Everville

PART Two CONGREGATION ONE

'Forgive me, Evervffle." The words were written in fading sepia ink on paper the color of unwashed bed sheets, but Erwin had read texts far less legible in the sixteen years h6'd been dealing with the will and testaments of Everville's citizens. Evelyn Morris's final instructions for instance ('Put the dogs to sleep, and bury them with me'), written in iodine on a table lamp beside her deathbed; or Dwight Hanson's codicil, scrawled in the margin of a book on duck decoys.

Erwin had read somewhere that Oregon had a larger percentage of heretical thinkers per capita than any other state. More activists, more flat sts, more survivalists; all happy to have three thousand miles between them and the seat of govennnent. Out of sight, in a state that was still comparatively empty, they went their own sweet way; and what better place to leave a statement about their individuality than their last words to the world?

But even by the high standard of eccentricity he'd encountered in his time as an attorney, the testament he was now studying was a benchmark. It was not so much a will as a confession; a confession which had gone unread in the @ or so years since it had been written in March of 1965. Its author was one Lyle McPherson, whose goods and chattels had apparently been so negligible upon his passing that nobody had cared to look for any indication as to how he had wanted them divided. Either that, or his only son, Frank, whose sudden demise had brought the confession into in's hands, had discovered it, read it, and decided that it as best kept hidden. Why he had not destroyed it completely ly the dead man knew for certain, but perhaps somewhere in his soul McPherson the Younger had been perversely proud of the claims his father made in this document, and had toyed with the possibility of one day making it public.

True or not, the contents would have certainly claimed the cover of the Evel-i,ille Tribune for a couple of weeks and perhaps brought McPherson-who had lived a blameless but dull life running the city's only Drain Rooter and Septic Service-a welcome touch of notoriety.

If that had indeed been his plan, death had foiled it. McPherson the Younger had passed from the world with only a seven-line obituary in the Tribune (five lines of which bemoaned the lack of a replacement Drain Rooter and Septic Service now that good ol' Frank was gone) to mark his exit. The life and crimes of McPherson the Elder, however, were waiting to be discovered, and now, sitting by the window in the heat of the late August sun, their discoverer pondered how best to show them to the world.

It was certainly a good time to find himself an audience. Every year, at the last weekend of August, Everville had a festival, and for three days its otherwise quiet streets became thronged, its population (which had stood at 7403 at the previous November's census) swelling to half that size again. Every hotel, inn, motel, and lodging house in that region of the Willamette Valley, from Aurora and Molina in the north to Sublimity and Aumsville in the south was occupied, and there was scarcely a store in town that didn't do more business over Festival Weekend than it did in the three months preceding it. The actual substance of the festival was of variable quality. The town band, which in fact drew players from as far afield as Wilsonville, was very capable, and Saturday's parade, featuring the band, floats, and a troupe of drum majorettes, was usually counted the highlight of the weekend. At the other end of the scale were the pig races and the frisbee-throwing contests, which were ineptly organized, and had several years ended in fistfights.

But the crowds who came to Everville in their hundreds every August didn't come for the music, or the pig racing. 'I hey came because it was a fine excuse to drink, dance, and enjoy the last of summer before the leaves started to turn. Only once in the years Erwin had been a resident of the town had it rained on Festival Weekend. This year, if the weather reports were to be trusted, the entire week ahead would be balmy, with temperatures climbing to the low eighties by Friday. Perfect Festival weather. Dorothy Bullard, who ran the offices of the Chamber of Commerce when she wasn't accepting cash for water bills, fronting the Tourist Board, or flirting with Jed Gilholly, the city's police captain, had announced in last week's Tribune that the Chamber of Commerce expected this year's Festival to be the most popular yet. If a man wanted to drop a bombshell, there could scarcely be a better time to do it.

With that in mind, Erwin went back to the pages on his lap, and studied them for the fourth time.

Forgive me, Everville, McPherson the Elder had begun.

I don't much like having to write these things that I'm going to write, but I got to put down the truth while I still can, being as I'm the only one left to tell it.

The fact is, everyone in town knew what we did that night, and they all was happy we did it. But there was only me, Verl Nordhoff, and Richie Dolan who knew the whole story, and now Verl's dead and I guess Richie got so crazy he killed himself, so that leaves me.

I ain't writing this to save my soul. I don't believe in Heaven and Hell. They're just words. I ain't going any where when I'm dead except into the dirt. I just want to say all of it straight, just once, though it don't show Everville up real pretty.

What happened was this. On the night of August 27, 1929, me and Nordhoff and Dolan hung three people from a tree on the mountain. One of them we hung was a cripple, and I feel more ashamed for that than I do about the other two. But they was all in it together, and the only reason he was crippled was he had bad blood in him...

The phone rang, and Erwin, wrapped up in his study, ju mped. He waited for his answering machine to pick up the call, but it had been on the blink for weeks, and failed to do so. He let the phone go on finging till the caller got bored, returned to the confession. Where was he? Oh yes, the t about the bad blood.

... and the way he jerked around on that rope, and hollered even though he couldn't breathe, I believe all the things folks were saying about him and his wife and that animal child of his.

We didn't find no human bones in the house, like we thought we might, but there was other weird stuff, like the pictures painted on the walls, and these carvings the cfippie had made. That's why we set fire to the house, so's nobody would have to see any of that shit. And I don't regret none of that, because the son was definitely going after innocent children, and the mother was a whore from way back. Everybody knew that. She'd had a whorehouse fight here in town, only it had been closed down in the twenties, and that's when she'd lost her mind and gone to live in the house by the creek with her crazy family.

So then when Rebecca Jenkins disappeared and her body was found in the reservoir, there wasn't nobody doubted what had happened. They'd kidnapped her on her way from school and done whatever they'd done to her then thrown her body in the creek, and it had been washed down into the reservoir. Only there was no proof. People was talking about it, and they were saying it was pitiful that the police couldn't pin it on the whore and her son and her damn husband, because everyone knew they'd been seen with kids before, kids they'd found in Portland, and brought back to the house at night, and if they got away with it again, with a kid from fight here in Everville, nobody's kids were going to be safe.

So that's when the three of us decided to do something about it. Dolan had known the Jenkins girl because she'd used to come by his store, and when he'd think about what had happened to her he'd get choked up and he'd be ready to go hang the whore right there and then. Richie had a little girl of his own, who was right about Rebeeca's age, and he kept saying if we can't keep the children safe we weren't worth a damn. So that's what we did. We went out to the creek, we burned the house, and then we took the three of them up the mountain and hanged them.

And everyone knew what we'd done. The house burned almost to the ground and nobody came to put out the fire. they just stayed out of sight till we'd done what we'd done and we'd come back down again.

But that wasn't the end of it. The following year, the police caught a man from Scotts Mills who'd killed a girl in Sublimity and he told them he'd murdered Rebecca too, and dumped her in the creek.

The day I heard that I got crazy drunk, and I stayed drunk for a week. People looked at me different after that, like I'd been a hero because of what we'd done and now I was just a killer.

Dolan took it even worse, and he started getting real angry, saying it was everybody's fault cause everybody knew, and that was true in a way. Everville was as much to blame as we were, and I hope if this ever gets read people forgive me for writing it down, but it's the truth, I swear on my mother's grave.

And then, in the same abrupt manner it had begun, McPherson's testimony ended, begging more questions than it answered and all the more intriguing for that.

Reading it over again left Erwin more excited than ever. He got up and paced around his office, chewing over the options available to him. It was his duty to bring this secret to light, that was not in doubt. But if he did so in Festival Week, when the city was polishing itself to perfection, he would gain a much larger audience while making enemies of his friends and clients.

Part of him replied: So what? Hadn't he been telling himself it was time to move on while he was still young enough to relocate? And what better calling card could he have than to be the man who had uncovered the McPherson Conspiracy? The other part of him, the part that had grown comfortable in this corner of the world, said: Have a little care for people's feelings. Let this news out in Festival Week and you'll be a pariah.

He paced, and he chewed, and finally he decided not to decide, at least not yet. First he'd check his facts to be certain the confession wasn't just McPherson's invention. Find out if a child called Rebecca Jenkins had indeed been dredged from reservoir, if there had ever been a house by the creek, and f so, what had happened to those who'd occupied it.

He made a photocopy of McPherson's confession in Bettijane's office

(he'd given her the day off so she could drive into Portland and pick up her mother), then sealed the original in an envelope and locked it up in the safe. That Two done, he folded up the copy, slipped it into his jacket pocket, and went out for lunch at Kitty's Diner. He wasn't by nature a self-analytical man, but as he wandered down Main Street he couldn't help but be struck by the paradox of his present mood. Murder, suicide, and the dispatch of innocents filled his head, but he could not remember when he'd last felt so utterly content with his lot in life.

There were those among Dr. Powell's patients that late morning who had seen looks like this on Phoebe Cobb's face before, and they knew from experience that caution was the byword. Woe betide the patient who reported to reception five minutes late, or worse still attempted to justify their tardiness with some lame excuse. Being carted into the waiting room in six pieces would not have won a sympathetic smile from Phoebe in her present mood.

There were even one or two of the doctor's regulars Mrs. Converse, here for a fresh supply of blood pressure pills, and Arnold Heacock, in need of suppositories-who were familiar enough with Phoebe to have guessed the rea son for her demeanor, and would have been correct in their assumptions.

Five and a half pounds. How was that possible? She'd not touched a candy or a doughnut in three weeks. She hadn't allowed herself even to inhale near a plate of fried chicken.

How was it possible to eat so frugally, to deny her body everything it craved, and still put on five and a half pounds? was the air in Everville fattening these days?

Audrey Laidlaw had just stalked in, holding her belly.

"I have to see Dr. Powell," she said, before she'd even reached the counter.

"Is it an emergency?" Phoebe wanted to know, floating the question so as not to betray the trap beneath.

"Yes! Absolutely!"

"Then you should have someone drive you over to Phoebe replied. "they deal with emergencies there."

"It's not that much of an emergency," the Laidlaw woman snapped.

"Then you'll have to make an appointment." Phoebe consulted her diary.

"Tomorrow at ten forty-five?"

Audrey Laidlaw narrowed her eyes. "Tomorrow?" she said. Phoebe kept smiling, which was a reliable irritant, and was pleased to see the woman grinding her teeth. Only two months before, under circumstances not unlike these, the thin and neurotic Miss Laidlaw had marched out of the waiting room muttering fat bitch just loudly enough to be heard. Phoebe had thought there and then: You wait.

"Will you just tell Dr. Powell I'm here?" Audrey said. "I'm sure he'll see me."

"He's with a patient," Phoebe said. "If you want to take a seat@'

"This is intolerable," the woman replied, but she had little choice in the matter. The round lost, she retired to a chair by the window, and fumed. Phoebe didn't stare, in case she looked triumphant, but went back to sorting the mail.

"Where have you been all my life?"

She looked up, and Joe was leaning over the counter, his words little more than a whisper. She glanced past his broad frame to see that everyone in the waiting room was looking their way, the same question in every gaze: What is a black man in paint-spattered overalls doing whispering to a married woman like Phoebe Cobb?

"What time are you finished here?" he asked her softly.

"You've got paint in your hair."

"I'll shower. What time?"

"You shouldn't be here."

He shrugged and smiled. Oh, how he smiled. "Around three," she said.

"You got a date."

With that he was gone, and she was left meeting half a dozen stares from around the room. She knew better than to look away. It would instantly be construed as guilt. Instead, she gave her audience a gracious little smile and stared back, hard, until they had all dropped their gazes. Then, and only then, did she return to the mail, though her hands were trembling so badly she was butterfingered for the next hour, and her mood so much sweetened, she even found a few minutes for Audrey Laidlaw to be given something for her dyspepsia.

Joe could do that to her: Come in and change her way of being in a matter of moments. It was wonderful of course, but it was also dangerous. Sooner or later, Morton would look up at her from his meatloaf and ask her why she was sparkling tonight and she wouldn't be able to keep the truth from her lips.

"Joe," she'd say. "Joe Flicker. You know who he is. You can't miss him."

"What about him?" Morton would reply, his tight little mouth getting tighter as he spoke. He didn't like blacks.

"I'm spending a lot of time with him," she'd say.

"What the hell for?" he'd say, and she'd look up at the face she'd married, the face she'd loved, and while she was wondering when it had become so sour and sad, he'd start yelling, "I don't want you talking with a nigger!"

And she'd say, "I don't just talk to him, Morton." Oh yes, she'd love to say that. "We kiss, Morton, and we get naked, and we do-"

"Phoebe?"

She snapped out of her reverie to find Dr. Powell at her side with the morning's files.

"Oh-I'm sorry."

"We're all done. Are you all right? You look a little flushed."

"I'm fine." She relieved him of the files and he started to pick through his mail. "Don't forget you've got a Festival meeting."

He glanced up at the clock. "I'll grab a sandwich and go straight over. Damn Festival. I'll be glad when it's-Oh, I've referred Audrey Laidlaw to a specialist in Salem."

"Is it something serious?"

He tossed the letters back onto the desk. "Maybe cancer," he said.

"Oh Lord."

"Will you lock up?"

That happened, over and over. People came in to see the doctor with a headache or a backache or a bellyache and it turned out to be something terminal. They'd fight it, of course: pills, scans, injections. And once in a while they'd win. But more often than not she'd watch them deteriorate, week in, week out, and it was still hard after seven years, seeing that happen; seeing people's strength and hope and faith in things slip away. There was always such emptiness towards the end; such bitter looks on their faces, as though they'd been cheated of something and they couldn't quite figure out what. Even the churchgoers, the ones she'd see in front of the tree in the square at Christmas singing hallelujahs, had that look. God wanted them in his bosom, but they didn't want to go; not until they'd made sense of things here.

But suppose there was no sense to be made? That was what she had come to believe more and more: that things happened, and there was no real reason why. You weren't being tested, you weren't being rewarded, you were just being. And so was everybody and everything else, including tumors and bad hearts: all just being.

She had found the simplicity of this strangely comforting, and she'd made her own little religion of it.

Then Joe Flicker had been hired to paint the hallway outside the surgery, and her homemade temple had cracked. It wasn't love, she'd told herself from the start. In fact, it wasn't anything important at all. He was an opportunist who'd taken a passing fancy to her, and she'd played along because she was flattered and she always felt sexier in the summer months, so why not flirt with him a little? But the flirting got serious, and secret, and before very long she was ready to scream if he didn't kiss her. Then, he did, and she was ready to scream if they didn't go all the way. Then they had, and she'd gone home with paint marks on her breasts and her belly, and sat in the bath and cried for a solid hour, because it felt like this was a reward and a test and a punishment all in one.

It still did. She was thirty-six years old, twenty pounds overweight

(her estimation, not Joe's), with small features on a moonish face, pale skin that freckled in the sun, ginger hair (with a few strands of gray already), and a mean streak she had from her mother. Not, she had long ago decided, a particularly attractive package. In Morton, she'd found a husband who didn't know or care what he'd married, for better or worse, as long as he was fed and the television worked. A man who'd decided at thirty that the best was over and only a fool would look beyond tomorrow, who increasingly defined himself by his bigotries, and who had not touched her between her legs in thirteen months.

