JUST THIS SIDE OF CHINA

                                                                                                                                                           by Thom Clink

                                                                                                                                                           and Chris Krawciw
 

The emotion becomes too powerful, and then he has to let it go.

"Follow it, Scott. Relax, the memories are the deep running waters of the river. Drift with them, run with them."

He is twenty five years old, and on the campus of Southern Michigan University in the Irish Hills. It is late winter, and the snow outside the frost rimmed windows swims to your knees if you stray from the paths. Part of Scott Cloud's mind knows he's still in his friend Perry's living room, but the biting cold of the relived memory is so strong he can feel the saliva in his mouth freeze as he billows icy clouds from his lungs. He is chasing someone through the snow of Island Park. A figure ahead of him, screaming in a woman's voice, fleeing. There is danger somewhere before him, a half frozen lake, covered under a foot of white, like an angelic Brazilian tiger trap.

The girl is running blind, hysteria having driven most of her common sense and all of her uncommon sense. He is sweating heavy under the winter jacket he'd thrown on over his pajamas. His damp legs wade through the icy quicksand of snow like high pistons kicking to stay free.

"Who is she, Scott. Is it China?"

Perry's inquiry was innocent enough, but her name brought the emotions, and the emotions brought the wall.

Scott Cloud shook off the daze of the vision, righting himself from his slouched position on Perry's couch. The dream, three years dead, abandoned him, and his sweat was no longer the cramped heat of a heavy coat, but the humidity of mid-July in Detroit.

"Paul told you?" Scott asked beneath his tired eyes, taking a sip from an ice tea whose cubes had melted hours ago.

Perry nodded. "Yeah. I didn't even know that you'd been to college, guy. Third generation cop and all, I'd have figured the closest you'd ever get to higher education was trying to pick up sorority girls down at Wayne State."

"I wish that's what I had done instead. You know," Scott continued and his voice began to waver like a snowdrift spread against the wind, "find one of those numerous Greek parties, trying to impress people with your scanty knowledge of a single alphabet, give a girl a beer, take her home, say goodbye in the morning. Wouldn't that have been so much more simple?"

"Why are you so angry, Scott? Tell me what happened. It'll make you feel better."

Scott barked a short, laconic laugh. "I don't want to feel better," he said. "I want China back. She was...she was, I don't know..."

Perry wished that he could have listened to Scott's broken speech with a pure, clinical ear, but he was unused to, and not a little frightened by the man, shaken as he was, usually so placid and calm. That, and Scott was his friend, although a friendship distanced by time and separate careers. He had always loved psychology, the hidden and secret turnings of the mind. Working with policemen, he had come to know the darker aspects. Why some men pulled the trigger and some men didn't, perhaps no one would ever know, but it was the mystery of the solution that intrigued him. He took a nervous pleasure in solving them, approaching each problem a little skittish at first, but by the end, almost everyone pulled the trigger. That's perhaps what eventually drove him out of the business like a schoolboy running home with his ass whipped by the bully of the block. One mind was not enough to endure the helpless and wanton screaming of so many others. He wondered. Would Scott too? Or was his resolve of a different nature, much more like the armor he had built around himself, instead of the scared little boy who was talking to him now?

"Why did you come to me of all people? We haven't seen each other for a long time."

"You're a professional," Scott said, "who used to work with cops. I used to be a cop. Who better to come to? You're also bound by privilege to never repeat a word."

"True," Perry said, and he never had, most of them forgotten or suppressed too deep to be recalled. "What about Paul?"

Scott sighed. "Paul deals with everything in his own way."

"You mean," he said and tilted an imaginary glass to his mouth.

"That's not his problem. His wounds go deeper than any bottle. No, Paul is...Paul. He doesn't know everything, but he's hurting too."

"Now you're playing the psychologist."

"I don't play at anything," Scott said scornfully.

"I think you do."

Scott sighed again, languidly, as if he were in a deep, contented slumber. "Then what am I playing now?" he asked, his voice bitter.

"The proud and respected detective. The loner. The man who would love nothing else but to be his father's son, but won't let himself be."

Scott slowly straightened himself on the couch and sat across from his tormentor, their eyes locking in a subtle battle of egos. "I didn't come here to talk about me. I came to talk about China."

Perry tried to smile to quell the tension, but his lips didn't respond, feeling more like a dead slab of meat than anything under his control. It was the moments such as this that he despised himself for becoming a psychologist, moments like this that he loved it. "Scott," he said, "we'll never be able to talk about China unless we talk about you. The two subjects are linked. You and she, in some way, have become the same person, or at the very least, she is alive in you now, as a memory--loved--cherished for who she was, for what she meant to you, and above all, who she can be again. Talk to me--let it go..."

Scott lay back down again, exhausted. He looked to Perry like one of the men who had spent their days and nights camped alongside the railroads as they were being built, toiling in the sun all day just long enough to lie down on rock for the night.

Scott seemed to be whispering to himself, a low murmuring of other voices, and Perry could not hear what he said. He leaned forward and wanted to put a hand on his shoulder, but knew Scott would instinctively fling it away.

They were not whispers, but whimpers, and Scott's knees drew themselves up to his stomach.

"No, no, not again..." he said, his slow ravings dying away like final embers.

"What, Scott, what?"

There was only Perry's voice, soothing and insistent, and the windswept terrain of a dream long dead, etched in white, whirling and cold.

"They've all left me, Perry."

"Who, Scott?"

"All of them. So many, so much..."

Perry drew back and felt himself connect with something that perhaps he too had forgotten, or forced away. There was no pity, only pain.

"They've all left me," he said again, and then in the sudden silence of the room, Scott L. Cloud whimpered.
 

"Any messages?"

Scott Cloud breezed into the office in total disarray. Well, Paul Edwards realized, as close as Scott every came to being disarrayed. No conservative sports coat, his black, close- cropped hair plastered to his forehead, the top button of his collar undone, and an actual sweat mark down the back of his white dress shirt. A week ago, you could not have convinced Paul that Scott ever perspired since the doctor slapped his ass into this world. If he'd been present the night before to see Scott cowering on Perry's couch, Paul may have interpreted it as one of the seven signs.

"Yeah, God called. He wants us to follow his wife around. He seems to think that she's been in bed with the devil."

"Any messages?" Scott tried again, this time a little more sternly, as he settled behind his desk and began mechanically sorting through the mail Paul had placed there this morning.

"Yeah, China called. She said to let her rest in peace, and quit acting like an asshole."

That one hurt the all mighty emotionless one, and Paul almost regretted saying it. But there was almost satisfaction in watching Scott flinch. For someone who'd lost their mother when they were nine, Cloud was handling China's death like a second grader. China had been a friend to both of them. One night she has a few too many, swerves to avoid an animal on some BFE road, and goes into a tree. Most people go to the funeral, cry a little, maybe shoot the shit later with old friends, reminiscing, but they let it go. Scott was walking around with an albatross around his neck, or more appropriately up his ass.

Paul gave up the game and picked up a yellow legal pad off his desk.

"Darlene called for you about three times, she wants to set up a date for you two to have drinks, dancing, and some pulchritudinal sex. The Gleason estate called, wondering how we were going to handle the post humorous billing, and the Chinese joint up on Schafer has stopped delivering. And I, my dear friend, have an appointment with a prospective client."

"A client, who?" Scott had come out of his doldrums and stopped pretending to be sorting the mail at the prospect of a case.

"Just an acquaintance of mine who's having some difficulties. It's still kind of personal, but I'll get you up to date if we're hired. Sorry I can't hang around and feel sorry for you, glum chum. Here's the number where I can be reached if you need me." Paul flipped what appeared to be a little blue business card onto the corner of Scott's desk, and was out the door like a bull out of a shoot.

