bed that there was no gap there at all. Long after their mother had fallen asleep, Dale could feel his brother's wakefulness, intense and watchful as his own.

When Lawrence's hand crept out from under the blankets onto Dale's cot, Dale didn't push it away. He made sure it was indeed his brother's hand and wrist... not something from the darkness below the bed... and then he held it tightly until he finally fell asleep.

♥ Mike munched on the bale and wondered how to phrase his question: Father C., I'm having a little problem with a sort of dead soldier tunneling under my house and trying to get at my grandma. Does the Church have anything that might help?

Finally he said, "Father, do you believe in Evil?"

♥ Mike frowned. He hated it when Father C., got into comparisons like that. The priest called them metaphors; Mike called it dodging the question.

♥ After dinner on Wednesday evening, before Dale Stewart called, Duane had gone in to peel inside the urn. The Old Man had come into the room at that moment, lighting the pipe.

"Those white chunks that look like bits of broken chalk are bone," the Old Man had said, puffing the pipe alight.

Duane had resealed the lid.

"You'd think that when they put a body in a furnace approaching the temperature of the surface of the sun," his father said, "that there'd be nothing left but ash and memories. But bones are persistent things."

Duane had sat on a seldom-used chair near the fireplace. Suddenly his legs had felt both heavy and weak at the same time. "Memories are persistent things, too," he'd said, wondering aloud why he'd chosen a cliché.

♥ "Bell? When was there a bell there?"

Duane sighed. This whole mystery was nonsense. "In eighteen seventy-six," he said softly. "Mr. Ashley brought it back from Europe..."

Mrs. Moon giggled. Her dentures were a bit loose and she used her tongue to adjust them. "You silly boy. I was born in eighteen seventy-six. How could I remember something from the year I was born?"

Duane blinked. He thought of this wrinkled and slightly senile lady as a wrinkled baby, pink and fresh and greeting the world in the year Custer's men were slaughtered. He thought of the changes she had lived through-horseless carriages appearing, the telephone, the First World War, the rise of America as a world power, Sputnik-all viewed from beneath the elms of Depot Street.

♥ The kids loved the deck in the evening, and they knew that sooner or later the adults would stir themselves from the stone patio and come up here. As large as a tennis court (although none in the group but Dale and Duane had ever seen a tennis court), set on several level of built-up platforms, catwalks, and steps, the deck commanded a view west to the road and Mr. Johnson's fields; south it looked out over the driveway, the swimming pond Uncle Henry had built, the woods, and even offered glimpses of Calvary Cemetery, when the trees began to thin in the autumn; to the east one looked down ant the barn and barnyard from the level of the hayloft, and Dale always imagined himself a medieval knight, watching from the ramparts and seeing the maze of pigpens, feedlots, chutes, chicken coops, and barnyards as the battlements in his fortress world.

♥ There was no other word for what he saw: something long and large slid through the corn and little more than a silky rustling. It was about fifteen yards out and only the slight motion of the stalks marked its wake.

If he had been at sea, Duane thought, he would have thought a dolphin was swimming alongside the ship, occasionally breaking the water with a smooth glistening of its back.

Starlight did glisten as something slid above the level of the cornstalks and then below, but the wet sheen Duane saw seemed to be a glint of starlight on scales rather than flesh.

Any thought that it was the Old Man out there, stumbling around in the low corn, disappeared as he watched the wake of the thing sliding counterclockwise in a huge circle, moving faster than a man could walk. Duane had the sense of a giant serpent moving through the field, a thing with a body as thick through as Duane's own. Something that was many yards long.

Duane made a noise like a swallowed laugh. This was nuts.

..This is insane. He curbed that line of thinking. It was insane... impossible... but it was happening. Duane felt the cool metal of the combine roof under his palms and forearms, smelled the cool air and scent of moist earth, and knew that however impossible it was, it was real. He had to deal with what was happening and not slide into denial.

♥ He got up and began moving around the circle of ravaged plants, seeing the turmoil everywhere, remembering overhearing his father telling his mother that Barney said that the state troopers and the volunteer firemen had stomped up the scene so much that the Oak Hill police hadn't been able to reconstruct much. Reconstruct, mused Dale. Strange word for figuring out the way something or someone is destroyed.

♥ Word was that the boy was also cremated, in a private service.

