There is Route 19 through West Virginia, and a little road-dusty carnival that’s looking for a man who can fix the rides and feed the animals. “Or the other way around,” says Greg Chumm, the carny’s greasy-haired owner. “You know, feed the rides and fix the animals. Whatever floats ya boat.” And for awhile, when a strep infection leaves the carny shorthanded (they are swinging down south by now, trying to stay ahead of winter), he finds himself also playing Menso the ESP Wonder, and with surprising success. It is also as Menso that he first seesthem, not vampires and not bewildered dead people but tall men with pale, watchful faces that are usually hidden under old-fashioned hats with brims or new-fashioned baseball hats with extra-long bills. In the shadows thrown by these hats, their eyes flare a dusky red, like the eyes of coons or polecats when you catch them in the beam of a flashlight, lurking around your trash barrels. Do they see him ? The vampires (the Type Threes, at least) do not. The dead people do. And these men, with their hands stuffed into the pockets of their long yellow coats and their hardcase faces peering out from beneath their hats? Do they see? Callahan doesn’t know for sure but decides to take no chances. Three days later, in the town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, he hangs up his black Menso tophat, leaves his greasy coverall on the floor of a pickup truck’s camper cap, and blows Chumm’s Traveling Wonder Show, not bothering with the formality of his final paycheck. On his way out of town, he sees a number of those pet posters nailed to telephone poles. A typical one reads:

LOST! SIAMESE CAT, 2 YRS OLD

ANSWERS TO THE NAME OF RUTA

SHE IS NOISY BUT FULL OF FUN

LARGE REWARD OFFERED

$ $ $ $ $ $

DIAL 764, WAIT FOR BEEP, GIVE YOUR NUMBER

GOD BLESS YOU FOR HELPING

Who is Ruta? Callahan doesn’t know. All he knows is that she isNOISY but FULL OF FUN. Will she still be noisy when the low men catch up to her? Will she still be full of fun?

Callahan doubts it.

But he has his own problems and all he can do is pray to the God in whom he no longer strictly believes that the men in the yellow coats won’t catch up to her.

Later that day, thumbing on the side of Route 3 in Issaquena County under a hot gunmetal sky that knows nothing of December and approaching Christmas, the chimes come again. They fill his head, threatening to pop his eardrums and blow pinprick hemorrhages across the entire surface of his brain. As they fade, a terrible certainty grips him: they are coming. The men with the red eyes and big hats and long yellow coats are on their way.