So how then-how, how?-had she come to her present state of grace? How was it possible that this man from North Carolina this Joe, who'd had a life of adventuring-he'd been stationed in Germany while he was in the army, he'd lived in Washington, D.C., for a while, Kentucky for a while, California for a while-how was it possible that this man had become so devoted to her?

When they talked, and they talked a lot, she wondered sometimes if he was quizzing her about her life the way he did because the same question vexed him; as though he was digging around for some clue as to what it was in her that drew him. Then again, perhaps he was simply curious.

"I can't get enough of you," he'd say over and over, and kiss her in ways and places that would have appalled Morton.

She thought of those kisses now, as she let herself into the house. It was six minutes to three. He was always on time (army training, he'd said once); six minutes and he'd be here. she'd read in a magazine a couple of weeks ago that scientists were saying time was like putty; it could be pulled and pushed, and she'd thought I could have told them that. Six minutes was six hours waiting on the back doorstep (Joe never used the front, it was too conspicuous, but the house was the last on the row and there was just wooded land beyond, so it was easy to come in from that direction unseen); waiting for a glimpse of him between the trees, knowing that once he arrived time would be squeezed in the other direction, and an hour, or an hour and a half, would fly by in a matter of moments.

There he was, pushing his way through the thicket, his eyes already upon her and never leaving her, not for a stride, of for a glance. And the clock in the living room that had belonged to Morton's mother and had never kept good time until she died, was sounding three o'clock. And all was well with the world.

they climbed the stairs unbuttoning as they went. By the time they reached the spare bedroom (they'd never made love in the marital bed) her breasts were bare, and he had his arms around her from behind, toying as they went. He loved nothing better than to pleasure her this way, his face against the nape of her neck, his chest hard against her back, his embrace absolute. She reached back to unzip him. As ever, she found her hands full.

"I've missed this!" she said, sliding her hand along his dick.

"It's been three days," he said. "I've been going crazy." He turned and sat on the edge of the bed, pulling her down so she perched on his knees, then opening her legs by opening his own. His hand went into her with unerring ease.

"Oh baby," he said, "that's what I need." He played with her, in and out. "That's the hottest pussy, baby. You got the hottest fucking pussy@' She loved to hear him say the words out loud, the dirty words she only wanted to hear or say when she was with him, the words that made her new, and ready.

"I'm going to fuck you till you're crazy. You want that?"

"Yes-"

"Tell me."

"I want you to fuck me@' She was starting to gasp.

"Now?"

"Till I'm-2'

"Yeah.

"Till I'm crazy."

She fumbled with his belt buckle, but he shoved her hands away and rolled her over, face to the quilt, hoisting up her dress and tearing down her panties. Backside in the air, legs apart, she reached behind her, the words always easier than she'd thought they'd be.

"Give me your cock."

And it was in her hands as though she'd summoned it, slick and hot-headed. She pressed it against her pussy. He held back for a few seconds, then slid it all inside, down to the zipper from which it still poked.

In the tiny committee room above the Chamber of Commerce, Larry Powell watched while Ken Hagenaner went through a full list of the weekend's activities and heard not a word, pre occupied as he was with his return home to Montana the weekend after next. And in the offices below, Erwin Toothaker waited while Dorothy Bullard called around to see if anyone could let the attorney into the old schoolhouse, where the Historical Society kept its collection, because he needed to do some urgent research. And while he waited Erwin eyed the yel lowed tape at the top of the window frames, still holding down an inch of Christmas tinsel, and the faded photographs of the mayor before last with his arms around the Bethany twins on their sixteenth birthdays, and he thought: I hate this place. I never realized till now. I hate it.

And outside, on Main Street, a youth called Seth Lundy-just turned seventeen and never been kissed-halted in the middle of the sidewalk outside the Pizza Place and listened to a sound he had not heard since Easter Sunday: the din of hammers knocking on the sky from Heaven's side.

He looked up, straight up above his head, because that was where the cracks usually began, but the blue was flaw less. Puzzled, he studied the sky for maybe fifteen minutes, during which time the meeting in the committee room was brought to a tidy conclusion, and Erwin decided to tell the truth to the largest audience he could find, and somewhere behind closed drapes in a house on the edge of town, Phoebe Cobb began to quietly weep.

"What's wrong?"

"Don't stop."

"You're crying, baby-"

"It's all right. I'll be all right." She reached behind her; put her hand on his buttocks, pressing him home, and as she did, the three words she'd kept under lock and key escaped.

"I love you."

Oh Lord, what had she said? Now he'd leave her. Run away and find some other desperate woman, who didn't tell him she loved him when all he wanted was a fuck in the afternoon. A younger woman; a slimmer woman.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"So am I," he replied.

There! He was going to pull out and leave right now.

"It's going to cause a lot of trouble, what's happening with you and me."

He kept fucking her while he talked, not missing a stroke, and it was such bliss she was sure she'd missed the sense of what he'd said. He couldn't have meant

"I love you back. Oh baby, I love you so much. I can't think straight sometimes. It's like I'm in a daze till I'm here. Right here."

It would be too cruel of him to lie, and he wasn't cruel, she knew that, which meant he was telling the truth.

Oh Lord, he loved her, he loved her, and if all the trouble in the world would come down on their heads because Of it, she didn't care.

She started to turn in his arms so that she could be face to face with him. It was a difficult maneuver, but her body was different in his arms, lusher and more malleable. Now came those kisses she could feel the day after; the kisses that made her lips burn and her tongue ache; the kisses that brought the tremors that had her shaking and hollering as though possessed. Only today there were words between them, promises of his undying devotion. And the tremors, when they came, rose from some place that was not in any anatomy book on the doctor's shelf. An invisible, unnameable place that neither God nor tumors could touch.

"Oh, I almost forgot-" he said while they were dressing, and fumbled around in the top pocket of his overalls. "I wanted you to have this. And after this afternoon-well, it's more important than ever."

He pulled out a photograph and handed it to her.

"That's my Mom, that's my brother Ron, he's the baby of the family, and that'@) my sister Noreen. Oh yeah, and that'@ me." He was in uniform, and shining with pride. "i look good, huh?"

"When was this taken?"

"The week after I came out of basic training," he said.

"Why didn't you stay in the army?"

"It's a long story," he said, his smile fading.

"You don't have to-" The phone interrupted her. "Oh shit! I'm not going to answer that."

"It could be important."

"Yeah, and it could be Morton," she said. I don't want to talk to him right now."

"We don't want him getting suspicious," Joe said, "at least till we've made up our minds how we're going to handle all this."

She sighed, nodded, and hurried down to the phone, calling back as she went: "We have to talk about this soon."

"How 'bout tomorrow? Same time?" She told him yes, then picked up the receiver. It wasn't Morton, it was Emmeline Harper, who ran the Historical Society, an overwrought woman with a puffed up view of her own importance.

"Phoebe-"

"Emmeline?"

"Phoebe, I need a favor. Dorothy just called, and apparently somebody needs to get into the schoolhouse to look through the records. I can't get over there, and I was wondering would you be a sweetheart?" No was on the tip of Phoebe's tongue. Then Emmeline said: "It's that nice Mr. Toothaker, the attorney? Have you met him?"

"Yes. A couple of years back." A bit of a cold fish, as she remembered. But maybe this wouldn't be such a bad time to talk to a man who knew the law. She could quietly quiz him about divorce, and maybe she'd learn something to her advantage.

"I mean I'm sure he's very trustworthy-I don't think for a moment he'd tamper with the collection, but I think somebody should be there to let him in and show him what's what." "Fine."

"He's over at the Chamber of Commerce. Can I call F: over and say you'll be twenty minutes?"

Society had been a repository for all manner of items relating to the city's past. One of the first and most valuable bequests came from Hubert Nordhoff, whose family had owned and run the mill that now stood deserted on the Molina road, three-quarters of a mile out of town. In the three and a half decades between 1880 and 1915, the Nordhoff Mill had pro vided employment for a good portion of Everville's citizens, while helping to amass a considerable fortune for the Nordhoffs. they had built a mansion in Salem, and another in Oregon City, before withdrawing from the blanket- and fabric-making business and putting their money into lumber, real estate (most of it in Portland), and even, it was rumored, an-naments. Hubert Nordhoff's bequest of some thousand photographs of life at the mill, along with several other pieces of memorabilia, had been widely interpreted as a belated act of contrition for his ancestor's sudden desertion; the years immediately following the closure of the mill had been Everville's darkest hour, economically speaking.

The Nordhoff bequest had begun a small avalanche of gifts. Seventeen watercolors of local scenes, prettily if some what blandly painted by the wife of Everville's first dentist, were now framed and hung in the walls of the schoolhouse

(the renovation of which had been paid for by H. Nordhoff).

A collection of walking sticks topped with the heads of fantastical animals, carved by one of the city's great eccentrics, Milius Biggs, was displayed in a glass case in what had been the principal's office.

But far outnumbering these aesthetic bequests were more mundane offerings, most of them from ordinary Evervillians. School reports, wedding announcements, obituaries, family albums, a collection of cuttings from The Oregonian, all of which mentioned the town (this assembled by the librarian Stanley Tharp, who had stammered traumatically for sixty-one years but on his deathbed had recited Milton's Paradise Lost without a stumble), and of course family letters in their hundreds.

The labor of organizing such a large body of material was slow, given that all the Society's workers were volunteers. Two of the schoolhouse's five rooms were still piled high with boxes of unsorted gifts, but for those visitors interested in Everville's past, the remaining three rooms offered a pleasant, if somewhat over-tidy, glimpse of the early days.

It was highly selective of course, but then so were most history lessons. There was no place in this celebration of the Evervillian spirit for the darker side; for images of destitution, or suicide, or worse. No room, either, for any individual who didn't fit the official version of how things had come to be. There were pictures of the city in its infancy, and accounts of how its roads were laid and its fine houses built. But of Maeve O'Connell, who had ventured to the shores of another world, and returned to make her father's dream real, there was no sign. And in that disinheritance lay the seeds of Everville's undoing.

Phoebe was a little late coming for Erwin, but he was all politeness. He was soriy to be inconveniencing her this way, he said, but it really was urgent business. No, he couldn't really tell her what it was about, but it would be public knowledge before very long, and he'd be certain to thank her for her kindness in print. There was no need, she insisted; but she'd be very grateful if after the weekend she could come and pick his brains in a legal matter. He readily agreed. was she planning to make a will?

No, she said, I'm planning to divorce my husband. to which he replied divorce was not really his area of expertise but he'd be happy to chat with her about it In confidence, she said. Of course, he told her. She should drop by his offices on Monday morning.

The schoolhouse was still baking hot, even though it was now close to six, and while Phoebe went around raising the blinds and opening the windows, Erwin wandered from room to stifling room, peering at the pictures. "Can you tell me what you're looking for?" Phoebe asked him.

"I mean, vaguely."

"Back issues of the Tribune, for one thing," Erwin said. "Apparently they don't have room to keep them at their offices, so they're here."

"And what else?"

"Well, I'm not familiar with the collection. Is it arranged chronologically?"

"I'm not sure. I think so." She led Erwin through to the back room, where six tables were piled with files. "I used to come and help sort through things," she said. "But this last year's been so hectic-" She flicked through one of the piles. "These are all marked nineteen forty to forty-five." She moved on to the next pile. "And these are forty-five to fifty."

"So it's in increments of half-decades."

"Right."

"Well that's a start. And the newspapers?"

Phoebe pointed through the adjacent door. "they are in order. I know,

'cause I was the one did it."

"Wonderful. I'll get started then."

:'Do you want me to wait till you're finished?"

'It depends how patient you're feeling."

"Not very," she said with a little laugh. "Maybe I should just jot down my telephone number, and when you're done@' "I'll call you and you can come over and lock up."

"Right."

"That's a deal then." She went to the front desk, wrote her number on one of the Society brochures, and took it back to him. He was already plundering the contents of one of the files.

"You will put everything back, won't you?" Phoebe said, in her best forbidding manner.

"Oh yes. I'll be careful," Erwin replied. He took the brochure from her. "I'll call you when I'm done," he said. "I hope it won't be too late."

As she got into the car she thought: What would happen if I never went home again? If I just drove to Joe's place now and left town tonight? It was a tempting idea-not to have to go back to the house and cook dinner and listen to Morton bitching about every damn thing-but she resisted it. If her future with Joe was to have a chance then she had to plan it: carefully, systematically. they weren't teenagers, eloping in the first flush of love. If they were going to leave Everville permanently (and she couldn't imagine their staying, once the truth was out) then they had responsibilities to turn over and farewells to take.

She'd be happy never to see the house or Morton or the stinking ashtrays he left behind him ever again, but she'd miss Dr. Powell, along with a handful of his regulars. She'd need to take the time to explain herself to the people she valued most, so that they knew she was going for love's sake, not because she was fickle or cruel.

So, she'd stay, and enjoy her last Festival in Everville. Indeed, thinking of it that way gave her a taste for the celebrations she'd not had in years. This weekend she'd get out and party, knowing that next year, come August, she'd be in another part of the world.

Hunger always made Morton bad-tempered, so rather than have him wait while she cooked, she went by Kitty's Diner to pick up a burger and fries. It was now three years since the death of Kitty Cowhick, and despite hard economic times her son-in-law Bosley had turned the place from a shabby little establishment into a thriving business. He was born Again, and brought his strict moral viewpoint to bear in managing the diner. He forbade, for instance, the reading of any literature he deemed indecent in the booths or at the counter, and if a breath of profanity was exhaled he personally requested that the guilty party leave. She'd seen him do it too. I want this to be a place the Lord himself could come to, he'd told her once, if He wanted a piece of pie.

Morton's burger purchased, she set off home, only to find the house deserted. Morton had been back-his work jacket was on the kitchen table, along with a couple of empty beer cans-but he'd apparently tired of waiting for her to come home, and gone out in search of something to eat. She was pleased: It gave her a little more time to @.

She sat at the kitchen table picking over the soggy fries, and used the pad she usually made her shopping lists on to jot down the things she wanted to take with her when she left. There wasn't much. Just a few bits and pieces that had some sentimental significance: a chair she'd inherited from her mother; some needlepoint her grandmother had made; the quilt in the spare bedroom.

thinking of the quilt, she left off her list-making and turned her mind back to the deeds of the afternoon. Or rather, to the deed performed in that room. It would not always be so wonderful, she counseled herself, the heat between them would be bound to mellow over the years. But if and when that happened, there would be a weight of feeling that re. And ffim would be memories of events like this aftenoon that would spring to rwnd every time she pressed her face to the quilt.

