Rupert blinked at the ceiling. Something had woken him. What? He tried to recall. A dream? A touch? A voice? He listened. Was Maddy sneaking out again? If so, he'd stop her cold. Once was Grand Adventure. Twice made formal request for Parental Authority to be affirmed in letters of fire and red ink. He listened for the creak of floorboards, the whispers of conspiring teens, the surreptitious open and shut of doors. Nothing.

Through his window leaked light vague as fog. A thin mist of shine, shaping a shadow-copy bedroom. Empty of anything interesting. Just a bed, a chair, a dresser, a Rupert. Had it even been a sound that woke him? He stared up at the ceiling stain where the air conditioning leaked in summer. An indeterminate blot resembling different things at different hours of the day, different frames of mind. Tonight it cast itself as a moon, pop-eyed and smiling.

What noises come in the night? The house frame settling, sinking soft and crooked into the years. Exact as a man. He'd best see to replacing that beam below the bathroom floor, before half his home fell down. He listened, caught no least creak of a failing house. Perhaps it'd been the rose bushes scraping the windowpane. That meant a night wind, presaging storm. Good, it'd best rain soon or half the woods would be afire by midsummer. He tuned his ears for thunder, for the whisper and rush of wind in the tree branches. Again: nothing.

Probably just a dog barking, or possums in the trash. Tomorrow he'd fix the lid so the damned critters couldn't nose it off. Unless it was a raccoon. Raccoons were a higher challenge. Rupert shared a grin with the moon-stain. Damned raccs were born safecrackers. He listened for the rattle and scurry of creatures pawing the trash. Nothing.

Might have been that stray cat. Spark. Maddy complained it stalked her like she was a red laser dot. Sitting on her window ledge at night. Following her to work, which was blocks away. She'd sounded annoyed. Which puzzled; Maddy being forever strategizing to get a cat or dog or bird into the house. You'd think she'd be sweating to catch this creature, tame it, put a big bow on it...

Rupert checked the windowsill. No feline shadow, no demonic blinking eye. Good. He didn't like pets. The last cat he'd owned had spent more time dying than living. Some kind of immune disease made it waste away, sad and slow as if it lived curling ever deeper into its own grave. And the last dog he'd owned: ran barking into an empty country road to be flattened by a tractor going seventy. Every fish he'd had as a kid: flushed, belly up. And Good God of Small Beasts, the hamsters? It was like having pet soap bubbles. Dead soon as you named them. Rest in peace, Toothpaste, Fuggy, Sniggles...

"Pets teach a kid about death", his dad told him. Screw that, Rupert thought. Maddy can learn about death on the internet along with sex and taxes.

But what the Hell, Texas just woke him? He struggled to remember. It'd felt like... someone shaking him. Perhaps someone lay in bed beside him now. A mystery woman who'd broken into the house. Infatuated with his lawman persona. Maybe it'd be Melody. Maybe she hadn't died, just pretended death for the usual crazy story-reasons. Back now? He'd sit up and see her curled into pillow and blanket. He'd watch her breathe while she slept, weary from one very long journey.

Sighing, he turned, looked about. Behold: a great big four-poster bed all for Rupert. A grand stage for a one-man play. He lay exact in the middle. Long, long ago he'd lain to the side, Melody taking her half. Entirely unfair, as he'd complained. The Just Division of Bed Resources ought to be in proportion to size of body. Which would grant Rupert easily two thirds of mattress, pillow and blanket. Melody had refused to even negotiate. She'd crossed arms, declared it was equal halves or no lying next one another. He'd capitulated. Immediately.

He stared up at the moon stain, glad it never took on her face. What an idiot thing that would be, to see one's dead wife in stains and clouds, ink blots and night shadows. Or hear their voice in the night wind...

Had he heard Melody? he asked the moon-stain. Easy enough from out a dream. Sometimes he did dream her. Never anything dramatic about embracing at graves and gates. No, just walking together, most times. He'd be strolling down the sidewalk or pushing a cart in the grocery store, chatting with Mel. She'd be keeping to his longer pace, chatting trivial stuff. Soup brands and toilet paper, cabbages and kings. Funny how trivial, how domestic those dreams went. If he could design his dreams, each night they'd find themselves in bed. In a fine hotel with the bill prepaid for a week. Had she called to him from dream?

