As soon as she said it, it sounded like the best idea he’d ever heard, and he pushed himself up, went into the bathroom and returned with the cheap tin wastebasket that was half full of wadded-up Kleenex and set it on the windowsill. The window was already open. All he needed was a match—and brandy, two glasses of the cut-rate Korbel brandy he kept in his desk drawer, for a toast—and if the smoke was a problem and he damned near set the side of the house on fire, it was worth it, definitely worth it.

But now the noise was inescapable, coming closer, booming, rattling, and he looked up to see a vehicle winding its way up the drive, a bus with some sort of cage or platform set atop it and people there, waving their arms and shouting. One of them began throwing things over the side—fuming cylinders that obliterated the air and bounced and rolled and drew a boiling green vapor out of the earth till it looked as if hydrothermal vents were opening up all over the yard. He just stood there, dumbfounded, while the noise came at him, clarifying until he realized it was music, or meant to be music, electric guitar, the screech of a flute, a bottom-heavy thump of bass and a superamplified voice crying, Earthlings, we’ve arrived! over and over. And here was the bus itself, bursting out of the trees in a skin of Day-Glo paint and shrieking past him and on up the drive to the house.

He snatched a glance over his shoulder to see Paulette lurch up from the chaise and bolt for the front door and in the next moment he was running himself, not for the house but for the woods, because whatever this was, he wanted no part of it. He ran till his lungs felt sodden and then pulled up abruptly, cursing himself. Why should he run? He lived here, didn’t he? This was his property—or Tommy and Billy’s anyway. But what was this? Who were these people? The music held steady and now there was a new sound intermixed with it: the horn. Incredibly, the driver was leaning on the horn as if he were stuck in a traffic jam, as if this were the FDR Drive at rush hour. That was it, he couldn’t help himself, and in the next moment, outraged and baffled at the same time, he was circling back round to come up behind them, careful to keep his distance till he could begin to sort things out.