When the cruiser passed the slaughterhouse, Officer Rocher said, "That's where I should be taking you." Walter Hosler, known as Walt to the friends and family he once had, turned to the back window and watched pigs feed into the huge dark mouth of the building.

They arrived at Harbrook Hill under a sky the color of old concrete. Spikes glistened on immense stone walls, half hidden behind tangled branches and creeping ivy. The gate was taller than the surrounding woods and so black that the guard leaning against the wrought iron stuck out in his charcoal jacket. He twirled a finger to someone on the other side, then trotted over to the car. "So this is Safe-Man, huh?" A squeal was building in the air. Shudders spread up the gate from its wheels, which began slowly to turn. "Thought he'd be younger. Well, you better hurry along. Sir Hudgins was expecting you half an hour ago, and God knows he's not patient."

"Sir Hudgins?" said Officer Rocher.

With a shrug, "Not exactly. But he sure acts it, and his first name is Arthur. You better call him by Mister though, or he'll have off with your head." The guard dragged his pointer finger across his neck. He lost his smile. As the pathway opened behind him, he turned his eyes on Walter. "What'd you do with hers, anyhow? You bury it?"

He was still staring when the cruiser pulled away.

Another guard waited on the other side, the shadow of the wall pulled like a hood over his face. He yanked on a lever and the gate began to grind shut, its black mass filling the rearview mirror. Walter felt the car give a lurching dip as the front end eased off solid ground onto an old bridge. Wooden trestles, fat at the bottom with moss, reached up from banks that appeared to be slumping into the river. Officer Rocher drove slow across the creaking beams, his hands tight on the steering wheel. The white didn't leave his knuckles until the cruiser was safely crowded in woods again.

The trees pressed more closely here, roots creeping over the shoulder, branches clipping the windshield at each bend in the road. Among the pine and hemlock stood an occasional splash of color, a red maple, its leaves bright as bloodstains. Walter's wife, Alva, had loved those trees. In the fall when school was starting and the first brisk winds were beginning to blow, she would come home in the evening and sit beneath one of the maples in their yard—sit and read for hours—until it was too dark to see the words. He'd come to understand that she would have stayed out there forever if possible, lived her life faraway between the lines.

After ten winding minutes, the woods spit them out onto an immense sloping lawn, carved in half by a scar-tissue streak of asphalt. Harbrook Hill stood at the top, a polished fossil towering white under the closed ceiling of the sky. Walter had belonged to a labor crew for over thirty years, and knew a thing or two about paint. That white was fresh, still too stark to have seen winter or felt more than a few rainfalls.

Perhaps, he thought, perhaps it had been his crew to do the work. Kolewood was a small town, after all. He pictured the men he'd sweat with for so long out here, dressing up his new home for him. A job like that must have taken the whole summer, crawling along the walls in the heat, three stories of walls with fluted columns framing the entrance and a gabled roof riding above a wide band of trim—all of it, down to the narrowest ledges, white.

Officer Rocher parked directly in front of the steps. He yanked open Walter's door. "Come on then. Get up." Walter didn't move. He had noticed the iron bars in the windows, like the spikes mounted on the perimeter, only thicker. The kind of bars that were buried deep in concrete. The kind that hadn't budged an inch in a century and wouldn't anytime soon, no matter who or what pulled on them. Dungeon bars. That was good.

That was safe.

"You deaf as well as dumb, old man?" He grabbed Walter by the handcuffs. "I said. Get. Up." This time Walter did as he was told. There was an audible click as the officer's teeth snapped shut. Officer Rocher had been distracted before the drive, too busy scribbling out paperwork to help his fellow policemen shove Walter in the cruiser, and now it was the real thing in front of him, not words on a page or an image in the rearview mirror.

Walter stood over six and a half feet tall. His arms filled out the sleeves of his orange jumpsuit. His hands were rough and large and callused. He looked down on Officer Rocher, who had mistaken the gray hairs in his beard for infirmity, and said nothing as he always did.

"This way," Rocher said weakly, and followed with his hand attached to his gun. They entered into a lobby as sober a white as the outside. Four empty chairs surrounded a bare table. Rectangular light fixtures lined the ceiling in rows. The latch caught behind them, then a head poked from an open doorway.

"Hey, look at that," it said, still without a neck, "Delivery's here. Should I sign on the dotted line?"

"Walter Hosler," announced Officer Rocher.

The guard stepped into the room, his black uniform unbuttoned at the collar and baton swinging loosely at his waist.

"To be transferred," Officer Rocher went on, "from the holding cell in Boston on August 16th—"

"I know who he is, where he's from, what he's done."The guard stroked the blond stubble on his chin. "Didn't know he was such a big bastard though. Must have been a tight squeeze in there."

