Everville

PART THREE. VESSELS

Tesla had woken early, despite the late-night call with Gfillo and the pukings from Lucien; early enough to enjoy the birdsong before the sound of traffic from Melrose and Santa Monica drowned it out. With the kitchen cupboards empty she ambled up to the cafe below the Health Club on Santa Monica, which had been open since five for the benefit of masochists, and bought coffee, fruits, and bran muffins for herself and her guest.

I don't want you screwing him, Raul reminded her as she walked back to the apartment. We agree& No sex till we're separated

"That may never happen, Raul," she pointed out, "and I'm damned if I'm going to live like a nun for the rest of my life. Which might be, by the way, a very short time."

My, we arefeeling chipper this morning.

"Anyway, monkeys like sex. It's all they ever do at the ZOO.

Gofuck yourself Bombeck.

"That's all I've been doing. Which you haven't been complaining about, by the way. Did you get off on me diddlin' myself?"

No comment.

"I'm going to fuck Lucien, Raul. So you'd better get used to the idea."

Slut.

"Monkey."

Lucien was showered and sitting on the balcony in the sun by the time she got back to the apartment. He had found some of Tesla's old clothes in the closet: patchwork jeans circa 1968 and a leather vest which fitted his skinny torso better than it had ever fitted her. Ah, the resilience of youth, she thought, seeing how quickly he'd recovered from the excesses of the previous night. Face flushed, smile lavish, he rose to help her unpack the breakfast and partook with no little appetite.

"I feel so stupid about throwing up," he said. "I never do that. Mind you, I never drink vodka." He gave her a sidelong glance. "You're teaching me bad habits," he said. "Kate says you have to purify the body if you want to be a vessel for the infinite."

"Now there's a phrase," Tesla said. "Vesselfor the infinite. What does that mean-exactly?"

"Well... it means... you know, we're made from the same stuff stars are made of... and... all we have to do is open our souls up... and the infinite, I mean, you know... everything becomes one, and everything flows through us."

"The past, the future, and the dreaming moment between are all one country living one immortal day. "

The quote had Lucien agog. "Where'd that come from?" he said. "You never heard it before? I learned it from@' She paused to think about this. "Fletcher maybe," she said, "maybe Kissoon."

"Who's Kissoon?" Lucien said.

"Somebody I don't want to talk about," she said. There were few experiences in her life she still kept filed away under untouchable, but Kissoon was definitely one of them.

"I want you to tell me, when you're in a good space to do it," Lucien said. "I mean, I want to share all the wisdom in you."

"You'll be disappointed," Tesla said.

He laid his hand over hers. "Please. I mean it."

She heard the monkey make a retching sound in her head, and could not keep a smile from her lips.

"What's so funny?" Lucien said, looking a little hurt.

"Nothing," she said. "Don't be sensitive. If there's one thing I can't bear it's sensitive men." they were heading north by seven-thirty, and made good time up the coast. Either Tesla, or Raul, or perhaps a combination of them both, had developed an uncanny instinct when it came to the presence of cops, and she gunned the cycle to a hundred, a hundred and ten when they were certain they were unmatched. By Thursday evening they were across the state line, and about ten at night decided they'd come far enough for one day. they found a motel and checked in. One room, one bed. What this meant went undiscussed.

While Lucien headed out for food, Tesla called Grillo. He sounded glad to hear from her. The conversation with Howie had not gone well, he told her, and suggested she might have to put a call in to the couple herself, to offer some support for his warning.

"What the hell happened to D'Amour?" Tesla wanted to know. "I thought he was supposed to be watching over them?"

"Want my best guess?" Grillo said.

"Yeah."

"He's dead."

"What?"

"He was closing on something big-he wouldn't tell me what-then he just ceased communication."

The news shook Tesla. While her relationship with D'Amour had never been that close-she'd met with him one time only since the Grove, when her trek through the Americas had taken her up to New York-she'd vaguely thought of him as both a backstop and a source of esotefica, as someone who would always be in the picture. Now it seemed that this was not the case. And if D'Amour, who'd been fighting this fight for fifteen years and had defenses against the enemy in every corner (including several tattooed on his person), had lost the battle, then what hope did she have? Little or none.

Lucien had not taken her hint about sensitivity, thank God; he knew the moment he saw her face that she wasn't as blithe as she'd been. He gently inquired as to why, and she told him. He reassured her as best he could with words, but she quickly made their inadequacy plain, and he turned instead to touches, and kisses, and before long they were getting naked and he was warning her that he was no great lover and that she shouldn't expect too much.

She found his modesty disarming, and, as it turned out, unnecessary. He was no great experimenter, to be sure, but what he lacked in range he made up for in depth, which wasn't to be despised. they coupled with the kind of fervor she'd not experienced since her college days, all of twenty years before the bed squeaking under them, the headboard deepening a' groove in the wall made by those who'd loved here before.

Raul kept his silence for the first bout. She heard not a peep from him. But when, after she and Lucien had eaten a couple of slices of cold pizza, the nuzzling began again, he piped up.

He's not going to do it again.

"He can do it all night," she thought, "if he's up for it." She put her hands down between their legs, and guided him inside her. "And it looks like he is."

Christ! Raul sobbed. How can you bear this? Make him pull it out!

"Shut up," she said, staring down at her and Lucien's locked groins. At least close your eyes, Raul said.

She was far too intrigued to do that. "Look at that," she thought, raising her hips to welcome his length. "Him meeting me meeting him-"

Damn you "Like crossroads." You're raving, woman.

She looked up into Lucien's face. He had his eyes half closed and his brows knitted.

"Are you... all right?" he gasped.

"Never better," she said.

The ape continued to sob in her head, the words expelled upon Lucien's thrusts. It's like-he's stabbing-us. I can't-take any-more!

As he spoke she felt his will impinging on hers, crossing the divide they'd established at the beginning of their cotenanting. It hurt, and she let out a moan, which Lucien took for a sigh of appreciation. His embrace became tighter, his jabs more frenzied.

"Oh yes," he started to chant, "yes! yes! yes!"

No! Raul hollered, and before Tesia could demand her body back he took control of it.

Her arms, which had been languishing on the pillow, suddenly flew at Lucien, her nails raking his naked back. From out of her throat came a bestial din she'd never known she was capable of making, and as he recoiled in mute shock her legs rose behind him, hooking beneath his armpits and pulling him back. All this in such a blur of noise and motion Tesla wasn't even certain what had happened until it was over, and Lucien was sprawled on the floor beside the bed. "What the hell was that all about?" he said, finding his voice now.

Satisfied with its efforts, the monkey's hold relaxed enough for her to say, "It... it wasn't me."

"What do you mean, it wasn't you?" Lucien said.

"I swear@' she said, getting up from the bed. But he wasn't going to allow her near him again. He was up on his feet in a flash, retreating to the chair where he'd thrown his clothes.

"Wait," she said, not making any further attempt to approach him. "I can explain this."

Watching her warily he said, "I'm listening."

"I'm not alone in here," she told him, knowing as she spoke there was no easy way to say what she was about to say. "There's somebody else in my skull." Still, she thought, he should be able to understand the principle. Hadn't he been talking about being a vessel for the infinite that very morning? "His name's Raul."

He looked at her as though she were speaking in an alien language. "What are you talking about?" he said, plainly incredulous.

"I'm talking about the spirit of a man called Raul being here in my head with me. He's been here for five years. And he doesn't want us to do what we've been doing."

"Why not?"

"Well... why don't I let him speak for himself?"

What? she heard Raul say.

"Go on," she said aloud, "you've done the damage. Now explain it."

I can't. "You owe it to me, damn you!"

Lucien listened to the side of the argument he could hear with disbelief all over his face. She waited, leaving her tongue slack in her mouth.

"You snarled," she reminded Raul, "now you can damn well talk."

Before she'd finished the thought she felt her tongue start to flap and sounds emerged, crude at first, but quickly turning into syllables. Lucien watched and listened to this bizarre performance without moving a muscle. She suspected he thought he was in the presence of a lunatic, but she had no way of reassuring him until this was over.

"What she's just told you... " Raul began, Tesla's voice now in his possession, "is true. I'm the spirit of a man who... gave up my body to a great evil called Kissoon." She'd not expected him to offer Lucien a guide to body- hopping, but it ameliorated her fury somewhat to hear him do so. This was difficult territory for him to discuss, she knew. Kissoon and his persuasions were a bitter memory for them both, but how much more so for him, who had lost his very flesh to the shaman's tricks?

"She... did me a great... kindness," he went on hesitantly. "One which I will... always be thankful for." He licked her lips, back and forth a couple of times. His nervousness had made her mouth arid. "But ... this thing you do to me with men... " He shook her head, "It sickens me."

As Raul spoke, Lucien instinctively dropped his hand between his legs, covering his sex.

"I'm sure you mean to give her pleasure," Raul cautioned. "But her pleasure is my pain. Do you understand?"

Lucien said nothing.

"I want you to understand," he pressed. "I don't want you to think this is any failing on your part. It isn't. Truly it isn't."

At this juncture Lucien plucked his briefs off the floor and began to pull them on.

"I've said all I can say," Raul concluded. "I'll leave you two to-" Tesla leapt on his words before they were finished. "Lucien," she said.

"What are you doing?"

"Which of you is it now?" "It's me. Tesla." She got up from the bed, pulling the sheet around her as she did so, and squatted on the ground in front of him. He continued to dress as she spoke. "I know this is probably the strangest thing you've heard@' "You're right."

"What about Kate and Friederika?"

"I wasn't fucking with Kate. Or Friederika," he said, his voice tremulous. "Why didn't you tell me?" "I didn't think you needed to know."

"I'm making it with a guy-and you don't think I need to know?"

"Wait. Is that what this is about?" She got up from the floor, and stared down at him imperiously. "Where's your sense of adventure?"

"I guess I'm all out of it," he said, hauling on her patchwork jeans.

"You're leaving?"

"I'm leaving."

"And where will you go?"

"I don't know. I'll get a ride somewhere." "Look, at least stay the night. We don't have to do anything." She heard the desperation in her voice, and despised herself for it. What was this? One and a half fucks and suddenly she couldn't face sleeping alone? "Strike that remark," she said. "If you want to go find a ride, go find a ride. You're acting like an adolescent, but that's your problem."

With that she retired to the bathroom and showered, singing loudly enough to herself so that he knew she didn't care if he left or not.

Ten minutes later, when she emerged, he'd gone. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her skin still wet from the shower, and called Raul out from hiding.

"So... I guess it's just you and me." You're taking this better than I thought.

"If we survive the next few days," she said, "we're going to have to part. You realize that?"

I realize that.

There was a silence between them, while she wondered what it would be like living alone.

"By the way, was it really so terrible?"

Abominable.

"Well at least you know what you're missing," she said.

So strike me blind

"What?"

Tiresias, he said.

She was none the wiser. You don't know that story?

It was one of the paradoxes of their relationship that he, the sometime ape, had been educated in the great myths of the world by Fletcher, while she, the professional storyteller, had only the sketchiest knowledge of the subject.

"Tell me," she said, lying back on the bed.

Now?

"Well, you scared off my entertainment." She closed her eyes. "Go on," she said, "tell me."

He'd several times regaled her with his versions of classical tales, usually when she'd questioned some reference of his. The philanderings of Aphrodite; the voyages of Odysseus; the fall of Troy. But this story was so much more appropriate to their present situation than any he'd shared with her, and she slipped into sleep with images of the Theban seer Tiresias (who according to legend had known sex as both a man and a woman, and declaring the woman's pleasures ten times finer had been struck blind by a goddess, irritated that the secret was out) wandering through the wilds of the Americas in search of Tesla, until he found her in the rubble of Palomo Grove, where they made love, at last, with the ground cracking open around them.

At about the same time Tesia was falling asleep in a motel somewhere south of Salem, Oregon, Erwin was stirring from a strange slumber to find himself lying on the floor of his own living room. Somebody had lit a fire in the grate-he could see it flickering from the corner of his eye-and he was glad of the fact, because for some reason he was incredibly cold; colder than he could ever remember being in his life before.

He had to work hard to recall the return journey from the creek. He had not come alone; of that he was certain, Fletcher had come too. They'd waited until dusk, hadn't they? Waited in the ruins of the house until the first stars showed, and then wound their way through the least populated streets. Had he left the car down by the Masonic Hall? Presumably so. He vaguely remembered Fletcher saying that he despised engines, but that sounded so absurd Erwin dismissed it as delirium. What was there to hate in an engine?

He started to raise his head off the ground, but Lifting it an inch was enough to induce nausea, so he lay down again. The motion, however, brought a voice out of the shadows. Fletcher was here in the room with him.

"You're awake," he said.

"I think I must have the flu," Erwin replied. "I feel terrible."

"It'll pass," Fletcher replied. "Just lie still."

"I need some water. Maybe some aspirin. My head-2'

"Your needs are of no importance," Fletcher said. "they too will pass." A little irritated by this, Erwin rolled his head to one side to see if he could get a glimpse of Fletcher, but it was the remains of a chair his eyes found: one of a quartet of Colonial pieces which had cost him several thousand, now reduced to scrap wood. He let out a groan.

"What happened to my lovely furniture?"

"I fed the fire with it," Fletcher replied.

This was more than Erwin could take. Defying his giddiness, he sat up, only to discover that the other chairs had also gone for tinderwood, and that the rest of the roomwhich he had kept as meticulously as his files-was in total disarray. His prints gone from the walls, his collection of stuffed birds swept from the shelves.

"What happened?" he said. "Did somebody break in?"

"It was your doing, not mine," Fletcher replied.

"Out of the question." Erwin's gaze sought Fletcher as he spoke and found him sitting in the one chair that wasn't tinder, his back to Erwin. In front of him, the window. Beyond the window, darkness.

"Believe me, you're responsible," Fletcher said. "If you had just been a little more compliant."

"What are you talking about?" Erwin said. He was getting angry, which was in turn making his head thump.

"Just lie down," Fletcher said. "All of this will pass, by and by."

"Stop saying that," Erwin replied. "I want some explanations, damn it."

"Explanations?" said Fletcher. "Oh, those are always so difficult." He turned from the window, and by some trick Erwin didn't comprehend, the whole chair swiveled with him, though he put no effort into realigning it. The firelight flattered him. His skin looked healthier than Erwin remembered it looking, his eyes brighter. "I told you I'd come here with a purpose," he said.

Erwin recalled that claim more clearly than any other detail of recent events. "You came to save me from banality," he replied.

"And how do you suppose I'll do that?" Fletcher said.

"I don't know and right now I don't care."

"What more do you have to care about?" Fletcher asked him. "Your furniture? It's a little late for that. Your frailty? Too late for that too, I'm afraid-"

Erwin didn't like the way this conversation was going; not at all. He reached for the mantelpiece, caught hold of it, and started to haul himself to his feet.

"What are you doing?" Fletcher wanted to know.

"I'm going to get mysclf some rncdication," he @d. It would not be wise, he suspected, simply to announce that he was going to call the police. "Can I get you anything?" he added lightly.

"Such as?"

"Something to eat or drink? I've got juice, soda water@' His legs were weak, but the door was just a few strides away. He tottered towards it.

"Nothing for me," Fletcher replied. "I have everything I need here." Erwin reached for the door handle, barely listening to Fletcher now. He wanted to get out of this room, out of this house in fact, even if it meant shivering in the street until the police arrived.

As his fist closed around the handle, the firelightwhich had been so kind to Fletcher-showed him the state of his flesh. The news was not good. His skin was hanging loosely at his wrist, as though the sinew had withered. He pulled the sleeve of his shirt back from his arm, and the sight made him cry out. No wonder he was weak. He was emaciated; his forearm down to little more than nerve and bone.

Only now did the significance of Fletcher's last remark sink in. Nothingfor me "Oh God no," Erwin said, and started to pull on the door. It was locked, of course, and the key gone.

I have everything I need here.

He threw himself against the door and beat on it, unleashing a yell. As it died in his throat for want of wind he heard a motion behind him, and glanced over his shoulder to see Fletcher-still seated on the last Colonial chair-moving towards him. He turned to face his devourer, back hard against the door.

"You promised you were going to save me," he said.

"And is your life not banality?" Fletcher said. "And will ath not save you from it?"

Erwin opened his mouth to say: No, my life isn't banal. I've got a secret, such a secret.

But before he could utter a word Fletcher reached out and caught hold of his hands@old flesh on cold flesh-and he felt the last of his life rushing out of him, as if eager to be gone into a body that would use it more wisely.

He started to sob, as much in rage at its desertion as in fear, and he went on sobbing as the substance of him was sucked away and sucked away, until there was not enough of him left even to sob.

It had not been Joe's intention to venture far up the mountain. He'd intended to stay among the trees on the lower slope until the last of the late-night traffic had died away in the streets below. Then he'd descend and make his way to Phoebe's house. That had been the plan. But sometime in the middle of the evening-he'd no way of telling exactly when-he'd decided to walk a little way to relieve the boredom, and once he'd started, his dreamy thoughts had counseled him to keep on climbing until he was clear of the trees. It was a fine night. There would be such a view from the Heights: The city, the valley, and more important than either, a glimpse of the world beyond, the world where he and Phoebe would be headed after tonight. So he'd climbed and climbed, but the trees, instead of thinning, grew so dense for a time he could barely see the stars between their branches. And still he climbed, the narcotic side-effects of the drug leaving him indifferent to the fact that its painkilling properties were steadily wearing off. It almost added to the pleasure of the ascent that some part of his mind and body was suffering: a touch of bitterness to sharpen his bliss.

And after a time out of time, the trees did indeed begin to thin, and repeated backward glances as he cleared the canopy confirmed that the journey had been worth taking. The city looked like a little box of jewels nestling below, and finding himself a rocky promontory, he sat down to enjoy the sight a while. His eyes had always been sharp and even at this distance he could see people walking on Main Street. Tourists, he supposed, out to taste the charms of Everville by night.

As he studied them he felt something tugging at his floating thoughts. Without quite knowing why, he looked back towards the mountaintop. Then he got to his feet and studied it. Were his eyes deceiving him, or was there a light up there, brightening and diminishing in waves? He watched it for fully a minute, and then, seduced by its gentle fluctuations, started up the Mountainside again, keeping his eyes fixed upon it as he went.

He could not make out its source-it was hidden behind rocks-but he had no doubt now that the phenomenon was real. Nor was the light its only manifestation. There was a sound, albeit so remote he felt it rather than heard it: a rhythmical boom, as of some vast drum being beaten in another state. And, almost as subtle, a tang in the air that made his mouth water.

He was within fifty yards of the twin rocks now, his eyes fixed on the cleft between them. His cock and balls were aching furiously, their throbs matched to booms of the drum; his sinuses, pricked by the air, were stinging; his eyes were wet, his throat running with spittle.

And now, with every step he took, the sensations grew. The throbbing spread from his groin, up to his scalp and down to his soles, until it seemed every nerve in his body was twitching to the rhythm of the boom. His eyes ran with tears; his nose with mucus. Spittle spilled from his gaping mouth. But he stumbled on, determined to know what mystery this was, and as he came so close to the rocks he would have touched them had he fallen, he saw that he was not the first to have done so. There was a body lying in the gap between the rocks, washed by the waves of light. Though it was the size of an adult, its proportions were more like those of a fetus: its head overlarge, its limbs, which it had wrapped around it in extremis, wasted; almost vestigial.

The sight distressed Joe, and had there been another route to the light available he would have gladly taken it. But the rocks were too smooth to climb, and he was too impatient for answers to try and find his way around them, so he simply strode up to the cleft and stepped past the body.

As he did so, one of those frail, dead limbs reached out d caught hold of his leg.

Joe let out a yelp and fell back against the rock. The creature did not let him go, however. Raising its unwieldy head off the hard ground, it opened its eyes, and even through the haze of tears, Joe could see that its gaze was not that of a dying soul. It was crystalline, as was the voice that issued from the lipless mouth.

"I am Noah," it said. "Have you come to carry me home?"

Phoebe had stayed at the hospital until after midnight, going through all the paperwork that came with Morton's passing. Gilholly had reappeared, as she knew he would once he got the news.

"This makes things a lot more serious for you and loverboy," he told Phoebe. "You realize that?"

"Morton had a heart attack," Phoebe pointed out.

"We'll wait for the autopsy reports on that. In the meantime, I want you to holler the moment you get word from Flicker, you understand me?" He wagged his finger at Phoebe, which under normal circumstances would have earned him a choice retort. But she kept her temper under control, and did her best to play the grieving wife.

"I understand," she said quietly.

The show seemed to convince Gilholly. He softened a little. "Why'd you do it, Phoebe?" he said. "I mean, you know me, I'm no racist, but if you were going to spread a little love around, why'd you go with him?"

"Why do any of us do anything?" she replied, unable to look him in his sorty face for fear she'd lose control and slap him.

He apparently read her downcast gaze as further proof of contrition, because he laid his hand on her shoulder and murmured, "I know it's hard to believe right now, but there's always a light at the end of the tunnel."

"Is there?" she said.

"Trust me," he replied. "Now you go home and try to sleep. We'll talk in the morning."

I won't be here in the morning, bozo, she thought as she padded away. I'll be someplace you'll neverfind me, with the "an I love.

She couldn't sleep, of course, even though she was aching to her bones, and the rest would have been welcome. There was packing to do, for one thing, which she interspersed with trips to the refrigerator for a slice of pie or a frankfurteryellow mustard dripping on her underwear as she sorted through the stuff she wanted Joe to see her in, and the stuff she would leave in the garbage-and then, with the clothes packed, a quick trip through the photograph albums, in search of a few memories to take with her. A picture of this house, when she and Morton had first moved in, all shiny with hope. A couple of pictures from childhood. Ma, Pa, Murray, and herself; her looking pudgy, even at the age of six.

She'd always hated the wedding photographs@ven the ones without Morton in them-but she took the group photograph, for sentiment's sake, along with a couple of shots of the 1988 Festival Parade, when the doctor had decided to pay for a float of his own and she'd made a witty costume for herself as a human pill bottle, which had proved quite a hit. By the time she'd finished her packing, her photo selection, her pie, and her frankfurters, it was almost three o'clock in the morning, and she began to wonder if maybe Gilholly hadn't caught up with Joe already. She dismissed the thought. If he had, he'd have called her to crow about it. Either that, or Joe would have used his call to tell her he wouldn't be coming for her and she should get him a lawyer.

No, her loverboy was still out there somewhere; he just hadn't reached her yet. Maybe he'd slipped back into his apartment once the streets were completely deserted to do some packing of his own; or gone to find them a getaway car that would be difficult to trace. Or maybe he was simply taking his time, the way he did when they had some hours to spare in the afternoon, idling here and there, just for the pleasure of it.

As long as they were away before dawn, everything would be fine; so they still had two or three hours. She went back door, and stood on the step watching the dark for some sign of him. He'd come. Later perhaps than er, but he'd come.

"Where is your home?" Joe had asked Noah, and the creature had raised its left hand-keeping fierce hold of Joe's leg with his right-and pointed up the slope between the rocks. Up towards the source of light and tang and boom, which he could not yet see.

"What is it?" Joe had said.

"You truly don't know?"

"No I don't."

"'I'he shores of Quiddity lie ten strides from here," the creature replied. "But I'm too weak to get there."

Joe went down on his haunches beside Noah. "Not that weak," he said, wrenching his trouser leg from Noah's fist.

"I've tried three times," Noah replied, "but there's too much power at the threshold. It blinds me. It cracks my bones."

"And it won't crack mine?"

"Maybe it will. Maybe it will. But listen to me when I tell you I am a great man on the other side. Whatever you lack here I will provide there-"

"Whatever I lack, eh?" Joe mused, half to himself. The list was long.

"So if I carry you over this threshold... " he went on, wondering as he spoke if perhaps he hadn't slipped from the promontory and was lying somewhere conjuring this as he bled to death, "what happens?"

"If you carry me over, you can put every fear you harbor in this world aside, for power awaits you there, that I promise you. Power that would seem to you unlimited, for your skull does not contain ambition enough to exhaust it."

The syntax was fancier than Joe was used to, and thatalong with the distractions of tears and throbs-prevented him from entirely grasping what he was being told. But the broad strokes were plain enough. All he had to do was carry this creature ten, eleven, maybe twelve strides over the threshold and he'd be rewarded for the service.

He looked back at the light, trying to distinguish some detail in its midst, and as he did so, his opiated thoughts began to make sense of this mystery.

"That's your ship, isn't it?" he murmured. "It's a fuckin UFO." g "My ship?"

"My God... " He looked down at the creature with awe on his face, "Are there more of you?"

"Of course."

"How many?"

"I don't know. I haven't been home in more than a century."

"Well who's in the ship-"

"Why do you keep talking about a ship?"

"That!" Joe said, pointing towards the light. "What did you call it? Quiddity?" "Quiddity's not a ship. It's a sea." "But you came here in it?" "I sailed on it, yes, to reach this place. And I wish I'd not."

"Why?"

"Because I found only soffow here, and loneliness. I was in my prime when I first set foot here. Now look at me. Please, in the name of compassion, carry me over the threshold...." Noah's face began to sweat beads of dark fluid as he spoke, which gathered at the bridge of his nose and in the corners of his mouth. "Forgive my emotion," he said, "I have not dared hope until now......

The sentiment found an echo in Joe; one he could not be deaf to. "I'll do what I can," he said to Noah.

"You're a good man." Joe put his hands under Noah's body. "Just so you know," he said, "I'm not in such great shape myself. I'll do my best, but I'm not guaranteeing anything. Put your arm around my shoulder. Yeah, that's it. Here we go." He started to stand. "You're heavier than you look," he said, and teetered for a moment before he got his balance. Then he straightened up.

