Walt from Framingham wanted to know why Tom Gor-don always pointed to the sky when he got a save ("You know, Mike, that pointin thing" was how Walt put it), and Mike the talk-show sports idiot explained it was Number 36's way of thanking God.

"He ought to point to Joe Kerrigan instead," Walt from Framingham said. "It was Kerrigan's idea to turn him into a closer. As a starter he was for the birds, you know?"

"Maybe God gave Kerrigan the idea, did you ever think of that, Walt?" the talk-show idiot asked. "Joe Kerrigan being the Red Sox pitching coach, for those of you who might not know."

"I do know, numbwit," Trisha murmured impatiently.

"We're mostly talking Sox tonight while the Sox enjoy a rare night off," said Mike the talk-show idiot. "They open a three-game set with Oakland tomorrow - yes, West Coast here we come and you'll hear all the action here on WEEI -  but today is an open date."

An open date, that explained it. Trisha felt an absurdly huge disappointment weigh her down, and more tears (in Danvizz you called them tizz) began to form in her eyes. She cried so easily now, now she cried over anything. But she had been looking forward to the game, dammit; hadn't known how much she needed the voices of Joe Castiglione and Jerry Trupiano until she found out she wouldn't be hearing them.

"We've got some open lines," the talk-show idiot said, "let's fill em up. Anybody out there think Mo Vaughn ought to stop acting like a kid and just sign on the dotted line? How much Mo' money does this guy need, anyway?

Good question, isn't it?"

"It's a stupid question, El Dopo," Trisha said pettishly. "If you could hit like Mo, you'd ask for a lot of money, too."

"Want to talk about Marvelous Pedro Martinez? Darren Lewis? The surprising Sox bullpen? A nice surprise from the Red Sox, can you believe it? Give me a call, tell me what you think. Back after this."

A happy voice began singing a familiar jingle: "Who do you call when your windshield's busted?"

"1-800-54-GIANT," Trisha said, and then dialed away from 'EEI. Maybe she could find another game. Even the hated Yankees would do. But before she found any baseball, she was transfixed by the sound of her own name.

" - is fading for nine-year-old Patricia McFarland, miss-ing since Saturday morning."

The news announcer's voice was faint, wavery, sliced and diced by static. Trisha leaned forward, her fingers going to her ears and pressing the little black buds deeper in.

"Connecticut law enforcement authorities, acting on a tip phoned in to state police in Maine, today arrested Fran-cis Raymond Mazzerole of Weymouth, Massachusetts, and questioned him for six hours in connection with the McFar-land girl's disappearance. Mazzerole, a construction worker currently employed on a Hartford bridge project, has twice been convicted of child molestation, and is being held pend-ing extradition to Maine on current charges of sexual assault and child molestation there. It now seems that he has no knowledge of Patricia McFarland's whereabouts, however.

A source close to the investigation says that Mazzerole claims to have been in Hartford over the past weekend, and that numerous witnesses corroborate..."

The sound faded out. Trisha pushed the power button and pulled the earbuds out of her ears. Were they still look-ing for her? They probably were, but she had an idea that they'd spent most of today hanging around that guy Mazze-role instead.

"What a bunch of El Dopos," she said disconsolately, and returned her Walkman to her pack. She lay back on the pine boughs, spread her poncho over her, then shuffled her shoulders and butt around until she was close to comfort-able.

A breeze puffed past, and she was glad she was in one of the hammocky dips between the rock outcrops. It was chilly tonight, and would probably be downright cold before the sun came up.

Overhead in the black were a zillion stars, just as forecast.

Exactly one zillion. They would pale a bit when the moon rose, but for now they were bright enough to paint her dirty cheeks with frost. As always, Trisha wondered if any of those brilliant specks were warming other live beings. Were there jungles out there populated by fabulous alien animals?

Pyramids? Kings and giants? Possibly even some version of baseball?

"Who do you call when your windshield's busted?" Trisha sang softly. "1-800-54 - "

She broke off, drawing swift breath in over her lower lip, as if hurt. White fire scratched the sky as one of the stars fell. The streak ran halfway across the black and then winked out. Not a star, of course, not a real star but a meteor.

There was another, and then another. Trisha sat up, the split rags of her poncho falling into her lap, her eyes wide.

Here was a fourth and fifth, these going in a different direc-tion.

