Everville

PART SEVEN. LEAVES ON THE STORY TREE

Everville's weekend of portents and manifestations did not go unnoticed. In the days immediately following the events of Festival Saturday and Sunday morning the city came under the kind of scrutiny usually reserved for communities that have produced mass murderers or presidential candidates. Something of strange consequence had happened there, nobody contested that. But nor could anybody quite decide what, not even those who'd been in the thick of it. In fact the people who should in principle have been the most reliable witnesses (those who'd been at the crossroads on Saturday afternoon; those trapped in the Town Hall around two on Sunday morning) were in one sense the least useful. Not only did they contradict one another, they contradicted themselves from hour to hour, recollection to recollection, their talk of quakes and fires and rock falls mingled with details so farfetched as to turn the story into tabloid fodder within a week.

No sooner had these details found pfint-along with the inevitable comparisons to other sites of outlandish bloodshed like Jonestown and Waco-than the city came under scrutiny from a very different selection of examiners-psychics, UFO-ologists, and New Age apocalyptics-their vocal presence further damaging the legitimacy of the story. Television coverage that had been sympathetic on Tuesday was getting wary or even cynical by the end of the week. Time magazine @CP ".." -I pulled a cover piece on the tragedy before it reached the presses, replacing it with a story inside that implied the whole event had been a publicity stunt that had spiraled out of control. The piece was accompanied by an unfortunate, and deeply unflattering, portrait of Dorothy Bullard, who'd been persuaded to be photographed in her nightgown, and was immortalized standing behind her screendoor looking like a lost soul under home arrest. The piece was entitled: Is America Losing Its Mind?

There was no denying that people had perished the previous weekend, of course, many of them horribly. The body count finally reached twenty-seven, including the manager of the Sturgis Motel and the three bodies discovered on the road outside the city, two of them burned beyond recognition, the third that of a sometime-journalist called Nathan Grillo. There were autopsies; there were overt and covert investigations by the police and FBI; there were public pronouncements as to the various causes of death. And of course there was gossip, some of which made it into the tabloids, much of which did not. The story that two skins made of some imitative alien substance were found at the motel did make the pages of the Enquirer. The rumor that three crosses had been found close to the summit of Harmon's Heights, with bodies crucified on two of them and a body of some unearthly creature slumped at the foot of the third did not.

In the second week of reporting, with the 100nier OPiners and witnesses ever more voluble, and the Time interpretation of events gaining adherents daily, the story took on a new lease of life with the suicide of one of Everville's most beloved citizens: Bosley Cowhick.

He was found in the kitchen of his diner at six-fifteen on Wednesday morning, a week and three days after Festival Weekend. He had shot himself, leaving, beside the cash register, a note, the contents of which were leaked to the press the following day, despite Jed Gilholly's best efforts to keep Bosley's last words under wraps. The note bore no address. There were just a few rambling and ill-punctuated lines scrawled on the back of a menu.

I hope the Lord willforgive mefor what I'm doing, he'd written, but I can't go on living any more with all these things in my head. I know people are saying I'm crazy, but I saw what I saw and maybe I did wrong, but I did it for the sake of the baby. Seth Lundy knows that's true. He saw it too and he knows I had no choice, but I keep thinking that God put her into my hands to test me and I was not strong enough to do His will even if I did itfor the best. I don't want to live any more thinking about it all the time. I have faith that the Lord will understand and be with me because He made me and He knows that I have always tried to do His will. Just sometimes it's too much. I'm sorry for hurting anybody. Goodbye.

Inevitably, the mention of Seth Lundy in this pitiful mi'ssive set a whole new trail of inquiries in motion, as Lundy was one of the people who was listed as missing after the weekend. Bill Waits admitted witnessing the Lundy boy being assaulted by two of his fellow musicians, but that story remained uncor-roborated. One of those two men, Larry Glodoski, was dead under highly suspicious circumstances, while the other, Ray Alstead, was in custody in Salem, suspected of his murder. He was being kept sedated, to minimize his eruptions of violence, which seemed to be associated with a fear that the deceased would he coming to find him because he'd seen more than he was supposed to see. Quite what he'd witnessed he would not say, but his obsession with the vengeful dead strengthened the belief among the police psychiatrists that he might well have been responsible for a number of the slaughters that night. He had gone on a rampage, the theory went, and was now in terror that his victims would come to claim him. Waits explicitly denied this-he'd been with Alstead most of the evening, he pointed out-but he'd also been in a highly intoxicated state for much of that time so he was not the most reliable of witnesses.

Now, with the death of Bosley Cowhick, the authorities lost a potentially useful witness and were left with another collection of puzzles. What had happened to Seth Lundy? Who exactly was this child that the God-fearing Bosley had felt so guilty for relinquishing? And, if the baby had even existed, to whom had he relinquished her?

There were no answers to any of these questions forthcoming in the short term. Bosley Cowhick was buried in the Potter Cemetery, alongside his mother, father, and maternal grandmother; Ray Alstead remained in a cell in Salem, while his lawyer fought to have him released on grounds of insufficient evidence; and as nobody came forward to report a missing baby, the child remained unidentified. As for the disappearance of Seth Lundy, it opened up what was in a sense to be the last of the Everville Mysteries to reach the eyes and cars of the genera) public, and that surrounded the figure of Owen Buddenbaum. Unlike the baby, nobody doubted Buddenbaum's existence. He'd been seen failing from a window, he'd been examined at Silverton Hospital, he'd been in the midst of events on the afternoon of Festival Saturday, which had ended in such turmoil, and he had still been in the city after nightfall, his presence noted and reported by several people. Indeed, he seemed to have been a constant factor in the weekend's events, so much so that in some quarters he was suggested to have been at the center of the whole cycle of events: the grand master, lording it over what was either a misbegotten hoax, a paranormat phenomenon, or a case of mass hysteria, depending on your point of view. If he could be found, it was widely believed, and persuaded to speak, he would be able to solve most, if not all, the unanswered questions. - A passable artist's likeness was made and appeared in several national magazines, as well as in both the Oregonian and the Everville Register. Almost immediately, the reports began to come back in. He had been seen in Louisiana two years before; he'd been sculling around a pool in Miami, just last week; he'd been spotted at Disneyland, moving through the crowd watching the Electric Parade, There were literally dozens of such sightings, some of them going back more than a decade, but even when the witness had had occasion to interact with the mysterious Mr, Buddenbaum there was little hard evidence about him. He certainly didn't speak of miracles or Mars or the secret workings of the world. He came and went, leaving behind him the vague sense of somebody who didn't belong in this day and age.

These reports, numerous though they were, were not weird enough to keep Everville's story in the public eye. Once all the funerals were over, and the photographers had been up Harmon's Heights to see the summit

(which had been so thoroughly scoured by the authorities 4here was nothing left to photograph but the view); once the Bosley Cowhii suicide had been recounted, and the Owen ]3uddenbau sightings run, the tale of Everville ran out of fuel. By the end of September it was state, and a month lat it was the stuff of Halloween tales, or forgotten, I am born here and now, Testa had said to Kissoon as she' stood in the dwindling remains of Maeve O'Connell's houst and that had been the truth. The very ground which she' assumed would be her grave had proved to be a womb, an she'd risen from it remade. Little wonder then that the wee that followed resembled a second childhood, far strang than her first.

As she'd told D'Amour, she felt little sense of reve) tion. The gift that she'd inadvertently received, or-and s did not discount this possibility-unconsciously purvu had not given her any great insights into the structure of rea itY. Or if it had she was not yet resilient enough to open he self up to their presence. Even the minor miracle she'

worked in the whorehouse that night-allowing Harry to s with the eyes of the dead-now seemed foolhardy. Sh would not be tempted to 90 around bestowing such visio on people again; not until she was certain she had control what she was doing, and that certainty, she suspected, wou) he a long time coming. Her mind felt more closed down no than it had before her resurrection, as though she had instin tively narrowed her field Of vision when the prospect of in nite horizons loomed for fear her thoughts would take flig and she would lose her grip on who she was completely.

Now she was back in her old apartment in We Hollywood, where she had headed immediately after lea ing Everville, not because she'd ever felt ecstaticall happy there-she hadn't-but because she needed th comfort of the familiar. Many of the neighbors' faces ha changed, but the comedies and dramas that surrounded he were essentially the same after five years. Every Saturda night the pre-op transsexual in the apartment below would get maudlin and play torch songs until four in the momin at least twice a week the couple in the next building would have screaming matches ending in verbally explicit reconciliations; every day somebody's cat was sick on the stairs. It was less than glamorous, but it was home, and there in that cramped apartment with its cheap furniture and its cracked plaster walls she could pretend, at least for a time, that she was a normal woman living a normal life. Not perhaps the kind of normality Middle America would have recognized, but a reasonable approximation. She'd nurtured her hopes here and wasted time she could have used realizing them. She'd tended her wounded ego when a piece of work had been rejected. Tended it too when love had dealt her a blow. When she'd caught Claus cheating; when Jerry had left for Miami and never come back. Hard times, some of them. But the memories helped remind her of who she was, scars and all. Right now that was more important than the pleasures of self-deception.

Of course this was also the apartment where Mary Muralles had perished in the coils of Kissoon's Lix, and where she and Lucien-poor, guiltless Lucien-had talked about how people were vessels for the infinite. It was a phrase she had never forgotten. She might have thought it a kind of prophecy had she not believed what she'd told D'Amour: that the future always remained untold and thus untenable. Prophecy or no, the fact remained that she had become a kind of vessel for what had always been touted as an infinite power. Now she had it, she was determined not to be destroyed by it. She would learn to use the Art as Tesia Bombeck, or let it lie fallow inside her.

Once in a while during this period of restoration she would get a call from Harry in New York, checking in to see that all was well. He was sweetly considerate of her tender condition, and their exchanges were for the most part determinedly banal. they never quite stooped to talking politics, but he kept his side of the conversation light and general, waiting for her to deepen the exchange if she felt resilient enough. she seldom did. Most of the time they chatted about nothing in particular and left it at that. But as the weeks went by she started to feel more confident of her strength, and dared to talk, albeit tentatively, of what had happened in Everville, and its long-term consequences. Had he heard anything of the IL

whereabouts of the lad, for instance? Or of Kissoon? (Me answer to both these questions was no.) What about TommyRay, or Little Amy?