"I want to know what planet you come from," he said as he proceeded towards the threshold.

"What planet?"

"Yeah. And what galaxy it's in. All that shit. 'Cause you're gone, the only way I'm going to have a hope of vincing people of this is if I've got details."

"I don't believe I understand you."

"I want to know... " Joe began, but the question went unfinished, as he stepped clear of the cleft between the rocks, and finally grasped something of what lay ahead. There was no starship here; at least none that was visible. There was only the sky, and a crack in that sky, and a light through the crack in that sky that touched him like a loving gaze. Feeling it upon him he wanted nothing more than to step beneath whatever sun shed this light, and meet it eye to eye.

Noah was trembling in his arms. His brittle fingers dug deep into Joe's shoulder.

"Do you see?" he murmured now. "Do you see?"

Joe saw. Another heaven; and under it a shore. And beyond the shore a sea, the boom of whose waves had become as familiar as his heartbeat, the spice of whose air had made him shed waters of his own, as if in tribute.

"Quiddity... " Noah breathed.

Oh Lord, Joe thought, wouldn't it be fine to have Phoebe beside me right now, to share this wonder? Awed by the sight, Joe was scarcely aware that the ground underfoot was in flux until he was ankle-deep in liquid dirt; dirt that was flowing back and forth over the threshold. There was strength in it, and in order not to be thrown off his feet he had to halt a moment and better distribute the weight of his burden. He was no more than two strides from the crack itself, and the energies loose here were considerable. He felt his joints creaking, his guts churning, his blood thumping in his head as if it would burst out and flow into Quiddity of its own accord if he didn't pick up speed.

He took the hint, clasped Noah close to him and ducked down, like a man walking into a high wind. Then he strode forward again, the first stride hard, the second harder still, the third less a stride than a lunge. His eyes were closed tight against the onslaught of energies, but it wasn't black behind his lids. It was blue, a velvet blue, and through the roar of his ambitious blood he heard birds, their voices like streaks of scarlet in the blue, somewhere overhead.

"I don't know your name," somebody whispered to him, "but I hope you ear me.'

"Yes... " he imagined he said, "I hear you."

"Then open your eyes," the voice went on. It was Noah, he realized.

"And let's be on our way."

"Where are we going?" Joe asked. Thong instructed his eyes to open, the blue behind his lids was so serene he wasn't all that eager to desert it.

"We're going to Liverpool," Noah said.

"Liverpool?" said Joe. The few images he had of that city were gray and prosaic. "We've come all this way to visit Liverpool?"

"It's the ships we want. I can see them from here."

"What kind of ships?" Joe wanted to know. His lids still refused to open.

"See for yourself"

Why not? Joe thought. The blue will always be there, the moment I close my eyes. And so thinking, he opened them.

Friday morning, and it was too late for excuses. If the shelves weren't stocked, if the windows weren't polished, if the door wasn't painted, if the street wasn't swept, if the dog wasn't clipped, if the swing wasn't fixed, if the linen wasn't pressed, if the pies weren't ordered, well, it was too damn late. Folks were here, ready to spend some money and have some fun, so whatever had been left unfinished would have to stay that way.

"No doubt about it," Dorothy Bullard had announced to her husband as she rose to see the sun at the windowsill, "this is going to be the best year yet." She didn't need to look far for confirmation. When she drove down Main Street a little shy of eight, it was already busier than an ordinary Saturday noon, and among the faces on the sidewalk there were gratifyingly few she knew. These were visitors; folks who'd checked into their motels and boarding houses the night before, and had driven or walked into town to begin their weekend with ham, eggs, and a slice of Evervillian hospitality.

As soon as she got to the Chamber of Commerce she checked in with Gilholly, whose offices were just across the hall, to see if there was any news on the Phoebe Cobb business. Gilholly wasn't in yet, but Dorothy's favorite among the officers, Ned Bantam, was sitting behind his desk with a copy of the Festival Weekend edition of the Tribune and a carton of milk.

"Looks like it's going to be a fine weekend, Dottie baby," he grinned. This nickname was one she'd several times forbidden him to use, but he defied her with such charm she'd given up trying to enforce the ban.

"Did you arrest Joe Flicker?"

"Gotta find him first."

"You didn't find him?"

"If we'd found him we'd have arrested him, Dottie," Ned replied. "Don't look so grim. We'll get him."

"You think he's dangerous?"

"Ask Morton Cobb," Ned said. "I guess it's a bit late for that."

"What?"

"You didn't know?" Ned said. "Poor bastard died last night."

"Oh my Lord." Dorothy felt sick. "So we've got a murderhunt going on in the middle of Festival Weekend?"

"It should spice things up a bit, huh?" "That's not funny," Dorothy said. "We work all year@' "Don't worry," Ned said. "Flicker's probably in Idaho by now."

"And what about her?" Dorothy said. She knew Phoebe by sight only; the woman had airs and graces, was her impression.

"What about her?"

"Is she going to be arrested or what?"

"Jed had Barney watching her house all night, in case Flicker came back, but he's not going to do that. I mean, why'd he do that?"

Dorothy didn't reply, though there was an answer on the tip of her tongue. Love, of course. He'd come back for love.

"So there was no sign of him?"

Ned shook his head. Dorothy couldn't help but feel a little spurt of satisfaction that the Cobb woman's lover had not returned to find her. She'd had all the secret trysts she was going to get. Now she'd have to pay the price. Her anxieties salved somewhat, she asked Ned if he'd keep her up to date on the manhunt, and then went to work, content that even if the felon wasn't in Idaho, he was too far away to spoil the next seventy-two hours.

He hadn't come for her. That was the thought Phoebe had woken with. She'd waited and waited at the back door, until the day had driven every star from sight, and he hadn't come for her.

She sat at the kitchen table now, with the remains of a plateful of pancakes between her elbows, trying to work out what she should do next. Part of her said just go; go now, while you can. If you stay you'll be stuck playing the grieving widow for every damn person you meet. And then there'll be all the funeral arrangements to make, and the insurance policies to dig through. And don't forget Gilholly. He'll be back with more questions.

But then there was another voice, with conflicting advice. Leave town now and he'll never find you, the voice said. Maybe he got lost in the dark, maybe Morton did him more harm than she'd thought, maybe he was lying bleeding somewhere.

What it comes down to is this, the voice said: Do you trust him enough to believe he'll come for you? If you don't, go now. If you do, then put a brave face on things, and stay.

When it was made simple like that, she knew there was no question. Of course she trusted him. Of course, of course.

She brewed herself a pot of very strong coffee to help her get over her fatigue, then took a brisk shower, fixed her hair, and dressed. At eight forty-five, just as she was about to get out for the doctor's office, the telephone rang. She raced to it and snatched up the receiver, her heart crazed, only to be greeted by Gilholly's drear tones.

"Just checking on your whereabouts," he said.

"I'm just going to work," Phoebe said. "If that's all right with you, that is."

"I guess I'll know where to find you."

"I guess you will."

"Your boyfriend didn't come home last night."

She was about to say no, when she realized that he wasn't asking her a question, he was telling her. He already knew that Joe hadn't come back to the house. Which meant that he'd had one of his men patroling around all night; which in turn meant that there was every chance Joe had seen the man, and had kept his distance for fear of being caught. All this flashed through her mind in a matter of moments, but not so quickly that her stunned silence wasn't noted.

"Are you still there?" Gilholly said.

She was glad this was a telephone conversation, so that she didn't have to hide the smile that was spreading across her face.

"Yes," she said, doing her best to keep the relief from her voice. "Yes, I'm still here."

"If he makes any attempt to contact you@'

"I know, I know. I'll call you, Jed. I promise."

"Don't call me Jed, Mrs. Cobb," he replied sniffily. "We've got a professional relationship here. Let's keep it that way."

With that he was gone. She put the phone down, and sat on the stairs for a moment, trembling. Then, without warning tears of relief and happiness came, and it was fully ten minutes before she could get them sufficiently under control to go up and wash her face....

Despite the exertions of the night before, Buddenbaum had woken, as always, a few minutes before dawn, stiffed by a body-clock so perfectly calibrated he'd not missed a sunrise in the better part of eighty years. His business was the epic, after all, and he knew of no drama as primal as that which was played out every dawn and dusk. The victory of light over darkness, however, had carried a particular poignancy this morning, illuminating as it did the arena for a narrative that would, he hoped, be deemed as memorable as any in the human canon.

It was a century and a half since he'd sown the seed that had become Everville; a century and a half in which he had sown many such seeds in hope of apotheosis. Lonely and frustrating years, most of them, wandering from state to state, always a visitor, always an outsider. Of course there were advantages to his condition: not least a useful detachment from the crimes and torments and tragedies that had so quickly soured the pioneers' dream of Eden. There was little left, even in a town like Everville, of the fierce, pure vision of those souls with whom he'd mingled in Independence, Missouri. It had been a vision fueled by desperation, and nourished by ignorance, but whatever its frailties and its absurdities, it had moved him, after its fashion. It moved him still, in memory.

There had been something to die for in those hard hearts, and that was a greater gift than those blessed with it knew; a gift not granted those who'd come after. they were a prosaic lot, in Owen's estimations, the builders of suburbs and the founders of committees: men and women who had lost all sense of the tender, terrible holiness of things.

There were always exceptions, of course, like the kid lying asleep in the bed behind him. He and little Maeve O'Connell would have understood each other very well, Owen suspected. And after years of honing his instincts he was usually able to find one such as Seth within a few hours of coming to a new town. Every community had one or two youths who saw visions or heard hammerings or spoke in tongues. Regrettably, many of them had taken refuge in addiction, he found, particularly in the larger cities. He discovered them on seedy street corners dealing drugs with one eye on Heaven, and gently escorted them away to a room like this (how many like this had he been in? tens of thousands) where they would trade visions for sodomy, back and forth.

"Owen?"

The boy's hair was spread on the pillow as though he were floating.

"Good morning," Owen had replied.

"Are you going to come back to bed?"

"What time is it?"

"Just before seven," Seth had said. "We don't have to et up yet." He stretched, sliding down the bed as he did so.

Owen looked at the spiral of hair beneath the boy's arms and wondered at the workings of desire. "I have to go exploring today," he'd replied.

"Do you want to come with me?"

"It depends what you're going to explore," Seth said, shamelessly fingering himself beneath the sheet.

Owen smiled, and crossed to the bottom of the bed. The youth had turned from waif to coquette in the space of one night. He was Lifting the sheet up between his knees now, just high enough to give Owen a glimpse of his butthole.

"I suppose we could stay here an hour or so," Owen conceded, slipping the belt of his robe so that the boy could see what trouble he was inviting. Seth had flushed-his face, neck, and chest reddening in two heartbeats.

"I had a dream about that," he said.

"Liar."

"I did," Seth protested.

The sheet was still tented over his raised knees. Owen made no attempt to pull it off, but simply knelt between Seth's feet, and stared down at him, his prick peeping out from his robe.

"Tell me-" he said.

"Tell you what?"

"What you dreamed." Seth looked a little uncomfortable now. "Go on," Owen said, "or I'm going to cover it up again."

"Well," said Seth, "I dreamed@h Jeez, this sounds so dumb-"

"Spit it out."

"I dreamed that," he pointed to Owen's dick "was a hammer."

"A hammer?" "Yeah. I dreamed it was separate from you, you know, and I had it in my hand, and it was a hammer."

Odd as the image was, it didn't strike Owen as utterly outlandish, given the conversation they'd had on the street the night before. But there was more.

"I was using it to build a house."

"Are you making this up?"

"No. I swear. I was up on the roof of this house, it was just a wooden fratne but it was a big house, somewhere up on the mountain, and there were nails that were like little spikes of fire, and your dick-" He half sat up and reached to touch the head of Owen's hard-on "your dick was driving the nails in. Helping me build my house." He looked up at Owen's face, and shrugged. "I said it was dumb."

"Where was the rest of me?" Owen wanted to know.

"I don't remember," Seth said.

"Huh.

"Don't be pissed off."

"I'm not pissed off."

"It was just a dumb dream. I was thinking about hammering and@an we stop talking about it now?" He slid his hand around Owen's sex, which had lost size and solidity while its dream-self was discussed, and attempted to stroke it back to its previous state. But it wouldn't be coaxed, much to Seth's disappointment.

"We'll have some time this afternoon," Owen said to him.

,,Okay," said Seth, dropping back onto the bed and snatching the sheet off his lower torso. "But this is going to make walking around a little uncomfortable."

Owen gazed at the nearly hairless groin before him with a vague sense of unease. Not at the sight itself-the boy's equipment was pretty in its lopsided way-but at the thought of his manhood being used to hammer in spikes of fire, while the rest of him went unremembered.

Most of the time, of course, dreams were worthless. Bubbles in the stew of a sleeping mind, bursting once they surfaced. But sometimes they were revelations about the past; sometimes prophecies, sometimes ways to shape the present. And sometimes@h, this was rare, but he'd known it happen-they were signs that the promise of the Art was not a hollow promise; that the human mind could know the past, present, and future as one eternal moment. He didn't believe that Seth's dream of house and hammer fell into this category, but something about it made his palms clammy and his nape itch. There was meaning here, if he could only decode it. "What are you thinking?"

Seth was looking up at him with a troubled expression on his long, pale face.

"Crossroads," Owen replied.

"What about them?"

"That's what we're going to look for this morning." He got off the bed, and went through to the bathroom to piss. "I want to find the first crossroads in the city."

"Why?" Seth wanted to know.

He contemplated lying to the boy, but why? The answer was a paradox anyway.

'Because my journey ends where the roads cross," he said.

"What does that mean?"

"It means-I'm not going to be here for very much longer," Owen said, addressing Seth from the bathroom door, so we may as well enjoy ourselves."

The boy looked downcast. "What will I do when you've gone?" he said. Owen ruminated for a moment. Then he said, "Build a. house, maybe?"

Tesia got lost just north of Salem, and had traveled thirty-five miles along the Willamina road before she realized her error and turned round. By the time she reached the Everville city limits it was past one, and she was hungry. She drove around for ten minutes, orienting herself while she looked for a suitable eatery, and eventually settled on a place called Kitty's Diner. It was busy, and she was politely told there'd be a ten-minute wait.

"No problem," she said, and went to sit out in the sun. There was plenty to divert her while she waited. The diner was situated at the intersection of the city's Main Street and a second, equally bustling thoroughfare. People and vehicles flowed by ceaselessly in both directions.

"This place is busy," she thought.

There's some kind offestival going on, Raul replied.

"How do you know?"

It's right in front of you, he said.

"Where, damn it?" she said, scanning the intersection in all four directions.

Up a couple offeet, Raul said.

Tesla looked up. There was a banner strung across the street, announcing WELCOME to THE EVERVILLE FESTIVAL WEEKEND in blue letters three feet high.

"How come I didn't see that?" she thought, confounded (as ever) by the fact that she and Raul could look through the same eyes and see the world so differently.

You were concentrating on your stomach, Raul replied.

She ignored the remark. "rhis isn't an accident," she said.

What isn't? "Us being here the weekend they're having a festival. It's some kind of synchronicity." if you say so. She watched the traffic in silence for a time. Then she asked Raul, "Do you feel anything?" Like what? "I don't know. Anything out of the ordinary?" What am I, a bloodhound? "All right," she said,

"forget I spoke." There was another silence. Then, very softly, Raul said, Above the banner.

She lifted her gaze, past the blue letters, past the roofs. "The mountain?" she said.

Yes...

"What about it?" she said.

Something, he replied. I don't know, but something...

She studied the peak for a little time. There wasn't that much to see; the summit was wreathed in mist. "I give up," she said, "I'm too hungry to think."

She glanced back at the diner. Two of its customers were up from their table, chatting to the waitress.

"About time," she muttered, and getting to her feet, headed inside.

"Just for one is it?" the waitress said, leading her to the vacated table and handing her a menu. "Everything's good, but the chicken livers are really good. So's the peach cobbler. Enjoy."

Tesla watched her pass between the tables, bestowing a word here and a smile there.

Happy little soul, Raul remarked dryly.

"Looks like Jesus is cookin' today," Tesla replied, eyeing the simple wooden cross hung above the serving hatch.

Better go for the fish then, Raul said, at which Tesla laughed out loud.

A few querulous glances came her way, but nobody seemed to much mind that this woman was so entertained by her own company she was weeping with laughter.

"Something funny?" the waitress wanted to know.

"Just a private moment," Tesia said, and ordered the sh.

Erwin could not remember what terrible thing had happened in his house; he only knew that he wanted to be out of it and away.

He stood at the unopened front door with his thoughts in confusion, knowing there was something he had to take with him before he left, but unable to remember what. He turned and looked back down the hallway, hoping something would jog his memory.

Of course! The confession. He couldn't leave the house without the confession. He started back down the hallway, wondering where he'd set it down. As he came to the living room, however, his desire to have the papers suddenly evaporated, and without quite knowing how he got there he found himself standing outside his house again with the sun beating down on him. It was altogether too bright, and he dug in his pockets, looking for his sunglasses, only to discover that he was wearing an old tweed jacket that he thought he'd given away to charity years before. The gift had been spontaneous (which was rare for him) and he'd almost instantly regretted it. All the more wonderful then to have chanced upon it again, however mystifying the circumstances.

He found no sunglasses, but he did find a host of mementoes in the various pockets: ticket stubs for concerts he'd attended in Boston two decades before; the muchchewed remains of a cigar he'd smoked to celebrate passing the bar exam; a little piece of wedding cake, wrapped up in a napkin; the stiletto heel of a scarlet shoe; the little bottle of holy water his mother had been clutching when she died. Every pocket contained not one but four or five such keepsakes and tokens, each one unleashing a deluge of memories-scents, sounds, faces, feelings-all of which might have moved him more had the mystery of the jacket not continued to trouble him. He was certain he'd given it away. And even if he hadn't, even if it had languished unseen at the back of his wardrobe for a decade, and by chance he'd plucked it out of exile this morning without realizing he'd done so, that still didn't solve the problem of where the memorabilia in its pockets had appeared from.

Something strange was going on; something damned strange.

Next door, Ken Margosian emerged from his house whistling, and sauntered among his rose bushes with a pair of scissors, selecting blooms. "The roses are better than ever this year," Erwin remarked to him.

Margosian, who was usually a neighborly sort, didn't even look up.

Erwin crossed to the fence. "Are you okay, Ken?" he asked.

Margosian had found a choice rose, and was carefully selecting a place to snip it. There was not the slightest sign that he'd heard a syllable.

"Why the silent treatment?" Erwin demanded. "If you've got some bitch with me@'

At this juncture, Mrs. Semevikov came along, a woman whom under normal circumstances Erwin would have happily avoided. She was a voluble woman, who took it upon herself to organize a small auction every Festival Saturday, selling items donated by various stores to benefit children's charities. Last year she had attempted to persuade Erwin to donate a few hours of his services as a prize. He had promised to think about it, and then not returned her calls. Now here she was again, after the same thing, no doubt. She said hello to Ken Margosian, but didn't so much as cast a glance in Erwin's direction, though he was standing five yards from her.

"Is Erwin in?" she asked Ken.

"I don't think so," Ken replied.

"Joke over," Erwin piped up, but Ken hadn't finished.

"I heard some odd noises in the night," he told Mrs. Semevikov, "like he was having a brawl in there."

"That doesn't sound like him at all," she replied.

"I knocked on his door this morning, just to see that he was okay, but nobody answered."

"Stop this," Erwin protested.

"Maybe he's at his office," Mrs. Semevikov went on. "I said stop it!" Erwin yelled. It was distressing him hearing himself talked about as though he were invisible. And what was this nonsense about a brawl? He'd had a perfectly peaceable The thought faltered, and he looked back towards the house, as a name rose from the murk of his memory.

Fletcher. Oh my God, how could he have forgotten Fletcher?

"Maybe I'll try him at his office," Mrs. Semevikov was saying, "because he promised me last year-"

"Listen to me," Erwin begged.

"He'd donate a few hours-2'

"I don't know why you're doing this, but you've got to listen."

"to the auction."

"There's somebody in my house."

"Those are beautiful roses, by the way. Are you entering them in the flower competition?"

Erwin could take no more of this. He strode towards the fence, yelling at Ken, "He tried to kill me! " Then he reached over and caught hold of Ken's shirt. Or at least he tried to. His fingers passed through the fabric, his fist closing on itself. He tried again. The same thing happened.

"I'm going crazy," he thought. He reached up to Ken's face and prodded his cheek, hard, but he got not so much as a blink for his efforts.

"Fletcher's been playing with my head."

A wave of panic rose in him. He had to get the meddler to fix his handiwork, now, before there was some serious damage done. Leaving Ken and Mrs. Semevikov to their chatter about roses, Erwin headed back up the path to the front door. It looked to be closed, but his senses were utterly unreliable, it seemed, because two strides carried him over th( threshold and into the hallway.

He called out for Fletcher. There was no reply, but the meddler was somewhere in the house, Erwin was certain of it. Every angle in the hallway was a little askew, and the halls had a yellowish tinge. What was that, if not Fletcher's influence?

He knew where the man lay in wait: in the living room, where he'd held Erwin prisoner in order to toy with his san ity, His fury mounting-how dare this man invade his house and his head?-he marched down the hallway to the living room door. It stood ajar. Erwin didn't hesitate. He stepped inside.

The drapes were drawn to keep out the day, the only source of light the fire that was now dying in the grate. Even so, Erwin found his tormentor at a glance. He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor, his clothes shed. His body was broad, hirsute, and covered with scars, some of. them fully six inches long. His pupils were rolled up beneath his eyelids. In front of him was a mound of excrement.

"You filthy animal," Erwin raged. His words drew no response from Fletcher. "I don't know what kind of mindtricks you've been playing," Erwin went on, "but I want you to undo them. Right now. Hear me? Right now!" Fletcher's pupils slipped back into view, much to Erwin's satisfaction. He was tired of being ignored. "And then I want you-"

He stopped to let out a groan of disgust as Fletcher reached out and took a handful of his own shit, then mashed it into his groin. Erwin averted his eyes, but what his gaze found in the shadows was infinitely worse than Fletcher's scatological games.

There was a body there, lying with its face to the wall. A body he recognized.

There were no words to express the horror of that moment; nor its terrible clarity. He could only let out a sob, a wracking sob, that went unheard by the masturbator. He knew why now. He was dead. His wizened body was lying in the corner of the room, drained of life by Fletcher. Whatever consciousness he still possessed, it was clinging to the memory of the flesh, but it had no influence in the living world. He could not be seen or heard or felt. He was a phantom.

He sank down in front of Fletcher and studied his face. It was brutish beneath the beard, the brow louting, the mouth grotesquely wide.

"What are you?" he murmured to himself.

Fletcher's manipulations were apparently bringing him close to crisis. His breathing was fast and shallow, and punctuated with little grunts. Erwin couldn't bring himself to watch the act concluded. As the grunts grew louder he rose d made for the door, passing through it, down the hall and ut into the sunlight.

Mrs. Semevikov had gone on her way, and Ken was heading back into his house with an armful of roses, but there was a thin, high-pitched whining sound coming from nearby. Something is in pain, Erwin thought, which fact curiously comforted him, to know that he was not the only soul suffering right now. He went in search of the sufferer, and didn't have to look far. It was the rose bushes that were giving off the whine; a sound he assumed only the dead could hear.

It was a poor compensation. Tears, or rather the memory of tears, fell from his remembered eyes, and he quietly swore an oath that even if he had to do a deal with the Devil to possess the means, he would somehow revenge himself on the beast that had taken his life. Nor would it be quick. He'd make the bastard suffer so loudly the grief of a million roses could not drown out his screams.

The Friday of Festival Weekend was always a slack day at the doctor's.

Early next week there'd be a waiting room full of folks who'd put off a visit because they had too much to do, their fingers turned septic, their constipation chronic. But today only those in extreme discomfort, or so lonely a trip to see Dr. Powell was a treat, came in.

None of the patients made any mention of recent events to Phoebe, though she didn't doubt that every man, woman, and child in Everville was by now steeped in the scandal. Even Dr. Powell kept his remarks to a minimum. He was sorry to hear about Morton's death, he said, and would perfectly understand if she needed to take a few days off. She thanked him, and asked if she might perhaps leave around two, so she could drive over to Silverton and meet the funeral director. The answer, of course, was yes.

In fact, that wasn't the only meeting she had planned. She needed more urgently than ever the guidance of a legal mind; someone who could give her a clear picture of just how bad a position she was in. She would try to see Erwin this afternoon she'd decided, rather than wait until Monday. A lot could happen in seventy-two hours, as the turmoil of the last twenty-four proved. Better that she knew the bad news and planned accordingly.

iv The fish was good. Tesia took her leisurely time eating, and listened while she ate, tuning in to conversations going on at five tables in her vicinity. It was a trick she'd first learned as a screenwriter (quickly finding that ordinary conversation was littered with remarks no producer would believe) and had gone on to hone it during her travels, when it had allowed her to keep track of the way the world was going without benefit of media or social skills.

today, much to her surprise, she found that three of the five conversations were about the same thing: the life and crimes of a local woman called Phoebe, who was apparently implicated in the bizarre demise of her husband.

While she was listening to one of the tables debating the morals of adultery, a parched-looking fellow, whom she took to be the manager of the place, came through with hamburgers for the debaters, and on his way back to the counter gathered up her dishes and casually asked if she'd enjoyed the fish. She said she had. Then, hoping to squeeze a little more information from him said: "I was wondering... do you happen to know a guy called Fletcher?"

The man, his name tag read Bosley, thought for a moment. "Fletcher... Fletcher... " he said.

