Fifth Inning

WHEN TRISHA woke the next morning her neck hurt so badly she could hardly turn her head, but she didn't care. The sun was up, filling the crescent-shaped clearing with early daylight. That was what she cared about. She felt reborn. She remembered waking in the night, being itchy and needing to urinate; she remembered going to the stream and putting mud on her stings and bites by moonlight; she remembered going to sleep while Tom Gordon was standing watch and explaining some of the secrets of his closer's role to her. She also remembered being terribly frightened of something in the woods, but of course nothing had been there watching; it was being alone in the dark that had frightened her, that was all.

Something deep in her mind tried to protest this, but Trisha wouldn't let it. The night was over. She wanted to look back on it no more than she wanted to go back to that rocky slope and repeat her roll down to the tree with the wasps' nest in it. It was daytime now. There would be search-parties galore and she would be saved. She knew it.

She deserved to be saved, after spending all night alone in the woods.

She crawled out from under the tree, pushing her pack before her, got to her feet, put on her hat, and hobbled back to the stream. She washed the mud from her face and hands, looked at the cloud of minges and noseeums already reforming around her head, and reluctantly smeared on a fresh coat of goo. As she did it she remembered one of the times she and Pepsi had played Beauty Parlor when they were little girls. They'd made such a mess of Mrs. Robichaud's makeup that Pepsi's Mom had actually screamed at them to get out of the house, not to bother washing up or trying to clean up but just to get out before she totally lost it and swatted them crosseyed. So out they had gone, all powder and rouge and eyeliner and green eyeshadow and Passion Plum lipstick, probably looking like the world's youngest stripteasers. They had gone to Trisha's house, where Quilla had first gaped, then laughed until tears rolled down her face. She had taken each little girl by the hand and led them into the bathroom, where she had given them cold cream for cleaning up.

"Spread upward gently, girls," Trisha murmured now. When her face was done she rinsed her hands in the stream, ate the rest of her tuna sandwich, then half of the celery sticks. She rolled the lunchbag up with a distinct feeling of unease. Now the egg was gone, the tuna fish sandwich was gone, the chips were gone, and the Twinkies were gone. Her supplies were down to half a bottle of Surge (less, really), half a bottle of water, and a few celery sticks.

"Doesn't matter," she said, tucking the empty lunchbag and the remaining celery sticks back in her pack. To this she added the tattered, dirty poncho. "Doesn't matter because there's going to be search-parties galore throughout the store. One'll find me. I'll be having lunch in some diner by noon. Hamburger, fries, chocolate milk, apple pie a la mode." Her stomach rumbled at the thought.

Once Trisha had her things packed away, she coated her hands with mud, as well. The sun had found its way into the clearing now-the day was bright, with the promise of heat-and she was moving a little more easily. She stretched, jogged in place a little to get the old blood moving, and rolled her head from side to side until the worst of the stiffness in her neck was gone. She paused a moment longer, listening for voices, for dogs, possibly for the irregular whup-whup-whup of helicopter blades. There was nothing except for the woodpecker, already hammering for his daily bread.

S'all right, there's plenty of time. It's June, you know. These are the longest days of the year. Follow the stream. Even if the searchparties don't find you right away, the stream will take you to people.

But as the morning wore on toward noon, the stream took her only to woods and more woods. The temperature rose. Little trickles of sweat began to cut lines through her mudpack. Bigger patches formed dark circles around the armpits of her 36 GORDON shirt; another, this one in a treeshape, began to grow between her shoulderblades. Her hair, now so muddy it looked dirty brunette instead of blonde, hung around her face. Trisha's feelings of hope began to dissipate, and the energy with which she had set out from the clearing at seven o'clock was gone by ten. Around eleven, something happened to darken her spirits even further.

She had reached the top of a slope-this one was fairly gentle, at least, and strewn with leaves and needles-and had stopped to have a little rest when that unwelcome sense of awareness, the one which had nothing at all to do with her conscious mind, brought her on alert again. She was being watched. There was no use telling herself it wasn't true because it was.

Trisha turned slowly In a circle. She saw nothing, but the woods seemed to have hushed again-no more chipmunks bumbling and thrashing through the leaves and underbrush, no more squirrels on the far side of the stream, no more scolding jays. The woodpecker still hammered, the distant crows still cawed, but otherwise there was just her and the humming mosquitoes.

"Who's there?" she called.

There was no answer, of course, and Trisha started down the slope next to the stream, holding onto bushes because the going was slippery underfoot. just my imagination, she thought ... but she was pretty sure it wasn't.

The stream was getting narrower, and that was most certainly not her imagination. As she followed it down the long piny slope and then through a difficult patch of deciduous trees-too much underbrush, and too much of it thorny - it shrank steadily until it was a rill only eighteen inches or so across.

It disappeared into a thick clump of bushes. Trisha bulled her way through the close growth beside the stream instead of going around because she was afraid of losing it. Part of her knew that losing it would make no difference because it was almost certainly going nowhere she wanted to go, it was probably going nowhere at all, in fact, but those things seemed to make no difference. The truth was she had formed an emotional attachment to the stream-had bonded with it, her Mom would have said-and couldn't bear to leave it. Without it she would just be a kid wandering around in the deep woods with no plan. The very thought caused her throat to tighten and her heart to speed up.

She emerged from the bushes and the stream re-appeared. Trisha followed it with her head down and a scowl on her face, as intent as Sherlock Holmes following prints left by the Hound of the Baskervilles. She didn't notice the change in the underbrush, from bushes to ferns, nor the fact that many of the trees through which the little stream now wove its way were dead, nor the way the ground under her feet had begun to soften. All of her attention was focused on the stream. She followed it with her head down, a study in concentration.

The stream began to spread again, and for fifteen minutes or so (this was around noon) she allowed herself to hope that it wasn't going to peter out after all. Then she realized it was also growing more shallow; it really wasn't much more than a series of puddles, most dulled with pond-scum and hopping wit bugs. Ten minutes or so later her sneaker disappeared through ground that wasn't solid at all but only a deceptive crust of moss over a soupy pocket of mud. It flowed over her ankle and Trisha drew her foot back with a little cry of disgust. The quick hard yank pulled her sneaker halfway off her foot. Trisha uttered another cry and held onto the trunk of a dead tree while she first wiped her foot with snatches of grass and then put her sneaker back on.

