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“The police told me. It was what they said.”

“You quote Will Graham.”

“Graham told me the lies. Graham.”

“Will you tell the truth now? About Me. My Work. My Becoming. My Art, Mr. Lounds. Is this Art?”

“Art.”

The fear in Lounds’s face freed Dolarhyde to speak and he could fly on sibilants and fricatives; plosives were his great webbed wings.

“You said that I, who see more than you, am insane. I, who pushed the world so much further than you, am insane. I have dared more than you, I have pressed my unique seal so much deeper in the earth, where it will last longer than your dust. Your life to mine is a slug track on stone. A thin silver mucus track in and out of the letters on my monument.” The words Dolarhyde had written in his journal swarmed in him now.

“I am the Dragon and you call me insane? My movements are followed and recorded as avidly as those of a mighty guest star. Do you know about the guest star in 1054? Of course not. Your readers follow you like a child follows a slug track with his finger, and in the same tired loops of reason. Back to your shallow skull and potato face as a slug follows his own slime back home.

“Before Me you are a slug in the sun. You are privy to a great Becoming and you recognize nothing. You are an ant in the after-birth.

“It is in your nature to do one thing correctly: Before Me you rightly tremble. Fear is not what you owe Me, Lounds, you and the other pismires. You owe Me awe.”

Dolarhyde stood with his head down, his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose. Then he left the room.

He didn’t take off the mask, Lounds thought. He didn’t take off the mask. If he comes back with it off, I’m dead. God, I’m wet all over. He rolled his eyes toward the doorway and waited through the sounds from the back of the house.

When Dolarhyde returned, he still wore the mask. He carried a lunch box and two thermoses. “For your trip back home.” He held up a thermos. “Ice, we’ll need that. Before we go, we’ll tape a little while.”

He clipped a microphone to the afghan near Lounds’s face. “Repeat after me.”

They taped for half an hour. Finally, “That’s all, Mr. Lounds. You did very well.”

“You’ll let me go now?”

“I will. There’s one way, though, that I can help you better understand and remember.” Dolarhyde turned away.

“I want to understand. I want you to know I appreciate you turning me loose. I’m really going to be fair from now on, you know that.”

Dolarhyde could not answer. He had changed his teeth.

The tape recorder was running again.

He smiled at Lounds, a brown-stained smile. He placed his hand on Lounds’s heart and, leaning to him intimately as though to kiss him, he bit Lounds’s lips off and spit them on the floor.

21

Dawn in Chicago, heavy air and the gray sky low.

A security guard came out of the lobby of the Tattler building and stood at the curb smoking a cigarette and rubbing the small of his back. He was alone on the street and in the quiet he could hear the clack of the traffic light changing at the top of the hill, a long block away

.

Half a block north of the light, out of the guard’s sight, Francis Dolarhyde squatted beside Lounds in the back of the van. He arranged the blanket in a deep cowl that hid Lounds’s head.

Lounds was in great pain. He appeared stuporous, but his mind was racing. There were things he must remember. The blindfold was tented across his nose and he could see Dolarhyde’s fingers checking the crusted gag.

Dolarhyde put on the white jacket of a medical orderly, laid a thermos in Lounds’s lap and rolled him out of the van. When he locked the wheels of the chair and turned to put the ramp back in the van, Lounds could see the end of the van’s bumper beneath his blindfold.

Turning now, seeing the bumper guard . . . Yes! the license plate. Only a flash, but Lounds burned it into his mind.

Rolling now. Sidewalk seams. Around a corner and down a curb. Paper crackled under the wheels.