While he mused, Raul said, Tesla?

"In a minute," she thought to Raul.

But there's something-Raul went on.

He got no further before Bosley said, "I don't believe I know of any Fletcher. Does he live in town?"

"No. He's a visitor."

"We're swamped with visitors," Bosley replied.

Clearly this wasn't going to prove a fruitful line of inquiry. But while she had the man in front of her she decided to quiz him about something else.

"Phoebe," she said. Bosley lost his smile. "Do you know

?"

"She came in now and again," Bosley conceded.

"What's she like?" By the expression on his face, Bosley was caught between the requirements of civility and his desire to ignore Tesla's question entirely. "Everybody's talking about her."

"Then I hope her story serves as a lesson," Bosley replied, chilly now.

"The Lord sees her sin and judges her."

"Has she been accused of something?"

"In the Lord's eyes-"

"Forget the fucking Lord's eyes," Tesla said, irritated by the guy's cant. "I want to know what she's like."

Bosley set the dishes back on the table and quietly said, "I think you'd better leave."

"What for?" "You're not welcome to break bread with us," he replied.

"Why the hell not?"

"Your language."

"What about it?" Tesla said.

The F word, Raul prompted.

She repeated it aloud, to test the thesis. "Fuck?" she said, "you don't like me sayingfuck?"

Bosley flinched as though the syllables were stings. "Get out," he said.

"All I said was fuck," Tesla replied sweetly. "What's wrong withfuck?" Bosley had taken hurts enough. "I want you out of here," he said, the volume of his voice rising. "Your foul tongue isn't welcome."

"I can't stay for the peach cobbler?" Tcsia said. "Out!" Bosley yelled. The gossiping patrons had fallen silent now. All eyes were turned in the direction of Tesla's table. "Take your abominations elsewhere. They're not welcome here."

Tesia lounged in her chair. "Fuck isn't an abomination," she said.

"Fuck's just a word, it's just a useful little word. Come on, Bosley, admit it. There are times when onlyfuck will do."

"I want you out of here."

"You see. I want you the fuck out of here would sound so much more forceful."

There were giggles from here and there, and a few nervous coughs. "What do you say to your wife on a Saturday night? You want to fornicate, honcy? No, you say I want a fuck." "Out!" Bosley yelled. There were others coming to his aid now, among them a cook from the kitchen who looked like he might have seen the light in San Quentin. Tesla got to her feet.

"Okay, I'm going," she said. She gave the cook a dazzling grin. "Great fish," she said, and sauntered to the door. "Of course we shouldn't forget the most important use of fuck," she said as she went. "The exclamation. As in oh fuck, or what a fuck up." She'd reached the door, and halted there to look back at Bosley. "Or the ever-useful fuck you," she said, and, offering him a little smile, took her leave.

She was standing on the corner, wondering where she might next go in search of Fletcher, when Raul whispered, Did you hear what I said in there?

"I was just defending my constitutional rights," Tesla replied.

Before that, Raul murmured.

"What?" she said.

I don't know what, he replied. I just felt some presence or other "You sound nervous," Tesia replied, glancing around. The intersection was busier than ever. It was an unlikely place to he haunted, she thought, at least right now. At midnight, perhaps, it'd be a different story.

"Didn't they bury suicides at crossroads?" she said to Raul. There was no reply. "Raul?"

Listen.

"What am I-?"

Just listen, will you?

There was plenty to hear. horns honking, tires squealing, folks laughing and chattering, music from an open window, shouting through an open door.

Not that, Raul said.

"What then?"

Somebody's whispering.

She listened again, trying to filter out the din of people d vehicles. Close your eyes, Rau I said, it's easier in the dark.

She did so. The din continued, but she felt a little more remote from it.

There, Raul murmured.

He was right. Somewhere between the traffic and the chatter, a tiny voice was trying to be heard. No, it seemed to be saying. And something about ketchup. Tesla concentrated, trying to tune her mind's ear into the voice, the way she'd tuned in to the conversations in the Diner. No, it said again, no about, no about "Know about," Tesla murmured. "It knows about something."

"Ketch... ketch... " the voice said.

Ketch?

"Ketch a-" No, not ketch a: Fletcher.

"You hear that?" she said to Raul. "It knows about Fletcher. That's what it's saying. It knows about Fletcher." She listened again, tuning into the frequency where the voice had been. The sound was still there, but barely. She held her breath, focusing every jot of her attention upon interpreting the signal. It wasn't words she was hearing now, it was a number. Two. Two. Six.

She said it aloud, so that the whisperer knew she'd understood.

"Two-two-six. Right?"

And now came further syllables. Itch or witch. Then hell, or something like it.

"Try again," she said softly. But either her powers of concentration or the whisperer's strength was giving out. Itch, she thought it said again. Then it was gone. She kept listening, hoping it would make further contact, but there was nothing. "Shit," she muttered.

What we need's a map, Raul said.

"What for?"

It was an address, Tesla. He was telling you where to find Fletcher. She looked back towards the diner. Her waitress caught sight of her as she opened the door.

"Please@'the woman began. "It's okay," Tesla said. "I just want one of these." She picked up a Festival brochure from the rack just inside the door. "Have a nice day."

When did you get to be so rabid about Jesus, by the way? Raul asked her as she sat astride the bike studying the map on the back of the brochure.

"I'm not," she said. "I love all that shit. I just think words are-" She stopped. Peered more closely at the map. "Mitchell Street," she said. "That's got to be it. Mitchell."

She pocketed the map and started the bike. "Are you ready for this?" she said.

Precious, he replied.

"What?"

You were going to say words are precious.

"was I?"

And no: I'm not ready.

Erwin had journeyed down to 10tty's Diner in search of the familiar; some face or voice he knew and liked, to settle the panic in him. Instead he'd heard a woman he'd never seen in his life before asking about his murderer, and he had almost gone crazy with frustration, haranguing her at a volume that would have torn his throat if he'd had a throat to tear, while she paraded her command of gutter-talk for Bosley.

She was neither as stupid or insensitive as that display might have suggested, however. Once she was outside she'd stopped to listen, and he'd pressed so close to her it would have been deemed molestation if he'd been flesh and blood, telling her over and over where Fletcher was. His tenacity had paid off. She'd gone back for the city map, and while she'd studied it, he had tried to warn her that Fletcher was dangerous.

This time, however, she hadn't heard. He wasn't quite sure why. Perhaps people couldn't map-read and hear the dead talk at the same time.

Perhaps the fault Jay with him, and he'd lost the knack of communication with the living moments after finding it. Whichever, what he had hoped would blossom into a fruitful exchange had been cut short, and the woman had been off on her motorcycle before he could tell her about Fletcher's murderous tendencies. He was not overly concerned for her well-being.

If she was in search of Fletcher, he reasoned, then she surely knew what he was capable of, and to judge by her performance in the diner she was no Milquetoast.

He watched her carving her way through the traffic on Main Street and envied her access to the combustion engine. Though he'd always been contemptuous of ghost stories (they'd belonged to the negligible realm of fable and fantasy), he knew phantoms had a reputation for defying gravity. they hovered, they flew; they perched in trees and steeples. Why then did he feel so earthbound, his body-. which he knew damn well was notional; the real thing was lying in his living room still behaving as though gravity had a claim on it?

Sighing, he started back towards his house. If the return journey took as long as the outward, then by the time he reached home the encounter he'd initiated would be over. But what was a lost soul to do? He would have to make his way as best he could, and hope that with time he'd better understand the state he'd died into.

Phoebe went to Erwin's office unannounced and found it closed. On any other day but today she would have left the matter there. Gone home. Waited till Monday. But these were very special circumstances. She couldn't wait; not another hour. She would go by his house, she decided, and beg for just half an hour of his time. That wasn't much to ask, now was it? Especially since she'd inconvenienced herself for him the day before.

She popped into the drugstore two blocks down from the offices, and asked Maureen Scfimm, who had her hair tinted for the celebrations and looked like the local tart, if she could borrow the phone book. Maureen wanted to gossip, but the store was crowded. Armed with Erwin's home address, Phoebe left Maureen to make eyes at every able-bodied man under sixty-five, and headed for Mitchell Street.

It was a quiet little thoroughfare lined with attractive, wellkept houses, the lawns and hedges trimmed, the fences and indow frames painted. The kind of haven Tesla had fantazed about many times on her journey across the Americas; a ace where people were good to each other, and lived, physically and spiritually, within their modest means. It didn't take much guesswork to figure out why Fletcher had chosen to lodge here. He had staged his own immolation back in the Grove in order to imagine from the dreams of its healthy, loving citizens, a legion of champions. Hallucigenia, he'd dubbed them, and left them to wage war in the streets of the Grove after his demise. If another battle was now in the offing, as Kate Farrell had predicted, then where better to seek out minds from which he could create new soldiers than in a haven like this, where people still had faith in a civilized life, and might conjure heroes to defend it? Listen to you, Raul said as Tesla wandered along the street looking for Fletcher's hideaway. "was I thinking aloud or were you just eavesdropping?" Eavesdropping, Raul replied. And I'm amazed. "By what?" By the way you're drooling over thiv place. You hated Palomo Grove. "It was phoney." This isn't? "No. It looks... comfortable." You've been on the road too long. "That may have something to do with it," Tesla conceded. "I am a little saddle-weary. But this looks like a good place to settle down-" Maybe raise some kids? You and Lucien? Wouldn't that be nice. "Don't be snide." All right, it wouldn't be nice. It'd be a living hell they had come, at last, to the whisperer's house, and very smart it was too. Tesla"What?" Fletcher was always a little crazy, remember that. "How could I forget?" Soforgive him his trespasses"You're excited. I can feel you trembling." I used to call him father all the time. He used to tell me not to, but that's what he was. That's what he is. I want to see him again "So do I," she said. It was the first time she'd actually admitted the fact in so many words. Yes, Fletcher was crazy, and yes, unpredictable. But he was also the man who'd created the Nuncio, the man who'd turned to light in front of her eyes, the man who'd had her half-believing in saints. If anyone deserved to have outwitted oblivion, it was him.

She started up the front path, studying the house for some sign of occupancy. There was none. The drapes were drawn at all but one of the windows, and there were two newspapers uncollected on the step.

She knocked. There was no response, but she wasn't that surprised. If Fletcher was indeed in residence, he was unlikely to be answering the door. She rapped again, just for good measure, then went to the one window without closed drapes and peered in. It was a dining room, furnished with anfique furniture. Whoever lived here when Fletcher wasn't visiting had taste.

Something's wrong with the sewers, Raul said.

"The sewers?"

Don't you smell it? She sniffed, and caught a whiff of something unpleasant.

"Is it from inside?" she asked Raul, but before he could reply she heard a footfall on the gravel path and somebody said, "Are you looking for Erwin?"

She turned. There was a woman standing a couple of yards from the front gate: large, pale, and overdressed.

"Erwin@' Tesla said, thinking fast, "yeah. I was just... is he around today?"

The woman studied Tesla with faint suspicion. "He should be," she said.

"He's not at his office."

"Huh. I knocked, but there was no reply." The woman looked distinctly disappointed. "I was going to try round the back," Tesla went on, "see if he's getting himself a tan."

"Did you try the bell?" the woman replied. "No, 1-11

The woman marched down the path and jabbed the bell. A saccharine jingle could be heard from inside. Tesia waited ten seconds. Then, when there was no sign of movement, she started round the side of the house, leaving the woman to try jabbing the bell again at the front.

"Ripe," she remarked to Raul as the smell of excrement tensified. She watched the ground as she went, half-expectg to find that a pipe had burst and the last flushings of Erwin's toilet were bubbling up from the ground. But there was nothing. No turds; and no Erwin either, sunning himself in the backyard. "Maybe this isn't the house," she said to Raul. "Maybe there's another street that sounds like Mitchell."

She turned on her heel, only to find that bell-jabber was coming down the side of the house herself, with a look of slight agitation on her face.

"There's somebody inside," she said. "I looked through the letterbox and I saw somebody at the end of the hall."

"was it Erwin?"

"I couldn't see. It was too dark."

"Huh." Tesla stared at the wall, as though she might pierce it with her sight if she looked hard enough.

"There was something weird about him-"

"What?"

"I don't know." She looked spooked. "You want to call the cops?"

"No. No, I don't think we have to bother Jed with this. Maybe I'll just... you know... try another day."

This is one nervous lady, Raul said.

"If there's some problem in here Tesia said. "Maybe I'll just look round the other side." She started back towards the yard. "I'm Tesla by the way," she called over her shoulder.

"I'm Phoebe."

Well, well... said Raul, the scarlet woman.

It was all Tesla could do not to say: Everybody's talking aboutyou. "Are you a relative of Erwin's?" Phoebe asked her.

"No, why?"

"It's none of my business, but I know you're not from Everville-"

"So you're wondering what I'm doing here," Tesla replied, as she tried the back door. It was locked. Cupping her hands around her eyes she peered through the glass. There were a few signs of life. A carton of orange juice overturned on the table; a small pile of dishes beside the sink.

"I'm not here to see Erwin," Tesla went on. "Truth is, I don't even know Erwin." She glanced round at Phoebe, who didn't seem overly concerned that she was talking to a potential house-breaker.

"I came to see a guy called Fletcher. Don't suppose the nam e means anything?"

Phoebe thought about this for a moment, then shook her head. "He's not a local man," she stated. "I'm sure I'd know him if he were."

"Small town, huh?"

"It's getting too small for me," Phoebe said, unable to disguise her sourness. "Everybody pretty much knows everybody else's business."

"I heard a few rumors myself."

"About me?" said Phoebe.

"You're the Phoebe Cobb, right?"

Phoebe pursed her lips. "I wish to God I wasn't right now," she said,

"but yes. I'm Phoebe Cobb." She sighed, her robust faqade cracking.

"Whatever you heard@'

"I couldn't give a shit," Tesla said. "I know it can't be much fun-"

"I've had better days," Phoebe said, seeming to suddenly catch the defeat in her voice and pulling herself together. "Look, obviously Mr. Toothaker doesn't want to answer the door to either of us."

Tesla smiled. "Toothaker? That's his name? Erwin Toothaker?"

"What's so funny about that?"

"Nothing. I think it's perfect," Tesla said. "Erwin Toothaker." She peered through the window again, squinting.

The door that led into the rest of the house was a couple of inches ajar, and as she stared, a sinuous shadow seemed to move through the gap.

She recoiled from the back door six inches, startled.

"What is it?" Phoebe said.

Tesla blinked, licked her lips, and looked again. "Does our Erwin keep snakes?" she said. "Snakes?"

"Yeah, snakes."

"Not that I know of. Why?"

"It's gone now, but I could swear I saw...

Tesla? Raul murmured.

"What?"

Snakes and the smell of shit. What does that combination remind you oP She didn't answer. Just backed away from the door, suddenly clammy. No, her mind said, no, no, no. Not Lix. Not here. Not in this little backwater.

Tesla, get hold ofyoursetf She was suddenly trembling from head to foot.

"Is it there again?" Phoebe said, taking a step towards the door.

"Don't, " Tesia said.

I'll in not scared of snakes."

Tesla put her hand to block Phoebe's approach. "I mean it," she said. Phoebe pushed her arm aside. "I want to look," she said forcibly, and put her face to the window. "I don't see anything."

"it came and went."

"Or it was never there," Phoebe replied. She looked back at Tesla. "You don't look so good," she said.

"I don'tfeel so good."

"Have you got a phobia?"

Tesla shook her head. "Not about snakes." She reached out and gently plucked at Phoebe's arm. "I really think we should get out of here." Either the grim tone in her voice, or the look on her ashen face apparently was enough to convince Phoebe she was deadly serious, because now she too retreated from the back door.

"Maybe I was just imagining it," Tesla replied, hoping to any God who'd listen that this was true. She was ready for anything but Lix.

With Phoebe trailing after her she made her way back round to the front of the house, and up the path to the street.

"Happy now?" Phoebe said.

"Just walk with me, will you?" Tesla said, and set the pace until they'd put fifty yards between themselves and the Toothaker house. Only then did Tesla slow down.

"Happy now?" Phoebe said again, this time a little testily.

Tesia stood staring up at the sky, and drew several long, calming breaths before she said, "This is worse than I thought."

"What is? What are you talking about?"

Tesia drew another deep breath. "I think there's something evil in that house," she replied.

Phoebe glanced back down the street, which looked more serene than ever as the afternoon drew on. "I know it's hard to believe-"

"Oh no," Phoebe said flatly. "I can believe it." When she looked back at Tesla she was wearing a small, tight smile. "This place is cruel," she said. "It doesn't look it, but it is."

Tesia began to think maybe there'd been a certain synchronicity in their meetings. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," she said. "Okay. I'm not going to try and-2'

"I mean yes," Phoebe said. "Yes, I do want to talk about it."

Six

"There's something wrong with the sea."

Joe sat up, and looked down the shore towards the booming surf. The waters were almost velvety, the waves large enough to tempt a surfer, but curling and breaking more slowly than those on any terrestrial shore. Flecks of irides cence rose in their lavish curl, and glittered on their crests.

"It's beautiful," he said. Noah grunted. "Look out there," he said, and pointed out beyond the breakers, to the place where the horizon should have been. Black and gray and green pillars of clouds were apparently rising from the sea as though some titanic heat was turning the waters to steam. The heavens, meanwhile, were failing in floods and fires. It was a spectacle the scale of which Joe had never conceived before, like a scene from the making of the world, or its unmaking.

"What's causing all that?"

"I don't want to speak the words until I'm certain," Noah said. "But I begin to think we should be careful, even here."

"Careful about what?"

"About waiting for the likes of that to come our way," he said, and pointed along the shore.

Three or four miles from where they stood he could see the roofs and spires of a city. Liverpool, he presumed. In between, perhaps a quarter of that distance away, was an approaching procession. "That's a Blessedm'n," Noah said, "I think we're better away, Joe."

'Why?" Joe wanted to know. "What's a Blessedm'n?"

'One who conjures," Noah said. "Perhaps the one who opened this door."

"Don't you want to wait and thank him?" Joe said, still studying the procession. There were perhaps thirty in the line, some of them on horseback; one, it seemed, on a camel.

"The door wasn't opened for me," Noah replied.

"Who was it opened for?" There was no answer. Joe looked round to see that Noah was once again staring out towards the apocalyptic storm that blocked the horizon. "Something out there?" he said.

"Maybe," Noah replied. Half a dozen questions appeared in Joe's head at the same time. If what was out there was coming here, what would happen to the shore? And to the city? And if it passed over the threshold, would the storm it brought go with it? Down the mountain, to Everville? to Phoebe?

Oh my God, to Phoebe?

"I have to go back," he said.

"You can't."

"I can and I will," Joe said, turning and starting back towards the crack. It was not hidden here, as it was on the mountain. It crackled like a rod of black lightning against the shifting sky. was it his imagination, or was it wider and taller than it had been?

"I promised you power, Joe," Noah called after him. "And I still have it to give."

Joe turned on his heel. "So give it to me and let me go," he said. Noah stared at the ground. "It's not as easy as that, my friend."

"What do you mean?"

"I can't grant you power here."

"On the other side, you said."

"Yes, I did. I know I did. But that wasn't quite the truth." He looked up at Joe now, his oversized head seeming to teeter on his frail neck.

"I'd hoped that once you got here and saw the glories of the dream-sea, you'd want to travel with me a little way. I can give you power. Truly I can. But only in my own country."

"How far?" Joe said.

There was no answer forthcoming. Infuriated, Joe went k to Noah, moving at such speed the creature raised its s to ward off a blow. "I'm not going to hit you," Joe said. Noah lowered his guard six inches. "I just want an honest answer."

Noah sighed. "My country is the Ephemeris," he said.

"And where's the Ephemeris?" Joe wanted to know.

Noah looked at him for perhaps ten seconds, and then pointed out to sea.

"No shit," Joe said, deadpan. "You really put one over on me."

"Put one over?" Noah said.

"Tricked me, asshole." He pushed his face at Noah, until they were almost nose to nose. "You tricked me."

"I believed you'd been sent to take me home," Noah said.

"Don't be pathetic."

"It's true, I did. I still do." He looked up at Joe. "You think that's ridiculous, that our lives could be intertwined that way?"

"Yes," said Joe.

Noah nodded. "So you must go back," he said. "And I'll stay. I feel stronger here, under my own sky. No doubt you'll feel stronger under yours."

Joe didn't miss the irony. "You know damn well what I'll be when I get back there."

"Yes, said Noah, getting to his feet. "Powerless." With that he started to hobble away down the beach. "Goodbye, Joe," he called after him.

"Asshole," Joe said, staring back up the shore at the sliver of night sky visible in the crack. What use would he be to himself or to Phoebe if he returned home now? He was a wounded fugitive. And just as Noah had pointed out, he was utterly powerless.

He turned again to scan the strange world into which he'd stepped. The distant city, the approaching procession, the storm raging over Quiddity's tumultuous waters: none of it looked particularly promising. But perhaps-just perhaps-there was hope for him here. A means to get power of some kind, any kind, that would make him a man to be reckoned with when he got back to his own world. Perhaps he'd have to sweat for it, but he'd sweated in the Cosm, hadn't he, and what had he got for his efforts? Broken balls.

"All fight," he said, going down the shore after Noah. "I'll stay. But I'm not carrying you, understand?"

Noah smiled back at him. "May I... put my arm around your shoulder, until I get some nourishment in me, and my legs are stronger?"

"I guess," said Joe.

Noah hooked his arm around Joe's neck. "There's.a beached boat down there," he said, "we'll take refuge until the procession's gone."

"What's so bad about these Blessedm'n?" Joe asked him as they made their hobbling way down to the vessel.

"No one ever knows what's in a Blessedm'n's heart. they have secret reasons and purposes for everything. Perhaps this one is benign, but we've no way of knowing." they walked on in silence, until they reached the vessel. It was two-masted, perhaps twenty-five feet long, its boards and wheelhouse painted scarlet and blue, though its voyages had taken their toll on both paintwork and boards. Its name, The Fanacapan, had been neatly lettered on its bow.

Hunger was beginning to gnaw at Joe, so he left Noah squatting in the lee of the vessel, and clambered on board to look for some sustenance. The narcotic effect of the painkillers was finally wearing off, and as he went about the boat, looking above and below for a loaf of bread or a bottle of beer, he felt a mingling of negative feelings creep upon him.

One of them was unease, another trepidation, a third, disappointment. He had found his way into another world, only to discover that things here weren't so very different. Perhaps Quiddity was indeed a dream-sea as Noah had claimed, but this boat, that had apparently crossed it, showed no sign of having been built or occupied by creatures of vision. Its two cabins were squalid, its galley unspeakable, the woodwork of its wheelhouse crudely etched with drawings of the obscenest kind.

As for nourishment, there was none to be found. There were a few scraps of food left in the galley, but nothing remotely edible, and though Joe searched through the strewn clothes and filthy blankets in the cabins in the hope of finding a bar of chocolate or a piece of fruit, he came up ty-handed. Frustrated, and hungrier than ever after his ons, he clambered back down onto the shore to find Noah was sitting cross-legged on the ground, staring up the shore with tears on his face.

"What's wrong?"

"It just reminds me Noah said, nodding towards the procession. Its destination was the crack, no doubt of that. Five or six celebrants, who looked to be children, and nearly naked, had broken from the front of the procession and were strewing a path of leaves or petals between their lord and the threshold.

"Reminds you of what?"

"Of my wedding day," Noah said. "And of my beloved. We had a procession three, four times that one. You never saw such finery. You never heard such music. It was to be the end of an age of war, and the beginning... " He faltered, shuddering. "I want to see my country again, Joe," he said after a time. "If it's only to be buried there."

"You haven't waited all this time just to die."

"It won't be so bad," Noah murmured. "I've had the love of my life. There could never he another like her, nor do I want there to be. I couldn't bear to even think such a thought until now, but it's the truth, Joe. So it won't be so bad, if I die in my own country, and I'm laid in the dirt from which I came. You understand that, don't you?" Joe didn't reply. Noah looked round at him. "No?"

"No," he said, "I don't have a country, Noah. I hate America."

"Africa then."

"I was never there. I don't think I'd much like that either." He drew a long, slow breath. "So I don't give a fuck where I'm buried." There was another long silence. Then he said: "I'm hungry. There's nothing on the boat. I'm going to have to eat soon or I'm going to start falling down." "Fhen you must catch yourself something," Noah said, and getting to his feet, led Joe down to the water's edge. The waves were not breaking as violently as they had been, Joe thought. "See the fisht' Noah said, pointing into curling waves.

The streaks of iridescence Joe had seen from the threshold were in fact,living things: fishes and eels, bright as lightning, leaping in the water in their thousands.

"I see them."

"Fake your fill." "You mean, just catch them in my hands?"

"And swallow them down," Noah said. He smiled, seeing the disgusted look on Joe's face. "They're best alive," he said. "Trust me."

The ache in Joe's stomach was now competing with that in his balls. This was, he knew, no time to be persnickety about his options. He shrugged and strode out into the water. It was balmy wartn, which came as a pleasant surprise, and if he hadn't known better he'd have said it was eager to have him in its midst, the way it curled around his shins, and leapt up towards his groin. The fish were everywhere, he saw; and they came in a number of shapes and sizes, some as large as salmon, which surprised him given the shallowness of the waters, others tiny as hummingbirds and almost as defiant of gravity, leaping around him in their glittering thousands. He had to exert almost no effort at all to catch hold of one. He simply closed his hand in their midst, and opening it again found he'd caught not one but three-two a reddish silver, the third blue-all flapping wildly in his palm. they didn't look remotely appetizing, with their black, black eyes and their gasping flanks. But as long as he and Noah were trapped here he had little choice. He either ate the fish, or went hungry.