"I was told to talk to Mr. Hudgins. Are you—"

"God no. Do I look like a Mr. Hudgins to you? My name's Jimmy. Jimmy Loft. Mr. Hudgins is in his office. Follow me."

Officer Rocher tugged on Walter's arm, and as they passed the room that Jimmy had popped out of, Walter heard a second pair of feet emerge from the doorway. The footsteps paced slowly after them on the polished floor. Walter didn't look back to see who they belonged to; he was more concerned with what lay ahead.

Jimmy led them down a hallway decorated with oil paintings and pictures. The oldest, a fuzzy black and white photograph of a group of men gathered in a courtyard, was dated 1865. "This is the administrative and maintenance wing. First floor is security. Second is the psychology department. Third is leftovers. Got a room up there with a bed where Mr. Hudgins sleeps when he doesn't go home, which is often."

Officer Rocher grunted. "Thanks for the tour."

"You're welcome," said Jimmy, either unaware of the sarcasm or untroubled by it. He stopped at a door near the end of the hallway, and the footsteps drew closer behind them before stopping as well. "Here we are."

He lifted his hand to knock, then a voice from inside called, "Bring them in."

Arthur Hudgins sat in a leather chair, his hands folded on a spotless desk of cherry-finished oak. His hairline receded halfway up the sides of his head. "Forms?"

Officer Rocher handed Mr. Hudgins a slip of paper, which he scanned, signed with a pen at the bottom, and returned.

"Mr. Rocher, would you unlock Mr. Hosler?"

Walter's escort produced a small silver key from his pocket. He didn't look up once as he removed the handcuffs. "Anything else?"

"If you'd like a coffee on the way out, the staffroom is the one door in the lobby."

Officer Rocher hurried out of the office, squeezing past Jimmy, who had stopped just inside the open door. Arthur motioned at the empty seat in front of his desk. "You can sit, Mr. Hosler."

Walter did not.

"Your choice. My name is Arthur Hudgins. I'm the chief of security at Harbrook Hill." He removed Walter's file from a drawer and opened it but ignored the contents, instead focusing on Walter with his small black eyes. "This is a hybrid institution, both punitive and reformative. You will be assigned a psychologist, who will attempt to diagnose and treat whatever mental illness ails you, as if the mind were a puzzle box to be solved. He or she will spend two hours with you per week, provided you are decent." Arthur let out a curt laugh. "What have we come to that indecent men are given such a kindness?"

Jimmy showed no inclination to answer, which was well enough because Arthur seemed to expect none. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms, bundling the muscle under his skin. "Your file states that you haven't spoken in a year, but I assume that you still have the ability to hear. Well, hear this: if the doctors of Harbrook Hill are the voice of compassion, then I am the voice of reason. There are 60 rooms in the East Ward and 59 residents, including you. In a decade, only eight men and women have been released from the building. Two were deemed harmless enough to be transferred to the West Ward, where they still remain, and the other six left in hearses. This may look like a hospital, Mr. Hosler, but make no mistake. You are in prison."

Arthur returned the file to the drawer. "Jimmy, Tim, show him to his room. And see that he gets a pair of tans. He looks like a pumpkin in that jumpsuit." Something closed around his bicep. It was a hand, though the fingers had felt for a moment like jaws. Walter looked up at the close, sharp-lined face of the man who had appeared beside him.

Tim looked about forty, fifteen or so years younger than Walter and much older than Jimmy, who wouldn't age a day until he lost that boyish grin. His cheeks were clean shaven and etched with a strong jaw line, his eyes watchful and hard to read.

"One more thing, Mr. Hosler," said Mr. Hudgins as Tim guided him to the door. "As you're a local, born and raised, I'm sure you've heard the saying that there are two types of people in Kolewood: those that work in the schools and those that work here at Harbrook Hill. Well, it seems that they forgot about folks like you." His voice was flat as a heart monitor on a corpse. "If it were up to me, I'd tie a rope around your neck and throw you from your cell. I don't care what the doctors think. You'd hang even if your brain was soup."

On the way out, a hairless man with heavy glasses and a nose barely large enough to support them peered down at Walter from a picture frame. His face was pinched with a pitiless smile, lips so thin and pale they would have been the same color photographed in black and white. Edmund Hudgins, 1905 – 1987, Warden of Harbrook Hill. A Sir if there ever was one. Arthur had inherited the title from his father, whether he knew it or not.

Walter was glad for a knight. A knight could be trusted to keep all the locks and keys in check.