(Again, the answer was no.)

"Everybody's keeping their heads down's my guess,"

Harry said. "Licking their wounds. Waiting to see who moves first."

"You don't sound all that bothered," Tesia said.

"You know what? I think Maeve had it fight. She said to me: If you don't know what's ahead of you, why be scared of it? There's a lot of sense in that."

"There's also a lot of people gone, Harry, who had good reason to be scared,"

"I know. I'm not trying to pretend it's all sunshine and flowers. It isn't and I know it isn't. But I've spent so much of my life looking for the Enemy@'

"And now you've seen it."

"Now I've seen it."

"And it sounds like you're smiling."

"I am. Shit, I don't even know why, but I am, I'm smiling. You know, Grillo used to tell me I was being simpleminded about all this shit, and we kinda fell out about it, but I hope to God he's hearing me, because he was right, Tes. He was right."

The conversation more or less petered out there, but Harry's mention of Grillo started her thinking of him, and once she'd begun there was no stopping. Until now she'd actively feared the thought of dealing with her feelings for him, certain she risked her hard-won self-possession if she was drawn into those troubled waters. But caught off-guard like this, obliged to let the memories snoWhall or be mowed down trying to halt them, she surrendered herself, and after all her trepidation, it was not so bad. In fact it was rather comforting, bringing him to mind. He'd changed radically in the eight years she'd known him: lost most of his idealism and all of his certainties and gained an obsession in their place. But under his increasingly prickly exterior, the man she had first met@harming, childish, irascible-remained visible, at least to her. they had never been lovers, and once in a while she'd regretted the fact. But there had never been a man in her life so constant as Grillo, or in the end so unalloyed in his affections. Even in more recent times, when she'd been traveling, and sometimes months would go by without their speaking, it had never taken more than a sentence or two between them before they were talking as though minutes had passed since their last exchange. Recalling those long-distance conversations from truckstop diners and backroad gas stations, her thoughts turned to the labor that had consumed Grillo in the half-decade since Palomo Grove: the Reef. He had described it to her more than once as the work which he'd been put on the planet to perform, and though it demanded more energies and more patience than he had sometimes feared he was capable of supplying, he had kept faith with it, as far as she knew, to the end.

Now she wondered: was it still intact? Still gathering tales of unlikely phenomenon from across the Americas? And the more she wondered, the more the notion of seeing for herself this collection of things out-of-whack and out-ofseason intrigued her. She remembered Grillo giving her a couple of numbers to call if ever she wanted to access the system and leave her own messages, but she'd lost them. The only way to find out whether the Reef was still operational was to go to Omaha and see for herself She didn't want to fly. The idea of relinquishing control of life and limb to a man in a uniform had never appealed to her; and did so now less than ever. If she was to go, it would be on two wheels, like the old days.

She duly had her bike thoroughly overhauled, and on the sixth of October she started the journey that would take her back to the city where many years before Randolph Jaffe had sat in a dead-letter office gathering clues to the mystery that now bided its time in her cells.

t Two Despite her best intentions, Phoebe had failed to dream of Joe that first night lying under Maeve O'Connell's bedroom window. Instead she'd dreamed of Morton. Of all things, Morton. And very unpleasant it proved to be. In this dream she was standing on the shore as it had looked before King Texas had overturned it, down to the birds who'd almost brought her adventures to a premature halt. And there, standing among the flock, dressed only in a vest and his Sunday best socks, was her husband.

Seeing him she instinctively covered her breasts, determined he wasn't going to lay his hands on them ever again, either for pleasure or punishment. As it was, he turned out to have other ideas. Producing a dirty burlap bag from behind his back, he said, "We're going to go down together, Phoebe. You know that's right."

"Down where?" she said to him.

He pointed to the water. "Mere," he said, approaching her while he reached into the bag. There were stones in it, gathered from the shore, and without another word he proceeded to ffimst them into her mouth.

Such was the logic of dreams that she now found her hands were glued to her breasts, and she couldn't raise them to prevent his tormenting her. She had no choice but to swallow the stones. Though some of them were as large as his fist, down they went, one after the other; ten, twenty, thirty. She steadily felt herself growing heavier, the weight carrying her to her knees. The sea had meanwhile crept up the shore and plainly intended to drown her.

She started to struggle, doing her choking best to plead with Morton. "I didn't mean any harm to come to you-" she told him.

"You didn't care," he said.

"I did," she protested, "at the beginning, I loved you. I thought we were going to be happy forever."

"Well, you were wrong," he growled, and started to reach into the bag for what she knew would be the biggest stone of the lot, the stone that would tip her over and leave her struggling in the rising water.

"Bye, bye, Feebs," he said.

"Damn you," she replied. "Why can't you ever see somebody else's point of view?" "Don't want to," he replied.

"You're such a fool-2' "Now, we get to it."

"Damn you! Damn you!" As she spoke she felt her innards churning, grinding the stones in her belly together. She heard them crack and splinter. So did Morton.

"What are you doing?" he said, leaning over her, his breath like an ashtray.

In reply she spat out a hail of fractured stones, which peppered him from head to foot. they struck him like bullets, and he stumbled back into the surf, dropping his burlap bag as he did so. The wounds were not bleeding. The shrapnel she'd spat at him had simply lodged in his body and weighed him down. In seconds the eager waters had covered him and he was gone, leaving Phoebe on the shore, spitting up stone dust.

When she woke up the pillow was wet with saliva.

The experience dampened her enthusiasm for dreaming things into being. Suppose she hadn't killed Morton in her dream, she thought; would he have appeared on the doorstep the following day, with his burlap bag in hand? That wasn't a very comforting notion. She would have to be careful in future.

Her subconscious seemed to get the message. For the next little while she didn't dream at all, or if she did she remembered nothing of it. Time went by, and she determined to settle into the O'Connell house as best she could. She was assisted in this process by the arrival of a strange, tic-ridden little woman called Jarrieffa, who introduced herself as Musnakaff s second wife. She had been in service at the house, she explained, cleaning and cooking, and wished to be reemployed, happy to work in order to have a roof over her family's head. Phoebe agreed gladly, and the woman duly moved in, along with her four children, the eldest an adolescent called Enko, who was-he proudly explained-a bastard, got upon his mother by not one but two sailors (now deceased). The children's shouts and laughter quickly enlivened the house, which was big enough that Phoebe could always find a quiet spot to sit and think.

The presence of Jarrieffa and brood not only distracted her from the pain of being without Joe, it also helped to regulate the passage of time. Until their arrival Phoebe had pretty much been driven by a mixture of need and indulgence. She'd slept whenever the whim had taken her; eaten the same way. Now, the days began to recover their shape. Though the heavens still refused to offer any diumal regu@ty-Aarkening without warning, brightening just as arbitrarily-she quickly trained herself to ignore these signs. And the increasing good order of the house was echoed in the city streets when she went out walking. Restoration was underway everywhere. Houses were being rebuilt and the harbor cleared; ships were being repaired and relaunched. Plainly these people didn't have Maeve's ability to dream things into being or they wouldn't have needed to sweat so much, but they seemed happy enough in their work. A few of her neighbors got to recognize her after a while, and would greet her with a surly look when they saw her out and about.

they made no attempt to engage her in conversation, however, and her attempts to chat with them were always shortlived.

Isolation, she began to realize, could became a problem if she didn't find some way to be accepted into the community, and she started to make a list of possible ways to ease that process. A party, held in the street outside the house, perhaps? Or an invitation to the house for a few choice neighbors to whom she could tell her story.

While she was turning these options over she made a discovery that was to prove strangely influential. She found a started to sort tnrougn Lne votuiiic:n, Ltiat ti.,y dreamed up by Maeve. More likely they'd been smuggled over into the Metacosm (or carried accidentally) by fleshand-blood trespassers like herself. How else to explain the presence of a book of higher mathematics beside a treatise on the history of whaling beside a water-stained edition of the Decameron?

It was this last that most appealed to her, not for the text-which she found dry-but for the black and white etchings scattered throughout it. Two of the artists-the pictures were rendered in three distinct styles-had chosen episodes of great drama to depict, but the third was only interested in sex. His style was far from slick, but he made up for that by dint of his sheer audacity. The people in his pictures were caught in the throes of sexual frenzy, and none of them shy about it. Monks sported huge erections, peasant women lay on bales of hay with their legs in the air, a couple were fucking in mud: all in bliss.

One illustration in particular caught Phoebe's fancy. It pictured a woman kneeling in a field with her dress hitched up so that her amply endowed lover could come into her from behind. As she studied it, a ripple of pleasure passed through her, her flesh remembering what her mind had tried so hard to forget: Joe's hands, Joe's lips, Joe's body. She felt his palms against her breasts and belly; felt the pressure of his hips against her buttocks.

"Oh God... " she sighed at last, and pitched the book back into the closet, slamming the door on it.

That wasn't the end of the story however; not by a long way. When she retired a couple of hours later, the image and its consequences still lingered. She would not be able to sleep, she knew, unless she pleasured herself a little, so she lay there on her mattress-which was still where she'd first set it, in front of the window-and with her eyes on the undulating sky she played between her legs until sleep found her.

She dreamed; of a man. But this time it was not Morton.

were acute enough to make him out. was whatever visible presence he possessed-the shred of self the fire watchers had seen-Awindling still further? He feared so. If they were to see him now he doubted they'd be quite so worshipful.

Several times he decided to leave Liverpool altogether-he didn't find the sights and sounds of reconstruction comforting; they only reminded him of how removed from life he'd become-but something kept him from leaving. He tried to attach some rationale to his reluctance (he needed time to recuperate, time to plan, time to understand his condition), but none of these explanations touched the truth. Something was holding him in the city, an invisible cord around his invisible neck.

