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  What was that?

  Someone’s in your saloon, Stevie.

  He froze there in the wind with one hand holding his keys and the other stretching over five cockeyed sticks ready to fall with the slightest movement. Muted laughter drifted through the door. He fingered through the ten or so keys, found the big brass one, and shoved it into the lock.

  He pushed the door open. A loud crash. Howling laughter.

  Yes, sirree, some fool was in his saloon. Well, he’d better not be. This saloon was closed, locked, off-limits to all fools, which meant everybody.

  Another crash sounded, loud now. He glanced about the storeroom, set the stakes carefully on the floor with trembling hands. He reached the inner door and placed his hand on the knob.

  Black-in-the-box popped up in his mind. Not thinking too clearly are you? It cackled past that plastic smile. Not too clearly at all. You can’t just walk in there unprepared.

  Another laugh peeled through the saloon, a shrill one that reminded Steve of Claude Bowers from down the street. He let go of the handle, shuffled back to where he’d set the stakes, and picked up the largest one. He swung it through the air, pleased at the small whoosh it made.

  Wanna trip, baby? Here, let me help you trip.

  Steve walked back to the door and shoved it open.

  The three fools were there in the middle of his saloon, sitting on the only table left standing. Claude Bowers, Chris Ingles, and Peter, Claude’s squirt kid. They looked at him with wide grins, like Black-in-the-boxes only without a box. He looked around the saloon.

  The tables and chairs had been splintered into a hundred pieces that littered the floor like kindling. The large Coors chandelier over the pool table hung twisted and smashed so that only the white fluorescent housing looked familiar to him. The pool table glistened with a liquid. Maybe vomit. The heat began to rise up his body like an erupting volcano. Dozens of empty bottles stood along the windowsills and in groups around the floor, like bowling pins waiting to be toppled.

  Steve felt his eyes bulge, felt the surge of blood in his temples. He looked to the right. The bar had been hacked at with a sharp tool of some kind. A large knife or an ax maybe. The bar stools were gone. Just gone.

  Then he realized that they were on the floor, only they were splinters, not stools anymore. The front door had been ripped from its hinges and lay on its side.

  “What in the fiery blazes is going on?”

  He heard his voice asking the question, but he was thinking, Where’s Black-in-the-box, because he knew this was really his doing.

  Claude and gang were looking at him like he was a ghost who’d walked in on them.

  “Hi, Steve,” Chris said. “We didn’t think you’d mind. Just having a little fun.”

  Black-in-the-box grinned in his mind. Have a heart. They’re not doing anything you wouldn’t do. Let ’em trip, baby.

  “Didn’t think I’d mind? What do you mean you didn’t think I’d mind?”

  Good for you, Stevie. You tell ’em.

  “You little stinkin’ weasels! How about I have a little fun with you?” He raised the stake in his hand like a bat. “How’d you like that?”

  Peter—the little squirt who was picking his jaw with Steve’s furniture—had an ax in his hand, and he laid it carefully on the table. Clunk.

  You think putting that thing down somehow makes all this okay?

  “Take it easy, Steve,” Chris said. “We’ll clean it up. Promise.”

  “Oh, I know you will, Chris. That’s why I’m gonna let you live. If I didn’t think you were gonna clean this up, I’d kill you.” He lowered the stick and twirled it in his hand. “I’d run this stake right through your heart.”

  Now that would be a trip.

  Chris chuckled. “Yeah. But we’re gonna clean it up, right guys?” Neither Claude nor Peter answered and Chris glanced their way. “Right boys?”

  “Of course, Chris,” Claude answered, but he wore a crooked grin and Steve wasn’t sure he liked the look of the fat man’s smile.

  “How about I give you exactly fifteen minutes to clean it up?” Steve said. “How about I come back in a quarter hour, and if you make this picture perfect I won’t run this stake through your hearts?”