Scott promptly ignored the card. The prospect of a long day at the office didn't entertain his attitude much. There weren't any pending cases, and Mr. role reversal himself, Paul Edwards, was out drumming up business. Well, since Paul was busy playing him, maybe he should play Paul.

The office liquor cabinet had at one time been a source of argument for the two partners. Paul had wanted to make it a business expenditure, P.O.ing it to Street Cloud Investigations. Keep the clients soused, he'd said, and the checks would flow more freely. They'd finally agreed that the business would buy the cabinet/fridge, but that Paul would have to keep it stocked himself.

The cool, alcohol perfumed air of the fridge breathed out into his sweating face. Scott wasn't choosy with his weapons, if he couldn't keep the emotions out, at least he could dampen the punches a little. He almost wished that there were a lazy Susan in the fridge so that he could play Russian roulette with the well stocked cabinet. Instead, he drew forth a bottle with "151" emblazoned upon it, remembering an instance when Paul, in his alcohol charged ego, had drunk a flaming shot, nearly setting his shirt on fire when some of it spilled from the corners of his mouth. Paul had shrieked, his eyes the size of new, shiny quarters, and then lethargically snuffed out the blaze with a few heavy swats of his palm. He had charged the burn ointment to Street Cloud. He'd called it "hazard pay."

Scott didn't believe in God or heaven, at least not in the conventional sense. He could see no extremely aged man with a flowing white beard, wisdom and love embedded in the deep creases of his brow, or gates made of pearl that opened to paradise, but he did believe in hell.

"You know, Scott," Paul had said at the funeral, "maybe this is hell, and we're already here, and just don't know it yet. I think I'll step over to the bar and wait for the tour guide."

Scott needed the visible, the real, things that could be touched, examined with his hands or eyes. He had never been taught faith, or had refused to accept it. The only faith he had ever had in anything was in the strength of his mind and the clean, sure stroke of the hammer once the trigger had been pulled.

Scott cracked the gummed-up seal of the 151 and selected a clean, iced glass from the refrigerator. Paul had reserved the Don Q for the most tense cases, or ladies, whichever came first. He knew that at this point Paul would scream at him for ignoring etiquette. Chilled glasses were for vodka, preferably Absolut, but Scott didn't give a damn. He poured himself a shot and looked out the window.

Cities never changed, just the inhabitants. There were probably a thousand other men staring out the window, glass in hand, watching the same battered skyline, and the irony was that he would never meet a one of them. Separated by glass and concrete, they would all drink alone.

What was it that Paul had said or that Scott had thought he had said, under his breath, head bent low over a Baptist pew somewhere in Memphis, Michigan?

"It wasn't you, Scott..."

Is that what he had said?

Scott shook off the memory and drained the amber rum in a gulp. There was an instant, fiery sensation, and he could feel the lining of his throat drying out, all the moisture driven away.

He coughed a moment, his lips sputtering an oath that was supposed to be "damn!," but it came as a dry hiss. His eyes teared, but he blinked them back.

They had drunk 151 in the Hills then, too, and had nicknamed it "battery acid," but he suspected that battery acid was a bit more palatable, at least the first shot. After the first, you couldn't taste anything anyway.

Relief filled him, at least a slow, subtle relaxation that posed as relief, a lie told to liars, and Scott grimly laughed at himself, sloshing himself a fresh drink, the windows and desperate men forgotten.

He went to his desk and set the bottle down with a hard thump, his mind turning to a dark-eyed beauty he once knew.

They had been on a case, as usual, when everything got fucked up, not just Paul.
 

The hands are soft, the voice attached to them is softer.

"What's inside of you, Scott Cloud?" One of the hands stops to cup his cheek, he finds himself leaning into it. It was a mothering touch, from a person who'd learned to be soft and good. It made Scott want to sigh, how good it felt.

"I'm smart enough to know that you aren't the normal freshman, Scott? Your roommate has college freshman written all over his beer mug, but you don't belong here."

Soft, and firm. The same hands that had held his own an hour before as they left the bar, guiding him back to her apartment. Not for a romantic interlude, and not for physical gratification, but just to talk. To reach out to another human, with defenses lowered just enough by the social oil of alcohol, and touch base.

The hand on his cheek was all the physical contact they would need, and anything more would have been sacrilege.

"Does it matter why I'm here?" he asked. "For all intents, I'm just like you. I'm a few years older, and I won't be back next semester, but other than that, I'm still a freshman."

She was a Baptist from a small town called Memphis, he wasn't religious and came from Detroit. She had been valedictorian and class president, he had stumbled through high school finding the classes boring and the social aspects frivolous. She had come from a close-knit, religious family, Scott has lost his mother when he was thirteen, and his father had lost him not long after.

They drank a couple of coolers in her dorm room, sitting on the carpet like a pair of Indians. She had lit a couple of candles and they'd both relaxed amid the stuffed animals of a young woman's room illuminated by flickering light. They laughed as they shared their lives with each other.

China's roommate, Lori, would sneak in later, around four a.m., she'd met a guy at a Delta Sig party and stayed out later than anticipated. She had to tip toe over China and Scott's bodies on the way to her bed. They'd fallen asleep there, China leaning back against the bed, her long, blonde hair fanned out across the sheet, and Scott, lying on his back with his head in her lap.

They looked so cute, Lori didn't have the heart to wake them.

Later on, as an older man, Scott would look back and realize that the contradictions of their previous lives hadn't meant anything that night, or any of the nights they'd be together on campus. There was a social bonding between them, and other people in the dorm, people who'd left home for the first time, and were piecing together a new life support system. The magic, social glue had hardened between them, and when it broke, it took pieces of Scott with it.
 

Scratch, scratch.

Like a cat clawing at the edge of a litter box.

Scratch, scratch.

Like someone scraping aged paint from a rotting fence.

Scratch, scratch.

Like someone was scraping at the office window, and they weren't going to stop until Scott woke up.

His eyes fluttered, and his heart followed suit. He'd been dreaming of her again. Of the time they'd been at college.

Scratch, scratch.

He was leaning back in his office seat, the window directly behind him. It didn't occur to him until he started to turn around that his office was on the second floor and there was no fire escape.

There was no light in the office, but the light from the street was enough. She was out there, as if suspended from wires.

He and Paul had stood over the coffin together and looked down at her. She had changed much over the past couple of weeks. The skin was tighter, and taking on a sickly darker hue, and it was all too obvious that her neck had been broken in the accident. As she knocked at the window one last time, her head lolled off at an odd angle, revealing a smile through which the mortician's stitches that held her mouth eternally shut were all too visible.

Scott flinched as if hit, clawing his way out of his chair like a madman, throwing himself across the office, away from the window.

When he looked back, she was gone.
 

Paul couldn't precisely remember when he had first suggested a trip to a "spiritual counselor," or medium, as most people called them, but recalled, verbatim, Scott's reply.

"Instead of a medium," Scott had said behind some unimportant paperwork, "maybe you should go to a large."

Just for that, Paul had paid for his first encounter with Street Cloud's petty cash.

Paul hadn't known what to expect, except for the surreal, stereotyped items one would find in a cheap horror flick. Crystal ball, weird, poorly illustrated tarot cards, women with Hungarian accents and the like. What he had found, instead, was an intelligent, thoughtful person, originally from Virginia whose accent had blurred due to so much time in the North.

Madame Laurel wore no Eastern European headdress, favoring a Tiger's baseball cap, no dresses made of veil-like material meant to inspire mystique. In fact, she preferred blue jeans, tight to everyone's tastes, and loosely fitting T-shirts silk screened with cunning blurbs of truth such as "If you want to do it--do it!" He never saw her with the same shirt twice and his first question was always to ask for the week's psalm.