Then, one gloomy day while he was loitering down by the harbor watching the ships, he felt something tug at him.

At first, he dismissed the sensation as wish-fulrillment. But it came again, and again, and on the third try he dared allow himself a measure of excitement. This was the first time since the fire watchers he'd felt some interaction with the world outside his thoughts.

He didn't resist the summons. Up from the harbor he went, following the unspoken call.

Phoebe dreamed she was back in Dr. Powell's office, and Joe was out in the hallway, where she'd first seen him, painting the ceiling. It was raining hard. She could hear the deluge slapping against the window of the empty waiting room, and beating on the roof.

"Joe?" she said.

Her lover-to-be was perched on the top of a ladder, naked to the waist, his broad back spattered with pale green paint. Oh, but he looked so fine, with his hair cropped close to his beautiful head, and his ears jutting out, and that patch of hair at the small of his back disappearing under his belt into the crack of his ass.

"Joe?" she said, hoping she could get him to turn around. "I've got something to show you."

As she spoke she went to the low table in the middle of the waiting room and, clearing off all the dog-eared magazines with one sweep of her arm, she lay on it facing him. For some reason the rain had started to come through the ceiling, and it fell on her in sharp, straight drops. they did more than drench her; they began to wash the clothes from her body as if her blouse and dress had been painted on, the colors running off her limbs and pooling around the table, leaving her naked, which was exactly how she wanted to be.

"You can turn round now," she said to him, putting her hand down between her legs. He always liked to watch her play. "Go on," she said to him,

"turn round and look at me."

He'd passed by this house on the hill before, and wondered who lived here. He would soon find out.

He was moving down the path to the steps, up the steps to the door, through the door to the staircase. Somebody at the top of the flight was murmuring: He couldn't quite hear what. He paused a moment to listen. The speaker was a woman, he could make out that much, but he couldn't yet grasp the words, so he started to ascend.

"Joe?"

He had heard her; there was no doubt of that. He'd put down his painthrush and was wiping his hands, taking his time, knowing it only made the moment when their eyes met all the more intense if it was delayed a little.

"I've waited a long time for this... " she told him.

He didn't dare believe what he was hearing. Not the words themselves, though they were wonderful: the voice that spoke them.

Phoebe here? How was that possible? She was in Everville, the world he'd left and lost forever. Not here; not in this musty house, calling to him. That was too much to hope for.

"Oh, Joe the woman was sighing, and God in Heaven, it sounded like her, so very like her.

He went to the door, knowing whoever was speaking was on the other side of it and suddenly afraid to enter, afraid to know it wasn't her. He paused a moment, preparing himself for the pain to come, then slipped inside. The room was huge and chaotic. His gaze instantly went to the bed at the far end. It was piled high with pillows and scattered with pieces of paper, but there was nobody lying there.

Then, from the tangle of sheets on the floor, the voice, her voice, warm with welcome.

"Joe... " she said. "I've missed you so much."

He was looking at her. Finally, he was looking at her. She smiled at him, and he smiled back, descending the ladder and sauntering in from the hallway to the table where she lay, her body wet with rain.

"I'm all yours," she said.

It was her. God in Heaven, it was her! How she came to be here didn't matter. Nor did why. All that mattered was that here she was, his Phoebe, his glorious Phoebe, whose face he'd despaired of ever seeing again.

Did she know he was close?

Her eyes were shut, her pupils roving behind her lids, but he didn't doubt she was dreaming of him. There was sweat on her face, and on her legs, which were bare. He longed for the fingers to pull away the sheet that lay between; for the lips to kiss that place and the cock to pleasure it. to make again the love they'd made those afternoons in Everville, bodies intertwined as though they'd never be separated.

"Come closer," she said in her sleep.

He did so. Stood over the bottom of her bed and looked down on her. If love had weight, she'd feel it now. Or if a scent, smell it, or if a shadow, know it was cast upon her. He didn't care how she came to realize his presence, as long as somehow she did; somehow understood that after the dream of him she would find his spirit waiting close by, ready for the moment when she opened her eyes and made him real.

He was standing between her legs now, covered in paint. Flecks and splashes of it, all over his face and in his hair, on his shoulders and down over the chest. She reached up towards him.

In dreams, and out of them, reached up...

He felt her touch. Though he had no skin, he felt the contact nevertheless, where his belly had been.

"Look at the state of you," she said, her fingers moving up from his stomach to the muscle of his chest, brushing his invisible presence, now with her fingers, now with her thumb. And wherever she'd touched him, he saw the air begin to seethe and knit, as though-dared he even hope?she was dreaming him back into being.

The paint was coming off, bit by bit. She brushed a little from his cheek and from the bridge of his nose, from his left ear, and from around his eyes. Then, though the job of paintremoval was far from finished, she went back down to his belt and unbuckled it. He smiled conspiratorially, and let her unbutton and unzip his pants, which despite their bagginess could not conceal his arousal. It seemed her finger had learned the trick of the rain, because the fabric around his groin now ran off as her dress and blouse had done, fully exposing him. He put his hands on his head, and thrust his hips forward, grinning while she ran her fingers over his cock and balls.

There were no words for this bliss, seeing his flesh knitting together as she stroked it; his balls remade unwounded, his cock as fine as she remembered it, perhaps finer.

And then-4ammit!-from somewhere in the rooms below, the sound of children shouting. Phoebe's hand stopped moving, as though the din had reached into her dream.

Children? What were children doing in the doctor's offices? Oh Lord, and here was she, stark naked. She froze, hoping they would go away, and for a few moments the hollering faded. She waited, holding her breath. Five seconds, ten seconds. Had they fled? It seemed so.

She started to reach for Joe's arm, to draw him down onto her and into her, but as she did so they began again, pounding up the stairs, shrieking in their games. He would gladly have strangled them both at that moment and there wouldn't have been a )over alive who'd have blamed him for it. But the damage was done. Phoebe's hand dropped back down onto her breast. She let out a soft, irritated moan. Then her eyes flickered open.

Oh, what a dream; and what a way to be woken from it. She'd have to tell Janieffa that in future the children Something moved in front of her, silhouetted against the window. For a heartbeat she thought it was outside-some shreds of cloth or litter, rising in a gust of dusty wind-but no. It was here, in the room with her: something ragged, retreating into the shadows.

She would have screamed, but that the thing was plainly more afraid of her than she of it. And no wonder. It was a tattered, twitching thing, wet and raw; it posed no threat.

"Whatever the fuck you are," she told it, "get the hell out of here!" She thought she heard a sound from it, but with so much noise from the kids, who were now just outside the door, she couldn't be certain.

She called "Stay out!" to them, but they either ignored her or missed the warning, because no sooner had she spoken than the door opened and in Jarrieffa's youngest pair tumbled, brawling.

"Out!" she yelled again, fearful that even if the interloper was beyond hanning them it would still give them a flight. they ceased their hullabaloo, and the littler of the two, catching sight of the thing in the shadows, began to shriek.

"It's all fight," Phoebe said, moving to usher them out of the room. As she did so the creature emerged from the murk and headed for the open door, pausing only to look in Phoebe's direction. It had eyes, she saw; human eyes attached by trailing threads of dark flesh to an ear and a piece of cheek, the air in which the fragments hung buzzing, as though it was some way of solidifying itself. Then the creature was gone, out past the panicking children into the hallway.

Phoebe heard Jarrieffa on the stairs, demanding to know what all the noise was about, but her words were cut short, and by the time Phoebe was out onto the landing the woman was clinging to the banisters sobbing with fear, watching the creature retreating down the flight. Then, recovering herself, she began up the stairs afresh, yelling for her kids.

"They're okay," Phoebe told her. "Just frightened, that's all." While Jam'effa gathered the children with her anus Phoebe went to the top of the stairs and looked down after the intruder. The front door stood open. He'd already slipped away.

"I'll fetch Enko," Jarrieffa said. "It's all right," Phoebe said. "He wasn't going to-2'

The rest of the words failed her, as halfway down the flight-halfway to closing the door to lock the creature outshe realized whose gaze she had met in that instant before the creature had fled.

"Oh God," she said.

"Enko'll shoot it," Jarrieffa was saying.

"No!" Phoebe shouted. "N@' She knew already what she'd done: half-dreamed him, then driven him away incomplete. It was unbearable. Gasping for air, she stumbled on down the stairs, and across the hallway to the front door. The sky was murky, and the ight drear, but she could see that the street was empty in both directions.

Joe had gone.

Despite the fact that Grillo's body had been identified, it seemed he had confounded any trail that might have led the authorities back to the Reef in the event of his demise. When Tesla got to the house in Omaha it was untouched. There was dust on every surface and mold on every perishable in the fridge, drifts of mail behind the front door, and a backyard so overgrown she could not see the fence.

But the Reef itself was in good working order. She sat in Grillo's stale, windowless office for a few minutes, amazed at the amount of equipment he'd managed to pile into it: six monitors, two printing machines, four fax machines, and three walls of floor-to-ceiling shelves, all loaded down with tapes, cassettes, and box-files of notes. In front of her the messages continued to fill up the screens as they had presumably been doing since his departure. Getting a grasp of the system, and of all the information it contained, was not going to be a simple matter. She was here for days, at least.

She headed back out to pick up a few essentials from the local market-coffee, milk, bagels, peaches, and (though she hadn't touched alcohol since her resurrection) vodka-then sorted out a few domestic details (the house was freezing, so she had to turn on the heating; and the contents of the fridge and the garbage can in the kitchen had to be dumped to clear the sickening smell) before settling down to familiarize herself with Grillo's masterwork.

She'd never been particularly adept at handling technology. It took her the best part of two, days to teach herself how to operate everything, working slowly so as not to accidentally wipe some invaluable treasure from the files. She was aided in her exploration by Grillo's handwritten notes, which were pinned, glued, and taped to both the machines and shelves. Without them, she would have despaired. Once she had a basic grasp of both the system and his methodology, she began to make her way through the files themselves. they numbered in the thousands. The names of some were self-evident-Dog-Star Saucers; Seraphic Visions; Death by Animal Ingestation-but Grillo had titled most of them for his own amusement, obliquely, and she had to call them up one by one in order to find out what they were about. There was a kind of poetry in some of the titling, along with Grillo's love of puns and a playful obscurantism. The Devouring Song, Zoological Pardons, The Fiend Venus, Neither Here nor There, Amen to That; the list went on and on.