Not just a meteor but a meteor shower.

As if something had only been waiting for her to under-stand this, the sky lit up in a silent storm of bright contrails.

Trisha stared, neck tilted, eyes wide, arms crossed over her breastless chest, hands clutching her shoulders with nervous nail-bitten fingers. She had never seen anything like it, never dreamed there could be anything like it.

"Oh, Tom," she whispered in a trembling voice. "Oh Tom, look at this. Do you see?"

Most were momentary white flashes, thin and straight and gone so quickly that they would have seemed like hal-lucinations if there hadn't been so many of them. A few, however - five, perhaps eight - lit up the sky like silent fireworks, brilliant stripes that seemed to burn orange at the edges. That orange might just have been eye-dazzle, but Trisha didn't think so.

At last the shower began to wane. Trisha lay back again and scooted the various sore parts of her body around some more until she was comfortable again... as comfortable as she was apt to get, anyway. As she did, she watched the ever more occasional flashes as bits of rock further off the path than she could ever get dropped into earth's well of gravity, first turning red as the atmosphere thickened and then burning to death in brief glares of light. Trisha was still watching when she fell asleep.

Her dreams were vivid but fragmentary: a kind of mental meteor shower. The only one she remembered with any clarity was the one she had been having just before she woke up in the middle of the night, coughing and cold, lying on her side with her knees drawn all the way up to her chin and shivering all over.

In this dream she and Tom Gordon were in an old meadow which was now running to bushes and young trees, mostly birches. Tom was standing by a splintery post that came up to about the height of his hip. On top of it was an old ringbolt, rusty red. Tom was flicking this back and forth between his fingers. He was wearing his warmup jacket over his uniform. The gray road uniform. He would be in Oakland tonight. She had asked Tom about "that pointin thing." She knew, of course, but asked anyway. Possibly because Walt from Framingham had wanted to know, and a cellular El Dopo like Walt wouldn't believe any little girl lost in the woods; Walt would want it straight from the closer's mouth.

"I point because it's God's nature to come on in the bot-tom of the ninth," Tom said. He spun the ringbolt on top of the post back and forth between his fingers. Back and forth, back and forth. Who do you call when your ringbolt's busted? Dial 1-800-54-RINGBOLT, of course. "Especially when the bases are loaded and there's only one out." Some-thing in the woods chattered at that, perhaps in derision.

The chattering grew louder and louder until Trisha opened her eyes in the dark and realized it was the sound of her own teeth.

She got slowly to her feet, wincing as every part of her body protested. Her legs were the worst, closely followed by her back. A gust of wind struck her - not a puff this time but a gust - and almost knocked her over. She wondered how much weight she had lost. A week of this and you'll be able to put a string around me and fly me like a kite, she thought. She started to laugh at that, and the laugh turned into another coughing fit. She stood with her hands planted on her legs just above her knees, her head down, coughing. The cough started deep in her chest and came out of her mouth in a series of harsh barks. Great. Just great. She put the inside of her wrist to her forehead and couldn't tell if she had a fever or not.

Walking slowly with her legs spread far apart - her butt chafed less when she did that - Trisha went back to the pines and broke off more branches, this time meaning to pile them on top of her like blankets. She took one armload back to her bed, got a second, and stopped halfway between the trees and the needle-floored dip she'd chosen to sleep in.

Slowly, she turned in a complete circle under the blazing four o'clock stars.

"Leave me alone, can't you?" she cried, and that started her coughing again. When she got the cough under control, she said it again, but in a lower voice: "Can't you quit it?

Can't you just cut me a break, let me be?"

Nothing. No sound but the soughing of the wind through the pines... and then a grunt. Low and soft and not even remotely human. Trisha stood where she was with her arms around her fragrant, sappy load of branches. Her skin broke out in hard little bumps. Where had that grunt come from?

This side of the stream? The other side? From the stand of pines? She had a horrible idea, almost a certainty, that it was the pines. The thing which had been watching her was in the pines. As she harvested branches to cover herself with, its face had been perhaps less than three feet from her own; its claws, the ones which had torn into the trees and ripped both deer apart, had perhaps hovered within inches of her own hands as she bent the branches back and forth, first splin-tering them and then breaking them.

Trisha started coughing again, and that got her moving.