She was also young, which shocked him at first. He had also thought of medium's as somebody's grandma who had just a little bit too much prune juice spiked with vodka in the morning.

Holly, (she had confided in him her real name after his third visit over the table, saying that he could never betray a confidence; she just used "Madame Laurel" as a stage name and for tax purposes. Besides, people liked it that way. If you didn't produce strange noises and dead relatives, people thought you were fake.) in her mid twenties, after serving too many truckers in a greasy spoon, had decided to put the gift she had discovered in her early life to use, and just be herself. On a first visit with a client, she usually wore the babushka, veil-like dress and caressed the crystal ball, (Hudson's Spring Sale, $39.95 with any clothing purchase) but Paul had caught her unguarded.

His first real contact with her had been over the phone.

The 1-900 number was used by many lonely, solemn people who had nothing better to do at three a.m. Was it his fault that he had come home from the bar a little early that night, a bit sloshed, and flipped on channel 20, hoping to catch the last hour of Barbarella, and just happened to catch the succession of advertisements.

He was just glad that he hadn't dialed the first number he had seen, and considered himself lucky that he wasn't consorting with any 1-900-BIG-BLONDES personnel.

If Holly hadn't been distraught over her recent break-up, and tired enough to spill her guts to him, Paul would have never seen her. He had too many strange, unexplainable experiences to have another one, and not enough whiskey to seek one out.

But, as usual, the soft heart surfaced, and he had become the counselor for the night, no irony at all that he was paying for the call.

Now he was Holly's steadfast client. One hour on each Thursday night was dedicated to him and his troubles. She had become his friend in a makeshift way, someone you saw on a regular basis, but wished to know more about, but probably never would due to circumstances.

"I hate brunettes," he would say later to Scott on one dull evening.

"Why?"

"Because I can never have them."

Entering her small flat now, Paul bypassed the larger, quaintly decorated room she used for most of her clients, and went with her straight to her kitchen where she began to brew tea.

"Oh yeah," Paul had said later that same evening, "I hate tea too."

"Why?"

"Because there's only one pot, no matter how slow you drink it."

The tea was jasmine, as was the incense she burned during the day to please her more mundane clients. It wasn't that the smell bothered her, it was just that it didn't mix well with Marlboro Lights.

Paul watched her prepare the tea and smiled to himself. She moved so lightly, and with a confidence he couldn't understand, yet seemed fragile in her approach to life, so concerned and exuberant.

"What's this week's psalm?" he asked over her smoking ashtray.

Holly turned around and stretched her shirt out to him to read.

"Roses are red, violets are blue, give me your money, or I'll kill you!"

Paul sputtered a laugh. "I don't suppose you take American Express."

Holly let her shirt drop back into place and scowled. "No!" she hissed.

"Good. I carry Visa."

Holly laughed and put the kettle over the flame. "You're just too much, Paul--too much!"

Paul nodded. "I know. About 40 pounds too much."

"Oh stop that!" she said and shook her hair about.

In the relaxed atmosphere of her small apartment, Paul wondered again why he did call, but couldn't find an easy answer, so he let it drop for the moment, but he did remember the moment that he knew she was for real, that she just wasn't another carpetbagger hoping to cash in on someone's insecurities.

He supposed it was the moment that she, caught in some fervor, had mentioned Showcase, in his days as an usher there, and had hinted that she wished to hear the entire story, if not for her benefit, then for his.

He had promised that he would, but had not mentioned anything since, and did not plan to on any given Thursday night. The story was his to tell, but she would have to ask first.

Paul listened to the slow gurgle of the tea as it began to brew. Holly was a truly remarkable person. Dark haired, sullen eyed, he suspected that she carried her own secrets as well, hidden in her smiles and sense of humor.

"How have you been this last week?" he asked. The jasmine air and steam made him want to sleep. The scent had always relaxed him, and here, with one of precious company, he felt comfortable, almost at home.

Holly barked another one of her cute Southern laughs. "You know, Paul, same old shit. One day blends in with another, nothing changes except maybe the faces looking for help."

"Yeah, I know. At least I think I know. Before you're finished with Thursday, you realize it's actually Friday and you still have another day to put up with before you're through. It's lucky you get weekends off."

The kettle began to whistle in a high-pitched scream. Holly went to remove it from the fire and poured the tea.

"So who did you help this week?" Paul asked her as she sat down across him and handed him his jasmine.

"Well, there was Joe. He's not a doctor, but he plays one on TV," she said, circling a finger in the air about her temple.

"A little off kilter, huh?"

"Off kilter?" Holly said. "The Leaning Tower of Pisa's off kilter. Joe's nuts."

Paul laughed, loving to listen to her.

"That bad, huh?"

Holly smiled and sipped at her tea. "Joe's one of those kind of guys who gets an idea into his head and just can't let it go. He's not crazy, he just needs help. I'm trying to steer him in the right direction, but it's really difficult. I don't know if I'll be able to do it."

"What's his problem?" Paul asked. The jasmine was excellent as usual.

"I'm bound by privilege," Holly said, coyly sneering at him.

Paul held his open palms up. "I'm sorry," he said. "I should have known better."

She slapped at his shoulder with the back of her hand. "I'm just kidding, you idiot!" she said. "Did I give you any sort of contract to sign when you came in here? Have I ever once

mentioned privilege. Hell, I like to tape all my conversations. Blackmail money, you know. How do you think I can afford the upkeep on this palace?"

Paul laughed and drank some more tea. "I think in my will you get my liquor cabinet. That's quite an honor considering some of the people I've known. Anyway--sorry, I know people hate that word--Joe?"

"Joe," Holly said, suddenly becoming somber. Her delightful eyes crinkled with worry. "Joe is on the edge of committing suicide. I'm trying to convince him to live..."

Paul sniffed at the steam rising from his teacup and was suddenly sorry that he had asked. Maybe he had pushed too much too early, but she seemed to want to talk.

"It's Ok, Paul, really. It's a relief to actually talk to someone without being his shrink."

"He'll live," Paul said with more sincerity than he felt.

"I sure hope so. I would hate to have the Free Press after me, accusing me of driving him to death with hopeless horoscopes."

Paul looked sternly at her a moment, trying to read the real from unreal.

Finally, her asked, "Will he live?"

Her eyes crinkled again and she was not looking at him, or at anything he could see.

"I don't know yet," she said.

He had pushed too early and he knew it now. It would take some time before the shell cracked.

"Besides," Holly said, "Why are you so interested? We're supposed to be talking about you."

"Just trying to make conversation," Paul said.

"Well, you're a brilliant conversationalist, but I need to make some money. The palace, you know."

Paul laughed to ease away the tension. "In that case," he said, "What's in my future, Madame Laurel?" he asked, bugging his eyes out like Peter Lorre. "And hurry up before Hardy gets here."

With that they took the short route, never leaving the path that would take them to emotions and anything else that did not concern her fee, but they could both feel it.

Before long, Holly had told him what his life had given and taken from him in the last few days with more accuracy than he would have cared for, and she needed nothing more than the use of her talents, no flash powder, no magic wand.

At last, the tea was gone, savored by both, each cup slowly drained like the blood of a dead man on the embalming table. When Paul got up to leave, he felt uneasy. He had to remember to tread lightly with her.

Holly escorted him to the door, but as he was about the leave, she squeezed his elbow to make him stop.

"Don't go," she whispered to him.

Paul swallowed hard.

"What?" he asked.

"There's something wrong," she said.

Oh no, Paul thought, she wants to make love to me, but has syphilis.

"Do you have a friend?"

"Most people do," he said.

"Help him."

