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bathroom, where the medicine cabinet told him Joe Sheer had been having physical trouble of all kinds in recent years, though maybe not heart disease. But, according to the junk in the medicine cabinet, he'd had piles and he'd been constipated and he'd had trouble sleeping and he'd had various troubles for which he'd been taking prescription medicines. Parker looked at the prescription bottles and they were all from the Five Corner Drug Store in Omaha, all with the name Dr. Quilley on them. According to the evidence of the medicine cabinet, Dr. Rayborn had never prescribed anything for Joe.
     
    Before leaving the bathroom, Parker took the top off the water tank, because that was such a favourite place for people to hide things, either down in the water tank itself, wrapped in something waterproof, or taped to the inside of the top. This time there was nothing in either place.
     
    The next room he went into was the spare bedroom, the smaller of the two. It had a bed, a dresser, a throw rug, and a kitchen chair in it, because Joe did, every once in a great while, have company that stayed over, somebody like Parker. He preferred most of the time to meet with his friends from his old life down in the apartment in Omaha, but every once in a while — particularly when the weather was good — he brought a house guest out to see him living the good life in the little town of Sagamore.
     
    Now, the bed was made, the dresser was empty, and the closet was emptier. There was nothing in this room at all, no messages for Parker about anything. Except maybe that Joe hadn't had any company that stayed over for some time.
     
    Joe's own bedroom was a different proposition. It wasn't as neat as the rest of the house. From the looks of it, it could have been searched two or three times already, and every time by impatient slobs. But Parker knew this was normal, the way Joe had always kept his bedroom. The rest of the house could be neat and clean, and usually was, but his bedroom had to be a mess. Maybe it was because he'd taken one fall, back when he was young, and had spent four years sleeping in the barren metallic neatness of a jail cell.
     
    It took a long time to go through Joe's bedroom, and when he was done Parker had learned nothing. Throughout the whole house, nothing he knew of was missing except the thousand bucks from the flour canister. The telephone and utilities were still on, there was additional proof that Dr. Rayborn had been lying, and there was no sign at all that anyone else had made a search through here. He knew a few facts and no reasons.
     
    There were still two places to look, the attic and the cellar. He stood in the central hall and considered, looking up at the trap-door in the ceiling but finally deciding to let the attic wait till last. He turned and opened the cellar door, and something with a sack over its head came lunging up out of the darkness, swinging something that whistled like the wind as it came around and smashed into the side of Parker's head. Parker had time to feel his hand scrape along burlap, time to see the cellar stairs rushing in on a long curve towards him, getting bigger and bigger, and then he went out like a burned-out bulb.
     
     
SIX
     
    THE voice was a centipede, a long twisty bug with needle-sharp feet running back and forth on the left side of his face, driving its needle feet into the bone beside his eye and into his cheekbone and into the bone above his ear. His face hurt like fury; it hurt every time the voice sounded, and the voice sounded all the time. He thrashed a little in impotent rage, wanting the voice to stop hurting the side of his face.
     
    Moving like that brought him up out of it a bit more, far enough out so he could begin to separate sensations, differentiate between hearing the voice in his ears and feeling the pains on the side of his face, begin to know they weren't connected, not two parts of the same thing after all but just two separate sensations that