A little after eight-thirty, with his stomach growling for want of dinner, Erwin's search through the woefully disorganized files turned up an odd little pamphlet, penned by one Raymond Merkle. He knew the name, vaguely. The man had made himself a minor reputation as a chronicler of smalltown Oregon. Erwin had seen companion volumes to this in the bookstore in Wilsonville. The text was a curious compendium of facts about Everville, written in the belabored style of a man who had aspirations to being a writer but precious little ear for language. It was entitled These Dreaming Hills, which turned out to be a quote from a piece printed (without the name of the poet, so Erwin assumed it to be Merkle) of doggerel at the front of the pamphlet. And there, halfway through this little labor of love, Erwin encountered the following: That the forces of heinous and unrepentant evil make their barbaric mark in a city as sweetly favored as Everville should come as no surprise to those of us who have seen something of the larger world. 1, your author, ventured from the fertile climes of our glorious state in the fortythird year of this century to perform my duties as an American in the South Pacific, and will carry to my grave the scenes of cruelty and human degradation I witnessed there, in surroundings as paradisaical as any this globe can offer.

It surprised me then not at all to discover, in the course of preparing this volume, rumors of diabolical deeds performed within the precincts of Everville's comely community.

The sad story of the death of Rebecca Jenkins is well known. She was a daughter of that fair city, much prized and adored, who was murdered in her eighth year, her body deposited in the reservoir. Her murderer was a man out of Sublimity who later died in prison while serving a life sentence. But the mystery surrounding the tragedy of poor Rebecca does not end there.

While gathering stories about the stranger incidents associated with Everville, the quizzical demise of one Richard Dolan was whispered to me. He had owned a candy store, I was told, and little Rebecca Jenkins had been a regular customer of his, so he had taken the death of the child particularly hard. The.capture and subsequent incarceration of her unrepentant murderer had done nothing to subjugate his great uneasiness. He had become more and more melancholy, and on the night of September

19, 1975, he had told his wife he was hearing voices from Harmon's Heights. Somebody was calling to him, he said. When she asked him who, he refused to say, but took himself off into the night. He did not return, and the next day a party ascended the Heights to look for him.

After two days of searching they found the delirious Richie Dolan, wedged in a crevice of rock on the northeast slope of the mountain. He was very horribly banned by his fall, but he was not dead. Such was the state of his face and torso that his wife fell into a swoon at the sight of him and was never of sound mind again.

He died in Silverton Hospital three days later, but he did not die silent. In that seventy-two hours he raved like a bediamite, unsubdued by the tranquilizers his doctors gave him.

What did he speak of in his final, agonizing hours? I could find no firsthand testament on this, but there is sufficient consensus among the rumors to suppose them broadly true. He raved, I was told, about dead men calling to him from Harmon's Heights. Over and over, even at the very end, when the doctors stood astonished at how he was clinging to life, he was begging forgiveness The account maundered on for a couple more paragraphs, but Erwin merely skimmed them. He had what he needed here: Evidence, albeit rudimentary, that there was some truth in what McPherson had written. And if one part was truthful, then why not the rest?

Content that his pursuit of verification was not a folly, he left off the search for the night, and called Phoebe Cobb. Would she come over and lock up? he asked. She would, of course. If he would just be kind enough to close the windows, she'd pop over in a while to secure the front door.

Her voice sounded a little slurred, he thought, but maybe it was his imagination. The day had been long, and he was weary. Time to get home, and try and put the McPherson confession out of his head until he resumed his inquiries tomorrow.

He knew where he'd begin those inquiries: down by the creek. Though it was three decades since the events McPherson had described, if the house he claimed the trio had burned down had in truth existed, then there would be some sign of it remaining. And if there was, then that would be another part of the confession verified, and he would be tempted to bring the whole story into the open air, where the whole state could smell how much it stank.

Phoebe had opened the brandy bottle around a quarter to eight, telling herself she wanted to toast her coming liberation, but in truth to dull the unease she was feeling. On the few occasions Morton went out to get some dinner for himself, he was usually back within the hour, ready to deposit himself in front of the television. Where had he gone to tonight? And more: Why did she care?

She drowned her confusion in a brandy; then in another.

That did the trick just fine, especially on an almost empty stomach. By the time the attorney called, she was feeling very mellow; too mellow to drive. No matter. She'd walk to the Old Schoolhouse she decided.

The night was balmy, the air fragrant with pine, and the walk proved more pleasant than she'd expected. At any other time of the year, even at the height of summer, the streets would have been pretty quiet in the middle of the evening, but tonight the lights were still burning in many of the stores along Main Street, their owners working on Festival window displays or stocking the shelves for the profitable days ahead. There were even a few visitors around, come early to enjoy the quiet of the valley.

At the corner of Main and Watson she waited for a moment or two. A

right turn took her up towards the schoolhouse, a left led down past the market and the park to Donovan Street, and a little way along Donovan Street was the apartment house where Joe lived. It would be just a slip of the foot to turn left rather than right. But she fought the urge. Better to let all that they'd felt and said this afternoon settle for a few hours, rather than get hot and flustered again. Besides, brandy always made her a little tearful, and her face got puffy when she cried. She'd see him tomorrow, and dream about him in the meantime.

Turning right, she headed on up the gentle gradient of Watson, past the new supermarket, which was still open and doing brisk business, to the schoolhouse. It took her five minutes to check all the windows, pull down the blinds, and lock up. Then she began the return journey.

About fifty yards from Main Street, somebody on the opposite sidewalk stepped out into the road, looking up at the night sky. She knew him vaguely. He was the youngest of the Lundy clan, Sam or Steve or "Seth."

Though she'd only murmured the syllable he heard her. Without moving from the middle of the street he looked round at her, his eyes glittering, and she remembered how she'd first encountered him. His mother had brought him in to see Dr. Powell, five or six years ago, and the child had stood in the waiting room with a look of such remoteness on his pinched little face, Phoebe had assumed he was mentally retarded. There was no remoteness now. He was fiercely focused.

"Do you hear it?" he said to her.

He didn't approach, but something about him intimidated her. Rather than get any closer, she halted, glancing back up the street towards the lights of the supermarket. There'd been plenty of cars in the lot when she'd passed, one of them would be bound to emerge soon, and she would use its passing as cover to continue on her way.

"You don't, do you?" he said, his voice singsong.

"Don't what?"

"You don't hear the hammering."

"Hammering?" She listened a moment. "No I don't."

"Hmm." He returned his gaze to the starry heavens. "You used to work at the doctor's," he said. "I still do."

"Not for long," he replied.

She felt a shiver pass down her body from scalp to sole.

"How do you know?"

He smiled at the sky. "It's so loud," he said. "Are you sure you can't hear it?"

"I told you-" she began,

"It's okay," he said softly. "Only sometimes at night, other people hear it too. It never happens in the day. In the day it's only me-"

"I'm sorry-2'

"Don't be sorry," he said; and then his smile went to her instead of the stars. "I'm used to it."

She suddenly felt absurd for fearing him. He was a lonely, bewildered kid. A little crazy in the head maybe, but harmless enough.

"What did you mean about me not working at the doctor's for long?" she asked him.

He shrugged. "Don't know," he said. "Mese things come out sometimes, without me really knowing what they mean." He paused for a moment.

"Probably nothing," he said, and returned his gaze to the sky.

She didn't wait for a car to emerge from the lot, but conover the whereabouts of the photograph that had inspired it, continued on her way to Main Street. "Enjoy yourself," she said and acted to spare herself, Joe, and Morton more grief than as she passed him by. any of them expected or deserved. "Yeah," he murmured, "I do."

The incident lingered with her as she wandered home, and she made a mental note to look up the Lundy file when she got into work tomorrow, to see what had brought mother and child to the doctor's that day, and why they'd never returned. When she got back to the house, Morton was in his chair in front of the television, sound asleep, a beer can in his lap, and four more between his feet. She didn't bother to wake him. Instead she went into the kitchen and made herself a ham and cheese sandwich, which she ate leaning on the sink gazing out into the darkened yard. Clouds were coming in to cover the stars, but she didn't suppose it much mattered to the Lundy boy. If he could hear hammerings in Heaven, a few clouds wouldn't dull it much. Sandwich eaten, she retired to bed, hoping that she'd be between the sheets and asleep before Morton roused himself. She needn't have worried. When finally a breath of cool air on her back stirred her from slumber and she felt him slide into bed beside her, the luminous face of the clock read ten past three. Grunting to himself, he pulled the sheets in his direction, rolled over and instantly began to snore.

It took her a little time to get back to sleep, and when she did it was fitful. In the morning, sitting alone at the kitchen table (Morton had already gone to work when she woke), she tried to sort through the dream fragments circling in her head and remembered that in one Joe had been introducing her to the people in the photograph he'd shown her. All five of them had been in a car for some reason, and Joe's brother kept saying: Where are we? Hell and damn, where are we? It wasn't the most reassuring of dreams. What was she thinking? That they were all lost together now? She took three aspirin with a cup of black coffee and headed out to work, putting the dream out of her mind. Which was a pity. Had she dwelt on it a little longer, she might have puzzled FOUR

The woman on the motorcycle looked like a seasoned traveler: her leathers dusty and beaten-up, her hair, when she eased off her helmet, cropped short and bleached by desert sun; her face, which had probably never been pretty, worn and raw. She had a bruise on her jaw, and lines deeply etched around her eyes and mouth; none of them laugh lines.

Her name was Tesla Bombeck, and today she was coming home. Not back to her literal birthplace (that was Philadelphia) nor even to the city where she'd been raised (which was Detroit) but to the town where the reconfiguring that had made her the raw, bruised, etched wanderer she was had begun.

Or rather, to the remains of that town. At the height of its mediocrity, this place-Palomo Grove-had been a nominee for the perfect California haven. Unlike Everville, which had grown organically over a century and a half, the Grove had sprung into being in three years, created by planners and real-estate magnates with sheaves of demographics for inspiration. And it had quietly prospered for a time, hidden in the folds of the Simi Valley a couple of miles from the highway that speeded its wage eamers to lose Angeles every morning and speeded them home again every night.

The u4fic on that highway was busier than ever now, but the off-ramp that served the Grove was seldom used. Occasionally a tourist who wanted to add the Town That Died Overnight to his list of Californian curiosities would come to look at the desolation, but such visits were increasingly rare.

Nor was any attempt being made to rebuild the Grove, despite vast losses sustained by both landowners and individuals. Tesla wasn't surprised. These were recessionary times; people no longer believed in real estate as a solid investment, much less real estate that had proven unstable in the past.

For Palomo Grove hadn't simply died, it had buried itself, its streets gaping like graves for its fine houses. Many of those streets were still barricaded off to keep the sightseers from coming to harm, but Tesla had been hearing yes when she was told no from childhood, and it was up over the barricades she first went, to wander where the damage was worst.

She had thought about coming back here many times in her five-year journey through what she liked to call the Americas, by which she meant the mainland states. they were not, she had many times insisted to Grillo, one country; not remotely. Just because they served the same Coke in Louisiana as they served in Idaho, and the same sitcoms were playing in New Mexico as were playing in Massachusetts, didn't mean there was such a thing as America. When presidents and pundits spoke of the voice and will of the American people, she rolled her eyes. That was a fiction; she'd been told so plainly by a yellow dog that had followed her around Arizona for a week and a half during her hallucination period, turning up in diners and motel rooms to chat with her in such a friendly fashion she'd missed him when he disappeared.

If she remembered rightly (and she'd never know) it was the dog that had first mentioned going back to the Grove.

"You gotta bury your nose in your own shit sooner or later," he'd advised, leaning back in a threadbare armchair. "It's the only way to get in touch."

"With what?" she'd wanted to know.

"With what? With what?" he'd said, coming to perch at the bottom of the bed. "I'm not your analyst! Find out for yourself."

"Suppose there's nothing to find out?" she'd countered.

"Don't talk crap," he'd said. "You're not afraid of finding there's nothing to find. You're afraid of finding so much it'll drive you crazy." He wandered down the bed and straddled her, so they were nose to nose. "Well guess what, Miss Bombeck? You're already crazy. So what's to loset'

She couldn't remember if she'd worked up some pithy y to this or simply passed out. Probably the latter. She'd sed out in a lot of motel rooms during that phase. Anyway, the yellow dog had sown the seed. And the months had passed, and she'd gradually regained a semblance of sanity, and on and off, when she was consulting a map or looking at a sign-post, she'd think: maybe I should do it today. Maybe I should go back to the Grove.

But whenever she'd come close to doing so, another voice had spoken up; the voice of the personality who had shared her skull with her for the past half-decade.

His name was Raul, and he'd been born an ape. He'd not stayed that way for long, however. At the age of four he'd been evolved from his simian state to manhood, the agent of that miracle fluid which its discoverer had dubbed the Nuncio, the messenger. The fluid was not the fruit of pure science, but of a mingling of disciplines-part biogenetics, part alchemy-and it had gone on to touch and transform others, including

(briefly) Tesia, coaxing forth the natural propensities of those it influenced, and creating in the process the two warring forces who had made Palomo Grove their battleground.

One was the Nuncio's maker, a mescaline-addicted visionary by the name of Fletcher, who had become a force for transcendence under the messenger's tutelage. The other was his patron, Randolph Jaffe, who had funded the discovery in the hope of attaining access to a condition of flesh and spirit that was tantamount to divinity. The Nuncio had done nothing to dull that ambition, but it had shaped from the Jaff a creature so consumed by his dreams of power that his spirit had atrophied. By the time he'd won the war with Fletcher (destroying the Grove in the process), and was ready to claim his prize, his psyche was too frail to bear the triumph. He had forfeited his reason in pursuit of godhood. Soon after, he'd forfeited his life. It was little wonder then, that Raul had protested so vigorously her desire to return to the Grove.

I hate California, he'd told her any number of times. If we never go back there it'll be too soon She hadn't fought with him over it. Though she had full control of her body, and could have driven West without his being able to do a thing to stop her, his presence had been comforting during the many terrible times that followed the demise of Palomo Grove, and given that she fully expected such times to come again, more terrible than ever. she wanted to keep relations sweet, The paradox of this, that her dubious sanity was preserved by one of the things that drove people crazy (voices in the head) was not lost on hei-. Nor did she forget that her tenant, who was usually scrupulous in respecting the boundaries between his thoughts and hers, suffered from crise,, of hi," own, at which times she became the comforter. She would wake sometimes to hear him sobbing in her head, bemoaning the fact that he had given up his body in the war, and would never again have an anatomy to call his own. She would soothe him then as best she could; tell him they would find some way to free him one of these days, and until then wasn't it better this way, because at least they had each other?

And it was. When she doubted all that she'd seen, he was there to say: It's true. When she feared the burden of all she'd come to comprehend he was there to say: We'll carry it together, till we can be done with it.

Ali! to be done with it. That was the trick. to find some way to off-load the revelation onto strong and trustworthy shoulders, and go her way back to the life she'd been living before she'd ever heard of Palomo Grove.

She'd been a screenwriter by trade, with the scar tissue to prove it, and though it was a long time since she'd sat down to write, her cinematic instinct remained acute. Even in the bad times, a week would not go by without her thinking: There's a scene here. The way that sky looks, the way those dogs are fighting, the way I'm sobbing-it could be the beginning of something wonderful and strange.