What soon became apparent was that while Grillo had assiduously collected and collated these reports, he had not edited them. There was no distinction made within each file between a minor bizanity and something of cataclysmic scale; nor any between a lucid, measured account and a scrap of babble. Like a loving parent, unwilling to favor one child over another, Grillo had found a home for everything.

Increasingly impatient, Tesla scrolled page after page after page, still hoping for come clue to the mystery in her cells. And while she dug, the reports kept pouring in from all directions.

From Kentucky a woman who claimed she had been twice raped by "the Higher Ones," whoever they were, checked in to report that her violators were now moving south-southeast towards the state, and would be visible tomorrow dusk in the form of a yellow cloud "that will look like two angels tied back to back." From New Orleans a certain Dr. Toumier wanted to share his discovery that disease was caused by an inability to speak "with a true tongue," and that he had cured over six hundred patients thought terminal by teaching them the basic vocabulary of a language he dubbed Nazque. From her home town of Philadelphia came a piece of psychotic prose from one who signed himself (it was surely a man) the Cockatrice, warning the world that from Wednesday next he would be in glory, and only the blind would be safe For three days she remained hostage to the Reef, like an atheist locked in the Vatican library, contemptuous, repulsed even, but going back and back to the shelves, morbidly fascinated by the dogmas she found there. Even in her most frustrated moods she could not quite shake the suspicion that somewhere amid this wilderness of insanities were gems she could profit by-knowledge of the Art, knowledge of the lad-if only she could find them. But it became increasingly clear that she might very well have passed over them already, their form so garbled or their code so dense she'd failed to recognize them for what they were. At last, in the middle of the afternoon of the fifth day, she told herself: If you do this much longer you'll be as crazy as they are. Turn it off, woman. Just turn the dwnn thing off.

She flicked back to the file list, and was about to kill the machines when one of the names caught her eye.

The Ride Is Over, it read.

Perhaps she'd passed over these four words before, and not recognized them, but now they rang bells. The Ride Is Over had been the headline Grillo had wanted for his last report from Palomo Grove; he'd told her later she could use it for a screenplay if she wanted, as long as the movie was cheap and opportunistic. It was probably just a coincidence but she called up the file anyway, determined it would be the last. Her heart jumped at the words that appeared on the screen.

Tesla, Grillo had written, I hope it's you out there. But whether it is or it isn, t, I guess it doesn't matter much now, because if you're reading this-whoever you are-I'm dead.

It was the last thing she'd expected to find, but now that it was there in front of her, she wasn't so surprised. He'd known he was dying, after all, and though he'd always hated farewells, even of the casual variety, he was still a journalist to the bone. Here was his final report then: intended for a readership of one.

It's the middle of June right now, he'd written, and the last couple of weeks I've been feeling like shit. The doc says things are movingfaster than he's seen before. He wants me to go in for tests, but I told him I'd prefer to use the time working. He asked me on what, and of course I couldn't tell him about the Reef so I lied and said I was writing a book.

(It's strange. While I'm typing this I'm imagining you sitting there, Tes, reading it, hearing my voice in your head.) She could; she could hear it loud and clear.

I tried to write once, when Ifirst got the bad news. I'm not sure it was ever going to be a book, but I did try and put down a few memories, to see how they looked on the page. And you know what? they were clich@s, all of them. What I remembered was real enough-the feel of my mother's cheek, the smell of my dad's cigars; summers in Chapel Hill, North Carolina; a couple of Christmases in Maine with my grandmother-but there was nothing that you couldn't find in a million autobiographies.

It didn't make the memories any less meaningful to me, but it did make the idea of writing them down redundant.

So I thought.- Okay, maybe I'll write about the things that happened in the Grove. Not just what went on at Coney Eye, but about Ellen (I think of her a lot these days) and her kid, Philip (I don't remember if you met him or not), and Fletcher in the mall But that plan went to shit just as quickly. I'd be writing away and some report would come in from Buttfuck, Ohio, about angels or UFOs or skunks speaking in tongues, and when I got back to what I'd been writing the words were like week-old cold cuts. they just lay there, stale and tasteless and gray.

I was so pissed with myself. Here was me, the wordsmith, writing about something that had actually happened in the real world, and I couldn't make it sing; not the way these crazies who were putting down whatever wild shit came into their heads could do it.

Then I began to see why Tesla leaned forward at this juncture, as if she and Grillo were debating over a couple of glasses of vodka, and now he was getting to the crux of his argument.

"Tell me, Grillo," she murmured to the screen, "tell me why."

I wouldn't let the truth go. I wanted to describe things just the way they'd happened (no, that's not right,- the way I remembered them happening), so I killed what I was doing trying to be precise, instead of letting itfly, letting it sing. Letting it be ragged and contradictory, like stories have to be.

What really happened in Palomo Grove doesn't matter anymore. What matters is the stories people tell about it.

I'm thinking while I'm writing this: None of it makes much sense, it's justfragments. Maybe you can connect it up for me, Tes.

That's part of it, isn't it? Connecting everything.

I know if I couldjust let my mother's skin and Christmas in Maine and Ellen and Fletcher and the talking skunks and every damn thing I everfelt or saw be part of the same story and called that story me, instead of always looking for something separate from the things I've fel@ or seen, it wouldn't matter that I was going to die soon, because I'd be part of what was going on and on. Connecting and connecting.

The way I see it now, the story doesn't give a ihit if you're real or not, alive or not. All the story wants is to be told. And I guess in the end, that's what I want too.

Will you do thatfor me, Tes?

Will you make me part of what you tell? Always?

She wiped the tears from her eyes, smiling at the screen, as though Grillo was leaning back in his chair, sipping his vodka, waiting for her to reply.

"You've got it, Grillo," she said, reaching out to touch the glass. "So she added, "what happens next?" The age-old question.

There was a breathless moment while the glass trembled beneath her fingers. Then she knew.

September had been a month of recuperation for Harry. He'd made a project of tidying his tiny office on Forty-fifth Street; touched base with friends he hadn't seen all summer; even attempted to reignite a few amorous fuses around town. In this last he was completely unsuccessful: Only one of the women for whom he left messages returned his call, and only to remind him that he'd borrowed fifty bucks.

He was not unhappy then, to find a girl in her late teens at his apartment door that Tuesday night in early October. She had a ring through her left nostril, a black dress too short for her health, and a package.

"Are you Harry?" she said.

I 11

'Yep.

"I'm Sabina. I got something for you." The parcel was cylindrical, four feet long, and wrapped in brown paper. "You want to take it from me?" she said.

"What is it?"

"I'm going to drop it-2' the girl said, and let the thing go. Harry caught it before it hit the floor. "It's a present."

"Who from?"

"Could I maybe get a Coke or something?" the girl said, looking past Harry into the apartment.

The word sure was barely out of Harry's mouth and Sabina was pushing past him. What she lacked in manners she made up for in curves, he thought, watching her head on down the hall. He could live with that.

"the kitchen's on your right," he told her, but she headed straight past it into the living room.

"Got anything stronger?" she said. "There's probably some beers in the fridge," he replied, slamming the front door with his foot and following her into the living room.

"Beer gives me gas," she said.

Harry dropped the package in the middle of the floor. "I've got some rum, I think."

"Okay," she shrugged, as though Harry had been the one to suggest it and she really wasn't that interested.

He ducked into the kitchen to find the liquor, digging through the cupboard for an uncracked glass.

"You're not as weird as I thought you'd be," Sabina said to him meanwhile. "This place is nothing special."

"What were you expecting?"

"Something more crazy, you know. I heard you get into some pretty sick stuff."

"Who told you that?"

'Fed."

"You knew Ted?"

"I more than knew him," she said, appearing at the kitchen door. She was trying to look sultry, but her face, despite the kohl and the rouge and the blood-red lip gloss was too round and childlike to carry it off.

"When was this?" Harry asked her. "Oh... three years ago. I was fourteen when I met him." "That sounds like Ted."

"We never did anything I didn't want to do," she said, accepting the glass of rum from Harry. "He was always real nice to me, even when he was going through lousy times."

"He was one of the good guys," Harry said.

"We should drink to him," Sabina replied.

"Sure." they tapped glasses. "Here's to Ted."

"Wherever he is," Sabina added. "Now, are you going to open your present?"

It was a painting. Ted's great work, in fact, DAmour in Wyckoff Street, taken from its frame, stripped off its support and somewhat ignominiously tied up with a piece of frayed string.

"He wanted you to have it," Sabina explained, as Harry pulled back the sofa to unroll the painting fully. The canvas was as powerful as Harry remembered. The seething color field in which the street was painted, the impasto from which his features had been carved, and of course that detail Ted had been so proud to point out to Harry in the gallery: the foot, the heel, the snake writhing as it was trodden lifeless. "I guess maybe if somebody had offered him ten grand for it," Sabina was saying,

"he would have given you something else. But nobody bought it, so I thought I'd come and give it to YOU."

"And the gallery didn't mind?"

"they don't know it's gone," Sabina said. "they put it in storage with all the other pictures they couldn't sell. I guess they figured they'd find buyers sooner or later, but people don't want pictures like Ted's on their walls. they want stupid stuff." She had come to Harry's shoulder as she spoke. He could smell a light honey-scent off her. "If you like," she said, "I could come back and make a new support for the canvas. Then you could hang it over your bed-" she slid him a sly look,

"or wherever."

Harry didn't want to offend the girl. No doubt she'd done as Ted would have wished, bringing the picture here, but the notion of waking to an image of Wyckoff Street every morning wasn't particularly comforting.

