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By Root 436 0

her blouse, her hair briefly burning in the rain (he sees this, he sees everything), and then for a moment she turns in Johnny's direction and looks at him with her one remaining eye and the lightning flashes, filling that eye with fire; in the last second or two of her life she is empty of everything but electricity, it seems. Then she stumbles out of one of her high heels and falls backward, swandives into the sound of thunder, the brief low flames in her hair going out, her head still smoking like the tip of an indifferently butted cigarette. She sprawls near the ceramic German Shepherd on Billingsley's lawn, the one with his name and the number of his house on it, and as her legs relax apart Johnny sees something which is terrible and sad and inexplicable, all at the same time: a dark shadow that can only be one thing. Grotesquely, the punchline of an old joke goes on for a moment in his head like a neon sign: I don't know about the other two, but the guy in the middle looks like Willie Nelson. He laughs out loud in the rain. Peter Jackson's accountant wife has just been killed by a ghost, shot from a van piloted by another ghost (this one the ghost of an alien in a Sesech uniform), and the lady has died drawerless. None of this is funny, but he laughs just the same. Maybe to keep himself from screaming. He's afraid that if he starts doing that, he won't be able to stop.

Now the shining creature behind the wheel of the blue van turns toward him and for just a moment Johnny sees it looking at him, marking him with its huge almond eyes, and he has a sense of having seen this thing before, insanity, of course, but the feeling is nevertheless very strong. It is only for a moment and then the van is past.

But he saw me, all right, Johnny thinks. That thing in the mask (it must have been a mask) saw me, and it marked me, the way you might turn down the corner of a book-page for later reference.

The shotgun goes off twice more, and at first Johnny can't see what this is about, because the blue van is in the way — he thinks he can hear shattering glass over the roar of the storm, but that's all. Then the van is retreating into the teeming, driving rain and he sees David Carver lying dead in his driveway in a litter of glass from the blown-in picture window. There's a huge red puddle in the center of Carver's stomach, it is surrounded by gobbets of torn white flesh that look like suet, and Johnny reckons that Carver's days as a postal worker — not to mention his days as a suburban car-washer — are over.

The blue van rolls rapidly up to the corner. By the time it gets there and turns right on Bear Street, it looks to Johnny like the mirage it should by all rights have been.

'Christ, lookit him!' Brad screams, and runs into the street.

'Bradley, no!' His wife grabs for him, but she's too late. Down the street, angling toward them, are the Reed twins.

Johnny walks out into the street on numb, unsteady legs. He raises a hand, sees that the fingertips are already white and pruney (he sees it all, yes indeed, and how could a guy in a Close Encounters alien mask possibly look familiar), and swops his soaked hair out of his eyes. Lightning jags across the sky like a bright crack in a dark mirror; thunder chases it. His feet are squelching in his sneakers, and he can smell damp gunsmoke. It'll be gone in another ten or fifteen seconds, he knows, driven to earth and then washed away by the pounding rain, but for the time being it's still there, as if to keep him from even trying to believe it was all just a hallucination . . . what his ex-wife Terry called 'a brain-cramp'.

And yes, he can see Mary Jackson's pussy, that highly sought-after part of the female anatomy that was known, in those dim old junior high school days, as 'the bearded clam'. He doesn't want to be thinking this — doesn't want to be seeing what he's seeing, for that matter — but he's not in charge. All the barriers in his mind have fallen, the way they used to when he was writing (it was one of the reasons he had quit writing novels, not the only one, but a biggie),