Whispers: An anthology of Fantasy and Horror

WHITE MOON RISING by Dennis Etchison

It went like this: in her room at the top of the stairs in the empty sorority house she lay warm and rumpled in her bed, trying hard to sleep some more. It was now near noon and the light streaming through the open curtains had forced her awake again. She did not seem to care if she ever got up; she had no classes, not for a week. Still she could not make herself relax. The late morning flashed a granular red through her eyelids. Then she heard the front door down below open and close, the click echoing through the abandoned house like a garbage can dropped in an alley at dawn. Probably it was one of the few remaining girls returning from an overnight date or to pick up books before leaving for vacation. Lissa hoped so. Now she could hear footsteps treading up the stairs. She tried to imagine who it was. The footsteps reached the top of the stairs and stopped. Firmly, deliberately the footfalls turned and came down the hall, toward her room. Maybe it was Sharon. She wanted it to be Sharon. She kept her eyes tightly closed. The shoes thumped deep into the rug; the loose board in the middle of the hall creaked. Finally whoever it was reached her room—there, just on the other side of the door. Lissa felt ice crystals forming in her blood. She waited for the knock, for the clearing of a familiar throat, for the sound of her own name to come muffled through the door. But there was no sound. Still she waited. She held a breath. The blood pulsed coldly in her ears like a drum beaten underwater. She wanted to speak out. Then the sound of a hand on the loose doorknob. And the almost imperceptible wingbeat of the door gliding open.

I know, she thought, I’ll lie perfectly still, I won’t let anything move in my body and I’ll be safe, whoever it is won’t see me and will go away. Yes, she thought, that’s what I will have to do. Now she clearly felt a presence next to her bed. She was sure that someone was standing there in the doorway to her right, a hand probably still on the knob. She had not heard it rattle a second time. Time passed. She counted her heartbeats. At last she knew she could hold her breath no longer. She would have to do something very brave. With a rush that screamed adrenalin into her body she sat bolt upright, at the same instant snapping her head to the right and unsticking her eyes with a pop. There was no one there. The door was still closed and locked. The room was empty. Suddenly she realized that her kidneys were throbbing in dull pain. She knew what that was. It was fear.

The sunlight washed in through the window.

“Oh, Joe,” said his wife, “it make me sick, just physically ill. And I know it gets to you too.”

Joe Mallory cleaned up the steak and eggs on his plate with a last swipe, then hesitated and let his fork mark a slow pattern through the smear of yolk that remained.

“No.” He cleared his throat. “No, honey. Just a job.” Gently he removed the newspaper from her side, poked it in half and tried to find something else to read.

“Joey,” she said. She reached across the tablecloth suddenly and covered his hand. “I know you. And I know I shouldn’t have let you take this job, not this one.”

He looked up and was surprised and strangely moved to see her clear brown eyes glistening. As he forced his shoulders to shrug and his mouth to smile, she placed her other hand as well over his. From the open kitchen window sprang the sounds of bright chains of children on their way to the elementary school. He could almost see their black bowl haircuts and dirty feet. He wished he could help them, but it was already too late. He blinked, trying to concentrate.

“Babe,” he said calmly, resurrecting a pet name they had abandoned before he went overseas. “One more semester and I’m finished with night classes. Look. You know the size of the government checks, and you know they aren’t going to get any bigger. We both know Ray can’t take me on without a degree—”

“You know he would, Joey, if you ask him again. What’s a brother for?” Instantly she darkened, regretting the last. She held to his hand, hoping that he would let it pass.

“Now let me finish,” he said slowly. “I can’t handle a position like that yet, not without leaning on someone half the time. I have to do it right. This damned uniform is just a job until I’m ready. Till then, well, what else do I know? Really, now?” He flipped her hands over and warmed them with his. “I have to make things right before I go ahead, to feel like I’m my own man. I thought you understood that.”

“Oh, I know all that. I’m sorry. I know. It was just all the details, the whole horrible thing, these last few weeks. It sounds so awful.”

She rested her forehead on her arm and cried for a few seconds. Then she pressed her nose and stood up, stacking the dishes. “Come on, you big jock. You’ll be late.”

He pushed away from the table and crossed the kitchen in three steps. He took his wife in his arms and held her close for a long minute, while the electric clock hummed high and white on the wall.

She rocked back and forth with his body. Finally she began to laugh.

“Get out of here,” she said, trying hard.

“Meet me at work,” he said. “I’ll take you to Fernando’s for dinner.”

