Southern

to an old, ugly hate they'd thought they were defeating—and they seemed helpless before it.
"Gentlemen," Farnam said, "believe me, I understand. And it's not just us. Every Southeastern state north of Florida is involved, and none of us has any idea why it's happening. We're asking the Justice Department to put the FBI on it, but I don't really expect them to find the answer either. The economy's strong. There's no special hardship to bring out the worst in people. It's like it just . . . appeared out of nowhere." He saw from their expressions that he'd told them nothing they didn't already know, and his face darkened with rage.
"Goddamn it!" He slammed a fist on the conference table, and his curse was a mark of just how distressed he was, for he was a devout Southern Baptist who abhorred profanity. "We were on top of it! We were making better racial progress than any other part of the country! What in God's name went wrong?"
It was a strong man's desperate plea for enlightenment, and no one had an answer at all.

"It goes well, Blake Taggart?" The Troll's voice had become very nearly human in the past several months of conversation with his minion.
"Very well, Master," Taggart said with a grin. He scarcely noticed any longer that he used the title the Troll had demanded of him. There were moments when he worried—fleetingly—that the Troll's insanity was infecting his own brain, but they were increasingly less frequent, for his master's nihilism had begun to send its strange, dark fire crawling through his own veins. He was becoming the Troll's Renfield; he knew it, yet it scarcely bothered him. He'd discovered the controls the Troll had set within his own brain and body, and, strangely, they didn't bother him, either. The operation had become something