With that done she looked around and saw she had come to a kind of ghost-woods, the site of some old fire. Ahead (and already around her) was a broken maze of long-dead trees. The ground in which they stood was swampy and wet. Rising from flat pools of standing water were turtleback hummocks covered with grass and swatches of weeds. The air hummed with mosquitoes and danced with dragonflies. Now there were more woodpeckers tackhammering away, dozens of them by the sound. So many dead trees, so little time.

Trisha's brook wandered away into this morass and was lost.

"What do I do now, huh?" she asked in a teary, tired voice. "Will somebody please tell me that?"

There were lots of places to sit and think about it; tumbles of dead trees everywhere, many still bearing scorchmarks on their pallid bodies. The first one she tried, however, gave beneath her weight and sent her spilling to the mucky ground. Trisha cried out as dampness soaked through the seat of her jeans-God, she hated having her seat get wet like that-and lurched upright again. The tree had rotted through in the damp; the freshly broken ends squirmed with woodlice. Trisha looked at them for a moment or two in revolted fascination, then walked to a second downed tree. This one she tested first. It seemed solid and she sat on it warily, looking out at the bog of broken trees, absently rubbing her sore neck and trying to decide what she should do.

Although her mind was less clear than it had been when she woke up, a lot less clear, there still seemed to be only two choices: stay put and hope rescue would come or keep moving and try to meet it. She supposed that staying in one place made a certain amount of sense: conservation of energy and all that. Also, without the stream, what would she be going toward? Nothing sure, and that was for sure. She might be heading toward civilization; she might be heading away from civilization. She might even get walking in a circle.

On the other hand ("There's always the other hand, sugar," her father had once told her), there was nothing to eat here, it stank of mud and rotting trees and who knew what other gross stuff here, it was ugly here, it was a bummer here. It came to Trisha that if she stayed here and no search party came before dark, she would be spending the night here. It was an awful idea. The little crescent-shaped clearing had been Disneyland compared to this.

She stood and peered in the direction the stream had been tending before it petered out. She was looking through a maze of gray tree-trunks and lacings of dry jutting branches, but she thought she could see green beyond them. A rising green. Maybe a hill. And more checkerberries? Hey, why not? She had already passed several more clumps of bushes loaded with them. She should have picked them and put them in her pack, but she had been concentrating so hard on the stream that it just hadn't occurred to her to do so. Now, however, the stream was gone and she was hungry again. Not starving (not yet, at least), but hungry, sure.

Trisha took two steps forward, tested a patch of soft ground, and watched with profound misgivings as water promptly seeped up around the toe of her sneaker. Was she going in there, then? Simply because she thought she saw the other side?

"There could be quicksand," she muttered.

That's right! the cold voice agreed at once. It sounded amused. Quicksand! Alligators! Not to mention little gray X-Files men with probes to stick up your butt!

Trisha gave back the pair of steps she had taken and sat down again. She was gnawing at her lower lip without realizing it. She now hardly noticed the bugs swarming around her. Go or stay? Stay or go?

What got her going ten minutes or so later was blind hope ... and the thought of berries. Hell, she was ready to try the leaves now, too. Trisha saw herself picking bright red berries on the slope of a pleasant green hill, looking like a girl in a schoolbook illustration (she had forgotten the mudpack on her face and the snarled, dirty spout of her hair). She saw herself picking her way to the crest of the hill, filling her pack with checkerberries . . . finally reaching the top, looking down, seeing ...

A road. I see a dirt road with fences on both sides ... horses grazing ... and a barn in the distance. A red one with white trim,

Crazy! Totally bazonka!

Or was it? What if she was sitting half an hour's walk from safety, still lost because she was afraid of a little goo?

"Okay," she said, standing up again and nervously re-adjusting the straps of her pack. "Okay, berries ho. But if it gets too gross, I'm going back." She gave the straps one final tug and started forward again, walking slowly over the increasingly wet ground, testing each step as she went, detouring around the skeletal standing trees and the fallen tangles of deadwood.

Eventually-it might have been half an hour after starting forward again, it might have been forty-five minutesTrisha discovered what thousands (perhaps even millions) of men and women before her have discovered: by the time it gets too gross, it's often also too late to go back. She stepped from an oozy but stable patch of ground onto a hummock that wasn't a hummock at all but only a disguise. Her foot went into a cold, viscous substance that was too thick to be water and too thin to be mud. She tilted, grabbed a jutting dead branch, screamed in fright and vexation when it snapped off in her hand. She fell forward into long grass that hopped with bugs. She got a knee under her and yanked her foot back. It came with a loud sucking plop, but her sneaker stayed down there someplace.

"No!" she yelled, loud enough to scare a big white bird into flight. It exploded upward, trailing long legs behind it as it became airborne. In another place and time, Trisha would have stared at this exotic apparition with breathless wonder, but now the bird barely registered. She turned around on her knees, her right leg covered with shining black muck up to the knee, and plunged her arm into the water-welling hole which had temporarily swallowed her foot.

"You can't have it!" she shouted furiously. "It's mine and you ... can't ... HAVE IT!"

She felt around in the cold murk, fingers tearing through membranes of roots or dodging between those too thick to tear. Something that felt alive pressed briefly against her palm, and then was gone. A moment later her hand closed over her sneaker and she pulled it out. She looked at it - a black mudshoe just right for an all-over-mudgirl, the very thing, the total puppy-shits, Pepsi would have said-and began to cry again. She lifted the sneaker up, tilted it, and a stream of grunge ran out of it. That made her laugh. For a minute or so she sat on the hummock with her legs crossed and the rescued sneaker in her lap, laughing and crying at the center of a black orbiting universe of bugs while the dead trees stood sentinel all around her and the crickets hummed.

At last her weeping tapered to sniffles, her laughter to choked and somehow humorless giggles. She tore handfuls of grass out of the hummock and wiped the outside of the sneaker as well as she could. Then she opened her pack, tore up the empty lunchbag, and used the pieces as towels to swab out the inside. These pieces she balled up and threw indifferently behind her. If someone wanted to arrest her for littering this butt-ugly, bad-smelling place, just let them.

She stood up, still holding the rescued sneaker in her hand, and looked ahead. "Oh fuck," Trisha croaked.

It was the first time in her life she had said that particular word out loud. (Pepsi said it sometimes, but Pepsi was Pepsi.) She could now more clearly see the green she had mistaken for a hill. It was hummocks, that was all, just more hummocks. Between them was more standing, stagnant water and more trees, most dead but some with fluffs of green at the top. She could hear frogs croaking. No hill. From bog to swamp, bad to worse.

She turned and looked back but could no longer tell where she had entered this purgatorial zone. If she'd thought to mark the place with something bright - a piece of her nasty old shredded poncho, say-she might have gone back. But she hadn't, and that was that.