The tears settled diamond-bright in her eyes. She kissed him noisily and pushed him out the door.

She watched him through the window.

He came back in.

“Forgot something,” he said. He walked briskly to the breakfast nook, picked up the morning paper and dropped it in the waste can. “Give my love to the ice cream man,” he said before he shut the door again.

“Hey, I don’t even know the . . .”

He was gone and she stopped laughing. She went to the can and picked out the paper. She spread it on the table and stared down at it.

“Jesus,” she said very seriously. “Oh Jesus, Joe . . .”

The latest headline read:

Lissa, now in tank top and embroidered Levi’s, toed into her sandals and slipped down the stairs, her thin fingers playing lightly over the handrail.

“Sharon?” On the wall at the foot of the stairs she noticed the poster Sharon had brought with her from New York. It was one of those old You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Love Levy’s advertisements, showing an Indian biting into a slice of rye bread; Sharon had replaced the Indian with the horribly burned face of an Asian child, and now she saw that someone had written across the face with a red marking pen the words You Don’t Have to Be a Unicorn to Enjoy the Tapestry in an unmistakably feminine hand. She wondered what that meant. “Has anybody seen Sharon?” she called, tapping her nails on the railing. Then, “Is anybody here?”

She thought she heard voices and stepped off the stairs. But she saw only the bright, still day outside the open front door, and the two familiar Security guards at the edge of the dry lawn. They stood with their hands behind their backs and, Lissa thought, peculiar smiles on their faces; as they rocked on their heels their billy clubs swung tautly from wide, black belts.

Something about them gave her the creeps.

Her eyes listlessly scanned the living room, finding nothing to settle on.

She stepped away from the open front door. Sharon must have left it open. On the way out, probably to see Eliot.

She could call Eliot and find out, couldn’t she?

She took two steps toward the phone. She stopped. The thought of the newly installed tap put her off again. Damn it, she thought. It irks me, just the idea of it. It really does.

She sighed. She stood in the middle of the rug, her left hand resting on the back of the sofa and her right hand fingering her left elbow. She took a breath, held it, let it out. Then she went over to the big front door and nudged it shut. With her back. She didn’t particularly want to look outside.

Officer William W. Williams was doing push-ups on the grass.

“How many I got, John?”

“Uh, forty-seven by my count, Bill.”

“You lyin’!”

“You’re not going to break no record today, Williams,” said Officer Hall around a lumpy chili dog from the food service machines.

“You shut up, Hal.” Williams spat to one side and pumped three more times. The muscles on his shining arms inflated with each stroke.

“Fifty,” said Joe matter-of-factly, “and still counting.”

Williams quivered high on his corded arms for a beat, then dipped again.

“Mother,” he breathed.

The sun, setting some kind of record for April, beat down in shimmering waves, now mercifully on the tin roof of the pergola so that the officers were able to remove their spongy hats, at least for half an hour. Joe felt not quite a breeze but at least a shift in the hovering air layers here in the shade; the sweat in his short black hair was beginning to evaporate, cooling and contracting his scalp. It was, he thought without knowing why, a day for ice cream. Williams, however, chose to remain under the sun, bridging again and again over the blanched grass.

“What did the Chief have to say this morning?” asked Joe. “Sorry I missed the briefing.”

The men did not answer.

As far as Joe could see the campus was deserted, the gray buildings flat and silent, the sparsely sown trees moving not at all in the noonday heat. Though he knew better, Joe wondered idly if anyone other than Security was on the grounds today.

Old John, white-haired and better suited to a Santa Claus costume than a black uniform, folded his hands unsteadily.

“It was another one of his pep talks, Joe. You know Withers.” Joe didn’t very well, but it didn’t matter. “I guess you didn’t miss anything.”

Hall resumed chewing.

Joe realized that Williams had suspended over the lawn. Finally he moved. Down.

“Well, I hope we get him,” offered Joe, “and soon. A guy like that has got to be sick, and needs help.”

Up. Williams stopped.

Hall stopped eating.

Joe felt odd. He repeated to himself what he had said, trying to figure why they were uptight. Something about Withers, maybe. Except for old John, they didn’t seem to like the Chief. That must be it.

“Hell,” said Hall, “this is the easiest job in the world. We don’t have to do anything. A person commits a violation, he does himself in.” He spoke carefully, as if laying out a scientific fact. “Because if he’s human, he’s ashamed of the act. That’s all the lever we need.” Barely changing his tone he said, “Look at that one, will you?”