He remembered her voice. Rather, he summoned copies of the memory of her voice. Fifteen years blurred recollection; and mercifully so. A perfect memory would kill a man by nights. And yet, and yet... suppose Melody were to call to him? What would she say? His name? Goodbye? Words of eternal love, last regret... bitter recrimination?

That'd been a bad parting. Panting breath, blood, birth, groans, screams, hospital machines blinking and beeping, medical people rushing to do this, apply that. Rupert standing useless, trying to keep his overlarge person out of the way, yet hold her twitching hand. Watching masked faces hinting concern, panic, eventually kicking him out to the hospital hallway. Damnation. He and Mel had not had a proper chance to say goodbye. Not a single minute to trade Maddy back and forth, poke her pink ball body in wonder, marveling at her tiny perfect fingernails. No speculating on her future, no playful vowing she'd say 'momma' before 'daddy'. No, it'd been a brisk handoff at the intersection of Life and Death. Melody boarding the bus in silence, face gaunt and grey; Maddy disembarking, howling and twitching. Bus door slamming shut, air brakes gasping like ghosts; the bus rumbling down the road into the dark.

Rupert scowled at the moon-stain. Reminded himself: no dark thoughts between bedtime and dawn. A survival rule for a lawman, even in a sleepy nowhere like Hell, Texas. In the daylight, let dark thoughts try and bully him. A strong man could face sorrows in the daylight, even the cold numbers on a headstone. But down on the seafloor of night, crushed by darkness into one's bed, into one's head, came a dead tide that turned a man's mind into his worst enemy. The current of dark thoughts pulled, pushed, gnawed away at a soul. Not seeking to make a man stronger or wiser. No: it just wanted to annihilate. Using every trick of regret, sorrow, fear, loss. Old memories and hypothetical futures. Brought before the mind's eye so sly it made you picture devils whispering in the ear. A man had to fight that dead tide. Steer his mind upwards towards thoughts of life. Think of kids playing, kites flying, gardens growing. It was that or sink down to oblivion.

Go back to Hell, Melody's father said after the funeral. Her sister beside him, cold eyes seconding the motion. The words made no joke upon town names. Nor were they said in a moment of angry sorrow, later repented with a self-excusing letter. No; that'd been a cold jury decision, never appealed: We find you guilty of Melody's death. Go back to Hell. While Rupert held a squirming Maddy against his black suit.

They blamed Rupert; not the hospital, not the doctor who couldn't spell 'eclampsia' the same way twice. Not God nor Melody herself. Probably they were right. She'd died howling in childbirth like some 18th century farm girl. Whose fault was that, except the idiot she'd charitably given half a bed, all her person?

If anything ever happened to Rupert, they'd take Maddy in. And then they'd treat her like dirt. Your mom's dead because you're alive, they'd be saying with their eyes. It'd crush Maddy like a bug beneath a jackhammer. If anything happened? God's sake, he was a lawman. Things happened to lawmen. He dealt every week with drunks and lowlifes. In a county with enough weaponry for a third-world revolution. Any day now he'd get shot, stabbed, run over. Or crash into a tree after some movie-scene car chase. He recalled the blood puddles in Smith-Golgotha's car, the cobwebs of broken glass. Maybe Rupert would disappear the same way, leaving just a mystery for Wulf and the Betty to argue over. Maddy would come home, fret, sleep on the couch, waking each time she heard a step...

Shit. What had woken him? What wakes a man in his bed? Something inside his head, most likely. Unless someone hid under the bed... Ah, but night's dark currents made a wrong turn there. The idea of some maniac beneath the bed made Rupert laugh. Even the moon-stain grinned. Anyone fool enough to hide under Sheriff Ranulf Rupert's bed was a thing worth meeting. It'd win universal admiration. Could run for mayor, if Rupert let it live. He considered leaning over the edge of the mattress, peeking upside-down beneath. He'd whisper 'boo'. Fool thing to do; but once considered it felt impossible to sleep till he got it done.

