“All the way back to Blackwood Farm he guided me, sometimes in total darkness, other times by the light of the moon. In less than an hour I saw the lights of the house shining blessedly through the trees, and I shot straight for the pier.

“People were shouting. I heard someone scream. And then as I hurried up to the kitchen door, Pops came out to embrace me and say:

“ ‘Thank God, son. We didn’t know what the hell had happened to you.’

“Aunt Queen came down the steps dabbing at her eyes.

“Sheriff Jeanfreau was there with one of his worthless, shiftless deputies, Ugly Henderson. All the Shed Men were hollering, ‘He’s home, he’s okay.’

“Immediately I fired off at Jasmine, ‘How come you put that beer in the cooler!’ to which she answered that she wasn’t the one who packed the damned cooler, her mother had done it, and then there was Big Ramona saying she wasn’t even awake when I left (which was true), and Jasmine remembering that it was actually Clem. And where the hell was Clem?

“I didn’t care. I wanted supper. I wanted everyone to gather round the kitchen table and listen so I’d only have to tell this story once.

“I demanded that Sheriff Jeanfreau stay. I even wanted worthless and annoying Ugly Henderson to stay. I told everybody that I wanted them to listen to me.

“Meantime, since it was only nine o’clock by my watch, I wanted one of the Shed Men to run the camera with its film over to the all-night drugstore in Ruby River City and get the pictures done in one hour, as the sign in the window always boasts.

“ ‘Where’s Goblin?’ I asked suddenly. I was in the kitchen. Big Ramona had just given me a wet washrag. ‘Goblin, where are you?’ and then I realized that after all he’d done, he didn’t have the power to make me feel him or see him or hear him.

“. . . And so mercifully, and gratefully, and with a new respect for him, and a new love, I let him alone.”

CHAPTER 14

14

“THEY DIDN’T BELIEVE a word I said. When I bubbled over crazily with the horrible dream of the piercing of Rebecca, Sheriff Jeanfreau just laughed at me, laughed at my references to myself as both man and woman in the dream, and only a sudden expostulation of

“ ‘Please!’ from Aunt Queen shut him up.

“When it came to my depiction of the mysterious stranger dumping the two bodies, Sheriff Jeanfreau started laughing again and there even came some audible snickering from his worthless deputy Ugly Henderson.

“Patsy, who had come into the kitchen sometime during the proceedings, picked up on Ugly’s snickering and started some snickering of her own.

“And when I described how Goblin had led me back out of the swamp, the sheriff, figuratively speaking, rolled on the floor.