They looked. A young girl, slender and poised, was crossing the parking lot in old Levi’s, very tight, and a form-fitting top.

Down. “Hoo. That one is sweet and tough,” said Williams. Up.

“You take girls like that,” Hall went on. “They don’t have any sense of shame. Man, somebody’s got to teach her a lesson.”

“I’m not sure I follow you,” said Joe.

Down. Williams rolled over onto his back. “Gimme some of that Dr. Pepper.”

Hall cackled and took the bottle over to Williams. He knelt and whispered something. Williams nodded, then drained the bottle and lay back, gazing dreamily through the low trees by the pergola. “Somebody gimme my shirt an’ gun.” He sang a few notes to himself. “You know what we need around here?” he asked. “Bows an’ arrows. That’s what we had in ’Nam. Pick a sentry out of a tree at a hundred yards. Whoosh. Simple as that. Don’t make no noise.”

The girl was disappearing from sight.

“What time’s it getting to be?” asked Joe. He reached for his walkie-talkie. “We’d better check in with the command post.”

“No reason to hurry,” said Hall.

Williams rolled over onto his belly. Up. He started counting again. Down.

Up.

Down.

“Hey, you can knock it off,” Hall said to him. “She’s gone.”

They all had a good laugh over that.

Lissa walking across the grass: what were they laughing about?

Beyond the glimmering parking lot she glanced over her shoulder at the pergola, blurry without her glasses, bouncing behind her with each step. She shrugged and went on.

She looked down. She slipped her shoes off and felt the warm grass, following her feet past the Library and the new Student Union, staying on the shade. At the far side of the campus she climbed the cool steps to the lab.

“Knock-knock?”

She slid around the open door.

The stink from the tiered cages was overpowering; she knew at once that it would be too much for her.

She heard someone clear his throat.

She held her breath, tucked in her top, and walked forward between the skittering enclosures.

“Oh!”

An electric buzz rattled the cages.

The rats scrambled over one another, hundreds and hundreds of rats. She almost screamed. The buzzing stopped. The rats subsided.

A hand, cold and clammy as sweating brass, touched her neck. She stiffened. It seemed to be trying to press her straight down into the floor.

“Ah, but you’re not Sherrie, are you.” It was a statement. “Apologies.”

She was released. She turned. She saw a moist left hand recently relieved of its rubber glove; as she faced it, an acrid fume sliced up her nostrils. Formaldehyde.

She stumbled back. “W’ll, hi, Eliot. I was looking for Sharon.” She rubbed at her watering eyes. “I was on my way to your apartment, but I thought I’d stop by here first.” She looked up into his pallid, implacable face. And shuddered. “You haven’t seen her?”

“Afraid not, Lissa.”

He simply observed her, waiting.

She wanted out, but she said, “Well, what are you up to in here, anyway? I never saw all these—these mice the last time I was here.”

He snapped off his right glove and moved to the sink, applied talc. He pocketed his pale hands in his white coat and leaned against a supply cabinet.

“A low voltage is discharged through the bottom of each cage,” said Eliot, “every two minutes, twenty-four hours a day. At various stages I remove typical specimens and dissect the adrenal cortex, the thymus, the spleen, the lymph nodes, and so forth, and of course the stomach. There is a definite syndrome, you know.”

Are you for real? she wondered, drifting to the window. Below, a fat, greasy-looking mama’s boy with horn-rimmed glasses gazed up at the window. She had seen him hanging around a number of times lately. Too many times. She stepped away from the window.

“The adrenal cortex,” continued Eliot conversationally, “is always enlarged. All the lymphatic structures are shrunken. And there are deep ulcers, usually, in the stomach and upper gut.”

He’s not kidding, she thought. She looked outside again. The young man was gone. She felt relieved. “What do you call it?” she said, almost reflexly.

“A stress rig,” said Eliot. Cheerfully, she thought. Then, “Sherrie’s probably back at the House by now. Be careful going home, will you? I know I don’t need to remind you.” When she did not say anything, “About what happened to the others. It was a combination, a choke hold from behind, forearm across the throat, under the chin, one arm in a hammerlock. Fractures of the larynx, internal hemorrhaging. And this vertebra, this one right here, at the base of the neck. That’s what finished them. He had to lift them off their feet. Here.” He reached out to show her.

Suddenly, jarringly, the cages buzzed.

Let me out of here! She felt sick.

“Well, I’ll see you later, Eliot.” She did not wait for an answer.