No one knew what Mr. McBride had done with the ashes.

At night, when he was drifting off to sleep, Dale thought of his friend now existing only as a handful of ashes and the thought brought him sitting up in bed, heart pounding with some deep realization that the universe was wrong.

♥ Dale bent over and aimed the dying beam at the surface of the water.

Tubby Cooke's body floated inches under the surface. Dale recognized him at once even though he was naked and his flesh was pure white-the white of rotting mushrooms-and terribly bloated. Even the face was bloated to twice or three times the size of a human face, like a pastry that had risen until the white dough was ready to explode from internal pressures. The mouth was open wide under the water-there were no bubbles-and the gums had blackened and pulled far back from the teeth so each molar ans incisor stood far out like yellowed fangs. The body floated gently there just under the surface, as if it had been there for weeks and would always be there. One hand floated near enough to the surface that Dale could see pure-white fingers swollen to the size of albino sausages. They seemed to waggle slightly as a gentle current touched them.

Then, eighteen inches away from Dale's face, the Tubby-thing opened its eyes.

♥ The death of Duane McBride had bothered Mike deeply, even though he hadn't considered himself a close friend the way Dale had. Mike realized that after he had flunked fourth grade-mostly because reading was so difficult for him, the letters in words seemed to rearrange themselves in random patterns even as he concentrated on making sense of them-after he had flunked, he'd come to think of himself as the total opposite of Duane McBride. Duane read and wrote more easily and fluently than any adult Mike had even known with the possible exception of Father Cavanaugh, while Mike could barely sound his way through the newspaper he delivered every day. He'd never resented that difference-it wasn't Duane's fault that he was brilliant. Mike respected it with the same equanimity that he respected gifted athletes or born storytellers like Dale Stewart, but the abyss between two kids about the same age had been infinitely larger than the grade level that separated them. Mike had envied Duane McBride the infinite number of doors that were open to him: not doors of privilege-Mike knew that the McBrides were almost as poor as the O'Rourkes-but doors of perception and comprehension that Mike barely glimpsed through conversation with Father C. He suspected that Duane had lived in those lofty realms of thought, listening to the voices of men long dead rising from books the way he'd once said he listened to late-night radio shows in his basement.

Mike felt a terrible sense of... not just loss, although loss there was, but of imbalance. It was as if he and Duane McBride had been on a seesaw together since they were tiny kids in Mrs. Blackwood's kindergarten, and now the corresponding weight was gone, the balance destroyed.

Only the stupid kid remained.

♥ "Ma," he said, "it's daytime. I'm not afraid of anything in the daytime. She's not gonna come back in the daytime." Actually, Harlen knew that only the first of those three statements was definitely true. The second was a lie. The third... he didn't know.

♥ It was better in the relative open at the top of the hill: the sun had set, but high cirrus clouds glowed coral and pink. Granite headstones caught the reflected light from above and glowed warmly. There were no shadows.

Father Cavanaugh paused as they clicked the black gate shut behind them. He pointed to the bronze-green statue of Christ far to the rear of the long cemetery. "You see, Michael, this place is one of peace. He watches over the dead with as much care as he watches over the living."

Mike nodded, although the thought that went through his head at that second was of Duane McBride alone on his farm, facing whatever he had faced. But Duane wasn't Catholic part of his mind insisted. Mike knew that meant nothing,

♥ "What do we know?" said Kevin in that little-professor voice of his.

"We know you're a dipshit," volunteered Harlen.

♥ "Let's go now," said Cordie. "It's not even ten yet."

There was a chorus of reasons no one could go that night. All of them valid-Mike had to stay with Memo, Harlen's mother would skin him if he didn't get home soon, after he had made her stay home, Kevin was out after curfew as it was, and Dale was still on the sick list at home. No one mentioned the real reason they couldn't go then. It was dark.

♥ Congden moved very fast. Long ago, Dale had learned the hard way that-at least on the subject of bullies-his father's advice was bullshit: they weren't cowards, at least not in any situation Dale had seen; they didn't back down if you faced up to them; and, most importantly, they weren't all huff and bluster. At least C.J. Congden and his buddy Archie Kreck weren't: they were mean-assed sonsofbitches who loved to administer pain.