He plucked one of the reddish variety off the plate of his palm, and without giving himself time to regret what he was doing, threw back his head and dropped it into his mouth. There was a moment of disgust when he thought he'd vomit, then the fish was gone down his gullet. He'd tasted nothing, but what the hell. This wasn't a gourmet meal; it was eating at its most primal. He took one more look at his palm, then he popped both the remaining fish into his mouth at the same time, throwing back his head so as to knock them back. One slipped down his throat as efficiently as the first, but the other flapped against his tonsils, and found its way back onto his tongue. He spat it out.

"Bad taste?" Noah said, wading into the surf beside Joe.

"It just didn't want to get eaten," Joe replied.

"You can't blame it," Noah replied, and strode on until he was hip deep in the waters.

"You're feeling stronger," Joe yelled to him over the sh of surf.

"All the time," Noah replied. "The air nourishes me." He plunged his hands into the water and came up not with a fish, but something that resembled a squid, its huge eyes a vivid gold. "Don't tell me to eat that," Joe said.

"No. No, never," Noah replied. "This is a Zehrapushu; a spirit-pilot. See how it looks at you?"

Joe saw. There was an eerie curiosity in the creature's unblinking gaze, as though it were studying him.

"It's not used to seeing your species in flesh and blood," Noah said.

"If you could speak its language it would surely tell you to go home. Perhaps you want to touch it?"

"Not much."

"It would please the Zehrapushu," Noah said, proffering the creature.

"And if you please one you please many."

Joe waded out towards Noah, watching the animal watch him. "You mean this thing's connected to other... what'd you call them... Zehra-what?"

"People call them 'shu, it's easier." He pressed the creature into Joe's arms. "It's not going to bite," he said.

Joe took hold of it, gingerly. It lay quite passively in his hands, its gaze turned up towards Joe's face.

"The oldest temples on the twelve continents were raised to the 'shu," Noah went on, "and it's still worshipped in some places." "But not by your people?"

Noah shook his head. "My wife was a Catholic," he said. "And I'm... I'm a nonbeliever. You'd better put it back before it perishes. I think it'd happily die just watching YOU." Joe stooped and set the 'shu back in the water. It lingered between his palms several seconds, the gleam of its eye still bright, then with one twitch of its boneless body it was away, out into deeper waters. Watching it go, Joe could not help but wonder if even now it was telling tales of the black man to its fellows. "There are some people," Noah said, "who believe that the 'shu are all parts of the Creator, who split into a billion pieces so as to pilot human souls in Quiddity, and has forgotten how to put the pieces back together again."

"so I just had a piece of God in my hands?" "Yes." Noah reached down into the water again, and this time brought up a foot-long fish. "Too big?" he said. "Too big!"... Me little ones slip down more easily, is that it?"

"Much easier," Joe said, and reaching into the waters plucked out two handfuls of the tiny fish. His encounter with the 'shu had taken the edge off his pickiness. Plainly these blank-eyed minnows were of a much lower order of being than the creature that had studied him so carefully. He could swallow them without concerning himself about the niceties of it. He downed two handfuls in as many seconds and then found himself something a little larger, which he bit into as though it were a sandwich. The meat of it was bright orange, and sweetly tender, and he chewed on it careless of how the thing thrashed in his grip, tossing it back only when one of its bones caught between his teeth.

"I'm done for now," he announced to Noah, working to ease the bone out.

"You won't drink?" Noah said.

"It's salty," Joe said, "isn't it?"

"Not to my palate," Noah said, Lifting a cupped handful of Quiddity's waters to his lips and sucking it up noisily. "I think it's good."

Joe did the same and was not disappointed. The water had a pleasant pungency about it. He swallowed several mouthfuls and then waded back to the shore, feeling more replete than he'd imagined possible given the fare.

In the time he and Noah had been discussing fish and God, the entire procession had arrived at the crack-which was indeed growing larger: It was half as tall again as it had been when he'd stepped through it-the members of the procession now gathered at the threshold.

"Are they going through?" he said.

"It looks that way," Noah replied. He glanced up at the sky, which though it had no sun in it was darker than it had been. "If some of them remain," he said, "we may find our crew among them."

"For what ship?"

"What other ship do we have but this?" Noah said, amming his palm against The Fanacapan.

"There are others in the harbor," Joe said, pointing along the shore towards the city. "Big ships. This thing doesn't even look seaworthy. And even if it is, how the hell are we going to persuade anyone to come with us?"

"That's my problem," Noah said. "Why don't you rest a while? Sleep if you can. We've a busy night ahead of us."

"Sleep?" Joe said. "You've gotta be kidding."

He thought about getting a blanket and a pillow out of one of the cabins, but decided it wasn't worth being lice ridden for the little snugness they'd afford, and instead made himself as comfortable as he could on the bare stones. It was undoubtedly the most uncomfortable bed he'd ever attempted to lie upon, but the serenity of the sky made a powerful soporific, and though he never fell into a deep enough sleep to dream, he drifted for a while.

Around four on Friday afternoon, while Tesia and Phoebe were getti ng to know each other in Everville, and Joe was lying under a darkening sky on Quiddity's shores, Howie Katz was sitting on the doorstep with Amy in his arms, watching a storm coming in from the northeast. A good rainstorm, he thought, maybe some thunder, and the heat would break.

The baby had not slept well the night before and had been fractious for most of the day, but now she lay contentedly in his arms, more asleep than awake. Jo-Beth had gone up to bed half an hour before, complaining of an upset stomach. The house was completely quiet. So was the street, except for the neighborhood dogs, who were busier than ever right now, racing around with their noses high and their ears pricked, all anticipation. When he'd found a better place for them all to live, they'd get a mutt, he decided. It would be good for Amy to have an animal around as she grew up, as a protector and a playmate.

"And he'll love you," Howie whispered to her. "Because everybody loves you." She grew a little restless in his arms. "Want to go lie down, honey?" he said, Lifting her up and kissing her face. "Let's take you upstairs."

He tiptoed up, and laid Amy down in the spare room, so as not to disturb Jo-Beth. Then he went to take a quick shower.

It felt good to put his head under the cool water and soap off the sweat and grime of the day; so good that he sprung a hard-on without touching himself. He ignored it as best he could-shampooed his hair, scrubbed his back-but the water kept beating on it, and eventually he took himself in hand. The last time he'd made love to Jo-Beth she'd been four months pregnant, and the attempt had ended with her crying and saying she didn't want him touching her. It was the first indication of how problematic the pregnancy was to prove. During the next few months it sometimes seemed to him he was living with two women, a loving twin and her bitch-sister. The loving Jo-Beth didn't want sex but she wanted his arms around her, and his comfort when she wept. The bitch-sister wanted nothing from him: not kisses, not company, nothing. The bitch-sister would say: I wish I'd never met you, and say it with such conviction he was certain she meant it. Then the old Jo-Beth would surface againusually through tears-and tell him she was sorry, so sorry, and she didn't know what she'd do without him.

He'd learned to curb and conceal his libido pretty well during this time. Kept a stash of skin magazines in the garage; found a soft-core channel to watch late at night; even had a couple of wet dreams. But Jo-Beth was never far from his imagination. Even in the last two weeks of her term, when she was enormous, the sight of her remained intensely arousing. She'd known it too, and seemed to resent his interest in her: locked the bathroom door when she was washing or showering, turned her back on him when she prepared for bed. She'd reduced him to a state of trembling adolescence, watching her from the corner of his eye in the hope of glimpsing the forbidden anatomy; picturing it later when he was jerking off.

He'd had enough of that. It was time they were man and wife again, instead of shy strangers who happened to share the same bed. He turned off the shower, roughly dried himself, then wrapped the towel around his waist and went into the bedroom.

Thunder was rolling in, low and cracked, but it hadn't woken Jo-Beth. She lay fully dressed on top of the bed, her pale face silvery with sweat in the gloom. He went to the window, and opened it a crack. The clouds were bruised and fat with rain; it would only be minutes before they loosed their waters on the dusty yard and the dusty roof.

Behind him, Jo-Beth murmured in her sleep. He went back to the bed, and gently sat down beside her. Again, she murmured something-he couldn't make out what-and raised her hand from her side, grazing his shoulder with her fingers as she did so. Her hand moved on to touch her mouth, and then, as though her sleeping self had realized somebody was sitting beside her, returned to his arm.

He was certain she'd awaken, but she didn't. The faintest of smiles appeared on her face, and her hand went from his arm to his chest. Her touch was feather-light but intensely erotic. All the more so, perhaps, because her unconscious was allowing her to do what her waking self could, or would not. He let her hand dally on his chest, and while it did so he gingerly pulled at the tuck of his towel. His erection had raised its head, eager to be touched. He didn't move; didn't breathe. Just watched while her hand wandered down his hard belly until it found his dick.

He exhaled as quietly as he could, luxuriating in her attention. She didn't linger at his sex any longer than she had at chest and belly, but by the time her fingers had moved over his balls and on down his thigh he was so aroused he feared if she returned there he'd lose control. He looked away from her fingers to her face, but the sight of her troubled beauty only heated him further. He closed his eyes, tight, and tried to picture the street outside, the storm clouds, the engine he'd been working on yesterday, but her face kept finding him in his refuge.

And now he heard her murmuring again, the words still incomprehensible, and without planning to do so he opened his eyes to watch her lips.

It was too much. He gasped out loud, and as if in response the murmurs grew a little more urgent, and her hand, which had been trailing on his leg, began to move back up towards his groin. He felt the first spasm behind his balls, and reached down to take tight hold of his dick in the hope of delaying the inevitable a moment longer. But it seemed she sensed the motion, because her hand went to his sex, reaching it before he could stop her, and at her touch he overflowed.

"Oh God," he gasped, and threw back his head. He could hear her words for the first time "It's all right," she was saying. He could only gasp. "It's all right, Tommy. It is. It is. It's all right-"

"Tommy?"

He kept spurting, as her slackened hand worked his dick, but the pleasure was already gone.

"No," he said. "Stop."

She didn't obey him because she didn't hear him. She was gabbling deliriously: "ItisitisifisalhightTommyalirightitis." He pulled his hand off her, sick to his stomach, and started to get up off the bed. But she caught hold of his hand as he rose, her aim good despite her closed eyes. The gabbling ceased.

"Wait," she said.

His dick dribbled on, mindlessly. He was sorely tempted to straddle her right now; let her open her eyes and see it there, raw and wet. to say: It's me, Howie. Remember me? You married me.

But he was too ashamed of his vulnerability, of his sweat, and of the fear in him, tickling away in his belly even now. The fear that Tommy-Ray McGuire was close, and getting closer. Before reason could stop him he scanned the murky room, looking for some sign, any sign, of the DeathBoy. There was none, of course. He wasn't here in the flesh. At least not yet. He was in Jo-Beth's mind. And that in its way was a far more terrible place for him to be. Snatching up his towel to cover his nakedness, Howie pulled his hand away and retreated to the door, the rage in him gone already, become ash and nausea.

Before he could reach for the handle Jo-Beth opened her eyes. :'Howie')" she said.

'Who were you expecting?"

She raised her sticky hand, sitting up as she did so. "What's been going on?" she said, her tone accusatory.

He wasn't going to let her turn this around. "You were dreaming of Tommy-Ray," he said.

She swung her legs off the bed, scraping his semen off her fingers onto the sheet as she did so. "What are you talking about?" she said. There were red blotches on her neck and upper chest; sure signs that she too had been aroused. Still was, probably.

"You kept saying his name," Howie replied.

"No, I didn't."

"You think I'd make a thing like that up?" he said, his volume rising.

"Yeah, probably!" she yelled.

He knew by the' way she came back at him she was fully aware that he was telling the truth (she was only ever this vehement if she was concealing something), which meant she had some waking knowledge of her brother.

The thought made Howie want to weep, or puke, or both. He hauled open the door and stumbled out onto the landing. As he did so the rain began-a sudden tattoo against the window. He looked up: saw the purple black clouds through the streaming glass, felt thunder rattle the house.

Amy had woken and was sobbing in the spare room. He wanted to go to her, but heard Jo-Beth at the bedroom door, and couldn't bear to be seen in the light the way he was now, with fear on his face. She'd tell Tommy-Ray, for certain, next time she saw him in her dreams. She'd say: Come get me. You've got no opposition here.

He stepped into the bathroom, and slammed the door behind him. After a time, Amy's crying subsided. And a little while after that, the storm passed, but it left the air uncleansed, and the heat as smothering as ever.

Grillo? It's Howie."

"I didn't expect to hear@'

"Have you heard anything m-m-m-more about Tommy Ray?"

"Something happened?"

"Sort of."

"Want to tell me what?"

"Not right now, no, I j-j-just have to k-k-know where he is. He's coming f-f-for her@'

"Calm down, Howie."

"I k-k-know he's coming for her."

"He doesn't know where you live, Howie."

"He's inside her head, Grillo. He was right. 1-f-ffuck!-haven't stuttered in f-five years." He paused to draw a ragged breath. "I thought it was over. At least w-w-with him."

"We all did."

"I th-th-thought he was gone and it was over. But he's ss-still there, inside her. So d-d-don't tell me he doesn't know where w-w-we live. He knows exactly."

"Where are you right now?" "At a gas station half a mile from the house. I didn't want to c-c-call from there."

:'You'd better get back there. Have you got any weapons?"

'I got a handgun. But what the fuck use is th-th-th-that g-g-going, going to be? I mean, if he's alive-"

"He's cheated death."

"And a handgun ain't going' to be a h-h-hell of a lot of good." :'Shit."

'Yeah, man, right. Shit. Right. That's what it, what it, what it is. It's fucking shit!" Grillo heard him slam his fist against the phone. Then there was a muffled sound. It took him a moment to realize Katz was weeping.

"Listen, Howie-" The muffled sound went on. He'd put his hand over the phone, to keep Grillo from hearing. I know that feeling, Grillo thought to himself. If I cry and nobody hears, maybe I didn't cry at all.

Except that it didn't work that way. "Howie? Are you there?" There was a moment or two of silence, then Howie came back on the line. The tears had calmed him a little. "I'm here," he said.

"I'm going to drive up there. We'll work this out, somehow." :'Yeah?"

'Meantime, I want you to stay put. Understand me?"

"What if he... I mean, what if h-h-he comes for her?" "Do what you have to do. Move if you have to move. But I'll keep checking in, okay?"

"Yeah.

"Anything else?" "He's not going to get her, Grillo."

"I know that."

"Whatever the f-f-fuck it takes, he's not going to get her."

What have I done? That was all Grillo could think when he'd put the phone down: What have I done volunteering for this? He couldn't help Howie. Jesus, he could barely help himself.

He sat in front of the screens-which were filling up like barrels in a cloudburst: news coming in from every state, all of it bad-and tried to work out some way to withdraw the offer, but he knew he'd not be able to live with himself if he turned his back and something happened.

The fact was, something would happen. If not tonight, tomorrow night. If not tomorrow night, the night after. The world was losing its wits. The evidence was right there on the screens in front of him. What better time for the resurrected to settle their scores? He had to do what he could, however little, however meaningless, or else never meet his gaze in the mirror again.

He turned off the screens and went up to pack an overnight bag. He was just about finished, when the telephone rang. This time it was Tesla, calling from Everville.

"I'm going to be staying with a woman I met here. She needs some company right how. Have you got a pen?" Grillo took the number, then gave her a brief update on the Katz situation. She didn't sound all that surprised. "There's a lot of endgames going to get played this weekend," she said. He told her he was going to drive up to Howie's. Then the conversation turned to the subject of D'Amour.

"I always thought his totems and his tattoos were so much shit," Grillo said, "but right now-"

"You wish you had one of them?"

"I wish I had something I believed in," Grillo said. "Something that'd actually do some good if Tommy-Ray is on the loose."

"Oh he's probably loose," Tesla said grimly. "Just about everything that could be loose is loose right now."

Grillo chewed on this for a moment. Then he said, "What the fuck did we do to deserve this, Tes?"

"Just lucky, I guess."

The storm that had broken over the Katzes' house moved steadily southwest, unloading its burden of rain as it went. There were a number of collisions on the slackened streets and highways, all but one of them inconsequential. The exception occurred one hundred and fifty-five miles from the house, on Interstate 84. An RV carrying a family of six, on their way home from a vacation in Cedar City, swerved on the treacherous asphalt, struck a car in the adjacent lane, and crossed the divide, taking out half a dozen vehicles traveling south before it plunged off the side of the highway.

The police, medics, and fire crews were at the scene with remarkable speed given that the highway was blocked in both directions, and the rain so torrential it reduced visibility to fifteen yards, but by the time they arrived, five lives had already ebbed away, and another three people-including the driver of the RV-were dead before they could be cut from the wreckage.

Almost as though it was intrigued by the chaos it had wrought, the storm slowed its progress and lingered over the accident scene for the better part of half an hour, its deluge weighing down the smoke that poured from the burning vehicles. In a bitter, blinding soup of smoke and rain, rescued and rescuers alike moved like phantoms, stinking and stained with blood and gasoline. Some of the survivors were lucky enough to weep; most simply stumbled from fire to fire, body to body, as if looking for their wits.

But there was one phantom here who was neither a rescuer nor in need of rescue; who moved through the hellish confusion with an ease that would inspire nightmares in all who saw him.

He was young, this phantom, and by all accounts indecently handsome: blond, tanned and smiling a wide, white smile. And he was singing. It was this, more than his easy saunter, more than his easy smile, that distressed those who spoke of him later. That he went from wreck to wreck with this bland, nameless jingle on his lips was nothing short of demoniacal.

He did not go unchallenged, however. A police officer found him reaching into the backseat of one of the wrecked vehicles and demanded he instantly desist. The phantom ignored the order and smashed the back window, reaching in for something he'd seen on the seat. Again, the officer ordered that he stop, and drew his gun to enforce his order. By way of response the phantom ceased his singing long enough to say, "I got business here."

Then, resuming the melody where he'd left off, he pulled the body of a child, her pitiful corpse overlooked in the chaos, out through the broken window. The officer leveled his weapon at the thief s heart, and ordered him to put the child down, but this, like the rest of the orders, was ignored. Slinging the body around his shoulders like a shepherd carrying a lamb, the phantom made to depart. What followed was witnessed by five individuals, including the officer, all of them in highly agitated states, but none so traumatized as to be hallucinating. Their testimonies, however, were outlandish. Turning his back on the officer, the corpse-stealer started to amble off towards the embankment, and as he did so a convulsion ran through the smoke around him, and for a moment or two it seemed to the witnesses there were human forms in the billows-their faces long and wretched, their bodies sinewy but softened, as though they'd had their bones sucked out of them-fonns that were plainly in the thief's employ, because they closed around him in a moaning cloud which no one, not even the officer, was willing to breach.

Five hours later, the body of the child-a three year old called Lorena Hernandez-was discovered less than a mile from the highway, in a small copse of birch trees. She had been stripped of her blood-stained clothing and her body carefully, even lovingly, washed in rain water. Then her little corpse had been arranged on the wet ground in a fetal position: legs tucked up snug against her belly, chin against her chest. There was no sign of any sexual molestation. The eyes, however, had gone from her head.

Of the singing beauty who'd taken her, and gone to considerable trouble to lay her out this way, there was no sign. Literally none. No foot marks in the grass, no finger prints on her body, nothing. It was as though the abductor had floated as he'd gone about his grim and inexplicable ritual.

A report of these events was added to the Reef that very night, but there was nobody there to read it. Grillo was on his way to Idaho, leaving the reports to accrue behind him at an unprecedented rate. Strange, terrible stories.

In Minnesota, a man undergoing heart surgery had woken on the operating table and despite the anaesthetists' desperate attempts to return him to a comatose state, had warned his surgeons that the tail-eaters were coming, the tai I eaters were coming, and nothing could stop them. Then he'd died.

On the campus of Austin College in Texas, a woman in white, accompanied by what witnesses described as six large albino dogs, was seen disappearing into the ground as though descending a flight of stairs. There was sobbing heard from the earth, so sorrowful one of those who heard it attempted suicide an hour later.

In Atlanta, the Reverend Donald Merrill, midway through a sermon of particular ferocity, suddenly veered from his subject-There is one love, God's love-and began to speak about Imminence. His words were being broadcast across the nation live, and the cameras stayed on him as he pounded and paraded, his vocabulary becoming more obscure with every sentence. Then the subject veered again, on to the subject of human anatomy. The answer is here, he said, starting to undress in front of his astonished flock: in the breast, in the belly, in the groin. By the time he was down to his underwear and socks, the broadcast had been blacked out, but he continued to harangue his assembly anyway, instructing his appalled and fascinated congregation to go home, find a large mirror, and study themselves naked, untii-as he put it-Imminence was over, and time stood still.

There was one report among those swelling the Reef that would have been of particular interest to Tesla, had she known about it; indeed might have changed the course of events to come significantly.

It came from the Baja. Two visitors from England, parapsychologists writing a book on the mysteries of mind and matter, had gone in search of a nearly mythical spot where rumor had it great and terrible events had taken place some years before. This had of course brought them to the spot where Fletcher had first created the Nuncio, the Misi6n de Santa Catrina. There, on a headland overlooking the blue Pacific, they'd been in the midst of photographing the ruins when one of the number who still tended the little shrine that nestled in the rubble came running up to them, tears streaming down her face, and told them that a fire had walked in the misi6n the night before, a fire in the form of a man.

Fletcher, she said, Fletcher, Fletcher... But this tale, like so many others, was soon buried beneath the hundreds that were flooding in every hour from every state. Tales of the freakish and the unfathomable, of the grotesque, the filthy, and the frankly ludicrous. Unminded, unmatched, and now uncared for, the Reef grew in ignorance of itself, a body of knowledge without a head wise to its nature.

Finding the crossroads where Maeve O'Connell had buried the medallion had proved more difficult than Buddenbaum had anticipated. With Seth in tow, he'd spent two hours following Main Street north-northwest and southsoutheast from the square, assuming (mistakenly, as it turned out) that the intersection he was seeking-that crossroads where his journey would end-would be close to the center of town. He found it eventually, two-thirds of a mile from the square; a relatively insignificant spot on Everville's map. There was a modest establishment called Kitty's Diner on one corner, opposite it a small market, and on the other two a rundown garage and what had apparently been a clothing store, its naked mannequins and EVERYTHING MUST GO signs all that remained of its final days.

"What exactly are you looking for?" Seth asked him as they stood surveying the crossroads.

"Nothing now," Buddenbaum replied.

"How do you know this is the right crossroads?"

"I can feel it. It's in the ground. You look up. I look down. We're complementaries." He locked his fingers together. "Like that." He pulled, to demonstrate their adhesion.

"Can we go back to bed soon?" Seth said. "In a while. First I'd like to take a look up there." He nodded towards the windows above the empty store. "We're going to need a vantage point."

"For the parade?" Seth asked.

Buddenbaum laughed. "No. Not for the parade."

"What for ffien?"

"How do I best explain?" "Any way you like."

"There are places in the world where things are bound to happen," Buddenbaum said. "Places where powers come, where... " He fumbled for the words a moment, "Where avatars come."

"What's an avatar?"

"Well, it's a kind of face. The face of something divine."

"Like an angel?"

"More than an angel."

"More?" Seth breathed.

"More."

Seth pondered this a moment. Then he said, "These things-"

"Avatars."

"Avatars. They're coming here?"

"Some of them."

"How do you know?"

Buddenbaum stared down at the ground. "I suppose the simplest answer is that they're coming because I asked them to."

"You did?" Seth said with a little laugh. It clearly delighted him that he was chatting on a street corner with a man who made invitations to divinities. "And they just said yes?"

"It isn't the first time," Buddenbaum replied. "I've supplied many-how shall I put this?-many entertainments for them over the years."

"What kind of things?"

"All kinds. But mostly things that ordinary people would shudder at."

"they like those the best, do they?"

Buddenbaum regarded the youth with frank amazement. "You grasp things very quickly," he said. "Yes. they like those the best. The more bloodshed the better. The more tears, the more grief, the better."

"That's not so different from us, is it?" Seth said, "We like that stuff too."

"Except that this isn't make-believe," Buddenbaum said. 'This isn't fake blood and glycerine tears. they want the real ing. And it's my job to deliver it." He paused, watching the flow of traffic on street and sidewalk. "It isn't always the most pleasant of occupations," he said.

"So why do you do it?"

"I couldn't begin to answer that. Not here. Not now. But if you stay by my side, the answer will become apparent. Trust me."

"I do."

"Good. Well, shall we go?"

Seth nodded, and together they headed across the street towards the untenanted building.

Only when they were on the opposite side of the street, standing in the doorway of the clothing store, did Seth ask Buddenbaum, "Are you afraid?" "Why would I be afraid?"

Seth shrugged. "I would be. Meeting avatars."

"They're just like people, only more evolved," Buddenbaum replied. "I'm an ape to them. We're all apes to them."

"So when they watch us, it's like us going to the zoo?"

"More like a safari," Buddenbaum replied, amused by the aptness of this.

"So maybe they're the nervous ones," Seth remarked. "Coming into the wild."

Buddenbaum stared hard at the kid. "Keep that to yourself," he said forcibly.

"It was only@' Buddenbaum cut him short. "I shouldn't even have told you," he said.

"I won't say anything," Seth replied. 111 mean, who would I tell?" Buddenbaum looked unamused. "I won't say anything, to anybody," Seth said. "I swear." He drew a little closer to Buddenbaum, put his hand on Buddenbaum's arm. "I want to do whatever makes you happy with me," he said, staring into Buddenbaum's face. "You just tell me."