  “Yeah,” Chris said, chuckling nervously. “What’s the use of living if you can’t have a little fun now and then, right? We all have our kinds of fun, right, Steve? I mean you have yours”—he motioned toward the stick in Steve’s hand—“and we have ours. But we’ll clean it up. Swear it.”

  It was then, just as he was thinking that Chris had a point, that Steve remembered the eight stakes he’d hidden under the bar. He scanned the floor, searching for a sign of them. But wood was everywhere, broken into splinters.

  A tiny sliver of fresh oak jumped into his vision. The rest of the wood faded into the floor and just that one little piece screamed up at him.

  Here I am. And yes, I am one of your sticks. What do you think of that?

  A dozen other splinters seemed to materialize. Steve’s forehead began to throb. A sickening weight thudded into his gut like a bowl of thick oatmeal.

  He jumped over to the bar. Rounded it. They had done it, hadn’t they? They’d destroyed his sticks! He ripped the velvet draping away from the back of the bar.

  The shelves were empty!

  With a horrendous growl, Steve leaped over the bar and faced Chris. Black-in-the-box screamed in the back of his mind. Do it, Stevie! Do him!

  Steve rushed.

  The weasel raised an arm to protect himself. Steve stopped two feet from Chris, raised his stake high above his head, and swung it down with all of his strength.

  Crack! Chris’s forearm snapped like a twig. The man howled in pain and rolled into a ball. His right arm flopped onto the pool table at an unnatural angle. Steve raised the shaft again and beat down again.

  Surprise, Chris! Say hello to my stake!

  He brought the stick down again, and again, and again, feeling power rush through him like a drug that filled him with a hot pleasure.

  Wanna trip, baby?

  He hesitated and brought the stick down one last time. Chris crumpled, draped over the pool table, still.

  Steve looked up at Claude and Peter, whose faces seemed carved of soap. He ran a hand along his stick and tried to wipe off the blood.

  “Clean this up,” he said and walked out the back, into the alley.

  What a trip.

  A boy stood in the alley, staring at him. He knew this boy. A rascal named Roland. This was his son.

  “Beat it, boy.”

  Roland just stared at him with round eyes.

  He almost said “beat it” again, but he decided not to bother. Roland was a big boy and could fend for himself. He probably didn’t have the guts not to beat it.

  Steve headed into the forest behind the bar. He looked back five paces past the first row of trees.

  Roland wasn’t beating it after all. He was already at the back door, peering in. Steve chuckled.

  What a very major trip.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  PARADISE

  Saturday morning

  MOM WAS holding her own, Johnny thought, but that wasn’t exactly encouraging considering what her own was. His mother had already half-lost it. She wasn’t like Claude or Chris, but she wasn’t her old self either. And no amount of prodding convinced her to explain herself to him.

  She’d spent most of Friday afternoon on the couch, picking through the refrigerator and reading a novel by Dean Koontz. At least Johnny finally convinced her to stay away from the water, a promise she tried to break once only to discover that water no longer flowed into the Drake house. Johnny had found the main and turned it off.

  She retired just after seven, and Johnny finally drifted off to sleep around midnight, still battling that throb that kept trying to latch itself onto his head. He’d actually become pretty good about deflecting the distortions when they came.

  Why was he able to do
this, but not everyone else? The best he could figure was that he had been terrified by Black when the preacher killed Cecil, and the moment put him on guard.

  That and the fact that Johnny stayed clear of Black’s poison, despite having undoubtedly ingested some in the water.

  He awoke at ten o’clock Saturday. The clouds that he either saw or thought he saw were now so dark that he could hardly see across the dust-blown street.

  Phone was still dead. He considered climbing into his mother’s four-wheel drive and taking a shot at driving out of the valley. Sally had refused to take him out yesterday. Probably a good thing in retrospect, considering her condition. But he’d never driven, and the conditions were anything but decent for a trial run. There were too many cliffs bordering the two-lane road out.

  Johnny stood in the kitchen and squinted against another headache. Stars popped to life, then faded. A musty smell drifted by. The tastes-like-nothing taste filled his mouth. He wanted it, sure he did.

