Chapter One

In Buffalo, New York

"How many is that, Vera?" John asked from his La-Z-Boy.

"Twenty-two," Vera answered. Vera—a chunky forty-five—kept track of trick-ortreaters. The previous Halloween there had been forty-seven of them, five more than the year before, but three less than the year before that. "Eight Frankensteins, two ghosts," she went on; she also kept track of costumes—keeping track of things was an obsession with her. She kept track of birthday cards, sunny days, gray squirrels (there were thirty-one of them, she insisted, in the twin maple trees in front of the house), salesmen, robins; anything that could repeat itself and therefore could be kept track of, she kept track of with a vengeance. She continued her litany of trick-or-treaters: "Three skeletons, one gremlin—"

"A Gremlin?" her husband John cut in. "Someone came dressed as a car?"

"A car?"

"Sure." He was making a small joke. He knew well enough what Gremlins were; he'd taken their five-year-old granddaughter, Amy, to see the movie. "A Gremlin; AMC makes them."

"AMC?" Vera asked, confused.

John sighed; Another gem down the toilet, he thought. "Forget it," he said.

She went on. "And six witches, one werewolf, two vampires—" She stopped; someone had knocked at the door. "And there's another one," she said. She went to the door, put her hand on the knob, glanced critically at the two large wooden bowls—one stocked with small packets of M&Ms, the other with candied apples—on a table to the right of the doorway. She'd, have to restock soon, she thought. She opened the door.

"Trick or treat!" the five kids standing on the porch screamed in unison. Vera quickly surveyed their costumes—two witches (witches were popular this year), something that looked like a dog, a Ronald Reagan—a costume she disapproved of because it showed flagrant disrespect—and another skeleton, though the little girl wearing that costume had taken the skeleton hood off, probably to give herself some breathing room this warm Halloween night.

"You're all very scary!" Vera shivered, and as she shivered her body vibrated beneath her flower print housedress.

"Trick or treat!" the kids screamed again, except for the pretty brown-haired, green-eyed girl in the skeleton costume, who looked vaguely pouty and put out, as if Vera were wasting her time.

Vera said to her, concerned, "Are you having a good time, honey?"

The girl nodded once glumly.

From inside the Ronald Reagan costume the voice of a small boy chirped, "Trick or treat!" as if to hurry things along.

"Just a moment," Vera said firmly but gently, and looked around at the two bowls on the table behind the door. She looked back at the trick-or-treaters. "Let me see," she began. "How many—" She stopped. The pretty girl in the skeleton costume was gone. Vera stepped forward and leaned with her hands on the door frame. She looked left down the row of well-lit lawns and then right, down a row of equally well-lit lawns; a number of other trick-or-treaters were going to and coming from the neat two-story houses that made up Hydrangea Avenue. In the roadway some cars were stopped and some were moving very slowly, all of them, Vera supposed, driven by the parents of trick-or-treaters. But she saw no pretty brown-haired girl in a skeleton costume, so she shrugged and got down to the business of handing out candied apples and M&Ms to the kids who remained.

~ * ~

An hour later John got wearily up from his La-Z-Boy and trundled into the kitchen for a snack. His habit was always to snack before retiring anyway; usually something heavy, something loaded with salt and laced with cholesterol—a ham sandwich with mayonnaise, mustard, and Colby cheese on deli rye, for instance, with a big glass of ice cold milk on the side. That's what he thought he'd like tonight.

He opened the refrigerator door and peered in glumly. "Vera?" he called. Vera was in the living room, in her own chair, a three-quarter-size pale violet upholstered version of John's dark green leatherette La-Z-Boy. She was knitting a bulky red sweater, probably, she thought, for John. She'd decide for certain when it was almost finished. If it was too small, it would go to her nephew, Floyd. If it was too large—which seemed unlikely—she'd put it in the Salvation Army bin.

"Yes, John?" she called back.

"I thought we had ham, Vera. Where's the ham?"

Before Vera could answer, there was a soft knock at the door. She got up, sighing. On her way to answer the knock, she stuck her head into the kitchen doorway. "I used it in the soup this afternoon," she said.

