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When he got off the streetcar at Canal Street, the Doctor hesitated, then headed for the police station to see whether Rust had yet found what remained of Flood. He went reluctantly, somewhat guilty for not confessing his own involvement. But would the information really have done any good?

Surely it would only have added confusion to a situation that already had enough of it. The Doctor tried to comfort himself with this thought, but he was still uneasy and found himself hoping that the phone and shipping records hadn't yet come in, and that Rust hadn't been to Flood's house to arrest him

But he knew as soon as Rust came out to the public area to meet him that the secret was out. The detective looked haggard, almost distraught.

'What's the matter?' the Doctor asked, feeling like a hypocrite.

'Flood's dead.'

The Doctor tried to look convincingly surprised. 'How?'

'That's a little hard to say.' Rust seemed almost dazed. The Doctor didn't blame him. The sight of the corpse must have been a shock even to a hardened homicide investigator.

'Was it murder?'

Rust looked at him blankly for a moment, as if he couldn't remember who he was. 'No,' he said finally. After a second he added, 'He appears to have had an accident.' 'Is this good or bad for you? Does it close your case?' 'I'm not sure yet.'

'Well,' said the Doctor, after a pause, Til let you get back to work.' 'Yes,'

said Rust and walked away. The Doctor almost ran after him to explain everything, but stopped himself. Somehow he didn't think a story about a trapped water spirit would make Rust feel any better.

'Anj! Come and look at this!'

When she hurried up, Fitz was pointing through the gnarled trees. 'I think the house is still here.'

'House', when they got close enough to see properly, proved not to be quite the word for the structure: a square tin-roofed shack covered with insulating black tarpaper. Jammed against the back of this, so that their doors met, was a rusting double-wide trailer. Every window was broken.

'I don't like this,' said Anji, as Fitz peered in one of the windows. He didn't respond, standing quite still, his eyes on whatever was inside. 'Whatisit?'

'Something very bad happened here,' he said quietly.

She stood on her toes and looked in. The floor was strewn with dry brown leaves that had drifted into piles in the corners, one of which contained an old iron wood-burning stove. There was no other furniture. Nor were there beer cans or whiskey bottles or any of the other signs of partying usually found in isolated derelict buildings near towns. Anji understood why. The rough board walls and the ceiling beams were gouged and scarred with such savagery that just the sight made her wince. The wounded wood was somehow, horribly,

expressive, as if she were looking at some beyond-modernist environmental sculpture of pure rage. She lowered her eyes. "That isn't the work of an animal.'

'It's awful,' said Fitz numbly. 'It's Anj, doesn't it strike you as personal?

She nodded, turning away from the house. Through the bent, overgrown orchard, the golden leaves of the woods they had come through seemed very far away. 'There's hate in it.'

'Yes,' said Fitz. 'That's it exactly. Hate.'

'If the walls look like that, then the bodies Who would have felt that much '

'I know. You'd think it had to be one of the family, wouldn't you, except they were all killed.'

'It was a madman,' she said decisively.

'Yeah,' said Fitz slowly. 'I wonder what made him that way.'

'Oh, who cares?' she said, almost angrily. 'It's a bad place, an evil place.

Let's get out of here.'

There was a fair-sized queue outside the Nightmare of Horror, mostly teenagers and college kids, smoking various substances and laughing and guzzling beer. Clips from old horror movies flickered on the side of the building: Karloff's monster entering backwards, Elsa Lancaster's bride hissing, Lugosi welcoming Dwight Frye to Dracula's castle, Janet Leigh screaming in the shower, Linda Blair's head turning 180 degrees. Everyone