♥ He had a sudden thought. I haven't seen these things. I'm taking Mike's and Harlen's word for this stuff. All I've seen is some holes in the ground. Jesus Christ, this guy's going to call the local asylum and they're going to put me in a rubber room before Mom even knows I'm late for supper. That made sense, but Dale didn't believe it for a second. He believed Mike. He believed Duane's notebooks. He believed his friends.

♥ Finally it was dark. For all its summer gradualness, night seemed to have suddenly descended on and around them.

Dale fed small limbs to the fire. Embers rose into the night, drifting up and out of the glade toward the stars. The boys grew closer together, their faces lifted from below. They tried to sing but found they had no will to do so. Harlen suggested that they tell ghost stories and the others scowled him into silence.

The stream down the hill made soft swallowing sounds. There was a sense of things awakening in the dark woods to hunt, the thought of many eyes opening out there, vertical irises widening to let in what little starlight there was in order to find prey.

Beneath the insect chorus and distant rumble-croak of a hundred species of frogs, there came the imagined sound of predators moving on padded feet through the night, beginning their stalk for fresh meat.

The boys tugged on sweatshirts and old sweaters, threw more wood on the fire, and sat closer until their shoulders almost touched. The fire crackled and spat, transforming their faces into demonic masks, until soon the orange flow was the only light in their world.

♥ "They really did it," Dale whispered, echoing his little brother's statement twenty minutes earlier. "They really tried to kill us."

Mike nodded, not sure if the other boy could see him even from two feet away. "Yeah. Now we know they're trying to do to us what they did to Duane."

"Because they figure that we know?"

"Maybe not," Mike whispered back. "Maybe they're just going to get all of us on general principles. But now we know. And we can go ahead."

"But what if they use... the other things?" whispered Dale. Harlen or somebody was snoring very softly, his white socks glowing from where they stuck out from under the blanket.

Mike still clutched the bottle of holy water. The squirrel gun was in his other hand, loaded, needing only the click of the safety and the pull of a hammer. "Then we get them, too," he said. He wasn't as confident as he sounded.

"God," whispered Dale. It sounded more like a prayer than a curse.

Mike nodded, huddled closer, and waited for dawn.

♥ Just after first light they went back to search for bodies.

It was one of the longest nights Dale Stewart could ever remember. At first there was the terror, excitement, and adrenaline rush to ride on, but after the first watch with Mike, when it was Dale's turn to sleep with several hours left until dawn there remained only the terror. It was a deep, sick-making terror, a fear of the dark combined wit the startle-awake sound of someone breathing under your bed. It was the terror of embalming tools and the blade at the eye, the terror of the cold hand on the back of your neck in a dark room. Dale had known fear before, the fear of the coal bin and the basement, the fear of the all-enveloping black circle of C.J. Congden's rifle aimed at him, the testicle-raising fear of the corpse in the water in his basement... but this terror went beyond fear. Dale felt as if nothing was to be trusted. The ground might open and swallow him up... literally... there were things under the soil, other things of the night just beyond the flimsy circle of branches that was their only protection. The men with axes might be waiting just beyond the leaves and branches, their eyes dead but bright, with no breath rising and falling in their chests but with a rattle of anticipation in their throats.

It was a long night.

♥ Mike felt like crying. His clever scheme had ended in confusion and near disaster. Mike had seen the Rendering Truck set back in the trees behind the Black Tree. He had smelled it. And that stench of death could have been from the rotting bodies of his friends if they had chosen to ride home on their bikes the way he had planned.

Mike knew that they were in a war as certainly as his father had known during World War II. Only there were no fronts or places of safety in this war, and the enemy owned the night.

♥ Friday the fifteenth of July had no dawn. The overcast was low and heavy and the cloudy sky merely paled to a lighter shade of gray as night turned to morning. While the clouds stayed low and threatening all day, the promised storm did not arrive. The moist heat lay over everything.

♥ Dale thumbed through the book. "Death is the crown of all," read Dale, "so sayeth the Book of the Law. Agape equals ninety-three, seven one eight equals Stele six six six, sayeth the Apocalypse of the Cabbala..."

"Read the other stuff," said Mike. He lowered the glasses. His eyes were very tired. "The stuff about the Stele of Revealing."

"It's sort of a poem," said Dale. He tugged his baseball cap lower to shade his eyes.

Mike nodded. "Read it."