She dropped the branches in a helter-skelter pile and crawled among them without any attempt to create order out of their jumbled chaos. She winced and moaned a little when one of them poked the place on her hip where she had been stung, then lay still. She sensed it coming now, slipping out of the pines and finally coming for her. The tough tootsie's special thing, the wasp-priest's God of the Lost. You could call it whatever you wanted - the lord of dark places, the emperor of understairs, every kid's worst nightmare. Whatever it was, it had finished teasing her; it was all done playing games. It would simply tear away the branches beneath which she was cowering and eat her alive.

Coughing and shivering, all sense of reality and rational-ity gone - temporarily insane, in fact - Trisha put her arms over the back of her head and waited to be torn open by the thing's claws and stuffed into its fangy mouth. She fell asleep that way, and when she woke in the early light of Tuesday morning, both of her arms were asleep from the elbows down and at first she couldn't bend her neck at all; she had to walk with her head cocked slightly to one side.

I guess I won't have to ask either Gramma what it's like to be old, she thought as she squatted to pee. I guess that now I know.

As she walked back to the pile of branches where she had slept (like a chipmunk in a burrow, she thought wryly), she saw that one of the other needle-filled hammocks - the one nearest hers, in fact - looked disturbed. The needles had been sprayed around and dug right down to the thin black earth in one place. So maybe she hadn't been insane in the dark of early morning, after all. Or not entirely insane. Because later on, after she'd gone back to sleep, something had come.

It had been right next to her, perhaps squatting and watch-ing her sleep. Wondering if it should take her now and finally deciding not to, deciding to let her ripen for at least one more day. To let her sweeten like a checkerberry.

Trisha turned in a circle, feeling a dim sense of deja vu but not remembering she had turned exactly the same circle in almost exactly the same place only a few hours ago. She stopped when she came back to where she had started, coughing nervously into her hand. The cough made her chest hurt, a small dull pain that was very deep inside. She didn't exactly mind - the pain was warm, at least, and every other part of her felt cold this morning.

"It's gone, Tom," she said. "Whatever it is, it's gone again. For a little while, anyway."

Yes, Tom said, but it'll be back. And sooner or later you'll have to deal with it.

"Let the evil of the day be sufficient thereof," Trisha said.

That one was her Gramma McFarland's. She didn't know exactly what it meant but thought she sort of knew, and it seemed to fit this occasion.

CHAPTER 12

She sat on a rock beside her hammock and munched three big handfuls of berries and beechnuts, telling herself it was granola. The berries weren't as tasty this morning - a little tough, in fact - and Trisha guessed they would be even less tasty come lunchtime. Still, she made herself eat all three handfuls, then went to the stream for a drink. She saw another of those little trout in it, and although the ones she'd seen so far weren't much bigger than smelts or large sardines, she suddenly decided to try and catch one. The stiffness had begun working out of her body a little, the day was warming as the sun rose, and she had begun to feel a lit-tle better. Hopeful, almost. Maybe lucky, too. Even the cough had eased.

Trisha went back to her tangled bed, extracted the remains of her poor old poncho, and spread it on one of the rock outcrops. She hunted for a stone with a sharp edge and found a good one near the place where the stream tumbled over the rounded lip of the bluff and into the valley below.

This slope was easily as steep as the one she'd gone sliding down on the day she had gotten lost (that day seemed at least five years ago to Trisha), but she thought it would be a much easier descent. There were lots of trees to hold onto.

Trisha took her improvised cutting tool back to her poncho (spread on the rock like that the poncho looked like a big blue paperdoll) and sawed the hood off below the shoulder-line.

She doubted very much if she could actually catch a fish in the hood, but it would be amusing to try and she didn't feel like trying the slope until she had limbered up a little more.

She sang softly under her breath as she worked, first the Boyz To Da Maxx song that had been in her head throughout, then the Hansons' "MMMm-Bop," then a snatch of "Take Me Out to the Ballgame." Mostly, however, she sang the one that went "Who do you call when your windshield's busted?"

The chilly breeze of the night before had kept the worst of the bugs away, but as the day heated up the usual cloud of tiny airshow performers coalesced around Trisha's head. She barely noticed them, giving an occasional impatient wave only when they got too close to her eyes.

When she had finished cutting the hood off the poncho she held it upside down, dangling it and studying it with a critical, judicious eye. Interesting. Undoubtedly too stupid to work, but sort of interesting, just the same.