"I can see you want to think about it," Sabina said, and leaning across to Harry laid a quick kiss beside his mouth. "I'll stop by sometime next week, okay?" she said. "You can tell me then." She finished her rum and handed the empty glass to Harry. "It was really nice meeting you," she said, suddenly and sweetly fon-nal. She was slowly retreating to the door as if waiting for a sign from Harry that she should stay.

He was tempted. But he knew he wouldn't think much of himself in the morning if he took advantage. She was seventeen, for God's sake. By Ted's standards that was practically nile, of course. But there was a part of Harry that still anted seventeen year olds to be dreaming of love, not being ed with rum and coaxed into bed by men twice their age.

She seemed to realize that nothing was going to come of this, and gave him a slightly quizzical smile. "You really aren't the way I thought you'd be," she remarked, faintly disappointed.

"I guess Ted didn't know me as well as he thought he did." "Oh it wasn't just Ted who told me about you," she said. "Who else?"

"Everyone and no one," she replied with a lazy shrug. She was at the door now. "See you, maybe," she said, and opening the door was away, leaving him wishing he'd kept her company a little longer.

Later, as he trailed to the john at three in the morning, he halted in front of the painting, and wondered if Mimi Lomax's house on Wyckoff Street was still standing. The question was still with him when he woke the following morning, and as he walked to his office, and as he sorted through his outstanding paperwork. It didn't matter either way, of course, except to the extent that the question kept coming between him and his business. He knew why: He was afraid. Though he'd seen terrors in Palomo Grove, and come face to face with the lad itself in Everville, the specter of Wyckoff Street had never been properly exercised. Perhaps it was time to do so now: to deal once and for all with that last corner of his psyche still haunted by the stale notion of an evil that coveted human souls.

He turned the notion over through the rest of the day, and through the day following that, knowing in his gut he would have to go sooner or later, or the subject would only gain authority over him.

On Friday morning, he got to his office to find that somebody had mailed him a mununified monkey's head, elaborately mounted on what looked suspiciously like a length of human bone. It was not the first time he'd had such items come his way-some of them warnings, some of them talismans from well-wishers, some of them simply illadvised gifts-but today the presence of this object, its aroma stinging his sinuses, seemed to Harry a goad, to get him on his way. What are you afraid of9 the gaping thing seemed to demand. Things die, and spoil, but took, I'm laughing.

He boxed the thing up, and was about to deposit it in the trash when some superstitious nerve in him twitched. Instead he left it where it lay in the middle of his desk and, telling it he'd be back soon, he headed off to Wyckoff Street.

It was a cold day. Not yet New York-bitter (that was probably a month, six weeks from now), but cold enough to know that there'd be no more shirtsleeve days this side of winter. He didn't mind. The summer months had always brought him the most trouble-this summer had been no exception- and he was relieved to feel things running down around him.

So what if the trees shed, and the leaves rotted and the nights drew in? He needed the sleep.

He found that much of the neighborhood around Wyckoff Street had changed drastically since he'd last been here, and the closer he got the more he dared hope his destination would be so much rubble.

Not so. Wyckoff Street remained almost exactly as it had been ten years before, the houses as gray and grim as ever. Rock might melt in Oregon, and the sky crack like a dropped egg, but here earth was earth and sky was sky and whatever lived between was not going to be skipping anywhere soon.

He wandered along the littered sidewalk to Mimi Lomax's house, expecting to find it in a state of dilapidation. Again, not so. Its pres-ent owner was plainly attentive. The house had a new roof, a new chimney, new eaves. The door he knocked on had been recently painted.

There was no reply at first, though he heard the murmur of voices from inside. He knocked again, and this time, after a delay of a minute or so, the door was opened a sliver and a woman in late middle-age, her face taut and sickly, stared out at him with red-fimmed eyes.

"Are you him?" she said. Her voice was frail with exhaustion. "Are you De Amour?"

"I'm D'Amour, yes." Harry was already uneasy. He could smell the woman from where he stood; sour sweat dirt. "How do you know who I am?" he asked her.

"She said-2' the woman replied, opening the door a little wider.

"Who said?" "She's got my Stevie upstairs. She's had him there for ffim days." Tears were pouring down the woman's cheeks as she spoke.

She made no effort to wipe them away. "She said she wouldn't let him go till you got here." She stepped back from the door. "You gotta make her let him go. He's all I got."

Harry took a deep breath, and stepped into the house. At the far end of the hallway stood a woman in her early twenties. Long black hair, huge eyes shining in the gloom.

'This is Stevie's sister. Loretta."

The young woman clutched her rosary, and stared at Harry as though he was an accomplice of whatever was upstairs.

The older woman closed the front door and came to Harry's side. "How did it know you were coming here?" she murmured.

"I don't know," Harry replied.

"It said if we tried to leave-2' Loretta said, her voice barely a whisper, "it'd kill Stevie."

"Why do you say it?"

"Because it's not human." She @ up the flight, her face fearful. "It's from HeH," she. 'Vm't you smell it?'

There was certainly a foul smell. This wasn't the fishmarket stench of the Zyem Carasophia's chwnber. This was shit and fire.

Heart cavorting, Harry went to the bottom of the stairs. "You stay down here," he told the two women, and started up the flight, stepping over the spot on the fifth stair where Father Hess's head had been resting when he expired. There was no noise from upstairs, and none now from below. He climbed in silence, knowing the creature awaiting him was listening for every creaking stair. Rather than let it think he was attempting to approach in silence and failing, he broke the hush himself.

"Coming, ready or not," he said.

The reply came immediately. And he knew within a syllable what thing this was.

"Harry-" said Lazy Susan. "Where have you been? No, don't tell me. You've been seeing the Boss Man, haven't you?"

While the demon talked, Harry reached the top of the stairs and crossed the landing to the door. The paint was blistered.

"You want a job, Harry?" Lazy Susan went on. "I don't blame you. Times are about to get real bad."

The door was already open an inch. Harry pushed it, lightly, and it swung wide. The room beyond was almost completely dark, the drapes drawn, the lamp on the floor so encrusted with caked excrement it barely glimmered. The bed itself had been stripped down to the mattress, which in turn had been burned black. On it lay a youth, dressed in a filthy T-shirt and boxer shorts, face-down.

"Stevie?" Harry said.

The boy didn't move.

"He's asleep right now," said Lazy Susan's curdled voice from the darkness beyond the bed. "He's had a busy time."

"Why don't you just let the kid go? It's me you want." "You overestimate your appeal, D'Amour. Why would I want a fucked-up soul like yours when I could have this pure little thing?"

"Then why did you bring me here?"

"I didn't. Sure, Sabina may have planted the thought in your head. But you came of your own accord."

"Sabina's a friend of yours?"

"She'd probably prefer mistress. Did you fuck her?"

"No.

"Ali, DAmour!" the Nomad said, exasperated. "After all the trouble I went to getting her wet. You're not turning queer on me, are you? No. You're too straight for your own good. You're boring, D'Amour. Boring, boring@'

"Well maybe I should just piss off home," Harry said, turning back to the door.

There was a rush of motion behind him; he heard the bedsprings creak, and Stevie let out a little moan. "Wait," the Nomad hissed. "Don't you ever turn your back on me."

He glanced over his shoulder. The creature had shimn-fied up onto the bed and now had its bone and muck body poised over its victim. It was the color of the filth on the lamp, but wet, its too-naked anatomy full of peristaltic inotions. "Why's it always shit?" Harry said.

The Nomad cocked its head. Whatever features were upon it all resembled wounds. "Because shit's all we have, Harry, until we're returned to glory. It's all God allows us to play with. Maybe a little fire, once in a while, as long as He isn't looking. Speaking of fire, I saw Father Hess the other day, burning in his cell. I told him I might see you@'

Harry shook his head. "It doesn't work, Nomad," he said. "What doesn't work?"

"Me fallen angel routine. I don't believe it any more." He started towards the bed. "You know why? I saw some of your relatives in Oregon. In fact, I almost got crucified by a couple of them. Brutish little fucks like you, except they didn't have any of your pretensions. they were just in it for the blood and the shit." He kept approaching the bed as he talked, far from certain what the creature would do. It had disemboweled Hess with a few short strokes and he had no reason to believe it had lost the knack. BuL stripped of its phoney autobiography, what was it? A thug with a few days' training in an abattoir.

"Stop right there," the creature said when Harry was a yard from the bed. It was shuddering from head to foot. "If you come any closer, I'll kill Little Stevie. And I'll throw him down the stairs, just like Hess."

Harry raised his hands in mock-surrender. "Okay," he said, "this is as close as I get. I just wanted to check the fainily resemblance. You know, it's uncanny."

The Nomad shook his head. "I was an angel, D'Amour it said, its voice troubled. "I remember Heaven. I do. @s though it were yesterday. Clouds and light and-2' "And the seat'

"Me sea?"

"Quiddity." "No!" it yelled. "I was in Heaven. I remember God's heart, beating, beating, all the time@'

"Maybe you were born on a beach."

"I've warned you once," the creature said. "I'll kill the boy-,,

"And what will that prove? That you're a fallen angel? Or that you're the little bully I say you are?"

The Nomad raised its hands to its wretched face. "Ohh, you're clever, D'Amour," it sighed. "You're very clever. But so was Hess." The creature parted its fingers, exhaling its sewer breath. "And look what happened to him."

"Hess wasn't clever," Harry said soffly. "I loved him and I respected him, but he was deluded. You're pretty much alike, now that I think about it." He leaned an inch or two closer to the entity. "You think you fell from Heaven. He thought he was serving it. You believed the same things, in the end. It was stupid to kill him, Nomad. It's not left you with very much."

"I've still got you," the creature replied. "I could fuck with your head until the Crack of Doom."

"Nah," Harry said, standing upright. "I'm not afraid of you any longer. I don't need prayers-2'

"Oh don't you?" it growled.

"I don't need a crucifix. I just need the eyes in my head. And what I see-what I see is an anorexic little shit-eater."