Dale read, his voice falling into a faint singsong rhythm:

"The Stele is the Mother and Father of the Magus,
The Stele is the Mouth and Anus of the Abyss,
Te Stele is the Heart and Liver of Osiris;
At the Final Equinox
The Throne of Osiris in the East
Shall look to the throne of Horus in the West
And the days shall be so numbered.
The Stele shall demand the Sacrifice,
Of cakes, perfumes, beetles, and
Blood of the innocent;
The Stele shall render unto those
Who serve it.
And in the Awakening of the Final Days,
The Stele shall be created of two
Of the Elementals-earth and air,
And may be destroyed only by the
Final two.
For the Stele is the Mother and Father of the Magus;
For the Stele is the Mouth and Anus of the Abyss."

♥ "Cool it." His voice was very tired. "One thing's for sure, we're not going to sleep apart tonight and let those things pick us off one by one."

"Right," said Harlen, settling back against a huge limb, "let's all get together so they can pick us off in one big gulp."

♥ "I've got it," said Lawrence, reaching down between the beds.

The white hand and arm shot from beneath the bed and grabbed Lawrence's wrist.

"Hey!" said Lawrence and was instantly jerked off the bed, bedclothes flying. He landed on the floor with a thump. The white arm began dragging him under the bed.

Dale didn't have time to shout. he grabbed his brother's legs and tried to hold on. The pull was inexorable; Dale was coming off his own bed, sheets and spread bunching around his knees.

Lawrence screamed just as his head went under his bed; then his shoulders were pulled in. Dale tried to hang on, tried to pull his brother back up. But it was as if there were four or five adults pulling from under the bed and there was no letup on the pressure. He was afraid that if he didn't quit pulling so hard, Lawrence would be torn in half.

Taking a deep breath, Dale jumped down between the beds, kicking his own bed away, lifting the dust cover that their mom had insisted in sticking on Lawrence's bed over the boy's protests that it was sissy.

There was a darkness under there... not a normal darkness, but a blackness deeper than the impenetrable storm clouds along the southern horizon. It was an ink-spilled-on-black-velvet blackness under there, covering the floorboards and broiling like a black fog. Two massive white arms came out of that blackness and stuffed Lawrence into the hole like a lumberjack feeding a small log to the sawblade. Lawrence screamed again, but the cry was cut off abruptly as his head disappeared into the round blackness within blackness. His shoulders followed.

He was almost gone as it was. Only his legs protruded from the blackness.

Jesus Christ, he's being pulled into the floor! Maybe it's just eating him up as he goes! But the legs were still kicking; his brother was still alive.

"Mike!"

Dale felt the blackness begin to curl around him then, tendrils and tentacles of darkness thicker and colder than a winter fog. Where the tendrils touched, Dale's legs and ankles prickled as if they had been touched by dry ice. "Mike!"

One of the white hands released itself from the chore of feeding Lawrence to the darkness and grabbed at Dale's face. The fingers were at least ten inches long.

Dale lurched backward, lost his grip on Lawrence's ankles, and watched as the last of his brother was fed to the darkness. Then there was nothing under the bed but the black fog, receding on itself now, the impossibly long fingers sliding backward and down like the hands of a sewer worker lowering himself into a manhole.

Dale threw himself under the bed, reaching into the darkness, groping for his brother even as he felt his hands and forearms go numb in the terrible chill, even as the blackness folded on itself, tendrils pulling in like a movie of some ebony blossom folding up for night, run at high speed... and then there was only the perfect circle of darkness-a hole! Dale could feel emptiness where the solid floor should be!-and then he tugged his hands back as that circle contracted all too quickly, snapping shut like a steel trap that would have taken Dale's fingers off in an instant...

♥ Beneath Mr. Ashley-Montague, the wooden floor of the seventy-two-year-old bandstand suddenly bowed upward and splintered with a sound rivaling the rash of thunder overhead.

Mr. Dennis Ashley-Montague had time to scream once before the lamprey mouth and six-inch teeth closed on his calves and legs to the knee and dragged him down through the splintered hole.

♥ "Let's go," said Dale. He was already starting down the hill toward the school, leaving the others behind. "Let's go!" There was no sign of his mother's car. All the lights were out in this part of town. Only Old Central seemed to glow with the same sick light that illuminated the interior of the clouds.