But of late it had come to seem that all she had was beginnings-always setting off on an unknown highway or opening a conversation with a stranger-and never getting to the second act. If the painful farce of her life to date was to have any resolution, then she was going to have to move the story on. And that could not happen, she knew, until she went back to the Grove and confronted its ghosts.

she would see synchronicity at work, and come to ieve that the timing of that journey was no accident. That idier her subconscious, or powers operating upon it in the dream-state, had so haunted her with memories of the Grove that her only hope of deliverance was to return that particular week in August, when so much else was waiting to happen.

Even Raul, who had so forcibly rejected the notion over the years, accepted the inevitability of the journey when she put it to him.

Let's get it over with, he said, though God knows what you think you're going to find there.

Now she knew. Here she was in the middle of what had once been Palomo Grove's mall, its geographical and emotional hub. People had come to meet here, to gossip, to fall in love, and (almost incidentally) to shop. Now all but a few of the stores were heaps of rubble, and those that were left standing were reduced to shells, the merchandise they'd housed smashed, looted or rotted away.

Tesla? Raul murmured in her head.

She answered him, as always, not with her tongue and lips, but with her mind. "What?"

We're not alone.

She looked around. She could see no signs of life, but that didn't mean anything. Raul was closer to his aninial roots than she; more alert to countless tiny signs her senses were receiving but that she no longer knew how to interpret. If he said they had company, they did.

"Where?" she thought.

Left of us, he replied. Over that mound of rubble.

She started towards it, orienting herself as she did so. The remains of the pet store lay off to her right, which meant that the heaps of plaster clotted steel and timbers in front of her was all that was left of the supermarket. She scrambled up over the debris, the sun bright against her face, but before she reached the top somebody appeared to block the way: a long-haired young man, dressed in T-shirt and jeans, with the greenest eyes she'd ever seen. "You're not allowed here," he said, his voice too soft to carry much authority.

"Oh, and you are?" Tesia said.

From the other side of the mound came a woman's voice. "Who is it, Lucien?"

Lucien directed the question at Tesla, "Who are you?"

By way of reply, Tesia started to climb again, until she could see the questioner on the other side. Only then did she say, "My name's Tesia Bombeck. Not that it's any of your business."

The woman was sitting on the ground, in a circle of incense-filled bowls, their smoke sickly sweet. At the sight of Tesla she started to rise, astonishment on her face.

"My God-" she said, glancing back at her second associate, an overweight middle-aged man, who was lounging in a battered chair. "Edward," she said. "Look who it is."

The man stared at Tesla with plain suspicion. "We heard you were dead," he remarked.

"Do I know you?" Tesla asked him.

The man shook his head.

"But I know you," the woman said, stepping out of the circle of smoke. Tesla was now halfway down the other side of the rubble, and close enough to see how frail and drawn this woman was. "I'm Kathleen Farrell," she said. "I used to live here in the Grove."

The name didn't ring a bell, but that was no surprise. Maybe it was having Raul using up some of her brain capacity for his own memories

(and maybe it was just old age) but names and faces slipped away all the time these days.

"What brought you back?" Tesla wanted to know.

"We were-"

She was interrupted by Edward, who now rose from his chair. "Kate," he cautioned. "Be careful."

"But she-"

"We can't trust anybody," he said. "Not even her."

"But she wouldn't even be here-" Kate said. She looked at Tesia. "Would you?" Back at Edward now. "She knows what's going on." Again, at Tesla. "You do, don't you?"

"Of course," Tesla lied. "Have you actually seen him?" said Lucien, approaching her from behind.

"Not-not in the last couple of months," Tesia replied, her mind racing. Who the hell were they talking about?

"But you have seen him?" Kate said.

"Yes," she replied. "Absolutely."

A smile appeared on Kate's weary face. "I @ew," she said. "Nobody doubts he's alive," Edward now said, his gaze still fixed upon Tesla.

"But why the hell would he show himself to her?"

"Isn't it obvious?" said Kate. "Tell him, Tesia."

Tesla put on a pained look, as though the subject was too delicate to be spoken about. "It's difficult," she said.

"I can @ that," Kate said. "After all, you started the fi@' In her head, Tesla heard Raul let out a low moan. She didn't need to ask him why. There was only one fire of any consequence Tesia had started, and she'd started it here in the mall, perhaps on the very spot where Kate Farrell had been sitting.

"Were you here?" "No. But Lucien was," Kate said.

Lucien stepped into Tesla's line of sight, taking up the thread of the story as he did so. "It's still so clear," he said. "Him covering himself in gasoline, then you firing the gun. I thought you were trying to kill him. We all did, I'm sure This doesn't make any sense, Raul murmured in her head. They're talking about "Fletcher," she thought back. "I know."

But it's as though they think he's still alive.

"I didn't understand what you were doing," Lucien was saying. "But you do now?" Tesla asked him. "Of course. You killed him so that he could live again."

As Lucien spoke, Fletcher's last moments played out on the screen in her skull, as they had hundreds of times in the intervening years. His body, doused in gasoline from head to foot. Her aiming the gun at the ground close to his feet, praying for a spark. She'd fired once. Nothing. He'd looked at her with despair in his eyes, a warrior who had fought his enemy until he had nothing left to fight with but the spirit trapped in his wounded flesh. Release me, that look had said, or the battle is lost.

She'd fired again, and this time her prayers had been answered. A spark had ignited the air, and a column of flame leapt up to consume the Nunciate Fletcher.

"He died right here?" she said, staring down at the circle.

Kate nodded, and stepped aside so that Tesla could approach the spot. After five years of sun and rain, the asphalt was still darker there where he'd perished; stained with fat and fire. She shuddered.

"Isn't it wonderful?" Kate said. "Hub?"

"Wonderful. That he's back among us."

"It means the end can't be far off," Lucien said.

Tesla turned her back on the stained asphalt. "the end of what?" she said.

He gave her a tender smile. "The end to our cruelties and our trivialities," he said. That didn't sound too bad, Tesla thought. "The time's come for us to nwve on, up the ladder. But you know this already. You were touched by the Nuncio, right?"

"Much good it did me," she said.

"There's pain at the beginning," Kate said softly. "We speak to shamans across the country-" e again, Edward interrupted. "I think Ms. Bombeck's already heard too much," he said. "We don't know enough One about her allegiances-"

"I don't have any," Tesla replied plainly.

"Is that supposed to reassure me?" Edward said.

"No-"

"Good. Because it doesn't."

"Edward," Kate said, "we're not at war here."

"Slow down," Tesla said. "A minute ago he@' she jabbed a thumb over her shoulder in Lucien's direction, "was saying we were heading for paradise, and now you're talking about war. Make up your minds."

"I already made mine up," Edward said. He turned to Kate. "Let's leave this till later," he said, glaring down at the circle. "When she's gone."

"I'm not going anywhere," Tesla said, taking a seat on the rubble. "I can hang out all day." Edward smiled. "See?" he said, his voice becoming frayed. "She's a troublemaker. She wants to keep us from the work-"

"What work?" Tesla said.

"Finding Fletcher," Kate said.

"Shut up, will you?" Edward snapped.

"Why?" said Kate, her equilibrium undisturbed. "If she's here to stop us, she already knows what we're doing. And if she isn't, then maybe she can help."

The argument silenced Edward for a few seconds. Time enough for Tesia to say, "If you think Fletcher's some kind of messiah, you're going to be disappointed. Believe me."

"I'm talking as though he's alive," she thought as she spoke, to which Raul murmured: Maybe he is.

"I don't believe he's a messiah," Lucien was saying, we've had too many messiahs as it is. We don't need another guy telling us what to be. Or what happens to us if we fail." Tesla liked the sound of that, which Lucien clearly saw, because he went down on his haunches in front of her, and continued to speak, face to face. "Fletcher's come back because he wants to be here when we rise, all of us, all rise up together and become something new."

"What-exactly?"

Lucien shrugged. "If I knew that I'd have to kill myself."

"Why?"

"Because I'd be a messiah." He laughed, as did she. Then he rose, shrugging. "That's all I know," he said.

She looked up at him guiltily. There was a sweet simplicity to him she found charming. More than chan-ning in fact, almost sexual. "Look," she said, "I lied when I said I'd seen Fletcher. I haven't."

"I knew it," Edward sneered.

"No you didn't," Tesla replied a little wearily. "You didn't have a fucking clue." She looked back at Lucien. "Anyway, why's it so important you find him, if he's only here as a sightseer?"

"Because we have to protect ourselves from our enemies," Kate said, "And he can help us." "Just so you know," Tesla replied, "I'm not one of your enemies. I know Eddie over there doesn't believe me, but it's true. I'm on nobody's side but my own. And if that sounds selfish, it's because it is." She got to her feet. "Do you have any solid evidence that Fletcher's alive?" she asked Lucien.

"Some," he said.

"But you don't want to tell me?"

He looked at his sandaled feet. "I don't think that'd be particularly useful right now," he replied.

"Fair enough," she said, starting back up the slope of rubble, "I'll leave you to it then. If you see him, give him regards, will you?"

"This isn't a joke," Edward called after her.

it was probably the one remark which she couldn't let slide by. She stopped climbing, and looked back at him. "Oh yes it is," she said.

"that's exactly what it is. One big fucking joke."

That encounter aside, Tesia's return to the Grove was a bust. There were no moments of revelation; no confrontations with ghosts (real or imagined) to help her better understand the past. She left in the same state of confusion she'd arrived in.

She didn't run for the state line, but drove back into L.A., to the apartment in West Hollywood she'd kept through her years on the road. She'd actually slept there perhaps two dozen times in the last five years, but the rent was peanuts, and the landlord a burnout case who liked the idea of having a real screenwriter as a tenant, however much of an absentee she was, so she'd kept it as a place to laughingly call home. In truth, it had grim associations, but tonight, as she lounged in front of the TV to eat her curried tofu-burger and watch the news, she was glad of its familiarity. It was several weeks since she'd paid any attention to events around the planet, but nothing of significance had changed. A war here, a famine there; death on the highway, death on the subway. And always, people shaking their heads, witnesses and warlords alike, protesting that this tragedy should never have happened. She sickened of it after ten minutes and turned it off.

Would it be so bad... ? Raul murmured. "Would what be so bad?" she said, staring at the blank screen.

to have a messiah.

"You really think Fletcher's been resurrected?"

I think maybe he was never dead.

Now there was a possibility: that Fletcher's death-scene in Palomo Grove had merely been a part of some greater scheme, a way to slip out of sight for a few years until he was better equipped to deal with the Nuncio and its consequences.

"Why now?" she wondered aloud. Ask Grillo, Raul suggested.

"Must I?" Grillo had been strange the last couple of times she'd called him: remote and short-tempered. When they'd spoken five or six weeks before, she'd come off the phone thinking maybe he was on serious drugs, he sounded so damn strange. She almost headed over to Nebraska to check on him, but she'd been feeling spooked enough without going into that apartment of his. Raul was right, however If anyone knew what was happening in the places that never found their way onto the evening news, it was Grillo.

Less than happily, she called him. He was in a better mood than the last occasion, though he sounded tired. She got straight to the point; told him about returning to the Grove, and her encounter with the trio.

"Kate Farrell, eh?" Grillo said.

"Do you know her?"

"She was the mother of one of the League of Virgins. Arleen Farrell. She went crazy."

"Mother or daughter?"

"Daughter. She died in an institution. Starved herself to death." This was more like the Nathan Grillo Tesla was used to. A clean, clipped summary of the facts, presented with the minimum of sentiment. In his pre-Grove days he'd been a journalists He'd never lost his nose for a good story.

"What the hell was Kate Farrell doing in Palomo Grove?" he asked.

She explained, as best she could. The circle of incense bowls, set around the place where Fletcher had perished (or at least done a damned good impersonation of perishing); the talk of sightings; the exchange about messiahdom.

"Have you heard anything about this?" she finished up by asking him.

There was a moment's silence. Then he said, "Sure."

"You have?"

"Listen, if it's there to be heard, I hear it."

This was not an idle boast. There in Omaha-a city built at the Crossroads of America@rillo had established himself as a clearinghouse for any and all information that related, however remotely, to events in Palomo Grove. Within a year he had won the trust and respect of a vast circle of individuals, from molecular physicists to beat cops, to politicians, to priests, all of whom had one thing in common: Their lives had somehow been brushed by mysterious, even terrifying, forces, the details of which they felt they could not share, either for personal or professional reasons, with their peers.

Word had quickly spread through the thicket where those marginalized by their experiences and beliefs and terrors had taken cover; word of this man Grillo who had seen the way things really were and wanted to hear from others who'd seen the same; who was putting the pieces together, one by one, until he had the whole story.

It was that ambition-whether practical or not-that had kept Tesla and Grillo talking to each other in the years since the Grove. Though she had gone wandering, and he seldom left his apartment, they were both engaged in the same search for connections. She had failed to find them in the Americas-it was chaos out there-and doubted Grillo had been any more lucky; but they still had the search in common. And she never failed to marvel at his ability to put two apparently disparate fragments of information together to suggest a third more provocative possibility. How a rumor from Boca Raton confirmed a hint from a suicide note found in Denver which in turn supported a thesis spoken in tongues by a prodigy in New Jersey.

"So what have you heard?"

"People have been sighting Fletcher on and off for the last five years, Tes," he said. "He's like Bigfoot, or Elvis. There's not a month goes by I don't get somebody sending me his picture."

"Any of them the real thing?"

"Shit, I don't know. I used to think His words trailed away for a moment, as though he'd lost track of his thought.

"Grillo?"

"Yeah."

"What did you used to think?"

"It doesn't matter," he said a little wearily.

"Yes it does."

He drew a long, ragged breath. "I used to think it mattered whether or not things were real. I'm not so sure any more...." Again he faltered. This time she didn't prompt him, but waited until he had his thoughts in order. "Maybe the messiahs we imagine are more important than the real thing. At least they don't bleed when you crucify 'em."

For some reason he found this extremely funny, and Tesla was obliged to wait while he got over his bout of laughter.

"Is that it then?" she said, faintly irritated now. "You don't think it matters whether things are real or not, so I should just give up caring?"

"Oh I care," he said. "I care more than you know." He was suddenly icy.

"What the hell's wrong with you, Grillo?"

"Leave it alone, Tes." "Maybe I should come see you

"No! "

"Why the hell not?"

"I just-leave it alone." He sighed. "I gotta go," he said. "Call me tomorrow. I'll see if I can dig up anything useful about Fletcher. But, you know Tes, I think it's time we grew up and stopped looking for fucking explanations."

She drew breath to reply, but the line was already dead. In the old days, they'd had a routine of cutting each other off in mid-farewell; an asinine game, but diverting. He wasn't playing now, however. He'd cut her off because he wanted to be away from her. Back to his grapevine, or to the doubts rotting on it.

Well it was worth a try, Raul said.

"I'm going to go see him," Tesla thought.

We only just got here. Can't we stay in one place for a few days. Kick back? Relax?

