The museum was a square block of company houses, the lousy dumps factories rented to their workers month-by-month for d.a.m.n-near each month's pay. The crummy dumps he and Uncle Ben lived in when he was... Through the rain-run window, the museum flickered. Uncle? No Uncle. Ben or otherwise! What the h.e.l.l was that? Nerves, yeah.

He stretched, twisted. His spine popped all the way down.

"Hall of Pain," he said to the empty Chrysler. "Perfect. This is America."

A dim light glowed to life in an upper window of the building. With it, his blood rushed, flushed his vision clear. The chatter in his arms and belly steadied. "Ah," he said to the light, "a fellow human. Well." He remembered to lock the car as he walked away. Rain misted him like the body-hot sweat of bad work. No matter how tightly he clutched his jacket, the rain soaked his neck. The iron bridge was painted with shadows. Drooping weeds, junk trees, sumacs, ginkgos, grew, dripping, from the riverbanks, below. To his right, a smooth coil of water rolled over a spillway. The cataract pounded the stone bridge supports and transmitted the rumble to his feet. A suck of cold air washed him as the flood thrumbed downstream, down the dark.

"Great day for a field trip, Miss Kerkauff!" he shouted, his voice lost in the roar of waters.

The museum entrance was a stoop and a wooden door, one of a dozen, either way along the building. Above the door, a single bulb glowed yellow against mossy brick. The lamp was clear gla.s.s, like the streetlights he'd potted with his BB gun when he was a kid. He smiled. Then the thought, "What the f.u.c.k?" BB gun? Jesus, no. "Put your eye out, Allie," Aunt Florence said. Then another gut-punch: Who in Christ was Aunt Florence?

He tried the k.n.o.b and What the f.u.c.k? It opened. He never expected it to, but it did and that p.i.s.sed him off. Why the h.e.l.l? Even this s.h.i.t-house should be locked, at-he squinted at his watch-4:28 in morning. He was ready to kick, to smash a face... And, Jesus, there was nothing and n.o.body and Jesus f.u.c.king Christ it was not going to be a good day for somebody. Maybe a few somebodies would have a day of bad hurt and long forevers. Wait till he found the Manager.

Above the rain and rushing river, he heard a cry from inside, a sob. He listened, tuned.

Another.

"It is the Hall of Pain." His voice came back from the darkness. "Scare me, will you?" He stepped inside. And it felt so good to not be rained on. When he shut the door, the roar of falling waters was lost. A lamp came on overhead, then farther along. They made a trail of light. They didn't brighten the place, but he could see the path. Ahead, to the sides, a half-dozen paths maybe, maybe more, he didn't count. Hard to tell, but the ceiling didn't look right, too high, too high. But the floor-he bounced on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet-good carpet. He liked that. Deep, solid underneath.

Above one corridor was a sign: "Those Who Suffer," it said, "Have Hope!"

Alex smiled. Above the smile came the sound, again the cry, a whimper from beyond the words. By G.o.d, he knew something of suffering, he did. He followed, alive now, tingling. The wonder of Rat Time: it posed no questions, it led and was reason alone, logic itself. Bless those who cry. Alex moved quickly from pool of light to pool of light. The whimperer ahead was one who knew the score, had no illusions left of life or of when death would come. The cry was the sob before the trigger. "Thank you," it said. "Please do it right, do it quick."

Alex was come to serve.

Pa.s.sages intersected. He didn't care, didn't count. He followed his stomach. Rooms slipped by. Exhibits. Lives in mannequins, worlds in props and furniture. He glimpsed an amputation, a shattered limb hacked in flickering electric candle. The patient howled in silence, straining, frozen, from the blood-wet table, the saw poised for another bite of flesh, nerve, and marrow.

He'd seen better in life. Still, he almost tasted the loose-bowel stink in the air. An effect? Bad plumbing?

