CHAPTER FOUR: THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK

- Lewis Carroll, "The Hunting of the Snark"

Russell had always hated the inevitable statements to the press, but this promised to provide such a neat closure to a shocking death that he couldn't help feeling a little thrill of anticipation. The crowd of reporters was larger than he expected. Morgan's story had attracted some out of staters, probably hoping for a connection with the recent killings in New York. It would be a moment of supreme satisfaction to disappoint the vultures.

As he ascended to the podium, he was flanked by Alan Nagle from Fish and Wildlife, who he'd never met before, and Paul Snyder, the police commissioner and a damned fine guy. Agent Kittredge was supposed to have been there, too, but neither he nor his department had been able to raise the man on the phone and in the scramble to arrange the press conference, tracking Kittredge down had gotten lost in the shuffle.

Sheriff Russell tapped the mic, making himself relax as he began with the perfunctory welcoming of them all here today.

He hoped to god Kittredge hadn't done anything stupid like try to make a run for it. The police department hadn't made any mistakes beyond the initial confusion. In fact, everyone had done their job admirably. The Morgan fiasco was settling down into simplicity again, and the squirrelly Kittredge and his corn pone friend were just sideshow acts. At any rate, he couldn't send any men after him at the moment. He was going to be needing every officer soon.

"I want to assure you, there's nothing to the rumors about a serial killer from New York operating in our woods. Thomas Morgan died in a hunting accident. We've determined he was attacked by a whitetail buck in rut. As I'm sure you know, during the mating season bucks become highly aggressive, and Mr. Morgan unfortunately happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time." Russell gave the reporters a wide, confident smile and let his voice roll out with a bit of that sonorous James Earl Jones warmth. "It's a tragedy, but a freak occurrence."

"Sheriff, what about the animals that escaped from that genetics research lab?"

Russell's smile froze into a grimace as he squinted into the lights. Who was asking? Escaped lab animals? He hadn't heard anything about that.

The pause stretched out. Finally, the police commissioner stepped up to the mic. Russell backed away, grateful for the save.

"This was a deer," Snyder said firmly. "A plain old local deer, nothing mysterious and reason for starting an panic. We're not talking about some transgenic Bambi-monster here."

The other reporters sniggered, but the questioner persisted. "Why was it in rut, though? It's out of season. That`s very odd."

Nagle from Fish and Wildlife leaned over and spoke into the mic. "It's not uncommon for some bucks to have seasons that last longer or shorter than average. This one was just on the far end of the bell curve. As the sheriff said, unfortunate but not mysterious."

Snyder muffled the mic with his hand and said out of the corner of his mouth, "None of this is live. We'll have them cut it out."

Russell nodded and took over again. "Now, has anyone got any relevant questions?"

"Isn't there an FBI agent on the case?" Another reporter called out. "Why would you need the FBI if a deer killed Morgan?"

Back on solid ice again, Russell let a smidge of condescension into his voice. "An agent was in the area investigating an unrelated drug enforcement case and merely stopped by the scene as a professional courtesy. He was in no way involved with the investigation."

It was a white lie, but allowable. Pendergast had been struck down with the flu or whatever it was before he could officially become part of the investigation. "One more question. You?"

"Sheriff Russell, are you at all concerned with the Devil sightings?"

"Believe me, our FBI agent was not Fox Mulder." Russell had never watched that show, but his two sons had been rabid fans when they were teenagers. The obliging press laughed. Russell let them, then said sternly, "However, we have had problems with kids running around the woods in Halloween costumes. I will not hesitate to arrest anyone pulling that sort of prank, for their own safety. We don't want anyone getting shot." Anyone else, he amended silently. So far, they were keeping Kittredge's mistake under wraps. Well, he'd burn that bridge when he came to it. "The same goes for anyone going devil-hunting. It's out of season."

The reporters laughed again, and with another flash of his best reassuring smile, Russell ended the conference by saying, "The only real danger are the blizzard conditions forecast for tonight. Stay safe."

