Everville

PART FOUR. THE DEVIL AND D'AMOUR

"That," said the man with the salmon-pink tie, gesturing towards the canvas on the gallery wall, "is an abomination. What the hell's it called?" He peered at his price sheet.

"Bronx Apocalypse," the man at his side said.

"Bronx Apocalypse," the critic snorted. "Jesus!" He eyed the man who'd supplied the title. "You're not him, are you?" he said. "You're not this fellow Dusseldorf.?"

The other man-a well-made fellow in his late thirties, with three days' growth of beard and the eyes of an insomniac-shook his head. "No. I'm not."

"You are in one of the paintings though, aren't yout' said the Asian woman at Salmon Tie's side.

"Am]L

She took the sheet from her companion's hand and scanned the twenty or so titles upon it. "There," she said. "DAmour in Wyckoff Street. It's the big painting next door," she said to Salmon Tie, "with that bilious sky."

"Loathsome," the man remarked. "Dusseldorf should go back to pushing heroin or whatever the hell he was doing. He's got no business foisting this crap on people."

"Ted didn't push," D'Amour said. He spoke softly, but there was no doubting the warning in his voice.

"I was simply stating my opinion," the man said, somewhat defensively.

"Just don't spread lies," D'Amour said. "You'll put the Devil out of work."

It was July 8, a Friday, and the Devil was much on Harry's mind tonight. New York was a stew as ever, and, as ever, Harry wished he could be out of the pot and away, but there was nowhere to go; nowhere he wouldn't be followed and found. And here, at least, in the sweet-and-sour streets he knew so well, he had niches and hiding places; he had people who owed him, people who feared him. He even had a couple of friends.

One of whom was Ted Dusseldorf, reformed heroin addict, sometime performance artist, and now, remarkably, a painter of metropolitan apocalypses.

Tiiere he was, holding court in front of one of his rowdier pieces, all five foot nothing of him, dressed in a baggy plaid suit, and chewing on a contender for the largest damn cigar in Manhattan.

"Harry! Harry!" he said, laying eyes on D'Amour. "Thanks for coming."

He deserted his little audience and hooked his arm over Harry's shoulder. "I know you hate crowds, but I wanted you to see I got myself some admirers."

"Any sales?"

"Yeah, would you believe it? Nice Jewish lady, big collector, lives on the park, fancy address, buys that"-he jabbed his cigar in the direction of Slaughtered Lambs on the Brooklyn Bridge-"for her dining room. I guess maybe she's a vegetarian," he added, with a catarrhal laugh. "Sold a couple of drawings too. I mean, I ain't gonna get rich, you know, but I proved something, fight?"

"That you did."

"I want you to see the masterwork," Ted said, leading Harry through the throng, which was divided into three distinct camps. The inevitable fashion victims, here to be seen and noted in columns. A smattering of well-heeled collectors, slumming. And Ted's friends, several of whom had tattoos as colorful as anything on the walls.

"I had this guy come up to me," Ted said, "fancy shoes, designer haircut, he says: Fantasy's so pass,6. I said: What fantasy? He looks at me like I farted. He says: These works of yours. I said: This isn't fantasy. This is my life. He shakes his head, walks away." Ted leaned closer to Harry. "I think sometimes there's two different kinds of people in the world. The people who understand and the people who don't. And if they don't, it's no use trying to explain, 'cause it's just beyond them, and it always will be."

There was an eight-by-six foot canvas on the wall ahead, its colors more livid and its focus more strident than anything else in the exhibition.

"You know, it keeps me sane, doing' this shit. If I hadn't started lettin' all this out onto canvas, man, I'd have lost my fuckin' mind. I don't know how you keep your head straight, Harry. I really don't. I mean, knowing what you know, seeing what you see... "

The knot of people standing in front of the picture parted, seeing the artist and his model approach, giving them plain view of the masterpiece. Like most of the other works it too depicted a commonplace street. Only this was a street Harry could name. This was Wyckoff Street, in Brooklyn, where one sunny Easter Sunday almost a decade before Harry had first been brushed by infernal wings.

Ted had painted the street pretty much as it lookeddrab and uncomfortable-and had placed the figure of D'Amour in the middle of the thoroughfare, regarding the viewer with a curious gaze, as if to say: Do you see what I see? At first glance it seemed there was nothing untoward about the scene, but further study gave the lie to that. Rather than simply accruing a host of disturbing details on the canvas, Ted had worked a subtler effect. He'd laid down a field of mushy scarlets and ochers, like the guts of an over-ripe pomegranate, and then stroked the details of Wyckoff Street over this seething backcloth, the grays and sepias of brick and iron and asphalt never completely concealing the rotted hues beneath, so that for all the carefully rendered detail, Wyckoff Street looked like a veil drawn over a more insistent and powerful reality.

"Good likeness, huh?" Ted said.

Harry assumed it was, given that he'd been recognized from it, but hell, it was less than comforting. He had good bones-Nonna had told him so the first time she'd touched his face-but did they have to protrude quite so rpuch? The way Ted had laid the paint down on Harry's face he'd practically carved the features: long nose, strong jaw, wide brow and all. As for the marks of age, he hadn't stinted. The gray hairs and the frown-lines were much in evidence. It wasn't a bad face to be wearing into his forties, Harry supposed. Sure, there was none of the serenity that was rumored to be compensation for losing the bloom and ease of youth-his stare was troubled, the smile on his lips tentative to say the leasthut it was a picture of a sane man with all his limbs and faculties intact, and of the people who'd wrestled with the beasts of the abyss, that pretty much put Harry in a league of one.

"Do you see it?" Ted said.

"See what?"

Ted brought Harry a couple of steps closer to the canvas and pointed to the lower half. "There." Harry looked. First at the sidewalk, then at the gutter. "Under your foot," Ted prompted.

There, squirming under Harry's right heel, was.a thin black snake, with burning coals for eyes.

"The Devil Himself," Ted said.

"Got him where I want him, have I?" Harry said.

Ted grinned. "Hey, it's art. I'm allowed to lie a little."

At Ted's request, Harry hung around for an hour or so in the offices at the back of the gallery until the crowd had begun to thin. He put his feet up on the desk and flipped through a couple of old copies of the Times while he waited. It was good sometimes to remember how other people, ordinary people, lived their lives: entertained by political dog-fights and foreign misery; by scandal and frippery and murder. He envied them their ignorance, and the ease with which they idled their lives away. Right now, he would have given just about everything he had for a week of that bliss; a week going about trivial business for trivial reasons, forgetful of the presences that scurried beneath the surface of things.

they weren't figments, these presences. He'd met them face to face

(those that had faces) in alleyways and tenements and elevator shafts. Found them squatting in hospital garbage, sucking on soiled bandages; seen them in the mud at the river, eviscerating dogs. they were everywhere, and more arrogant by the day. It was only a matter of time, Harry knew, before they took the streets at noon. And when they did, they would be unopposed.

At the beginning of his career-when his investigations as a private detective had first led him into the company of the inhuman-he had entertained the delusion that he might with time help turn the tide against these forces by alerting the populous to their presence. He soon learned his effor., People didn't want to know. they had drawn the parameters of belief so as to exclude such horrors, and would not, could not, tolerate or comprehend anybody who sought to move the fences.

Hany's stumbling attempts to articulate all that he knew or suspected were met with derision, with rage, and, on one or two occasions, with violence. He quickly gave up trying to make converts, and resigned himself to a lonely war.

He wasn't entirely without allies. In the course of the next few years he'd met a handful of people who had all in some fashion or other come to know what he knew. Of these few, none was more important to him than Norma Paine, the black blind medium who, though she never left her tiny two-room apartment on Seventy-fifth, had tales to tell from every corner of Manhattan, passed on to her by the spirits that came looking for guidance on their journey to the Hereafter. Then there'd been Father Hess, who had for a little time labored with Harry to discover the precise nature of the presences that haunted the city. Their work together had come to an abrupt halt that Easter Sunday in Wyckoff Street, when one of those presences had sprung a trap on them both, and Hess had perished on the stairs while the triumphant demon sat on the bed where it had been found, speaking the same riddle to Harry over and over:

"I am you, and you are love, and that's what makes the world go round. I am you, and... "

In the years since that appalling day, Harry had never found an individual whose judgment he'd trusted as he'd trusted Hess's judgment. Though Hess had been a fervent Catholic, he'd not let his faith narrow his vision. He'd been a keen student of all manner of religions, with a passion for life and its mysteries that had burned more brightly than in any soul Harry had encountered, A conversation with Hess had been like a trip on whitewater rapids: by turns dizzying and dangerous. One moment he was theorizing about black holes, the next extolling the virtues of peppered vodka, the next speaking in reverential tones about the mystery of the Virgin Birth. And somehow always making the connections seem inevitable, however unlikely they were at first glance.