You can go back anyway-you know the general direction.

Maybe, but she wasn't going to follow the kind of thinking that had gotten her into this mess in the first place.

Trisha turned toward the hummocks and the bleary glints of sun on scummy standing water. Plenty of trees to hold onto, and the swamp had to end somewhere, didn't it?

You're crazy to even think about it.

Sure. It was a crazy situation.

Trisha stood a moment longer, her thoughts now going to Tom Gordon and that special stillness of his-it was how he stood on the mound, watching one of the Red Sox. catchers, Hatteberg or Veritek, flash the signs. So still (the way she was standing now), all of that deep stillness seeming to somehow spin out around him from the shoulders. And then to the set and the motion.

He's got icewater in his veins, her Dad said.

She wanted to get out of here, out of this nasty swamp to start with and then out of the damned woods altogether; wanted to get back to where there were people and stores and malls and phones and policemen who would help you if you lost your way. And she thought she could. If she could be brave. If she had just a little of the old icewater in her veins.

Breaking out of her own stillness, Trisha took off her other Reebok and knotted the laces of both sneakers together. She hung them around her neck like cuckoo-clock pendulums, debated over her socks, and decided to leave them on as a kind of compromise (as an oog-shield was the thought which actually went through her mind). She rolled the cuffs of her jeans up to her knees, then took a deep breath and let it out.

"McFarland winds, McFarland pitches," she said. She resettled her Sox cap (backward this time, because backward was cool) and started moving again.

Trisha stepped from hummock to hummock with careful deliberation, looking up frequently in snatching little glances, setting a landmark and then moving toward it, just as she had yesterday. Only today I'm not going to panic and run, she thought. Today I've got icewater in my veins.

An hour passed, then two. Instead of firming, the ground grew boggier. Finally there was no solid ground at all, except for the hummocks. Trisha went from one to the next, steadying herself with branches and bushes where she could, holding her arms out for balance like a tightrope walker where there was nothing good to hold onto. Finally she came to a place where there was no hummock within jumping distance. She took a moment to steel herself and then stepped into the stagnant water, startling up a cloud of waterbugs and releasing a stench of peaty decay. The water was not quite up to her knees. The stuff her feet were sinking into felt like cold, lumpy jelly. Yellowish bubbles rose in the disturbed water; swirling in them were black fragments of who knew what.

"Gross," she moaned, moving forward toward the nearest hummock. "Oh, gross. Gross-gross-gross. Gag a maggot."

She walked in lurching forward strides, each ending in a hard yank as she pulled her foot free. She tried not to think of what would happen if she couldn't do that, if she got stuck in the bottom ooze and started to sink.

"Gross-gross-gross." It had become a chant. Sweat ran down her face in warm droplets and stung in her eyes. The crickets seemed stuck on one high endless note: reeeeeeeee. Ahead of her, on the hummock which was her next stop, three frogs jumped out of the grass and into the water, plip-plip-plop.

"Bud-Why-Zer," Trisha said, and smiled wanly.

There were tadpoles by the thousands swimming in the yellow-black murk around her. As she looked down at them one of her feet encountered something hard and covered with slime - a log, maybe. Trisha managed to flounder over it without falling and reach the hummock. Gasping, she pulled herself up and looked anxiously at her mud-slimy feet and legs, half-expecting to see bloodsuckers or something even worse squirming all over them. There was nothing awful (that she could see, at least), but she was covered in crud right up to her knees. She peeled off her socks, which were black, and the white skin beneath looked more like socks than her socks did. This caused Trisha to laugh maniacally. She lay back on her elbows and howled at the sky, not wanting to laugh like that, like

(insane people)

a total idiot, but for awhile she couldn't stop. When she was finally able to, she wrung her socks out, put them back on, and got up. She stood with her hand shielding her eyes, picked out a tree with a large lower branch broken off and dangling in the water, and made that her next goal.

"McFarland winds, McFarland pitches," she said tiredly, and started off again. She was no longer thinking about berries; all she wanted now was to get out of here in one piece.

There is a point at which people who are cast upon their own resources stop living and begin merely surviving. The body, with all its freshest sources of energy exhausted, falls back on stored calories. Sharpness of thought begins to dull. Perception begins to both narrow and grow perversely bright. Things get wiggy around the edges. Trisha McFarland approached this borderline between life and survival as her second afternoon in the woods wore on.

That she was now moving due west did not trouble her much; she thought (probably correctly) that moving consistently in one direction was good, the best she could do. She was hungry but for the most part not very aware of it; she was concentrating too fiercely on keeping to a straight line. If she started to wander off to the left or right, she might still be in this stinkhole when it started to get dark, and she couldn't stand that idea. Once she did stop to drink from her water bottle, and around four o'clock she drank the rest of her Surge almost without realizing it.

The dead trees began to look less and less like trees and more and more like gaunt sentinels standing with their gnarled feet in the still black water. Be seeing faces in them again pretty soon, she thought. While wading past one of these trees (there were no hummocks for almost thirty feet in any direction), she tripped over another submerged root or branch and this time sprawled full-length, splashing and gasping. She got a mouthful of gritty, silty water and spat it out with a cry. She could see her hands in the dark water. They looked yellowish and tallowy, like things long drowned. She pulled them out and held them up.

"I'm all right," Trisha said rapidly, and she was almost aware of crossing some vital line; could almost feel herself going over into some other country where the language was different and the money was funny. Things were changing. But

"I'm all right. Yeah, I'm all right." And her pack was still dry. That was important because her Walkman was inside, and now her Walkman was her only link to the world.

Filthy, now soaked all down her front, Trisha pushed onward. The new landmark was a dead tree that split halfway up and became a black letter Y against the declining sun. She moved toward it. She came to a hummock, glanced at it briefly, and waded on through the water instead. Why bother? Wading was quicker. Her revulsion at the cold decayed jelly on the bottom had faded. You could get used to anything, if you had to. She knew that now.

Not long after taking her first spill, Trisha began passing the time of day with Tom Gordon. At first this seemed strange-weird, even-but as the long hours of late afternoon went by, she lost her self-consciousness and chattered away quite naturally, telling him which landmark she was heading for next, explaining to him that a fire had probably caused this swamp, assuring him that they would be out soon, it couldn't go on like this forever. She was telling him that she hoped the Red Sox would score about twenty runs in the game tonight so he could take it easy out there in the bullpen when she suddenly broke off.

"Do you hear something?" she asked.

