“We’re getting close now to where he lives or at least used to live, so I am putting this gun down—hear?—but it is cocked and ready to blow your brains out if you don’t obey me as good or better than you obeyed your lover the scissors-grinder. . . . So now pull yourself together for the sequel, Sidney De Lakes.”

He had hardly said all this before they turned off the road marked Warrior Creek and drove up to the Sturtevant place with its three barns, four farm houses, and the ruins of the old rendering sheds.

“Did you ever see such a sight now! By God, he was telling me the truth for once in his life!”

Gareth said this, for he had been the first to jump out of the truck and run right up to the barn door, and there he was, nailed stark naked just as Sidney had told him he would be.

“Are you dead, Roy? Because you sure look it.” (Sidney closed his eyes as he heard this part of Gareth’s ranting, and made no sign he was about to come out of the truck.)

“Because,” Gareth’s voice still reached him, “if you are still alive I may aim to shoot you myself and put you out of your misery.”

He rubbed his hand over the renderer’s chest, and when it came away smeared with red he wiped his hand lazily on his trousers.

“You let go of my prisoner!” Sidney suddenly shouted, leaning out of the truck window. “I am fulfilling my part of this bargain, and you keep out of it. You hear me? You dry up. I’m sick of you putting the screw on me.”

“Would you look at them nails, the size of them, the way they have been pounded in!” Gareth’s voice rose over the gray-­white landscape, echoing and re-­echoing from the empty barns and sheds and unused houses. “Why you are a God damned fiend, Sidney De Lakes.” Here Gareth turned, still holding his rifle, which having been pointed at Roy Sturtevant was now aimed in the general direction of the truck.

“Put that damned gun down, you hear, and get over here and help me with Brian, will you?”

For some reason Gareth obeyed Sidney. He put the rifle down by a little fence with cottoneaster vine growing all over it, and sauntered up to the truck.

Sidney, his face flushed, his mouth open, was lifting the dead Brian out of the truck.

“He’s heavy as lead for some reason or else I have lost all my strength from hearin’ you ravin’ and rantin’ . . .”

Gareth made a show of holding his nose.

“You help me with him, curse you, Garey . . . Why don’t you behave!”

Gareth took hold of the dead boy and helped Sidney carry him directly in front of where the renderer stood against the barn door. They propped Brian up with a few good-­sized boulders that were lying around.