It was a face—he didn’t need light to see that—but one strangely disproportionate. Larger than normal. The eyes and nose were too close together, and the mouth too low and too wide and grinning madly from ear to ear. And it didn’t move. Hesitantly, he reached in as close as he dared and thumbed the lighter in front of it. The flame danced and reflected red in a dead man’s eyes. Doug Baugh’s paint-stained face stared back at him, but it was not larger than normal as he’d thought at first glance. The boy’s mouth was not even open; his lips were still tightly pursed in an agonized grimace. It was his throat that grinned. The flesh there gaped raggedly, like the teeth of a smiling jack-o’-lantern. It had been torn from one jaw hinge to the other. There was no more blood; the flesh looked like bread dough. There was a bouquet of arms framing that face, his and others, twisted and warped at horrid angles, ever reaching, but not far enough.

There was barely enough room in the culvert for a child to crawl through. It must have taken some ingenuity, and not a little strength, to stuff three bodies into it at once.

Rusty Sanders finally made it to the Tunnel an hour after he started. But the deputy didn’t take the T-Bird’s presence as seriously as had Stiles; it was just one more abandoned car to him, and he’d checked out too many there in the past. He wrote down the license number and the name from the registration, and then he left.

Back at the office, Dutch pushed him to check further, and he finally phoned Lawrence Whitten in Seymour. But the man didn’t seem particularly concerned; in fact, he sounded rather disinterested. His son was driving the car, and Tommy was a rambunctious youth. It wasn’t unusual for him to be gone for days at a time, especially on the weekends. The boy would turn up soon, his father predicted, and the deputy tended to agree. The “investigation” was over before it began.

Late in the afternoon, Marshal Larson came out of his office and noticed that the handyman was still nowhere to be seen. He asked Sanders about it, but the deputy just shrugged. He didn’t even look up from his magazine.

Billie hung up the phone slowly, giving away its message. Bart looked up from The Brady Brunch with concern. “Mom? What’s wrong?”