There wasn't a day went by Harry didn't miss him.

"Congratulate me," Ted said, appeafing at the office door with a broad grin on his face, "I sold another piece."

"Good for you."

Ted slipped inside and closed the door behind him. He had a bottle of white wine in his hand. Squatting down against the wall, he sipped from it.

"Jeez, what a night," he said, his voice quivering with emotion. "I almost canceled last week. I wasn't sure I wanted people looking at what's in my head." He leaned back against the wall, and closed his eyes, expelling a long, low breath. There was silence for perhaps half a minute. Then he said, "I got what you wanted, Harry."

"Yeah?"

"I still think you're out of your mind-"

"When's the ceremony?"

"Next Tuesday."

"Do you know where?" look. "Of course," Ted said, giving Harry a mock-offended "Where?"

"Down around Ninth and-2' "Ninth and what?" "Maybe I should just take you." "No, Ted. You're going to stay out of this."

"Why?" Ted said, passing the wine bottle to Harry. "Because you swore off all that shit, remember? Heroin and magic, out of your life. That's what you said." "they are. I swear. Are you going to drink or not?" Harry took a mouthful of wine. It was sour and warm. "So keep it that way. You've got a career to protect." Ted gave a little self-satisfied smile. "I like the sound of that," he said. "You were about to tell me the address." "Ninth, between Thirteenth and Fourteenth. It's a trian gular building. Looks deserted." He claimed the wine bottle back from Harry's hand, dropping his voice to a near whisper. "I've dug some secrets out of people in my time, but shit, getting this address, Harry, was like getting blood from a stone. What's going on down there?"

"You don't want to know."

"The less you tell me," Ted warned, "the more damn curious I'm going to get."

Harry shook his head despairingly. "You don't let go, do you?"

"I can't help it," Ted replied with a shrug, "I've got an addictive personality." Harry said nothing. "Well?" Ted pressed. "What's the big deal?"

"Ever heard of the Order of the Zyem Carasophia?"

Ted stared hard at Harry. "You're kidding?" Harry shook his head.

"This is a Concupigaea ceremony?"

"That's what I heard."

"Harry... do you know what you're messing with? They're supposed to be exiles."

"Are they?" Harry said.

"Don't bullshit me, Harry. You know fucking well."

"I hear rumors, sure."

"And what do you think?"

"About what?"

"About where the fuck they came from?" Ted said, his agitation increasing.

"Like I say, it's all rumors, but@'

"But?"

"I think they're probably from Quiddity."

Ted let out a low whistle. He needed no introduction to the notion of the dream-sea. He'd dabbled in occult practices for half a decade, until in the midst of a conjuration, high on heroin, he'd unwittingly unleashed something with psychopathic tendencies, which it had taken all of Hariy's wits to beat. Ted had sworn off magic and signed on for a detox program the same day. But the vocabulary of the occult still carried its old, familiar power, and there were few words in that vocabulary as potent as Quiddity.

"What are they doing here?" Ted said.

Harry shrugged. "Who knows? I'm not even sure they're the real thing."

300 Clivc Barkcr

"But if they are-?" "If they are, I got some questions I need answering." "About what?" "About that snake you put under my heel."

"The Anti-Christ." "they call it the lad." Again, Ted needed no education in seminologies. "The Uroboros and the Anti-Christ are the same thing?" he said. "It's all the Devil by another name," Harry replied. "How can you be so sure?"

"I'm a believer."

The next day Harry went downtown to take a look at the building Ted had pinpointed. It was utterly commonplace, a four-story tenement, now apparently deserted, its windows boarded blind, its doors either padlocked or bricked up altogether. Harry ambled around it twice, studying it as discreetly as possible, in case he was being watched from inside. Then he headed back up to Nonna's apartment, to get some advice.

Conversation wasn't always easy at Norma's place. She had been since adolescence a beacon for lost and wandering souls (particularly the recently dead) and when she tired of their importunings she turned on the thirty-odd televisions she owned, the din of which drove the wanderers away for a spell, but rendered ordinary exchanges near impossible.

today, however, the televisions were all mute. The screens flickered on, selling diets and cars and life everlasting. Norma didn't see them, of course. She'd been blind since birth. Not that she ever spoke like someone who was sightless.

"Look at you," she said as soon as Harry opened the door. "Are you catching something?"

"No, I'm fine. I just didn't get very much sleep."

"More tattoos?" Norma said.

"Just one," Harry admitted.

"Let me see."

"Norma."

"Let me see," Non-na said, reaching out from the wellcushioned comfort of her armchair.

Harry tossed his jacket on top of one of the televisions, and went over to Norma, who was sitting by the open window. The sounds of voices and traffic drifted up from below.

"Why don't you turn on the air-conditioning?" Harry said as he rolled up his shirt sleeve. "You're just breathing fumes."

"I like to hear the world going by," Norma said. "It's reassuring. Now, let's see the damage." She took hold of Harry's wrist and drew him a little closer, running her fingers up his arm to the place close to his elbow where he'd been most recently marked. "You still go to that old fake Voight?" Norma said, pulling away the bandage the tattooist had applied and running her fingers over the tender skin. Harry winced.

"It's nice work," Norma conceded. "though Christ knows what good you think it's going to do you."

This was an old debate between them. Harry had gathered the better part of a dozen tattoos over the last halfdecade, all but two of which had been the handiwork of Otis Voight, who specialized in what he called protective ink: talismans and sigils etched into his clients' skin to keep the bad at bay. "I owe my life to some of these," Harry said.

"You owe your life to your wits and your bloodymindedness, Harry; no more nor less. Show me a tattoo that can stop a bullet-"

"I can't."

"Right. And a demon's a dainn sight worse than a bullet."

"Bullets don't have psyches," Harry countered.

"Oh, and demons do?" said Norma. "No, Harry. They're pieces of shit, that's all they are. Little slivers of heartless filth." She bared her fine teeth in a grimace. "Oh God," she said, "but I'd love to be out there with you."

"It's not much fun," Harry said. "Believe me."

"Anything's better than this," she said, slamming her hands down on the arms of the chair. The glasses on the table beside her clicked against the rum and brandy bottles. "Sometimes I think this is a punishment, Harry. Sitting here day after day hearing people coming through with their tales of woe. Sobbin' about this, sobbin' about that. Regrettin' this, regrettin' that. I want to yell to 'em sometimes, It's too damn late! You should've thought about regrettin' while you could still do something about it. Ah! What's the use? I'm stuck talking to the snotty dead while you have all the fun. You don't know you're born, boy. You really don't."

Harry wandered over to the window and looked down seven floors to Seventy-fifth. "One of these nights," he said.

"Yeah?"

"I'm going to come fetch you and we're going to ride around for a few hours. Check out a few of the bad places, the really bad places, and see how quickly you change your mind." "You're on," Norma said. "In the meanwhile, to what do I owe the honor? You didn't come here to show me Voight's handiwork."

"No.

"And you didn't come bearing rum."

"I'm sorry."

She waved his apology away. "Don't be silly. I'm happy you're here. But why?"

"I need some advice. I'm going to a party Tuesday night."

"Go on, ask a blind woman what you should wear," Norma replied, much amused. "Who's throwing the party?" "The Order of the Zyem Carasophia." Norma's smile vanished. "That's not funny, Harry." "It's not meant to be," Harry replied. "They're having some kind of ceremony, and I have to be there."

"Why?"

"Because if anyone knows where the lad'Il attempt another breach it's them."

"There's a good reason why nobody ever talks about them, Harry."

"Because everybody buys the rumors. The fact is, nobody knows who the hell they are."

"Or what," Norma said.

"So you believe the stories?"

"About them being exiles?" Norma shrugged. "Seems to me, we're all exiles."

"Now don't get metaphysical on me." "It's not metaphysics, it's the truth. All life began in the dream-sea, Harry. And we've all been trying to get back there ever since."

"Why don't I find that very comforting?"

"Because you're afraid of what it means," Norma said, lightly. "You're afraid you'd have to throw away all the rules you live by, and then you'd go crazy." "And you wouldn't?"

"Oh no, I'd probably join you," Norma replied. "The issue isn't my sanity or yours, Harry. It's what's true or not. And I think you, me, and the Zyem have a lot in common."

"What have I got to fear?" Harry said.