She didn't know about Tom, but she did: the steady whapping pulse of helicopter blades. Distant but unmistakable. Trisha was resting on a hummock when she heard the sound. She jumped to her feet and turned in a complete circle, hand up and shading her eyes, squinting at the horizon. She saw nothing, and before long the sound faded.

"Spaghetti," she said disconsolately. But at least they were looking. She slapped a mosquito on her neck and got moving again.

Ten or fifteen minutes later she was standing on the halfsubmerged root of a tree in her filthy, unraveling stockings and looking ahead, both wondering and puzzled. Beyond the straggling line of broken trees where she now was, the bog opened out into a flat, stagnant pond. Running across the center were more hummocks, but these were brown and seemed made of broken twigs and gnawed branches. Sitting on top of several and staring at her were half a dozen fat brown animals.

Slowly the lines on Trisha's forehead smoothed out as she realized what they were. She forgot all about being in the swamp, about being wet and muddy and tired, about being lost.

"Tom," she whispered a little breathlessly. "Those're beavers! Beavers sitting on beaver-houses or beaver tepees or whatever you call them. They are, aren't they?"

She stood on tiptoes, holding the trunk of the tree for balance, staring and delighted. Beavers lounging on top of their stick-houses . . . and were they watching her? She thought they were, especially the one in the middle. He was bigger than the others, and it seemed to Trisha that his black eyes never left her face. He appeared to have whiskers, and his fur was a luxuriant dark brown, shading almost to auburn around his plump haunches. Looking at him made her think of the illustrations in The Wind in the Willows.

Finally Trisha stepped off the root and got moving again, her shadow trailing out long behind her. At once the Head Beaver (so she thought him) got up, backed away until his hindquarters were in the water, and slapped down smartly with his tail. It made a whacking sound that was incredibly loud in the still hot air. A moment later they were all diving off the stick-houses, going into the water in unison. It was like watching an aqua-diving team. Trisha gazed at them with her hands clasped against her breastbone and a big grin on her face. It was one of the most amazing things she had ever seen in her life, and she understood that she'd never be able to explain why, or how the Head Beaver had looked like a wise old schoolmaster or something.

"Tom, look!" She pointed, laughing. "Look at the water! There they go! Yeah, baby!"

Half a dozen Vs formed in the murky water, moving away from the stick-houses in bow-waves. Then they were gone and Trisha started moving again. Her current landmark was an extra-large hummock with dark green ferns growing all over it like wild hair. She approached it along a gradual arc instead of walking in a straight line. Seeing the beavers had been great-totally ghetto, in Pepsi-ese - but she had no desire to encounter one while it was swimming underwater. She had seen enough pictures to know that even little beavers had big teeth. For awhile Trisha uttered a shriek each time a submerged bit of grass or weed brushed against her, sure it was the Head Beaver (or one of his minions), wanting her out of the neighborhood.

Keeping the beaver-condos always on her right, she approached the extra-large hummock-and as she drew closer, a sense of hopeful excitement began to grow in her. Those dark green ferns weren't just ferns, she thought; she had been fiddleheading with her mother and grandmother three springs in a row, and she thought those were fiddleheads. Fiddleheads were over in Sanford-had been for at least a month-but her mother had told her they came into season quite a bit later inland, almost up until July in especially marshy places. It was hard to believe anything good could come out of this smelly patch of creation, but the closer Trisha got, the surer she became. And fiddleheads weren't just good; fiddleheads were delicious. Even Pete, who had never met a green vegetable he liked (except for frozen Birds Eye peas nuked in the microwave), ate fiddleheads.

She told herself not to expect too much, but five minutes after the possibility first occurred to her, Trisha was sure. That was no mere hummock up ahead; that was Fiddlehead Island! Except maybe, she thought as she drew closer, wading slowly through water that was now thigh-deep, Bug Island would be a better name. There were lots of bugs out here, of course, but she kept replenishing her mudpack and had pretty much forgotten about them until now. The air over Fiddlehead Island absolutely shimmered with them, and not just minges and noseeums. There were a gazillion flies as well. As she drew closer she could hear their somnolent, somehow shiny buzz.

She was still half a dozen steps away from the first bunches of plump furled greens when she stopped, hardly aware of her feet settling into the muddy mulch under the water. The greenery bordering this side of the tussock was shredded and torn; here and there soggy uprooted bunches of fiddleheads still floated on the black water. Further up she could see bright red splashes on the green.

"I don't like this," she murmured, and when she next moved it was to her left instead of straight ahead. Fiddleheads were fine, but there was something dead or badly wounded up there. Maybe the beavers fought with each other for mates or something. She wasn't yet hungry enough to dare meeting a wounded beaver while gathering an early supper. That would be a good way to lose a hand or an eye.

Halfway around Fiddlehead Island, Trisha stopped again. She didn't want to look, but at first she couldn't look away. "Hey, Tom," she said in a high trembling voice. "Oh hey, bad."

It was the severed head of a small deer. It had rolled down the slope of the tussock, leaving a trail of blood and matted fiddlehead ferns behind. It now lay upside down at the water's edge. Its eyes shimmered with nits. Regiments of flies had alit on the ragged stump of its neck. They hummed like a small motor.

"I see its tongue," she said, and her voice was far away, down an echoing hallway. The gold suntrack on the water was suddenly too bright, and she felt herself swaying on the edge of a faint.

"No," she whispered. "No, don't let me, I can't."

This time her voice, although lower, seemed closer and more there. The light looked almost normal again. Thank God-the last thing she wanted was to faint while standing almost waist-deep in stagnant, mucky water. No fiddleheads, but no fainting, either. It almost balanced.

She pushed ahead, walking faster and being less careful about testing her footing before settling her weight. She moved in an exaggerated side-to-side motion, hips rotating, arms going back and forth across her body in short arcs. She guessed if she had a leotard on, she'd look like the guest of the day on Workout with Wendy. Say, everybody, today we're doing some brand-new exercises. I call this one "Getting away from the torn-off deer's head." Pump those hips, flex those butts, work those shoulders!

She kept her eyes pointed forward, but there was no way not to hear the heavy, somehow self-satisfied drone of the flies. What had done it? Not a beaver, that was for sure. No beaver ever tore a deer's head off, no matter how sharp its teeth were.

You know what it was, the cold voice told her. It was the thing. The special thing. The one that's watching you right now.

"Nothing's watching me, that's crap," she panted. She risked a glance over her shoulder and was glad to see Fiddlehead Island falling behind. Not quite fast enough, though. She glimpsed the head lying at the edge of the water one last time, the brown thing wearing a buzzing black necklace. "That's crap, isn't it, Tom?"