* * * * *

At times Pendergast's hyperacute hearing had been more affliction than boon, and it had taken him years of strict disciple to learn to filter out distractions. But he was well served by it. The snap and rustle of a large animal walking through the underbrush had the unmistakable cadence of a biped. What's more, one leg was being dragged, which matched the information he'd gathered from the prints - of bare feet - that he'd been following. Somehow, his quarry had circled round behind him.

Pendergast stopped moving. It was not a freeze, the startled immobilization of a frightened animal. Just a controlled, relaxed split second pause for thought. Then he moved again, balanced and easy, dropping to his knees and rolling into the underbrush in a swift, almost soundless motion. Before returning to the pine barrens, he'd stopped off briefly in his rented room and picked up his winter camouflage, and the streaks of muddy brown and grey on white made him all but invisible against the snow-strewn forest floor.

The dragging footsteps came closer, and he heard his pursuer's stertorous breathing. It was making no attempts to be stealthy, but then, if it was what Pendergast suspected then it would have the confidence of territorial advantage. He slipped his gun, a custom Les Baer .45, out of the holster and braced his elbows on the ground, drawing a bead on the swaying bushes.

Even closer now.

The creature was not just breathing heavily, it sounded as if it was muttering to itself. Pendergast sniffed, detecting a wave of cologne soured by a day's worth of sweat. He frowned. That couldn't be right.

A tall, gaunt figure crashed through the underbrush, and Pendergast stood up, smoothly reholstering his weapon.

"Doctor House. I'm rather surprised to encounter you so far from your offices, considering you are not, ah - " He inclined his head politely, "Altogether well."

House leaned heavily on his cane, catching his breath. "I could say the same about you."

Pendergast turned away, his mouth drawing into a thin, compressed line. "I did give you my promise that I would submit to treatment, but I also made it quite clear that I would have to complete my investigation."

"You're not stupid, so stop acting like you are," House cut him off. He removed his knit cap, mopped his face, and pulled it back down firmly over his sweat-matted curls. "And I don't appreciate the cuteness, either. It doesn't suit you."

"Cuteness?"

"You left that Mardi Gras float of yours parked a few blocks away from an ATV rental, for one thing. For another, half the places around here are named Devil this or Devil that. Devil's Point, Devil Hollow, the Devil's Spittoon, Devil Leap Road. And this is the old Devil Cabin, Shourds House."

He gestured around them, indicating the sad heaps of piled rocks laced with thick ropes of dead ivy that were the only remaining evidence of what had once been the walls of a small cabin. The corners were heaped with windblown trash, shattered beer bottles, and the cleaned bones of small animals, all sugared with a delicate covering of fresh snowfall.

"The phrase `no shit, Sherlock' comes to mind. Stop thinking you're the smartest boy in class, Pendergast."

"Thank you for the advice. I shall."

They faced each other silently, glaring and bristling like tomcats. A chilling wind blasted through the swaying trees. Ice-coated branches creaked and stridulated. A handful of tiny stinging ice particles sandblasted them in the face. House had only a basic acquaintance with meteorology, but he remembered the forecasters describing how the warm, moist air mass that had been squatting over the town yesterday was being lanced by a vicious cold front stabbing downward from Canada, and the combination of the two was going to result in some serious snowfall.

Pendergast was the first to speak.

"There is a severe blizzard forecast, as I am sure you know. Twenty to thirty inches overnight. Snow has already begun to fall. If I wait any longer, the tracks will be obliterated."

"And you'll be dead," House said flatly. Pendergast was flushed rose-red, all pink without the usual complement of yellow in the mix, his eyes glazed, his lips dry and cracked. He trembled slightly, not shivering from cold but with the strain of standing up.

"It is not safe for you to be out here, either," the agent temporized. "I was under the impression you typically sent your young associates on forays like this."

House grunted. Someone, probably Foreman, had been telling tales. "In the words of that great American philosopher, John Rambo, this time it's personal."

Pendergast looked momentarily at a loss. "Very well. We seem to be at an infrangible impasse. Since you're here, though, would you be so kind as to once again lend me your expertise and give me a professional opinion about these tracks, Doctor?"