"They're probably as afraid of you as you are of them, and that means they'd prefer to have your head on a plate where they can see it. Or eat it."

"Ha fucking ha."

"You asked," Norma replied.

Harry turned his attention from the street to the television screens. Three dozen silent dramas were in progress before him, the cameras' eyes picking up every little triumph and agony, whether real or rehearsed.

"Do you ever think we're being watched?" Harry said, after a few moments of staring at the screens.

"I am, all the damn time," Norma replied.

"I don't mean by ghosts," Harry replied.

"What then?"

"Oh, I don't know@od?"

"No.

"You sound very sure."

"I am. Sitting here right now. Ask me tomorrow I might have a different answer. I doubt it, but you never know."

"You talk about demons-"

"So?"

"That means the Devil's in the mix somewhere."

"And if the Devil's on the planet God must be too?" She shook her head.

"We've had this argument before, Harry. It's one of those useless subjects."

"I know."

"I don't know what your demons are@'

"They're not mine, for a start."

"You see, we're disagreeing already. I think they're very much yours."

"You mean what happened to Hess was me?" Harry said, his timbre darkening.

"You know that's not what I mean." "What then?"

"The demons find you, because you need them. So did Hess. You need them for the world to make sense to you. Some people believe in-I don't know, what do people believe in? Politicians, movie stars... " she sighed, exasperated. "Why are you fretting about it anyway?"

"Time of year. Time of life. I don't know." He paused. "That's not true. I do know." "Going' to tell me?"

"I've got this constant feeling of dread."

"About the Order?"

11

"No. "What then?"

"I still believe in Hell. It's me I don't believe in any longer."

"What the heck are you talkin' 'bout?" Norma said. She extended her arm in Harry's direction. "Come here," she said. "Harry? You hear me?" Harry extended his arm, and Norma unerringly seized hold of his wrist.

"I want you to listen to me," she said. "An' I don't want you shushing me or tellin' me you don't want to hear, 'cause sometimes things don't get said that should be said and I'm going' to say em now. Understand me?" She didn't wait for Harry to agree to her conditions, but went on, tugging on Harry's arm to bring him still closer to her chair. "You're a good man, Harry, an' that's rare. I mean really rare. I think something moves in you that doesn't move in most men, which is why you're always being tested this way. I don't know what it is testin' you@r me come to that-but I know we got no choice. Understand me? We got no choice but to just get on with things, day by day, and make our way as best we can."

"Okay, but-"

"I haven'tfinished.

"Sorry.

She drew Harry down beside her. "How long we known each other?" she asked him.

"Eleven years."

Her free hand went to his face. Touched his brow, his cheek, his mouth.

"Takes its toll, huh?" she said.

"Yep.11

"If we knew why, Harry, we wouldn't be what we are. Maybe we wouldn't even be human."

"You think that, really?" Harry said softly. "You think we have to just stumble on because that's what being human is?"

"Part of it."

"And if we get did understand?" Harry said.

"We wouldn't be human," Norma said.

Harry let his head sink on Norma's arm. "Maybe that's it then," he murmured.

"What is?"

"Maybe I think it's time to stop being human."

The new tattoo hurt more than any of the others. That night it itched furiously, and several times Harry woke from dreams of the design moving on his arm like a living thing, writhing to be out from under the dressing.

The next day he'd called Grillo and had what was to be his last conversation with the man, in the midst of which he'd spoken about the Anti-Christ. Grillo had made his contempt for the term perfectly plain

(You're too damn Catholic for your own good, he'd said) after which the exchange had come to a chilly end. The Reef and its keeper had been Harry's last hope of useful information about the Order, and he had come up empty-handed. He would enter the building between Thirteenth and Fourteenth without any real sense of what he was facing. But then what else was new?

He took up his position across the street from the spot before noon the following day and waited. There was little sign of activity until the middle of the afternoon, when the first of the celebrants arrived, slipping out of a car, crossing the sidewalk fast, and disappearing down a flight of steps that led below ground level. Harry had no time even to glimpse his or her face. There were another ten or so appearances before dusk, all the visitors heading on down the same flight. Harry had checked it out when he'd first examined the building. There was an iron door at the bottom of the steps, which had looked to be rusted shut when he'd examined it. Plainly it was not.

He had expected things to speed up somewhat as darkness fell, but that was not the case. Another half dozen partygoers arrived, and disappeared down into the ground, but it began to seem as though the gathering would be considerably more intimate than he'd anticipated. This was both good news and bad. Good, because there would be fewer eyes to spot an interloper like himself; bad, in that it implied the ceremony was not mere ritual reunion; rathe r a meeting of a few authorities, bringing with them who knew what powers? Not a comfortable doubt.

Then, just a little before nine, with the last of the daylight gone from the sky, a cab drew up outside the liquor store at the corner of Thirteenth and Ted got out. The cab drove off, and he stood at the intersection a minute, pulling on a cigarette. Then he crossed towards the building. Harry had no choice but to break cover, and start towards him, hop_ ing Ted would catch sight of him and retreat. But Ted had his eyes fixed on his destination, and before Harry could intercept him he'd disappeared around the back of the building. Slowing his pace somewhat so as not to attract undue attention (could he doubt somebody was watching from inside?) Harry gained the opposite side of the street and followed Ted around the block. But he had already gone. Harry doubled back, and turned the corner in time to see Ted starting down the flight of steps. Quietly cursing him, Harry picked up his pace. There was not sufficient traffic to cover the sound of his footfalls. Ted glanced back over his shoulder, flattenin himself into the shadows of the stairs as he did so, only to emerge a moment later with a grin of welcome on his face.

"It' s you-"

Harry hushed him with a gesture, and beckoned him out of the stairwell, but Ted shook his head, pointing down the stairs to the door. Grimacing, Harry hurried along the wall, and headed down into the shadows to Ted's side.

"You're not coming with me," he hissed.

"You think you're going to get through that door without help?" Ted replied, pulling a hammer and croWhar from inside his jacket.

"You're not getting involved with magic any more, remember?" Harry said.

"This is my farewell appearance," Ted replied. Then, his voice dropping to a near growl, "I'm not taking no for an answer, Harry. You wouldn't even be here if it weren't for me."

"I'm not going to be responsible for you," Harry warned him.

"I'm not asking@,

"I mean it. I got too much on my plate as it is."

"Deal," Ted said, with a little grin. "So are we going or what9" So saying, he slipped down the flight of stairs to the door. Harry followed on.

"Got your lighter?" Ted asked.

Harry fished for it and flicked it on. The flame showed them a door, encrusted with rust. Ted pulled out his croWhar and pushed it between the door and the jamb. Then he leaned all his weight against it. A hail of rust particles flew against their faces and the hinges of the door creaked, but it didn't open.

"That's no damn use," Harty whispered.

"You got a better idea?" Ted hissed.

Harry snapped the cigarette lighter shut. In the darkness he said,

"Yeah, I got a better idea. But you look the other way.

"What the hell for?"

"Just damn well do it," Harry said, and flicked the lighter back on to see that his instruction was being obeyed. It wasn't. Ted was staring at him with a quizzical look on his face.

"You've got some suit, haven't you?" he said, his tone more admiring than accusatory.

"Maybe.

"Jesus, Harry-"

"Listen, Ted, if you don't like it get the fuck out of here."

"What you got?" Ted said. There was a gleam in his eyes as he spoke, like an addict in the presence of his prefeffed poison. "You got a hand of glory?"

"Christ, no."

"What then?" "You're not seeing it, Ted," Harry insisted. "I told you: Look away."

Very reluctantly Ted averted his eyes and Harry brought from his pocket the prodigile suit, a minor magical device for which he'd paid Otis Voight four hundred bucks. It was a sliver of aluminum two inches long and one and a half inches wide, with a small sigil stamped at one end, and five narrow grooves radiating from the sign. Harry pressed it into the gap between the door and the frame, as close to the lock as he could get it.

Behind him he heard Ted say, "You got a prodigile. Where the fuck'd you get that?"

It was too late to tell him to look away, and no use lying. Ted knew magic's methods and implements too well to be deceived.

"It's none of your business," Harry told him. He didn't like dabbling in the craft (even the use of a prodigile, which was an extremely minor device on the thaumaturgic scale, brought with it the danger of contamination or addiction), but sometimes circumstances demanded that the enemy's weapons be used in the very labor of destroying them. Such was the sour reality of war.

