Collier felt cheated. "Nothing?"

"Nothing yet. I didn"t see the guy and when I looked out the windows I didn"t see the two girls but-and this is the unsettling part-I did smell something."

An irrepressible chill swept up Collier"s back. Please don"t tell me you smelled- "I smelled urine. Jeez, I"ll never forget it. Old urine, like when you walk under an expressway bridge where homeless people pee. It seemed to emanate from that door-room two. I actually got down on my knees to look in the keyhole, and that"s where the smell was coming from-right from that hole."

Collier didn"t know what to say, or what he might add to corroborate.

"But the funniest part? It was gone a minute later."

"The smell, you mean."

"Right. One minute the hall reeked, and the stench coming out of that keyhole was so strong it was like steam. And the next minute..."

"Gone like it was never there."

She nodded slowly.

Collier remained silent for several steps; then her face turned mischievous.

"Either you just swallowed a frog or...something"s bothering you all of a sudden."

Collier decided what the h.e.l.l. "I"ve smelled the same thing a time or two myself."

"I love it!" But then her enthusiasm lapsed. "But, you know, it"s probably just a rotten carpet or something. Mildew."

"Yeah, maybe. That would be a much more sensible reason why Mrs. Butler never rents that room. It"s just unserviceable, not haunted," he said, but continued in thought: Haunted...by urine?

"Sure. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe I"m more impressionable than I think, and I simply thought I smelled it."

Collier pushed his hair back. "Your mind invented it, in other words?"

"Yeah."

"Dominique, what reason would your subconscious mind make you think you were smelling...that?"

"Because of the story!" she exclaimed as though it were obvious. "You know. The whole *Mrs. Tinkle" thing. I"m sure J.G. Sute told you about that, didn"t he?"

"No, but Mayor Snodden did. Some kinky *water sport" fetish is what I a.s.sumed."

"No, no, that"s not it."

"Well then what is?" Collier insisted. "Why did people call her Mrs. Tinkle behind her back?"

Dominique almost blushed. "Same reason they called her *Penelope p.i.s.s." You don"t know?"

"No! So tell me!"

She seemed coyly uncomfortable now. "That"s what she"d always have her secret lovers do. You know. You never heard of Redneck Birth Control?"

"What?"

"A Southern Douche? Jeez. I guess I have to explain everything...as gross as it is. Whenever her lovers were...done..."

Collier finally put the pieces together. They urinated in her after they came, to wash the sperm out. For s.h.i.t"s sake! "All right, I get it."

"And the rumor is she always took her lovers to the same room-the door marked room two now-and that"s why it always reeked of urine."

"How charming," Collier muttered. Yes indeedy. A Southern Douche.

"It didn"t always work, of course," she added. "Penelope had several abortions."

"Sute was kind enough to point that out."

A stasis pa.s.sed as they walked. Collier presumed her story was over. "Oh, look," she said and immediately stood on her tiptoes.

Collier"s sudden leg fetish raged. Her shapely calves tensed as bare heels elevated in the sandals. Then he pictured her standing like that bent over nude...

Pervert. The word clacked in his head like two stones smacking. Pervert, pervert, pervert...

"The moon," she said. "Tell me that"s not creepy..."

They"d walked to the end of the side street. There were no streetlamps here. Crossing the road at an angle was another length of track sunken in the bricks. It extended past the street and seemed to continue into scrubby gra.s.sland. Collier walked out farther with her and actually found the rail still mounted securely on century-and-a-half-old railroad ties. An oblong moon the color of brick cheese glowed eerily in a shallow sky.

In the oddest vertigo, like a snippet of nightmare, Collier saw a woman"s face, grinning in a wanton evil, then skeletal hands rising up toward the moon.

The face of the mirage belonged to Penelope Gast...

"I second that," he finally said. "Perfect setting for your ghost story."

"And that"s the land, right out there. G.o.d knows how many acres, not used for anything anymore."

He realized after the fact that they were holding hands.

Something almost like a hidden terror trembled in him. Who did that? Me? Her? He didn"t know...

"And it never will be," she continued, gazing. "People really do believe the land is hexed by what Gast did out there."

Staking the heads of slaves and hoeing them into the earth, he remembered. It was monstrous, but...

Collier wasn"t particularly focused on town history anymore. Oh my G.o.d, this girl... His blood felt like oil heating up on a stove top, just from the warm sensation of her hand.

"And in a way, even though all that scrubland out there is pretty ugly...there"s still something beautiful about it."

"Yes, there is," Collier agreed without even getting it.

The low moonlight on her face surrealized her features, leaving lines and wedges black but luminescing the rest. Now her eyes looked bottomless, the swell of her bosom and the moonshine on her legs a threshold to something that transcended the reality of his l.u.s.t. Collier had never seen a more beatific face in his life.

Who turned whom, then? Collier didn"t know. She remained on tiptoes when he suddenly found himself kissing her. Her grip on his hand tightened and grew hotter; the tips of their tongues met. Her other hand stole around his back and urged him closer, and when he slid his mouth off her lips and ran it down the side of her neck, she sighed in what could only be desire.

Collier felt he had stepped into a precious demesne, a place where desire was more than instinctive brain cells firing to compel reproduction. He was overjoyed to be in that special place-the first time, truly, in his life. But he also knew it was a place he did not deserve to stand in...