Paul was startled now, his fantasies lost. "Why, what's wrong?"

"China."

A silent, quicksilver shock shook the detective and he turned around to search her languid eyes.

"Oh God," Paul said, "We have to talk."

"My wife is beginning to get suspicious about us two, Scott," Perry rubbed his fading hair line like Buddha's tummy. Scott still framed Perry's front doorway, the sweat which had gathered in abundance on his flight across town was now freezing like a shell about him. "We go from seeing each other once a week at the bowling alley, to being a hot item."

"China..." Scott muttered through his frozen lungs.

Perry stood aside and Cloud did little more than stumble through the door.

"What did you give him?" Paul asked Perry, looking down at the limp form of his partner, sprawled across Perry's living room couch. "Ether?"

"No. About three or four shots of Ouzo."

Paul breathed in deeply though his nose and expelled the exhaust through his mouth. Holly and he had been speaking for better than two hours when his beeper had gone off. He'd excused himself under the pretense of having to complete a drug deal. Holly'd led him to her private line, so as not to interrupt the business phone and the paying patrons search for inner guidance.

"Paul, there's trouble. Scott's here right now and he's not in too good of shape. He's obviously drunk, and he keeps on shaking and talking about China, it's like being alone with Marco Polo on the DT's."

Paul looked across Holly's cluttered kitchen to where she sat with her legs crossed and eyes closed. She was pretty, he thought, in a spooky kind of way.

"Go to him, Paul. Then bring him here, I know he'll be too difficult to persuade when he awakens. But China won't stay dead, and she may be looking for a way back. Scott's guilt will be the path she takes. Bring him to me."
 

Scott was being carried, he was relatively sure of that. The swinging motion and the feeling of free fall were dead giveaways. He was deposited none too gracefully into the back seat of a car which smelled to be none too clean.

There was the banging of doors, and then more movement. The voices in the front seat were too far away to distinguish any words, but the voices in his head were nice and clear, and after a few moments, pictures accompanied them as if his little grey cells were watching a movie against the back of his skull.

"If you ever had the chance, Scott, would you make love to me?"

They'd known each other for several weeks now, gone to the bar quite a few times, had a lot of laughs, and even more late night conversations. They were close enough now that he wasn't shocked by the question, though they'd never even kissed. It was just China thinking out loud again, trying to find out what motivated him. They were also close enough now that he didn't mind answering.

"I don't know, China. I know that I've wanted to. But wanting to do something and doing it are a long ways apart. Not to mention the fact that you would have some say in the matter, and I really don't know if your plans include someone like me. Let me put it to you like this, would you make love to me if you got the chance?"

She laughed, strolled over to where he was standing in her dorm room, and placed here hands to cup his cheeks, just as she'd done that first night.

"Not now, Scott. For me to sleep with someone like you, would entail me falling in love, and right now, I want a little more than that. We could never be a one night stand, and I would never want us to be one. But maybe someday, I think things would be very good between us."

Still cupping his cheeks, she leaned forward and lightly kissed him on the lips, not just friendly, but not quite passionate. As Goldilocks had said, just right.

He didn't say anything for a moment, a little bit in awe and a little bit in shock.

He could see she realized the awkward position he was in, so China quickly picked up the conversation.

"So what kind of party is this your roommate's throwing?"

"It's called a trash can," he blurted out, want all of a sudden to talk about anything other than sex. "Everybody who comes has to bring some liquor, any kind will do, and we dump it all together, into a trash can, and drink till no one is left standing."

China frowned. She wasn't a big drinker and Scott knew it. When she went to the bar, she did it to dance and to flirt. The most he'd ever seen her drink was a sip off a cooler.

"Come on," he prodded, China had become a lifeline to him, and with all the new world of college academia engulfing him, he'd needed someone to cling on to. He dreaded the thought of going to one of Paul's drinking parties without her. "You only live so long, and somewhere down the line you just have to experience a drunken bash."

She smiled a bit at his enthusiasm, and he knew he had her hooked.

"Only if you promise to watch out for me," she told him.

"But what if you're leaving the big bad wolf to watch the hen house?"

As they left her room, she kissed him quickly, one last time.

"I know you'll watch out for me, Scott."
 

"I thought I did," he moaned to himself in the floating ease of the car, "didn't I?"

The car abruptly stopped and Scott tumbled from the back seat, wedging himself in the space between the seats and floor. He moaned, casting a bit of ouzo-thickened spittle from his mouth.

Paul looked over the seat to see the sandwich Scott had made of himself. "You're lucky I wasn't driving," he said to his comatose friend. "Remember that time you drove me home from Lipstyx? Thought I was on an ocean liner. How about a big, juicy piece of salt pork, you mean ol' Puddytat?"

Scott, of course, didn't hear and couldn't answer. By the time Paul and Perry hoisted him out of the car, Scott had lost most of his dinner in a puddle on the floor.

"Does your insurance policy have a drunken friend clause?" Paul asked Perry as they shouldered Scott like an oversized rucksack.

"No."

"You'd better get one," Paul said, nodding to the vomit.

"Fuck it. I don't care about any damn car," Perry said as they began to lurch Scott toward Holly's, Scott's legs trailing behind him in a mockery of a wounded man.

"In Iowa you can say that. I'm Michigan--bad idea."

Holly waited for them on the steps, her door thrown open in apparent haste, the sheer material of her robe clinging to her.

"Tomorrow," Paul said, "remind me to tell Scott that I hate robes too."

Dragging him inside, Holly shut the door behind them, and then helped them settle Scott on the couch, his eyes closed as if they had swollen shut after some terrible blow, mouth hanging open as if in a search for air.

"Keep him here. He'll have to be a little more awake. I'll make some coffee and put on some real clothes."

Paul almost wondered aloud why in a crisis, everyone's first reaction was to boil water. The man wasn't pregnant, just drunk.

Holly had already gone to her bedroom to change, while Perry began to timidly slap Scott's face.

"That won't work," Paul said. "Trust me. And besides, even drunk, he could still probably take you."

"Shut up, Edwards! I'm trying to help my friend!" he said and slapped him again, this time a little harder, more out of frustration than any inclination to help.

Paul scoffed at him. "Pardon me, Doc, but I don't think he came with any Freudian manual," he said, pointing down at Scott. "In fact, Scott would have probably driven Freud straight into an anal retentive frenzy."

"You're not helping any," Perry said. "Why don't you go chase some vampires or something!"

"Because it's nearly dawn, you idiot. They're all about to hit the coffin for the day! Now look, I know you don't believe in any of this shit. Hell, I've worked with it and I still don't believe, don't want to believe some of the shit I've seen and been involved with, but I know Holly. If she says she can help, she can. You and I have known each other a long time, not always on the best of terms, but we've always been able to get along. We don't need to get into an argument in the middle of a seance or whatever Holly's got cooked up. Let's just calm down and remember that we're here for our mutual friend."

Paul's impromptu speech seemed to have a calming effect on both of them and focused their minds to the problem at hand. Perry even cracked a smile.

"I still want to hit him," he said.

"Yeah, me too," Paul said.
 

The voices were coming from somewhere in the distance, like the muffled muttering of one of Charlie Brown's teachers.

Scott's eyes were still shut, and the veil of black was a welcome cover. His ears couldn't be trusted, but there were three distinct entities carrying on a rather monotone conversation, which suited him fine, any loud noises at this point would be like letting an epileptic loose in the china shop of his mind. He burped, and his throat swam in acid for a few moments before he could wash it back down with a dry swallow.