"Fake," he said, barely glancing at the prints crisscrossing the bare ground between the broken-down walls. "Kids do this sort of thing all the time. Like Sasquatch. The whole load of crap started when some college kid carved a pair of giant wooden feet and stomped around the woods with his buddy on his shoulders to make the impressions deeper."

"I must respectfully disagree. Please, take a closer look."

"Back off fifteen feet, and stay there."

Pendergast complied, leaning up against a tree. He managed to make it look as though he were resting and not overcome by dizziness. With the staining solution washed out of his hair and dressed in winter camo, he almost did disappear into the background.

House bent over as far as he could without toppling, warily keeping him in his peripheral vision. A thin, crisp layer of fresh snow coated the ground, preserving the trail as clearly as black and white line drawings. The prints were shaped like a combination of cloven hooves and human feet. Overall they were y-shaped with what appeared to be a single large toe at the end of each fork. The prints were almost twice the length of House`s own feet, even in boots.

The clearness of the preservation showed the startling size wasn`t created by a scuffing step, and it had been too cold for the snow of a few days ago to melt, distorting and enlarging the shape. It had gotten steadily colder as the sun sank into a cloudbank, and the woods had never warmed up as much as the town. Even now, House felt the runnels of sweat that coursed over his face and moistened his palms, armpits, soles and the small of his back beginning to freeze.

"Could be acromegaly." He took on that peculiarly inward expression of a man thinking at full mental capacity, head cocked to one side, eyes vague. "That's an excess of growth hormones, usually caused by a pituitary tumor. It produces gigantism in children, but in adults the long bone growth plates have fused so only the face, hands, feet and ribs start growing again. Usually the first symptom is the shoe size increasing. Also causes some nasty cancers. But it wouldn't give the prints this weird cloven effect. Traumatic injury? No . . . no, no. It's too symmetrical. Maybe something like ectrodactyly, but not quite." He stared at the print silently, his brow knotted up with ferocious concentration.

"What is that," Pendergast interrupted. He took a step forward, and House waved him back. "Ectrodactyly?"

"Lobster claw syndrome. Jeez, you must've had some relatives in sideshows, you can't tell me you've never heard of it. Albinos were always popular, like bearded ladies or midgets. Nothing really gross to make ladies and people of delicate constitution faint." He winked at Pendergast.

If the needling bothered the FBI agent, he gave no sign of it, just a slow blink of those colorless chatoyant eyes and a patient wait for House to continue his explanation.

"It's an inherited dominant mutation with variable expression in the hands, feet or both together. There are two tribes in Zimbabwe that have been passing the mutation down for several generations. They call them `ostrich-footed' people, for obvious reasons. Wadoma, Kalanga, something like that. Yeah, familial foot ectrodactyly. Couldn`t be anything else." House straightened up. "Well, there you go, Pendergast. You've got a really skilled prankster with a interest in freaky mutations."

"Or an individual suffering two rare, disfiguring diseases. What are the chances of the conditions occurring simultaneously?" Pendergast appeared troubled. Before House could answer, he said, "If you'll take another look, Doctor, I'm sure you'll notice that the heel and toes have dug in deeper than the rest of the print and there is a midline mound from the forward thrust of the step, which argues against a hoax. The print is so much larger than a normal foot that if it were fake, the wearer's weight would be distributed evenly, like a snowshoe."

As he spoke, Pendergast had again taken a few steps forward. House watched, tense, waiting for the right moment.

"Also, you'll see that the toe end of both forks have dug in and curled under here where the maker skidded slightly on a patch of mud. If the inner fork was an addition, this would not have happened." He stretched out his hand, pointing.

It was the perfect opportunity. House grabbed his extended arm in both hands, squeezed hard and twisted in opposite directions. Pendergast flinched like he'd been touched by a brand and raised his free arm, but before he could strike, House released him.

"You can deck me," he said roughly. "But first, take a gander at your forearm."