At this, it launched itself at him, shrieking, all the wounds in its head wide. Harry retreated across the filthy floor, avoiding its whining talons by inches, until his back was flat against the wall. Then it closed on him, flinging its arms up at his head. He raised his hands to protect his eyes, but the creature didn't want them, at least not yet. Instead it dug its fingers into the flesh at the back of his neck, driving its spiked feet into the wall to either side of his body.

"Now again, D'Amour-" the creature said. Harry felt the blood pour down his spine. Heard his vertebrae crack. "Am I an angel?" Its face was inches from Harry's, its voice issuing from all the holes at once. "I want an answer, D'Amour. It's very important to me. I was in Heaven once, wasn't I? Admit it."

Very, very slowly, Harry shook his throbbing head.

The creature sighed. "Oh, D'Amour," it said, uprooting one of its hands from the back of Harry's neck and bringing it round to stroke his larynx. The growl had gone from its voice. It was no longer the Nomad; it was Lazy Susan. "I'll ss you," it said, its fingers breaking the skin of Harry's at. "There hasn't been a night when I haven't thought of "-its tone was sultry now-"here, in the dark together."

On the bed behind the creature, the boy moaned.

"Hush... " Lazy Susan said.

But Stevie was beyond being silenced. He wanted the comfort of a prayer. "Hail Mary, full of grace-" he began.

The creature glanced round at him, the Nomad surfacing again to shriek for the boy to shut the fuck up. As it did so, Harry caught hold of the hand at his neck, lacing his fingers with the talons. Then he threw his weight forward. The Nomad's feet were loosed from the wall and the two bodies,. locked together, stumbled into the middle of the room.

Instantly, the creature drove its fingers deeper into Harry's nape. Blinded by pain, he swung around, determined that wherever they fell it wouldn't be on top of the boy. they reeled wildly, round and round, until Harry lost his balance and fell forward, carrying the Nomad ahead of him.

Its body struck the charred door, which splintered under the combined weight of their bodies. Through his tear-filled eyes Harry glimpsed the misbegotten face in front of him, its hands slack with shock. Then they were out onto the landing. It was bright after the murk of the bedroom. For the Nomad, painfully so. It convulsed in Harty's embrace, hot phlegm spurting from its maws. He seized the moment to wrest its talons from his neck, then their momentum carried them against the banisters, which cracked but did not break, and over they went.

It was a fall of perhaps ten feet, the Nomad under Harry, shrieking still. they hit the stairs, and rolled and rolled, finally coming to rest a few steps from the bottom.

The first thing Harry thought was: God, it's quiet. Then he opened his eyes. He was cheek to cheek with the creature, its sweat stinging his skin. Reaching out for the spattered banister he started to haul himself to his feet, his left arm, shoulder, ribs and neck all paining him, but none so badly he could not enjoy the spectacle at his feet.

The Nomad was in extremis, its body-which was even more pitiful and repulsive by the light of day than in the room above-a mass of degenerating tissue.

"Are... you... there?" the creature said.

It had lost its growl and its silkiness too, as though the selves it had pretended had flickered out along with its sight.

"I'm here," Harry replied.

It tried to raise one of its hands, but failed. "Are you... dying?" it wanted to know. "Not today," Harry said softly.

"That's not right," the creature said. "We have to go together. I... am... you... "

"You haven't got much time," Harry told it. "Don't waste what you've got with that crap."

"But it's true," the thing went on. "I am... I am you and... you are love... "

Harry thought of Ted's painting; of the snake beneath his heel. Clinging to the banister, he raised his foot.

"Be quiet," he said.

The creature ignored him. "You are love it said again. "And love is.

.. "

Harry laid his heel upon its head. "I'm warning you," he said. "Love is what...

He didn't warn it again, but ground his foot down into its suppurating face as hard as his weary body would allow. It was hard enough. He felt its muck cave in beneath his heel, layers of wafer-bone and ooze dividing under his weight. Small spasms ran out along the creature's limbs to its bloodied fingertips. Then, quite suddenly, it ceased, its schtick unfinished.

In the hallway below, Loretta was murmuring the prayer her brother had begun above.

"Hail Mary, full of grace, the L4ord is with thee, blessed art thou among women-"

It sounded pretty to Harry's ears, after the shrieks and the threats.

"And blessed be the fruit of thy womb, Jesus-"

It would not turn death away, of course. It would not save the innocent from suffering. But prettiness was no insignificant quality, not in this troubled world. While he listened he pulled his heel out of the Nomad's face. The creature's matter, stripped of the will that had shaped it, was already losing distinction and running off down the stairs.

Five steps to the bottom, Harry saw. Just like Hess.

The victory had taken its toll. In addition to his lacerated neck and punctured throat Harry had a broken collarbone, four cracked ribs, a fractured right arm, and mild concussion. As for Stevie, who had been the Nomad's hostage for three days, his traumas were more psychological than physical. they would take some time to heal, if they ever did, but the first step on that journey was made the day after the creature's death. The family moved out of the house on Wyckoff Street, leaving it to the mercy of gossip. This time there would be no attempt to redeem the house. Untenanted, it' would fall into disrepair through the winter months, at what some thought an uncanny speed. Nobody would ever occupy it again, One mystery remained unsolved. Why had the creature plotted to bring him back to Wyckoff Street in the first place? Had it begun to doubt its own mythology and arranged a rematch with an old enemy to confirm its sense of itself'.) Or had it simply been bored one September day and taken it into its head to play the old game of temptation and slaughter for the sheer hell of it?

The answer to those questions would, Harry assumed, join the long list of things he would never know.

As for Ted's magnum opus, after a few days of indecision Harry elected to hang it in the living room. Given that he was presently one-handed, this took him the better part of two hours to accomplish, but once it was up-the canvas nailed directly to the wall-it looked better than it had in the gallery. Unbounded by a frame, Ted's vision seemed to bleed out across the wall.

Of the lovely Sabina, who had presumably been obeying the Nomad's instructions when she'd delivered the painting, there was no further sign. But Harry had two new deadbolts put on the front door anyway, just in case.

A little less than a fortnight after the endgame in Wyckoff Street, he got a call out of the blue from a fretful Raul.

"I need you to get on a plane, Harry. Whatever you're doing-"

"Where are you?"

"I'm in Omaha. I came looking for Tesia."

"And?"

"I found her. But... not quite the way I thought I would."

"Is she okay?" Harry said. There was a silence down the line. "Raul?"

"Yeah, I'm here. I don't know whether she's okay or not. You have to see for yourself.

"Is she at Grillo's place?"

"Yeah. I tracked her from L.A. She told her neighbors she was heading out to Nebraska. That's proof of insanity in Hollywood. How soon can you get out here?"

"I'll catch a flight today, if I can find one. Will you pick me up at the airport? I'm not in the best of shape."

"What happened?"

"I trod in some shit. But it's dead now."

Phoebe didn't tell Jarrieffa that she knew the identity of their visitor. It was too painful, for one thing, and for another she was afraid the result would be to scare the woman and her children out of the house. She certainly didn't want that; not just for their sakes, but for her own. She had become used to their mess and their ruckus, and it would make the recognition of what she'd done all the more unbearable if she was left alone in the O'Connell mansion as a consequence.

Jarrieffa had a lot of questions, of course, and she was less than satisfied with some of the answers Phoebe furnished. But as time slipped by, and the children's nightmares and spontaneous bursts of tears diminished in frequency, the house returned to its former rhythm, and whatever doubts Jarrieffa still had she kept to herself.

Phoebe, meanwhile, had begun a systematic search of the city, looking for some clue as to Joe's whereabouts. Assuming he had not simply evaporated upon departing the house (this she doubted; rudimentary he'd been, but still solid), his escape through the streets could not, she reasoned, have gone completely unnoticed. Even in this city, the streets of which boasted more strange forms and physiognomies with every new vessel that dropped anchor, Joe's appearance had been to say the least noteworthy. Somebody must have seen something.

She soon came to regret that she'd been so tardy warming up relations with her neighbors. Though most of them were reasonably polite to her when she came asking questions, they were all wary of her. As far as they were concerned she remained an outsider, and she feared that even if they had answers to her questions they would not be forthcoming.

Several days in a row she returned to the O'Connell house frustrated and exhausted, having traipsed from door to door (on some streets from construction site to construction site) asking for information, the parameters of her search steadily expanding, along with her sense of desperation. She lost her appetite and her sense of humor. Some days, having skipped two consecutive meals, she'd wander the streets lighthearted and close to tears, calling Joe's name like a crazy woman. Once, finding herself at the end of the day lost and too weary to discover a way home, she slept in the street. On another occasion, wandering into the middle of some territorial dispute between two families, she almost had her throat cut. But she continued to journey out every day, hoping for some clue that would eventually lead her to him.

As it turned out, the sliver of information she'd been searching for came from a source close to hand. Preparing to step into her bath one day, having walked the city for twelve hours or more, there was a knock on her bedroom door, and upon her invitation Enko entered, asking to speak to her for a few moments. He had always been the least friendly member of Jarrieffa's brood; a gangly boy, even by adolescent stan- dards, his face human but for the symmetrical patches of mottling upon his brow and neck, and the vestigial gills that ran from the middle of his cheeks down to his neck. "I've got a friend," he explained. "His name's Vip Luemu. He lives down the street two blocks. The house with the boarded up windows?"

"I know it," Phoebe said. "He told me you'd been round asking about... you know, that thing that was here."

"Yes I was."

"Well... Yip knew something about it, but his mother told him not to speak to you."

"That was neighborly," Phoebe remarked.

"It's not you," Enko replied. "Well... it is and it isn't.

It's mainly what happened here, you know, in the old days, and with the ships coming back in again, they think you're going to start up business like Miss O'Connell."

"Business?" said Phoebe.

"Yes. You know. The women."

"I'm not following this, Enko."

"the whores," the boy said, the mottling on his face darkening.

"WhoresT' said Phoebe. "Are you telling me this house... used to be a brothel?"

"The best. That's what Vip's father says. People came from all over." Phoebe pictured Maeve, sitting in regal splendor amid her pillows and her billet-doux, opining on the imbecility of love. And no wonder. The woman had been a madam. Love wasn't good for business.