His father, a veteran of many street beats, had taught him a trick years before to use when he began to feel cramped up and tight. The idea was to start by flexing the muscles at the tips of your toes, and then work your way up to your head, working every voluntary muscle you met along the way. After a few moments of working out the kinks, his head began to clear a little, cutting just enough of the wah-wah of the distant voices for him to make out two distinctive male and one female voice. Of course, the context was still beyond him, at the moment he was still having a hard time listening to his own thoughts.

He was resting on something whose smell reminded him of old incense. The strong stuff that the pot smokers always used to cover the odor of their Columbian Red.

Well, smell at least was working all right, hearing was definitely on the fritz, touch so far was abstaining from the vote, so it was just logical progression to work on sight.

His eyes crept open with all of the veracity of a hooker's legs after a long night of Jims and Johns. The light was mercifully dim. He was lying on his side (never leave a drunk on his back, Paul was always fond of reminding him, they'll choke on their own bile, and from the taste in Scott's mouth, Paul's axiom had come in useful tonight) on a weathered couch, the kind of davenport everyone at SMU had planted in the middle of their dorm rooms like some pagan altar. These couches were ceremoniously dug out of parent's basements and rummage sales every fall, in various dilapidated states, drug onto campus, and used for just about every purpose from drink coaster, to mid day nap, to late night romantic encounters, and as each day went by, the aromas of college would soil their surfaces. China had such a couch.

But he didn't want to think about that right now.

Instead he concentrated on the pile of Indian blankets on which his head rested. They too were hung with the odor of ancient potpourri, and appeared to be refugees from the sixties, back when it used to be fashionable to get in contact with the native Americans and by trinkets like these blankets that were probably manufactured in Ohio.

The whole room which surrounded him appeared to be kind of an afterthought. Nick knacks were shoved into almost every corner. A broom and dust pan here, some file cabinets here, a book shelf over there, complete organized chaos. He was either lying down in a very small den, or a very large closet.

When he craned his head in the direction of the light source, which was also coincidentally the direction from which Mrs. Othmar's voice was coming from, Scott could see it was coming through a doorway which was covered with a veil of beads. He was beginning to feel like God had picked him up in his drunken stupor, and taught him a lesson by setting him down in the middle of a Cecil B. Demille film.

Suddenly, the temperature of the large closet/small den dropped, and the musty, incense smell was replaced by a more sweet, sickly odor, one that Scott more generally associated with flies and old meat.

He was no longer alone in the room, someone was sitting on the edge of the couch next to his head. The light from the next room, the light which was eternally tied to the voices and sanity of another world were being blocked by the new figure.

A hand gently ran through his hair, a hand which felt like rough and torn leather. Scott wanted to cry out, to attempt to reach those distant voices, distant mirrors of where he should be, but there was nothing but a dry rasp.

He rolled over just enough to peer up at her. It was China, or at least what remained of her. The specter was still silent, but the reason was more than obvious to Scott now. The stitches which had bound her mouth so tightly at the funeral were still intact, and he could see the long dead muscles of her jaw working underneath the blanket of thin, leathery skin, straining against the thread.

Finally, it was not the thread to give way, but the rotted flesh around her mouth tearing away with the sound of a hook being torn out of a fish's guts who'd been unfortunate enough to swallow more than just the worm.

Her voice was clear and sharp, and cut straight through his battered senses.

"You did this to me."
 

Paul had never seen Perry quite so livid. It was almost as if the man had some scruples.

"In a term I like to use in my profession: BULLSHIT!"

Paul, joking, said, "Shhh, you'll wake him," and jabbed a thumb toward the next room.

Holly had carefully explained the entire procedure, as the professional would say, or ritual, as an initiate, a pagan believer would. In her work, certain things were necessary, even the use of certain incense, candles, anything that would dim the mood, make the user more comfortable with the charms of lost knowledge. Nothing she used, however, were blessed talismans or virgin's blood, or anything like that. The candles were wax, just plain wax, but color was important. Red for emotion, anger, love, lust, and hate. White for tranquility, blue for contemplation. She was to use one for each of them. Perry just shook his head in anger and disbelief.

"You're not actually going to go along with this, are you?" Perry asked him, ignoring the frustrated Holly for a moment, who sat with her arms crossed in her lap.

"You know, Perry," Paul said, reaching for his nearly forgotten emergency pint, hidden somewhere in one of his coat pockets, "I think in the movies you would be the one who gets killed first, but not before he realizes his foolish mistake. 'Oh shit, I guess there really was an escaped chain saw murderer in these woods. I should have guessed when I smelled the gasoline!'"

"You asshole!"

"There you go again, Perry--Freudian slip?"

"Paul, please!" Holly interjected, lines of worry woven across her forehead like a threadbare tapestry. She reached out to take his hand and squeezed it, and for a moment, just a moment, Scott and his troubles, his drunkenness, delirium, and guilt were forgotten, and he wished that he were someone else, a plaintive nobody who had come to her for the winning Lotto numbers, someone of no interest whom she would comfort for the afternoon. Paul realized this feeling was selfish and his thoughts came back into focus, and with it, the monotone wailing of his friend, who to him, seemed like he was having an orgasm. Either that or an upset stomach.

"Listen to him," Paul said, more to cover his own feelings than anything else. "He get's luckier unconscious that I do awake."

Perry laughed. "Corpses see more action than you," he said.

Paul, his mouth open for a comment, was about to resort to a remark involving Perry's mother and her illegitimate goat-child, but he decided to let the comment slip. He instead filed it away for later use.

Holly got up to quickly brew some tea, but did not take her time in her usually precise actions. She just needed to do something, make herself feel useful, understanding that nothing she could say would make any difference to Perry, except maybe...

Paul produced an aluminum, collapsible shot glass, pulled it open as if he were stripping bark from a twig, and gently poured himself a shot of Seagrams.

"Does that shit go everywhere with you?" Perry asked, sickened and incredulous.

"Will it satisfy you if I tell you that I'm going to be buried in a whiskey barrel?"

"No."

"Beechwood aged wouldn't satisfy you?"

"No."

"Cold-filtered?"

"No."

"Damn, you're a hard man to bargain with. Oops. I'm sorry, I said hard, didn't mean to get you excited."

Perry threw his hands up in exasperation.

"Say, sweetie," Paul said, "what're you doing Tuesday?"

Perry's spread fingers rifled through his hair. "Am I the only sane person here?"

Paul, breathing deeply, sensing the tension strangely flowing from him in his uncompromising exhalation, decided that he'd had enough.

"Look, Perry," he said. "I'm sorry if this shit bothers you. I know it doesn't quite stand up to modern psychoanalysis, but we need you, man. And frankly, I'm scared shitless. I don't mind holding your hand for a few minutes if it's for Scott's sake, and, ethics aside, if this is all bullshit, what can it hurt. All we would have been doing, then, is be playing a stupid parlor game rich men's wives use to amuse themselves between state dinners. Give it a chance."

Perry seemed suspicious, as if he were Adam looking at the apple, curious to taste it, but not quite sure whether he should. He knew that as a man of science, the things Holly was suggesting was ridiculous. Summoning spirits! Talking with the dead! And yet, did he never feel the pull toward the unknown. Had he never wondered? Surely it was human to doubt, but it was also human to cast the dice.

"I'm not so sure," he said reluctantly, all the anger and furor burned out of him like a fever that had run its course.

"I'm not saying you have to believe," Paul said. "Just be willing to try. Help us. Holly said it was dangerous for only two people to try."

Perry shook his head, his decision made. "I'm sorry, Paul. I want to help Scott, but not like this. I also don't want to look like an asshole..."

Holly's hand was on Perry's shoulder for several moments before he realized it was there, strong, confident, almost charged with an electric current that vibrated through him with each word she spoke.

"Holly?" Paul asked, suddenly concerned. Her face was mottled with deep patches of red, almost as if someone had slapped her, but only in certain areas.