And then the bed shook. As did the dresser. A glass leaped from the night table, thumped to the floor, rolling about, declining a dramatic shatter. In the kitchen, plates rattled in the cupboards. Something thumped on the bathroom tiles. Shower curtain, probably. Far off, car alarms began to shriek and beep. A dozen dogs began a barking choir, ordering the earth to cease this nonsense or they'd bite it.

An earthquake, thought Rupert. Damnation. A goddam quake in the center of Nowhere, Texas? Might as well live in California, wear a Hawaiian shirt and designer underwear.

Well, yeah; but not a real quake. Just fracking nonsense. Rupert yawned, closed eyes. Wasn't anything a man's mind could do when woken by a shaking earth. Might as well worry whether the globe spun too fast. Probably the Earth did spin wrong. Sure as Hell, Texas, the world had some flaw deep down inside. But nothing to be done about it tonight, except go back to sleep.

* * *

Bode lay beside the fire of the gypsy camp, resting head on folded arms, staring up at the night sky. Tatters of cloud stretched, tore and reformed, making faces, shaping figures that writhed and rippled. All a host of shrouded ghosts passed above him, hurried and harried by the cruel night wind. Bode watched a great grey cloud form eyes wide in horror, opening its mouth in silent scream. It stretched hands towards the moon as a man pulled by currents out to sea might reach for a rock to clasp. But the wind pulled, the figure shredded into pieces, rushing along to oblivion.

Closer to the earth, the night wind whispered in the tree branches. Bode listened, catching bits of sad conversations, muttered confessions, slow weeping and sudden bursts of rage. He considered that the wind in a pine was for lament; wind in the oaks for defiance. A night breeze in cypress was the truest song of mortal end.

For a while he closed eyes, listening to the things within the earth. Worms stirring, bones rotting, roots grasping. Mud forming faces that stared into mud, eyes blinded by clods, mouths agape in clay-filled scream. He could feel the twitch of the earth as though he lay upon a giant's skin. Bode rested atop a world of death cycling into life, and then back to death. An idiot cycle marked by an infinite host of faces just beneath the pleasant grass. Faces staring up with hollow sockets pop-eyed as the moon...

He opened his own eyes, watched sparks rise up from the campfire, twisting towards the stars. Shook his head.

"They never make it."

"Who?" That from Beth, holding hands right to the fire, near petting the flames.

"The sparks," whispered Bode. "They never make it higher than a few feet up in the air. Then they die."

Beth looked up at the sky, followed a few sparks, observed their fate. "You being poetic?"

Dog growled. Maybe in amusement. Probably not. If poetry were something teeth could bite, Dog would rip its guts out, bury the bones behind the camper. Come back twenty years later, dig them up and chew them into pieces small enough to swallow and shit. So much for the Dog's opinion of Poetry.

Bode sighed. "No, child. Not being poetic. I'm being old. Stars used to be lower down. Brighter. A determined spark could get up there with them, used to be."

The old woman sat in her chair, rocking, singing to herself, rocking. Now she chose to speak. "Things fade. Sparks. Stars. Blood. The fields don't grow as they used. The heart don't beat like it used."

"Silly old things," said Beth. "Old, old, old." She poked a finger into a flame, teasing it to bite her.

"Going to burn yourself," warned the old woman. They laughed at that.

Of a sudden the ground shook. The logs of the fire leaped into the air, fell to earth again. A host of sparks rushed up from the tumbling wood, making their brave escape towards the stars.

"Did I do that?" asked Beth, eyes wide.

"No." That from Bode, the old woman and the Dog together.

"What was it then?" puzzled Beth.

The old woman chuckled. "Something down below. Far, far below. It wants up. It wants out."

Bode listened awhile; then sighed, shook head. "Townsfolk are fooling with that well again. They've summoned something." He settled himself to gaze at the war of stars and fire and clouds again. "Idiots." He smiled to the sky, delivered his prediction, inevitable as sparks flying upwards.

"Whatever it is, it's going to eat them up."