In other rooms, tortures, ancient and modern, the usual tools: flame, pincers, tongs, flesh-flecked rope and gore-beaded spikes, batteries and clamps. Accidents, industrial and domestic. Rooms of flickering solutions, many solutions, all failed, attempts that yearned for the perfection of finality. Photo montages tacked on cracked walls: holdups, murders caught on camera, dismemberments. Parents and children, husbands and wives, lovers and the d.a.m.ned of love. Or scenes of famed mayhem acted in silent film: local talent, Lizzie Borden, that swinging doll, her own Rat Time Two-Step blessing her. Crippen, Gein, Manson, Jones, and Dahmer, the wonders of Kosovo, Saddam and Sons...

And all lousy. None of it satisfied.

He wanted that voice, the still-wet meat-throat that led, the yellow-brick whimper down the halls of Pain. Where are you? Where are you? Through a window, dark: a man in gloom, a dummy man, slope-shouldered, by a bed. On soaked sheets, the newly dead-another dummy-legs spread, gown rolled, her whatchacallit place between her legs; she was a red crater, belly to knees. The guy? He held something. Something nice and red. Newborn, the thing, a baby. Ah! Alex had thought he'd done her with a knife, an ax, his hands, his teeth. But, no, no she had died of birth. Like his mother. Nice. The doctor, head hanging, hands blooded, held the life that had killed its mother. Frustration? Exhaustion? Disgust? Annoyance? Did he want to smash the little wet doll he'd saved?

"f.u.c.k up, Doc?" Alex wished the doc were alive so he could kill him now, kill him to pieces.

The sob was near. A splash of light washed from an open door across the hallway. The sob was there. In there. Rats stirred deep, behind Alex's eyes, in his b.a.l.l.s, at his jaws.

"Ahhh..." Alex walked into the light.

The room was a bright cube of no one. The sobs drained away.

"Ahhh..." His throat rumbled. He put a clamp on Rats about to tumble. It had been here.

In the corner was a toilet. He used it. There was a sink. He splashed his face. There was a comfortable-looking chair, a refrigerator. The fridge was filled. He had a bite and it was good. There was a television. The bed invited. Every wall had windows, each window had curtains. He opened them one at a time. Nothing. Dark gla.s.s. One-way gla.s.s, he'd bet.

This was an exhibit. An exhibit in-process, in the making. Me. He sat on the bed and it felt good. It was still. So comfortable to sit on a thing didn't do 85-90 miles-per-hour. The ceiling was a transparent blue like summer. If he imagined, there were clouds. If he wanted, there was a breeze from across the, yes, meadow. d.a.m.n. This was a big room and his, no one else's. His room.

His door closed.

For the first hour, he smashed himself against the gla.s.s, the door. He shouted until he couldn't. Nothing gave, no one came, and he was b.l.o.o.d.y with effort. He dumped furniture, smashed it, looked for weapons. He could make knives, bludgeons, garrotes. Wonderful tools, but nothing to use them on.

He sat to think.

He thought nothing. He ate. He collapsed on the bed and pretended to nap. He'd catch whomever, p.r.i.c.kb.a.s.t.a.r.d, c.o.c.ksucker soon-to-be-dead-as-a-doornail motherf.u.c.king son-of-a-someone, sneaking.

No one came. Soon he slept for real.

When he woke the light had dimmed. Without glare, the room was almost pleasant. Personal rats swarmed his spine and loins, of course. They burrowed, rammed the inside of his skull. There he was. In memory the projector chattered behind him. Hinners.h.i.tz's wool pants p.r.i.c.kled his leg. He ate deeply of Hazel Gensler's grape breath. Alone in his room, food, water, plenty of everything and he was going...

Going a little ratty. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Rat Time tunes and not a partner in the hall.

He whimpered and monkey punched a knot in the muscle above his right knee. Good! He clenched and hit himself again. He screamed. Again. Harder. Harder. He screamed. Sobbed. The sob. He recognized the sob. He'd known it before he knew it now. He was the expert on sobs, the tear without illusion, the cry that knew the score, the gasp before the trigger. Yes. He. Alex, Alex, Alex. Winkler. Winkler. Winkler. He reminded himself as he struck. All but his name slipped away. He buried knuckle in flesh, through nerve, struck bone. He called, "G.o.d! I'm a friggin' professional!" He bit his cheek to shut himself the f.u.c.k up. He shut, finally, the f.u.c.k up when he tasted meaty cheek, oozing salty, a morsel on his tongue. Then it wasn't bad. Wasn't too bad if he sat unmoving, so still no one knew he was nibbling inside. Just a knotting of the jaw, a quiver in the eye. But small. So small. Rat Time condensed.

