He was off the interstate before dawn, striking out across the plains and up the Snowy Range to Sugarloaf. In the dark, he could see rags of thermal mist glowing above the roadside grass, but one silvery ghost alone brought a quickening to his pulse. It was large and oddly formed, and for several hundred meters it appeared to keep pace with him, following just beyond his reach, like a phantom ship. Then it was gone.

Thirty miles farther, where they'd instructed him to be, he pulled into a kidney-shaped turnout and waited in his car while the first light started in the east and spread like milk across the April sky. The waxing moon still hung over the western mountains. He sat behind the steering wheel with the engine idling and the heat blowing thickly into his face. He sat with his teeth unconsciously gritted. He glanced into his rearview mirror and saw the sky hulking up behind him, then he turned and stared at the sky over his shoulder, as if something up there watched him in return. A sense of unease crept over him, something he couldn't identify. For several weeks now, since the onset of a mysterious illness the worst of which had passed quickly and yet which, even now, had not fully left him, he'd been falling in and out of this anxious state of mind, a tense, almost paranoid state accompanied by bouts of sleeplessness and a feeling of hypochondria he could not eliminate. It had become his habit to worry about his health.

But there was something more: the entire night before and into this morning, for no particular reason, sad memories of his mother kept worming their way into his brain, coming with a strange insistency. His mother had been a silent soul, elegant and calm. He had imagined himself done with her long ago. Why was he thinking about her again now? What did she matter at this point? At the same time, the nagging notion pressed in around him that there is no God, and these two thoughts seemed connected in his mind; he wasn't sure how. His mother, with her touch of otherworldliness, had never been a believer, that was for certain. But he had been once, though gradually as he'd gotten older his religious impulse, of its own accord, had given way to considerations more nearly philosophical. And yet the idea of God as an all-loving, all-knowing presence had always comforted him.

Now it seemed gone for good; so that here at age thirty-three he was beset by the desire to lie down in his mother's room again, as he had when he was a child, to just lie there on her couch and that was all, not next to her, but with her simply somewhere in the room. So persistent were these thoughts that fifty miles ago he'd pulled his car over and retrieved from his army bag the one and only letter she had ever written him, a missive slipped inside a book she'd left for him, one of a whole trunkful. Indeed, he had not looked at this letter in many years, and it was in part this realization - that she should write him in such a clandestine manner - striking him anew, that was troubling him now.

The single page lay folded twice on the passenger seat. He was apprehensive about the prospect of rereading it.

He turned to the window. Cars trickled in around him. He held his wrist draped over the steering wheel, the bone gleaming within. He sat there, watching a kernel of gray light in the northeast swell up and seep out across the sky, negating the morning stars one by one. His eyes were soft, soft as soot, but they contained depths, a metal strength. There was something unbreakable in his features. He had acne scars gouged beneath either cheekbone, but he was good-looking in spite or perhaps because of them. His arms were lean and laced with long azure veins. He had two hundred dollars folded in the back pocket of his jeans. His gaze was pensive and preoccupied. Within the last two hours, without consciously realizing it, he'd become convinced that someone would pursue him eventually. He just didn't know who - or how long it would take before he was found.

Beside him and resting facedown atop his mother's letter was an open copy of The Complete Novels of Sherlock Holmes, the same book she'd hid the letter in all those years ago. Glancing at it now, it occurred to him to wonder if there was something significant in this. Had his mother chosen this book for a particular reason, beyond the mere fact that as a boy it had been one of his favorites and she'd read it to him religiously? Had she been trying to tell him something, encoding a secret, perhaps, for him to unravel at a later time? He flipped the book over so that he could read the pages the letter had marked. The left-hand side was blank; the right-hand side was blank but for these words:

He sat scowling. His nerves were jagged and he'd begun to perspire. He could feel his heart hammering below his jaw, in his neck, in his temples.

Was he imagining things? In his foggy state, he couldn't tell. He couldn't process the questions objectively.

He moved his eyeballs back to the letter. Everything suddenly seemed suspicious. He sat staring at the page a long time. Finally, disgusted with himself for his protracted delay, he reached over and snatched the letter up. Its message was brief:

Her signature looked identical to the rest of her writing: the same fluid, unslanted hand he'd always admired. The brittle paper still carried a whisper of her perfume.