"Soup?" John said. "I didn't see any soup."

"I froze it," Vera explained.

Another soft knock. John glanced in the direction of the front door. "What's that? Some more trick-or-treaters? God almighty, it's"—he checked the teapot-shaped kitchen clock over the sink—"it's almost ten o'clock."

"Last year," Vera said, rummaging about in her memory, "they kept coming until eleven-fifteen."

John shook his head. There was another soft knock at the front door—no more urgent, no louder, and so, in its repetitive way, very insistent. "What kind of parent would let their kid trick-or-treat till ten o'clock at night, Vera?"

She said, "I don't know, John," and went to answer the door while John poked gloomily about in the refrigerator.

Before Vera put her hand on the doorknob, there was another knock; it was the same as the first three—a soft triple knock, the knock of a child, she thought. But she hesitated. She hesitated because she sensed danger. Vera had a sixth sense about such things. She had stopped counting the number of times, for instance, that she'd hesitated over a chicken leg or a forkful of fish because she was certain that an errant bone waited to strangle the life out of her, and, upon investigation, usually found that she was right.

"Yes?" she called now through the front door.

Her only answer was yet another soft triple knock.

John called from the kitchen, "Hey, this mayonnaise is rancid, for chrissake!"

"That's yogurt," she called back. "Florence made it." Florence was Vera's best friend.

"Yogurt?!" John called, as if the word itself smelled bad.

Another soft triple knock sounded from the front door.

Vera sighed quickly, with agitation. She wished she were tall enough to peer through the two small rectangular windows in the top of the door. She stared fixedly at the door itself, as if conjuring up the ability to see through it. "Damn!" she breathed; she'd have to ask John to look into installing one of those security peepholes in the center of the door.

John called, "Well, I'm not going to eat it!"

And Vera, sighing, pulled the front door open.

The pretty brown-haired girl in the skeleton costume, sans hood, smiled appealingly up at her. "Hello, Mrs. Brownleigh," she said.

Vera's smile, which had appeared automatically, vanished. "How do you know our name?" she asked, although the literal answer was obvious; The Brownleighs was emblazoned in stylized black letters just to the right of the front door. What she had meant to ask, but hadn't had the time to figure out how to phrase, was, Why do you greet me as if you've known me all your life? She was, in fact, starting to construct just such a sentence when the pretty brown-haired girl on her doorstep began to change.

She got taller, first, though her face remained that of a thirteen- or fourteen-year old. Rapidly, and fluidly, as if enacting a precise time lapse of the next decade of her life, she grew a good ten inches. And her body matured, too, her hips flared and her breasts blossomed, and the skeleton costume, which did not change, shredded down the sides and held precariously at the left shoulder.

A quivering, incredulous smile appeared on Vera's mouth. "Are you all right, honey?" she whispered raggedly, as if the girl had merely put her hand to her stomach, or had looked suddenly pale, or had asked for a glass of water. Because, very simply, how could she—Vera—actually be seeing what she thought she was seeing? Clearly something was wrong here, but just as clearly it was something wrong with her, with Vera, as much as with the pretty brown-haired girl. Clearly the sun did not rise in the west, and if, one morning, it appeared to, then someone was simply mistaken about directions.

The change hesitated there—the playfully grinning thirteen- or fourteen-year-old face on the electrifyingly sensuous body of a twenty-year-old woman.

That's when John appeared from the kitchen. He had a bottle of Coke in one hand, a cheese sandwich in the other, and when he saw what Vera was seeing, a huge and lustful grin played on his mouth momentarily. Until he realized that what he was looking at was not quite right somehow, that it was even a little obscene—like goats surgically altered to look like unicorns. That sweet and pretty little girl's face had no business there, on that incredible body.

"Vera?" he managed. "Who's that?'

Vera shook her head slowly. She said nothing.

The skeleton costume fell, revealing the nakedness beneath.

And the change resumed. The eyes lost their innocence, the playful grin became a sneer. And the mouth opened very, very wide, the way a snake's mouth opens to take in the body of a mouse.