But Tom didn't answer. Tom couldn't answer. Tom was probably at Fenway Park by now, joking around with his fellow teammates and putting on his bright white home uniform. The Tom Gordon walking through the bog with her-this endless bog-was just a little homeopathic cure for loneliness. She was on her own.

Except you're not, sugar. You're not alone at all.

Trisha was terribly afraid the cold voice, although not her friend, was telling the truth. That feeling of being watched had come back, and stronger than ever. She tried to dismiss it as nerves (anyone would have jumpy nerves after seeing that torn-off head) and had almost succeeded when she came to a tree which had been scored with half a dozen diagonal cuts through its old dead bark. It was as if something very big and in a very bad frame of mind had slashed at it on its way by.

"Oh my God," she said. "Those are claw-marks."

It's up ahead, Trisha. Up ahead waiting for you, claws and all.

Trisha could see more standing water, more hummocks, what looked like another green, rising hill (but she had been fooled that way before). She saw no beast ... but of course she wouldn't, would she? The beast would do whatever beasts did while they were waiting to spring, there was a word for it but she was too tired and scared and generally miserable to think of it ...

They lurk, said the cold voice. That's what they do, they lurk, Yeah, baby. Especially special ones like your new friend,

"Lurk," Trisha croaked. "Yes, that's the word. Thank you." And then she started forward again because it was too far to go back. Even if something really was waiting up ahead to kill her, it was too far to go back.

This time what looked like solid ground turned out to be solid ground. At first Trisha wouldn't let herself believe it, but as she drew closer and still couldn't see water cutting through that mass of green bushes and scrubby trees, she began to hope. The water in which she was wading was shallower, too: only up to mid-shin instead of to her knees or thighs. And there were more fiddleheads growing on at least two of the hummocks. Not as many as there had been back on Fiddlehead Island, but she picked what there were and gobbled them down. They were sweet, with a faintly acrid aftertaste. It was a green taste, and Trisha thought it absolutely delicious. She would have picked more and stored them in her pack if there had been more, but there weren't. Instead of mourning this, she relished what she had with a child's single-mindedness. There was enough for now; she would worry about later later. She snacked her way toward solid ground, biting off the furled nubbins and then nibbling on the stalks. She was hardly aware of wading through the bog now; her revulsion had passed.

As she reached toward the last few fiddleheads growing on the second hummock, her hand froze. She heard the somnolent buzzing of flies again. It was a lot louder this time. Trisha would have angled away from it if she could, but as the swamp ran out it had become choked with dead branches and drowned bushes. There seemed to be only a single halfway-clear channel through this mess, and she'd have to take it unless she wanted to spend an extra two hours struggling over submerged barriers and maybe cutting her feet up in the process.

Even in this channel, she was forced to clamber over one downed tree. It had fallen just recently, and "fallen" was really the wrong word. Trisha could see more slash-marks in its bark, and although the butt-end of its trunk was lost in a tangle of bushes, she could see how fresh and white the wood of the stump was. The tree had gotten in something's way, and so the something had simply pushed it over, snapping it like a toothpick.

The buzzing grew louder still. The rest of the deer - most of it, anyway - was lying at the foot of an extravagant splurge of fiddleheads near the spot where Trisha finally climbed wearily out of the swamp. It lay in two pieces which were connected by a fly-shining snarl of intestines. One of its legs had been torn off and stood propped against the trunk of a nearby tree like a walking stick.

Trisha put the back of her right hand over her mouth and hurried rapidly on, making weird little urk-urk sounds as she went and trying with all her might not to upchuck. The thing that had killed the deer wanted her to upchuck, maybe. Was that possible? The rational part of her mind (and there was still quite a lot of it) said no, but it seemed to her that something had deliberately polluted the two biggest, lushest growths of fiddleheads in the bog with a deer's mangled body. And if it had done that, was it impossible to believe it might try to make her throw up the little nourishment she had managed to scrounge?

Yes. It IS. You're being a dork. Forget it. And don't upchuck, for heaven's sake!

The urk-urk noises-they were like big, meaty hiccups began to space themselves out as she walked west (keeping on a westward course was easy now, with the sun low in the sky) and the sound of the flies began to recede. When it was entirely gone, Trisha stopped, took off her socks, then slipped her sneakers back on. She wrung the socks out again, then held them up and looked at them. She could remember putting them on in her Sanford bedroom, just sitting there on the end of the bed and putting them on while she sang "Put your arms around me ... cuz I gotta get next to you" under her breath. That was Boyz To Da Maxx; she and Pepsi thought Boyz To Da Maxx were yummy, especially Adam. She remembered the patch of sun on the floor. She remembered her Titanic poster on the wall. This memory of putting on her socks in her bedroom was very clear but very distant. She guessed it was the way old people like Grampa remembered things which had happened when they were kids. Now the socks were little more than holes held together by strings, and that made her feel like crying again (probably because she herself felt like holes held together by strings), but she controlled that, too. She rolled the socks and put them in her pack.

She was re-fastening the buckles when she heard the whup-whup-whup of helicopter rotor-blades again. This time they sounded much closer. Trisha bounded to her feet and turned around with her wet clothes flapping. And there, off in the east, black against the blue sky, were two shapes.

They reminded her a little bit of the dragonflies back there in Dead Deer Swamp. There was no sense waving and shouting, they were about a billion miles away, but she did it anyway-she couldn't help herself At last, when her throat was raw, she quit.

"Look, Tom," she said, following them wistfully from left to right . . . north to south, that would be. "Look, they're trying to find me. If they'd just come a little bit closer. . ."

But they didn't. The distant helicopters disappeared behind the bulk of the forest. Trisha stood where she was, not moving until the sound of the rotors had faded into the steady hum of the crickets. Then she fetched a deep sigh and knelt to tie her sneakers. She couldn't feel anything watching her anymore, that was one thing

Oh you liar, the cold voice said. It was amused. You little liar you.

But she wasn't lying, at least not on purpose. She was so tired and so mixed up she wasn't sure what she felt . . . except still hungry and thirsty. Now that she was out of the muck and the goo (and away from the torn corpse of the deer), she felt hunger and thirst very clearly. It crossed her mind to go back and pick more of the fiddleheads after all-she could steer clear of the deer's body and the goriest, bloodiest places, surely.

She thought of Pepsi, who was sometimes impatient with Trisha if Trisha scraped her knee while they were rollerblading or fell while they were tree-climbing. If she saw tears welling in Trisha's eyes, Pepsi was apt to say, "Don't go all girly on me, McFarland." God knew she couldn't afford to go all girly about a dead deer, not in a situation like this, but ...