He refolded the page and was about to slip it back inside the book and be done with the whole thing, when he noticed something strange: a small drawing on the backside of the paper, block letters printed beneath. It was a child's game, a game of hangman, which he, age six, had played with his mother. He had forgotten all about it; he remembered it now. His mother had chosen a long word for him to figure out and he had lost. The stick figure was hanged.

It struck him particularly that she'd given the figure long wavy hair, indicating, in essence, that the hanged person was female. Another dim memory tried to surface in his mind, failed. He gazed at the incomplete word:

_ A _ _ I _ E S S

She had written the rejected letters just above the gallows.

Y M U O R T

He felt there must be an important clue in all this, something exceptional, but a clue into what exactly, he had no good idea. He wondered again if it was all in his imagination.

He stared at the game of hangman for several minutes. Then, abruptly, he reached up to his sun visor and extracted a black pen. He filled in the missing letters.

H A P P I N E S S

When he was finished, he noticed, in the gaining light, that more had been written there: a phone number, erased but still faintly readable, which the figure of the hanged girl was partially covering, as if at one time someone had tried concealing the number. He didn't know whose phone number it was. Still, he thought he recognized once again his mother's handwriting, but because of the erasure he couldn't be sure.

He sat there, looking.

The light got darker, then turned violet, and at six o'clock the rain began. Shortly after that, the superintendent drove up in an orange truck and made an announcement. He thanked them all for coming but said that he was sorry. He said that the job had been cancelled because funding had been pulled. He said that a new road was being built outside Gemstone and into South Dakota, and that if anyone wanted to get on with a crew there, they should head out now because, he said, it was a long way off. Then the superintendent climbed back in his truck and drove away.

The rain continued to fall, light and misty. Above Medicine Bow, the clouds were moving rapidly now, disclosing thin slices of baby-blue. Sugarloaf Peak wore a long scarf of mist, a wig of snow. A dark wilderness stood on the mountain below. He got back in his car and sat for many minutes watching the rain burst noiselessly against his windshield.

And that was when it began.

Perhaps even more extraordinary than his resolution was that over the course of the past twenty-four hours, his mind had grown so agitated, and he so consumed with his thoughts, that he himself didn't see anything at all remarkable in his resolution.

He gazed out across the watery lot. His was the only car left. The highway was deserted. He made a hard U-turn and drove out the same way he had come in. The aftermath of the storm straggled off to the north. He accelerated out from under a navy of fat-bellied clouds. The sun cast long bars of light across the earth. Ten miles east of Centennial, he looked to the right and saw, or thought he saw, far down county road 11, a dim sleek-looking shape, approximately the color of quicksilver but tinged with teal. This object, whatever it was, may have been moving or it may have been stationary, he could not tell. It intrigued him very much. There was a liquid-like quality about it which, for all its remove, struck him as indescribably beautiful. It reminded him of a larger version of some vital human organ, perhaps something he'd seen a photograph of when he was young and then at that age suddenly realized: this is inside me too.

He turned onto the dirt road and followed that road all the way into Woods Landing. He never came upon the object. In every direction, inexplicable roads led off to hidden places. It struck him then that he had been in this area once before, long ago, on an extended fishing trip with his mother and father. Or had he? The memory was vague. At the same time, he realized with total clarity now that he could have chosen other roads today, but he had not. He had chosen this one.

He followed a winding highway west, and when he came down off the other side of the mountain, he parked his car and went into a small cafe that doubled as a bus depot; here he drank a cup of coffee. He asked the owner if he knew of an isolated glacial lake anywhere near here, somewhere above timberline, with water so deep that the whole lake looked turquoise, surrounded with silver rocks. The owner shook his head. He next asked the man about the possibilities of work around this area, tree-cutting, sawmill, anything, but the owner said that as far as he knew there was nothing going on, and disappeared into the kitchen.

Not five minutes later, he stood next to his graphite-gray Mazda gazing for a long time into the pine-scented air. A complicated feeling was mutating in his mind. At his feet sat a cluster of dead white insect eggs, which when he noticed them sent an upsurge of nausea sliding into his throat. He averted his eyes. The sky above looked as though it had been scoured with a stiff broom. To the west and to the south, the land tilted away into a vast parkland, as wide and windy as the sea. Fallow fields still dotted with dirty clumps of snow; tractor roads curving off everywhere into the intricate horizon. Dry wind poured into the cavities of his head. Far away, he could see the curve of the earth pulsing. Pulsing, he thought, like a living organism.

