cats and ridicule.
  For twenty-five years he had lived with his mother, and for twenty years she had kept a 
cat in the house, first Caesar and then Caesar the Second. She had never realized that 
the cats were quicker and far more cunning than her son and, therefore, a bane to him. 
Caesar-first or second; it made no difference- liked to lie quietly atop bookshelves and 
cupboards and high-boys, until Buddy walked past. Then he leaped on Buddy's back. The cat 
never scratched him badly; for the most part it was concerned with getting a good grip on 
his shirt so that he could not shake it loose. Every time, as if following a script, 
Buddy would panic and run in circles or dart from room to room in search of his mother, 
with Caesar spitting in his ear. He never suffered much pain from the game; it was the 
sudden-
  ness of the attack, the surprise of it that terrified him. His mother said Caesar was 
only being playful. At times he confronted the cat to prove he was unafraid. He 
approached it as it sunned on a window sill and tried to stare it down. But he was always 
the first to look away. He couldn't understand people all that well, and the alien gaze 
of the cat made him feel especially stupid and inferior.
  He was able to deal with ridicule more easily than he could deal with cats, if only 
because it never came as a surprise. When he was a boy, other children had teased him 
mercilessly. He had learned to be prepared for it, learned how to endure it. Buddy was 
bright enough to know that he was different from others. If his intelligence quotient had 
been several points lower, he wouldn't have known enough to be ashamed of himself, which 
was what people expected of him. If his I.Q. had been a few points higher, he would have 
been able to cope, at least to some extent, with both cats and cruel people. Because he 
fell in between, his life was lived as an apology for his stunted intellect- a curse he 
bore as a result of a malfunctioning hospital incubator where he had been placed after 
being born five weeks prematurely.
  His father had died in a mill accident when Buddy was five, and the first Caesar had 
entered the house two weeks later. If his father hadn't died, perhaps there would have 
been no cats. And Buddy liked to think that, with his father alive, no one would dare 
ridicule him.
  Ever since his mother had succumbed to cancer ten years ago, when he was twenty-five, 
Buddy had worked as an assistant night watchman at the Big Union Supply Company mill. If 
he suspected that certain people at Big Union felt responsible for him and that his job 
was make-work, he had never admitted it, not even to himself. He was on duty from 
midnight to eight, five nights a week, patrolling the storage yards, looking for smoke, 
sparks, and flames. He was proud of his position. In the last ten years he had come to 
enjoy a measure of self-respect that would have been inconceivable before he had been 
hired.
  Yet theme were times when he felt like a child again, humiliated by other children, the 
brunt of a joke he could not understand. His boss at the mill, Ed McGrady, the chief 
watchman on the graveyard shift, was a pleasant man. He was incapable of hurting anyone. 
However, he smiled when others did the teasing. Ed always told them to stop, always 
rescued his friend Buddy-but always got a laugh from it.
  That was why Buddy hadn't told anyone what he had seen Saturday morning, nearly 
twenty-four hours ago. He didn't want them to laugh.
  Around that time he left the storage yard and walked well off into the trees to relieve 
himself. He avoided the lavatory whenever he could because it was there the other men 
teased him the most and showed the least mercy. At a quarter to five, he was standing by 
a big pine tree, shrouded in darkness, taking a pee, when he saw two men coming down from 
the reservoir. They carried hooded flashlights that cast narrow yellow beams. In the 
backwash of the lights, as the men passed within five yards of him, Buddy saw they were 
wearing rubber hip boots, as if they had been fishing. They couldn't fish in the 
reservoir, could they? There were no fish up there. Another thing .
  each man wore a tank on his back, like skin divers wore on television. And they were 
carrying guns in shoulder holsters. They looked so out of place in the woods, so strange.
  They frightened him. He sensed they were killers. Like on the television. If they knew 
they had been seen, they would kill him and bury him out here. He was sure of it. But 
then Buddy always expected the worst; life had taught him to think that way.
  He stood perfectly still, watched them until they were out of sight, and ran back to 
the storage yard. But he quickly realized he couldn't tell anyone what he had seen. They 
wouldn't believe him. And by God, if he was going to be ridiculed for telling what was 
only the truth, then he would keep it secret!
  Just the same he wished he could tell someone, if not the watchmen at the mill. He 
thought and thought about it but still could not make sense of those skin divers or 
whatever they were. -In fact, the more he thought about it, the more bizarre it
  seemed. He was frightened by what he could not understand. He was certain that if he 
told someone, it could be explained to him. Then he wouldn't be afraid. But if they 
laughed .
  Well, he didn't understand their laughter either, and that was even more frightening 
than the mystery men in the woods.
  On the far side of Main Street, the cat scampered from the heavy purple shadows and ran 
east toward Edison's General Store, startling Buddy out of his reverie. He pressed 
against the windowpane and watched the cat until it turned the corner. Afraid that it 
would try to sneak back and climb up to his third floor rooms, he kept a watch on the 
place where it had vanished. For the moment he had forgotten the men in the woods because 
his fear of cats was far greater than his fear of guns and strangers.
   
  PART ONE:
  Conspiracy
   
  1
  Saturday, August 13, 1977
  WHEN HE DROVE AROUND THE CURVE, into the small valley, Paul Annendale felt a change 
come over him. After five hours behind the wheel yesterday and five more today, he was 
weary and tense-but suddenly his neck stopped aching and his shoulders unknotted. He felt 
at peace, as if nothing could go wrong in this place, as if he were Hugh Conway in Lost 
Horizon and had just entered Shangri-La.
  Of course, Black River was not Shangri-La, not by any stretch of the imagination. It 
existed and maintained its population of four hundred solely as an adjunct of the mill. 
For a company town it was quite clean and attractive. The main street was lined with tall 
oak and birch trees. The houses were New England colonials, white frame and brick 
saltboxes. Paul supposed he responded to it so positively because he had no bad memories 
to associate with it, only good ones; and that could not be said of many places in a 
man's life.
  "There's Edison's store! There's Edison's!" Mark Annendale leaned over from the back 
seat, pointing through the windshield.
  Smiling, Paul said, "Thank you, Coonskin Pete, scout of the north."
  Rya was as excited as her brother, for Sam Edison was like a grandfather to them. But 
she was more dignified than Mark.
  At eleven she yearned for the womanhood that was still years ahead of her. She sat up