... but she was afraid that the thing which had killed the deer might still be there, watching and waiting. Hoping she'd come back.

As for drinking the bog-water, get serious. Dirt was one thing. Dead bugs and mosquito eggs were something else. Could mosquitoes hatch in a person's stomach? Probably not. Did she want to find out for sure? Definitely not.

"I'll probably find some more fiddleheads, anyway," she said. "Right, Tom? And berries, too." Tom didn't reply, but before she could have any second thoughts, she got moving again.

She walked west for another three hours, at first moving slowly, then able to go a little faster as she entered a more mature stretch of woods. Her legs ached and her back throbbed, but neither of these hurting places drew much of her attention. Not even her hunger occupied her mind to any real degree. As the day's light went first to golden and then to red, it was her thirst that came to dominate Trisha's thoughts. Her throat was dry and throbbing; her tongue felt like a dusty worm. She cursed herself for not having drunk from the swamp when she had the chance, and once she stopped, thinking, Screw this I'm going back.

You better not try, sweetheart, said the cold voice. You'd never find your way. Even if you were lucky enough to backtrack perfectly, it would be dark before you got there ... and who knows what might be waiting.,'

"Shut up," she said wearily, "just shut up, you stupid mean bitch." But of course the stupid mean bitch was right. Trisha turned back in the direction of the sun-it was now orange-and began walking again. She was becoming actively frightened of her thirst now: if it was this bad at eight o'clock, what would it be like at midnight? just how long could a person live without water, anyway? She couldn't remember, although she had come across that particular fun fact at some time or other-she was sure that she had. Not as long as a person could go without food, anyway. What would it be like to die of thirst?

"I'm not going to die of thirst in the darn old woods ... am I, Tom?" she asked, but Tom wasn't saying. The real Tom Gordon would be watching the game by now. Tim Wakefield, Boston's crafty knuckleballer, against Andy Pettitte, the Yankees' young lefthander. Trisha's throat throbbed. It was hard to swallow. She remembered how it had rained (as with her memory of sitting on the end of her bed and putting on her socks, this also seemed like a long time ago) and wished it would rain again. She would get out in it and dance with her head back and her arms out and her mouth open; she would dance like Snoopy on top of his doghouse.

Trisha plodded through pines and spruces that grew taller and better spaced as this part of the woods grew older. The light of the setting sun came slanting through the trees in dusty bars of deepening color. She would have thought the trees and the orange-red light beautiful if not for her thirst ... and a part of her mind noted their beauty even in her physical distress. The light was too bright, though. Her temples were pounding with a headache and her throat felt like a pinhole.

In this state, she first dismissed the sound of running water as an auditory hallucination. It couldn't be real water; it was too darned convenient. Nevertheless she turned toward it, now walking southwest instead of due west, ducking under low branches and stepping over fallen logs like someone in a hypnotic trance. When the sound grew even louder-too loud to mistake for anything other than what it was-Trisha began to run. She slipped twice on the carpet of needles underfoot, and once she ran through an ugly little pocket of nettles that tore fresh cuts on her forearms and the backs of her hands, but she hardly noticed. Ten minutes after first hearing that faint rushing noise, she came to a short, steep drop-off where the bedrock emerged from the thin soil and needle carpeting of the forest floor in a series of gray stone knuckles. Below these, brawling along at a healthy clip, was a brook that made her first one seem like no more than a drip from the end of a shut-off hose.

Trisha walked along the edge of the drop with perfect unself-consciousness, although a misstep would have sent her tumbling at least twenty-five feet and likely would have killed her. Five minutes' walk upstream brought her to a kind of rough groove from the edge of the forest into the gully where the stream ran. It was a natural flume, floored with decades of fallen leaves and needles.

She sat down and hooked herself forward with her feet until she sat on top of the grooved place like a kid sitting on top of a slide. She started down, still sitting, dragging her hands and using her feet as brakes. About halfway down she started to skid. Rather than trying to stop herself-that would most likely start her somersaulting again-she lay back, laced her hands together behind her neck, closed her eyes, and hoped for the best'

The trip to the bottom was short and jolting. Trisha whammed into one jutting rock with her right hip, and another struck her laced-together fingers hard enough to numb them. If she hadn't put her hands over the top of her head, that second rock might have torn open her scalp, she thought later. Or worse. "Don't break your fool neck" was another grownup saying she knew, this one a favorite of Gramma McFarland.

She hit bottom with a bonecrunching thud, and suddenly her sneakers were full of freezing cold water. She pulled them out, turned around, flopped onto her belly, and drank until a spike drove into her forehead the way it sometimes did when she was hot and hungry and gobbled ice cream too fast. Trisha pulled her dripping, mudstreaked face out of the stream's cold boiling course and looked up at the darkening sky, gasping and grinning blissfully. Had she ever tasted water this good? No. Had she ever tasted anything this good? Absolutely not. This was in a class by itself She plunged her face back in and drank again. At last she got up on her knees, uttered a vast watery belch, and then laughed shakily. Her stomach felt swollen, tight as a drum. For the time being, at least, she wasn't even hungry.

The flume was too steep and too slippery to re-climb; she might get halfway or even most of the way up only to slide all the way back to the bottom again. The going looked fairly easy on the other side of the brook, however-steep and tree-covered but not too brushy-and there were plenty of rocks to use as stepping-stones. She could go a little way before it got too dark to see. Why not? Now that she had filled her belly with water she felt strong again, wonderfully strong. And confident. The bog was behind her and she had found another stream. A good stream.

Yes, but what about the special thing? the cold voice asked. Trisha was frightened by that voice all over again. The stuff it said was bad; that she should have discovered such a dark girl hiding inside her was even worse. Did you forget about the special thing?

"If there ever was a special thing," Trisha said, "it's gone now. Back with the deer, maybe."

It was true, or seemed to be true. That sensation of being watched, perhaps stalked, was gone. The cold voice knew it and made no reply. Trisha found she could visualize its owner, a tough little sneery-mouthed tootsie who looked only slightly, coincidentally, like Trisha herself (the resemblance of a second cousin, perhaps). Now she was stalking away with her shoulders held stiffly high and her fists clenched, the very picture of resentment.