"You could do me a great service," Phoebe said, "if you'd tell Vip to spread the word that I have no intention of reopening this house for business any time soon."

"I'll do that."

"Now... you said he knew something?"

Enko nodded. "He heard his father talking about a misamee that was seen down at the harbor."

"Misamee?"

"Oh, that's a word the sailors use. It means something they find out at sea that's not really made yet."

Half-dreamed, she thought. Like my Joe; my misamee Joe. "Enko, thank you."

"No trouble," the boy replied, turning to go. Hand on the door, he glanced back. "You know, Musnakaff wasn't my father."

"Yes, I had heard."

"He was my father's cousin. Anyway, he told all about how he used to go out and find women for Miss O'Connell." "I can imagine," Phoebe said.

"He explained everything. Where to go. What to say. S@'

Enko halted and stared at his shoes. "So if I ever go back into business@' Phoebe said.

The boy beamed.

"I'll bear you in mind."

She let the bathwater go cold, and began to get dressed again, putting on several layers of clothing against the wind, which had been bitter the last couple of days and was always keener close to the water. Then she went to the kitchen, filled up one of Maeve's silver liquor flasks with moumingberry juice, and headed down to the harbor, thinking as she went that if she failed to find Joe after a year or so, she'd reopen the brothel just to spite the neighbors who'd given her so little help, and like Maeve grow old and sour in luxury, profiting from lovelessness.

As Raul had promised, he was waiting at Eppley Airport, though at first Harry failed to recognize him. He'd warmed up the somewhat eerie pallor of his host body with a little pancake, and was sporting a fancy pair of tinted glasses to conceal his silvery pupils. Covering his bald pate, a baseball cap. The ensemble wasn't particularly fetching, but it allowed him to move unnoticed through the crowds.

On the way back to Grillo's house, with Raul tucked behind the wheel of the antiquated Ford convertible (which he confessed he had no license to drive), they exchanged accounts of their recent adventures. Harry told Raul about all that had happened in Wyckoff Street, and Raul reciprocated by telling of the journey he'd made back to the Misi6n de Santa Catfina, on the Baja Peninsula, where Fletcher had first discovered and synthesized the Nuncio.

"I built a shrine up there a long time ago," he said, "which I tended till Testa found me. I was sure it would have disappeared. But no. It was still there. The village women still go up to the ruins to pray and ask Fletcher to intercede if their children are sick. It's quite touching. I saw one or two women I knew, but of course they didn't know me. There was one woman though@od knows she must be ninety if she's a day-and I did go seek her out and tell her who I. She's blind now, and a little crazy, but she swore to me 'd seen him, the day before she lost her sight."

"You mean Fletcher?"

"I mean Fletcher. She said he was standing on the edge of the cliff, staring up at the sun. He used to do diat@' "And you think he's still up there?"

"Stranger things are true," Raul pointed out. "We both know that."

"The walls are getting thinner, right?" Harry said. "I'd say so." they drove on in silence for a while. "I thought I'd. maybe make another pilgrimage," Raul said after a minute or so, "while I'm here in Omaha."

"Let me guess. The Dead-letters Office."

"If it's still standing," Raul said. "It's probably a deeply uninteresting piece of architecture, but we'd neither of us be here if it hadn't been built."

"You believe that?"

"Oh, I'm sure the Art would have found somebody to use if it hadn't been Jaffe. But we might never have known anything about it. We could have been like them"-he nodded out through the window at Omaha's citizenry, going about their business@'thinking what you see's what you get."

"Do you ever wish it were?" Harry asked him.

"I was born an ape, Harry," Raul replied. "I know what it's like to evolve." He chuckled. "Let me tell you, it's wonderful."

"And that's what this is all about?" Harry said. "Evolving?"

"I think so. We're born to rise. to see more. to know more. Maybe to know everything one day." He halted the car outside a large, gloomy house. "Which brings us back to Tesia," he said, and led Harry up the overgrown driveway where Tesla's bike was parked, to the front door.

The afternoon was drawing on, and the house was even gloomier inside than out, its walls bare, its air damp.

"Where is she?" Harry asked Raul, struggling out of his jacket.

"Let me give you a hand."

"I can do it," Harry said, impatient now. "Just take me to Tesla, will you?"

Raul nodded, his mouth tight, and ushered Har7y through to the back of the house. "We have to be careful," he said, as they came to a closed door. "Whatever's going on in here, I think it's volatile."

With that, he opened the door. The room was packed to capacity with all the paraphernalia of Grillo's beloved Reef, the sight of which put Harry in mind of Nonna's little sanctum, with its thirty screens busily keeping lost souls at bay. Here, he knew, the reverse process was at work. Here the lost and the crazy found refuge; a place to unburden themselves of all that obsessed them. Their reports were on the screens now, scrolling furiously. And sitting in front of them, her eyes closed, Testa.

"nis is how she was when I got here," Raul said. "In case you're wondering, she's breathing, but it's very slow." Harry took a step towards her, but Raul checked him. "Be careful," he said.

.'Why?"

"When I tried to get close to her I felt some kind of energy field."

"I don't feel anything," Harry said, advancing another step. As he did so something grazed his face, oh so lightly, like the tremulous wall of a bubble. He made to retreat, but he was too slow. In one paradoxical moment the bubble seemed to suck him in and burst. The room vanished, and he flew like a bullet fired into the blaze of a scarlet sun, its color pure beyond expression. A moment there, and he was gone, out the other side and into another, this one blue; and on, into a yellow, then green, then purple. And as he traveled, sun succeeding sun, vistas began to open to left and right of him, above and below, receding from him to the limit of his sight. Forms erupted on every side, stealing their incandescence from the suns he was piercing, the blaze of which was retreating now, as the forms claimed his devotion. they came at him from every direction, bombarding him with images in such numbers his mind failed to grasp a single one. He started to panic as the assault intensified, fearing his sanity would abandon him if he didn't find a rock in this maelstrom.

And then, Tesla's voice: "Harry?"

The sound fixed a vision for an instant. He saw a scene of vivid particulars. A patch of scarred ocher ground. A hole and a bitch mutt sitting beside it, chewing at her rump. A

hand with bitten fingernails emerging from the hole, tossing a shard of pottery out onto the cloth laid beside it. And Tesla-or a fragment of her-somewhere beyond the hole and the hand and the mutt.

"Thank God," Harry said, but he'd spoken too soon. The picture slid away, and he was off again, yelling for Testa as he flew. "it Is okay," she said, "hold on."

Again her voice pulled him up short. Another scene. More particulars. Dusk, this time, and distant hills. A wooden shack in a field of swaying grass, and a woman running towards him with a bawling baby in her arms. Behind her, three dark, diminutive creatures in eager pursuit, their heads huge, their eyes golden. The woman was sobbing in terror as she fled, but the child was weeping for very different reasons, its skinny arms reaching back towards the pursuers. And now, as the babe turned to beat at its mother's head, Harry saw why. Though it appeared to be a human child, its eyes were also golden.

"What's happening here?" Harry said.

"Anybody's guess," Testa replied. As she spoke he saw another piece of her in the vicinity of the shack. "It's all part of the Reef."

And now, as the child started to slip from its mother's arms, the scene slid away like the first, and on he flew, his mind starting to snatch hold of some of the dramas he was piercing. Never more than a piece-a flock of birds in ice, a coin bleeding on the ground, somebody laughing in a burning chair-but enough to know that every one of these innumerable images was part of some greater scheme.

"Amazing-" he breathed.

"Isn't it?" Testa said, and again her voice brought him to a halt. A city, this time. A lowery sky, and from it flecks of silvery light dropping lightly, like mirrored feathers. On the sidewalks below, people went about their business blind to the sight, except for one upturned face: an old man, pointing and hollering.

"What am I seeing?" Harry said.

"Stories... " Testa replied, and hearing her, Harry glimpsed another piece of her mosaic, in the crowd. "That's what Grillo gathered here. Hundreds of thousands of stories.

The street was slipping. "I'm losing you@' Harry warned.

"Just let go," Tesla replied. "I'll catch up with you somewhere else."

He did as she instructed. The street fled, and he moved on at breath-snatching speed while the stories continued to fly at him from all directions. Again, he caught only glimpses. But now he had some way to interpret the sights, however brief. There were epics and chamber pieces here; domestic dramas and quests to the end of the world; Old Testament splendors and nursery-tale terrors.

"I'm not sure I can take much more," Harry said. "I feel like I'm going to lose my mind."

"You'll find another," Tesla quipped, and again he stopped dead in the midst of a tale.

This time, however, there was something different about it. This was a story he knew. "Recognize it?" Tesla said.

Of course. It was Everville. The crossroads, Saturday afternoon, with the sun pouring down on a scene of farce and lunacy. The band on their butts; Buddenbaum digging for glory; the air laced with visions of whores. It was not the way Harry remembered it exactly, but what the hell? It held its own with anything he'd witnessed so far.

"Am I here?" he asked.

"You are now," Tesla replied.

"What?"

"Grillo was wrong, calling it a reef " Tesla went on. "A reefs dead This is still growing. Stories don't die, Harry-"

"they change?"

"Exactly. Your seeing all this enriches it,' evolves it. Nothing's ever lost. That's what I'm learning. "

"Are you going to stay?" Harry said, watching the drama at the crossroads continue to elaborate.

"For a while," she said. "There are answers here, if I can get down to the root. "

She reached out towards Harry as she spoke, and he saw that the fragments he'd glimpsed on the way here were before him still. Part of her was carved from a patch of ocher ground, and part from the hole dug there. Part resembled the shack in the field, and part the golden-eyed child. Part was made of mirror-flakes, part was the old man, pointing skyward.

And part, of course, was made from that sunlit afternoon, and from Owen Buddenbaum, who would be at the crossroads raging for as long as stories were told.

Finally, though he could not see this sliver, he knew she was also made from him, who was in this story somewhere.

I am you... the Nomad murmured in his head.

"Do you understand any of this?" Tesla asked him.