"Do you remember," she began saying to Perry, "when you were nine and your uncle came to visit?"

Perry's brow furrowed in concentration. "No, no I don't."

"Sure you do. He took you fishing, just the two of you, out on Strawberry Lake."

"No."

"Gave you a can of Budweiser. Said it was OK for you to have it."

Perry shook his head, his eyes staring to nowhere.

"He..."

"Stop it!" Perry yelled and shrugged himself free of her attention, and, breathing hard, finally calmed himself. "You're evil," he said.

Holly shrugged. "If I am," she said, "then I've got plenty of company."

Paul didn't want to know, and wouldn't ask. He poured himself another shot.

A minute or two went by in silence. Time was measured in swishes of the spoon as Holly set out a cup of tea for each of them. Finally, Holly, uprooting the stillness, took Perry's clammy hands.

"It's OK," she said. "He died in despair."

Perry snarled. "Good," he said.
 
 
 

It was settled five minutes later. They would try. No promises, no guarantees.
 

Under normal circumstances, Scott Cloud may have stood his mental ground, but in his weakened state, his mind pulled up its stakes and his body pulled into a fetal ball like a frightened sea crab.

"No," he was all he could mutter.

The leathery hand which had been caressing his scalp a few moments earlier now became a little more insistent. The fingers took grip of his black, conservatively cut hair, which was matted and tangled from days of neglect. Her hold was more than tenacious, as she quickly yanked his hundred and ninety pound frame up off the couch so that they were facing one another.

Scott felt the locks of his hair begin to give way at the roots, slowly tearing away from his scalp like a bad fingernail being pulled back. He could have scrambled his legs underneath him to support his weight, but his body was being particularly unresponsive today.

He opened his mouth to scream in pain, but the corpse quickly rammed her fingers inside his muzzle. Scott's mouth was flooded with a sweet, yet rotten taste that he equated with chewing on dirt. He gorged the contents of his stomach over the things hand and arm.

"Have you been drinking, Scotty? As long as you haven't been drinking and driving, I hear it's bad for your health. You wouldn't want to scream right now anyway. You see, your friends in the next room wouldn't hear me unless I want them to. But unfortunately they can still hear you just fine. Think of it this way, I've got an idea you want to talk to me anyway, and this may very well be the last chance you have to do that, unless you decide to help me."

There was an odd sense of logic to what the China/thing was saying, a logic that would appeal to a man who was drowning in his emotions, appeal to someone who was as physically ill as they were spiritually, appeal to someone who was pickled to the gills and couldn't think on their own.

The corpse drew a breath to speak, and Scott's murky mind was suddenly struck by the irony of it. The only reason she was inhaling and exhaling was to converse, when she wasn't saying anything she stood as still as the statues down in Hart Plaza.

"You don't get away that easy, Pretty Boy," China hissed. "Even if you were to pass out, how hard do you think it would be for me to follow you right on into the arms of Morpheus?"

Something didn't ring quite right about that in his mind.

"Why?" he groaned. Why are you so bitter, he meant to ask, why are you doing this to me, why did you have to die, why not me when I'm so much more deserving, why have you come back; all were fair questions, but all that he had strength to deliver were the monosyllabic grunts.

"Because dying my dear boy can do an awful lot to enhance one's personality. Watching the hood of your Sunbird fold up like an accordion as you ram a maple tree, hearing your own fucking neck snap as your body's wrapped around a steering wheel. Please pardon me if I seem a little irrational."

The sarcastic corpse shook Scott's head violently every few moments to emphasize what it was saying. Scott felt as if his own neck would shatter, but maybe that was her intention.

"It's funny," China rattled on, motioning toward the room beyond the beaded door. "Your buddy, Edwards. Drinks so much he might as well have an I.V. hooked up to a still, and yet someone like me has a few coolers and I end up looking like shit in my coffin."

The smell of molting flesh became a little too much for Scott and a little geyser of bile jutted out from his already empty stomach. Paul was here, he thought, if only he could get his attention, maybe Edwards could get this thing off of him.

She absently wiped the drool from his chin with one of her coarse hands.

His mind was drowning, trying to find any purchase to steady himself upon.

"You said I could help you," he managed to croak, little fireworks exploding inside his head with every word.

The China/thing attempted to smile, a smile that through cracked and shredded lips turned out to be something much less.

"I'm stuck right now, Scott. Do you know what purgatory is?"

He weakly nodded.

"Well, Paul's going to help us. He's got a friend named Holly who's going to pull me out of here, all you have to do is repeat a few words for me. But they've got to be our little secret, if you tell them anything about this chat we've had, then I'll never be able to be free again. But if you do help me out, then I might find it in my heart, what's left of it, that is, to forgive you."

Forgiveness. Scott felt himself passing over into unconsciousness again, but his mind had found the crutch it needed to lean on, a crutch it had known and needed all along, to be forgiven.
 

Holly was a superb illusionist. She had subtly changed her sparse, but warmly decorated kitchen into some version of a Delphic theatre, all christened in an opaque, chilly glow.

There was no window in her kitchen so no light bothered to spill in from the outside. The blinds in her living room had been drawn, the curtains closed, shutting everything up in a deathlike shroud.

Paul had the strange, echoing feeling of entering a deep sleep like one would have in winter, white sheets cool and crisp, knowing that outside all was raw and bitter, but you were inside, warm and content with just the edge of a hard wind bothering slumber.

Scott had been propped up in one of the four chairs, his head thrown back, mouth open, entering and exiting consciousness every few minutes with plaintive moans.

"Just don't let him fall out of the chair, I'll be right back," Holly said, quickly leaving the room, slipping deeper in the dark until they couldn't see her at all.

She returned not in her robe, but in a white, woollen sweater that seemed to accentuate her seductive figure. Her blue jeans were denim and off the rack, slightly faded.

Paul was sorry to see the robe go, but pleased at the change.

"I hate blue jeans," he muttered.

"What?" Perry asked.

"Nothing."

Holly had also returned with three candle holders, small chunks of glass sharpened out to five-pointed stars, a groove in the center for the candles.

A candle in each holder, she placed a red one before Perry, a blue before Paul, and reserved the white one for herself.

"Why doesn't he get one?" Paul asked, sipping at his tea garnished with a dollop of gin.

"He's not going to be part of the actual ceremony--ritual--whatever you want to call it," Holly answered, striking a match and lighting each of the candles in turn.

The kitchen grew into a semicircle of dim, flickering light, the table cut into a half-moon by the encroaching shadows. Shrill spears of firelight cut themselves onto the walls, trailing tenuous threads of smoke, like a cigarette left in an ashtray to smolder.

"Then why even bother to have him here?" Perry asked, still somewhat fuming over the entire situation.

"He's our link to the spirit, what will draw the spirit here. Without him, what would we have to work with, a little supposition and superstition."

"That's all we have anyway," Perry said.

"Maybe we should conjure Freud's ghost," Paul retorted. "You and he could discuss that certain case of envy you're always blushing about."

"I'm going to hit you yet, Edwards," Perry sneered.

"That would be uncivilized for one of your profession." With that, Perry sighed and decided to shut up, at least for the time being. It was all just bullshit to him anyway.

The candlelight wavered in an unsensed breeze, distorting the misshapen images on the wall. Paul felt that there should have been a cathedral somewhere in the distance, shouting with its somber music, a hunchback swinging free in a bell tower.

"OK, now," Holly said. "Like I told you, I've only done this once before, and that was a long, long time ago before I really had any idea what I was doing. I was just playing around at first, you see, and then I just sort of stumbled onto this certain `formula', a way of speaking to others..."

"You don't need blood or anything do you?" Paul asked in a joking tone, but she knew he meant it.