"Yeah, go away and stay away," Trisha said. "You don't scare me." And after a pause: "Fuck you!" There it came out of her mouth again, what Pepsi called The Terrible Effword, and Trisha wasn't sorry. She could even imagine saying it to her brother Pete if Pete started up with all his Malden crap again while they were walking home from school. Malden this and Malden that, Dad this and Dad that, and what if she just said Hey Pete, fuck you, deal with it instead of trying to be either all quiet and sympathetic or all bright and cheery and let's-change-the-subject? just Hey Pete that's a big fuck you, like that? Trisha saw him in her head - saw him staring at her with his jaw dropped most of the way down to his chin. The image made her giggle.

She got up, approached the water, picked out four stones that would take her across, and dropped them, one at a time, into the streambed. Once on the far side, she began to work her way down the slope.

The hillside steepened steadily and the stream grew ever noisier beside her, rolling and tumbling in its rocky bed. When Trisha came to a clearing where the ground was relatively flat, she decided to stop for the night. The air had grown thick and shadowy; if she tried to go on down the slope, she would be risking a fall. Besides, this wasn't too bad; she could see the sky, at least.

"Bugs are fierce, though," she said, waving at the mosquitoes around her face and slapping a few more off her neck. She went to the stream to get mud, but-ha-ha, joke's on you, girl - there was no mud to get. Plenty of rocks but no mud. Trisha sat back on her heels for a moment while the minges executed complicated flying patterns around her eyes, thought things over, then nodded. She scraped the needles away from a small circle of ground with the sides of her hands, dug a little bowl in the soft earth, then used her water-bottle to fill it up from the stream. She made mud with her fingers, taking a great deal of pleasure in the process (it was Gramma Andersen she thought of, making bread in Gramma Andersen's kitchen on Saturday mornings, standing on a stool to knead the dough because the counter was so high). When she had lots of good goo she smeared it all over her face. By the time she finished this, it was almost dark.

Trisha stood up, still rubbing mud on her arms, and looked around. There was no convenient fallen tree to sleep under tonight, but about twenty yards from this side of the stream she spied a. tangle of dead pine-boughs. She took these to one of the tall firs near the stream and leaned them against the trunk like upside-down fans, creating a little space she could crawl into ... sort of a half-tent. If no wind came up to knock the branches over, she thought she would be fairly snug.

As she brought the last two over, her stomach cramped and her bowels loosened. Trisha stopped, holding a branch in each hand, waiting to see what would happen next. The cramp let go and the odd weak feeling down low inside of her passed, but she still didn't feel quite right. Fluttery. Buttergutten was Gramma Andersen's word, only she used it to mean nervous and Trisha didn't feel nervous, exactly. She didn't know how she felt.

It was the water, the cold voice said. Something in the water You're poisoned, sugar. Probably be dead by morning.

"If I am I am," Trisha said, and added the last two branches to her makeshift shelter. "I was so thirsty. I had to drink."

To this there was no reply. Perhaps even the cold voice, traitor that it was, understood that much-she'd had to drink, had to.

She slipped off her pack, opened it, and reverently took out her Walkman. She settled the earbuds into place and pushed the power button. WCAS was still strong enough to listen to, but the signal wasn't what it had been last night. It made Trisha feel funny to think she had almost walked out of a radio station's broadcast area the way that you drove out of them when you were on a long car-trip. It made her feel funny, all right, very funny indeed. Funny in her stomach.

"All right," Joe Castiglione said. His voice was thin, seeming to come from a great distance. "Mo stands in and we're ready for the bottom of the fourth."

Suddenly the butterflutters were in her throat as well as her stomach, and those meaty hiccups-urk-urk, urk-urk started again. Trisha rolled away from her shelter, lurched to her knees, and threw up into the shadows between two trees, holding onto one tree with her left hand and clutching her stomach with her right.

She stayed where she was, gasping for breath and spitting out the taste of slightly used fiddleheads-sour, acidic-while Mo fanned on three pitches. Troy O'Leary was up next.

"Well, the Red Sox have got their work cut out for them," Troop remarked. "They're down seven to one in the bottom of the fourth and Andy Pettitte is twirling a gem.

"Oh sugartit," Trisha said, and then vomited again. She couldn't see what was coming out, it was too dark for that and she was glad, but it felt thin, more like soup than puke. Something about the almost-rhyme of those two words, soup and puke, made her stomach immediately knot up again. She backed away from the trees between which she had thrown up, still on her knees, and then her bowels cramped again, this time more fiercely.

"Oh SUGARTIT!" Trisha wailed, tearing at the snap on the top of her jeans. She was sure she wasn't going to make it, absolutely positive, but in the end she was able to hold on just long enough to get her jeans and underwear yanked down and pulled out of the way. Everything down there came out in a hot, stinging rush. Trisha cried out and some bird in the dying light cried back, as if in mockery. When it was finally over and she tried to get on her feet, a wave of lightheadedness struck her. She lost her balance and plopped back down in her own hot mess.

"Lost and sitting in my own crap," Trisha said. She began to cry again, then also to laugh as it struck her funny. Lost and sitting in my own crap indeed, she thought. She struggled up, crying and laughing, her jeans and underwear puddled around her ankles (the jeans were torn at both knees and stiff with mud, but at least she'd avoided dipping them in shit . . . so far, anyway). She pulled her pants off and walked to the stream, naked from the waist down and holding her Walkman in one hand. Troy O'Leary had singled around the time she lost her balance and plopped into her own poop; now as she stepped barefoot into the freezing cold stream, Jim Leyritz hit into a double play. Side retired. Utterly SECK-shoo-al.

Bending, getting water and splashing it onto her fanny and the backs of her thighs, Trisha said: "It was the water, Tom, it was the damn old water, but what was I supposed to do? just look at it?"

Her feet were completely numb by the time she stepped out of the stream; her backside was also pretty numb, but at least she was clean again. She put on her underwear and her pants and was just doing the snap on the jeans when her stomach clenched again. Trisha took two big steps back to the trees, clutched the same one, and vomited again. This time there seemed to be nothing solid in it at all; it was like ejecting two cups of hot water. She leaned forward and put her forehead against the pine tree's sticky bark. For just a moment she could imagine a sign on it, like the kind people hung over the doors of their lakeside and seaside camps: TRISHA'S PUKIN' PLACE. That made her laugh again, but it was bad laughter. And through all the air between these woods and the world she had so foolishly believed was hers, that jingle was playing again, the one that went "Dial 1-800-54-GIANT"

Now her bowels again, tightening and cramping.

"No," Trisha said, with her forehead still against the tree and her eyes closed. "No, please, no more. Help me, God. Please no more."

Don't waste your breath, said the cold voice. It's no good praying to the Subaudible.