Outside and down the stairs, a breeze was coming in with the dusk. Its really summer, she thought. She wanted desperately to be at the beach. She could almost smell the Sea & Ski basting her skin. A bird sang high on a telephone wire. O let there always be summers, she thought. A hundred, a thousand of them. That was what she wanted. She wanted there to be a thousand summers.

Joe trod blankly along University Drive. Off duty at last, he was on his way back to the campus, where his wife would be waiting.

“How long has this been happening?” he asked, a little dazed.

“Ed Withers’s been paying off Hall to keep him quiet ever since, Lord, seven-eight months,” said old John, strolling with his hands behind his back, his voice low as a moribund bulldog’s. “Anyway, Joey”—he had never called him that before—“I figured you ought to know. What I mean to get across is, try to keep to yourself as much as you can while you’re here. They’re a kind of—oh, they’re a bunch of what you would call motivated young officers. Highly motivated.”

“What I can’t understand,” Joe persisted, “is why everyone is keeping his mouth shut.”

Old John averted his eyes and took an unexpected number of steps to answer. He fingered his handcuffs nervously; they glinted in the day’s dying rays of sunlight. “Job’s a job, you know what I mean,” muttered old John.

Joe turned those words over and over as they came to Portola Place.

What in the world did that have to do with it? He stopped at the curb. “What does that have to do with it?” he asked.

But old John was trekking on down Portola Place. He continued to keep an eye on Joe, however. Joe saw him put a hand behind his ear.

“Nothing,” Joe shouted. Nothing at all. “See you Friday.”

He shook his head. Even here, he thought. He took a too-deep breath of the lukewarm air, squinting as the setting sun peeped its staring red eye from between the buildings. He started walking again. He lowered his head and watched his feet move, crossing the street at a fast clip.

So Hall’s wife was getting pumped by the Chief of Security. And Chief Withers was being—was there a less melodramatic word for it?—blackmailed by Hall. With a promotion thrown in. Joe throttled a bitter laugh. He wondered whether Halls wife knew that end of it. And whether she was smugly enjoying the benefits with her husband. What the hell, what the hell, what the hell, Joe thought aimlessly. And heard a rustling in the bushes.

‘Where’s the cook?”

“She’s not coming in again till after vacation.”

“Well, where’s the House Mother?” said Kathy. “I know, I know, there’s no House Mother here. Ooh, I wish I was still a PT!”

“Better not let Madam President hear you,” said Sharon. “She’ll kick you out on your ass.”

Kathy groaned and went upstairs.

Lissa laughed. She had seen the House Mother for the Pi Taus; her face had more lines in it than War and Peace, which she had been reading for English 260. Trying to read. Part I had been on the “Six O’Clock Movie” Monday. Dutifully she had watched it, but for some reason she had had to miss Part II. Part III had been on for a few minutes now.

“Henry Fonda’s the only one who acts like he read the book,” said Sharon, giving up on the color controls and laying her legs over the arm of the couch again. The set, which rendered everything the color of bile, did look, as Sharon had once remarked, “like somebody took a whiz on it.” Lissa tried to follow the plot, but by now it made no sense at all to her.

‘Who’s been leeching my Marlboros, anyway?” said Sharon, digging under the cushions.

Lissa flipped over to Channel 11. “Hey, Chiller’s on.”

“Right arm,” said Sharon.

“Is that Frankenstein?”

“Not again,” said Sharon. “I’ve seen this flick so many—”

“You know, I’ve never seen it all the way through,” said Lissa. “My folks would never let me.”

“Ha!”

“No, really.”

“Well, go ahead, knock yourself out.”

Fascinated, Lissa watched the scene in which little Maria so innocently shared her flowers with the Monster on the riverbank. One by delicate one they cast daisies on the water. Then, very slowly, the Monster’s expression began to change, as the child ran out of flowers, as the scene began to fade out.

“That’s the part they always cut,” said Sharon. “You should see his face right after this, before they find her with her neck broken. You know what I think? I don’t believe he even meant to kill her at all. I think he just sort of, you know, crushed her to him. You know what I mean? I don’t think there was anything evil about it. They were both innocents. Neither one of them knew anything about it.”

A bald-headed used-car salesman appeared on the screen, his face a sneer of chartreuse.

Joe stood stock-still and waited for the next sound.

It did not come.

He stepped onto the blue-shadowed lawn. His hand steadied on his flashlight.

He heard footfalls on the other side of the hedge, close to a house.