Outwit the place. Ha! As long as there were no people, safe ones he could not get to, the other side of the gla.s.s, the door, as long as there were no people anywhere in this world, Rat Time would leave him the f.u.c.k alone.

He sat quiet, belly full, in good soft light. The window reflected him back at him. He saw Alex in the dark gla.s.s, Alex in the room. Alex, quiet. Maybe, in the distance, a tiny chatter, a shutter clacking (maybe). Open-shut. Open-shut. Ultra. Slow. Motion. Was it? There. Yes it was. A shutter. Each click, a picture. Each picture, a moment. Pictures mean people, people watching. Smart guys, scared guys, fat guys, beautiful women, pimply girls, tough guys, and guys just trying to help. Guys who'd disappear into the ma.s.s of rats around them. He hardly recognized himself among them in the flickering frames and pictures, those watching, and him, another rat in plenty.

Only his teeth moved. He chewed rich, slippery cheek meat, blood-salt seasoned. It hurt. Hurt like.

It's supposed to.

Each bite was a revelation of what pain, idealized, might aspire to. Each bite an apotheosis (Good word, a word to chew over. Thank you, Miss Kerkauff). Each bite a shot to take you to the stars on cold fires of dead-eyed physics. So far to go and so little of him, so little of this flesh to carry him.

Well, not so little. He still had (he counted): his lips, his tongue to work with. There were fingers, miles of fingers. Each hand had, count them, one, two, three... Fourteen. Fourteen knuckles, each one a meal, each, an ocean of pain to cross. He studied: a hand was a future, a planet of undiscovered pain to explore. And before the knuckles, the fingernails, each one hugging its meat. Each could be mined. Oh, yes, f.u.c.king Hillegas, yes.

Who were they, the watchers in the museum? Among those who would not be there: the Baseball Family, the Empty-Eyed Girl in the Ladies' John, the Sweaty Kid Who Would Be a Man, the Beauty Piece of Kagen's Island, his Partner, Fat What'shisname. And What'shisname, the Manager Mister, Mister Hillegas. They'd never be there.

He ran the trip in his head. Start to finish. There were more he'd forgotten. Where was he now? The beginning? Was he always here? No, no, he'd just arrived. Ah, that kid on the bus, the Greyhound out of Berdoo, the Doofus kid he'd left to breed, alive in the breathing world, he was out there. Could he be watching? And the Chrysler Lady. Oh, Chrysler Lady! He'd pay for them, oh the sins of so long life were not the deaths, oh no. The sins were those he'd left to live. So many. So, so, many. He'd pay for those, all those.

For now, he joined them. He looked at his image in the black gla.s.s: a small man, seated, quiet, a perfect gentleman. A man at rest on square-one, and, like everyone alive, watching. He was very, very, very, very, very, very good. And, he'd get better. He'd see to that.

THEN, JUST A DREAM.

A kid walks. Late afternoon. All alone, he walks the rail line. Trees push close to the tracks, one side; the other, a graveled drop-off leads to more trees. Pine trees cover the hillside down to a river, maybe a lake, but something watery is off that side of the tracks and down there. He smells it, the water, the mud, fish, mosquito eggs; those smells rise from that side. He's walked miles. As long as he can remember the day, he's walked it. It's summer, late summer, not hot, but warm. Nice. No place to go from here but home. The smells, the feel of the gravel underfoot, the scent of creosote bubbled from the ties, it smells, yes, like home. Near-home. He's wanted to go there for...