Her could feel her nipples go rigid against his fake Tommy Bahama shirt; he could swear he even felt his own nipples sensitize. Another hot, liquid sigh, and she pulled his mouth back to her, and sucked his tongue, inhaled his breath...

Her hand opened on his chest and she pushed back.

"Time to stop-"

s.h.i.t! "I don"t want to," he said, and tried to recaress her. But her opened hand remained firm.

She seemed disappointed and awkward. "Justin...I"ve only explained some of myself, not all. There"s stuff you don"t understand about me. I"m just the way I am, I can"t help it, and I don"t want to."

Collier felt like a popsicle that had just been run over on Arizona asphalt. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it. "I want to know what you mean. I want to know everything about you."

"It just wouldn"t be fair."

"Fair? To who?"

"To you."

The reply stunned him. Next, she was leading him by the hand back to the bench. "It"s too soon."

"Okay, that"s fine," he nearly pleaded. "I"m very patient-"

Her chuckle fluttered in the dark. "Yeah, right."

I"m f.u.c.king crazy about you... "I can wait till it"s not too soon."

"No, you can"t. s.h.i.t, in this day and age there"s probably no guy anywhere who"d wait that long...and you"re distracting me, anyway."

"Distracting you?"

She turned on the bench, still grasping his hand. "You"re the one who wanted to hear my story. I didn"t want to tell you, but you insisted."

"And you told me. It"s a great story, and I believe it. But what"s that got to do with-"

"My story"s not over," came the abrupt information.

d.a.m.n it..."There"s more?"

"Everything I"ve told you until now is squat compared to the rest. Now. Do you want to hear it, or not?"

"Yes..."

So this was how she checked her boundaries. I don"t care, Collier thought. He was content to sit with her hand in his, their shoulders touching...that is, he was content, but the same wasn"t holding true for a certain part of his anatomy. Deal with it! Don"t be an a.s.shole and p.i.s.s her off...

"The stench from room two, like I was saying, disappeared so fast, I honestly don"t see how it could"ve been there. I must have imagined it." You didn"t. Collier kept the correction to himself.

"And I found no trace of the old guy with the screwed-up nose, so I told myself that was my imagination, too. s.h.i.t, it happens sometimes. Tired, long day, hadn"t eaten much-it happens. No big deal, right?"

"Right."

"But I told you, except for room two, the other rooms had their doors open, and the second-floor rooms on the stair hall all have balconies overlooking the garden, the courtyard, and then all that scrubland past it."

"I know, it was the first thing I noticed about my room when I walked into it. So...what happened?"

For the recital"s entirety, Dominique had maintained a smooth, none-too-serious composure, as though she were fine with the likelihood of it all being imagination. Now, though- Collier"s gaze on her face hardened.

It was akin to a Hollywood morph the way Dominique"s expression went dark. Her eyes, at once, looked troubled, and she almost stammered a few times. "In one second, there was-was-orange light, real bright-"

"Orange light? Where?"

"In the French doors right when I was standing at the doorway of the room you"re staying in."

"Dominique, I don"t understand. Orange light?" Alarm. "Was part of the house on fire, or the fields?"

"That"s what I thought at first, but no, and then I thought I must"ve fallen asleep and woke up at the crack of dawn." She paused. "But my watch said it was going on two in the morning."

"So you went to the balcony, right? And looked out-"

A stifled nod. Was her hand shaking? "I went out the French doors, and saw that it was a fire, all right. And I heard a ringing sound, too. The entire backyard was lit up, and shifting. I could feel wafts of heat..."

Now something began to nag in Collier"s mind- She spoke in front of her, not to him. "There"s an old Civil War-era iron forge out there. I don"t know if it"s still there but-"

"It is," Collier spoke up. "I saw it the day I came. But Jiff told me it"s never used for anything but a barbecue nowadays, for holidays and parties."

"Jiff wasn"t there, and this was no barbecue. Ore was being smelted in that thing. Every time the bellows pumped the orange light doubled...that and the intermittent sounds of a hammer made the whole thing feel maniacal. There"re several different chutes on the walls of the forge, and all that light and heat just poured out of them."

Collier remembered the look of the thing, and the vents, one quite large. "What next?"

"There was a man down there, too, of course, but I couldn"t really see any details. He seemed to be working in cycles: pumping, hammering, pumping, hammering, like that. But every so often he"d disappear around the other side of the forge, and the light would go down some "cos he wasn"t pumping."

"Probably skimming slag or whatever it is they do."

"He was pouring molten metal out of a little crucible," she verified, "but I didn"t find that out till I got down there."

Collier considered the scenario. "Must"ve been pretty scary."

Another slow nod. "The whole thing was so crazy, I had to go out there. Somebody smelting iron in a bed-and-breakfast garden at two in the morning? You"ve got to be kidding me. I was freaked out, yeah, but I was also mad. I ran down there-"

Collier couldn"t help but antic.i.p.ate. "And the guy was gone and the forge was cold."

She nudged him. "Hey, I"m telling the story!"

"But am I right?"

"You"re dead wrong. By the time I got down there, if anything, the light was brighter, the air even hotter. The guy"d come back around, pumping the bellows and hammering something on an anvil, but now...I could see him..."

Was she doing it on purpose? Collier didn"t think so. He used the old line: "You sure know how to keep a jacka.s.s in suspense. Tell me. Who was the guy?"