Niceville

early hour. Merle’s heart was racing and he was making an effort to slow it down.
    “The hospital is set apart from town, over on Eufaula Lane, inside an old park there, about two block up and we take a right. You never said if you wanted some help, John? I always keep something in the bus against bad men who might get on.”
    He leaned to his left, reached down beside his seat, and pulled out a medium-framed revolver, stainless-steel, angular, brute-ugly but so clean it shimmered in the light.
    “It’s a Forehand and Wadsworth I had from my daddy who went to the South African War. It fires a .38-caliber bullet. Not good for long-range work, but it will do pretty good for in close. I would take it as a personal favor if you were to allow me to walk along with you.”
    He wheeled the bus around the corner and pulled it to a stop about a hundred feet down from the gates of a single-story flat-roofed structure made of pale yellow brick, looking very much like a blockhouse instead of a palliative care center.
    The neighborhood around it was shady and old-fashioned, a few warm yellow lights showing in the windows here and there, porch lamps glimmering in the early-morning light. A dog started to bark in the distance, and from somewhere else came the sound of music. Swifts and swallows and mourning doves were calling in the leafy canopy over the street.
    The palliative care center was fenced off by wrought-iron spikes eight feet tall, with a single open gate in front of the entrance. The clinic sat in the middle of a large green park studded with willows and live oaks draped in shaggy tendrils of moss, still shrouded in a heavy morning mist. The clinic had few windows, some of which were showing a cool institutional light. They could see only one set of doors, twobroad wooden slabs under a wide stone archway, in front of a circular drive.
    There was a small metal sign, blue, with gilt letters, mounted on the fence near the open gate.
    GATES OF GILEAD
PALLIATIVE CARE CENTER
PRIVATE NO VISITORS
    Two white men in blue shirts and black trousers were sitting under the shelter of the archway, tilting back in wooden chairs, smoking cigarettes, and by the set of their heads, watching the Blue Bird as it sat there, idling, its engine wheezing and chuffing.
    “I think we are expected,” said Albert, looking at the men under the arch. “What would you like to do, John?”
    Merle stood up, reached for the flask on the dashboard, sipped at it, handed it to Albert Lee.
    “I accept your offer of walking along with me, if you still feel like it?”
    This brought a huge smile.
    “Thank you. I could use some excitement.”
    He took a sip, twisted the cap on tight, put it away in the compartment, and shut off the bus. He took the keys out and put them in the compartment beside the flask.
    “Best to leave the keys here, in case one of us is coming back alone.”
    He pushed himself up with a groan, looked at the revolver in his hand, checked to see that he had all six chambers loaded, and then looked at Merle, his eyes calm and clear, watching Merle’s hands as he slid out the magazine, checked the chamber and the magazine, loaded the magazine back in, and racked the slide, a satisfying metallic clank. They shook hands and Merle stepped down out of the bus. The two men in shirtsleeves were on their feet now, and staring hard at them.
    And then something
happened
, almost as soon as his boots hit the sidewalk. Merle was standing there, fighting his adrenaline, taking in the street, the low brick building, the sleepy residential neighborhood, when, in some indefinable but powerful way, the entire street
changed
.
    The comfortable old houses were engulfed in a thickening mist, their porch lights dwindling into yellow sparks and then winking out, the warm yellow windows going black. They were alone in a dense fog with only the Gates of Gilead showing dimly through the haze, a low barrow-like bulk.
    The milky light of the early morning turned yellowish and sickly. The scent of spring earth and cut grass and cool morning air changed into a brackish reek, sulfur and ammonia and the stink of dead things half-buried.
    The low brick building seemed to dig itself deeper into the green lawn surrounding it, and grow darker, more sealed, more remote from the normal world, like an animal pulling back into a cave. The live oaks sheltering it grew blacker, larger, and their branches creaked like old bones, their leaves rustling as if they were