She opened the sliding door and stepped out onto the balcony. It was a voyeur's paradise. She could see into half a dozen living rooms and bedrooms from where she stood. The indows of the apartment directly across the yard from her open wide; people were partying there, music and aughter floating her way. She didn't know the hosts: They'd moved in a year or so ago, after the death of Ross, who'd been in residence a decade when she'd moved in. The plague had taken him, the way it had taken so man others in the vicinity, even before she'd left for her travels. But the parties went on, the laughter went on.

"Maybe you're right," she thought to Raul, "maybe it is time I-"

There was a knock on the door. Had somebody seen her listening alone on the balcony, and come to invite her over?

"What is it?" she called as she crossed the living room.

The voice from the far side of the door was little more than a whisper.

"Lucien," it said.

He had come without Kate Farrell or her sidekick Eddie knowing; told them he wanted to look up some friends in L.A. before he rejoined the pursuit of Fletcher. "Where's Kate gone?" Tesla wanted to know. "Up to Oregon." "What's in Oregon?"

Lucien sipped the neat vodka Tesia had poured for him, and looked a little guilty. "I don't know if I should be telling you this," he said,

"but I think there's more going on than Kate realizes. She talks about Fletcher as though he's got all these answers-"

"Fletcher's in Oregon?" Lucien nodded. "How do you know?"

"Kate has a spirit-guide. Her name's Friederika. She came through after Kate lost her daughter. Kate was channeling her when you arrived.

And she picked up the scent."

"I see." "A lot of people still find it difficult to believe-"

"I've believed a lot weirder," Tesla replied. "was, uh, was Friederika specific about this, or was it just somewhere in Oregon?"

"Oh no, she's very specific."

"So they've gone looking for him?"

"Right." He drew a deep breath, swallowed the last of his vodka, then said: "And I came after you." He gazed up at her with those submarine eyes. "was I wrong to do that?" She was very seldom dumbfounded, but this silenced her. "Shit," he said, grimacing, "I thought-maybe something was going on... " The words became shrugs.

"Have another vodka," she said.

"No, I think I'd better go."

"Stay," she said, catching hold of his arm with a little more urgency than she'd intended. "I want you to know what you're getting into."

"I'm ready."

"And drink up. You'll need it."

She told him everything. Or at least everything her increasingly vodka-sodden brain could remember. How she'd first gone to Palomo Grove because Grillo was there writing a story, and how circumstances had elected her-much against her will-as Fletcher's cremator, or liberator, or both. How after his death she'd traveled down to his laboratory in the Misi6n de Santa Catrina to destroy whatever remained of the Nuncio, only to be shot in the attempt by the Jaff s son, Tommy-Ray. How she had been saved, and changed, by the very fluid she'd come to destroy, and then returned to the Grove with Raul-via the apartment they were sitting in-to find it close to destruction, Here she stopped. Getting this far had taken the better part of three hours, and she still had to speak of the most problematic part of the whole story. The party in the apartment opposite had quieted down considerably, the various rock-and-roll of earlier forsaken in favor of ballads for slowdancing. It was scarcely the most appropriate music to accompany what she had to say.

"You know about Quiddity of course," she said.

"I know what Friederika's said." "And what's that?"

"That it's some kind of dream-sea, and we go there three times in our lives. Edward says it's a metaphor for-2'

"Fuck metaphors," Tesla said. "It's real."

"Have you been there?"

"No. But I know people who have. I saw the Jaff tear a hole between this world and Quiddity-4ear it open with his bare hands." This was not strictly true. She'd not been in the room when the Jaff had done the deed. But the story played so much better telling it as though she had.

"What was it like?" "I don't want to live through it again, put it that way." Lucien poured himself another vodka. He'd started to look distinctly queasy in the last few minutes@is face pasty and moist-but if he needed the liquor to deal with what he was hearing, who was she to argue? "So who closed the door?" he asked her.

"That doesn't matter," she said. "Doors open, doors close. It's what's on the other side you need to know about."

"You already told me. Quiddity."

"Beyond Quiddity," she said, aware that the very words carried a palpable menace. He looked at her with his green eyes now bloodshot, breathing rather too fast through his open mouth. "Maybe you don't want to know," she said.

"I want to know," he replied, without a trace of inflection.

"they'rc called the lad Uroboros."

"Uroboros," he said, speaking the word almost dreamily. "Have you seen these things?"

"From a distance," she said.

"Are they like us?" he asked her.

"Not remotely." "What then?"

She remembered as clearly as her own name the words Jaffe had used to describe the lad, and repeated them now, for Lucien's benefit, though Lord knows it didn't help much.

"Mountains and fleas, " she said. "Fleas and mountains.

Lucien rose suddenly. "Excuse me@'

I'@ you-?"

"I'm going t@' He turned towards the bathroom, raising his hand to his mouth. She went to help him, but he waved her away and lurched through the door, closing it behind him. There was a moment's hush, then the sound of retching, and of vomit splashing into the toilet. She kept her distance. Her own belly, which was pretty strong, weakened at the smell of puke.

She look down at her vodka glass, decided she'd had more than enough, and walked out onto the balcony. She didn't wear a watch (the yellow dog had told her to bury her imitation Rolex in the desert) so she could only guess at the time. Certainly way after midnight; perhaps one-thirty, perhaps two. The air was a little chilly, but fragrant with nighthlooming jasmine. She inhaled deeply. Tomorrow she was going to have a splitting headache, but what the hell? She'd actually enjoyed telling her story, laying it out as much for her own benefit as Lucien's.

He has the hotsfor you, Raul said.

"I thought you'd gone to sleep."

I was afraid you'd do something stupid.

"Like try to fuck him?" She glanced back into the apartment. The bathroom door was still closed. "I don't think there's much chance of that tonight-2'

Or any night.

"Don't be so sure." We had an agreement, Raul reminded her. As long as I'm in here with you: no sex. That's what we agreed. I don't have a homosexual bone in my body.

"My body," Tesia reminded him.

Of course, if you wanted to sleep with a woman, I could probably stretch the point "Well you might just have to look the other way," Tesla said,

"I think my celibate phase is coming to an end."

Don't do this.

"Oh for God's sake, Raul, it's just a fuck."

I mean it.

"If you screw this up," she said, "you'll be sorry you ever got inside my head. I swear."

Raul was silent.

"Better," Tesla said, and went back inside. The shower was running in the bathroom. "Are you okay in there?" she called, but he couldn't hear her over the water, so she left him to his cleaning up and went through to the kitchen to look for something to fill her growling stomach. All she could find was a box of year-old Shredded Wheat, but it was better than nothing. She munched, and waited, and munched more.

The shower continued to run. After a couple of minutes she went back to the bathroom door, knocked and elled: "Lucien? Are you all right?"

There was still no reply. She tried the handle. The door was unlocked; the room so filled with steam she could barely see across it. His clothes were scattered on the floor, and the shower curtain closed. She called his name again, and again there was no answer. Concerned now-he must have heard her, even over the water-she grabbed the curtain and pulled it back. He was sprawled naked in the tub, the water beating on his belly, eyes closed, mouth open.

Some lover, Raul said.

"Shut the fuck up," she told him, going down on her haunches beside the tub and Lifting Lucien into a sitting position. He coughed up a throatful of watered down puke.

Very pretty.

"I'm warning you, monkey-"

That was the forbidden word: monkey-the word that always threw him into a fit.

Don't call me that! he yelled.

She didn't give him the satisfaction of a response, so he shut up. It worked like a charm every time. She turned off the shower, then gently slapped Lucien into opening his eyes. He looked at her dozily, mumbling something about feeling stupid.

"Have you finished throwing up?" she asked him.

He nodded, so she fetched a clean bath towel and did what she could to dry him off while he was lying in the tub. He wasn't in bad shape. A little skinny perhaps, but meaty where it counted most. Even though he was near as dainnit comatose, his dick swelled as she dried him, and she couldn't help but stroke it a little, which brought it to full erection. It was pretty. If he had the wit to use it well he might be fun in bed.

He was as dry as she was going to be able to get him, so rather than try to lift him out of the tub, she decided to let him sleep where he lay. She fetched a pillow and a blanket, and made him as comfortable as she could, given the cramped conditions. As she tucked the blanket around him, he murmured, "What about tomorrow?"

"What about it?" she said.

"Can we... do it... Tomorrow?"

"Well, that depends," she said. "I was thinking of heading up to Oregon@'

"Oregon... " he mumbled.

"That's right."

"Fletcher... "

"That's right." She leaned a little closer to him, until she was almost whispering in his ear. "He's up there, right? In ... in-"

"Everville."

"Everville," she said softly.

Have you no shame? Raul muttered.

She laughed, and for a moment Lucien's eyes fluttered open. "You sleep," she said to him. "We're going to take a trip Tomorrow."

The notion seemed to please him, even in his stupor. He was still wearing a little smile when she put the light out and left him to his slumbers.

Six Grillo called the body of knowledge he'd gathered over the last five years the Reef, in part because, like coral, it had grown through countless minute accretions (more often than not of dead matter) and in part because a marine image seemed appropriate for information that pertained to the secrets of the dream-sea. But of late the name mocked him. He no longer felt like the Reef s keeper, but its prisoner.

It was housed, this Reef, in the memory-banks of four linked computers, donated to Grillo's strange cause by a man in Boston, who'd asked only one thing in return for his generosity: that when Grillo finally persuaded the computers to collate all the information and spit out the answer to the mysteries of America, he'd be the one to spread the news. Grillo had agreed. He'd even believed, when the gift had first been mooted, that such a moment might one day come. He believed that no longer. The husks and shreddings he'd gathered so studiously over the years did not contain the secrets of the universe. they were worthless trash, lost to sense and meaning, and he would join them in their senselessness, very soon.

His body, which had done him good service for forty three years, had in the last six months begun a calamitous decline. At first he'd ignored the signs; put the dropped coffee cups and aching spine and blurred vision down to over work. But the pain had been too much after a time, and he'd gone to the doctor for something to control it. He'd got his painkillers, and a lot more besides: visits to specialists, mounting paranoia, and finally, the bad news. "You've got multiple sclerosis, Nathan."

He'd closed his eyes for a moment, not wanting to look at the sympathetic face in front of him, but the darkness behind his lids was worse. It was a cell, that darkness; it stank of himself. "This isn't a death sentence," the doctor had explained. "A lot of people live long, fruitful lives with this disease, and there's no reason why you shouldn't be one of them."

"How long?" he wanted to know.

"I couldn't even hazard a guess. The disease moves in different ways from person to person. It could take thirty years-"

He'd known, sitting there in that bland little office, that he didn't have three decades of life ahead of him. Nothing like. The disease had him in its teeth, and it was going to shake him until he was dead.

His appetite for information had not deserted him, however, even in these grim circumstances. He researched the nature of his devourer meticulously, not out of any hope that he would defeat it, but simply to know what was going on inside his body. The coverings of his nerve fibers were being stripped, it seemed, in his brain and in his spine. Though many fine minds were working to discover why, there were no definitive answers. His disease was a mystery as profound as anything in the Reef, and a good deal more palpable. Sometimes, while he was sitting in front of the monitors watching messages come in, he imagined he could feel the beast Sclerosis moving through his body, unmaking him cell by cell, nerve by nerve, and the words appearing on the screens, tales of sightings and visitations, began to seem like just another manifestation of disease. The healthy psyche had no need of such fantasies. It lived in the world of the possible, and was content.

Sometimes, in a fury of despair, he would switch off the screen and toy with the notion of unplugging the whole system; leaving the tale-tellers to babble on in silence and darkness. But he would always return to his chair after a time, addict that he was, guiltily turn the screens back on to study whatever bizarrities the Reef had accrued in his absence. In early spring, the beast Sclerosis had suddenly become ambitious; within the space of a month he felt twenty years of frailties overtake him. He was prescribed heavier medications, which he diligently took, and the doctor offered advice about planning for disability, which he just as diligently ignored. He would never go into a wheelchair; that much he'd decided. He'd take an overdose one night, and slip away; it would be easier that way. He had no wife to hold on for; no children to watch grow just another day. He had only the screens, and the tales they told; and they would gd until the end of the world, with or without him.

And then, in early June, a strange thing: There was a sudden escalation in the number of reports, the systems besieged every hour of the day and night with people wanting to share their secrets. There was no coherent pattern in this onslaught, but the sheer scale of it made him wonder if the madness was not reaching critical mass.

Around that time Tesia had checked in from New Mexico, and he'd told her what was going on. She'd been in one of her fatalistic moods (too much peyote, he suspected) and not much interested. When he'd called Harry D'Amour in New York, however, the response had been entirely different. D'Amour, the sometime detective whose cases had invariably turned into metaphysical excursions, was eager for information. they had spoken at least twice daily over a three-week period, with D'Amour demanding chapter and verse of any report that smacked of the Satanic, particularly if it originated in New York. Grillo found D'Amour's faith in the vocabulary of Catholicism absurd, but he played along. And yes, there were a number of reports that fitted the description. Two mutilation-murders in the Bronx, involving nails through the hands and feet, and a triple suicide at a convent in Brooklyn (all of which D'Amour had already investigated); then a host of other more minor oddities which he was not aware of, some of which clearly supported some thesis or other. D'Amour had declined to be explicit, even on a safe line, as to the precise nature of that thesis, until their last conversation. Then he'd solemnly told Grillo he had good reason to believe that the return of the Anti-Christ was being plotted in New York City. Grillo had not been entirely able to disguise how laughable he thought the notion.

"Oh you don't like the wordy, is that it?" D'Amour had replied. "We'll find something different, if you prefer. Call it the lad. Call it the Enemy. It's all the Devil by another name." they hadn't spoken after that, though Grillo had several times attempted to make further contact. There were new reports from the five boroughs almost every day, it seemed, many of them involving acts of sickening brutality. Several times Grillo had wondered if perhaps one of the bodies found rotting on the city's wastelands that summer was not that of Harry D'Amour. And wondered too what name he might call the Devil if it came looking for D'Amour's informer, here in Omaha.

Sclerosis, perhaps.

And then there'd come this recent call from Tesla, asking about sightings of Fletcher, and he'd finished the exchange with such an emptiness inside him, he was almost ready to take the overdose there and then. Why could he not bear the notion of her coming to see him?

Because he looked too much like his father now; legs like sticks, hair gray and brittle? Because he was afraid she'd turn away, unable to see him like this? She'd never do that. Even in her crazy times (and she'd had more than her share) she never lost her grip on the feelings between them.

No, what he feared was regret. What he feared was her seeing him in decline, and saying: Why didn't we do better with what we feel for each other? Why didn't we enjoy what was in our hearts, instead of hiding it away? What he feared was being told it was too late, even though he already knew it.

Once again, the Reef had saved him from utter despair. After her call he'd brooded for a while-thinking of the pills, thinking of his stupidities-and then, too weary to think any more but too stirred up to sleep, he'd gone back to his place in front of the monitors, to see if he could find any convincing reports of the Fletcher's presence.