Then, a soft click, metal, or a sound that would be metallic if it weren't smothered by leather and a soft foot, and he isn't walking. His foot is stuck. Now, he looks. The boot, his foot and ankle in it, is caught in a switch. A spur of a spur, the rails split at just where he was walking and a switch that he never noticed and hadn't seen closed just as his foot arrived there. Jesus Christ. Along some track, middle of nowhere, a guy's walking along, and the thing just closes, thump, like that. It doesn't hurt; it simply holds him. Fact is, he couldn't tell if it closed on him or if he just stepped in it and got wedged there. Doesn't matter. Point is he cannot get out.

The line, this spur, he'd been walking hasn't been used in...

He looks. Well, not for a long time. Gra.s.s, small trees and brush grow in the middle, between the ties, up from the rails; and the rails, they're rusty, like nothing had rolled on them in months, years.

So the guy... Call him what he is, a kid... The kid's not scared, not right away. Not of being run down and shoved to furious pieces by a train. Only thing worries him, how the h.e.l.l's he getting out? How's he getting home? How's he going to eat? The more he twists his foot, the stucker he is.

He laughs. "The stucker." The switch, though, that's not moving, not opening. It's holding him like a retriever holds a duck: soft, but that's one duck that is not flying.

Takes him most of the afternoon to realize that unless someone comes, unless the switch opens, he is there, part of that track, for the duration.

Now the fact that this is most likely an abandoned spur of some out of use line is starting to scare the h.e.l.l out of him. He could die there, a really dull, pointless death.

By the time the dark starts, he is halfway convinced this is a dream. He hopes it is, anyway, one of those things that, once you realize you're in bed, safe and stupid, you're going to wake up, go down and get you a sandwich and a beer from the PX.

He starts to believe the day, the place, the rails, the switch, his foot, really are pieces of a dream. He imagines a rabbit.

Doesn't a d.a.m.n rabbit run across the track in the moonlight!

He imagines a howling wolf.

Yep. Beyond the trees, a pack takes up the cry.

He looks into the now-night sky. He knows a meteor will flash. And one tears a bright silent crack across the dipper.

He plays with the night, adjusting it.

Then he imagines a dinosaur nearby.

Nearby, the woods creak, crash, thunder. Trees groan, then explode. A hundred feet down the line a shadow like the world lumbers from the woods, crosses the track as a flesh-wrapped pile driver might and slip-slides the gravel down into darkness, the trees below. The dream shakes as it pa.s.ses.

"Wow," the guy says, thinking of what he'd brought to the world, this dream. The d.a.m.n rails still shiver. With the shiver, without wanting to, he imagines a train, a metal and fire thing, abroad on this abandoned, this unused, spur line. Can't help that. In the distance, the dinosaur cannonb.a.l.l.s into the water and bubbles away, forever.

Into its place slides the sorrow of a steam whistle. In a few moments, pitifully few, the puff and chug of an engine rides the curve of rails. It's coming from ahead. The steel races toward him; the rails that hold him quiver, they breathe against his leg, tightening, loosening, but never giving up on him.

He pictures the train. It is an old friend, the train, black, a steam giant at full blaze, shadow and fire in night. He sees the length of it; the cars run bright with people, eating, dozing, talking, planning, dreaming. A hundred at least, a hundred people, all with places to go, promises to keep, business, things they'll do and undo at the end of the line.

The boy? He's still stuck. He imagines the switch opening, releasing him.

It does not. He comes quickly now to realize that in this dream, this world, you can't unmake the life you made. You can't take back the dinosaur, can't rezip the sky, unhop the bunny, unhowl the wolf.

And the train is near...

He thinks, maybe there is a bridge.

There is a bridge. Yes, he remembers. And he dreams it out. Dreams the gorge and the bridge across it a sliver of broken wood, down-bending steel, emptiness hung between the train and his trapped self! Then...

Then, he thinks, maybe. Maybe this dream is only the dream of someone. Someone on the train, the train heading his way is dreaming this. Maybe he's on board, home from the war, safe, and waking...