He pressed his thumb against the exposed edge of the suit, and jerked it down. His flesh opened easily,, and he felt the prodigile throb as it drew blood. This, he knew, was the most likely moment for addiction; when the suit was activated. He told himself to look away, but could not. He watched, never less than amazed, as his blood hissed against the metal and was sucked along the grooves and out of sight. He heard Ted draw a sharp breath behind him. Then there was a burst of luminescence from the crack between door and jamb, and the unmistakable sound of the lock mechanism snapping open. Before the light had quite died, Harry put his shoulder to the door. It opened without resistance. He glanced round at Ted, who despite his earlier bullishness, now looked a little fearful.

"Are you ready?" Harry said, and without waiting for an answer slipped inside, leaving Ted to come or stay as he wished.

The interior smelled of stale incense and week-old sushithe odors, in short, of bad magic. It made Harry's heart hmnmer to smell those smells. How many times do I have to do this? he found himself wondering as he advanced into the murk. How many times into the maw, into the sickened body? How many times before I've done my penance?

Ted laid his hand on Hany's shoulder.

"There," he murmured, and directed Harry's gaze off to the right. Some ten yards from where they stood was a further flight of stairs, and from the bottom a wash of silvery light.

Ted's hand remained on Hariy's shoulder as they crossed to the top of the flight and began the descent. It grew colder with every step, and the smell became steadily stronger: Signs that what they sought lay somewhere at the bottom. And, if any further evidence was required, Harry's tattoos supplied it. The new one itched more furiously than ever, while the old ones (at his ankles, at his navel, in the small of his back, and down his sternum) tingled.

Three steps from the bottom, Harry turned to Ted, and in the lowest of voices murmured, "I meant it: about not being responsible for you."

Ted nodded and took his hand off Hany's shoulder. There was nothing more to be said; no further excuse to delay the descent. Harry reached into his jacket and lightly patted the gun in its holster. Then he was down the last three steps and, turning a corner was delivered into a sizable brick chamber, the far wall of which was fifty feet or more from where he stood, the vaulted ceiling twenty feet above his head. In the midst of this was what at first glance resembled a column of translucent drapes, about half as wide as the chamber itself, which was the source of the silvery light that had drawn them down the stairs. Second glance, however, showed him that it was not fabric, but some kind of ether. It resembled the melting folds of a Borealis, draped over or spun from a cat's cradle of filaments that crisscrossed the chamber like the web of a vast, ambitious spider.

And amid the folds, figures: the celebrants he'd seen coming here through the afternoon. they no longer wore their coats and hats, but wandered in the midst of the light nearly naked.

And such nakedness! Though many of them were partially concealed by the drooping light, Harry had no doubt that all he'd heard about the Zyem Carasophia was true. These were exiles; no doubt of it. Some were plainly descended from a marriage of bird and man, their eyes set in the sides of their narrow heads, their mouths beakish, their backs feathered. Others gave credence to a rumor Harry'd heard that a few of Quiddity's infants were simply dreamed into being, creatures of pure imagination. How else to explain the pair whose heads were yellowish blurs, woven with what looked like bright blue fireflies, or the creature who had shrugged off the skin of her head in tiny ribbons, which attended her raw face in a fluttering dance.

Of the unholy paraphernalia Harry had expected to see, there was no sign. No sputtering candles of human fat, no ritual blades, no gutted children. The celebrants simply moved in the cradle of light as if drifting in some collective dream. Had it not been for the smell of incense and sushi he would have doubted there was even error here.

"What's going on?" Ted murmured in Harry's ear.

Harry shook his head. He had no clue. But he knew how to find out. He shrugged off his jacket and proceeded to unbutton his shirt.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm going to join them," he replied.

"They'll be on to you in a minute."

"I don't think so," Harry said, heeling off his shoes as he pulled his shirt out of his trousers. He watched the wanderers as he did so, looking for any trace of belligerence among them.. But there was none.

It was as if they were moving in a semi-mesmerized state, all aggression dulled.

There was every possibility they wouldn't even notice if he went among them clothed, he suspected. But some instinct told him he would be safer in this throng if he were as vulnerable as they. "Stay here," he said to Ted.

"You're out of your mind, you know that?" Ted replied.

"I'll be fine," Harry said, glancing down at his nearnaked body and patted his belly. "Maybe I need to lose a pound or two...... Then he turned from Ted and walked towards the cradle.

He hadn't realized until now that either the light or the filaments was making a low, fluctuating whine, which grew louder as he approached. It throbbed in his skull, like the beginning of a headache, but uncomfortable as it was it could not persuade him to turn round. His skin was gooseflesh now, from head to foot, the tattoos tingling furiously.

He raised his left arm in front of him and pulled the dressing off his fresh ink. The tattoo looked livid in the silvery light, as though it had been pricked into his flesh moments before: a ruby parabola that suddenly seemed an utter redundancy. Norma had been right, he thought. What defense was a mere mark in a world so full of power?

He cast the dressing aside and continued to advance towards the cradle, expecting one of the celebrants to look his way at any moment. But nobody did. He stepped into the midst of the drapes without so much as a glance being cast in his direction and, weaving among the wanderers, made his way towards the center of the Borealis. He raised his arms as he did so, and his fingers brushed one of the filaments, sending a small charge of energy, too minor to be distressing, down to his shoulders and across his chest. The Borealis shook, and for a moment he feared that it intended to expel him, for the shimmering folds closed around him from all sides. Their touch was far from unpleasant, however, and whatever test they had put him to he apparently passed, for a moment later they retreated from him again, and returned to their gentle motion.

Harry glanced back, out into the chamber, in search of Ted, but everything beyond the light-the walls, the stairs, the roof-had become a blur. He didn't waste time looking, but turned his attention back to whatever mystery lay waiting in the center of the cradle.

The ache in his head grew more painful as he approached, but he bore it happily enough. There was something ahead of him, he saw: a sliver of darkness at the core of this cradle of light. It was taller than he was, this sliver, and it almost seemed to exercise some authority over him, because now that he had it in view he could not turn his eyes from it.

And with the sight, another sound, audible beneath the whine, like the repeated roll of muffled drums.

Mystified and mesmerized though he was, the identity of the sound was not lost on him. It was the sea he was hearing. His heartbeat grew urgent. Tremors ran through his body. The sea! My God, the sea! He breathed its name like a blessing.

"Quiddity-"

The word was heard. He felt a breath upon his back and somebody said,

"Hold back."

He glanced round, to find that one of the exiles, its face an eruption of color, was close to him. "We must wait before the neirica," the creature said. "The blessing will come."

The blessing? Harry thought. Who were they expecting down here, the Pope? "Will it be soon?" Harry said, certain that at any moment the creature would see him for the simple Homo sapiens he was.

"Very soon," came the reply, "he knows how impatient we are." The creature's gaze went past Harry to the darkness. "He knows how we ache to return. But we must do it with the blessing, yes?"

"Yes," said Harry. "Of course. Yes."

"Wait... " the creature said, turning its head towards the outside world, "is that not him?"

There was a sudden flurry of activity in the vicinity as the creatures-including Harry's informant-moved off towards the edge of the Borealis. Harry was torn between the desire to see whoever this was, coming to bless them, and the urge to see Quiddity's shore. He chose the latter. Turning on his heel he took two quick strides towards the sliver of darkness, his momentum speeded by the force it exercised. He felt the ground grow uncertain beneath him, felt a gust of rainy wind against his face, fresh and cold. The darkness opened before him, as though the gust had blown open a door, and for an instant his sight seemed to race ahead of him, his lumpen flesh stumbling after, out, out across a benighted shore.

Above him the sky was spired with clouds, and creatures trailing dusty light swooped and soared in lieu of stars. On the stones below, crabs made war or love, claws locked as they clattered towards the surf. And in that surf, shoals leapt the waves as though aspiring to sky or stones, or both.

All this he saw in a single hungry glance.

Then he heard a cry behind him, and with the greatest reluctance looked back over his shoulder towards the chamber. There was some consternation there, he saw. The cradle was shaking, the veils that circled the crack, like bandages wrapped around a wound, torn here and there. He tried to focus his eyes to better see the cause, but they were slow to shake off the wonders they'd just witnessed, and while they did so screams erupted to right and left of him. Their din was sufficient to slap him from his reverie. Suddenly fearful for his life he took off from his place beside the sliver, though its claim on him was powerful, and it took all his strength to do so.

As he ran he caught sight of the creature who had so recently addressed him, stumbling through the veils with a wound in its chest the size of a fist. As it fell to its knees its glistening eyes fixed on Harry for a moment, and it opened its bony mouth as to beg some explanation. Blood came instead, black as squid's ink, and the creature toppled forward, dead before it hit the ground. Harry searched for its killer among the shaking veils, but all he found were victims: creatures reeling and failing, their wounds atrocious. A lopped head rolled at his feet; a creature with half its body blown away took hold of him in its agony, and expired sobbing in his arms.