It was not Fletcher he found, however. Sifting through the reports logged in the last couple of weeks, he came across a tale that had previously gone unread. It came from a regular and, he thought, reliable source: a woman in Illinois who printed up crime-scene photographs for a local county sheriff's department. She had a horrible account to make. A young couple had been attacked in late July, the female victim, who was seven months pregnant, killed outright and then opened up by the attacker, who had taken his leisurely time to examine her in front of her wounded lover," then removed the fetus and absconded with it. The father had died a day later, but not before he passed a strange description along to the police, which had been kept out of the newspapers because of its bizarrity, but which Grillo's informer felt needed relating. The killer had not been alone, the dying man had said. He'd been surrounded by a cloud of dust "full of screams and faces."

"I begged him," he'd gone on to say, "begged him not to mess up Louise, but he kept saying he had to, he had to. He was the Death-Boy, he said, and that's what Death-Boys did."

That, in essence, had been the report. Having read it Grillo sat for half an hour in front of the screen, as confounded as he was intrigued. What was happening out there in the real world? Fletcher had died in the mall at Palomo Grove. Cremated; gone to flame and spirit. Tommy-Ray McGuire, the son of the Jaff, the Death-Boy, had died a few days later, at a spot in New Mexico called Trinity. He too had been cremated, but in a more terrible fire than had consumed Fletcher.

they were both dead, their parts in the tangled tale of humanity and the dream-sea over. Or so everyone had supposed.

was it possible everyone had been wrong? That somehow they'd defied oblivion and each returned to pick up the threads of their ambition? If so, there was only one explanation as to how. Both had been touched by the Nuncio during their lives. Perhaps evolution's message was more extraordinary than anyone had guessed, and it had put them beyond the reach of death.

He shuddered, daring to think that. Beyond the reach of death. Now there was a promise worth living for.

He called California. A bleary Tesia answered the phone.

"Tes, it's me."

"What time is it?"

"Never mind the time. I've been going through the Reef, looking for stuff about Fletcher."

"I know where he's headed," Tesia said. "At least I think I know."

"Where?"

"This town in Oregon, called Everville. Has it ever turned up in the street?"

"It doesn't ring a bell, but that doesn't mean much."

"So why are you calling? It's the middle of the fucking night."

"Tommy-Ray." "Hub?" "What do you hear about Tommy-Ray?"

"Nothing. He died in the Loop." "Did he?" There was a hush from the other end. Then Tesla said, "Yeah. 11 "You got out. So did Jo-Beth and Howie-"

"What are you saying?" "I've found a report in the Reef about a killer calling himself the Death-Boy-"

"Grillo," Tesia said. "You wake me up-" "And he's surrounded by a cloud of dust. And the dust's screaming." Tesla drew a long breath, and expelled it slowly. "When was this?" she said softly. "Less than a month ago." "What did he do?" "Killed a couple in Illinois. Ripped a baby out of the woman. Left the guy for dead." "Careless. Is that the only report?"

"It's the only one I've found so far, but I'll keep looking."

"I'll check in on my way up to Oregon@' "I was thinking@'Grillo began.

"You should talk to Howie and Jo-Beth." "Yeah, I will. I was thinking about Fletcher." "When did you last talk to them?" "A couple of weeks ago." "And?" Tesla pressed. "they were fine," Grillo replied.

"Tommy-Ray had the hots for her, you know. They're twins-2' "I know@'

"One egg, one soul. I swear, he was crazy about her-"

"Fletcher," Grillo said. "What about him?"

"If he's there in Everville I'm going to come meet him." "What for?" There was a short pause. Then Grillo said, "For the Nuncio."

"What are you talking about? There is no Nuncio. I destroyed the last of it." "He's got to have kept some for himself." "He was the one that asked me to destroy it, for God's sake." "No. He kept some." "What the hell's all this about?" "I'll tell you some other time. You find Fletcher, and I'll try tracing Tommy-Ray."

"Try sleeping first, Grillo. You sound like shit."

"I don't sleep much these days, Tes. It's a waste of time."

Howie had started working on the car just after eight, intending to get his tinkering over and done with before the sun got too hot. This was the fifth blistering summer they'd lived in Illinois, and he was determined it would be the last. He'd thought returning to the state where he'd been born and raised would be reassuring in a time of uncertainty. Not so. All it had done was remind him of how radically his life had changed in the last half-decade, and how few of those changes had been for the better.

But whenever his spirits were down-which was often since he'd lost his job in March-he only had to look at Jo-Beth cradling Amy and he would feel them rise again.

It was five years since he'd first laid eyes on Jo-Beth in Palomo Grove; five years since their fathers had waged war on the streets to keep them apart. Years in which they'd lived under an assumed name in a suburb where nobody cared about your life because they'd given up caring about their own. Where the sidewalks were littered and the cars dirty and smiles hard to come by. It wasn't the life he'd wanted to give his wife and his daughter, but D'Amour had put it to them this way: If they lived in plain sight as Mr. and Mrs. Howard Katz, they would be found within months and murdered. they knew too much about the secret life of the world to be allowed to survive. Forces sworn to protect that life would silence them, and call themselves heroes for doing so. This was certain.

So they had hidden themselves away in Illinois, and only called each other Howie and Jo-Beth when the doors were bolted and the windows locked. And so far the trick had kept them alive. But it had taken its toll. It was hard, living in shadow, not daring to plan too much, to hope too hard. Once every couple of months Howie would talk to D'Amour, and ask him for some sense of how things were going. How long, he'd say, before they've forgotten who the hell we are, and we can get out into the light again? D'Amour was no great diplomat, but time after time Howie could hear him doing his best to prettify the truth a little; to find some way of keeping them from despair.

But Howie was out of patience. This was the last summer they'd be in this God forsaken hole of a place, he told himself as he sweated under the hood; the last summer he'd pretend he was somebody he wasn't to satisfy D'Amour's paranoia. Maybe once he and Jo-Beth had some part to play in the drama they'd glimpsed half a decade before; but that time had surely passed. The forces D'Amour had evoked to intimidate them-the murderous heroes who would slaughter them in their beds-had more urgent matters on their minds than pursuing two people who'd chanced to swim in Quiddity once upon a time.

The phone was ringing in the house. Howie stopped work, and picked up a rag to clean his hands. He'd skinned his knuckles, and they were stinging. He was sucking at the bloodiest when Jo-Beth appeared on the step, squinting in the sun just long enough to say, "It's for you," then disappearing into the darkness of the house.

It was Grillo.

"What's up?" Howie said. "Nothing much," came the reply. "I was calling to see if you were okay,"

"Amy's keeping us up most nights, but otherwise@'

"Still no job?"

"No job. I keep looking, but@'

"It's tough."

"We're going to have to move, Nathan. Just get out there and start a proper life."

"This... may not be the best time to do it."

:'Things are going to look up." 'I'm not talking economics."

"What then?" Silence. "Nathan?" "I don't want to alarm you-"

"But?" "It's probably nothing-"

"Will you spit it out, for God's sake?" "It's Tommy-Ray." "He's dead, Grillo." "I know that's what we've assumed-" Howie lowered his voice to a fierce whisper. "What the hell are you telling me?" "We're not exactly sure."

"We?"

"Tesla and me." "I thought she'd disappeared." "She did for a time. Now she's on her way up to Oregon-"

"Go on."

"She says your father's up there." Howie was a heartbeat from slamming the phone down. "I know how this sounds@' Grillo said quickly.

"it sounds like shit is what it sounds like," Howie said.

"I wasn't ready to believe it either. But these are strange times, Howie."

"Not for us they're not," Howie replied. "They're just a fucking waste, okay? We're wasting our fucking lives waiting for somebody to tell us something that makes sense and all you can do-" He wasn't whispering any longer, he was shouting, "all you can do is tell me my father-who's dead, Grillo, he's dead-is wandering around Oregon, and Tommy-Ray@' He heard Jo-Beth let out a sob behind him. "Shit!" he said. "Just stay out of our lives from now on, Grillo. And tell D'Amour to do the same, okay? We've had it with this crap!" He slammed down the phone, and turned to look at Jo-Beth. She was standing in the doorway, with that woebegone look on her face she wore so often these days. "What do they fucking take us for?" he said, covering his eyes with his hand. they were burning.

"You said Tommy-Ray."

"It was just-"

"What about Tommy-Ray?"

"Shit. That's all it was. Grillo's fucking shit." He glanced up at her. "It's nothing, sweetie," he said.

"I want to know what Grillo told you," Jo-Beth said doggedly.

She would worry more if he didn't tell, he suspected. So he gave a pr6cis of what Grillo had said.

"That's it?" she asked him when he was done.

'That's it," he said. "I told you it was nothing." She nodded, shrugged, and turned away. "It's all going to change, sweetie," he said. "I swear."

He wanted to get up and go to her. Wrap her in his arms and rock her till she melted against him. So many times in the past they'd ended up entwined after hard words. But no longer. Now when she turned from him he kept his distance, afraid she'd refuse him. He didn't know why or where this doubt had originated-was he reading some subtle signal in her eyes that told him to keep his distance?-but it was too strong to be overcome; or else he was too weak.

"So fucked up," he murmured to himself, his hands returning to cover his face.

Grillo's words circled in the darkness.

These are strange times...

Howie had refuted it at the time, but it was true. Whether Fletcher was in Oregon or not, whether TommyRay was alive or not, when a man could no longer put his an,ns around his wife, they were indeed strange times.

Before returning to work on the car he headed upstairs to take a peek at Amy. She'd been sick the last couple of days-her first summer on the planet she'd caught a coldand she lay exhausted in her cot, arms splayed, head to one side. He took a tissue from the box beside the bed and wiped a little gloss of spit from her chin, his touch too gentle to wake her. But somewhere in sleep, she knew her daddy was there, or so he believed. A barely perceptible smile appeared on her bow-lips, and her cheeks dimpled.

He leaned on the railing of the cot and gazed down at her in unalloyed bliss. Fatherhood had been unexpectedthough they'd talked about children many times, they'd decided to wait until their situation had improved-but he didn't regret for a moment the accident that had brought Amy into their lives. She was a gift; a simple sign of the goodness in Creation. All the magic in the world, whether wielded by his father, or the Jaff, or any of the secret powers D'Amour talked about-weren't worth a damn in the face of this simple miracle.

The little time spent with his sleeping beauty thoroughly invigorated him. When he stepped out into the heat again, the problems of a sickly car seemed piffling, and he set to solving them with a will.

After a few minutes of work a light wind started to get up; cooling gusts against his sweaty face. He stood clear of the hood for a moment and drew a deep breath. The wind smelt of the green beyond these gray streets. they would escape there soon, he told himself, and life would be good.

Standing chopping carrots in the kitchen, Jo-Beth paused to watch the wind shaking the unkempt thicket that choked the yard, thought of another yard in another year, and heard Tommy-Ray's voice calling her name out of the past. It had been dark that night in the Grove, but she remembered things having an exquisite luminosity: dirt, trees, reeling stars all filled with meaning.

"Jo-Beth!" Tommy-Ray was yelling, "Something won der.ful!"

"What?" she'd said.

"Outside. Come with me.

She'd resisted him at first. Tommy-Ray was wild sometimes, and the way he was shaking had made her afraid. "I'm not going to do anything to hurt you, " he'd said. "You know that. "

And she had. Unpredictable though he was, he had never shown her anything but love. "We feel things together," he'd said to her. That was true; they had shared feelings from the beginning. "So come on, " he'd said, taking hold of her hand.

And she'd gone, down the yard to where the trees churned against a pinwheel sky. And in her head she'd heard a whispering voice, a voice she'd been waiting to hear for seventeen years without realizing it.

Jo-Beth, it had said. I'm the Jaff. Your Father.

He had appeared then, out of the trees, and she remembered him looking like a picture from Mama's Bible. An Old Testament prophet, bearded and absolute. No doubt he had been wise, in his terrible fashion. No doubt if she'd been able to speak with him, and learn from him, she would not now be living in the grave, drawing only the tiniest breaths for fear of depleting what little supply of sanity remained to her.

But she had been parted from him, the way she'd been parted from Tommy-Ray, and she'd fallen into the arms of the enemy. He was a good man, this enemy, this Howie Katz; a good and loving man. And when they'd slept together for the first time, they had each dreamed of Quiddity, which meant that he was the love of her life. There would be none better. But there were affections that went deeper than found love. There were powers that shaped the soul before it was even born into the world, and they could not be gainsaid. However loving the enemy was, and however good, he would always be the enemy.

She hadn't realized this at first. She'd assumed her unease would disappear as the traumas of the Grove receded, and she learned a new normality. But instead it grew. She started to have dreams about Tommy-Ray, light pouring over his golden face like syrup. And sometimes in the middle of the afternoon, when she was at her most weary, she'd seem to hear her father speaking to her, and she'd ask him under her breath the question she'd asked in Mama's backyard.

"Why are you here now? After all this time?"

"Come closer," he would say, "I'll tell you...

But she hadn't known how to get closer, how to cross the abyss of death and time that lay between them.

And then, out of nowhere, hope. Sometimes she remembered how it had come to her very clearly, and on those days she would have to hide herself away from Howie, in case he saw the knowledge on her face. Other times-like nowwhen she knew he was in pain, and her heart opened to him the way it had at the beginning, the memory became confounded. Her thoughts lost focus, and she would spend hours staring out of the window, or at the sky, trying to catch hold of some elusive possibility.

No matter, she told herself. It would come back. Meanwhile, she would chop the carrots and wash the dishes and tend the baby and The wind threw a scrap of litter against the window and pinned it there for a moment, flapping like a one-winged bird. Then a second gust carried it away.

She would go soon, with the same ease. That was part of, the promise. She would be carried off, and away, to a place where the secrets her father had almost told her were waiting to be whispered, and her loving enemy would never find her.

Everville rose early that Thursday morning, even though it had gone to bed later than usual the night before. There were banners to hang and windows to polish, grass to be cut, and streets to be swept. No idle hands today.

At the Chamber of Commerce, Dorothy Bullard fretted about the clouds that had blown in overnight. The weatherman had promised sun, sun, sun, and here it was, eleven twenty-two, and so far she'd not seen a glimmer. Masking her anxiety with a beam of her own, she got about the business of the day, organizing the distribution of the Festival brochures, which had arrived that morning, to the list of sites that always carried them. Dorothy was a great believer in lists. Without them, all was chaos.

Just before noon, at the intersection of Whittier and Main, Frank Carlsen ploughed his station wagon into the back of a stationary truck, the collision bringing traffic on Main Street to a virtual halt for the better part of an hour. Carlsen was taken off to the police station, where he admitted to having started celebrating a little early this year; just a few beers to get into the spirit of things. There was no great damage done to the truck, so Ed Olson, who'd brought him in, sent him out again with a simple reprimand. "I'm bending the law for you, Frank," he told Carisen, "so stay sober and don't make me look like an asshole."

Main Street was running freely again by twelve-fifteen, at which time Dorothy looked out of her office window to see that the clouds had started to thin, and the sun was breaking through.