Mike clapped Harlen on the back, did the same with Kevin, and jogged down the slope toward Dale's house. Dale had paused across the street, looking back at his friend. Mike heard the edge of a shout but the words were drowned by the next roll of thunder from the storm. It might have been "Good luck." Or possibly "Good-bye."

♥ It's ahead of me.

He lay flat, waiting.

The thing came around a bend in the tunnel perhaps twelve feet ahead of him. It was worse than Mike could have imagined.

For a second he almost let his bladder go, but controlling that helped him to control his thinking. It's not so bad, it's not so bad.

It was.

It was the eel that Mike had caught and run from in a small boat, and a lamprey with its all-devouring mouth and endless rows of teeth disappearing into the gut that was its body, and it was a worm the size of a large sewer pipe, with quivering appendages that might have been a thousand tiny fingers ringing the mouth, or perhaps waving tendrils, or perhaps serrated lips... Mike didn't give too much of a damn at that second.

The flashlight illuminated gray and pink flesh, pulsing blood vessels visible through the skin. No eyes. Teeth. More teeth. Pink gut not so dissimilar from the tunnel itself.

The thing paused, tendril lips writhed, the lamprey snout pulsated, and it came on at a terrific speed.

♥ Lightning to the south revealed a solid wall of black moving across the fields toward Elm Haven at the speed a horse could run at full gallop, but there was no one to see it.

♥ The interior of Old Central looked nothing like the building Dale had left for the last time seven weeks earlier. His neck first pivoted as he took in the scene, then arched as he looked up through the center stairwell.

The floor was awash with thick, almost-fried brown fluid that rose to the top of Dale's sneakers like some great molasses spill. The walls had been covered with a thin layer of pinkish, vaguely translucent material that reminded Dale of the naked and quivering flesh in a nest of newborn rats he had uncovered once. The organic-looking stuff dripped from railings and banisters, hung in great cobwebby strands from portraits of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, dribbled in even thicker webs from the books in the cloakrooms, dangled from the doorknobs and transoms, hung from the corners of the boarded windows like huge, irregular picture frames made of pulsing flesh, and rose toward the mezzanine and dark stairs above in a great cheesy mass of strands and rivulets.

But it was above them that the nightmare grew obscene.

Dale arced farther back, seeing Harlen's flashlight beam join his own.

The second- and third-floor balconies were almost covered with gray and pink strands, the filaments growing more substantial as they rose toward the central belfry, arching and crisscrossing the dark space up there like flesh-colored flying buttresses in a cathedral designed by a lunatic. Stalactites and stalagmites of graying epoxy were everywhere, dripping from darkened light fixtures, rising from railings and balustrades, hanging across the great central space like clotheslines made of torn flesh and ribbed cartilage.

And from those "clotheslines" hung a foul wash of what looked like pulsing red egg sacs. Dale's flashlight beam stopped on one and he saw dark shadows inside, scores of them. They were moving. The entire sac pulsed and throbbed like a human heart hung on a bloody thread. There were dozens more.

Shadows moved on the mezzanines. Liquid dripped from the dark stained-glass window. But Dale had eyes for none of this. He was looking at the belfry.

Above the third-floor landing, the "high-school level" that had been closed off for so many years, someone had torn out the broad-planked floor of the belfry. And that is where the glow was coming from.

"Glow" was not the right word, Dale realized, as he stared at the bluish-green throbbing, stared open-mouthed at the radioactive false light of the thick, fleshy web tendrils that filed the belfry, and at the redly glowing thing centered there.

He might have called it a spider, for there was a sense of many legs and more eyes; he might have described it as an egg sac itself, for Dale had seen the half-formed heart and reddish eye of such a thing in the yolk of fertilized eggs on Uncle Henry's farm; he might have said it was a face or giant heart, for it resembled both in a sick way... but even from forty feet beneath the thing, staring upward with a growing sense of despair and sickness, Dale knew that it was none of these things.

♥ Mike decided that taking the tunnel had not been among the smartest choices he had ever made. His hands and knees were bleeding openly now, his back was killing him, he was lost, he felt like several hours had passed, he was sure that he had almost certainly missed anything that was happening the school, the lamprey-things were coming back, he was almost out of shotgun shells, his flashlight was giving out, and he'd just discovered that he shuddered from claustrophobia.