As to the cradle, which had so suddenly become a grave, it shook from one end to the other, the veils shaken down by the violence in their midst, and bringing the filaMents with them. they spat and spasmed on the ground, the light they'd lent the veils dying now, and steadily delivering the chamber into darkness.

Shielding his head against the failing cradle, Harry gained the outer limit of the circle, and now-finally-had sight of the creature that had visited these horrors on the scene.

It was a man. No more, no less. He had the beard of a patriarch, and the robes of a prophet. Blue robes once, but now so stained with blood he looked like a butcher. As to his weapon, it was a short staff, from which spurts of pallid fire broke, going from it almost languidly. Harry saw one go, snaking through the air to catch a victim who had so far avoided harm. It struck the creature (one of the blur-and-firefly couple) above her buttocks and ran up her back, gouging out the flesh to either side of her spine. Despite the appalling scale of her wounding, she was not felled, but swung round to face her wounder.

"Why?" she sobbed, extending her flabby arms in his direction. "Why?" He made no answer. Simply raised his staff a second time, and let another burst of energy go from it, striking his victim in the mouth.

Her pleas ceased on the instant, and the fire climbed up over her skull, turning it to ruin in a heartbeat. Even then she didn't fall. Her body shook as it stood, her bowels and bladder voiding. Wearing a look close to amusement, the prophet stepped over the bloody litter that lay between them and with one backhanded swipe struck the seared face with the staff, the blow so hard her head was separated from her neck.

Harry let out an involuntary cry, more of rage than of horror. The killer, who was already striding past the beheaded woman towards the crack, stopped in mid-step, and stared through the blood-flecked air. Harry froze. The prophet stared on, a look of puzzlement on his face.

He doesn't see me, Harry thought.

That was perhaps overly optimistic. The man continued to look, as though he glimpsed some trace of a presence in the deepening darkness, but could not quite decide whether his eyes were deceiving him. He wasn't about to take any chances. Even as he stared on in puzzlement he raised his staff.

Harry didn't wait for the fire to come. He made a dash for the stairs, hoping to God that Ted had escaped ahead of him. The killing fire sighed past him, close enough for Harry to feel its sickly heat, then burst against the opposite wall, its energies tracing the cracks as it dispersed. Harry looked back towards the prophet, who had already forgotten about the phantom and had turned towards the dark crack that let on to Quiddity.

Harry's gaze went to the sliver. In the diminishing light of the chamber the shore and sea were more visible than they had been, and for a moment it was all he could do not to turn back; to race the prophet to the threshold and be out under that steepled sky. Then, from the murk off to his left, a pained and weary voice.

"I'm sorry, Harry... please... I'm sorry-"

With a sickening lurch in his stomach Harry turned and sought out the source of the voice. Ted lay seven or eight yards from the bottom of the stairs, his arms open wide, his chest the same. Such a wound, wet and deep, it was a wonder he had life enough to breathe, much less to speak. Harry went down at his side.

"Grab my hand, will you?" Ted said.

I'll ve got it," Harry said.

"I can't feel anything."

"Maybe that's for the best," Harry said. "I'm going to have to pick you up."

"He came out of nowhere

"Don't worry about it." "I was keepin' out of the way, like you said, but then he just came out of nowhere."

"Hush, will you?" Harry slid his arms under Ted's body. 'Okay, now, are you ready for this?"

Ted only moaned. Harry drew a deep breath, stood up, and without pausing began to carry the wounded man towards the stairs. It was harder to see the flight by the moment, as the last of the light in the filaments died away. But he stumbled on towards it, while little spasms passed through Ted's body.

"Hold on," Harry said. "Hold on." @

they had reached the bottom of the flight now, and Harry began to climb. He glanced back towards the center of the chamber just once, and saw that the prophet was standing at the threshold between Cosm and Metacosm. No doubt he would step through it presently. No doubt that was what he had come here to do. Why had it been necessary to slaughter so many souls in the process was a mystery Harry did not expect to solve any time soon.

"It's late, Harry," Norma said. She was sitting in the same chair beside the window, with the televisions burbling around her.

Hour-before-dawn shows.

"Can I get a drink?" Harry said. "Help yourself."

His passage lit only by the flickering screens, Harry crossed to the table at Norma's side and poured himself a brandy.

"You've got blood on you," Norma said. Her nose was as keen as her eyes were blind.

"It's not mine. It's Ted Dusseldorf's."

"What happened?"

"He died about an hour ago."

Norma was silent for a few seconds. Then she said, "The Order?"

"Not exactly," Harry sat on the hard, plain chair set opposite Norma's cushioned throne, and told her what he'd witnessed.

"So the tattoos were a good investment after all," she said when he'd finished the account.

"Either that, or I was lucky."

"I don't believe in luck," Norma said. "I believe in destiny." She made the word sound almost sexy, the way she shaped it.

"So it was Ted's destiny to end up dead tonight?" Harry said. "I don't buy that."

"So don't," Norma said, without a trace of irritation. "It's a free country."

Harry sipped on the brandy. "Maybe it's time I got some serious help," he said.

"Are you talking therapy? 'Cause if you are, I'm telling you right now I've had Freud through here-least he said he was Freud-and that man was sofucked up-"

"I'm not talking about Freud. I'm talking about the Church, or maybe the FBI. I don't know. Somebody's got to be told what's going on."

"If they're inclined to believe you, then they've already been recruited by the enemy," Norma said. "You can be certain of that."

Harry sighed. He knew what she said was true. There were people out there wearing uniforms and cassocks and badges of office whose daily agenda was the suppressing of information about the miraculous. If he chose the wrong ear in which to whisper what he knew he was dead.

"So we choose carefully," Harry said.

"Or we let it be."

"The door's not supposed to be open, Norma."

"Are you sure?"

"That's a damn stupid question," Harry replied. "Of courve I'm sure."

"Well that's comforting," Norma said. "Do you remember when you first decided this?"

"I didn't decide it. I was told."

"By whom?"

"I don't know. Hess maybe. You."

"Me? Don't listen to me!"

"Then who the hell should I listen to?"

"You could start with yourself," Norma replied. "Remember what you said to me a few days ago?" "No.,'

"You were talking about how maybe it was time to stop being human?"

"Oh that-"

"Yes, that."

"That was just talk."

"It's all just talk till we make it true, Harry."

"I'm not following this."

"Maybe the door's supposed to be open," Norma said. "Maybe we have to start looking at what's in our dreams, only with our eyes open."

"We're back to Freud."

"No we're not," she said softly. "Not remotely."

"Suppose you're wrong?" Harry said. "Suppose leaving the door open is some kind of catastrophe, and if I don't do something about it-"

"Then the world comes to an end?"

"Right."

"It won't. It can't. It can change, but it can't end."

"I have to take your word for that, I suppose?"

"No. You could ask your cells. They'd tell you."

"We don't talk much these days, me and my cells," Harry said.

"Maybe you're not listening carefully enough," Norma replied. "The point is: So what if the world changes? Is it so dandy the way it is?"

"It could be a damn sight worse."

"Says who?"

"Me! I say so!"

Norma raised her arm, reaching out for Harry. "Let's go up onto the roof," she said. "Now?"

"Now. I need some air."

Up they went, Norma wrapped in her shawl, onto the roof nine floors above Seventy-fifth. Dawn was still a while away, but the city was already gearing up for another day. Norma looped her arm through Harry's, and they stood together in silence for perhaps five minutes, while the traffic murmured below, and sirens wailed, and the wind gusted off the river, grimy and cold. It was Norma who broke the silence.

"We're so powerful," Norma said, "and so frail."

"Us?"

"Everybody. Powerful.

"I don't think that's the way most people feel," Harty said.

"That's because they can't feel the connections. they think they're alone. In their heads. In the world. I hear them all the time. Spirits come through, carryin' on about how alone they feel, how terribly alone. And I say to them, let go of what you are-"

"And they don't want to do that?"

:'Of course not."

'I don't like the sound of it either," Harry said. "I'm all I've got. I don't want to give it up." "I said let go of it, not give it up," Norma said. "They're not the same thing."

"But when you're dead-"

'.What's dead?" Norma shrugged. "Things change but they don't end. I told you."

"And I don't believe you. I want to, but I don't."