Pendergast fixed him with a direct, evaluating stare, then slowly complied, unsnapping the cuff of his jacket and pushing back the sleeve. The imprints of House's fingers were visible as pure white marks on his skin, an absence of perfusion. There wasn't enough blood in his veins to refill the capillaries. Tiny starburst patterns were erupting across the skin of his inner wrist.

"Doctor, there isn't time - "

"You're bleeding internally, which is causing low blood volume, rapid heartbeat, and the lightheadedness. Where's that blood that's supposed be in your veins going, you ask? All over the place. I notice you're having trouble catching your breath. Probably an indication of pleural effusion. Blood's oozing from the membrane lining your chest cavity and taking up the space your lungs need to inflate."

"Doctor - "

"I'm not done yet!" House barked. "It'll get worse, Pendergast. You need to be on IV fluids and Dilantin in case you start seizuring. Otherwise, little bits and pieces of your brain are going to start dying. Which may qualify you for the US Senate, but is probably a bad idea if you want to keep working as an FBI agent."

"Dr. House, I cannot afford any further delay."

"And I told you, you're not irreplaceable!"

"Did you inform Agent Kittredge?"

Pendergast lifted his sharp chin, indicating a dark object huddled against a broken down wall. With a sick shock, House realized that a man's body lay crumpled on its back under a thick tangle of briars. He was not unaccustomed to cadavers, of course, but there was something particularly chilling to come upon one out in the woods, forlorn and forgotten. And with the killer possibly still on the loose.

Suppressing a shiver, he pushed some of the thorny branches aside with his cane and leaned over to brush snow away from the face. House had barely glanced at him in the hospital, but he recognized the corpse as the young man hovering nervously over Pendergast's bed until the agent had shooed him away.

The man's flesh was stiff as a chunk of frozen beef, the skin a pearly blue-white, the eyes open and staring. Dead for hours. His head was turned too far to one side, and it was not a result of tendon shrinkage. Blood crusted the corners of his mouth and dark bruises mottled his throat. House probed the back of his neck and felt the jumble of broken, misaligned cervical vertebrae. Most strangulation deaths are caused by cutting off the supply of air or blood to the brain. Kittredge's murderer had twisted his skull off like a bottle cap.

"What killed him was not what killed Thomas Morgan," Pendergast said in a near-whisper. "But it was what left those tracks. The bruising on his face indicates deformities of the hand similar to those in the feet. The tracks are still relatively fresh. I intend to follow them."

"And if you do find the killer without keeling over, what good are you going to be?" House said.

All of a sudden, Pendergast looked tired. Intolerably, burdensomely tired. He wavered, and House was barely fast enough to catch him before he fell over.

He lowered Pendergast to the ground, trying not to drop him. Thin as he appeared, the agent was surprisingly heavy, all bone and limp, slippery muscle, like a sleeping cat.

"Hell," House said, making it sound less like a epithet and more like a description of the circumstances. "Great time for you to go belly up, Pendergast."

His pale eyes fluttered open, revealing red-scrawled sclera. "What is our situation?"

"We're not alone." House hunkered down beside him on the cold, hard ground. The tallest of the brittle weeds barely stood higher than the top of his head. "I saw something skulking around just now. They had to have seen us, so why hide? At least it's no Devil."

"Are you certain?" His voice was a low rasp.

House chuckled scornfully. "Not unless the Devil leaves size eleven boot prints."

"Assuredly not." Pendergast`s head sagged back, his eyes drooping closed once more. All that was needed to complete the picture was a lily on his chest. "Direct me to the prints, Doctor."

House took him by the wrist and guided his hands to the prints, only a few inches from where he was laying. Pendergast removed his gloves and with excruciating slowness and care ran his long, sensitive fingertips over the impressions in the frozen mud, like someone reading Braille. He nodded, as if this only confirmed something he'd suspected.

He gave the man a slap on the shoulder, a little too hard for it to be a reassuring pat. "It's your lucky day. No way could I drag your carcass back home on my own." Planting his cane securely in the icy mud and levering himself up, he called out, "Who's out there?"