  But he also hated it.

  He grunted and decided then that he couldn’t just sit here without a plan. He had to talk to someone sane, at the very least. He had to talk to Roland even if it did mean leaving his mother for a few minutes and braving the dark wind.

  Johnny poked his head into his mother’s room, satisfied himself that she was still dead to the world, pulled on a hoodie for protection, and headed down the back alley.

  The town was dark and windy and dusty and dead. Hot though.

  He couldn’t shake the possibility that he was actually only seeing this in his mind’s eye. If so, then Black was probably a messenger from God after all. But after all he’d seen, Johnny couldn’t make that fit.

  A lone howl drifted above the wind. Johnny froze. What was that? A loud crash on his left, nearby in the forest. Then a loud grunt.

  He began to run, straight toward Roland’s house.

  When he got there, he quickly came to the awful conclusion that the house was deserted. At least no one was stirring. Roland’s shade was open and his bed was made, but no Roland. The lights were off in the whole place. Not a soul to be seen.

  Main Street was just as empty.

  Buffeted by fresh fear, Johnny sprinted back to his house, ignoring an ache in his weaker leg. Things were worse than yesterday, much worse. Where was everyone? And where was Black?

  He had to get home.

  Inside, the back door slammed shut behind him. Then again, things were no better in here. He stood alone in the hall for a few moments, soaking in the silence.

  He wanted to cry. He was alone, wasn’t he? And he had no place to go. Maybe it would be easier to walk over to the saloon and ask them for some of Black’s crud. Maybe he should just walk out into the street and scream his surrender to the black sky, let the black angel administer some of his grace and hope.

  Johnny checked on his mother again. No movement other than the rise and fall of the sheets with her breathing. No sense in waking her up.

  He walked into his room, sat on his bed, and was about to lie down when the one-inch marble he had with him the day Cecil died rolled slowly toward the edge of his dresser.

  Johnny blinked at the sight. The red shooter stopped, then rolled back the way it had come. It stopped in its original position.

  Johnny’s pulse quickened. Had he really seen that? What could have caused a marble to roll like that? No wind in here. No tremors, no tilting. But things rolled on their own sometimes, didn’t they? The slightest force could . . .

  The marble vanished.

  Johnny stood, amazed. The space where the round red marble had sat just a moment ago was empty. Nothing but an oak dresser top.

  He ran his hand over the varnished wood grain. He’d seen eyes poked out and an apple turned into a snake. He’d seen warts come and go. He’d even seen Black pull his lip off his face. But this was different.

  This was the first time he’d seen something impossible happen without the magician on hand to execute his magic.

  Fred and Peter saw something on the old theater wall, but only after they’d taken some of Black’s slimy concoction. And he hadn’t seen that himself. They’d all seen the clouds darkening overhead and dust blowing along the streets, but Johnny was quite sure that was real.

  So what did that make this disappearance of the red marble? Real?

  A thunk sounded behind him. He spun, but there was nothing he could . . .

  He caught his breath. The red shooter sat on the wall, halfway up, near the door frame. Johnny lowered himself to his bed unsteadily. What was going on here? He watched it for a minute, waiting for it to move. The marble just sat there as if stuck to the wall with glue.

  Johnny rose and approached the red shooter. Slowly, ever so slowly, he reached out. Touched it. Gripped it between his forefinger and thumb. Pulled it off the wall.

  The glass shooter was smooth and weighty, exactly as it always had been. He let it rest in his palm and opened his fingers. The ball trembled and rose from his hand as if suspended on an invisible string.

  Incredible! Johnny moved his hand to the right. The marble followed, precisely equaling the movement of his hand. He jerked his hand to the left. Again the marble followed precisely. No lag.

  He moved his hand in a quick circle. The red orb followed every move without falling behind even a fraction of a second. A crooked smile formed on his face. This was absolutely . . .

  The marble broke form, drifting toward the dresser. Like an unidentified flying object, the orb hovered two feet above the dresser for a long moment, then sunk slowly to the oak surface and touched down in its original resting place without a sound.