"Men I can't convince you," Norma said. "You'll have to find out for yourself, one way or another." She drew a little closer to Harry. "How long have we known each other?" she said.

"You asked me that."

"And what did you say?"

"Eleven years."

"That long, huh?" She lapsed into silence again, for a minute or so. Then she said, "Are you happy, Harry?"

"Christ, no. Are you?"

"You know what? I am," Norma said, her voice tinged with surprise. "I like your company, Harry. Another time, another place, we would have made quite a pair, you and me. Maybe we did." She laughed, softly.

"Maybe that's why it feels like I've known you longer than eleven years." She shuddered. "I'm getting a little chilly," she said. "Will you take me back downstairs?"

"Of course."

"You sound so tired, Harry. You should sleep for a few hours. I've got a mattress in the spare room."

"It's okay, thanks. I'll go home. I just needed somebody to talk to."

"I wasn't much use, was I? You want plain answers and I don't have any."

"There was something I didn't tell you."

"What's that?"

"I almost stepped through." "Through the door?"

"Yeah.

"And why didn't you?"

"I couldn't leave Ted, for one thing. And-I don't know-I guess I was afraid there'd be no way back."

"Oh, maybe the best journeys are the ones with no return ticket, Haffy," Norma said, with yearning in her voice. "Tell me what it was like."

"The shore? It was beautiful." He conjured it in his mind's eye now and could not help but sigh.

"Go back, then," Norma said.

Harry didn't reply for a moment, but instead scanned the glittering panorama before him. It too was beautiful, after its fashion, but only from this angle, and only at night.

"Maybe I should," he said. "If you're thinking about me, don't," Norma said. "I'll miss you, but I'll be fine. Who knows, maybe I'll come after you one of these days."

He went back to his apartment to clean up (his shirt was glued to his chest with Ted's blood) and gather a few items for the journey. It was an absurd procedure, of course, given that he had no clue as to what lay on the other side, beyond sea, sky, and stones.

He pocketed his wallet, though he doubted they traded in dollars. He put on his watch, though surely time was redundant there. He slipped on his crucifix, despite the fact that he'd heard the tale of Christ had been fashioned to distract attention from the very mystery he was about to enter. Then, with the new day barely dawning, he made his way back to the building between Thirteenth and Fourteenth.

The door he'd opened using the prodigile, less than a dozen hours before, was open. With the steady beam of a flashlight to precede him he made his way to the top of the stairs. There he paused, listening for any sound from below. He'd escaped the prophet's murderous ways once; twice was tempting fate. There was no noise, however; not a moan. Extinguishing the flashlight, he made his way down the stairs by what little illumination came from the door above. It had given out by the time he reached the bottom of the flight, but there was a second source below, this far stronger. The blood of one of the murdered celebrants, spilled liberally from head an I t irew up a lilac light from its pools, like the phosphorescence of something rotted.

Harry halted at the bottom of the step until his eyes had become properly accustomed to the illumination. After a time, it showed him a scene he had prepared himself for as best he could, but which still raised the hairs on the nape of his neck.

He'd seen death arrayed before, of course, all too many times, and seldom neatly. Bodies carved and corroded, their limbs broken, their faces erased. But here was something stranger than that; twice stranger. Here were creatures he'd thought unholy-worshippers of the Anti-Christ, he'd thought-whose flesh was not the stuff of any simple biology. He had a primal suspicion of things that looked as different from himself as these beasts had. Such forms had in his experience housed malice and lunacy. But surveying this scene he could not bring himself to rejoice at their dispatch. Perhaps they'd been innocents, perhaps not. He would never know. What he did know was that in the past week he'd spoken of moving beyond what he'd once assumed were the limits of his species. He could no longer afford to scorn any form, however unlikely, for fear in time it might turn out to be his own. Anything was possible. Perhaps, like a fetus which resembled a reptile and a bird before it came to its humanity, he would revisit those states as he moved on. In which case he had siblings here, in the darkness.

He looked beyond them now, towards the center of the chamber. Though the filaments had lost their light, a few scraps of the misty veils that had hung from them remained. But they could not conceal the absence at the heart. The opening that had led on to Quiddity's shore was gone.

Stumbling over corpses as he went, Harry crossed to the spot, hoping with every step that his eyes deceived him. It was a vain hope. The prophet had closed the door behind him when he'd stepped away into that other place, and left nothing to mark the place.

"Stupid," Harry told himself.

He'd been so close. He'd stood on the threshold of the miraculous, where perhaps the mysteries of being might be solved, and instead of taking the opportunity while he had it, he'd let himself be distracted. He'd turned his back, and lost his opportunity.

as this the destiny Norma had spoken of? That he be left among the dead, while the miracle train moved off without him?

His legs@rained of the adrenaline that had fueled him thus far-were ready to give out. It was time to go, now; time to bury his frustration and his sorrow in sleep for a few hours. Later, maybe, when he had his thoughts in better order, he'd be able to make better sense of all this.

He made his way back across the slaughterhouse and up e stairs. As he came to the top of the flight, however, someing lurched out of the shadows to block his path. The phet's massacre had not been completely thorough, it appeared. Here was one who'd survived, though even in the paltry light of the passageway it was plain she could not be far from death. She wore a wound from the middle of her chest to her hip, its length gummy with dried blood. Her face was as flat as an iron, her eyes gleaming gold in her noseless, lipless face.

"I know you," she said, her voice low and sibilant. "You were at the ceremony."

"Yes I was."

"Why did you come back?"

"I wanted to get through the door."

"So did we all," she said, leaning in Harry's direction. Her eyes shone and fluttered eerily, as if she were reading his marrow. "You're not one of us," she said.

Harry saw no reason to lie. "No, I'm not."

"You cw-ne with him," %he suddenly said. "Oh by the'shu... She flung herself back away from Harry, raising her arms to protect her face.

"It's all right," Harry said. "I wasn't with him. I swear."

He came up the last few steps and started towards her. Too weak to outrun him, the creature sank down against the wall, her broken body wracked with sobs. "Kill me," she said. "I don't care. There's nothing left."

Harry went down on his haunches in front of her. "Listen to me, will you? I didn't come with whoever it was-"

"Kissoon," she said.

"What?" She peered at him through her webbed fingers. "You do know him."

"The Kissoon I know's dead," he said. "Or at least I thought he was."

"He murdered our Blessedm'n and came in to our ceremonies wearing his flesh. And why?"

Harry had an answer to that, at least. "to get into Quiddity."

The creature shook her head. "He didn't leave," she said. "He just sealed the door."

"Are you sure?"

"I saw it with my own eyes. That's how I know it was Kissoon."

:'Explain that."

'When it closed, at the very last moment, there was a light went through everything-the brick, the flow, the dead-and I seemed to see their true nature, just for a little time. And I looked up at him-at the man we'd thought was our Blessedm'n-and I saw another man hidden in his flesh."

"How did you know it was Kissoon?"

"He had tried to join us, once. Said he was an exile, like us, and he wanted to come home with us, back to Quiddity." When she said the word, she shuddered, and more tears came down. "You know what's strange?" she said with a sour little laugh. "I was never there. Most of us were never there. We're the children of exiles, or their children's children. We lived and died for something we only ever knew in stories."

"Do you know where he went9"

"Kissoon?"

Harry nodded.

"Yes, I know. I went after him, to his hiding place."

"You wanted to kill him?"

"Of course. But once I got there I had no strength left. I knew if I faced him like this, he'd finish me. I came back here to prepare myself."

"Tell me where he is. Let me do the job for you."

"You don't know what he can do." "I've heard," Harry replied. "Believe me. I've heard."

"And you think you can kill him?"

"I don't know," Harry said, picturing in his mind's eye the portrait Ted had produced. The heavens livid, the street reeling, and a black snake under his pointed heel. Kissoon was that snake, by another name. "I've beaten some demons in my time."

"He's not a demon," the creature said. "He's a man."

"Is that good news or bad?"

The creature eyed him gravely. "You know the answer to that," she said. Bad, of course, Demons were simple. they believed in prayer and the potency of holy water, Thus they fled from both. But men- what did men believe?

iv The address the creature had given him was up in morningside Heights, around I 10th and Eighth Avenue: an undistinguished house in need of some cosmetic repair. There were no drapes at the lower windows. Harry peered inside. The room was empty: no pictures on the walls, no carpets on the floor, no furniture, nothing. He knew before he'd reached the front door, and found it an inch ajar, and stepped through it into the gray interior, that he'd come too late. The house was empty, or nearly so.