Erwin had set out for the creek a little after ten, stopping off at Kitty's Diner for some apple pancakes and coffee to fortify himself Bosley was his usual ebullient self, which on some days Erwin found grating but today merely amused him. Appetite satisfied, Erwin set off for the creek, parking his car beside the Masonic Lodge on First Street and walking from there. He was glad he'd put on sturdy boots and an old sweater. The warmth of the late summer days, along with the rains of a week or so ago, had made the thicket lusher than ever, and by the time he reached the creek he had scratches on his neck, face, and hands, and enough twigs in his sweater to fuel a small fire.

Over the centuries the creek had carved itself a deep trench to run in, its shallow, speeding waters overcast with antediluvian ferns. He had not ventured here in six or seven years, and he was surprised afresh at how remote it felt. Though Main Street lay no more than three-quarters of a mile behind him, the whine of gnats around his head was louder than the murmur of traffic, while in front of him, on the other side of the creek, the thickly wooded slope rose up towards the Heights undeveloped and, he supposed, untenanted. He was alone, and that was by no means an unpleasant feeling. He'd take his time looking for the house by the creek, and chew over his future while he did so.

Joe called Phoebe at the doctor's in the middle of the morning and asked her if she'd be available to meet him at lunchtime rather than in the afternoon. She warned him it'd only give them a few minutes together; it was a ten-minute drive in both directions between the office and home.

r, most likely, with the streets so busy. He had anticid this. Come to the apartment, he suggested, it's just a couple of minutes away. She told him she would. Expect me just after twelve-thirty, she told him.

"I'll be waiting," he said, and she got goosebumps from the heat in his voice. She spent the rest of the morning with a twitchy little smile on her face, and at twelve twenty-eight she was gone. She'd visited him at the apartment only twice before, once when Morton had been sick in bed with the flu, and once during his vacation. It was riskier than the house, because there was no way into his building without being seen. Especially today, with so many people out and about. She didn't care.

She parked on the street right outside the building, and defiantly marched up the side steps that led to Joe's front door almost hoping she was being seen.

Her knuckles had barely touched the door when it was opened. He was wearing just his shorts, and was running with sweat.

"The fan's broken," he said, ushering her inside. "But you don't mind sweatin', right?" The place was a mess, as usual, and baking hot. He cleared a place for her on the sofa, but instead of sitting she followed him through to the kitchen, where he poured a glass of ice water for her. There they stayed, with the noise of the street coming in through the open window.

"I've been thinkin'," he said. "The sooner we come clean about this, the better.

"I'm going to see an attorney on Monday."

He grinned. "Good girl." He laid his arms on her shoulders, clasping hands to wrist behind her head. "You want me to come with you?"

"No. I'll do it."

"Then we'll just get out of here. As far away as possible."

"Any place you like."

"Somewhere warm," he said. "I like the heat."

"Suits me," she said. She put her thumb to his cheek and rubbed.

"Paint," she said.

"Kiss," he said back.

"We have to talk."

"We'll talk while we fuck."

"Joe

"Okay, we'll fuck while we talk, how's that?" He drew a little closer to her. "It's too hot to say no." There was sweat trickling down between her breasts; sweat between her buttocks, sweat between her thighs. She was almost dizzy with the heat.

"Yes?" he said.

"Yes," she said, and stood there, head spinning, while button by button, clasp by clasp, he bared her to the air.

Erwin had first followed the creek downstream, thinking that the house was more likely to be situated on the flatter land than on the uneven terrain of the Heights' lower slopes. Either he was wrong in that assumption, he discovered, or else this part of McPherson's confession was a lie. After an hour he gave up trailing the creek's southeasterly course and turned round, following his own tracks back to the place where he'd begun. There he halted for a couple of minutes to smoke a cigarette and plot his next move. Bosley's pancakes would sustain him for another hour and a half at least, but he had quite a thirst after clambering over boulders and thrashing his way through the thicket.

Maybe a respite was in order. A cup of coffee back at Kitty's; then back to the trek refreshed. After a few moments, he decided to forgo the break and continue his search. Once he'd found the house the coffee would taste all the better anyway.

The terrain rapidly became more problematic as he moved upstream, however, and after a quarter of an hour of fighting his way through the dense undergrowth, his hands stained green with moss, his knees skinned from slipping on rocks, he was about ready to retreat. He paused to pull off his sweater-in which he was now cooking-and as it cleared his face he caught sight of a mysterious shape between the trees up ahead.

He started towards it, tugging his arms from the sweater as he went, little sounds of pleasure escaping him the closer he got.

"Oh... oh... that's it! That's it!"

There it was, right in front of him. Fire and rot had med most of the boards, but the framework and the brick mneys were still standing.

He hung his sweater in a branch, then thrust his way through the thicket until he reached the front of the housethough it scarcely deserved the word-shack, more likeand stepped over the threshold.

There were a few pitiful signs of the life that had been lived here underfoot: sticks of charred furniture, a piece of decayed rug, fragments of some plates, a battered pail. The scene was pitiful, of course, but Erwin was elated. There was now no doubt in his mind that McPherson's confession was substantially true. He had evidence enough to make public what he knew without fear of contradiction. All he had to do now was work out how to get maximum mileage out of the announcement.

He went down on his haunches and pulled a shard of crockery out from the tangle of undergrowth, touched for the first time by a tremor of unease. He didn't believe in ghosts@e dead were the dead, and they stayed that way- but the dripping hush of the place gnawed at him nevertheless. It was time to go back; time to get that cup of coffee, and maybe a celebratory slice of carrot cake to go with it.

Wiping the dirt from the plate shard, he got to his feet. As he did so he caught a motion in the trees on the other side of the creek. He looked towards it, and his stomach leapt. Somebody was standing there, watching him. The plate shard slipped from his fingers. The hairs at his nape prickled.

The shadows between the pines were too dense to make out much detail of the watcher's appearance, but it was plain he was no hiker. He was wearing something dark and full, almost like robes, his face half-hidden by a substantial beard, his pallid hands clasped in front of him.

He inclined his head in Erwin's direction now, as if to say: I see that you see me. Then he raised his left hand and beckoned Erwin towards him. The creek lay between them, of course, the humble gorge it had cut for itself deeper here, closer to its source, than further downstream.

It afforded sufficient protection should the stranger prove to be a lunatic that Erwin felt safe to obey the man's instruction, and come a little nearer. As he reached the edge of the bank, which fell away steeply four or five feet, the man spoke. His voice was low, but it carried over the rush of water.

"What place is this?" he said.

"This is Unger's Creek."

"I meant the town."

"It's not a town, it's a city. It's called Everville."

"Everville@'

"Are you lost?"

The man started down the incline between the trees. He was barefoot, Erwin saw, and with every stride the strangeness of his garb and features became more apparent. As Erwin had guessed, he was indeed wearing robes, of a blue so deep it was almost black. As for his face, it was a curious mingling of severity and ease: the brow knitted, the eyes lively, the mouth narrow, but carrying a little smile.

"I thought I was lost," he said, "but now I see I'm not. What's your name?"

"Erwin Toothaker."

"Erwin, I have a favor to ask of you."

"First tell me who you are."

"Oh, by all means." The stranger had reached the opposite bank now, and opened his arms to Erwin. "My name," he said, "is Richard Wesley Fletcher. And I am come to save you from banality."

"Joe. There's somebody coming up the stairs."

He unglued his lips from her breast, and listened. There were children yelling in the street outside and a radio playing in the apartment below. But no footfall, no creak. He went back to licking her nipple.

"I swear," she whispered, her eyes turned towards the door.

"Okay," he said, snatching his shorts off the floor and pulling them on, pressing his ever-buoyan errection against his belly in order to do so.

She ran her fingers over the breast he'd so conscientiously licked, then plucked the nipple between middle finger and thumb.

"Let me see what you got, baby," he said, looking back at her from the doorway.

She let one leg drop off the sofa on which she was sprawled and raised her hips a little. He stared at her cunt.

"Oh baby."

"You like that?" she whispered.

"You're going to see how much I like that."

She almost called him back to her there and then, but before she could do so he was gone into the hallway. She looked down at her body, grabbing hold of the excess flesh around her waist. He said he loved her this way; but she didn't. She would shed twenty pounds, she swore to herself, twenty pounds before Thanksgiving. That was "Nigger!" she heard Morton yell. The door smashed against the wall. Joe stumbled back along the hallway, clutching his bare belly.

She reached for the back of the sofa to haul herself up, but before she could do so Morton was in the doorway, staring down where Joe had stared moments before, disgust on his face.

"Christ!" he yelled. "Christ, look at you!" and came at her across the room, arms outstretched. He grabbed her splayed legs, and pulled her off the sofa with such violence she screamed.

"Don't!"

But he was past hearing anything. She'd never seen such an expression on his face: teeth bared, lips flecked, veins, sweat, and eyes popping. He wasn't red, despite his exertion: he was the color of somebody about to puke or pass out.

He reached down and hauled her up onto her knees.

"You fucking whore!" he yelled, slapping her face. "Does he like these?" He slapped her breasts this time, back and forth. "I bet he does!" Harder now, back and forth, stinging blows. "I bet he fucking eats your fucking tits!"

She tried to cover herself, but he was into the sport of it now.

"Nice tits!" Slapping, slapping so hard tears came. "Nice tits! Nice, nice tits!"

She hadn't seen Joe get up, she was too busy begging Morton to stop. But suddenly he was there, grabbing hold of her tormentor's collar and flinging him back across the room.

Morton was a good three or four inches taller, and easily fifty pounds heavier, but Joe was after him in a heartbeat, fists driving him against the wall.

Wiping the tears from her eyes, Phoebe reached for some article of clothing to cover her nakedness. As she did so Morton-his nose pouring blood-let out a roar and lunged forward again, the mass of his body thrown against Joe with such force they were carried across the room. Joe landed on the television, which toppled off the low table on which it was set, and Joe went down with it, the table cracking beneath him.

Morton fell on top of him, but he was up a moment later, returning Joe's punches with kicks. they were aimed between Joe's legs, and landed solidly, five, six, seven times, while Joe lay winded and dazed on a bed of splinters and glass.

Forsaking her attempts at modesty Phoebe got to her feet and tried to pull Morton off him, but he put his hand over her face, pinching her cheeks.

"You wait your turn!" he said, stomping on Joe's groin now. "I'll get to you."

Then he pushed her away, almost casually, so as to concentrate on his brutalities. She looked down at Joe-at his body sprawled over the debris, at the bloody patch spreading in his shorts-and realized with a kind of giddiness that Morton would not be done till Joe was dead.

She had to do something, anything. She looked around the room for a weapon, but there was nothing she could lift that would fell Morton. In desperation she raced through to the kitchen, hearing as she went the terrible dull thud of boot against body, and the moans of Joe, weaker by the moment.

She pulled the kitchen drawers open one after the other, looking for a steak knife or a bread knife; something to threaten Morton with. But there was only a collection of battered cutlery.

"You're fucked, nigger@' Morton was saying. Joe's moans had stopped altogether.

In desperation she snatched up an ordinary knife and fork and raced back into the living room, in time to see Morton reach down and pull Joe's shorts away from his body to inspect his handiwork. The sickening intimacy of this fueled her rage, and she threw herself at Morton, weapon sed. He swung round as she did so, and more by chance intention dashed the knife from her hand. The fork, wever, found its mark, her momentum sufficient to thrust it into the flesh of his upper chest.

He looked down at it, more puzzled than pained, then struck her a backhanded swipe that had her stumbling back towards the door. Blood was running from the wound, but he didn't waste time pulling the fork out.

"You fucking slut!" he said, coming at her like a driverless truck. She backed out into the hallway. The front door was still open. If she made a dash she might still outrun him. But that meant leaving Joe here while she found somebody to help her, and God alone knew what Morton would do to him in the meantime.

"Stand still," he said to her, his voice dropping now to a pained rasp.

"You've got this coming." He almost sounded reasonable. "You know you got this coming."

She glanced down the narrow hallway towards the bathroom, and as he lunged at her she threw herself through the door, turning to close it before he reached her. Too late. His arm shot through the gap; grabbed hold of her hair. She threw her weight against the door, slatnming it on his arm. This time he yelled, a stream of obscenities rising into a howl of rage and pain. He started to push against the door, pulling his bloodied arm out again and wedging his leg in the gap when it was wide enough.

Her bare feet slid on the tiles; it was only a matter of moments before he had the door open. Then he would kill her, she was certain of it. She started to scream at the top of her voice, her din filling the tiny bathroom. Somebody had to come quickly, or it would be too late.

His face appeared at the opening now, white and clammy as the tiles.

"Open up," he said, pushing harder. "You know how to do that." And with a final shove he threw the door wide. She had nowhere to run and he knew it. He stood in the doorway, bleeding and gasping, looking her up and down.

"You're a whore," he said. "A fat, fucking whore. I'm going to rip your fuckin' tits off."

"Hey!" Joe shouted.

Morton looked down the hallway. Joe was up and hanging onto the frame of the living room door.

"You not dead yet?" Morton said, and strode back towards Joe.

to the end of her days, Phoebe would never be exactly sure what happened next. She went after Morton to hold him back, or at least delay him long enough for Joe to get to the front door-that much was sure-but as she grabbed his shoulder, Joe stepped or slipped into his path. Perhaps he struck Morton; perhaps Morton stumbled, weak from blood loss; perhaps her weight was enough to topple him. Whichever it was, he fell forward, reaching to snatch hold of Joe even as he did so. As he struck the ground there was a snapping sound, followed by something like a sob from Morton. He didn't get up. His legs twitched for a moment. Then he lay still.

"Oh... my... God..." Joe said, and turning from Phoebe started to vomit violently.

Still afraid Morton could get up again, she approached him cautiously. There was blood seeping from beneath his chest. The fork! She'd forgotten the fork!

She started to roll him over. He was still breathing, but his breaths were like spasms, shaking him from head to toe. As for the fork, it had snapped halfway down its length. The rest, maybe three inches of it, was buried in his chest.

Joe was getting to his feet now, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. "Gotta get a doctor here," he said, and disappeared into the living room.

Phoebe went after him. "Wait, wait," she said. "What are we going to say?"

"Tell 'em the truth," he said. He pulled the phone out of the debris.

It had been dragged out of the wall. Grimacing with every move he made, he stopped to plug it back in, while Phoebe pulled on her underwear.

"They're going to put me away for this, baby."

"It was an accident," she said.

He shook his head. "That's not the way it works," he went on. "I've had trouble before." "What do you mean?"

"I mean I've got a record," he said. "I would've told you-"

"I don't care," she said.

"Well, you should," he snapped, "because that screws erything." He had found the end of the phone line, but it ended in sheared wires. "It's no good," he said, tossing the phone down amid the trashed furniture. Then he got to his feet, tears filling his eyes. "I'm so sorry... " he said,

"I'm so... sorry."

"You'd better go," she said.

"No.

"I can take care of Morton. You just go." She'd pulled on her skirt, and was buttoning up her blouse. "I'll explain everything, he'll be looked after, then we'll just get out together." There was faulty logic here, she knew, but it was the best she could do. "I mean it," she said. "Get dressed and go!"