A long silence from the woods, then a young, rather high voice quaveringly answered, "Don't shoot!"

"I don't have a gun," House yelled back. He felt it wasn't precisely necessary to mention Pendergast was packing heat, considering he was about one firing neuron away from being unconscious at the moment.

There was another nervous wait, then a short, goateed young man in a black trench coat emerged from the tree line and hurried over to them.

"Wow, damn, man," he exclaimed. "There are all kinds of crazy people running around out here today. Some dude almost filled my ass full of buckshot. Gotta be careful. You got a cell phone? Mine won't get anything this far out."

He held out a hand to help House upright, glancing worriedly at Pendergast, who lay on the ground, pale and limp as a worm on a rain-drenched sidewalk and whimpering quietly under his breath.

"Jesus, are you hurt?" The young man bent down, peering curiously at him. "Is he okay?"

With a lithe twist upwards, Pendergast threw himself on the trench coated stranger. The motion was so swift, so vicious and unexpected that House yelled as if he were the one being attacked and staggered backwards. He didn't see what Pendergast actually did to the boy, just a noiseless blur of speed. Something small, metallic and gun-shaped flew out of the trench coat's inner pocket and disappeared into a pile of leaves.

By the time House managed to sit up again, Pendergast had the boy pinned, twisting his cuffs in one hand, the other gripping the back of his head and grinding his face into the dirt, one knee digging viciously into his spine. House could barely make out a stream of muffled invective.

Pendergast turned to him. For an instant his face was distorted into a terrible, heart freezing snarl - a cat's face, predaceous, ferine and capable. The instant passed and his expression relaxed once again, and he asked smoothly, "Are you uninjured, Doctor? I apologize if I startled you."

"Good enough." If by that he meant his heart was not quite fibrillating badly enough to kill him, it was the truth. The adrenaline flooding his bloodstream would keep him on edge for several more minutes.

"Would you be so kind as to retrieve the young man's camera?" He nodded toward the object House had mistaken for a gun. In fact, it was a small digital camera with a pistol grip.

"Hands off my property, asshole! I have rights!" The young man made a mighty effort and lifted his face. "You fucking piece of crap! That's mine."

"And you would be?" Pendergast inquired.

"Mike Tzerkas, and that's my property, shithead. You can't touch it without a warrant or something, and I know that! "

"Do you kiss your mother with that mouth," House asked.

Tzerkas spit out a mouthful of dirt and snow. "I kiss your mother's c - "

Pendergast shoved the boy's face into the ground again, cutting him off, then said in that same uninflected voice, "Now, now. None of that. You seem to be well-acquainted with law enforcement procedures, Mr. Tzerkas. It might interest you to know that I'm an FBI agent, and you're impeding a murder investigation."

That shut the kid up for a few moments. Pendergast let go of him, and the boy sat up, rubbing his wrists. His eyes darted around, but he didn't seem likely to want to mess with them again.

Pendergast fiddled with the camera, unfolding a small screen. "Doctor, look at this."

House nudged up beside him, squinting down at the screen. It showed a shot of the forest floor, then jigged sideways and up to reveal a cleared area. A graveyard.

The camera zoomed in to pick up details. The headstones were incredibly ancient, skewed and cracked, the inscriptions obscured by lichens, moss, and erosion. Centuries of erosion. House could make out a date beginning in 17-. The camera panned slowly. Carefully stacked piles of rocks took the place of the headstones. The picture jumped erratically as the cameraman stepped closer, then pointed the camera directly into a freshly dug hole.

House realized his hands were curled into fists so tight his nails drew blood from his palms.

The body in the grave was human, but just barely. Already badly decayed, it had been tied up with dried vines in a curled position, knees drawn up to chest and arms wrapped around itself. The body was thinly coated with long strands of colorless, filament-like hair, the slender limbs were twisted with rickets. A hand reached into the shot, wearing the same orange and black ski gloves Tzerkas had one, and brushed away loose dirt and leaf mold, zooming in even closer on the face.