A few signs of Kissoon's occupancy remained. At the top of the stairs, lying in a pool of its own degenerating matter, was a modestly sized Lix. It raised its head at Harry's approach, but with its maker departed, it had lost what tiny wits it had, overreached itself, and slid down the stairs, depositing cobs of sewerage on each step as it descended. Harry followed the fetid trail it had left to the room that Kissoon had lately occupied. It resembled a derelict's hideaway. Newspapers laid in lieu of carpets; a filthy mattress under the grimy window; a heap of discarded cans and plates of rotted food, alongside a second pile, this of liquor bottles. In short, a squalid pit.

There was only one piece of evidence to mark the ambition of the man who had shit and sweated here. On the wall behind the door, a map of the continental United States, upon which Kissoon had inscribed all manner of marks and notations. Harry pulled the map off the wall and took it to the window to study. The man's hand was crabbed, and much of the vocabulary foreign to Harry's eye, like a mismatched marriage of Latin and Russian, but it was plain that over a dozen sites around the country had been of significance to Kissoon. New York City and its environs had attracted the densest concentration of marginalia, with a region in the southwest corner of North Dakota, and another in Arizona, of no little interest to him. Harry folded up the map and pocketed it. Then he made a quick but efficient search of the rest of the room, in the hope of turning up further clues to Kissoon's purpose and methodology. He found nothing of interest, however, excepting a pack of bizarre playing cards, plainly hand-made and much used. He flicked through them. There were perhaps twenty cards, each marked with a simple design: a circle, a fish, a hand, a window, an eye. These he also pocketed, as much for the taking as the wanting, and having done so slipped away past the decayed Lix and out into the warm, pale air.

It was only later, when he spread the cards out on the floor of his office, that he realized what the deck represented. Tesla Bombeck had first described these symbols to him, when speaking of the medallion she'd decoded in the caves beneath Palomo Grove. There had been a human figure at its center, she'd said: a form that Kissoon the card-maker had divided into two sides of a torso, each with an outstretched arm and two legs. The rest of the images were lifted from the medallion design unchanged. Rising above the head of the figure, if Harry remembered Tesla's account aright, had been four symbols apparently representing humanity's ascension to oneness. Below it, another four, representing its return to the simplicity of the single cell. On its left hand, which spurted energy, or blood, symbols that led to a cloud-eclipsed circle: the Cosm. On its right, which spurted like its fellow, symbols leading to an empty circle: the mystery, or perhaps the sacred absence, of the Metacosm.

Harry arranged the signs as Tesla had described, pondering as he did what purpose they'd served Kissoon. was this a game he'd played? Metaphysical solitaire, to keep himself occupied while he planned his plans? Or was it something less frivolous? A way of predicting (or even influencing) the processes the deck described?

He was in the midst of turning these questions over when the telephone rang. It was Nonna.

"Turn on the news," she said. He did so. Images of a fire-gutted building emerged along with a commentary from an on-site reporter. Several corpses had been discovered in the basement of the building, he said. Though the count was as yet unconfirmed, he personally had seen twenty-one victims removed from the building. There was no sign of any survivors, nor much hope now of finding any. "Is that where I think it is?" Norma said.

"That's the place," Harry said. "Have they said anything about the state of the bodies?"

"Just that most of them are burned beyond recognition. they were exiles, I assume." "Yes. "Noticeably so?"

"Vizry",

"That's going to raise a few questions," Norma remarked dryly.

"They'll file it away and pretend it never happened," Harry said. He'd seen the process at work countless times. Rational men dealing with the apparently irrational by turn ing blind eyes.

"Mere was something else, Norma. Or rather somebody."

"Who?"

"Kissoon."

"Impossible."

"I swear."

"You saw him? In the flesh?" "Actually in somebody else's flesh," Harry replied, "but I'm pretty sure it was him."

"He was leading the Order?"

"No. He was the one slaughtering them," Harry said. "they had a door open to Quiddity. A neirica, one of them called it."

"It means passageway," Norma said. "A passageway to sacred wisdom."

"Well, he closed it," Harry replied.

There was a silence while Norma chewed this over. "Let me get this straight," she said. "they opened the neirica; he murdered them and left through it-"

"No.

"I thought you said-"

"I said he closed it. He didn't leave. He's still here in New York."

"You've found him?"

"No. But I will."

Harry returned to Morningside Heights later that day, and watched the house for seventy-two hours, in the hope of catching Kissoon. He had no particular plan as to how he would deal with him if he did, but took some comfort in the fact that he had the cards and the map. Both, he suspected, were of some value to Kissoon. Enough to have him stay his hand if killing Harry meant he'd never be able to find out where they were hidden. At least, that was the calculation.

As it turned out, both wait and calculation were wasted. After three days of almost constant surveillance, without so much as a glimpse of Kissoon, Harry went back into the house. The Lix at the bottom of the stairs was little more than a crusty stain on the boards. As for Kissoon's bedroom, it had been ransacked, presumably by its sometime occupant searching for the cards. He would not come back, Harry Ilues,,,ed. He'd done his work here. He was off on the road somewhere.

The next day Harry left for North Dakota, and the pursuit that would occupy the next seven weeks of his life began. The only person he informed was Norma and, despite her questions, he refused to furnish her with details for fear Kissoon had an agent among the dead listening in. The only other person he was tempted to tell was Grillo, but he decided against it. He'd never been certain of Grillo's agenda, or in truth of his allegiances. If Harry shared any part of what he knew in the hope of tracking Kissoon through the Reef, he risked the information finding its way back through the system to the enemy. Better to disappear silently, presumed incapacitated or dead.

Harry spent eleven days in North Dakota, first in Jamestown, then in Napoleon and Wishek, where by chance he picked up a trail that led him west, into the Badlands. There, during a spell of brutally hot weather at the end of July, he came within a day, perhaps two, of Kissoon, who had moved on, leaving another massacre behind. This time, there was no fire to conceal the bizarre nature of the corpses, and after a short time all reports of the incident were suppressed. But Harry had garnered enough information to be certain Kissoon had done here what he'd done in New York: located and destroyed a group of exiles from Quiddity '

Whether they too had been in the process of opening a door back into the Metacosm he could not discover, but he assumed so. Why else would Kissoon go to the trouble of slaughtering them?

The assumption begged a question that had been itching at the base of his skull since he'd left New York. Why, after being exiled in the Cosm for so many years, were these people now gaining access to Quiddity? Had they discovered some conjuration previously unknown to them, which opened doors where there had only been solid walls? Or were those walls becoming thinner for some reason, the divide between this world and the Metacosm growing frail'?

The heat did nothing for his equilibrium. Lingering in Wishek, hoping to discover where Kissoon had headed next, his fears grew gross in the swelter, and bred hallucinations. Twice in two days he thought he saw Kissoon out walking, and pursued him around corners only to find the streets empty. And at dusk, watching the solid world succumb to doubt, he seemed to see the shadows shift, as though darkness was the weakest place in the Cosm's wall, and there the cracks were beginning to show.

He looked for some comfort in the people around him, the tough, uncomplicated men and women who had chosen this joyless corner of the planet to call home. Surely there was some reserve of hard-won truth in them that would help him keep the delirium at arm's distance. He couldn't ask for evidence of it outright, of course (they already viewed his presence with suspicion enough), but he made a point of listening to their exchanges, hoping to find some plain wisdom there that could be used against the insanities he felt creeping upon him. But there was no solace in his study. they were as sad and cruel and lost as any people he'd encountered. By day they made their dull rounds with sullen faces, their feelings locked out of sight. By night, the men got drunk (and sometimes violent) while the women stayed home, watching the same chat shows and cop shows that softened wits from coast to coast.

He was glad to go, finally, into Minnesota, where he'd read of an incident of cult murder outside Duluth, and hoped to discover Kissoon's hand at work. He was disappointed. The day after his arrival, the cultists-two brothers and their shared mistress, all three in severely psychotic states-were arrested and admitted to the slaughter.

With the trail growing colder by the hour, he contemplated traveling down into Nebraska and hooking up with Grillo in Omaha. It was not his preference-the man's contempt still rankled-but he increasingly suspected he had no choice. He put off calling Grillo for a day. Then, finally, dulling his irritation with half a bottle of scotch, he made the call, only to discover that Grillo wasn't home. He declined to leave a message, fearful as ever that the wrong ears would be attending to it. Instead, he finished off the other half bottle, ;ttid went to bed drunker than he'd been in many a year.

And he dreamed; dreamed he was back in Wyckoff Street, up in that foul room with the demon that had slaughtered Father Hess, its flesh like embers in a gusty wind, dimiiiing and brightening in the murky air.