"Yes, I know. I'm sorry I snapped. I guess I am a little nervous." He leaned closer to the youth, his lips inches from his ears and whispered.

"I want to fuck you. Right now." And with one apparently effortless motion he forced the lock on the door and led Seth inside.

This little scene had not gone unnoticed. Since his encounter with the foul-mouthed virago, Bosley had been on the alert for any further sign of Godless behavior, and had witnessed the curious intimacy between the Lundy boy, whom he'd known was crazy for years, and the stranger in the well-cut suit. He said nothing about it to Della, Doug, or Harriet. He simply told them he was going to take a short walk and slipped out, keeping his eyes locked on the empty store as he crossed the street.

The subject of sex had never been of much interest to Bosley. Three or four months might pass without him and Leticia being moved to perform the act, and when they did it was over within a quarter of an hour. But sex kept finding him, however much he attempted to purify his little corner of the world. It came in on the radio and television, it came in magazines and newspapers, dirtying what he tried so hard to keep clean.

Why, when the Lord had raised man from dust, and given him dominion over the beasts of the field, did people have such an urge to act like beasts, to go naked like beasts, to rut and roll in dirt like beasts?

It distressed him. Angered him sometimes too, but mostly distressed him, seeing the young people of Everville, denied the guiding principles of faith, stumbling and succumbing to the basest appetites. For some reason, perhaps because of the boy's mental disturbance, he'd thought Seth Lundy a bystander to these debaucheries. Now he suspected otherwise. Now he suspected the Lundy boy was doing something worse than his peers, far worse.

He pushed open the front door and stepped into the store. It was cooler inside than out, for which he was grateful. He paused a moment a yard over the threshold, listening for the whereabouts of the boy and his companion. There were footsteps above, and murmured voices. Weaving between the debris left by the Gingerichs, he made his way to the door out the back of the store, moving lightly and quietly. The door led in to a small storage room, beyond which lay a steep, murky flight of stairs. He crossed the room and started his ascent. As he did so, he realized the voices had stopped.

e froze on the stairs, fearful his presence had been discovd. He was taking his life in his hands, spying on creatures at lived in defiance of morality. they were capable of anything, including, he didn't doubt, murder.

There was no footfall, however, and after a short pause he started up the stairs again, until he reached the door at the top. It stood an inch or two ajar. He pushed it a little wider, and listened.

Now he heard them. If dirt and depravity had a sound, then what he heard was it. Panting and slobbering and the slap of flesh on flesh. It made his skin itch to hear it, as though the air was filthy with their noise. He wanted to turn and go but he knew that was cowardice. He had to call the wrongdoers on their wrongs, the way he had the virago, or t, else wouldn't the world just become filthier and filthier, until people were buried in their own ordure?

The door creaked as he pushed it open, but the beasts were making too much din to hear it. The room was so configured he could not yet see them; he had to edge his way along a wall before he came to a corner around which to peep. Drawing breath in preparation, he did so.

they were there, coupling on the bare boards in a patch of sunli-ht, the Lundy boy naked but for his socks, his sodom t, izer with his trousers around his ankles. He had his eyes closed, as did the boy-how could he feel pleasure at this act, delving into a place of excrement?-but within two thrusts the sodomite opened his eyes and stared at Bosley. There was no shame on his face, nor in his voice. Only outrage. "How dare you?" he said. "Get out of here!"

Now Lundy opened his eyes. Unlike his violator, he had the good grace to blush, his hand going up between his legs to conceal his sex.

"I told you, get out!" the sodomite said. Bosley didn't retreat; nor did he advance. It was the boy who made the next move. Sliding forward until he'd disengaged himself he turned to his impaler and said, "Make him go."

The sodomite started to pull up his pants, and while he was doing so, and vulnerable, Bosley took the offensive.

"Animals!" he raged, coming at the sodomite with his raised arms.

"Owen!" the boy yelled, but the warning came too late.

As the violator started to straighten up, Bosley's weight struck him, carrying him backwards in a flailing stumble.

The boy was getting to his feet now-Bosley saw him from the corner of his eye-a wordless cry of rage roaring from his throat. Bosley glanced round at him, saw the feral look on his sallow face, teeth bared, eyes wild, and started to step out of his path. But as he did so he heard the sound of breaking glass, and looked back to see that the sodomite had fallen against the window. He had a moment only to register the fact, then the Lundy boy was on him, naked and wet.

Panic erupted in him, and a shrill sound escaped him. He tried to thrust Lundy off him, but the boy was strong. He clung to Bosley as if he wanted kisses; pressed his body hard against Bosley's body, his breath hot on Bosley's face.

"No-no-no!" Bosley shrieked, thrashing to free himself of the embrace. He succeeded in detaching himself, and retreated, gasping, almost sobbing, towards the door.

Only then did he realize that the sodomite had gone.

"Oh Christ... " he murmured, meaning to begin a prayer. But further words failed him. All he could do was stumble back towards the broken window, murmuring the same words over and over. "Oh Christ. Oh Christ. Oh... "

Lundy ignored him now. "Owen!" he yelled and was at the window in three strides, slicing his body on the jagged glass as he leaned out. Bosley was beside him a moment later, his litany ceased, and there on the sidewalk below lay the sodomite, his trousers still halfway down his thighs. Traffic had come to a halt at the crossroads, and horns were already blaring in all directions.

. Dizzy with vertigo and panic, Bosley retreated from the window.

"Fuckhead!" the Lundy kid yelled, and apparently thinking Bosley meant to escape, came after him afresh, blood running from his wounded flank.

Bosley tried to avoid the youth's fists, but his heel caught in a tangle of discarded clothes and he fell backwards, the breath knocked from him when he hit the ground. Lundy was on him in a second, setting his skinny butt on Bosley's chest and pinning Bosley's upper arms with his knees. That was how they were found, when the first witnesses came racing up the stairs: Bosley on his back, sobbing Oh Christ, Oh rist, Oh Christ while the naked, wounded Seth Lundy kept im nailed to the boards.

Whatever speculations Erwin had entertained where death was concerned, he'd not expected the experience to be hard on the feet. But he'd walked further in the last six hours than in the previous two months. Out from the house, then back to the house, then down to Kitty's Diner, then back to the house again, and now, drawn by the sight of an ambulance careening down Cascade Street, back to the diner again. Or rather, to the opposite corner, in time to see a man who'd been pushed from an upper window being loaded into the back of an ambulance and taken off to Silverton. He hung around the crowd, picking up clues as to what had happened, and quickly pieced the story together. Apparently Bosley Cowhick had done the deed, having discovered the pushee in the middle of some liaison with a local boy. Erwin knew Bosley by reputation only: as a philanthropist at Christmas, when he and several good Christian souls made it their business to take a hot dinner to the elderly and the housebound, and as a rabid letter writer (barely a month would go by without a missive in the Register noting some fresh evidence of Godlessness in the community). He had never met the man, nor could even bring his face to mind. But if it was notoriety he was after, he'd plainly got it this afternoon.

"Damn strange," he heard somebody say, and scanning the dispersing crowd saw a man in his late fifties, early sixties, gray hair, gray eyes, badly fitting suit, looking straight at him.

"Are you talking to me?" Erwin said. :'Yeah," said the other, "I was saying, it's damn strange-2' 'You can't be." "Can't be what?" "Can't be talking to me. I'm dead."

"That makes two of us," the other man replied, "I was saying, I've seen some damn strange things around here over the years."

"You're dead too?" Erwin said, amazed and relieved. Finally, somebody to talk to.

"Of course," the man said. "There's a few of us around town. Where did you come in from?"

"I didn't."

"You mean you're a local man?"

"Yeah. I only just, you know-"

"Died. You can say it."

"Died."

"Only some people come in for the Festival. they make a weekend of it."

"Dead people."

"Sure. Hey, why not? A parade's a parade, right? A few of us even tag along, you know, between the floats. Anything for a laugh. You gotta laugh, right, or you'd break your heart. Is that what happened? Heart attack?"

"No... " Erwin said, still too surprised by this turn of events to have his thoughts in order. "No, I... I was-"

"Recent, was it? It's cold in the beginning. But you get used to that. Hell, you can get used to anything, right? Long as you don't start looking back, regretting things, 'cause there's not a hell of a lot you can do about it."

"Is that right?"

"We're just hanging on awhile, that's all. What's your name, by the way?" "Erwin Toothaker." "I'm Richard Dolan." "Dolan? The candy store owner?" The man smiled. "That's me," he said. He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder at the empty building. "This was my store, back in the good old days. Actually, they weren't so good. It's just, you know, when you look back-"

"The past's always prettier." "That's right. The past's always-" He halted, frowning. "Say, were you around when I owned the store?" "No."

"So how the hell do you know about it?" "I heard a confession by a friend of yours." Dolan's easy smile faded. "Oh?" he said. "Who's that?" "Lyle McPherson?" "He wrote a confession?" "Yep. And it got lost, till I found it."

"Sonofabitch."

"Is he, I mean McPherson, is he still... in the vicinity?"

"You mean is he like us? No. Some people hang around, some people don't," Dolan shrugged. "Maybe they move on, somewhere or other, maybe they just"-he clicked his fingers-"disappear. I guess I wanted to stay and he didn't." "These aren't our real bodies, you know that?" Erwin said. "I mean, I've seen mine."

"Yeah, I got to see mine too. Not a pretty sight." He raised his hands in front of him, scrutinizing his palms. "But whatever we're made of," he said, "it's better than nothing. And you know it's no better or worse than living. You get good days, you get bad days... " He trailed away, his gaze going to the middle of the street. "'Cept I think maybe all that's coming' to an end."

"What makes you say that?"

Dolan drew a deep breath. "After a while you get to feel the rhythm of things, in a way you can't when you're living. Like smoke."

:'What's like smoke?" he said.

'We are. Floatin' around, not quite solid, not quite not. And when there's something weird in the wind, smoke knows."

"Really?"

"You'll get the hang of it."

"Maybe I already did."

"What'd you mean?" "Well if you want to see something weird, you don't have to look any further than my house. There's a guy there called Fletcher. He looks human, but I don't think he is."

Dolan was fascinated. "Why'd you invite him in?" "I didn't. He... just came."

"Wait a minute... " Dolan said, beginning to comprehend. "This guy Fletcher, is he the reason you're here?"

"Yes... " Erwin said, his voice thickening. "He murdered me. Sucked out my life, right there in my own living room."

"You mean he's some kind of vampire?"

Erwin looked scornful. "Don't be absurd. This isn't a late-night movie, it's my life. was my life. was! was!" He was suddenly awash in tears. "He didn't have any right-any right at all-to do this to me. I had thirty years in me, thirty good years, and he just-just takes them away. I mean, why me? What have I ever done to anybody?" He looked at Dolan. "You did something you shouldn't have done, and you paid the price. But I was a useful member of society."

"Hey, wait up," Dolan said testily. "I was as useful as you ever were."

"Come on now, Dolan. I was an attorney. I was dealing with matters of life and death. You sold cavities to kids." Dolan jabbed his finger in Erwin's direction. "Now you take that back," he said.

"Why would I do that?" Erwin said. "It's the truth."

"I put some pleasure in people's lives. What did you ever do, besides get yourself murdered?"

"Now you take care."

"You think your customers will mourn you, Toothaker? No. They'll say: Thank God, there's one less lawyer in the world."

"I told you, take care!"

"I'm quaking, Toothaker." Dolan raised his hand. "Look at that, shaking like a leal"

"If you're so damn strong why'd you put a bullet through your brain, huh? Gun slip, did it?"

"Shut up."

"Or were you just so full of guilt-"

"I said-"

"So full of guilt the only thing left to do was kill yourseIP"

"I don't have to listen to this," Dolan said, turning his back and stalking away.

"If it's any comfort," Erwin called after him, "I'm sure you made a lot of people very happy."

"Asshole!" Dolan yelled back at him, and before Erwin had a chance to muster a reply, was gone, like smoke in a high wind.

"We have our crew, Joe."

Joe opened his eyes. Noah was standing a little way up the beach with six individuals standing a couple of yards behind him, two of them less than half Noah's height, one a foot taller, the other three broad as stevedores. He could make out little else. The brightness had almost gone out of the sky entirely. Now it simmered like a pot of dark pigments-purples and grays and blues-that shed a constantly shifting murk on the beach and sea.

"We should get moving," Noah went on. "There are currents to catch."

He turned to the six crew members, and spoke to them in a voice Joe had not heard from him before, low and monotonous. they moved to their tasks without so much as a murmur, one of the smaller pair clambering up into the wheelhouse while the other five went to the bow of The Fanacapan and began to push the vessel down the beach. It was a plainly backbreaking labor, even if they made no sound of complaint, and Joe went to lend a hand. But Noah intercepted him. "they can do it," he said, drawing Joe out of the way.

"How did you hire them?"

"They're volunteers."

"You must have promised them something."

'@y're doing it for love," Noah said.

"I don't get it."

"Don't concern yourself," Noah said. "Let's just be away while we can." He turned to watch the volunteers pushing the boat out. The waves were breaking against the stem now, sending up fans of spray. "the news is worse than I'd imagined," Noah went on, now turning his gaze towards the invisible horizon. Lightning was moving through the clouds that coiled there, the bolts, if that was what they were, vast and serpentine. Some rose from sea to sky, describing vivid scrawls that burned in the eye after they'd gone. Some came at each other like locomotives, and, colliding, gave birth to showers of smaller bolts. Some simply fell in blazing sheets and seemed to sink into the sea, their brilliance barely dimmed by the fathoms, until they drowned.

"News about what?" Joe asked.

"About what's out there."

"And what is out there?"

"I suppose you should be told," Noah replied. "The lad Uroboros is moving this way. The greatest evil in this world or yours."

"What is it?"

"Not it. Them. It's a nation. A people. Not remotely like us, but a people nevertheless, who've always harbore a hunger to be in your world."

"Why?"

"Does appetite need reasons?" Noah said. "They've tried before, and been stopped. But this time-"

"What's being done about it?"

"The volunteers don't know. I'm not sure they even care." He drew a little closer to Joe. "One thing," he said. "Don't engage them in conversation, however tempted you are. Their silence is part of my deal with them." Joe looked puzzled. "Don't ask," Noah said, "for fear you won't like the answer. Just believe me, this is for the best." The vessel was in the water now, rising and failing as the waves broke against it. "We'd better get aboard," Noah said, and with more strength in his limbs than Joe he strode out into the surf and was hauled up onto the deck by one of the volunteers, all of whom were now aboard. Joe followed, his mind a mass of confusions.

"We're out of our minds," he told Noah once he was aboard. The volunteers were at the oars and laboring to row the vessel out beyond the breakers. Joe had to yell above the noise of sea and creaking timbers. "You know that? We're out of our fucking minds!"

"Why's that?" Noah yelled back.

"Look what we're heading into!" Joe hollered, pointing out towards the maelstrom.

"You're right," Noah said, catching hold of a rope ladder to keep from being thrown off his feet. "This may be the end of us both." He laughed, and for a moment Joe considered throwing himself overboard and striking out for the shore while he was still within swimming distance.

"But my friend," Noah went on, laying his hand on Joe's shoulder.

"You've come so far. So very far. And why? Because you know in your heart this is your journey as much as it's mine. You have to take it, or you'll regret it for the rest of your life."

"Which would at least be long," Joe yelled.

"Not without power," Noah replied. "Without power it's over in a couple of breaths, and before you know it you're on your deathbed thinking: Why didn't I trust my instinct? Why didn't I dare?"

"You talk like you know me," Joe replied, irtitated by Noah's presumption. "You don't."

"Isn't it a universal truth that men regret their lives?" Noah said.

"And die wishing they could live again?" Joe had no reply to this. "If you want to make for shore," Noah went on, "best do it quickly."

Joe glanced back at the beach, and was astonished to see that in this short time the vessel had cleared the breakers and was in the grip of a current that was carrying it away from land at no little speed, He looked along the darkened shore towards the city, its harbor lights twinkling, then back to the crack, and the small encampment around it. Then, determined he would regret nothing, he turned his back on the sight, and his face towards the raging seas ahead, Tesla and Phoebe had little in common, beyond their womanhood. Tesla had traveled; Phoebe had not. Phoebe had been married; Tesia had not. Tesla had never been in love, not obsessively; Phoebe had, and still was.

It made her curiously open, Tesla soon discovered; as though anything was plausible in a world where passion held sway. And sway it held; no doubt of that. Though they knew each other scarcely at all, Phoebe seemed to sense an uncensorious soul in Tesla, and soon began to freely talk about the scandal in which she'd played so large a role. More particularly, she spoke of Joe Flicker@f his eyes, his kisses, his ways in bed-all of this with a sweet boastfulness, as if he were a prize she had been awarded for suffering a life with Morton. The world was strange, she said several times, apropos of how they'd met, or how quickly they'd discovered the depth of their feelings. "I know," Tesla said, wondering as she listened how much this woman would accept if and when she asked for Tesla's story in return. That was put to the test when Tesla got off the phone from Grillo, and Phoebe, who'd been in the room throughout the call said, "What was that all about?"

"You really want to know?"

"I asked, didn't I?"

She began with the easy stuff. Grillo, and the Reef, and how she'd traveled the states in the last five years, discovering in the progress that things were damn weird out there.

"Like how?" Phoebe said.

"This is going to sound crazy."

"I don't care," said Phoebe. "I want to know."

"I think maybe we're coming to the end of being what we are. We're going to take an evolutionary jump. And that mak es this a dangerous and wonderful time." "Why dangerous?"

"Because there are things that don't want us to take the jump. Things that'd prefer us to stay just the way we are, wandering around blindly, afraid of our own shadows, afraid of being dead and afraid of being too much alive. they want to keep us that way. But then there's people everywhere saying: I'm not going to be blind. I'm not going to be afraid. I can see invisible roads. I can hear angel's voices. I know who I was before I was born and I know what I want to be when I'm dead."

"You've met people like this?"

"Oh yes."

"That's wonderful," said Phoebe. "I don't know if I lieve any of those things, but it's still wonderful." She got to her feet and went to the refrigerator, talking on as she surveyed the contents. "What about the things that want to stop us?" she said. "I don't think I believe in the Devil, so maybe you're right about that, but if not the Devil then who are these people?"

"That's another conversation," Tesia said.

"Want to talk while we eat?" Phoebe said. "I'm getting hungry. How about you?"

"Getting that way."

"There's nothing worth having in there," she said, closing the fridge.

"We'll have to go out. You want pizza? Chicken?"

"I don't care. Anywhere but that fucking diner."

"You mean Bosley's place?"

:'What an asshole."

'The hamburgers are good." "I had the fish." they walked rather than taking the car, and while they walked Phoebe told Tesla how she'd come to gain a lover and lose a husband. The more she told, the more Testa warmed to her. She was a curious mingling of small-town pretensions (she plainly thought herself better than most of her fellow Evervillians) and charming self-deprecation (especially on the subject of her weight); funny at times (she was wittily indiscreet about the medical problems of those who, upon seeing her on the sidewalk, played the Pharisee) and at other times (speaking about Joe, and how she'd almost given up believing she could be loved that way) sweetly touching.

"You've got no idea where he's gone, then?" Tesia said. "No." Phoebe surveyed the thronged street ahead of them. "He can't hide in a crowd, that's for sure. When he comes back he'll have to be really careful."

"You're sure he'll come back?"

"Sure I'm sure. He promised." She cast Tesla a sideways glance. "You think I sound stupid."

"No, just trusting."

"We've all got to trust somebody, right?"

"Do we?"

"If you could feel what I feel," Phoebe said, "you wouldn't ask that question."

"All I know is, you're alone in the end. Always."

"Who's talking about the end?" Phoebe said.

Tesla stepped out of the stream of people into the street, taking Phoebe with her. "Listen to me," she said, "something terrible's going to happen here. I don't know exactly what and I don't know exactly when, but trust me: This place is finished."

Phoebe said nothing at first. She simply looked up and down the busy street. Then, after a moment to consider, she said, "It can't happen fast enough as far as I'm concerned."

"You mean that?"

"Just 'cause I live here doesn't mean I like it," Phoebe replied. "I'm not saying I believe you, I'm just saying if it happens you won't hear any complaints from me."

She's quite a piece of work, Raul said when they found a table at the pizza parlor, and Phoebe had gone off to relieve herself.

"I wondered where you'd got to."

I was just enjoying the girl-talk, Raul said. She's one angry lady.

"She's no lady," Tesla said, "that's what I like about her. Pity about her boyfriend."

You think he's gone for good, right?

"Don't you?"

Probably. Why are you wasting time with her? I mean she's very entertaining, but we came here to find Fletcher.

"I can't go back to Toothaker's house alone, " Tesla replied. "I just can't. Soon as I smelled that smell-"

Maybe it was just a backed-up sewer.

"And maybe it was Lix," Tesla said. "And whoever raised them's already killed Fletcher."

But we have to get in to find out.

"Right."

And you think this woman's going to lend some moral support?

"If it's not her who's it going to be? I can't wait till Lucien comes crawling back." I knew we'd get to him"I'm not blaming you, I'm just saying: I need help, and she's the only help available." Suppose she comes to some serious harm? "I don't want to think about that." You have to. "What are you, Jiminy Cricket? I'll be honest with her. I'll tell her what we're up against@' So then you're not responsible, is that it? Tesla, she's just an ordinary woman. "So was I," Tesla reminded him. Whatever you were, Tesla, I don't think you were ever ordinary.

"Thank you." My pleasure. "She's coming back. I'm going to tell her, Raul. I have to." It'll end in lears"Doesn't it always?"

It was a hell of a conversation to have over a pepperoni pizza, but Phoebe's appetite wasn't visibly curbed by anything that Tesia had to say. She listened without comment as Tesla went through her experiences in the Loop, detail by terrible detail, stopping every now and then to say: I know this sounds ridiculous or You probably think this is crazy until Phoebe told her not to bother, because yes, it was crazy, but she didn't care. Tesla took her at her word, and continued the account without further interruption, until she got to the matter of the Lix. Here she stopped.

"What's the problem?" Phoebe wanted to know.

"I'll leave this bit to later."

"Why?"

"It's disgusting, is why. And we're eating."

"If you can bear to tell it, it won't bother me. I've worked in a doctor's office for eight years, remember? I've seen everything."

"You never saw anything like a Lix," Tesla said, and went on to describe them and their conception, dropping her volume even lower than it had been. Phoebe was unfazed.

"And you think it was one of these Lix things you saw in Erwin's house?"

"I think it's possible, yes."

"This guy Fletcher made them?" "I doubt it."

"Then what?"

"Somebody who meant Fletcher harm. Somebody who, came after him, and found him there and-2' She threw up her hands. "The fact is, I don't know. And the only way I'll find out-"

"Is by going in there."

"Right."

"Seems to me," Phoebe said, "if the Lix are real-I'm not saying they are, I'm saying if they are-and if they're made of what you say they're made of, they shouldn't be that hard to kill."

"Some they grow six, seven feet long," Tesla said.

"Huh. And you've actually seen these things?"

"Oh, I've seen them." She turned her gaze out through the window, in part so as not to look at the congealing pizza on her plate, in part so that Phoebe couldn't see the fear in her eyes. "they got into my apartment in L.A.-"

"What did they do: Come up through the toilet?"

Tesla didn't reply.

You're going to have to tell her, Raul murmured in her head.

"Well?" Phoebe said.

Tell her about Kissoon.

"She'll freak," Tesia thought.

She's doing pretty well so far.

Tesla glanced back at Phoebe, who was finishing off her pizza while she waited for a reply.

"Once I've started with Kissoon, where do I stop?" she said to Raul.

You should have thought of that before you mentioned the Lix. It's all part of the same story. Silence from Tesia. Isn't it? he prodded.

"I guess so."

So tell her. Tell her about Kissoon. Tell her about the Loop. Tell her about the ShoaL Tell her about Quiddity if she hasn't got up and left.

"Did you know your lips move when you're thinking?" Phoebe said.

"they do?" "Just a little."

"Well-I was debating something."

"What?"

"Whether I could tell you the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but@'

"And have you decided?" Tell her.

"Yes. I've decided," Tesia leaned forward, pushing her plate aside. "In answer to your question," she said, "no, the Lix didn't come up from the toilet. they came from a loop in time-"

This was the tale she'd never told. Not in its entirety. She'd given Grillo and D'Amour the bare outlines, of course, but she'd never been able to bring herself to fill in the details. they were too painful, too ugly. But she told it now, to this woman she barely knew, and once she'd begun it wasn't so difficult, not with the clatter of plates and the chatter of patrons all around them; a wall of normality to keep the past from catching hold of her heart.

"There was a man called Kissoon," she began, "and I think if we had to make a list of the worst people to have graced the planet he'd probably be somewhere near the top. He was a-what was he?-a shaman, he called himself, but that doesn't really get to it. He had power, a lot of power. He could play with time, he could get in and out of people's heads, he could make Lix-"

"So he was the one."

"It's an old trick, apparently. Sorcerers have been doing it for centuries. And when I say sorcerers I'm not talking about rabbits and hats, I'm talking about people who could change the world-who have changed the world, sometimes-in ways we'll never completely understand."

"Are they all men?" Phoebe wanted to know.

"Most of them."

"Hmm.11

"So Kissoon was one of a group of these people, they were called the Shoal, and they were dedicated to keeping the rest of us from ever knowing about@' She paused here a moment. "Go on," said Phoebe. "I'm listening."

"About a place called Quiddity."

"Quiddity?"

"That's right. It's a sea, where we go sometimes in dreams."

"And why aren't we supposed to know about it?" Phoebe asked. "If we go there in dreams, what's the big secret?" Tesla chewed on this a moment.