John dropped his bottle of Coke. It thudded to the floor, bounced on the hard wood; the lip of the bottle hit his ankle and he glanced at it, muttered a small, confused Urp! of pain, looked back at the woman in the doorway.

Her head was buried in the left side of Vera's neck. Only her arms, the top of her head, something of her forehead, and the bridge of her nose were visible because Vera 's quivering body in the flower print housedress blocked the rest of her.

And for a moment John resented Vera for that. For blocking his view of the woman's incredible body. He smiled in anticipation. He said, "Vera?" and wanted to add, Get out of the way, but realized he couldn't say that to her, that she was still his wife; they'd shared twenty-seven .years and had produced six children and now that her life was coming to an end—it was obvious; the red stain on the back of her housedress was growing larger by the second—he had to say something comforting to her, something to sum up their lives together, something short and simple and sweet, something that would surely push through the shock and fear that had to be consuming her—just as that incredible body was consuming her—and into her heart.

"Vera," he said, "you really knew how to keep track of things."

Vera's body quivered violently, and she fell with a massive thump to the hardwood floor.

Then the woman standing over her turned her gaze on John. And he turned his gaze on her—on her nakedness, first. Then on her eyes as she swept toward him. And he was as pleased and as eager as an infant at its mother's breast to make himself her next victim.

~ * ~

In another part of Buffalo, where the rats outnumbered the humans a hundred to one, a woman pushed open the door of a seedy bar, moved fetchingly over to a table, and sat down. The night was unseasonably warm, and she was in a voluptuous, low-cut, tight green dress and high heels.

At the other end of the bar, one of two men sitting playing poker nudged his buddy—who had his back turned to the woman—and said loudly enough that he hoped the woman could hear him, "Looka that, Sam. I wouldn't mind givin' her a poke or two."

Sam glanced around and saw the woman; his face broke into a broad, sleazy grin. "What's she doin' in here, I wonder, Hap?"

Hap said, "Only one way to find out," and he stood and made his way over to the woman.

She didn't acknowledge him at once, so he said, "How you doin', honey?"

She glanced slowly up at him. A chill coursed through him. He'd never seen eyes like hers before—they were huge, and brown and beautiful and ... distant. As if, as she looked at him, her eyes were on something else entirely. And her little flat grin, Hap thought, was like the one that Sam got when they watched porno flicks together.

He pressed on. "My name's Hap. What's yours?"

The bartender, a beefy guy in his early forties who'd spent several years as a professional wrestler, bellowed, "What'll it be, lady?"

Her gaze turned slowly from Hap to the bartender. "Sloe gin fizz," she said, and her gaze drifted back to Hap. Another chill went through him. He nodded. "Nice meetin' you, huh?" he said, and hurried back to his table.

"Not my type," he said sullenly to his friend Sam, and sat down.

Sam took a long, appreciative look at the woman. "Well, she's sure as hell mine," he said.

~ * ~

Six Months Earlier

In a little town twenty miles south of the Pennsylvania border, near Erie, a middle-aged man and woman laid a wreath on the grave of their teenage daughter, Lila, dead exactly two months. The man, whose name was Will Curtis, was wearing a heavy gray coat to protect himself from the mid-April chill and supported himself with a cane because of arthritis. He nodded sullenly at the grave and said to the woman, his voice slight and creaking, "All her life she was a good girl, Frances. She was a nice girl. She ran away, but she came back to us. She was a nice girl."

But Frances said nothing. Frances believed otherwise. She let her husband rattle on: "It's impossible ... it's impossible to protect ourselves totally from the . . . evils . . ." He fought back a tear; it returned and slid down his weathered cheek. He finished, "... the evils of this world, Frances."

She nodded. "Yes," she said. She knew it was the truth.

He took her hand and said again, "The evils of this world." He thought a moment. "The evils of this fucking world!"

"Yes," Frances said.

"I'm sorry," he said.

"For what?"

"For using the ‘F' word here. In front of Lila."

She squeezed his hand. "It doesn't matter. She hears no words at all." And that, Frances thought, surely was the truth—thank God, it surely was the truth.