And the world is soft and too small, a compartment of a train, the train. It's night, his leg is asleep, the world is a window, a black mirror with only him and this little rushing room in it. Ahead, the engine whistle blows. They're going so fast that his compartment catches the shriek, devours, spits it pastward. The whistle blows again. His body presses into the seat at his back. The train screams with stopping, trying to at least, the whistle rushes on, 80, 90 miles per hour, all the steel and flesh around him strains toward zero. Working for stillness in a length of track too small to catch that much quiet.

Christ, what the h.e.l.l? The young man looks out the window. He wonders. Is the bridge out? Ahead? Is there a bridge? A bridge, or something else, something on the track? And without thinking, he knows there is. He knows for sure there is a bridge but does not want to think about it. He knows for sure something else is there. The bridge and something. How high, how long, how deep, how rocky, how intact? And has he left the war, that place... Is THIS the dream...? Could this be THE dream? Could this be where he's not? Could THIS be something he should wake from? Or not? What the h.e.l.l would happen if... if this is still not home, not a ride, not...

Then he wakes. And it was. A dream, a G.o.dd.a.m.n...

SO MANY TINY MOUTHS.

When the wind freshened, the mouths climbed the sky, played among the trees.

Earl Sooey sat in his shack, writing down. Like always. He wrote, They eat top-down well as bottum-up. Don't matter nun. He wrote like once, like long ago when he was barely a coot, back when the government claimed men were going to the moon. Th whole d.a.m.n world snackered by this bulls.h.i.t. Cap Hainey, too.

Earl saved that newspaper. Still had the d.a.m.n thing somewhere. That was how many years ago? Earl was writing even then.

Now, he watched dark creep. Sand drifted in dog-high waves under and around his shack.

Dammed by sand and dark, he wrote, then added, Forever dark is c.u.mming. Didn't matter, he figured. He figured the d.a.m.n mouths couldn't see. Even tho they got one of my eyes! He swigged a little Beam and added Ha-ha! to what he wrote.

His eyehole itched and hurt at the same time. So many mouths, even blind, all they had do was open and bite, bite so quick and often that something would be there by and by to eat.

Blind mouths agenst a haff-blind man. That make an even fite? he wrote on The Toms River Sentinel.

"Even?" he said to no one, laughing. Nuthins even wen th end is shur! He wrote that down.

Earl wrote things down. Sometimes he didn't, but he had years of the Sentinel saved, saved to write on, writing his own wide lines of truth with black crayon overtop their d.a.m.n gray lies. Always sumthin gon to kill you, he wrote over a story about some president and Water-whatever. "Now there's truth in that d.a.m.n paper," he said to no one and swigged again.

He listened.

The air clacked, clicked, hissed. A dry rain of sand sifted over the shack's tin roof when the wind died; when it blew it scoured roof, walls, everything.

"Gobble, hobble, bobble," he said when the sand brushed the window. "Sweet nothings," he said. Sand making loving whispers to the gla.s.s.

Soon his windows were gone. Turned! he wrote. All my windagla.s.s gone back to sand! He wrapped the plastic tarp around him tighter, hugged the bottle of Beam closer.

He wrote, There're noyses in the air where they eat. They are... He listened to noises in the air. By and by he wrote, ...are not like squirrel scratches inunder the eaves. Sand's eating noyses are... He put on paper the sounds in the air. Nik, nik, nik, he wrote, A millyun niks, is nite tonite.

There were no squirrels now. No squirrel in the Barrens, he wrote. An pretty soon, no Barrens, then no squirrel everware, was the afterthought. "Do without squirrel, anyways," he said to his Beam.

The air was cool. His breath dripped down inside of the plastic he'd wrapped around himself. That cold day in July everone talks of, he wrote.

The mouths had come with the Fourth of July. He wrote, Everone missed the end of the world. Then added, Cap Hainey an Buster Leek too... too much FUN I gess howlin at the moon.

Moon! There had been a picture-made him laugh-he cut it from The Sentinel years ago, showed it around over by Chatsworth. The d.a.m.n picture was the astronauts standing on the moon in their suits. And there it was. The d.a.m.n moon in the sky of the d.a.m.n picture!

"Now, how can they be on the moon when the moon's in the sky, there?" he said. "You answer me that."