The image blurred momentarily, and House squinted so hard his head started to ache. He ignored the double rows of misshapen teeth studding the shrunken gums, the cleft palate that almost split the upper lip and nose in half, the still apparent reddish color of the sunken, desiccated eyes. Its skin was blotched by the same petechiae, the rash of burst capillaries, that marred Pendergast's skin. This unfortunate individual had survived an astounding collection of birth defects only to be killed by dengue hemorrhagic fever.

He looked up at Pendergast, grim as death.

There was the sound of something whizzing through the air at high speed. Pendergast's head snapped back, his mirror shades shattering in a spray of blood. He lashed out, knocking House flat to the ground, then spun and drew his gun, firing blind.

House lay on the ground struggling to catch his breath as Pendergast squeezed off three shots, then dropped to his stomach and wiped the blood from his face with the back of his arm. In the distance, something bellowed, then crashed away into the woods. Anyone else might have cursed, but Pendergast only let out a little hiss. He leapt up, eyes slitted almost shut, and ran towards the source of the agonized howling with his gun pointed in the air.

House rolled over onto his side, reaching for his cane. Tzerkas was faster, however, scrambling to his feet and snatching it away. House managed to get a grip on the very tip and pulled it back.

"What are you doing?"

That little pointed goatee made him look like a short, chunky Lucifer as he grinned. "You know what they say. You don't have to outrun the tiger, you just have to outrun the other two guys the tiger is chasing."

Reaching the edge of the clearing, Pendergast knelt and fired again. Tzerkas's head jerked up, his face contorting in dread. House realized the boy had been checking the woods the whole time. The quarter dropped in the slot.

"It's after you," House said.

The boy's stricken expression confirmed it. Whatever was attacking them, it followed or was led by Tzerkas. With a sudden terror-inspired strength, he yanked the cane out of House's grasp and leapt over the low wall, running hard back in the direction of the crime scene.

"Pendergast!" House wrenched himself up in a sitting position and cupped his hands around his mouth, bellowing, "Pendergast! I left the keys in my ATV!"

The agent spun around, but it was too late. He fired into the air once, but the boy was far more afraid of whatever had followed him to the Shourds House than of Pendergast.

He limped back to the ruins and crouched down beside House, sheltering in the low remains of the wall and the weeds growing around it.

"I apologize for my poor aim," Pendergast said. The plastic shards of the mirrored lens had sliced into the flesh of his forehead, and the deep gash was spilling blood he couldn't spare. Oddly, his breathing was no more disturbed than it already had been by the dengue.

"Yeah, remind me to shoot you in the head the next time you challenge me to a game of darts."

Pendergast narrowed his eyes, then dug around in the leaf litter, plucking out a small, round, blood-covered object. "Look at this."

"It's not a bullet?"

"It's a stone. Whoever attacked us was using a slingshot, I believe." He rolled it between his fingertips consideringly, then let it drop and fastidiously wiped the fresh blood off on his pants leg. "You had noticed the accumulation of small animal bones, I take it? Several of them have small bore holes in the skull that could have been made by just such a weapon. I suppose I should consider myself lucky."

"There are some advantages to being thick skulled." House dug around in his pocket and came up with a packet of moist towelettes. He ripped it open and began daubing at the blood flowing freely down his face. "See, Pendergast? You should listen to ol' Doc House. You wouldn't have gotten very far even if your brain weren't slowly being tenderized and cooked alive. Know what homozygosity for a 2.7 kilobase-pair deletion in the P gene means? No? You should. It means your gene that should be making the protein that packages and transports melanosomes is fucked up."

"If this is the set up for another albino joke, I believe I shall take a pass," Pendergast snapped. The flashpoint irritability would've been routine in any normal person, but in that ice sculpture of a human being, it was probably another disquieting symptom of worsening dengue fever.

"No joke. The mirror shades weren't just to conceal your eyes, were they? You're really being bothered by the snow glare."

Pendergast didn't answer.