He let himself into the foliage, deciding to follow it up. Leaves, small and shiny, tracked past him on either side, hard branches skidding off his head, almost knocking his hat to the ground.

Close to the other side, he saw a man’s back moving quickly away from him along the side of the house, toward the front sidewalk. The house was dark, probably empty; he hoped so. He felt disoriented for a fraction of a second, almost as if he were not really here but somewhere else entirely. Then he saw the figure stand straight and slow to a normal gait, crossing under the street lamp. Then the figure returned to a crouch and headed into the trees on the other side. Peeping Tom? Or the one he had been hired to catch? Well, if this is the one, he must be one poor scared son of a bitch right now, even if he doesn’t know he’s being watched. In fact, Joe realized, his own heart hammering at the back of his badge, that part wouldn’t really have anything to do with the feeling, not anything at all.

Joe pulled free of the hedge and backed up. He moved down behind the next four houses in line and then continued forward to the street and crossed at the end of the block. He cut into the alley just past the houses.

He stayed close to the wooden fence, navigating around trash barrels—empty, they would drum an alarm down the whole of Sorority Row. He heard tennis shoes grinding into the gravel.

A young man crossed the alley not fifty feet in front of him.

They heard Kathy put a record on the turntable upstairs.

The TV screen receded into the deepening shadows of the living room. A cricket started up, sounding so close that Lissa glanced nervously about to see if it was in the house with them. Outside, an elderly officer paced past the hedge, hands behind his back.

“Look at that old codger,” Sharon’s ash flared and hissed before her face, then arced down. “I’ll bet they still don’t give them real bullets to use. Yeah, I saw his gun one time. The barrel was plugged up with wood or bubble gum or something. I wonder if they’re going to do any good now that we need them? Somebody needs them. The only thing they’ve been good for so far is to remind us all. D’you see what I mean?” She sat forward. “God, I’ve got to get away from here for a while. I’m starting to vegetate. When’s Eliot coming over?”

“He didn’t say.”

“He always takes his time. I don’t know what he does on his way over here, wandering around jacking his brain off with some new pet theory.”

“Sharon!”

“Well, it’s the truth.”

They sat with the sound turned down. The cricket synched with the record for a few bars, then continued on its own again.

“Can I have one of those, please?”

“I didn’t know you were smoking now, Lees.”

“I’m not. Not really.”

The young man crossed the alley.

Joe froze.

Then he followed.

Passing between two houses, he stopped again and dropped to one knee.

He saw ahead to the next street. The young man had already crossed over and was now hesitating by one of the huts on the other side. Houses, he told himself. Now Joe looked between the trees and houses as down a tunnel: as the street lamp flicked on, the pavement mottled under the new light, his eyes focused through to a square of still-bright sky visible now above the long campus, parking lot.

He waited.

Another figure, nearly a silhouette, appeared against the sky.

It was a woman.

He snapped to, aware that he had lost track of his prey. The young man was gone. He had slipped through, probably to the lot. But—had he gone through, or was he still somewhere on the block between, sidestepping from house to house?

He had blown it.

He started to move anyway.

Then it hit him. The woman. The woman waiting in the lot.

It had to be his wife.

“Eliot,” said Sharon, “is very into it. And therefore out of it. If you know what I mean. There are moments with us. Not many, but there are. You were right, though. Sometimes I do wonder if it’s worth it. God, I’ve been staring into this box too long. Now its beginning to stare back.” She clicked off the TV with her toes. “I don’t need to turn on the tube to see rape, murder, and perversion. I can get all that right here at school.”

Lissa heard a record droning upstairs. It sounded like Dylan.

turn, turn, turn again

“Tell her to turn it over, will you?” said Sharon. “That songs bumming me out.”

Lissa felt her way to the top of the first landing.

“Lis-sa? Bring down something to scarf, will you? Um, Screaming Yellow Zonkers. Whatever she’s got hidden up there. An-y-thing!”

Lissa smiled.

turn, turn to the rain and the wind

She walked on down the hall.

Joe had squatted so long that his gaze was fixed, almost as if the rectangle of light sky had somehow been looking back down into him instead. His eyes stung.

Fatigue. He hoped. Four days a week had seemed fine at first. Enough time to do some good, maybe, but not enough to—but it was late now, much later than he had thought, judging by the color of the sky. Marlene, he realized, blinking alert, had been waiting—how long? How long had he crouched here? And how long before, at the other village? Block, he reminded himself, block.

He crossed the street, his breath jangling in his ears like dog tags.

