Frenzy

shows,' the euphemism for live sex acts, having celebrated a birthday by performing in a particularly nasty S & M show in which she was listed as 'golden shower-receiving.'

But the quality of mercy droppeth as the gentle rains. Tiff's addiction and crippled body they could accept. Her stubborn streak was a continual irritant to the Freunds. Her owners now regarded Tiff as worthless chattel, fast becoming a tiresome liability. When the Freunds are approached by some mob-connected people who need an untraceable live target for a snuff movie being shot out of the country, she is sold for what will be the last time.

Maybe it was around the time his daughter disappeared that the bad dreams began, he thinks. Or was it earlier — when he came home from the trip to the coast and discovered Pat and Buddy Blackburn were sharing his bed? Spain cannot recall the precise instant the nightmares began. Only the dreams themselves, which are bloody real and etch themselves into his memory banks.

The large picture window framed a vista of falling autumn leaves that dropped from the tall oak, maple, and sycamore across his landscaped lawn. The leaves and grass appeared to have lost all chlorophyll content overnight, the lush look becoming sparse as the dead, brittle leaves floated down to turn to mulch. The Archilochus colubris had long disappeared, and it was just as well, since there was no longer anyone to tend the feeders.

All the losses were building deep within Spain, and about the time he thinks the awful, aching hurts have become a dull, throbbing pain, some new shock wave of recognition hits his core. Ever the realist, he senses that his child is gone for good.

One day she'd been buying Cabbage Patch dolls and Care Bears and the next day she's hitchhiking and getting birth-control pills. Why couldn't he have spotted all of this coming and done something to ward it off? Over and over he makes himself look at things that had happened between himself and Pat, between father and daughter, the harshness and coldness that had alienated a wife and then a daughter.

He could sense now that there would be no reunion or eventual reconciliation. No firm but fair fatherly attentions to put his wayward child back on the track. There would be no reprieves for them. No second chance to become a family again.

He'd been in the family room, staring out the window at the falling leaves, when he'd seen the shadow again or a sense of some movement there in back of him and he'd whirled, instinctively, his right hand going for the small automatic he carried and then catching himself all in the same moment.

That feeling again. The eerie feeling that someone was there in the big, empty house with him. Watching him. Jesus. He felt the skin on his arms and shoulders prickle with what his dear mother had called 'goose bumps.' And this man who feared nothing shrugged it off. He knew the tricks that stress and lack of sleep could play.

He tried to mentally add up how many hours of sleep he'd actually had so far that week. It was Thursday morning, he thought, and since Sunday night he didn't think he'd had sixteen hours' sleep, and much of that furtive. Still, he told himself, Edison invented the light bulb on less. He was very tired.

His eyes stung and he decided he'd take something and hit the sack. Good night, his mom would say tucking him in, sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite. Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake . . . CHRIST, he saw it again, a movement of some kind behind him as he headed up the richly carpeted stairs. He had to catch himself to keep from saying something out loud. Get a grip on yourself, man, he told himself and headed for bed.

He had begun to dream the moment he put his head on the pillow, sleeping on his face with his arms under him, the blood cut off. And the dream was very bad this time. One of the worst, in fact.

It is the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive. He is driving down a black-topped service road somewhere in the country. The road runs parallel to a set of railroad tracks not far from a busy interstate. A crop duster periodically dives low over the road to spray the adjacent fields of milo and soybeans, and Spain admires the grace of the small, yellow biplane.

A train is approaching in the distance and the appearance of the countryside, the flat farmland, the old-time plane, the train approaching, it all combines to give the atmosphere a kind of quaint, old-fashioned feel, as if it should be photographed in a freeze frame and made into a calendar scene for a drug company.

The crop duster zooms down across the road again, leaving another trail of white spray through the azure of the crystal-clear sky, and Spain and his companion drive through the falling, dissipating chemicals where the blacktop bisects two halves of a field.

The monstrosity beside Spain says, 'What a beautiful day, eh?'

'Yes. It's nice.'

'The kind of day you really feel glad to be alive.'

'Sure do.'

'Just beautiful.' The monstrosity leans back expansively, the car seat creaking under his massive weight. 'Really pretty.'

'Yep.'

'Hey,' the thing asks Spain, 'd'ya know what a kris is?'

'Chris?'

'Yeah. A kris. A Malaysian dagger. Ever seen one?'

'No, I don't bel —' And before he can answer, the monstrosity reaches over and pries one of Spain's fingers — his right thumb, actually, — loose from the wheel and slices something across it, squirting a gush of blood like the end of a garden hose squirting bright red over the dashboard and the wheel as Spain cries out in agony. The thing has sliced his right thumb off with a ridged, serpentine dagger and the pain is just unbearable now as Spain fights to stanch the flow of blood and the monstrosity laughs.

'Oh, wow. I wouldn't worry about that too much if I were you. You ain't gonna have time to bleed to death,' it says, and the kris bites into his neck, the thing slashing the sharp, wavy edge across Spain's jugular, then tossing the blade down and picking up a club as the bloodspurt bathes the interior of the car, and saying, 'Adi—s, motherfucker,' as he slams a home run using Spain's head for a ball, and just as the club slams into his screaming face, the car coming in the opposite direction hits them head-on and they are spun around and back-ended by an eighteen-wheeler loaded with steel and in the crushing impact they are smacked out on to the railroad tracks and the train grinds down on them just as the crop duster crashes down out of the sky on the deadly tableau and Spain sits up in the grinding, crushing, pulverizing meat grinder shaking and bathed in nightmare terror, and the thing in the shadows there with him in the empty house speaks for the first time as he jerks out of the dream, and Spain feels his whole body cover in chill bumps as the ancient and horrible voice says, 'Hello there.'

'Who, uh, how did you get in here?' Spain dreams.

'Who how did I get in here? You sure have a way with words.'

'You're the one who's been watching me.'

'Bingo.'

'Why don't you come out of the shadows? You scared?'

'Uh-huh.'

'What are you scared of?'

'What are I scared of? Not you, big fella.'

'Are you a demon of some kind?'

'Will you just listen to yourself? You're getting all worked up over nothing.'

'Motherfucker.'

'Oh, no. I'd never fuck her. My mother is sin and you never fuck sin. Sin fucks you. Sin and madness.'

'Go to hell.'

'From your lips to God's ear.'

'Horseshit.'

'Sin, madness, hell, and horseshit. The four horseshits of the apocalypse.'

'Fuckyou!' Spain screams, lurching out of the dream in the empty darkness of his bedroom, waking as the abrasive echo of his curse resonates in his mind. The shadows are very near now and soon they will find him and enclose him, enveloping him in a shroud of insanity and death.

'Come on, man,' Morales said to the slim, dark-haired man as he adjusted one of the large, heavy-duty lights