It had called itself by many names during the long hours of their confrontation: the Hammennite, Peter the Nomad, Lazy Susan. But towards the end, either out of fatigue or boredom, it gave up all its personas but one.

"I am DAmour," it had said, over and over. "I am you and you are love and that's what makes the world go round.

It must have repeated this nonsense two hundred, three hundred times, always finding some fresh way to deliver it as wisdom from the pulpit, as an invitation to intercourse, as a skipping song-until it had imprinted the words on Harry's mind so forcibly he knew they'd be circling his skull forever.

He woke strangely calmed by the dream. It was as though his subconscious was making a connection his conscions mind could not, pointing him back to that terrible time as a source of wisdom. His head thumping, he drove in search of a twenty-four hour coffee shop, and finding one out on the highway, sat there until dawn, puzzling over the words. It was not the first time he'd done so, of course. Far sweeter memories had died in his cortex, gone forever into whatever oblivion happiness is consigned, but the demon's words had never left his head.

I am you, it had proclaimed. Well, that was plain enough. What internal seducer had not tried confounding its victim with the thought that this was all a game with mirrors?

And you are love, it had murmured. That didn't seem to demand much exegesis either. His name was D'Amour, after all.

And that's what makes the world go round, it had gasped. A cliche, of course, rendered virtually meaningless by repetition. It offered nothing by way of insight.

And yet, there was meaning here; he was certain of it. The words had been designed as a trap, baited with a sliver of significance. He had simply never understood what that significance was. Nor did pondering it over half a dozen cups of coffee, and-as dawn came up-Canadian bacon and three eggs over easy, give him the answer. He would just have to move on, and trust that fate would bring him to Kissoon.

Fortified, he returned to his motel, and again consulted the map he had taken from the hovel in morningside Heights.

There were several other sites his quarry had deemed worthy of marking, though none of them had been as significant to him as New York or Jamestown. One was in Florida, one in Oregon, two in Arizona; plus another six or seven. Where was he to begin? He decided on Arizona, for no better reason than he'd loved a woman once who'd been born and bred in Phoenix.

The trip took him five days, and brought him at last to Mammoth, Arizona, and a street corner where a woman with a voice like water over rock called him by his name. She was tiny, her skin like brown paper that had been used and screwed up a dozen times, eyes so deeply set he was never quite certain if they were on him at all.

"I'm Maria Lourdes Nazareno," she told him. "I've been waiting for you sixteen days."

"I didn't realize I was expected," Harry replied.

"Always," the woman said. "How is Tesla, by the way?"

"You know Tesla?"

"I met her on this same corner, three years ago."

"Popular place," Harry remarked, "is there something special about it?"

"Yes," the woman replied, with a little laugh. "Me. How is she?"

"As crazy as ever, last time we spoke," Harry said.

"And you? Are you crazy too?"

"Very possibly."

The response seemed to please the woman. She lifted her head, and for the first time Harry saw her eyes. Her irises were flecked with gold.

"I gave Tesla a gun," the woman went on. "Does she still have it?" Harry didn't reply. "D'Amour?"

"Are you what I think you are?" Harry murmured.

"What do you mean?"

"You know damn well."

Again, the smile. "It was the eyes that gave it away, yes? Tesla didn't notice. But then I think she was high that day."

"Are there many of you?"

"A very few," Maria replied, "and the greater part of all of us is Sapas Humana. But there's a tiny piece"-she put thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart to demonstrate how little-"a tiny piece of me which Quiddity calls to. It makes me wise."

"How?"

"It lets me see you and Tesla coming."

"Is that all you see?" "Why? Do you have something in mind?"

"Yes I do." "What?"

"Kissoon."

The woman visibly shuddered. "So he's your business."

"Is he here?"

"No."

"Has he been here?"

"No. Why? Do you expect him?"

"I'm afraid so."

The woman looked distressed. "We thought we were safe here," she said.

"We haven't tried to open a neirica. We don't have the power. So we thought he wouldn't notice us."

"I'm afraid he knows you're here." "I must go. I must warn everyone." She took hold of Harry's hand, her palms clammy. "Thank you for this. I will find some way to repay you."

"There's no need."

"oh, but there is," she said, and before Harry could protest further she'd gone, off across the street and out of sight.

He stayed in Mammoth overnight, though he was pretty certain that the Nazareno woman was telling the truth, and Kissoon was not in the vicinity. Weary after so many weeks of travel, he retired to bed early, only to be woken a little after one by a rapping on his door.

"Who is it?" he mumbled as he searched for the light.

The answer was not a name but an address. "One-twoone, Spiro Street," said a low sibilant voice.

"Maria?" he said, picking up his gun and crossing to the door. But by the time he had it open the speaker had disappeared from the hallway.

He dressed, and went down to the lobby, got the whereabouts of Spiro Street from the night manager, and headed out. The street he sought was on the very edge of town, many of its houses in such an advanced state of disrepair he was amazed to see signs of occupancy: rusty vehicles in the driveways, bags of trash heaped on the hard dirt where they'd once had lawns. One-two-one was in a better state than some, but was still a dispiriting sight. Comforted by the weight of his gun, Harry stepped up to the front door. It stood a couple of inches ajar.

"Maria?" he said. The silence was so deep he had no need to raise his voice.

There was no reply. Calling again, he pushed the door open, and it swung wide. There was a fat white candle-set on a dinner plate surrounded by beads@n the threadbare rug. Squatting in front of it, with her eyes downcast, was Maria.

"It's me," he said to her. "It's Harry. What do you want?"

"Nothing, now," said a voice behind him. He went for his gu. n, but before his fist had closed on it there was a cold palm gnpping the back of his skull. "No," the voice said simply.

He showed his weaponless hands.

"I got a message-" Harry said.

Another voice now; this the message carrier. "She wanted to see you," he said.

"Fine. I'm here."

"Except you're too damn late," the first man said. "He found her already."

Harry's stomach turned. He looked hard at Maria. There was no sign of life. "Oh Jesus."

"Such easy profanity," said the message carrier. "Maria said you were a holy man, but I don't think you are."

The palm tightened against the back of Harry's head, and for one sickening moment he thought he heard his skull creak. Then his ton-nentor spoke, very softly: "I am you, and you are love-"

:,Stop that," Harry growled.

'I'm just reading your thoughts, D'Amour," the man replied. "Trying to find out whether you're our enemy or our f'riend."

"I'm neither." "You're a death-bringer, you know that) First New York-"

"I'm looking for Kissoon."

"We know," came the reply. "She told us. That's why lk she sent her spirit out, to find him. So you could be a hero, and bring him down. That's what you dream of, isn't it?"

"Sometimes- "Pitiful.

"After all the hann he's done your people I'd have thought you'd be happy to help me." "Maria died to help you," came the reply. "Her life is our contribution to the cause. She was our mother, D'Amour."

"Oh-I'm sorry. Believe me, I didn't want this."

"She knew what you wanted better than you did," the message carrier replied. "So she went out and found him for you. He came after her and sucked out her soul, but she found him."

"Did she have time to tell you where he is?"

I 11

'Yes.

"Are you going to tell me?"

"So eager," the skull holder said, leaning close to Harry's ear. "He killed your mother, for Christ's sake," Harry said. "Don't you want him dead?" "What we want is irrelevant," the other son replied, "we learned that a long time ago." "Then let me want it for you," Harry said. "Let me find some way to kill the sonofabitch." "Such a murderous heart," the man at his ear murmured. "Where are your metaphysics now?" "What metaphysics?" "I am you, and you are love-"

"That's not me," Harry said. "Who is it, then?"

"If I knew that@' "If you knew that?" "Maybe I wouldn't be here, ready to do your dirty work." There was a lengthy silence. Then the message carrier said: "Whatever happens after this-" "Yes?"

"Whether you kill him or he kills you-"

"Let me guess. Don't come back."

"Right."

"You've got a deal."

Another silence. The candle in front of Maria flickered.

"Kissoon's in Oregon," the message carrier said. "A town called Everville."

"You're sure?" There was no reply. "I guess you are." The hand didn't move from the back of Han-y's head, though there was no further response from either of the sons. "Have we got some further business?" Harry asked.

Again, silence.

"If we're done, I'd like to get going; get an early start in the morning."

And still, silence. Finally, Harry reached round and tentatively touched the back of his head. The hand had gone, leaving only the sensation of contact behind. He glanced round. Both of Maria's children had disappeared.

He blew out the candle in front of the dead woman, and said a quiet goodbye. Then he went back to his hotel, and plotted his route to Everville.