"You know, I don't know? I always assumed-what did I assume?-l guess I assumed that the Shoal were the wise ones, and if they lived and died keeping this secret it was because the secret needed to be kept. But now that you mention it, I don't really know why."

"But they're all dead now anyway."

"All dead. Kissoon murdered them." "Why?"

"So that he could eventually have control over the greatest power in the world. A power called the Art."

"And what's that?"

"I don't think anyone really knows."

"Not even this guy Kissoon?"

Tesla pondered this a moment. "No," she said eventually, "not even Kissoon."

"So he committed these murders to get something when he didn't even know what the something was?" she said, her incredulity perfectly plain.

"Oh, he did more than murder. He hid the bodies in the past-"

"Oh come on."

"I swear. He'd killed some of the most important people in the world. More important than the pope or the president. He had to hide the bodies where they'd never be found. He chose a place called Trinity."

"What's that?"

"The when's more important than the where," Tesla said. "Trinity's where the first A-bomb was detonated. Sixteenth of June, nineteen forty-five. in New Mexico."

"And you're telling me that's where he took the people

'd murdered."

"That's where he took 'em. Except-"

"What?"

"Once he was there, he made a mistake-a little mistakeand he got himself trapped."

"Trapped in the past?"

"Right. With the bomb ticking away. So-he made a loop of time, that went round and round on itself, always keeping that moment at bay." Phoebe smiled and shook her head. "What?" said Tesla.

"I don't whether you're crazy or what, but if you made all this up, you should be selling it. I mean, you could make a movie for TV-"

"It's not a movie. It's the truth. I know, because I was there three times. Three times, in and out of Kissoon's Loop."

"So you actually met this guy?" Phoebe said.

"Oh sure, I met him," Tesla replied.

"And-?"

"What was he like?" Phoebe nodded; Tesla shrugged. "Hard to find the words," she said.

"Try." "I've spent five years trying not to think of him. But he's there all the time. Every day something-something dirty, something cruel, maybe just the smell of my own shit-reminds me of him. He wasn't much to look at, you know? He was this runt of a guy, old and dried up. But he could turn you inside out with a look. See inside your head. See inside your guts. Work you, fuck you." She rubbed her palms together, to warm them, but they wouldn't be warmed.

"What happened to him?" "He couldn't hold the moment." Phoebe looked vacant. "What?" "The little loop of time that kept the bomb from being detonated," Tesla explained, "he couldn't hold it."

"So the bomb went off?" "The bomb went off and he went with it."

"You were there?"

"Not right there, or I would have gone up with him. But I was the last out, I'm sure of that." She settled back in her chair. "That's it. Or as much of it as I can tell you right now."

"It's quite a story."

"And you don't believe a word of it."

"Some bits I almost believe. Some bits just sound ridiculous to me. And some bits-some bits I don't want to believe. they frighten me too much."

"So you won't be coming with me to Erwin's house?"

"I didn't say that," Phoebe replied.

Tesla smiled, and dug into the pocket of her leather I jacket.

"What are you looking for?"

"Some cash," she said. "If you're willing to dare Lix with me, the least I can do is pay for the pizza."

As the streets started to empty, Erwin began to regret his contretemps with Dolan. Though his feet ached, and he felt weary to his imagined marrow, he knew without putting it to the test that phantoms didn't sleep. He would be awake through the hours of darkness, while the living citizens of Everville, safe behind locked doors and bolted windows, took a trip to dreamland. He wandered down the middle of Main Street like a lonely drunk, wishing he could find the woman he'd whispered to outside Kitty's Diner. She at least had heard him, if only remotely whereas nobody else with a heart beating in their chest., even glanced his way, however loud he shouted. There'd been something special about that woman, he decided. Perhaps she'd been psychic.

He did not go entirely ignored. At the corner of Apple Street he encountered Bill and Maisie Waits, out walking their two chocolate labradors. As they approached Erwin the dogs seemed to sense his presence. Did they smell him or see him? He couldn't be sure. But they responded with raised hackles and growls, the bitch standing her ground, the male dashing away down Apple Street, trailing his leash. Billwho was in his fifties and far from fit-went after him, yelling.

The animal's response distressed Erwin, He'd never owned a dog, but by and large he liked the species. was being a phantom so profoundly unnatural a state that the nearest whiff of him was enough to make the beasts crazy?

He went down on his haunches, and softly called to the bitch.

"It's okay... it's okay... " he said, extending his hand, "I'm not going to hurt anybody-" The animal barked on ferociously, while Maisie watched her husband pursue the other dog. Erwin crept a little closer,' still murmuring words of reassurance, and the bitch showed signs of hearing him. She cocked her head, and her barking became more sporadic.

"That's it," Erwin said, "that's it. See, that's not so bad, now is it?" His open hand was now maybe two feet from her nose. Her din had lost all its ferocity, and was now reduced to little more than an occasional bark. Erwin reached a little further, and touched her head.

She stopped barking entirely now, and lay down, rolling onto her back to have her stomach scratched.

Maisie Waits looked down at her. "Katy, what on earth are you doing?" she said. "Get up." She lugged on the leash, to raise the animal, but Katy was enjoying Erwin's attentions too much. She made a little growl as though vaguely remembering that her stroker had frightened her a minute or two before, and then gave up even on that.

"Katy," Maisie Waits said, exasperated now, then, to her husband, "Did you find him?"

"Does it look like I found him?" Bill gasped. "He's headed off down towards the creek. He'll find his way home."

"But the traffic-"

"There is no traffic," Bill said. "Well, hardly any. And he's got lost before, for God's sake." Bill had reached the corner of the street now, and he stared at the recumbent Katy. "Look at you, you soft old thing," he said fondly, and went down on his haunches beside the dog. "I don't know what spooked him that way."

"Me," Erwin said, stroking the bitch's belly along with Bill. The dog heard. She pricked her ears and looked at Erwin. Bill, of course, heard nothing. Erwin kept talking anyway, the words tumbling out. "Listen, will you, Waits? If a mutt can hear me you damn well can. Just listen. I'm Erwin Toothaker-"

"As long as you're sure," Maisie was saying.

"Erwin Toothaker." "I'm sure," Bill replied. "He'll probably be home before He patted Katy's solid belly, and got to his feet. "Come us. on, old girl," he said. Then, with a sly glance at his wife: "You too, Katy."

Maisie Waits nudged him in the ribs. "William Waits," she said in a tone of mock outrage.

Bill leaned a little closer to her. "Want to fool around some?" he said to her.

"It's late-"

"It's Saturday tomorrow," Bill said, slipping his arm around his wife's waist. "It's either that or I ravish you in your sleep."

Maisie giggled, and with one quick jerk on the leash got Katy to her feet. Bill kissed Maisie's cheek, and then whispered something into his wife's ear. Erwin wasn't close enough to hear everything, but he caught pillow and like always. Whatever he said, Maisie returned his kiss, and they headed off down the street, with Katy casting a wistful glance back at her phantom admirer.

"Were you ever married, Erwin?"

It was Dolan. He was sitting in the doorway of Lively's Lighting and Furniture Store, picking his nose.

"No, I wasn't."

"Mine went off to Seattle after I passed over. Took her seven weeks and two days to uproot and go. Sold the house, sold most of the furniture, let the lease go on the store. I was so mad. I howled around this damn town for a month, weeping and wailing. I even tried to go after her."

.'And?"

Dolan shook his head. "I don't advise it. The further I went from Everville the more... vague... I became." "Any idea why?"

"Just guessing, but I suppose me and this place must be connected, after all these years. Maybe I can't imagine myself in any other place.

Anyhow, I don't weep and wail any more. I know where I belong." He looked at Erwin. "Speaking of which, I came looking for you for a reason."

"What?" "I was talking to a few friends of mine. Telling them about you and what happened outside my old store, and they wanted to see you."

"This is more-"

"Go on. You can say it." "Ghosts?"

"We prefer revenants. But yeah, ghosts'll do it." "Why do they want to see me?" Dolan got up. "What the hell does it matter to you?" he hollered, suddenly exasperated, "got something better to be doing?"

"No," Erwin said after a moment.

"So are you coming or not? Makes no odds to me."

"I'm coming."

Buddenbaum woke up in a white room, with a splitting headache. There was a sallow young man standing at the bottom of the bed, watching him.

"There you are," the young man said.

Clearly the youth knew him. But Buddenbaum couldn't put a name to his face. His puzzlement was apparently plain, because the kid said, "Owen? It's me. It's Seth." "Seth." The name made a dozen images flicker in Buddenbaum's head, like single frames of film, each from a different scene, strung together on a loop. Round and round they went, ten, twenty times. He glimpsed bare skin, a raging face, sky, more faces, now looking down at him. "I fell."

"Yes.

Buddenbaum ran his palms over his chest, neck, and stomach. "I'm intact."

"You broke some ribs, and cracked some vertebrae and fractured the base of your skull."

"I did?" Buddenbaum's hands went to his head. It was heavily bandaged.

"How long have I been unconscious?"

"Coming up to eight hours." "Eight hours?" He sat up in bed. "Oh my Lord."

"You have to lie down."

"No time. I've got things to do. Important things." He put his hand to his brow. "There's people coming. I've got to be... got to be... Jesus, it's gone out of my head." He looked up at Seth, with desperation on his face. "This is bad," he said, "this is very bad." He grabbed hold of Seth, and drew him closer. "There was some liaison, yes?" Seth didn't know the word. "You and 1, we were coupling-"

"Oh. That. Yes. Yes, we were going' at it, and this gu Bosley, he's a real Christian-"

"Never mind the Christians." Buddenbaum snarled. "Do you trust me?"

"Of course I trust you," Seth said, putting his hand to Buddenbaum's face. "You told me what's going to happen."

"I did, did I? And what did I say?"

"You said there's avatars coming." Seth pronounced the word haltingly.

"They're more than angels, you said." Comprehension replaced the despair on Buddenbaum's face. "The avatars," he said. "Of course." He started to swing his legs off the bed.

"You can't get up," Seth said, "you're hurt."

"I've survived worse than this, believe me," Buddenbaum said. "Now where are my clothes?" He stood up, and made for the small dresser in the corner of the room. "Are we still in Everville?"

"No, we're in Silverton."

"How far's that?" "T'hirty-five miles."

"So how did you get here?" "I borrowed my mother's car. But Owen, you're not well-"

"fhere's more at risk here than a cracked skull," Buddenbaum replied, opening the dresser, and taking out his clothes. "A lot more."

"Like what?"

"It's too complicated-"

"I catch on quickly," Seth replied. "You know I do. You said I do."

"Help me dress." "Is that all I'm good for?" Seth protested. "I'm not just some idiot kid you picked up."

"Then stop acting like one!" Buddenbaum snapped.

Seth immediately withdrew. "Well I guess that's plain enough," he said.

"I didn't mean it that way."

"You want somebody to dress you, ask the nurse. You want a ride back home, hire a cab."

"Seth@'

It was too late. The boy was already out of the door, slamming it behind him. Owen didn't try to go after him. This was no time to waste energy arguing. The boy would come round, given time. And if he didn't, he didn't. In a few hours he would not need the aid-or the affection@f Seth or any other selfwilled youth. He would be free of every frailty, including love; free to live out of time, out of place, out of every particular. He would be unmade, the way divinities were unmade, because divinities were without beginning and without end: a rare and wonderful condition.

As he was halfway through dressing, the doctor-a whey-faced young man with wispy blond hair-appeared. "Mr. Buddenbaum, what are you doing?" he asked.

"I would have thought that perfectly obvious," Owen replied.

"You can't leave."

"On the contrary. I can't stay. I have work to do."

"I'm amazed you're even standing," the doctor said. "I insist you get back into bed." He crossed to Owen, who raised his arms. "Leave me be," he said. "If you want to make yourself useful, call me a cab."

"If you attempt to leave," the doctor said, "I will not be responsible for the consequences." "Fine by me," Owen replied. "Now will you please leave me to dress in peace?" unusually large number of cemeteries. St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery lay two miles outside the city limits on the ulino road, but the other three, the Pioneer Cemetery (the mallest and most historically significant), the Potter emetery (named for the family who had buried more people in the region than any other), and the plain old Everville Cemetery, were all within the bounds of the city. It was to the Potter Cemetery, which lay on Lambroll Drive, close to the Old Post Office building, that Dolan took Erwin.

He chatted in his lively fashion as they went, mostly about how much the city had changed in the last few years. None of it was for the better, in his opinion. So many of the things that had been part of Everville's history-the family businesses, the older buildings, even the streetlamps-were being uprooted or destroyed.

"I didn't think much about that kind of thin when I was 9 breathing," Dolan remarked. "You don't, do you? You get on with your life as best you can. Hope the taxman doesn't come after you; hope you can still get it up on Saturday night; hope your hair doesn't fall out too quickly.

You don't have time to think about the past, until you're part of it. And then-"

"Then?"

"Then you realize what's gone is gone forever, and that's a damn shame if it was something worth keeping." He pointed over at the Post Office building, which had been left to fall into dereliction since a larger and more centralized facility had opened in Salem. "I mean look at that," he said. "That could have been preserved, right? Turned into something for the community."

"What community?" said Erwin. "There isn't one. There's just a few thousand people who happen to live next door to one another, and hate the sight of each other eighty percent of the time. Believe me, I saw a lot of that in my business. People suing each other 'cause a fence was in the wrong place, or a tree had been cut down. Nice neighbors, you'd say, looking at them: regular folks with good hearts. But let me tell you, if the law allowed it, they'd murder each other at the drop of a hat."

This last remark was out of his mouth before he realized quite what he'd said. "I was just trying to protect the children," Dolan muttered.

"I wasn't talking about you," Erwin replied. "What you did--"

"was wrong. I know that. We made a terrible error, and I'll regret it forever. But we did it because we thought we had to."

"And how did your precious community treat you when they realized you'd screwed up? Like pariahs, right?" The other man said nothing. "So much for the community," Erwin said.

they did not speak again until they reached the gates of Potter's Cemetery, when Dolan said, "Do you know who Hubert Nordhoff is?"

"Didn't his family own the mill?"

"A lot more than the mill. He was a great man hereabouts, for fifty years."

"So what about him?"

"He holds court on the last Friday of every month."

"Here?" Erwin said, peering through the ironwork gate into the cemetery. There was a thin veil of clouds covering the moon, but it was light enough to see the graves laid out ahead. Here and there a carved angel or an um marked the resting place of a family with money to waste, but most of the tombs were simple stones.

"Yes, here," said Erwin, and led him inside.

There was an ancient, moss-covered oak at the far end of the cemetery, and there, under its titanic branches, was an assembly of six men and a woman. Some lounged on stones; one-a fellow who looked sickly even for a dead soul-sitting on the lowest of the branches. And standing close to the trunk of the tree, presently addressing the group, was a man in his seventies, his dress, his spectacles, and his somewhat formal manner suggesting he had lived and died in a earlier age. Erwin did not need Dolan whispering in his ear to know that this was the aforementioned Hubert Nordhoff. He was presently in full and rhetorical flight.

"Are we unloved? My friends, we are. Are we forgotten? By all but a few, I'm afraid so. And do we care? My friends, do we care?" He let his sharp blue gaze rest on every one of his congregation before he answered, "Oh my Lord, ves. to the bottom of our broken hearts, we care." He stopped here, looking past his audience towards Dolan and Erwin. He inclined his head.

"Mr. Dolan," he said. "Mr. Nordhoff." Dolan turned towards Erwin.

"This is the guy I was telling you about earlier. His name's-"

"Toothaker," Erwin said, determined not to enter this circle as Dolan's catch, but as a free-willed individual. "Erwin Toothaker."

"We're pleased to see you, Mr. Toothaker," the old man said, "I'm Hubert Nordhoff. And this... " he took Erwin round the group, introducing them all. Three of the names were familiar to Erwin. they were the members of families still prominent in Everville (one was a Gilholly; another the father of a former mayor). The others were new to him, though it was apparent by their postmortem finery that none had been disenfranchised in life. Like Hubert, these were men who'd had some significant place in the community. There was only one surprise: that the single female in this group was not a woman at all, but one Cornelius Floyd, who had apparently been delivered into the afterlife in rather dowdy drag, and seemed quite happy with his lot. His features were too broad and his jaw too square to be called feminine, but he effected a light, breathy tone when telling Erwin that though his name was indeed Comelius, everybody called him Connie.

With the introductions over, Hubert got down to business. "We heard what happened to you," he said. "You were murdered, we understand, in your own house."

"Yes, that's right."

"We're of course appalled." There were suitably sympathetic murmurs all around the circle. "But I regret to say not terribly surprised. This is increasingly the way of the world."

"It wasn't a normal murder," Erwin pointed out, "if any murder's normal." "Dolan mentioned something about vampires," Gilholly the Elder said.

"His word, not mine," Erwin pointed out. "I got the life sucked out of me, but there was none of that neck-biting nonsense."

"Did you know the killer?" asked a portly fellow called Dickerson, who was presently recumbent on the top of a tomb. "Not exactly." "Meaning?" "I met him down by Unger's Creek. His name was Fletcher. I think he fancies himself some kind of messiah."

"That's all we need," said the scrawny guy in the tree. "What do we do about this, Nordhoff7" Gilholly wanted to know.

"There's nothing we can do," Erwin said.

"Don't be defeatist," Nordhoff snapped. "We have responsibilities."

"It's true," said Connie. "If we don't act, who will?"

"Act to do what?" said Erwin.

"to save our heritage," Nordhoff replied. "We're the men who made this city. We poured our sweat into taining this wilderness and our geniuses into building a decent place to raise our families. Now it's all coming apart. We've suspected it for months now. Seen little signs of it everywhere. And now you come along, murdered by something unnatural, and the Lundy boy, raped in Dolan's store by something else, equally unnatural-"

"Don't forget the bees," Dickerson put in.

"What bees?" Erwin said.

"Do you know Frank Tibbit?" Dickerson said, "Lives off Moon Lane?"

"No, I can't say-"

"He keeps bees. Or rather he did. they all took off ten days ago."

"Is that significant?" Erwin said.

"Not if it were a solitary case," Nordhoff said. "But it isn't. We watch, you see, and we listen. It's our business to preserve what we made, even if we've been forgotten. So we hear everything that goes on, sooner or later. And there are dozens of examples-"

"Hundreds," said Connie.

"Many dozens, certainly," Nordhoff said, "many dozens of examples of strange goings-on, none of them of any -reater scale than Tibbit's bees-"

"Barring your murder," Dickerson put in.

"Is it possible I could finish a sentence without being interrupted?" Nordhoff said.

"Maybe if you weren't so long-winded about it," said Melvin Pollock, who looked to be at least Nordhoff s age, and had the long, drawn dour mouth of one who'd died an unrepentant curmudgeon. "What he's trying to say is this: We invested our lives in Everville. The signs tell us we're about to lose that investment forever."

"And when it's gone-" Dickerson said.

"We go with it," Pollock said. "Into oblivion."

"Just because we're dead," Nordhoff said, "it doesn't mean we have to take this lying down."

Dickerson chuckled. "Not bad, Hubert. We'll make a comedian of you yet."

"This isn't a laughing matter," Nordhoff said.

"Oh but it is," Dickerson said, heaving his bulk into a sitting position. "Here we are, the great and the good of Everville, a banker"-he nodded in Pollock's direction. "A real-estate broker." At Connie now. "A mill owner." Nordhoff, of course. "And the rest of us all movers and shakers. Here we are, holding on to our dignity as best we can, and thinking we've got a hope in hell of influencing what goes on out there"-he pointed through the gate, into the world of the living-"when it's perfectly obvious to anyone with eyes in his head that it's over."

"What's over'?" said Connie.

"Our time. Everville's time. Maybe He paused, frowned. "Maybe humanity's time," he murmured.

There was silence now, even from Nordhoff. Somewhere in the streets outside the cemetery, a dog barked, but even that most familiar of sounds carried no comfort.

At last, Erwin said, "Fletcher knows."

"Knows what?" said Nordhoff.

"What's going on. Maybe he's even the reason for it. Maybe if we could find some way to kill him-"

"It's a thought," said Connie.

"And even if it doesn't save the city," Dickerson said, clearly heartened by this prospect, "we'd have the sport of it."

"For God's sake, we can't even make people hear us," Dolan pointed out,

"how the hell do we kill somebody?"

"He's not somebody," Erwin said. "He's a thing, He's not human."

"You sound very certain of that," Nordhoff said. "Don't take my word for it," Erwin replied. "Come see for yourself."

Tesla had bought her flrst gun in Florida, four years ago, after narrowly escaping assault or worse at the hands of two drunken louts outside a bar in Fort Lauderdale, who'd decided they simply didn't like the look of her. Never again, she'd sworn, would she be without some means of selfdefense. She'd bought a modest little.45, and had even taken a couple of lessons so she'd be able to handle it properly.

It was not the last of the armaments she came by, however. Six months later, during her first trip to Louisiana, she'd found a gun lying in the middle of an empty highway, and despite Raul's warnings that it had surely been discarded for a reason, and she'd be a damn fool to pick it up, she'd done so. It was older and heavier than her purchase, the barrel and butt nicked and scratched, but she liked the heft of it; liked too the sense of mystery that surrounded it.

The third gun had been a gift from a woman called Maria Lourdes Nazareno, whom she'd met on a streetcomer in Mammoth, Arizona. Lourdes, as she'd preferred to be called, had been waiting for Tesla on that corner for several days, or so she'd claimed. She had the sight, she'd said, and had been told in a dream that a woman of power would be passing by. Tesia had protested that she was not the one, but Lourdes had been equally certain she was. She had been waiting with gifts, she said, and would not be content until Tesla had accepted them. One of the gifts had been a clavicle bone, which Lourdes told her belonged to a St. Maxine. Another had been a brass compass-"for the voyage" she'd said. The third had been the gun, which was certainly the prettiest of the three weapons, its handle inlaid with mother of-pearl. It had a secret name, Lourdes had told her, but she did not know what that name was. Tesla would discover it, however, when she needed to call it.

That occasion had not come along. She had traveled for a further two years after her encounter with Lourdes, and had never had need of any of the guns.

Until now.

"Which one do I get?" Phoebe said.

they had returned to the Cobb house from the pizza parlor for one purpose only: to arm themselves.

"Do you know how to use a gun?" Tesla asked her.

"I know how to point my finger," Phoebe said.

"Your finger isn't going to make a hole in somebody,"

Tesia said.

Phoebe picked up Lourdes' gun, and passed it from palm to palm. "It can't be that difficult, when you see the men who do it." She had a point.

"You want that one?" Tesia asked.

"Yeah," she said, smiling.

"We're only going to use them if we really have to."

"If something that looks like a snake and smells like shit comes sniffing around."

"You still don't believe me, do you?"

"Does it matter whether I do or I don't?" Phoebe said.

Tesia thought about this for a moment. "I guess not," she said. "I just want you to be ready for the worst."

"I've been ready for years," Phoebe said.

The Toothaker house was in darkness, but they'd come prepared for that eventuality. Phoebe had a large flashlight, Tesla a slightly smaller one.

"Feet anything?" Tesia asked Raul as she and Phoebe headed down the path.

Not so far.

The smell of excrement still lingered in the air, however, and it grew stronger the closer they got to the front door. The temperature had dropped considerably since they'd left the restaurant almost an hour before, but Tesia felt clammy-hot, as though she was developing a bad bout of flu. Weak at the knees, too.

"What do we do?" Phoebe said once they reached the step. "Just knock?"

"It beats trying to break the door down," Tesia said. She still harbored the hope that this was a wild-goose chase: that the whisper she and Raul had heard outside the diner had been a trick of the wind, and the smell was just a backed-up sewer, as Phoebe had said. She knocked on the door, loudly' they waited. There was no answer. She knocked again, and while she did so asked Raul if he sensed the presence of an occupant. His answer was not the one she wanted.

Yes, he said. I hear somebody.

The beast that had been twitching in Tesia's belly since they'd set out convulsed. She caught hold of Phoebe's arm. "I can't do this," she said.

"It's all right," Phoebe replied. She was reaching for the door handle.

"We've come this far." She turned the handle, and to Tesla's surprise the door opened. A wave of cold, sour air broke over the threshold.

Tesla retreated from the step, tugging on Phoebe's arm, but Phoebe made a little grunt between her teeth and jerked her arm free.

"I want to see," she said.

"We'll see tomorrow," Testa replied. "When it's light."

"Tomorrow might be too late," Phoebe said, without glancing back at Tesia. "I want to see now. Right now." And so saying she stepped into the house. As she did so Tesia heard her murmur, "Where are you?"

Where are you? said Raul.

"Yeah, I heard it too." Somebody's got into her head, Tes.

"Fuck!"

Phoebe had already taken half a dozen strides into the house, and the darkness had almost closed around her.

"Phoebe?" Tesia yelled. "Come out of there."

The other woman didn't falter however. She just kept walking, until Tesla was in danger of losing sight of her completely.

Get in there- Raul said.

"Shut up!"

Or you'll lose her completely.

He was right, of course, and she knew it. She pulled the found.45 out of her belt and stepped inside, following Phoebe down the darkened hallway. If she was quick she could maybe catch hold of her and haul her out into the street before The door slammed behind her. She spun round, the cold air pressing against her face like a stale, damp washcloth. It was a labor to draw breath, and she didn't waste air calling after Phoebe again. Plainly whatever had its hooks in her wasn't going to let go without a fight. Tesla?

"I'm here."

She turned right. There's a door.

She could vaguely make out the door frame, and yes, there was Phoebe stepping through it. Picking up her pace Tesla hurried down the hallway, but she was too late to catch hold of her quarry, who had slipped through the door into the room beyond. There was a little more light there, Tesla was pleased to see; candles perhaps, flickering.