  Johnny sat hard on the bed. The box springs squeaked. He didn’t know what to think, other than it wasn’t a trick. Black wasn’t up in the attic floating the ball on an invisible string. He wasn’t crouched behind the bed using magical magnets that worked on glass. Johnny had touched the marble. Held it in his hand. What he’d just seen had to be real.

  The marble did not move.

  Johnny just watched.

  STEVE SMITHER had spent the night under the saloon’s back porch, where he intended to keep an ear tuned to destruction. He awoke close to noon, although he wouldn’t have known it by the sky, because the sun was obscured by dark clouds.

  He had only four sticks left—Claude and gang destroyed eight, and he ruined one on Chris. He needed more sticks.

  Steve walked home, past the shed, looking for any wood that might work.

  No wood.

  He returned to the saloon and struck out for the forest, gripping one of the sharpened stakes in his left hand. His mind was foggy and he couldn’t see too well, but he lurched toward the grove of saplings from which he’d harvested his other stakes.

  The leaves were coming off the trees, an early fall in the middle of summer. What a trip.

  Steve stumbled into a small clearing and paused, dazed. Had he forgotten something? His destination maybe. No, he was going to the grove of aspens to make some more sticks.

  Or he would cut down some little trees and then haul them to his shed where he would make some more sticks. Unless Paula was there—then he would stay out at the grove where she couldn’t ask him any questions, like why he was making so many sticks.

  He looked down at the stake in his right hand and then at his left hand, hanging there, limp, empty. Of course! He’d forgotten the ax. Stupid, stupid!

  Steve lifted his hand and stared at the dried blood on his forearm. Chris’s blood. He wondered if he’d killed the man. An image of Chris lying there on the pool table all curled up filled his mind. He grinned and forgot about the ax for the moment.

  Beat that man good, hadn’t he? Should’ve beat the other two while he was at it. In fact, it was probably Claude’s punk kid who’d found his sticks in the first place. Kids were like that, poking their noses in where they didn’t belong.

  Maybe they would come back for some more fun and he could have some more of his fun. He flexed his fingers ar
ound the crusted blood. This time he might stick the sharp end into them. They would sure howl about that!

  The thought of making more sticks struck him as senseless. Why make more stakes when he had four perfectly good sticks? He should start learning how to use the stakes, shouldn’t he? Like graduating from boot camp. It was time to learn how these things worked for real. He could always make more stakes. But learning how to use them, now that would be something.

  And not just the blunt end either.

  Steve stood in the small clearing, swaying on his feet, left hand clamped around a three-foot stake and the other bloody hand palm up by his chest. He looked around at the trees.

  Well, I can’t just go around poking people for practice. They’d never understand. So then what? What can I stick my stakes into?

  A chipmunk scurried across the clearing, and Steve watched it go. Now there was a thought. Course, the critter was a bit small, but it could make for good practice. It could be like a mission: Pursue and kill all the chipmunks. And any other bigger animals you encounter.

  Yes, sir. Now bigger animals might be something. He could jab them good with his stakes. Jab, jab, jab.

  Steve clenched the stake with both hands and stalked into the forest.

  WHILE STEVE was stumbling through the woods, discovering bloodlust, Claude Bowers was down by the Starlight Theater grinning up at the big sign. Beside him stood a badly bruised and bloodied Chris Ingles. Roland, Peter, and Fred stood to one side, watching his every move.

  They’d fixed a crude splint to Chris’s broken arm, but he’d complained for the last thirty minutes about the pain, and Claude was getting sick of telling him to shut up.

  “Take some more of those painkillers and just shut your trap, Chris! Here, drink some of this.”He shoved his bottle of Jack Daniels at the man.

  “We’re gonna ransack this entire town,” Claude said, looking at his son with a wide grin. “What do you think of that?”He snatched the bottle back from Chris and took a slug. Chris had almost emptied it, but Peter had another bottle in his pocket, and they knew where Steve kept the rest.