"I'm beginning to."

"It's like love, Harry. No; that's not right. I think maybe. it is love. "

She smiled at her own comprehension. And as she smiled the contact between them was broken. He flew from her, back through the blazing colors, and was returned in the bursting of a bubble to the stale room he'd departed. Raul was there, waiting for him, trembling.

"God, D'Amour," he said, "I thought I'd lost you."

Harry shook his head. "It was touch and go for a moment there," he said. "I was visiting with Tesla. She was showing me around."

He looked at the body sitting in the chair in front of the monitors. It seemed suddenly redundant: the flesh, the bone. The true Tesla-perhaps the true Harry, perhaps the true world-was back where he'd come from, telling itself in the infinite branches of the story tree. "Will she be coming back?" Raul wanted to know.

"When she's got where she wants to go," Harry replied.

"And where's that?"

"Back to the beginning," Harry said. "Where else?"

I in That first trip down to the harbor proved fruitless; Phoebe found nobody who knew anything about the misamee. But on the second day her relentless questioning bore fruit. Yes, one of the Dock Road bar owners told her, he knew what she was talking about. Some creature in an agonized and unfinished state had indeed been seen down here several weeks before. In fact, if his memory served, some attempt had been made to corral the abomination, for fear it had murderous appetites. to his knowledge the creature had never been caught.

aps, he suggested, it had been driven back into the sea, which everybody had assumed it emerged. In which the tide had carried its misbegotten body away.

There was both good news here and bad. She had confirmation that she was at least searching in the right quarter of the city; that was the good. But the fact that Joe had not been sighted of late suggested that perhaps the bar owner's theory was correct, and he had indeed been lost to the waters. She now went in search of somebody who had been a member of the pursuit party, but as the days went by it became more and more difficult to keep track of her progress. There were new ships docking daily, from single masted vessels to the plethora of fishing boats that plied in and out of the harbor, leaving light and returning heavy with their catch. Often she found herself neglecting her inquiries and listening, half enchanted, to the talk exchanged by the sailors and the stevedores: stories of what lay out beyond the tranquil waters of the harbor, out in the wilds and wastes of the dream-sea.

She had heard of the Ephemeris of course, and from Musnakaff of Plethoziac and Trophett6. But there were far more than these; countries and cities whose names conjured glories. Some were real places (their goods being unloaded at the dock), others in the category of fables.

Into the former group went the island of Berger's Mantle, where crews were apparently lost all the time, preyed upon by a species so exquisite the victims died of disbelief. Into the latter went the city of Nilpallium, which had been founded by a fool, and which was ruled over-justly and well, so legend went-by its founder's dogs, who had devoured him upon his decease.

The story that most engaged her, however' was that of Kicaranka Rojandi. It was reputedly a tower of burning rock, which rose straight-sided out of the sea, climbing to a height of half a mile. The species that crawled and climbed upon it were not consumed by its flames, but had to constantly fling themselves down into the steaming waves to cool their bodies, only to begin the ascent afresh when they could bear to, desperate to court and fertilize their queen, who lived encased in flame at the very summit.

The more preposterous of these stories were a healthy, indeed vital, distraction from her misery, and the true ones were curiously encouraging, evidence as they were of how many miraculous states of being were plausible here. If the citizens of b'Kether Sabbat had the courage to live in an inverted pyramid, and the fire climbers of Kicaranka Rojandi the devotion to climb their tower, believing they would one day reach their queen, should she not keep looking for her misamee?

And then came the day of the storm. It had been predicted by the retired mariners along the quayside for some time: a tempest of notable ferocity that would have all manner of deepsea fish rising in shoals from their trenches. For those enterprising fisherman willing to risk their nets, their boats, and very possibly their lives in open waters, a haul of prodigious proportions was predicted.

Phoebe was wanning herself in front of the kitchen fire when the winds started to rise, the children sitting eating stew nearby, their mother kneading bread.

"I hear a window slamming," Jarrieffa said, as the first rain pattered on the kitchen sill, and hurried away to close it.

Phoebe stared into the flames, while the gusts whooped and howled in the chimney. It would be quite a spectacle down by the Dock Road, she suspected. Ships tossing at anchor and the sea throwing itself against the harbor wall. Who knew what a storm like this would drive up onto the shore?

She rose as she formed the thought. Who knew indeed?

"Jarrieffa?" she yelled, as she fetched her coat from the closet.

"Jarrieffa! I'm going out!"

The woman was coming down the stairs now, a look of concern on her face.

"In this weather?" she said.

"Don't worry. I'll be fine."

"Take Enko with you. It's cruel out there."

"No, Jarrieffa, I can stand a little rain. You just stay in the warm and bake your bread."

Still protesting that this was not a wise thing to be doing, Jarrieffa followed Phoebe to the door, and out onto the step.

"Go back inside," Phoebe told her. "I'll be back in a while."

Then she was off, into the deluge. It had cleared the streets as effectively as the lad. She encountered scarcely a soul as she made her way down through the warren of minor streets and back alleys that were by now as familiar to her feet as Main Street and Poppy Lane. The closer she got to the water, the less cover she had to shield her from the fury of the storm. By the time she reached the Dock Road she was leaning into the wind, and more than once had to grip a wall or railing to keep herself from being thrown off her feet.

The quayside and the decks of the ships were a good deal busier than the streets she'd come through, as crews labored to secure sails and lash down cargo. One of the single-masted vessels had slipped its mooring and as Phoebe watched it was dashed against the harbor wall. Its timbers splintered, and a number of its crew jumped into the water, which was frenzied. She didn't wait to see if the vessel sank, but hurried on, past the harbor and through the warehouse district adjacent to it, out onto the shore. The waves were tall and thunderous, the air so thick with spray and rain she could not see more than a dozen yards ahead of her. But the grim fury of the scene suited her mood. She stumbled over the dark, stick rocks, daring the waters to reach high enough to claim her, yelling Joe's name as she went. The gale snatched the syllable from her lips, of course, but she strode on doggedly, her tears mingling with the rain and the spume off the dream-sea.

At last her fatigue and her despair overcame her. She sank down onto the stones, soaked to the skin, her throat too hoarse and lungs too raw to call his name again.

Her extremities were numb with cold, her head throbbing. She raised her hands to her mouth to warm her fingers with her breath, and was thinking that if she didn't move soon she might very well freeze to death when she caught sight of a figure in the mist further along the beach. Somebody was approaching her. A man, his few clothes less than rags, his body a strange compendium of forms and hues. In places he was purplish in color, his skin scaly. In others he had small patches of almost silvery skin. But the core of him-die flesh around his eyes and his mouth, down his neck and across his chest and belly-was black. She started to rise, the name she had been yelling to the wind too much for her astonished lips'

It didn't matter. He had seen her; seen her with the eyes she herself had dreamed into being. He halted now, a few yards from her, a tiny smile on his face.

She could not hear his voice@e waves were too loud-but she knew the shape of her name when he spoke it.

"Phoebe... ?" Tentatively, she approached him, halving the distance between them, but not yet coming within reach of his arms. She was just a little afraid. Perhaps the rumors of murderous intent were true. If not, where had he found the pieces of flesh to finish his body?

"It is you, isn't it?" he said. She was close enough to catch his words now.

"It's me," she said.

"I thought maybe I'd lost my mind. Maybe I'd imagined it all."

"No," she said. "I dreamed you here, Joe."

Now it was he who approached, looking down at his hands. "You certainly put some flesh on me," he said. "But the spirit@' one of those hands went to his chesrt, "what's in here-that's me. The Joe you found out in the weeds."

"I was certain I dreamed you."

"You did. And I heard. And I came. But I'm not some fantasy, Phoebe. This is Joe." "So what happened to you?" she said. "Where did-2' "The rest of me come from?"

"Yes."

Joe turned his gaze towards the water. "Me 'shu. The spirit-pilots." Phoebe remembered Musnakaff s short lesson on that subject well enough: Pieces of the Creator, he'd said, or not. "I threw myself into the water, hoping I'd drown, but they found me. Surrounded me. Dreamed the rest of me into being." He raised his hand for her scrutiny. "As you can see," he said, "I think they put a little of their own nature into me while they were doing it." The limb was more strangely f@hioned than she'd first realized; the fingers webbed, the skin full of subtle ripples. "Does it offend you?"

"Lord, no... " she said. "I'm just grateful to have you back."

Now at last, she opened her arms and went to him. He gathered her to his body, which was warm despite the rain and spray, his embrace as fierce as hers.

"I still can't quite believe you followed me," he murmured.

"What else was I going to do?" she replied.

"You know there's no way back, don't you?"

"Why would we want to go?" she said.

they stayed there on the shore for a long while, talking sometimes, but mostly just cradling one another. they didn't make love. That was for another day. For many days, in fact. Now, just embraces, just kisses, just tenderness, until the storm had exhausted itself.

When they returned along the quay, several hours later, the heavens clearing, the air pristine, scarcely a gaze was turned in their direction. People were too busy. There were damaged hulls to be repaired, torn sails to be mended, scattered cargoes to be gathered up and restowed.

And for those audacious fishermen who'd dared the violence of the storm, and returned unharmed, prayers offered up on the quayside as the boats were unloaded. Prayers of thanks for their survival and for the dream-sea's largesse. The prophets who'd predicted the tempest had been proved correct: The frenzied waters had indeed thrown up an unprecedented catch.

While the lovers wandered unnoticed to the house on the hill (where they would with time, come to a certain notoriety), the contents of the nets were heaped on the dock. Up out of Quiddity, from its unfathomed places, had come creatures strange even to the fisherinen's eyes. they were like things made in the first days of the world, some of them; others like the scrawlings of an infant on a wall. A few were featureless, many more bright with colors that had no name. Some flickered with their own luminescence, even in the daylight. Only the

'shu were thrown back. The rest were sorted, put in baskets, and carried up to the fish-market where a crowd had already gathered in anticipation of this bounty. Even the ugliest, the least of the infant's scrawls, would nourish somebody. Nothing would be wasted; nothing lost.