Other than that, he thought, I'm doing just fine.

♥ "The toys," said Roon, gesturing impatiently toward the squirt guns in their belts.

Dale started to lower the plastic weapon, turned the muzzle upward at the last second, hand squeezed a long burst of hot water directly into Dr. Roon's face.

The ex-principal shook his head slowly, removed a handkerchief from his suitcoat's breast pocket, mopped his face, and calmly removed his glasses to wipe them. "You silly, silly boy. Just because the Master spent a thousand years in the center of such belief and still reacts to old habits, not all of us grew up in the land of Popery." He set his glasses back in place. "After all, you don't believe in this miraculously altered water, now do you?"

♥ Dr. Roon dragged Dale and Harlen up stairs that looked like a waterfall of melted wax, beneath the stained-glass window, which seemed to have grown a tapestry of fungus, under huge webs apparently made of sinew, past stalagmites of bone, below stalactites of what appeared to be fingernail material, up past the library mezzanine, onto the second-floor landing and into their regular classroom. The door was held its regular size and almost concealed by thin filaments of black hair that spouted from nodes in the walls.

♥ The gasoline hadn't exploded. He could see the rivulets running from the shattered tank, could see the gas that had splashed the walls and was seeping to the interior, could hear the gurgling and smell the fumes. It hasn't exploded.

Damn, it wasn't fair. In the movies that Kevin watched, a car went off a cliff an exploded in air for no reason except the director's need for pyrotechnics. Here he'd just destroyed almost fifty thousand dollars of his father's livelihood, smashed four tons and thousand gallons of gasoline into a tinderbox of a school... and nothing! Not a goddamned spark.

♥ Instead he looked straight out at the thing hanging from its web in the center of the belfry.

The bulbous, translucent sac may have been bell-shaped at one time. Dale thought he saw the mountings and fixtures for a bell where the thing had anchored itself with the most tendrils and web attachments. It did not matter.

What he saw now looked back at him... at all of them... with a thousand eyes and a hundred pulsing mouths. Dale sensed the thing's outrage, the total disbelief that ten thousand years of quiet dominance could end in such force... but mostly he sensed its rage and power.

You can still serve me. The Dark Age can still begin.

Dale and Lawrence and Harlen were staring right at the thing. They felt the tremendous warmth touch them... not just the heat from the flames, but the deeper warmth at knowing that they could serve the Master, possibly even save Him through their service.

Together, legs moving as a creature with one mind, the three of them took two steps toward the edge of the catwalk and the Master.

Mike raised Memo's squirrel gun and fired into the egg sac from a distance of six feet. The sac ruptured and dribbled its contents, hissing, into the rising flames.

Mike tugged them back and used the gun as a hammer to bash out the rotted slats on the side of the belfry.

♥ The days passed. The corn grew. The boys' nightmares did not disappear altogether, but they became less troublesome things.

The nights grew slightly longer each day, but seemed much shorter.

♥ "Look!" interrupted Cordie, pointing to the sky.

They all raised their eyes to watch Echo move silently across the sky. Even the adults stopped in their conversation to watch the small ember of the satellite move between the stars.

"Gosh," whispered Lawrence.

"It's way up there, ain't it?" whispered Cordie, her face strangely soft and glowing in the starlight.

"Just where and when Duane said it'd be," whispered Mike.

Dale quietly lowered his head, knowing that the satellite-like the Bootleggers' Cave, like so many things-would be there tomorrow night and the day after, but that this moment, with his friends around and the night soft with summer sounds and breezes, and the voices of his parents and their friends just beyond the house, and the sense of endless summer days that August brought-that this moment was only for now and must be saved.

And while Mike and Lawrence and Kevin and Harlen and Cordie watched the satellite pass over, their gazes raised in wonder at the bright new age now beginning, Dale watched them, thinking of his friend Duane and seeing things through the words that Duane might have used to describe them.

And then, knowing instinctively that such moments must be observed but not destroyed by observation, Dale joined his friends in watching as Echo reached the zenith and began to fade. A minute later they were arguing baseball and shouting at each other about whether the Cubs would ever win another pennant, and Dale was only slightly aware of it as a warm breeze blew across the endless fields, rustling the silk tassels on a million stalks of corn as if promising many more weeks of summer and another hot, bright day after the short interlude of night.