Grateful for this small mercy at least, she followed Phoebe through the door. It was not candlelight illuminating the room, it was the remains of a fire, guttering in the grate. A number of blackened branches littered the hearth. The smell in the air was not woody, however, but meaty; almost appetizing after the sourness at the threshold. Somebody had cooked and eaten here, recently, though she could not yet see who. The room was large, and had been comprehensively trashed, the furniture almost all destroyed, the ornaments and bric-a-brac reduced to fragments underfoot. At the far end, fifteen feet or so from where she stood-and half that from Phoebe, who was standing in the middle of the room, her arms slack at her sidesthe darkness was denser than elsewhere, and busier. She tried to study the place, certain that somebody was standing there, but when she rested her gaze on the spot her eyes flickered violently back and forth, as though they couldn't (or wouldn't) make sense of what they were seeing.

"Fletcher?" she said. "Is that you?"

As she spoke Phoebe glanced round at her. "Leave us alone," she said.

"It's me he wants."

"Is that right?" Tesla said, approaching her gently. There were tremors and tics around Phoebe's mouth and eyes, as though she might well weep or shriek at any moment.

"That's right," she said.

"And is this person who wants you Fletcher?" Tesla said, trying-and once again failing-to fix her eyes on the shadows.

"It doesn't matter what his name is," Phoebe said.

"It matters to me," Tesia replied. "Maybe you can ask him. Would you do that for me?" Phoebe looked back towards the darkness. She seemed to have no difficulty focusing upon it.

"She wants to know who you are," she said.

"Is he Fletcher?" Tesla said.

"Are you-?" Phoebe didn't finish the question, but listened, head slightly cocked.

There was silence, but for the crackle and spit of the fire. Tesia glanced back down at the hearth. There were pools of melted wax or fat around the branches, and in the grate itself a stone or "If that's what you want," Phoebe said to the darkness.

Tesia looked back at her. She was reaching up to unbutton her blouse.

"What are you doing?" Tesla said.

"He wants to see me," Phoebe said simply.

Tesla crossed to her and pulled her hands from her blouse.

"No he doesn't."

"Yes he does," Phoebe said fiercely, her hands going back to her buttons. "He says... he says-"

"What's he saying?"

"He says... we shouldfuckfor the millennium."

Tesla had heard the phrase before. Spoken once, and dreamed a thousand times.

Now, at the sound of it, the floor seemed to pitch beneath her, as if to tip her into the darkness at the other end of the room.

It was five years since she'd first heard the words spoken; five years in which she had many times thanked God their speaker was dead. Her gratitude, it seemed, had been premature.

"Kissoon she murmured, and leaving her lips the syllables took on a life of their own. Kissss-sssoooon. Kiiisssssoonn. Shimmying around her.

She'd met him in countless nightmares-run from him, succumbed to him, been judged, murdered, raped, and eaten by him-but she'd always woken from those ordeals, even the most terrible, with the comfort that one day the memories of him could recede, and she'd be free.

Not so. Oh Lord in Heaven, not so.

Here he was, come again.

She reached down to her belt, pulled out her gun, and pointed it at the darkness.

It isn't Fletcher then-Raul murmured. He sounded close to tears.

"No."

You think it's Kissoon.

"I know it's Kissoon," she said, leveling the gun.

Suppose you're wrong.

"I'm not," she said, and fired, once, twice, three times. The din careened around the room, coming back an instant later, bruisingly loud. But there was no gratifying cry from the darkness; no spillage of blood, no death-rattle.

The only effect the shots seemed to have was upon Phoebe, who began to sob pitifully.

"What am I doing?" she gasped, and reeled away from Tesla's side, as if making for the door.

Testa glanced after her in time to see Phoebe coming back with her arms outstretched. She struck the gun from Tesia's fist with one hand and caught hold of her neck with the other. Tesla's breath was summarily stopped. She reached up to wrench Phoebe's hand away but before she could do so the woman's sobs-which had gone on unabated through the assault-stopped dead. "Go to him," she said, her voice monotonal. "Go to him and tell him you're sorry."

She started to push Tesla back towards the far end of the room, towards the darkness and whatever form of Kissoon it ntained. Tesla kicked and flailed but Phoebe's weight, eled by her possessor's will, was not easily resisted.

"Phoebe! Listen to me!" Tesla yelled. "He's going to kill us both!"

"No-"

"You can fight him, I know what it feels like, having him sitting on your head"-this was no lie. Kissoon had worked this same trick on Tesla in the Loop: pressed on the top of her head to subdue and control her-"but you can fight it, Phoebe, you can fight it."

The face in front of her showed no flicker of comprehension. The tears just continued to fall. Tesia reached down to her belt. The Florida gun was there. If Phoebe wouldn't listen to reason, maybe she'd respond to the business end of a.45.

As she grabbed the butt however, Phoebe let her go. Tesla drew a grateful breath, bending over as she did so, and as her gaze met the floor she saw a dark, serpentine form wiggle into view from behind her. She pulled her second gun from her belt, and was stepping out of the Lix's way to fire when she sensed that the darkness at her side seemed to be unfolding; she heard it shifting, and felt the air around her disturbed by its motion.

She looked down at the ground again. The Lix at her feet had been joined by several of its siblings; piffling little horrors, by comparison with some she'd seen, the biggest eighteen inches long or so, the smallest as fine as hair. But they kept coming, and coming, some of them no longer than a finger, as though one of their nests had been overturned at her feet. None of them seemed much interested in doing her hann. they squirmed off across the debris-strewn floor towards the last of the fire.

The only threat lay in the person of their maker, in whose direction Tesla now turned her gaze. This time, though her eyes remained incapable of fixing upon him, she caught a glimpse. He was sitting on a chair, it seemed, but the chair was hovering three or four feet off the ground. And though she could not look directly at him, he was not so restricted. She felt his gaze. It pricked her neck. It made her rattle.

"It'll pass he said, and with those words any last hope that she'd made a mistake, and that this was not Kissoon, vanished.

"What'll pass?" she said, fighting hard to look at him. Doubtless he had good reason to prevent her laying eyes on him, which was all the more reason to defy the edict. If she could just distract him for a few moments, perhaps he'd drop his guard long enough for her to get one good look at him. "What'll pass?" she asked him again.

"The shock."

"Why should I be shocked?"

"Because you thought I was dead and gone." "Why would I think that?"

"Don't try this."

"Try what?"

"This stupid game you're playing."

"What game?"

"I said stop it!" As he yelled, she looked at him, and for perhaps the length of two heartbeats his irritation made him careless, and she had plain sight of him.

It was long enough to see why he'd kept her from looking at him. He was in transition, his skin and sinew drooping around him, gangrenous and fetid. Enough of his flesh remained for her to recognize his face. The post-simian brow, the wide nose, the jutting jaw: All had been Raul's, before Kissoon had stolen them.

Jesus... she heard Raul say, look away. Forpity's sake, look away... As it was, she had little chance. She'd no sooner registered the sight than Kissoon became aware of her scrutiny, and his will, sharp as a blow, slapped her sight aside. Tears of pain sprang into her eyes.

"You're too curious for your own good," Kissoon said.

"You're getting very vain in your old age," she replied, wiping the tears off her cheeks.

"Old? Me? No. I'll be new forever. You, on the other hand, look like shit. Were your travels worth it?"

"What do you know about my travels?" "Just because I've been out of sight doesn't mean I've been out of touch," Kissoon replied. "I've been watching the world very closely. And I've reports of you from a lot of grubby little corners. What were you looking for? Fletcher?"

"No."

"He's gone, Tesia. So's the iaff. That part of things is er. It was a simpler age, so I suppose you felt at home there, but it's over and done with."

"And what follows?" Tesia said.

"I think you know." Tesia said nothing. "Are you too afraid to say it?"

"lad, you meant'

"There. You knew all along."

"Haven't you seen enough of them?" Tesla said. "We've seen more than most, you and 1. Yet we've seen nothing. Nothing at all." There was excitement in his voice. "they will change the world out of all recognition." "And you want that?"

"Don't you?" Kissoon said. She'd forgotten how strangely persuasive he could be; how well he comprehended the ambiguities in her heart. "This chaos is no good, Tesla. Everything severed. Everything broken. The world needs to be put back together again." Like all great liars, there was enough truth in what he said to make it sound perfectly plausible.

"Unfortunately, the species can't heal itself without help," he went on.

"But not to worry. Help's on its way."

"And when it comes?"

"I told you. It'll change things out of all recognition."

"But you-"

"What about me?"

"What will it do for you?"

"Oh-that."

"Yes, that."

"It'll make me king of the hill, of course." "Plus ga change."

"And I'll have the Art." Ah, the Art! Sooner or later it always came back to that. "I'll live in one immortal day-"

"Sounds lovely. And what about the rest of us?"

"The lad'Il make theirjudgments. You'll abide by them. Simple as that. I think they have quite an appetite for the feminine. Ten years ago, they probably would have kept you for breeding. Now, of course, you'd be better used for fertilizer." He laughed. "Don't worry, I'll make sure you don't go to waste." She felt something move against her ankle, and looked down. There was a Lix there, five or six times larger than any of those she'd seen here previously. It curled around her foot, raising its head as it did so. Its open mouth was lined with tiny scarlet teeth, row upon row of them, receding down its throat.

"Wait@' she said.

"No time," Kissoon said. "Maybe I'll see you in the past, tomorrow. Maybe I'll find you in the Loop and we'll talk about how you died today."

The Lix was climbing her leg, its hold on her already tightening.

She screamed and stumbled backwards, her legs caught in the creature's coils. There was a moment when she teetered, then she fell, fell hard, the debris biting into her back. For a moment the room went white, and if she'd not had Raul yelling in her head, telling her to Hold on, hold on, she'd certainly have lost consciousness.

When the whiteness receded, she was looking towards the hearth. The Lix that had ventured there before her dialogue with Kissoon had done with warming themselves, and had turned their heads in her direction. Now they came, in a squirming river.

She tried to sit up, but their monstrous sibling had wound itself around her, incapacitating her. Her only hope was Phoebe. She craned her head round, looking for the woman, yelling her name as she did so. It was a lost cause. The room was empty, but for Kissoon and her devourers.

She looked back towards the hearth, and as if this weren't nightmare enough, realized what the Lix had been doing there. Not warming themselves at all, but feeding. What she'd taken to be branches scattered around the fire were human bones, and the stone amidst the embers a skull. Erwin Toothaker hadn't left home after all, except as smoke.

She let out a sob of horror. Then the Lix were upon her.

"Is she alive?"

Erwin went down onto his haunches beside the woman sprawled on his doorstep. Her brow was bleeding, and there was a trail of puke running from her mouth, but she was still breathing.

"She's alive," he said. "Her name's Phoebe Cobb."

The front door stood open. The air from out of the house smelled like shit and meat. Though Erwin had little to lose in his present condition, he was as scared as he'd ever been in life. He glanced back at the trio that had accompanied him here-Nordhoff, Dolan, and Dickerson-and saw unease on their faces too.

"He can't do anything to us, right?" Erwin said. "Not now."

Nordhoff shrugged. "Who the hell knows?" he said.

"What if he can see us?" Dickerson replied.

"We're never going to find out if we stay here," Dolan said impatiently and, stepping over Phoebe Cobb, he entered.

Erwin suddenly felt proprietorial. This was still his house: If anyone was going to lead the way, it should be him.

"Wait," he said to Dolan, and hurried after him down the hallway.

The Lix were not interested in her flesh (perhaps it was too leathery after so many years in the sun). they sought out her mouth and her nostrils, they went to her ears and eyes, so as to gain access to the tender stuff inside her.

She thrashed and rolled, her mouth sealed against their probing and pushing, but her nose was stopped with them now, and in a few seconds she would be out of breath. As soon as she parted her lips they would enter into her, and that would be the end.

Tesla "Not now."

It's over, Tesla.

"No.

I want you to know "No, I said, no!"

She heard him keen in her head; the sound not quite human.

"Don't give up," she told him. "It's not... over... yet." He stifled his moans, but she felt his terror in her marrow, as though at the last he was not merely sharing her mind but her body too.

And this was the last, despite her protestations. She had to draw breath: now, or else never. Though the Lix were at her lips, waiting, she had no choice. She opened her mouth, teeth clenched, drawing air between the gaps. ut w re breath could go, so could the finest of the Lix. She felt them sliding between the cracks, under her tongue and down her throat.

Her system revolted. She started to gag, and the reflex bettered her will. Her teeth parted. It was all the Lix needed. they were in her mouth in a moment, filling it up. She bit down on them, tasting their shit and rot, and spitting out what she could. But for every one she expelled, there were two hungry to eat her out from the inside, and willing to risk her teeth to do so.

Gagging, spitting, and thrashing she fought with every ounce of power in her, but the battle was beyond winning. Her throat was choked, her nostrils blocked, her body creaking in the coils of the giant Lix. At the last, hanging on the slivers of consciousness, she thought she heard Raul say: Listen.

She listened. There were voices coming from somewhere in the room.

"Christ Almighty!" one of them said.

"Look there! In the fire!"

Then a cry of anguish, and at the sound she used her last top of energy to turn her head in its direction. Death was almost on her, and her eyes-which had witnessed so many strangenesses in their time, but had always been wedded to the real-were now in extremis, wise to subtle presences. Four of them-all men, all aghast-approaching from the door.

One went to the fire. Two lingered a couple of yards from her. The fourth and oldest, God bless him, went down on his knees beside her, and reached to touch her face. No doubt he intended to soothe her passage from life to death, but his phantom touch did more than that. At his touch she felt the Lix writhe upon her face like cutworms, then soften and liquefy and pour off down her cheeks and neck. Down her throat too, as though their dissolution was contagious. A look of astonishment crossed her liberator's face, but he plainly understood in a moment what power he possessed, because as soon as she drew a breath, he then turned his attention to the Lix that had her in its coils. She raised her head off the ground in time to see the creature rising off her body like a startled cobra, spitting a warning. The phantom was unmoved. He reached out and ran his hand over the Lix's head, almost as though he were stroking it. A shudder passed through its glossy length, and its head began to droop, its filthy anatomy collapsing on itself. The lower jaw softened and ran like molasses; the upper followed moments later, its collapse initiating the dissolution of the beast's entire length. She pulled herself free of its sticky grasp, and as she turned over her system revolted and she puked up the filth that had found its way down her throat. When she looked up, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, the phantoms were already indistinct, and growing more so as she retreated from their condition.

She had moments, she knew, to make sense of this.

"Name yourselves."

The old man's voice, when it came, was feather-light. "Hubert Nordhoff," he said, "and him'@he pointed to the man at the hearth-"he's Erwin Toothaker."

She was looking in Erwin's direction when she heard another voice: this from behind her.

"When did you learn to raise spirits?"

She'd forgotten Kissoon, in the rush of deliverance. But he hadn't forgotten her. When she looked round at him, he was too astonished by what he'd seen to keep her gaze at bay, and she had a second opportunity to study him in the midst of transformation. He was more naked than he'd been minutes before; much more. All resemblance to Raul had disappeared. In fact, there was barely anything left that was human. The vague shape of a head, formed from a roiling darkness; the last remnants of a ribcage, and a few fragments of leg and arm bones; that was all. The rest-the sinew, the nerves, the veins and the blood that had pulsed in them-had corrupted away.

I think... maybe he's afraid of you, Raul said, his tone astonished. She dared not believe it. Not Kissoon. He was too crazy to be afraid. Look at him, Raul told her. "What am I supposed to be seeing?" Look past the particulars. As she looked, Kissoon spoke again. "You played with me," he said, his tone almost admiring. "You endured the Lix, to prove they were nothing to you."

"You've got the general idea," she said, still trying to do as Raul had instructed, and see what he was so eager she saw.

"Where did you learn to raise spirits?" Kissoon wanted to know.

"Detroit," she said.

"Are you mocking me?"

"No. I learned to raise spirits in the Motor City. Something wrong with that?"

As she spoke, the last portions of Kissoon's usurped anatomy fell away, and with their passing she glimpsed what Raul had already seen. In the center of Kissoon's shadowself, there was another form, glimmering remotely. A spiral, receding from her like a tunnel, as its curves tightened. And at the far end, where her gaze was inexorably drawn, something glittering.

"You don't know what you've done," Kissoon murmured.

His voice shook her from her scrutiny, and she was glad of it. The spiral had claimed her gaze with no little authority. What Kissoon meant by the remark (was he warning her about raising spirits or staring into spirals?) she didn't know; nor was this any time to quiz him. As long as he believed she was a woman who could raise spirits, and might do him harm while he was vulnerable, she might yet escape this room alive.

"Take care-" Kissoon was saying.

"Why's that?" she said, glancing back towards the door. It was probably six, perhaps seven, strides away. If she was to preserve the illusion of authority, she would have to exit without falling flat on her face, which would be a challenge given her trembling limbs.

"If you make any assault upon me now"-he is vulnerable, she thought-"I will have every soul in this city slaughtered. Even for the tiniest harm you do me." So this was the way power treated with power. It was a lesson she might profit from if she had occasion to play bluff with him again.

She didn't reply, however, but pretended to chew the deal over.

"You know I can do it," Kissoon said.

This was true. She didn't doubt him capable of any atrocity. But suppose this was a bluff of his own? Suppose he was so susceptible in his present condition that she might reach into the dark spiral at his core right now, and squeeze the life from him? Don't even think it, Raul said.

Wisdom, no doubt. But oh, she was sorely tempted to try Let's get out while we can, Raul was saying. Tesla? Are you listening to me?

"Yes... " she replied reluctantly. There would never be another opportunity like this, she knew. But Raul's defensive instincts were right. Get out now, and live to fight another day.

There was one last piece of theatrics before she departed, however. She went down on her trembling haunches, and whistled lightly, as if to invisible dogs. She waited a moment, then smiled to welcome her spirits back, and rose again. "Consider this@' Kissoon said as she turned to go.

"What?" "That we're not after all so far apart. You want revelation. So do 1. You want to shake your species up. So do 1. You want power-you already have a little, but a little's never enough-and so do

1. We've taken different paths, but are we not coming to the same spot?"

I 11

'No.

"I think we are. Maybe it's too much for you to admit right now, but you'll see the sense in it. And when you do-".

"I won't." "When you do I want you to know there's a place for you in my heart"-Aid he turn this phrase deliberately, she wondered, tempting her gaze back towards the spiral at his core?-"and I think a place for me in yours."

Say nothing, Raul murmured.

"I want to tell him to fuck off."

I know you do, but leave him guessing. Biting back a retort, she headed for the door, her legs strong enough not to betray her.

"Let me say something snide," Tesla implored.

Don't even look at him, Raul replied.

She took his advice. Without word or glance she opened the door a little wider and slipped out into the cooler air of the hallway.

Phoebe was sitting on the step, her head in her hands. Tesla went to her, comforted her and persuaded her to her feet. Then they hobbled away up the path and down the street, under trees that were sighing in sweet breezes from the mountain.

Perhaps a mile out from the shore, The Fanacapan was caught by a second current, this one of no little ferocity, which threw the vessel around like a plaything before speeding it on its way. The scale of the waves rapidly increased, much to Joe's distress, Lifting the boat up twenty, thirty feet one moment, giving them a precarious perch from which to see the awesome vista ahead, then dropping it like a stone into a trough so deep and dark it seemed with every descent this would be their last, and the foaming waves would bury them. Not so. Each time they rose again, though every board in the vessel creaked, and the decks were awash from bow to stem.

It was impossible to speak under these conditions. All Joe could do was cling to the frame of the wheelhouse door, and pray. It was a long time since he'd begun a sentence with Our Father, but the words came back readily enough, and their familiarity was comforting. Perhaps, he thought, there was even a remote chance that the words were being heard. That notion-which would have seemed naive the day before-did not seem so idiotic now. He'd crossed a threshold into another state of being; a state that was just like another room in a house the size of the cosmos: literally, a step away. If there was one such door to be entered, why not many? And why should one not be a door that led into Heaven?

All his adult life, he'd asked why. Why God? Why meaning? Why love? Now he realized his error. The question was not why; it was why not?

For the first time since childhood, since hearing his grandmother tell Bible stories like reminiscences, he dared to believe; and for all the darkness of the troughs and terrible turmoils that lay ahead, for all the fact that he was soaked to the skin and sickened to his stomach, he was strangely happy with his lot.

If I had Phoebe beside me now, he thought, I'd be lacking nothing.

Tesia refused to answer any of Phoebe's questions until she'd stood under a hot shower for a quarter of an hour, and scrubbed every inch of her body from scalp to feet, sniffing water up her nose and snorting it out to clean the last of the shit from her nostrils and using half a tube of toothpaste and a full bottle of mouthwash to scour her mouth and throat.

That done, she stood in front of the mirror and surveyed her body from as many angles as anatomy allowed. She'd looked better, no doubt of that. There was scarcely six square inches of flesh unmarked by the yellow stain of an old bruise, or the livid purples and reds of a new one, but in its strange way the sight pleased her.

"You've lived some," she told her reflection. "I like that."

Let's be sure we live a little longer, Raul counseled. "Any bright ideas?"

We need help, that's for sure. And don't start with me about Lucien. He'd be no use right now. We need somebody who can help us defend ourselves. And I'm not talking about guns. "You're talking about magic." Right. "There's only D'Amour that I know of," Tesla said. "And Grillo thinks he's dead." Maybe Grillo didn't look hard enough. "Where the hell do you suggest we start?"

He worked with a psychic, remember?

"Vaguely." Her name was Norma Paine.

"How'd you remember that?" What else have I got to do with my time? She found Phoebe in the kitchen, standing beside the dishwasher in a litter of twitching roaches with a can of Raid in her hand. "Damn things," Phoebe said, brushing a couple that had expired on the countertop onto the floor. "they breed where it's warm. I open the machine sometimes and they're swarming everywhere."

"Looks like you pretty much finished them off," Tesla said.

"Nah. They'll be back. You feeling better?"

"Much. What about you?"

"I took some aspirin. My head feels like it's ready to burst. But I'm okay. I made some peppermint tea. You want some?"

"I'd prefer something stronger. Got a brandy?" Phoebe picked up her cup and led the way through to the living room. It was chaotic: magazines everywhere and brimming ashtrays. The whole room stank of stale cigarettes.

"Morton," Phoebe remarked, as if that explained everything. Then, while she went through the array of liquor bottles on the dresser, told Tesla,

"I don't really remember what happened in Erwin's house."

"Don't worry about it."

"I remember going down the hallway with you. Then the next thing I remember was waking up on the step. Did you find Fletcher?"

"No.

"I've only got bourbon. We had some brandy from last Christmas, but-"

"Bourbon's fine."

"But the house wasn't empty, was it?"

"No, it wasn't empty."

"Who was in there?"

"A man called Kissoon."

"was he a friend of Fletcher's?" Phoebe asked. She'd poured an ample measure of bourbon, and now passed the glass to Tesla. She took a stinging mouthful before answering.

"Kissoon doesn't have friends," she said.

"That's sad."

"Believe me, he doesn't deserve them." The bourbon took an almost instant toll on her brain functions. She could practically feel its influence through her cortex, slowing her systems down. It was a pleasant sensation.

"Is the clock on the TV right?" she asked Phoebe. It read three-oh-five.

"Near enough."

"We'd better get some sleep," she said, her words faintly slurred.

"This man Kissoon-" Phoebe said.

"We'll talk about it tomorrow."

"No. I want to know now," she said. "He's not going to come after us, is he?"

"What the hell put that idea in your head?"

"The state of you when you came out of there," Phoebe said. "He messed you up. I thought maybe-"

"He wasn't done?"

"Right."

"No. I think we can sleep easy. He's got bigger fish to fry than me. But tomorrow morning, I think you should get the hell out of here."

"Why?"

"Because he's a malicious sonofabitch, and if things don't go the way he wants them to he'll trash this city from one end to the other."

"He could do that?"

"Very possibly."

"I can't leave," Phoebe said.

"Because of Joe?" Phoebe nodded. "He's not coming back any time soon," Tesla said. "You've got to look after yourself for a while."

"But what if he does come back and I'm gone?"

"Then he'll go looking for you, and he'll find you."

"You believe that? Really?" Phoebe said, studying Tesla's face. "If we're meant to be together, then we will be?"

Tesia avoided her gaze for a few moments, but at last had no choice but to meet Phoebe's eyes. When she did, she couldn't find it in her heart to lie.

"No," she said. "I don't believe that. I wish I did, but I don't." There was little to say after that. Phoebe retired to her bed, and left Tesia to make herself comfortable on the sofa. It was ill-sprung and smelled of Morton's cigarettes, but these were minor details given how exhausted she was. She laid down her head, and was just wondering whether the bourbon in her head would keep her awake, when she stopped wondering, and slept.

Upstairs, in the double bed that seemed larger tonight than it had the night before, Phoebe wrapped herself up in her arms, and tried to put Tesla's words out of her head. But they wouldn't go. they stalked the hopes she'd worked so hard to keep alive the last forty-eight hours, sniffing their weakness, ready to pounce and devour them the moment Phoebe oo ed the other way.

"Oh God, Joe," she said, suddenly sobbing, "Joe, Joe, Joe, where are you?"

Just as Joe was beginning to think the swell would never die down and the continued violence of its motion would shake The Fanacapan apart at the timbers, the towering waves began to diminish, and after a time the current delivered them into a region of much calmer waters.

Noah ordered the volunteers to check on the condition of the vessel's boards (it had fared better than Joe had expected; it was taking in water in one place only, and that no more than a trickle), then the torches were lit at stem and bow, and everyone took time to rest and catch their breaths. The volunteers all sat together at the stem, heads bowed.