"No," she said.

Reassured, Paul tried to relax.

"What do we have to do exactly?" Paul asked, sipping again.

"Exactly? I don't know. You just have to free your mind of everything and concentrate on one thing. For me, its the firelight, the candle. Think about the color, what it means to you, reminds you of, the warmth, the strength."

"Sounds like hypnosis to me," Perry said.

Holly nodded. "It is, in a way. It allows the mind to free float, to be more receptive, but I'm not sure it will be enough."

"What do you mean?" Paul asked.

"Just a feeling I have. I can't explain any further, not yet. I think you, Paul, should concentrate on something of Scott's, his wallet, credit cards, pictures of his, it doesn't matter."

"Anything?"

"Anything at all except the body itself. In his current state, his body would invoke the wrong images for you, and you, Perry, just might want to take a shot of that gin. You could use some loosening up."

"Seriously?" Perry asked her with a disconcerted expression. Holly nodded.

"Good. I was going to ask for some anyway," he said and snatched the pint away from Paul.

Paul stood up and went to search through Scott's coat pockets. It was a London Fog trench coat, Scott's favorite, almost the perfect item to concentrate on except for the drying trail of vomit along one arm. He decided to skip that. Going through Scott's outer pockets, Paul felt something round and cool and pulled it free.

"Oh my God," Paul hissed, instantly losing some of that permanent red alcoholic pallor from his face.

"What is it?" Holly asked.

Paul held a crystalline (snow globe?). Inside was an old brown brick building with two tiny figures walking toward it, hand in hand, it seemed, along an evergreen path. The craftsmanship and detail was remarkable for something so small. Paul could almost see the tiny figure's scarves. He tilted it upside down and righted it again to watch the snow glitter, and settle to the bottom in an nearly endless tumble.

"This was China's," Paul said. "I had forgotten about it." He slumped back into his chair as if exhausted by his confession.

"You see," Paul continued, "we met China during Southern's winter semester. This was her goodbye gift to Scott."

Paul looked at neither of them, but rather at the globe, almost caressing the glass as if it were the supple cheek of a dead friend.

"Jesus."

Paul had placed the bauble in the center of the converted kitchen altar/table, and regained his seat.

"So what," chirped Perry, the drink obviously having a positive affect on his stamina and attitude. "Do we hold hands and chant hari krishna's or something?'"

"Why Perry," Paul burbled. "I didn't know you cared."

"No," Holly replied, ignoring Paul's chiding. "Not unless you feel the theatrics will make you more comfortable. Scott is being haunted by something, possibly China, possibly something as spiritually benign as his own guilt. But whatever that thing is, his anguish is going to be a beacon, and our focused minds are going to be the transmitter that magnifies the signal."

"Gee, I feel so used."

"Concentrate, Paul. It's the only way this thing is going to work."

For a selfish moment Paul wondered if he really wanted it to work. But one look over at the dozing form of his friend was enough to dispel any of his doubts. He'd stopped letting his fear of the bogeyman dictate his life a long time ago.

Instead, he turned his attention to the ornament and watched the gently stirring flakes of the ornament as they drifted across the yard of the church. The two figures were smiling as they walked along, their hands clasped in eternal union. The could have been lovers, he thought, but somehow that didn't quite set right. Maybe they were just good friends, maybe they had some potential, maybe they were walking back from a mad dash through the snow, one having saved the other, or maybe they both saved one another. Paul looked closer.

The grains of snow, or whatever the shit was they put inside of these things was, began to stir into little funnels, and he had to squint to make out the fine details. The male figure had a shock of dark hair, whereas the woman had shoulder length blonde, they were certainly a striking couple. As the snow began to swirl faster he could feel himself being pulled in down to the doll house world of the globe. Closer to the figures which now seemed to be moving amongst the storm which clouded his vision.

Something was wrong with the woman, he could see that now. Her face and hands were just a little too pale, and if he drew himself closer still, he could see the way her hair was matted to her head, and the dark red discoloration to what was once a beautiful mane. What he'd taken for a smile at first was now visible for what it was, a broken and twisted jaw, swollen in death like a shattered doll that a father has attempted to repair for a loving daughter, but fallen horrible short of restoring it to its original form.

The snow was blinding now, and he momentarily lost sight of the two figures in the storm. When they reappeared it was only as a brief glimpse of figures in the snow. The woman was now spread eagled on top of the man as he lay on his back in the snow, at first Paul thought his initial thoughts of the twosome's relationship may have been accurate after all, but then he saw the woman figure's arms raise above her head, as if she were welding something. Her arms pumped down, and buried whatever the object was into the man's chest. The man figure on the ground jerked and convulsed, but the woman strode him like a bull, and would not be dismounted by the struggles.

Somewhere, someone was calling his name, but he didn't have time for that.

"Scott," he cried out as he raced to where he'd last seen the figures, but now found only the sea of white. His friend was lying somewhere in this blizzard bleeding to death, of that he was sure.

"Paul!" a demanding voice called from the distance. Edwards knew he would have to leave soon.

"Scott," he cried one last time into the snow.

Suddenly, he felt as if he were falling up a well, as if he'd finally dug the proverbial hole to China, and was now falling through a tunnel to the opposite side of the planet.

Perry was sitting across a table from him with an ashen look on his face. Slightly disoriented, Paul was taken back to the academy, and the poker games they'd had in the barracks. Perry had more hair on his head then, and the look on his face was a little more drained than losing a hand of twenty bucks would warrant, but the sentiment was the same.

A second look told Paul that Perry had checked out mentally for the moment, his eyes were fixed on the glass of liquor as if he were a Russian psychic trying to bend spoons, but there was definitely a vacant sign on his forehead.

On his right, someone was grabbing his arm and shaking it violently. He looked over, it was Holly. She wasn't as pretty when she was frightened, he realized. Holly was yelling something at him, pointing to the fourth side of the table, where someone else was sitting, but he didn't think he wanted to look there.

His mind was drift along comfortably, and he gave Holly a big shit eating grin as if to say, "Don't worry, it's A.O.K., my mind feels like an excrement system on Exlax, and everything is A.O.K.

Holly obviously didn't agree, because she drew her hand back and slapped the shit right out of his grin.

Her words were now penetrating his mind.

"It doesn't feel right, Paul. Someone, something, came out, but I don't think it's China. I don't even think its female."

Paul looked behind her. It was as if nothing in the room had changed, and yet everything was different. He was reminded of looking at the pictures Norman Rockwell drew every April Fool's Day where there were at least a dozen things wrong with a picture, but everything looked normal at first glance. It was only later, under close inspection, that you discovered the little boy was chewing on worms and not gum, and that the little girl at the breakfast table was eating a bowl of lye instead of oatmeal

The candlelight still danced on the wall, but it didn't seem to be in harmony with the flame before him. It was as if every shadow in the room was reflecting its own private reality, instead of the tangible images of everyday life.

There was also a howling sound, like a gusting wind, but if he concentrated really hard it disappeared, like a water faucet being turned off.

Holly hit him again.

"Look at Scott."

Paul turned to face his partner and friend of many years.

Cloud was wide awake and had seemed to have undergone some kind of miracle cure for the common drunken stupor. His eyes were those of a coke addict at the peak of his high, propped open with almost comical intensity, but Holly didn't seem to find it funny.

Scott arm raised into the air, his fist clenched like a hammer. A stream of words erupted from his lips, like a babbling litany. To Paul's ear the language which issued forth was something like Latin, but whatever it was, chills began to streak through him like cool iron spikes of disease.

Holly began to scream almost the instant Scott started babbling. Obviously, Paul realized, she understood perfectly well what he was saying, picking up in fact what Paul could sense with his emotions.