He reentered the cafe and exchanged a ten dollar bill for a role of quarters. The owner, shifty-eyed, silent, watched him suspiciously. Or so it seemed to him.

He went back outside to the payphone.

The payphone stood burning in the knifey sunlight.

He looked around. He couldn't see anybody and yet he felt as if a pair of hot eyes were following him everywhere. He scanned the trees. They were empty. Wind moved sluggishly through the topmost boughs.

He broke the roll of quarters against the black metal phone box and spilled the quarters onto the shelf below. The sun reflected off each coin, lancing his eyes with thin daggers of light. After a full minute, he lifted the phone from the cradle and began punching quarters into the slot. He dialed the number that he'd seen imprinted on his mother's letter. Then he stood up straight and held the phone to his ear. He closed his eyes and listened to the submarine sound within. After two seconds, before the first ring, another sound began as well, the likes of which he could not recall ever hearing: a droning, not loud but insistent and peculiar, a noise which after a moment seemed to him to be emanating from the very center of the planet. He opened his eyes and listened more closely. He couldn't figure it out. He saw his reflection in the chrome plating of the payphone, his black eyes staring straight back at him, his damp face, almost unrecognizable, looking inordinately warped, acne scars buried like bruises beneath mutant cheekbones.

The phone rang a long time. He kept waiting. All the while, the droning continued without intermission.

He was on the verge of hanging up when someone finally answered - or, rather, someone picked up the phone, though no voice came through.

"Hello?" he said.

There was no response.

"Hello?" he said.

Still nothing. But he could clearly hear breathing on the other end, the droning beneath. He grew anxious. The breathing was rhythmic, muffled, and yet from the clarity of both sounds, he knew that there wasn't anything wrong with his connection.

"Hello?" he said. He spoke louder this time. "Is somebody there? I may have a wrong number, I don't know. I'm not sure who this is that I'm calling. Can you tell me?" He enunciated his words precisely.

Still there was no response; only the steady breath and the continuous drone beneath. He didn't say anything further. He simply stood there, listening to the resounding depths inside. The acute sunlight streaked his long black hair with skeins of blond. After a while, he imagined the droning was a sound not of this world at all. He heard the whoosh of potato-shaped asteroids tumbling headlong through the universe.

"Hello!"

Nothing.

He slammed down the phone and strode back to his Mazda. When he opened his door, he remembered that he had left about five dollars in quarters sitting there. He didn't care. He ducked all the way into the car.

And then the phone rang.

His heart boomed.

He looked over toward the cafe.

The phone was ringing rapidly, stridently.

He got out of the car and walked back across the parking lot. He saw the coins still sizzling on the shelf, the torn and sepia-colored paper of the quarter-roll fluttering in the breeze. He felt that if he didn't answer the phone, it would just go on ringing forever. He absently scooped the quarters into his palm and pocketed them. The phone was still ringing, ringing. He finally picked up.

"Angela Gasteneau is dead," said a cracked voice he did not recognize. "And you're a dead man."

A soft click issued through, and then the only thing he heard was the oppressive drone. He stood holding the phone to his ear. Through the window of the cafe, he saw the owner inside, glaring at him.

He looped up highway 230, through Saratoga and then onto 71. It was along this isolated stretch of road that he first noticed something sweet-smelling coming through his vents. It was along this isolated stretch of road also that he began questioning if the second phone call had taken place after all. At half past three, he pulled into a parking lot behind a motel in Rawlins and slept in his car for forty-five minutes. He woke alone in the long heat of the afternoon, and into the saddest light he thought he'd ever seen. With a kind of urgency, he began driving northward, straight through until nighttime. He took one wrong turn left which cost him two hours before he regained his way. Late that night, the moon wobbled up in the east and stood in the sky like a giant squeeze of lime, the horizon beneath it a band of xanthic light, furred and radioactive. By midnight, his legs were cramping in fits and starts. He was seeing on the roadside horizontal lines of fuzz that aped the horizon but vanished just before he got to them. He didn't realize it, but he drove the entire night with his teeth clenched and grinding. He had a small scowl stitched into the middle of his forehead, pushing out a fold of flesh above the bridge of his nose. He was troubled now in the extreme, and he sweated, but not from heat.