"Are they praying?" Joe asked Noah.

"Not exactly."

"I'd like to thank them for what they did back there," Joe said. "I wouldn't bother."

"No, I want to," Joe said, leaving Noah's side.

Noah caught hold of Joe's arm. "Please leave them be," he said.

Joe pulled himself free. "What's the big problem?" he said, and strode down the deck towards the half-dozen. None, of them looked up at his approach.

"I just wanted to thank you-" Joe began, but he stopped as a dozen little details of their condition became apparent. Several of them had been hurt in the stonngashed arms and flanks, bruised faces-but none of them were nursing their wounds. they bled freely onto the soaked deck, shuddering occasionally.

Unnerved now, Joe went down on his haunches beside them. This was the first opportunity he'd had to study their physiognomy closely. None of them looked entirely human. Each had some detail of skin or eye or skull that suggested they had come of mixed marriages: the blood of Homo sapiens mingled with that of creatures who either lived beside Quiddity or below it.

He looked from face to face. None of them showed the slightest sign of pain or even discomfort.

"You should get those cuts covered up," he said.

He got no response. they weren't deaf, he knew that. They'd heard Noah's instructions, even over the roar of surf. But they showed no sign of even knowing that Joe was beside them, much less understanding his words.

Then, a voice from behind him.

"I had no choice."

Joe looked back over his shoulder. Noah was standing a couple of yards down the deck from him.

"What did you do to them?"

"I simply put them in my service," Noah said.

"How?" "I worked what I think you call a conjuration upon them."

"Magic?"

"Don't look so disdainful. It plainly works. We needed their service, and I had no other way of getting it."

"Would you have done the same thing to me, if I hadn't agreed to bring you here?"

"I didn't have the strength back there. And even if I had, you'd have resisted me better than they did."

"They've hurt themselves."

"So I see."

"Can't you wake them up? Get them to tend to themselves?"

"What for?"

"Because otherwise they're going to be scarred for life."

"Their lives are over, Joe."

"What do you mean?"

"I told you: They're in my service. Permanently. We'll use them to get us home, and then," he shrugged "they'll have no further purpose."

"So-what?"

"They'll lie down and die."

"Oh my God."

"I told you: I had no choice. How else were we going to get off the shore?" "You're killing them."

"they don't feel anything. they don't even remember who they are."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Joe said. "Look at me, Noah. I don't like this slave shit. Wake then7 up!"

"It's too late."

"Try, damn you!" Joe yelled, his fingers itching to wipe the sham of pity off Noah's face.

The man knew it. He retreated down the boards a few yards. "We've done well together so far," he said to Joe. "Let's not fight now and spoil our fellowship."

"Fellowship?" Joe said. "I didn't notice any fellowship. You wanted something from me. I wanted something from you. Simple as that." ,'Very well," Noah said. "I tell you what," he said, "I'll do what I can to reverse the conjuration-"

"Good."

"I don't believe they'll thank us for it, but I suppose you think freedom's preferable to their present state, even if it brings agony with it. Am I right?"

"Of course."

"And if I liberate them, we'll assume the bargain between us over."

"What?" "You heard me."

"That wasn't what we agreed."

"But it's what I'm offering now," Noah calmly replied. "they can be free or you can have power. One or the other, but not both."

"You sonofabitch."

"Which is it to be, Joe?" Noah replied. "You seem very certain in your righteousness so I suppose it's an easy decision. You want to liberate the slaves, yes?" He watched and waited. "Yes, Joe?"

After several seconds of deliberation Joe shook his head. 'No.

"But they're bound to my will, Joe. They're sitting there bleeding, bound to my will. You can't want that, can you?" He waited a beat. "Or can you?"

Joe looked back at the creatures sitting on the deck, his mind a maze. There'd been a clear path ahead of him moments before, but Noah had confounded it. And why? For the pleasure of seeing him squirm.

"I came here because you promised me something," Joe said.

"So I did."

"And I'm not going to have you talk me out of it."

"You talked yourself out of it, Joe."

"I didn't agree to anything."

"Do I take it then that the slaves will remain in thrafl?"

"For now," Joe said. "Maybe I'll set them free myself, when I get what I'm due."

"A noble ambition," Noah replied. "Let's hope they survive that long." He wandered over to the starboard side. "Meanwhile," he said, "I have work for them to do." He glanced at Joe, as if expecting some objection. Getting none, he gave a little smile and went back to the stem of the vessel to make his instructions known.

Cursing under his breath, Joe looked over the side to see what the problem was, and found the water clogged in every direction with sinuous weed of some kind. Its fronds were the palest of yellows, and here and there it was knotted up into bundles, the smallest like foothalls, the largest twenty times that size. Plainly the weed was slowing the vessel's progress, but the slaves were already at the bow, clambering over the sides and lowering themselves into the water to solve the problem. Digging their way through the floating thicket they started to hack at the weed, two with machetes, the others with pieces of broken timber. Watching them labor, making no sound of complaint, Joe could not help the shameful thought that perhaps it was better they felt nothing. The task before them was substantial-the weed field stretched at least two hundred yards ahead of the vessel-and would surely exhaust their wounded limbs. But at least the waters beyond the field looked calm and clear. Once the boat reached them the slaves would be able to rest. He might even try bargaining with Noah afresh, and get him to release the weakest of them from bondage, so they could tend themselves.

Meanwhile, he retired to the wheelhouse, stripping off his damp shirt and hanging it on the door before sitting down to ponder his situation.

The air had grown balmier of late, and despite his recent agitation, he felt a kind of languor creep upon him. He let his head drop against the back of the cabin seat, and closed his eyes...

In her lonely bed in Everville, Phoebe had finally drifted to sleep on a pillow damp with her tears, and had begun to dream. Of Joe, of course. At least of his presence if not his flesh and blood. She drifted in a misty place, knowing he was not that far from her, but unable to see him. She tried to call to him, but her voice was smothered by the mist. She tried again, and again, and her efforts were rewarded after a time. The syllable seemed to divide the mist as it went from her, seeking him out in this pale nowhere.

She didn't let up. She kept calling, over and over.

"Joe... Joe... Joe..

Sprawled asleep in the cabin of The Fanacapan, Joe heard somebody calling his name. He almost stirred, thinking the summons was coming from somewhere in the waking world, but as soon as he began to float up out of his slumbers, the call became more remote, so he let the weight of his fatigue carry him back down into dreams.

The voice came again and this time he recognized it.

Phoebe! It was Phoebe. She was trying to find him. He started to reply to her, but before he could do so she called out to him again.

"Where are you, Joe?" she said. "I'm here," he said. "I can hear you. Can you hear me?"

"Oh my God," she gasped, plainly astonished that this was actually happening. "Is that really you?"

"It's really me."

"Where are you?"

"I'm on a ship."

On a ship? she thought. What the hell was he doing on a ship? Had he fled to Portland and hopped the first cargo vessel out?

"You've left me," she said.

"No, I haven't. I swear."

"That's easy to say-" she murmured, her voice thickening with tears,

"I'm on my own, Joe-"

"Don't cry."

"And I'm afraid-"

"Listen to me," he said softly. "Are you dreaming?"

She had to think about this for a moment. "Yes," she said. "I'm dreaming." "Then maybe we're not that far apart," he said. "Maybe we can find each other."

"Where?"

"In the sea. In the dream-sea."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Hold on," he said. "Just hold on to my voice. I'll lead you here."

He didn't dare wake. If he woke, the contact between them would surely be broken, and she'd despair (she was already close to that; he could hear it in her voice) and perhaps give up on ever finding him again. He had to walk a very narrow path; the path that lay between the state of dreaming, which was one of forgetfulness, and the waking world, where he would lose contact with her. He had to somehow find his way across the solid boards of this solid boat without rising from slumber to do so, and plunge into the waters of Quiddity, where perhaps the paradox of dreaming with his eyes open would be countenanced and he could call her to him.

"Joe?" "Just wait for me@'he murmured.

"I can't. I'm going crazy."

"No you're not. It's just that things are stranger than we ever thought."

"I'm afraid-"

"Don't be."

"I'm afraid I'm going to die and I'll never see you again."

"You'll see me. Just hold on, Phoebe. You'll see me."

He felt the cabin door brush against his arm; felt the steps up into the deck beneath his feet. At the top, he stumbled, and his eyes might have flickered open, but that by chance she called to him, and her voice anchored him; kept him in a sweet sleep.

He turned to his right. Walked two, three, four strides until he felt the side of the boat against his shins. Then he threw himself overboard.

The water was cold, the shock of it slapped him into wakefulness. He opened his eyes to see the weeds around him like a swaying thicket, its tangle LIFE with fish, most of them no larger than those he'd swallowed whole on the shore. Cursing his consciousness, he looked up towards the surface, and as he did so heard Phoebe again, calling him.

"Joe-?" she said, her voice no longer despairing, but light; almost excited.

He caught hold of the knotted weed around him, so as not to float to the surface. "I'm here," he thought. "Can you hear me?"

There was no answer at first, and he feared her call had been the remnants of their previous contact. But no. She spoke again, softly.

"I can hear you." It was as though her voice was in the very water around him. The syllables seemed to caress his face.

"Stay where you are," she said.

"I'm not going anywhere," he replied. It seemed he had no need of breath; or rather that the waters were supplying him with air through his skin. He felt no ache in his chest; no panic. Simply exhilaration. He turned himself around in the water, parting the strands of weed to look for her. The fish had no fear of him. they darted around his face, and brushed against his back and belly; they played between his legs. And then, out of the tangle to his right, a form he knew. Not Phoebe, but a Zehrapushu, a spirit pilot, its golden gaze fixed upon him. He gave up turning a moment, in order to let it see him properly. It scooted around him once, clockwise, then reversed its direction and did the same again, always coming to a perfect hovering halt in front of his face.

It knew him. He was certain of it. The way its huge eye tilted in its socket, scanning his face; the way it came close enough to brush his cheek with its tentacles, fearlessly; the way it flirted with his fingers, as though encouraging them to caress it: all were signs of familiarity. And if this was not the same 'shu he'd cradled on the shore (and how many billion to one was that chance?) then he had to assume that for all Noah's misrepresentations, he'd been telling th ' e truth on the subject of 'shu. they had not many minds, but one, and this individual knew him because it had seen him through its brother or sister's eyes.

Suddenly, it darted away. He watched it go, weaving through the thicket of weeds, and as it disappeared from sight, the tangle around him convulsed, and he heard Phoebe say his name again, not remotely this time, but almost like a whisper in his ear. He turned his head to the left, and There he was, just a few feet from her, floating in the forested water, looking at her. Even now, she wasn't sure how she'd got here. One moment she'd been lost in a mist, hearing Joe's voice but unable to reach him; the next she'd been naked and tumbling down the bank of Unger's Creek. The creek was running high and fast, and in the grip of its water she was carried away. She'd been vaguely aware that this was her mind's prosaic creation; its way of supplying pictures to accompany the journey her spirit was taking. But even as she'd grasped that slippery notion, the landscape had receded around her, the sky overhead becoming vast and strange, and Unger's Creek had disappeared, delivering her into far deeper waters.

Down she went, down, down into the dream-sea. And though she felt its currents caress her and saw its shoals part like shimmering veils to let her pass, and so knew she wasn't imagining this, she didn't fear that she'd drown. The laws that bound her body in the world she'd left had no authority here. She moved with exquisite case, passing over a landscape whose mysteries she could not begin to fathom, the most puzzling of which lay waiting for her at the end of the journey in the person of the man she'd last seen hobbling out of a door in Everville.

"It's really you," she said, opening her arms to him.

He swam to meet her, his voice in her head, the way it had been from the beginning of this strange journey. "Yes," he said, "it's really me," and held her tight.

"You said you were on a ship."

He directed her gaze up towards the dark shadow overhead. "That's it," he said.

"Can I go with you?" she asked him, knowing as she spoke what the answer would be. "You're dreaming this," he said. "When you wake up-"

"I'll be back in bed?"

"Yes.

She took fiercer hold of him. "Then I won't wake up," she said, "I'll stay with you until you wake up too."

"It's not as easy as that," he said. "I have a journey I have to take."

"Where to?"

"I don't know."

"Then why are you taking it? Why not just tell me where you're sleeping and I'll go find you?"

"I'm not sleeping, Phoebe."

"What do you mean?"

"This is me." He touched her face. "The real me. You're dreaming but I'm not. I'm here, mind and body."

She started to draw away from him, distressed. "That's not true," she said.

"It is. I walked through a door, and I was in another world."

"What door?" she demanded to know.

"On the mountain," he said.

Her face grew slack. She stared past him into the swaying fronds. "Then it's true," she said. "Quiddity's real."

"How do you know that name?"

"A woman I met... " Phoebe said, her tone and expression distracted.

"What woman?"

"Tesla... Tesia Bombeck. She's downstairs right now. i Lnought she was crazy@'

"Whoever she is," Joe said, "she isn't crazy. Things are weirder than either of us ever guessed, Phoebe."

She put her hands on his face, "I want to be with you," she said. "You are.

"No. Really be with you."

"I'm going to come back," Joe said, "sooner or later." He kissed her face. "Things are going to be all right."

"Tell me about the door, Joe," she said.

Instead, he kissed her again, and again, and now she opened her mouth to let his tongue between her lips, still speaking her thoughts at him.

"The door, Joe-"

"Don't go near it," he said, pressing his face against hers. "Just be here with me now. Be close with me. Oh God, Phoebe, I love you." He kissed her cheek and eyes, running his fingers up through her hair.

"I love you too," she said. "And I want us to be together more than anything. More than anything, Joe."

"We will be. We will be," he said. "I can't live without you, baby. I told you, didn't I?"

"Keep telling me. I need to know."

"I'll do better than tell you." He ran his hands down her shoulders, and round to touch her breasts. "Beautiful," he murmured. His left hand lingered there while his fight slid on down over her belly, between her legs. She raised her knees little. He ran his fingers back and forth over her sex.

She sighed, and leaned forward to kiss him. "I want to stay here," she said. "I want to sleep forever and just stay here with you."

He slid down her body now, kissing her along the way, her neck, her breasts, her belly, until he had his lips where his fingers had been, his tongue darting between. She opened her legs a little wider, and he took the signal of her abandon, pressing his palms against her knees to spread her still wider and burying his face in her groin.

The weeds seemed to sense the passion in their midst, and were excited by it. Their sinuous stems stroked her body with an eagerness all of their own, their silky pods nuzzling her. Four or five of them dallied around her face, like suitors awaiting an invitation to her mouth, while others ran up her spine and down between the cleft of her buttocks.

She started to let out little gasps of bliss, and reached out to left and fight of her to take handfuls of the weed. It responded to her attentions instantly, wrapping lengths of itself around her wrists and elbows to anchor her, and swaying against her body with fresh abandon, its strands, soft though they were, falling on her naked back like gentle whips, rousing her dreamed skin, her spirit skin, to new heights of sensation.

All the while Joe licked and probed below, and with each new wave of sensation that passed through her and over her, and spread out into the forest of weed around her, she felt the limits of her body dissolving, as though she and the waters and the weeds were no longer quite distinct. There was nothing unpleasant or distressing about this. Quite the reverse. The more she spread, the more of her there was to feel pleasure, her sensations flowing out into the stems and the pods and the swaying element in which she floated, then returning in waves to the soft vessel of her body, which in turn spread wider to accommodate the feelings, so that body and feelings kept on growing, each feeding off the other's advancement.

She looked up at the surface of the dream-sea, and at the dark shape of the boat above. There were figures working in the water up there, she saw, hacking at the weed to clear a path for the vessel. She wished she could coax them down to join the fun; to share what she was feeling and exuding; to watch them dissolve in the gfip of bliss, and have them open to her.

She felt a sliver of shame at these thoughts-moments ago this had been the most intimate of encounters between herself and Joe, now here she was, wanting to invite everyone in sight to join the party-but she couldn't help it. Her pleasure didn't belong to her. It couldn't be boxed, it couldn't be banked, it couldn't be traded or trafficked. It moved through her and disappeared, existing for the length of a shudder or a sigh, or a loving afternoon.

It was part of being alive, like tears and hunger; and given that her being was connected with everything else with the water and the weeds and the men on the boat abovewhat fight did she have to prevent pleasure radiating from her, giving itself freely?

With a great democracy of bliss founded in her head, she looked down at Joe through the swaying veil of stems that were caressing her face. Oh, but he was beautiful. The flesh of him, the bone of him; the bruise and blood of him He seemed to sense her scrutiny, and cast his gaze'up towards her. She smiled down upon him, feeling at that moment like some sea goddess in her temple while he, her worshipper, rose up from the darkness to eat and drink from her.

The stems had caught hold of him as they had her, she saw. they were wrapped around his limbs, and pressed against his back and buttocks with the same shamelessness as they pressed against her. She no longer sa I w any reason to ke@p them out. She relaxed her body and on the instant they floated into her, down her throat, up into her bowels, even pressing between her labia and Joe's lips to come into her by that route.

The surge of sensations almost undid her, literally. For a moment her body seemed to lose its coherence, shredding itself in pleasured layers, opening at every pore and letting the waters and all they contained rush into her, dissolving her dreamed bones.

Oh, but it was wonderful. Her parameters spread to contain all that swayed and surged around her. She was present in the waters, and in the stems and in the pods; she was rising towards the boat, she was plunging towards the darkness. She was embracing Joe as she never embraced him before, her consciousness surrounding him from all sides. She nuzzled at his ass in the form of pods, eager to enter him as she was entered; she bound his legs and arms, round and round, so tight she could feel the throb of his veins; she flowed across his back and against his chest, and against his groin too, where the water was murky with blood. He was plainly wounded, but not so badly that he couldn't be aroused. She could see and feel his rod, hard in his pants, wanting liberty.

If not for the memory of their previous couplings-the particulars of which would never leave her-she might have let her body dissolve completely. But the promise of having that intimacy again, even if it was just one more time, kept her from embracing dissolution.

Tomorrow maybe, or the day after, she'd let Phoebe go, and be unmade into everything. But before that happenedbefore her body slipped from her and went into the worldshe wanted to enjoy its particulars a little longer; wanted to take pleasure in knitting her substance with Joe's.

She pulled her arms free of the strands and reached down to take hold of his head. Again, he looked at her, but now his expression was so distracted she wasn't even certain he saw her. Then a smile appeared in his eyes and loosing himself from the eager weeds he climbed her body until they were face to face, mouth to mouth.

Did he know what had happened to her in the last few moments, she wondered? It seemed not, for when she heard his voice in her head again, murinufing his love to her, it was as if he was picking up where he'd left off.

"You can't stay," he said. "You'll wake up sooner or later, and when you do-"

"I'll come and find you."

He laid his forefinger against her lips, though she was not using them to speak. "Stay away from the door," he said, "it's dangerous. There's something terrible coming through it. Understand me? Please, Phoebe, tell me you understand me?"

"What's coming through it?" she said. "Tell me." "Iad," he said, "lad Uroboros."

His hand slipped from her mouth to the back of her head, and took firm hold of her. "I want you to promise me you'll stay away from the door," he said.

She pushed her tongue out between her lips. She wasn't going to promise anything. "Phoebe," he said, but before he could get beyond her name she mashed her face against his, distracting him with her fervor.

"I love you," she thought, "and I want you inside me."

He didn't need a second invitation. She felt him pulling his belt, then felt his dick pressing into her. It was easy; oh it was easy. But it pained him. He grimaced, and stopped moving; stopped kissing her even.

"Are you all fight?" she breathed.

"Your damn husband," he said, his voice small, and punctuated with little gasps. "I don't know... I don't know if I can... do this-"

"It's okay."

"Chfist, it hurts."

"I said it's okay."

"I want to finish what I started," he said, and began to push into her again. She looked down. The water between them was tinged red; he was plainly bleeding, and badly.

"We should stop," she said.

But he had a dogged look upon his face: teeth gritted, brow furrowed. "I want to finish," he gasped, "I want t@' A shadow fell upon them both. Phoebe looked up, and saw that somebody was leaning over the side of the boat, pointing down into the water. Did she hear a voice, remotely? She thought so.

And now two of the weed-cleaners left off their labors and were diving down through the tangle of weeds. She didn't doubt their purpose. they were coming to rescue Joe.

He hadn't seen them. He was too intent on fucking, pressing into her over and over, despite the pain on his face.

"Joe... " she murmured.

"It's okay," he thought to her. "It's kinda raw but@'

"Open your eyes, Joe." He opened them. "They're coming for you." He looked up now, and tried to wave his rescuers away, but either they thought the gestures were pleas, or else they didn't care.

The latter, Phoebe guessed, glimpsing their features. they had a distinctly alien cast to them, but it wasn't their strangeness that chilled her, it was their total absence of expression. She didn't want Joe taken from her by these blank-faced creatures. She took tighter hold of him.

"Don't go," she said.

"No way," he murmured, "I'm here, baby, I'm here."

"They're going to take you."

"No they're not. I won't let them." He pulled out of her, almost all the way, then slid back up into her, slowly, slowly, as though they had all the time in the world. "We're staying together till we're done," he said.

He'd no sooner spoken than his rescuers laid their hands on him. was she perhaps invisible to all but the man who had brought her here? It seemed so, for they made no attempt to detach her arms from around his body. they simply tugged on him; as though it was the weeds he'd fallen prey to.

Joe had no choice but to unhand Phoebe in order to beat them off. But the moment he did so, they claimed him. He was hauled up through her arms, a shocking burst of blood coming from his groin as he was detached from her. For a moment she lost sight of him in the stained water. All she could do was cry out to him, mind to mind.

"Joe! Joe!"

He answered her, but all the strength had gone from his voice.

"No... " he moaned, "I don't want... don't want to...

She started to flail blindly, hoping to catch hold of his leg or ankle, and keep him from being taken, but the weeds resisted her motion, and by the time the water cleared enough for her to see his body, it was beyond her grasp.

"Can you hear me, Joe?" she sobbed.

The sound she heard in her head was not words, not even moans, but a hiss, like gas escaping a slit pipe.

"Oh God, Joe," she said, and began to struggle against the weeds afresh, desperate to rise and be with him. But their desire for her, which had been so arousing a couple of minutes before, had become nightmarish.

they pressed at her orifices with the same insistence as ever, the pods swaying in her mouth and depositing a bitter fluid down her throat.

She started to shudder from head to foot, her whole body spasming. There were other sounds coming from somewhere: distant voices, children's laughter. was it from the ship?

No. Not the ship. The world. It was coming from the world. It was morning, Festival morning, and folks were already up to meet the day.

"Don't panic," she told herself, and gave up thrashing in the weeds for a few moments, to regain control of her body. The spasms lessened. The sounds withdrew a little way. Very slowly, she looked for Joe. He and his rescuers had broken surface, she saw. Others were leaning over the side of the vessel to haul him out of the water. It didn't take her long to realize why he hadn't replied to her. He was a dead-weight, his arms hanging loosely at his sides.

A shudder of horror shook her.

"Not dead," she murmured. "Oh God, please; please, not dead."

Blood was running from between his legs, a spreading pool staining the surface.

"Joe," she said. "I don't know if you can hear me... She listened, hoping for a reply, but none came. "I want you to know I'm going to come and find you. I know you told me not to, but I am. I'm going to find you and we're going to-"

She stopped, puzzled to see one of the creatures leaning over the side of the vessel, gesturing to Joe's rescuers. The mystery was solved a moment later. Without ceremony, they released the body, returning it to the elements they'd claimed it from. "No!" she yelled, seeing her worst fears confirmed. "No, please, no-"

There was no controlling the spasms this time. they convulsed her body from scalp to sole. And as they came, so did the day she had shunned, laughter, light, and all. She felt the lumpy mattress beneath her back; smelled the staleness of the room. Even now, she fought to keep wakefulness at bay. If she could only catch hold of Joe's body-stop him from tumbling away down into the darkness-perhaps she could work some miracle upon him. Put her last dreaming breath into him, and keep him from oblivion.

She started to reach up towards his sinking form-the day was upon her; she had seconds at best-and her fingers caught hold of his trouser leg. She pulled him closer. His mouth was open and his eyes closed. He looked deader than Morton had looked. "Don't, love," she said to him, meaning don't give up, don't die, don't leave me.

She let go of his trousers and took hold of his face, cupping it in her hands and drawing his mouth to hers. He came with horrible ease, but she refused to be discouraged. She laid her lips on his, and said his name, like a summons.

"Joe.

There was light in her eyes. She could not resist it any longer.

"Joe."

Her eyes opened. And as they did so, in the last moment before the sea and the weeds and her lover disappeared, she saw, or imagined she saw, his lids flicker, as though her summons had stirred some sliver of life in him.

Then she was awake, and there was no way of knowing.

She squinted up at the beam of sunlight slipping between the crack in the drapes. The sheets were as tangled around her as the weeds where she'd almost let her body go to joy; the pillow was damp with her sweat. She had dreamed all that she'd just experienced, but she knew without question this was no ordinary dream. While her body had tussled and sweated here, her spirit had been in another place, a place as real as the bed on which she lay.

It was probably wonderful that such a place existed. It would probably change the world, if the world were ever to find out. But she didn't care. All that concerned her right now was Joe. Without him, the world wasn't worth a damn.

She got up and pulled back the drapes. It was Festival Saturday, and the sky was a perfect, cloudless blue. An escaped helium balloon, shining silver, floated into view. She watched it as the breeze carried it up over the pinetops towards the Heights. She would be following soon, she thought. No matter that this was Everville's day of days. No matter that the valley would be ringing from end to end with the din of people making music and money and love. Somewhere on the mountain a door stood open, and she would be through it before noon, or be dead in the attempt.