"She's got him, Paul!!!" Holly screamed. "Stop, him! For Christ sakes, stop him."

It shook Paul deeply to see his Holly like this. His little, quiet friend, who dressed like a gypsy, listened to new age music, and ate organic foods had been driven to the point of tearful screams of panic.

Paul didn't really know what he was trying to stop Scott from doing, maybe just from spouting out the Latinish dribble, but he rose from the table and got a grappling hold on his friend, trying to literally shake some sense into him.

Up close, Paul could see that the wide eyed looked was caused more my feverish concentration than by drug enhancement. "Please, Paul." he whispered under his breath. "She wants it this way, she wants to be free."

Paul persisted despite Scott's protests.[MORE CLIMAX]

Cloud shook himself violently, and Edwards fell to the floor like a weakened branch in a hurricane. He rose up on one knee in time to see Scott's chanting end, and to see his partner's fist come plummeting down on the snowy scene like a wrecking ball. A fraction of a second before his hand made contact, Paul was met with one last vision of the swirling flakes within the stormy globe. And then the tiny world exploded and the insanity stopped.

Scott Cloud collapsed back into the chair, apparently restored to alcoholic bliss.

Perry reached forward and grasped the drink he'd been studying so attentively for so long. Somehow, Paul believed that within a week he would deny that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.

Holly had her head down, and was crying with deep wrenching sobs, the kind that only women could do right, the kind that were so deep and moving that they almost sounded like they were laughing when they were really dying inside.

A half hour later, Paul had finished tucking Holly into her little twin bed. A bed so often he'd wondered what it would be like to share, but probably never would.

Holly hadn't said anything to him since the return to normalcy, just gone on crying like a little kid bawling until he finally drifts off to sleep. Paul tried a few words of gentle comfort, but he found them to be almost useless in such cases, he would just wait till tomorrow, and she'd be ready to get back to reality, and her calm, demure ways.

The shell shocked Perry helped Paul heft the unconscious Scott out to his car which now smelled of stale vomit and Perry's cheap cigarettes. They weren't cheap, Paul mused, just inexpensive.

Paul walked the last few steps to Holly's feeling pensive, the last few days had not gone so well. Scott had finally come out of his shell-shocked condition, but slowly, like a soldier returning from war only to find that there was no one else to fight, a little lost and very afraid. Cloud would never admit it, however, maybe not even to Perry, when in the best of times, was a good friend, and in the worst, was an apprehensive one. It wasn't that Perry was a bad guy, he just had trouble relating to people whom he couldn't control with Freudian games. Paul had often thought that the real reason Perry had quit being a police psychiatrist was that he recognized too much of himself in those blue uniforms, men who had killed or watched their partners die because they had to. Perry would be there, but not quite how he was needed.

Scott, upon waking, had a clear, lucid expression as if he just returned from a long, peaceful slumber. He was exhausted, but himself, quiet and more than a little determined. Still, Paul worried about him. The man heaped the world's troubles on his shoulder's quicker than Jesus had produced food for the masses.

Scott had spent the following two days at the hospital, at Paul's and Perry's insistence on the pretense of stress exhaustion, just resting on a credit care provided for them by an old client. It was perhaps the best deal that Cloud had ever made for payment. Lifetime insurance for the both of them, and for what Street Cloud had done for that client, it was little, but for now, enough.

Paul had spent the first night with him, fitfully dozing in a plastic chair beside his bed, listening to his friend's dwindling moans. Every hour or so Paul would be startled awake by China's name, open his eyes to find the antiseptic room quiet and still, and then carefully slipped back into sleep, thinking

"Be well, Scott. Be well, Scott."

He was. He remembered nearly nothing of what had happened and had even gone so far as to accusing Paul of slicking his favorite London Fog trench coat with vomit.

For the first time in days Paul gave a great belly laugh much to Scott's frustration, and said, "No, Scott, I haven't been drinking Tequila."

Scott seemed different now, too, propped up in his synthetic foam pillows, playing a few hands of gin with his partner while "WKRP in Cincinnati" reruns played on the TV above them. He seemed calmer, as if a silent, secret battle had been fought and won and the last shattered fragments of China were put away to be recalled on the days the snows fell.

Paul hadn't heard from Scott in the last few days, but he was well and at home, probably playing chess with his computer.

As for himself, Paul felt relieved, but a little tired. In his quest for companionship, he had decided to ask Holly out. Nothing special. Maybe a visit to one of the old Showcase Cinemas and something to eat. He had often heard that many whirlwind romances started that way, why not him too? If he was going to live his life alone, then it would be on his own terms. There was no one to say that it wasn't possible--except Holly, and like many times before he decided to risk the sacrifice of a friendship for the possibility of something more.

It wasn't Thursday so he knew Holly wasn't expecting him. He rang the doorbell a few times, and when she didn't answer, double checked the street for her car. It was there.

"Probably in the shower," he said to himself and began to knock. When she again didn't answer, Paul let himself in and as he had done many times before, using the key she had shown him in her trust of him.

A fetid stench rose to greet his entrance, the sickly sweet odor of hamburger left too long in the sun before the bar-b-que. He stepped back into the street a moment to catch his breath, fighting the urge to vomit, his head suddenly spinning.

"She's got to clean out that refrigerator," he rasped to himself between clenched teeth, but he knew it was more than that.

The blinds and curtains had remained drawn just as he had left them a week and a half ago, the dust collected in the spaces in between. Everything else lay cloaked in darkness, but he heard a muffled screaming coming from the kitchen, as if someone were trying to shout with cloth wedged between his lips.

Paul, taking a deep breath before entering, quietly stalked toward the kitchen, his apprehension and sickness growing with each step as he realized the voice in the kitchen was Holly's, yelling, screaming as if she were being attacked.

"God no, let her be alright."

Revolver drawn, Paul pushed his way into the kitchen through the darkened room.

Paul would later describe it to Scott as dubious shock, but what it was, in reality, was a charnel house.

The kitchen was a massed confusion of blood and terror, a butcher's block used with such abandon that its edges had splintered. It was like a seminar in butchery in which the professor had decided to let the students teach themselves.

Bodies and parts of bodies lay strewn across the floor, in the sink, in the cupboards. A woman's hand was nailed to the wall, it's fingers pointing downward in its last gesture of grotesque submission. A man's arm, eternally gripping a cup of tea in rigor mortis lay on a shelf where the clean dishes had been kept.

There were smears of blood everywhere, streams of it on the wall in thin rivers, pools of it that had dried to a slick consistency.

And Holly--Holly was spread eagled above a man who had his back on the table plunging a large knife into him again and again, making new wounds, mutilating the old ones.

The tip had broken off with the force of her thrusts, no doubt buried somewhere in the man, and she screamed, screamed herself hoarse, too hoarse for anyone to hear unless he was standing in the room.

The knife's edges were blunted and chipped in sharp, tiny triangles, and she thrust and thrust, drenched in blood.

Her T-shirt was now only white in small patches near the hem, her jeans pulled in tighter by the dried blood. She wore her baseball cap backward as if expecting a long, sweaty day of work, giving comfort to those who needed it, perhaps throwing in the week's winning Lotto numbers.

"You just couldn't take it, could you, Joe! NO! You had to be a bastard and sleep around on your wife! Couldn't take it, had to give up!"

She stabbed and stabbed the very dead man.

All this Paul saw in a second, and a second later, quickly vomited up his lunch from Miller's Bar. The sound startled Holly

enough to stop.

She twisted her head around to look at Paul

It was the most angelic smile he had ever seen, and then, as if he were not there, she continued with her work.

Paul stumbled back from the kitchen, dizzily crawled to the phone, and dialed 911.