The cramp loosened. Trisha walked slowly back to her shelter on legs that felt rubbery and unstable. Her back hurt from vomiting; her stomach muscles felt oddly sprung. And her skin was hot. She thought maybe she had a fever.

Derek Lowe came in to pitch for the Red Sox. Jorge Posada greeted him with a triple into the right-field corner. Trisha crawled into her shelter, being careful not to brush any of the branches with her arm or hip. If she did that the whole thing would probably fall over. If she was caught short again (that's what her Mom called it; Pepsi called it "having the Hershey squirts" or "doing the outhouse polka"), she'd probably knock it all over, anyway. Meantime, though, she was in here.

Chuck Knoblauch hit what Troop called "a towering fly ball." Darren Bragg caught it, but Posada scored. Eight to one, Yankees. She was on a roll tonight, no doubt about it. On an absolute roll.

"Who do you call when your windshield's busted?" she sang under her breath as she lay on the pine needles. 1-800-54-Gl-"

A sudden spasm of the shivers took her; instead of hot and feverish, she felt cold all over. She grabbed her muddy arms with her muddy fingers and held on, hoping the branches she had so carefully set up wouldn't all fall down on top of her.

"The water," she moaned. "The water, the damned old water, no more of that."

But she knew better, and didn't need the cold voice to tell her anything. She was already thirsty again, vomiting and the aftertaste of fiddleheads had made the thirst even stronger, and she would be revisiting the stream soon enough.

She lay listening to the Red Sox. They woke up in the eighth, scoring four runs and chasing Pettitte. While the Yankees batted against Dennis Eckersley in the top of the ninth ("the Eck" was what Joe and Troop called him), Trisha gave in-she couldn't stand listening to the daffy babble of the stream any longer. Even with the Walkman's volume turned up it was there, and her tongue and throat begged for what she was hearing. She backed carefully out of the shelter, went to the stream, and drank again. It was cold and delicious, tasting not like poison but like the nectar of the gods. She crawled back to her shelter, alternately hot and cold, sweaty and shivery, and as she lay down again she thought, I'll probably be dead by morning. Dead or so sick I'll wish I was dead.

The Red Sox, now down by a score of eight to five, loaded the bases with just one out in the bottom of the ninth. Nomar Garciaparra hit a deep drive to center field. If it had gone out, the Sox would have won the game by a score of nine to eight. Instead, Bernie Williams made a leaping grab at the bullpen wall and snared Garciaparra's bid. One run scored on the sacrifice fly, but that was all. O'Leary came up and struck out against Mariano Rivera, completing an undistinguished night and ending the game. Trisha pushed the power button on her Walkman, saving the batteries. Then she began to cry, weakly and helplessly, with her head in her crossed arms. She was sick to her stomach and queasy in her bowels; the Sox had lost; Tom Gordon never even got in the stupid game. Life was the puppy-shits. She was still crying when she fell asleep.

At the Maine state police barracks in Castle Rock, a short telephone call came in just as Trisha was going against her better judgment and drinking from the stream for the second time. The caller gave his message to the operator and to the tape-recorder which preserved all incoming calls.

Call commences 2146 Hours

Caller: The girl you're looking for was snatched off the trail by Francis Raymond Mazzerole, that's M as in microscope.

He's thirty-six years old, wears glasses, has short hair dyed blond. Got that?

Operator: Sir, can I ask you to-

Caller: Shut up, shut up, listen. Mazzerole is driving a blue Ford van, what I think is called an Econoline. He is in Connecticut by now at least. He is a bad scumbag. Run his record and you'll see. He'll fuck her a few days if she doesn't give him any trouble, you could have a few days, but then he'll kill her. He's done it before.

Operator: Sir, do you have a license number

Caller: I gave you his name and what he's driving. I gave you all you need. He's done this before.

Operator: Sir

Caller: I hope you kill him.

Call ends 2148 Hours

Traceback put the origin of the call at a pay telephone in Old Orchard Beach. No help there.

Around two o'clock the next morning-three hours after police in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, and New Jersey had begun looking for a blue Ford van driven by a man with short blond hair, wearing eyeglasses-Trisha awoke with more nausea and cramps. She knocked her shelter over backing out of it, fumbled her jeans and underwear down, and voided what seemed like a huge quantity of weak acid. It hurt her down there, hurt with a deep itching sting that felt like the worst case of prickly heat she'd ever had.

When that part was over she crawled back to Trisha's Pukin' Place and grabbed hold of the same tree. Her skin was hot, her hair was matted with sweat; she was also shaking all over and her teeth were chattering.

I can't vomit any more. Please God, I can't vomit any more. It'll kill me if I go on vomiting.

This was when she actually saw Tom Gordon for the first time. He was standing in the woods about fifty feet away, his white uniform seeming almost to burn in the moonlight which fell through the trees. He was wearing his glove. His right hand was behind his back and Trisha knew there was a baseball in it. He would be cupping it against his palm and twirling it in his long fingers, feeling the seams go by, stopping only when they were exactly where he wanted them and the grip was right.

"Tom," she whispered. "You never got a chance tonight, did you ?"

Tom took no notice. He was looking in for the sign. That stillness spun out from his shoulders, enveloping him. He stood there in the moonlight, as clear as the cuts on her arms, as real as the nausea in her throat and belly, all those nasty butterflutters. He was stillness waiting for the sign. Not perfect stillness, there was that hand behind his back turning the ball and turning the ball, searching for the best grip, but all stillness where you could see; yeah, baby, stillness waiting for the sign. Trisha wondered if she could do that-just let the shakes run off her like water off a duck's back and be still and conceal the churning inside her.

She held onto the tree and tried. It didn't happen all at once (good things never did, her Dad said), but it did happen: quiet inside, blessed stillness. She stayed that way for a long time. Did the batter want to step out because he thought she was taking too long between pitches? Fine. It was nothing to her, one way or the other. She was only stillness, stillness waiting for the right sign and the right grip on the ball. Stillness came from the shoulders, it spun out from there, it cooled you and focused you.

The shivers eased, then stopped entirely. At some point she realized that her stomach had also settled. Her bowels were still crampy, but not as bad now. The moon was down. Tom Gordon was gone. Of course he had never really been there at all, she knew that, but

"He sure looked real that time," she croaked. "Real as real. Wow."

She got up and walked slowly back to the tree where her shelter had been. Although she wanted nothing except to huddle on the pine needles and go to sleep, she set up the fans of branches again, then crawled in behind them. Five minutes later she was dead to the world. As she slept, something came and watched her. It watched for a long time. It was not until light began to line the horizon in the east that it went away ... and it did not go far.