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By Root 1022 0

look older, exactly; she looked less there. Her hair had started to look finer, like a baby's hair. You could see her scalp through it. And her skin looked like it was startin to grow its own skin - this fine, misty webbing over her cheeks, around her nostrils, at the corners of her eyes, between her fingers. Wherever there was a fold in the skin, that was where you could see it best. It fluttered a little as she walked. You want to hear something crazy? When the County Fair comes to town these days, I can't bear to go near the cotton-candy stands on the midway. You know the machine they make it with? Looks like a doughnut and goes round and round, and the man sticks in a paper cone and winds the pink sugar up on it? That's what Ardelia's skin was starting to look like -those fine strands of spun sugar. I think I know now what I was seein. She was doin what caterpillars do when they go to sleep. She was spinnin a cocoon around herself.

'I stood in the doorway for some time, watchin her go back and forth. She didn't notice me for a long while. She was too busy rollin around in whatever bed of nettles it was she'd stumbled into. Twice she hammered her fist against a wall and smashed all the way through it - paper, plaster, and lath. It sounded like breakin bones, but it didn't seem to do her no hurt at all, and there was no blood. She screamed each time, too, but not with pain. What I heard was the sound of a pissed-off she-cat ... but, like I said, there was fear underneath her anger. And what she screamed was that deputy's name.

'"John Power!" she'd scream, and whack! Right through the wall her fist would go. "God damn you, John Power! I'll teach you to stay out of my business! You want to look at me? Fine! But I'll teach you how to do it! I'll teach you, little baby of mine!" Then she'd walk on, so fast she was almost runnin, and her bare feet'd come down so hard they shook the whole damn house, it seemed like. She'd be mutterin to herself while she walked. Then her lip would curl, her eyes would glare redder'n ever, and whack! would go her fist, right through the wall and a little puff of plaster comin out through the hole. "John Power, you don't dare!" she'd snarl. "You don't dare cross me!"

'But you only had to look into her face to know she was afraid he did dare. And if you'd known Deputy Power, you'd have known she was right to be worried. He was smart, and he wasn't afraid of nothing. He was a good deputy and a bad man to cross.

'She got into the kitchen doorway on her fourth or fifth trip through the house, and all at once she saw me. Her eyes glared into mine, and her mouth began to stretch out into that horn shape - only now it was all coated with those spidery, smoky threads - and I thought I was dead. If she couldn't lay hands on John Power, she'd have me in his place.

'She started toward me and I slid down the kitchen door in a kind of puddle. She saw that and she stopped. The red light went out of her eyes. She changed in the wink of an eye. She looked and spoke as if I'd come into a fancy cocktail party she was throwin instead of walking into her house at midnight to find her, rammin around naked and smashin holes in the walls.

' "Davey!" she says. "I'm so glad you're here! Have a drink. In fact, have two!"

'She wanted to kill me - I saw it in her eyes - but she needed me, and not just for a companion no more, neither. She needed me to kill Tansy Power. She knew she could take care of the cop, but she wanted him to know his daughter was dead before she did him. For that she needed me.

' "There isn't much time," she said. "Do you know this Deputy Power?"

'I said I ought to. He'd arrested me for public drunkenness half a dozen times.

' "What do you make of him?" she asked.

' "He's got a lot of hard bark on him," I says.

' "Well, fuck him and fuck you, too!"

'I didn't say nothing to that. It seemed wiser not to.

'"That goddam square head came into the Library this afternoon and asked to see my references. And he kept asking me questions. He wanted to know where I'd been