of course, a demon incarnate—or the shadow of a god. They called him Mir, which to these
people meant “the world beneath the world.” He stood seventy feet high, and after eighteen or more centuries of undisputed rule in the West Woods, he was dying. Perhaps the
instrument of his death had at first been a microscopic organism in something he had eaten
or drunk; perhaps it was old age; more likely a combination of both. The cause didn’t
matter; the ultimate result—a rapidly multiplying colony of parasites foraging within his
fabu- lous brain—did. After years of calculating, brutal sanity, Mir had run mad.
The bear had known men were in his woods again; he ruled the forest and although it was
vast, nothing of importance which happened there escaped his attention for long. He had
drawn away from the new- comers, not because he was afraid but because he had no
business with them, nor they with him. Then the parasites had begun their work, and as his
madness increased he became sure that it was the Old People again, that the trap-setters and
forest-burners had returned and would soon set about their old, stupid mischief once more.
Only as he lay in his final den some thirty miles from the place of the newcomers, sicker
with each day’s dawning than he had been at sunset the night before, had he come to believe
that the Old People had finally found some mischief which worked: poison.
He came this time not to take revenge for some petty wound but to stamp them out entirely
before their poison could finish having its way with him . . . and as he travelled, all thought
ceased. What was left was red rage, the rusty buzz of the thing on top of his head—the
turning thing between his ears which had once done its work in smooth silence— and an
eerily enhanced sense of smell which led him unerringly toward the camp of the three
pilgrims.
The bear, whose real name was not Mir but something else entirely, made his way through
the forest like a moving building, a shaggy tower with reddish-brown eyes. Those eyes
glowed with fever and madness.
His huge head, now wearing a garland of broken brunches and fir- needles, swung
ceaselessly from side to side. Every now and then he would sneeze in a muffled explosion
of sound—Ali-CHOW!—and clouds of squirming white parasites would be discharged
from his dripping nos- trils. His paws, armed with curved talons three feet in length, tore at
the trees. He walked upright, sinking deep tracks in the soft black soil under the trees. He
reeked of fresh balsam and old, sour shit.
The thing on top of his head whirred and squealed, squealed and whirred.
The course of the bear remained almost constant: a straight line which would lead him to
the camp of those who had dared return to his forest, who had dared fill his head with dark
green agony. Old People or New People, they would die. When he came to a dead tree, he
some- times left the straight path long enough to push it down. The dry, explo- sive roar of
its fall pleased him; when the tree had finally collapsed its rotten length on the forest floor
or come to rest against one of its mates, the bear would push on through slanting bars of
sunlight turned misty with floating motes of sawdust.
3
Two DAYS BEFORE, EDDIE Dean had begun carving again—the first time he’d tried to
carve anything since the age of twelve. He remembered that he had enjoyed doing it, and he
believed he must have been good at it, as well. He couldn’t remember that part, not for sure, but there was at least one clear indication that it was so: Henry, his older brother, had hated
to see him doing it.
Oh lookit the sissy, Henry would say. Whatcha makin today, sissy? A dollhouse? A
pisspot for your itty-bitty teeny peenie? Ohhh . . . ain’t that CUTE?
Henry would never come right out and tell Eddie not to do some- thing; would never just
walk up to him and say, would you mind quitting that, bro? See, it’s pretty good, and when
you do something that’s pretty good, it makes me nervous. Because, you see, I’m the one
that’s supposed to be pretty good at stuff around here. Me. Henry Dean. So what I think I’ll
do, brother o’ mine, is just sort of rag on you about certain things. I won’t come right out
and say, “Don’t do that, it’s makin me nervous,” because that might make me sound, you know, a little fucked up in the head. But I can rag on you, because that’s part of what big
brothers do, right? All part of the image. I’ll rag on you and tease you and make fun of you
until you just . . . fucking . . . QUIT IT! Okay?
Well, it wasn’t okay, not really, but in the Dean household, things usually went the way
Henry wanted them to go. And until very recently, that had seemed right—not okay but
right. There was a small but crucial difference there, if you could but dig it. There were two
reasons why it seemed right. One was an on-top reason; the other was an underneath
reason.
The on-top reason was because Henry had to Watch Out for Eddie when Mrs. Dean was at
work. He had to Watch Out all the time, because once there had been a Dean sister, if you
could but dig it. She would have been four years older than Eddie and four years younger
than Henry if she had lived, but that was the thing, you see, because she hadn’t lived. She
had been run over by a drunk driver when Eddie was two. She had been watching a game of
hopscotch on the sidewalk when it happened.
As a lad, Eddie had sometimes thought of his sister while listening to Mel Alien doing the
play-by-play on The Yankee Baseball Network. Someone would really pound one and Mel
would bellow, “Holy cow, he got all of that one! SEEYA LATER!” Well, the drunk had
gotten all of Gloria Dean, holy cow, seeya later. Gloria was now in that great upper deck in
the sky, and it had not happened because she was unlucky or because the State of New
York had decided not to jerk the jerk’s license after his third OUI or even because God had
bent down to pick up a peanut; it had happened (as Mrs. Dean frequently told her sons)
because there had been no one around to Watch Out for Gloria.
Henry’s job was to make sure nothing like that ever happened to Eddie. That was his job
and he did it, but it wasn’t easy. Henry and Mrs. Dean agreed on that, if nothing else. Both
of them frequently reminded Eddie of just how much Henry had sacrificed to keep Eddie
safe from drunk drivers and muggers and junkies and possibly even malevolent aliens who
might be cruising around in the general vicinity of the upper deck, aliens who might decide
to come down from their UFOs on nuclear-powered jet-skis at any time in order to kidnap
little kids like Eddie Dean. So it was wrong to make Henry more nervous than this terrible
responsibility had already made him. If Eddie was doing something that did make Henry
more nervous, Eddie ought to cease doing that thing immediately. It was a way of paying
Henry back for all the time Henry had spent Watching Out for Eddie. When you thought
about it that way, you saw that doing things better than Henry could do them was very
unfair.
Then there was the underneath reason. That reason (the world beneath the world, one
might say) was more powerful, because it could never be stated: Eddie could not allow
himself to be better than Henry at much of anything, because Henry was, for the most part,
good for nothing . . . except Watching Out for Eddie, of course.
Henry taught Eddie how to play basketball in the playground near the apartment building
where they lived—this was in a cement suburb where the towers of Manhattan stood
against the horizon like a dream and the welfare check was king. Eddie was eight years
younger than Henry and much smaller, but he was also much faster. He had a natural feel
for the game; once he got on the cracked, hilly cement of the court with the ball in his hands,
the moves seemed to sizzle in his nerve-endings. He was faster, but that was no big deal.
The big deal was this: he was better than Henry. If he hadn’t known it from the results of the
pick-up games in which they sometimes played, he would have known it from Henry’s thunderous looks and the hard punches to the upper arm Henry often dealt out on their way