"Of course," House persisted, mainly talking to himself now as he continued cleaning the wound. "Hardly any pigment in your eyes at all, is there? Not with that pale grayish blue color. Lack of pigment lets light leak into the retina through the iris muscle instead of just through the pupil. That's why they showed up purple-red under a low angle light. The color comes from the exposed blood vessels. Normally this causes only minor visual acuity problems which you've obviously managed to compensate for, but the high albedo of the ice and snow and cloud cover is bleaching out your retina. You're almost blind."

He patted the last bit of oozing blood away. "Well, that's my last wet-nap. You know, in the Amazon, the natives use a species of ant to close wounds instead of stitches. The soldier ants have these huge, oversized mandibles, you see. They make the little guys bite down on the wound, then twist the bodies off. Reflex action holds the mandibles shut. Works pretty good, actually. I saw it on the Discovery channel."

Pendergast seemed to be ignoring him, or perhaps he was growing lethargic. Not a good sign. That little display of sharp shooting must've taken far more out of him than he would like to admit. House could see an blotchy maculopapular rash creeping across the bare skin of the man`s neck, and with thrombocytopenia robbing his blood of oxygen-carrying red cells and a collection of myalgias and arthralgias assaulting his muscles and joints with searing inflammation, Pendergast couldn't be more than an hour or two away from total collapse.

But now he pushed House's steadying hand aside and stood up, checking his gun before replacing it in the holster. He squinted into the wind, scanning the woods in the direction their attacker had fled.

As annoying as the guy was, House had to admire that. He was stubborn, he was prideful, he was opinionated, he was totally convinced that not only was he right, but that delegating responsibilities into the hands of lesser beings meant certain disaster, and he wasn't about to let himself be stopped by a few things going drastically haywire in the meatsack his exquisitely developed mind was obligated to drag around.

Hell, it was like looking into a funhouse mirror.

"Say, Pendergast. Ever see a movie called El Topo?"

He probed his wound, then sighed. "I'm afraid I haven't had the pleasure."

"Cultural heathen," House said amiably. "Look, I can't walk without support for more than a few yards, and you can't see what the hell you're doing. On our own, neither of us is getting out of here before the blizzard kicks in. How about I lean on you and direct you?"

"And if we're attacked?"

"Give me your gun. Don't shake your head at me, junior g-man."

"Have you ever fired a gun, Doctor?"

"Do paintball rifles count?"

Pendergast seemed to be struggling with some inner quandary. With a shuddering moan, the wind blasted through the trees, kicking up a whirlwind of loose snow. House closed his eyes, but snow swirled into his ears and nose, melting instantly. When he opened them, he saw that the snowfall had commenced in earnest. Huge flakes tumbled down, each as distinct and ornamental as a Christmas decoration. The first few melted as soon as they touched the stones of the old Shourds House, then, as more and more fell, they began to stick.

Pendergast seemed to come to a decision. He pulled a different gun from a hidden holster. It was beautifully made, with a long, narrow barrel.

"This is a German Luger. It has the least kickback of anything I'm carrying." With brisk economy of motion, he slapped in the clip and yanked up the toggle, loading the chamber. "It's ready to shoot now. This is the safety." He pushed it on. "Just shove it forward and up, and pull the trigger. You have eight shots. It is not an Uzi, so remember you must pull the trigger for each shot. And be sure to put the safety back on when you're through."

House took the proffered gun, gingerly hefting it.

"Maybe I should take a test shot?" He aimed at a distant tree. Pendergast reached out, put his hand on the barrel and gently lowered it.

"You're inexperienced, and it's likely that after the first shot you'll flinch. It's nothing to be embarrassed about, it's a natural reaction to the sound and the recoil.". He unbuckled the holster and handed it to House. "We have no idea how good of a shot you are, and flinching will throw your shot even wilder. It would be best if you fired as though you only had a single bullet. At any rate, aim for the abdomen, not the chest. A perfect heart shot is nearly impossible and the ribs will protect it, possibly deflecting the bullet."

"Yes, teacher," he said truculently, strapping the holster on. Deadeye Greg and his sidekick, Kid Albino.

Devils, beware.