She went back to the door. Morton was muttering now, which was an improvement on the spasms: obscenities mingled with nonsense, like baby talk, except that there was blood coming from between his lips instead of milk and spit. "He's going to be all right," she said to Joe, who was still standing in the middle of the wrecked room looking desolate.

"Will you please go? I'll be fine."

Then she was out into the sunlight, and down the stairs. The kids had stopped playing in the street, and were watching from the opposite sidewalk.

"What are you looking at?" she said to them in the tone she took to latecomers at the surgery. The group dispersed in seconds, and she hurried along to the phone at the corner of the street, not daring to look back for fear she'd see Joe slipping away.

"I bet you thought this was a quiet little town, right?" Will Hannick said, sliding another glass of brandy the way of his sober-suited customer. "Is it not?" the fellow said.

He had the look of money about him, Will thought; an ease that only came when people had dollars in their pocket. Hopefully, he'd spend a few of them on brandies before he moved on.

"There's been some kind of bloodshed across town this afternoon."

"Is that so?"

"A guy comes in all the time, Morton Cobb, sits at the table by the wall there," Will pointed to it, "been carted off to the hospital with a fork in his heart."

"A fork?" said the man, plucking at his perfect moustaches.

"That's what I said, I said a fork, just like that, a fork, I said. Big man too' "

"Hmm," said the man, pushing the glass back in Will's direction.

"Another?"

"Why not? We should celebrate."

"What are we celebrating?"

"How,about bloodshed?" the fellow replied. This struck Will as tasteless, which fact must have registered on his long, dolorous features, because the drinker said, "I'm Sorry. I misunderstood. Is this fellow Cobb a friend of yours?" :'Not exactly."

'So this attempt upon his life, by the wife, or her lover, her black lover-2'

"You've heard."

"Of course I've heard. This bloody, scandalous deed is really just something to be... savored, isn't it?" He sipped his brandy. "No?"

Will didn't reply. The fellow was spooking him a little, truth to tell.

"Have I offended you?" he asked Will.

"No.

"You are a professional bartender, am I right?"

"I own this place," Will said.

"All the better. You see a man like yourself is in a very influential position. This is a place where people congregate, and when people congregate, what do they do?"

Will shrugged.

"they tell tales," came the reply.

"I really don't-2'

"Please, Mr.-"

"Hamrick."

"Mr. Hamrick, I've been in bars in cities across the world-Shanghai, St. Petersburg, Constantinople-and the great bars, the ones that become legendary, they have one thing in common, and it isn't the perfect vodka martini. It's a fellow like you. A disseminator."

"A what?"

"One who sows seeds."

"You got me wrong, mister," Will said with a little gfin "You want Doug Kenny at Farm Supplies."

The brandy drinker didn't bother to laugh. "Personally," he said, "I hope Morton Cobb dies. It'll make a much better story." Will pursed his lips. "Go on, admit it," the man said, leaning forward, "if Morton Cobb dies of a fork wound to the chest will it not be a far better story for you to tell?" "Well... " Will said, "I guess maybe it would."

"There. That wasn't so difficult was it?" The drinker drained his glass. "How much do I owe you?"

"Nine bucks."

The man brought out an alligator-skin wallet, and from it drew not one but two crisp ten-dollar bills. He laid them down on the counter. "Keep the change," he said. "I may pop back in, to see if you've got any juicy details about the Cobb affair. The depth of the wound, the size of the lover's apparatus-that sort of thing." The brandy drinker smirked. "Now don't tell me it didn't cross your mind. If there's one thing a good disseminator knows it's that every detail counts. Especially the ones nobody'll confess they're interested in., Tell them shameful stuff and they'll love you for it." Now he laughed, and his laughter was as musical as his voice. "I speak," he said, "as a man who has been well-loved."

And with that he was gone, leaving Will to stare down at the twenty bucks not certain whether he should be grateful for the man's generosity or burning the bills in the nearest ashtray.

Phoebe stared at the face on the pillow and thought: Morton's got more bristles than a hog. Bristles from his nose; bristles from his ears; bristles erupting from his eyebrows and from under his chin where he'd missed them shaving.

Did I love him before the bristles? she asked herself. Then: Did I ever love him?

Her musings were curiously detached, which fact she put down to the tranquilizers she'd been given a couple of hours before. Without them, she doubted she would have gotten through the humiliations and interrogations without collapsing. She'd had her body examined (her breasts were bruised and her face puffy, but there was no serious damage); she'd had Jed Gilholly, Everville's police chief, asking her questions about her relationship with Joe (who he was; why she'd done it); she'd been ferried back from the hospital in Silverton to the apartment, and quizzed about what, precisely, had happened where. And finally, having told all she'd could tell, she was brought back to the bedside where she now sat, to sit and meditate on the mystery of Morton's bristles.

Though the doctor had pronounced his condition stable, he knew the patient's vices by rote. He smoked, he drank, ate too much red meat and too many fried eggs. His body, all its bulk, was not strong. When he got the flu-which he did most winters-he'd be sick for weeks. But he had to live. She hated him down to every last wiry bristle, but he had to live.

Jed Gilholly came by a little before five, and called her out into the hallway. He and his family (two girls, now both in their early teens) were all patients of Dr. Powell's, and while his wife and children were pretty healthy, Jed himself was severely dyspeptic, and-if memory served-had the first mumbling of a prostate problem. It made him rather less forbidding, knowing these little things.

"I got some news," he said to her. "About your... er... boyfriend."

They've caught him, she thought.

"He's a felon, Phoebe."

No, maybe they hadn't. "He was involved in a wounding incident in Kentucky, four or five years ago. Got probation. If you know where he is...

they hadn't got him, thank the Lord.

"I suggest you tell me right now, 'cause this whole mess is looking pretty bad for him."

"I told you," she said, "Morton was the one started it."

"And Morton's also the one lying in there," Jed replied. "He could have died, Phoebe."

"It was an accident. I was the one stuck the fork in him, not Joe. If you're going to arrest anybody, it should be me."

"I saw what he did to you," Jed said, a little embarrassed, "knocking you around like that. I reckon what we got here is some wife beating, some assault, and," he looked Phoebe in the eyes, "a man who's been in trouble with the law before, and who's maybe a danger to the community."

"That's ridiculous."

"I'll be the judge of what's ridiculous and what's not," Jed said. "Now I'm asking you again: do you know where Flicker is?"

"And I'm telling you straight," Phoebe replied, "no I don't."

Jed nodded, his true feelings unreadable. "I'm going to tell you something, Phoebe, that I wouldn't maybe say if I didn't know you."

"Yes?"

"It's simple really. I don't know what the story was between you and this guy Flicker. I do know Morton isn't the friendliest of guys the way he beat you around this afternoon," he shook his head, "that's a crime all of its own. But I have to consider your boyfriend dangerous, and if there's a choice between his safety and the safety of my officers-2' "He's not going to hurt anybody."

"That's what I'm telling you, Phoebe. He isn't going to get the chance."

Without a vehicle, Joe had been presented with a limited number of options. He could steal a car and drive somewhere isolated then come back for Phoebe after dark. He could find somewhere to hide within the city limits, and bide his time there. Or he could climb.

He chose the latter. The stealing of a vehicle would only add to his sum of crimes, and the city was too small and too white for him to pass unnoticed in its streets. Up the mountain he would go, he decided; at least far enough to be safe from pursuers.

He'd left the apartment with the barest minimum of supplies: some food, a jacket for later on, and, most important, given the condition he was in, the first-aid box. He'd only had time for a perfunctory self-examination Oust enough to check that he wasn't going to bleed to death) before making his escape, but the pain was excruciating, and he only got as far as the creek before he had to stop. There, he slithered down into the ditch where the creek ran, and, out of sight of all but the fishes, washed his bruised and bloodied groin as tenderly as he could. It was a slow, agonizing business. He could barely suppress his cries when the icy water ran over his lacerated flesh, and several times had to stop completely before the pain made him pass out. At last, against his better judgment, he resorted to chewing two painkillers he'd stored with the kit, the last (but one) of ten odan he'd been prescribed for a back injury. It was powrful stuff; and had induced in him a kind of blissful stupor which was not to his present advantage. But without it he doubted he'd be able to get much further than the creek. He sat on the bank for a while and waited for them to kick in before he finished with his ministrations, his trousers and blood-crusted underwear around his ankles. The blaze of the day was over, but the sun still found its way through the ferns and gilded the sliding water. He watched it go while the pain subsided. If this was what death was like, he thoughtpain receding, languor spreading-it would be worth the wait.

After a few minutes, with his thoughts fuzzier than they'd been and his fingers more clumsy, he returned to washing his wounds. His balls had ballooned to twice their normal size in the last half-hour, the sac purplish in places and raw-red in others. He felt the testicles gently, rolling them in between his fingers. Even through the haze of Percodan they were painful, but he felt nothing separated or clotted. He might yet have children, one of these distant days. As to his cock, it was badly torn in three places, where Morton had ground his heel upon it.

Joe finished cleaning the cuts with creek water and then applied liberal dollops of antiseptic cream.

Once, during this delicate procedure, a wave of nausea rose up in him-less at the sight of his wounds than at the memory of how he'd come by them-and he had no choice but to stop and watch the sun on the water until the feeling subsided. His mind wandered as he waited. Twenty-nine years on the planet (thirty in a month's time) and he had nothing to show for it but this pitiful condition. That would have to change if he was to get through another twenty-nine. His body had taken enough punishment for one lifetime. From now on, he would chart his course, instead of letting circumstances take him where they would. He'd put the past behind him, not by denying it but by allowing it to be part of him, pain and all. He was lucky, wasn't he? Love had found him, in the form of a woman who would have died for him this afternoon. Most people never had that in their lives. they lived with compromise where love was concerned; with a mate who was better than nothing but less than everything. Phoebe was so much more than that.

She wasn't the first woman to have said she loved him, nor even the first he'd replied to in kind. But she was the first he was afraid to lose, the first he knew his life would be empty without; the first he thought he might love after the fierce heat was gone, after the time when she'd cared to spread her cunt for him, or he to see it spread.

A sharp pain in his groin reminded him of his present state, and he looked down to see that all was not lost. His cock had risen to respectable erection while he'd pictured, Phoebe's display, and he had to concentrate on counting flies until it had subsided. Then he finished putting on ointment, and bandaged himself up, albeit roughly. It was time to move on, before the search spread as far as the creek; and before the effect of the painkillers wore off.

He pulled up his pants, buried the litter from his salvings, and wandering a little way up the bank found a place where the creek was narrow enough to be crossed in a hobbled leap. Then he clambered up the opposite bank and headed off up the slope between the trees.

At six-seventeen, while Phoebe was at the hot drink machine getting a cup of coffee, Morton opened his eyes. When she got back to the room, he was babbling to the nurse about how he'd been on a boat, and fallen overboard.

"I coulda drowned," he kept saying, clutching at the sheets as though they were lifelines. "I coulda. I coulda drowned."

"No, Mr. Cobb. You're in a hospital-"

"Hospital?" he said, raising his head off the pillow an inch or two, though the nurse did her best to restrain him. "I was floating-"

"You were dreaming, Morton," Phoebe said, stepping into his line of vision.

At the sight of her the memory of what had brought him here seemed to come back. "Oh Christ," he said through clenched teeth, "Christ in Heaven," and sank back onto the pillow. "You bitch," he muttered now.

"You fucking bitch."

"Calm down, Mr. Cobb," the nurse insisted, but fueled a sudden spurt of rage, Morton sat bolt upright, tearing at e drip tube in his arm as he did so. "I knew!" he screamed, jabbing his finger in Phoebe's direction.

"Do as the nurse says, Morton."

"Please, give me a hand, Mrs. Cobb," the beleaguered woman said.

Phoebe put down her coffee and went to assist, but the proximity of his wife threw Morton into a frenzy.

"Don't you fucking touch me! Don't you-"

He stopped in mid-sentence, and uttered a tiny sound, almost like a hiccup. Then all the venom went out of him at once-his arms dropped to his sides, his knotted face slackened and went blank-and the nurse, unable to support the weight of his upper body, had no choice but to let him sink back onto the pillow. It did not end there. Even as the nurse raced to the door calling for help, Morton began to draw a series of agonizing breaths, each more panicked and desperate than the one before.

She couldn't watch him suffer without trying to do something to calm him.

"It's all right," she said, going back to the bedside and laying her hand on his cold brow. "Morton. Listen to me. It's all right."

His eyes were roving back and forth behind his lids. His gasps were horrible. "Hold on, Morton," she said, as his suffering continued to mount. "You'll bust something."

If he heard her, he didn't listen. But then when had he ever listened? He went on gasping, until his body was out of power. Then he simply stopped.

"Morton," she murmured to him. "Don't you dare-"

There were nurses back at the bedside now, and a doctor spewing agitated orders, but Phoebe registered none of them. Her focus was upon Morton's stricken face. There were flecks of spittle on his chin, and his eyes were still wide open. He looked the way he'd looked at the bathroom doorraging; raging even as the sea he'd been dreaming about closed over his head. One of the nurses took hold of her hand and now gently escorted her away from the bed.

"I'm afraid his heart's given out," she murmured consolingly. But Phoebe knew better. The damn fool had drowned.

There was always a moment at the close of day when the blue gloom of dusk had settled on the city, but the sun was, still in glory on Harmon's Heights. The effect was to make Everville seem like a ghost town, sitting in the shadow of a living mountain. What had seemed unequivocal a minute ago had now become ethereal. Folks who'd been able to read their neighbors' smiles across the street could no longer do so; children who'd known for certain there was nothing darting behind the fence, or snaking between the garbage cans, were no longer secure in their belief.

In that uncertain time before the sun left the Heights entirely, and the streetlamps and porch lights of Everville asserted their authority, the city bathed in doubt, and insolid souls in insolid streets entertained the notion that this life was just a candle-flame dream, and likely to flicker out with the next gust of wind.

It was Seth Lundy's favorite time of day. Better even than midnight, or that time before dawn when the moon had sunk, and the sun was no more than a gray hope in the east. Better than those, that minute.

He was standing in the town square, looking up at the last of the light on the mountaintop and listening for the hammering, which was often loud at this uncertain hour, when a man he hoped at one glance he would come to know better stepped out of the murk towards him and said, "What can you hear?"

He had only ever been asked that question by doctors. This was no doctor. "I can hear angels hammering on the sky from Heaven's side," he replied, seeing no reason to lie.

"My name's Owen Buddenbaum," the man said, coming so close that Seth could smell the brandy on his breath. "May I ask yours?"

"Seth Lundy." Owen Buddenbaum came a little closer still. Then, le the city waited in doubt around them, he kissed Seth on the lips. Seth had never been kissed on the lips by a man before, but he knew the rightness of it, to his heart, soul, and groin.

"Shall we listen to the hammering together?" Owen Buddenbaum said, "or shall we make some for ourselves?"

"For ourselves," Seth replied.

"Good," said Owen Buddenbaum. "Ourselves it will be."