He shot a glance at the patch of sky and the dark figure of his wife.

His pace quickened.

As he headed over a lawn, a young man bolted out of the shrubs, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses clattering from his face.

With Ritz crackers and a five-pack of Hydrox cookies in one hand, she drew the knob toward her, cutting the sliver of light from Kathy’s room, and made for the stairs.

There was a knock on the front door.

The stairway was an unknown in the dark. She waited.

Finally, “Sharon? Can you get that?”

The knock again.

She descended, pressing against the wall.

“Just a—” She felt a catch in her throat. Why?

The door swung open.

The kid was squirming on the lawn, his face jumping.

“Whatsa matter? I’m on my way home from a study date! Whatsa matter?”

Joe closed the cuffs, pressed the key into the notch, and set the lock.

Something in the young man’s face, swarming in a film of sweat, refused to let Joe relax. He shoved the glasses at him and pulled him to his feet.

He glanced ahead. The sky was dark, too dark to see her.

He whipped up the antenna on his walkie-talkie. It shook in his hands, waving back and forth in the night air.

She saw a woman, backlighted in the open doorway.

“I’m sorry,” said the woman. “But I wonder if you’ve seen my husband. He was supposed to meet—”

“No, I—” stammered Lissa. “Do you mean he was outside?” Where was Sharon? Where? She left the doorway. “Just a minute, okay?”

She felt around the room. “Share?” she called. I know, she thought. She was hungry. I’ll check the kitchen. If I can only find the light! “Sha-ron!” she called, and wondered why her voice was breaking.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” Joe said. “Believe that.”

He drew his prisoner through the shrubs, crushing twigs and unseen garden creatures in his path.

He turned up the gain and depressed the call button. He needed back-up. His throat was dry and the back of his tongue hurt.

A shrill electronic sound whined close by. Instantly he recognized it. It was feedback—his own signal being picked up on another receiver.

“I guess you wouldn’t know who I mean,” the woman said from the doorway. “But he’s one of the Security . . .”

It’s so dark, thought Lissa at the door to the kitchen. She forced herself across the chill linoleum, her arms outstretched like antennae.

She heard a sound—a low voice. It was singing:

A wind from nowhere blew through her chest.

He pushed the kid ahead of him, following the sound.

Louder. Joe was relieved. Reinforcements were near.

Then he noticed his prisoner’s stare.

At the rear of the last house by the parking lot, dark shapes were moving.

She seemed to swim through darkness past the smooth pulsating refrigerator where there were always tooth marks in the cheese, to the drawer from which the tools had been quietly disappearing for weeks, clamoring for something, anything with which to protect herself. It was silly, she knew, but—there. A butcher knife.

Joe released his own wrist and locked the kid to the branch of what might have been a rubber tree.

“We’ll be back for you, Charlie,” he said.

She felt herself drawn down the short stone steps from the kitchen to the storage porch, to the low singing and other voices and what sounded like a scratching close to the screen door that opened into the back yard.

The officer plunges through the shrubbery. At that someone slams out the back door, sees dark forms and the girl held to the dirt and reflexly cocks back an arm, white moons rising on the nails that clench the knife.

The officer sees the downed girl, uniforms, another figure lunging into it. There is no time to question, not now while there is still time to stop it before it happens again. He remembers them sitting there dumbly in their baggy pajamas, their wooden bowls empty of the ice cream a few minutes before it happened, and how he had gone away and done nothing, not even when he heard the laughter and the grunting and the automatic fire. And the screams. But not this time. He dodges and grabs the empty hand, wrenching it into a hammerlock as he encircles the waist with his left arm, releasing the wrist with his right and setting his forearm under the chin. The back arches and the legs kick madly, but the hand refuses to let go the knife. Faces turn up. One of the officers stays atop their victim. It is Williams who closes in from the front, spreading his milky palm across the distorted mouth, covering it.

“Nice going, Joe.” He grins. “Now you’re one of us, too.”

Joe does not yet understand. Now he feels a slip in the neck and the body swings like the clapper of a bell in his arms. Now he hears new footsteps behind him and a sudden skull-splitting screech. It is the scream of a woman. He thinks he recognizes it but it is too late, now it really is too late as the girl in his arms swings one last anguished time, as her knife slices at the dark with a flash and he sees a face reflected in the blade for an instant before it drops into the leaves. But he must know what he has seen. He has seen the face of a killer. It is the same face he has always seen.

The moonlight washes down on them all.