The Great and Secret Show

PART SIX: IN SECRETS, MOST REVEALED

Tommy-Ray had been in the driver's seat of a car since his sixteenth birthday. Wheels had signalled freedom from Momma, the Pastor, the Grove and all they stood for. Now he was heading back to the very place a few years ago he couldn't have escaped from fast enough, his foot on the accelerator every mile of the way. He wanted to walk the Grove again with the news his body carried, wanted to go back to his father, who'd taught him so much. Until the Jaff the best life had offered was an off-shore wind and a west swell at Topanga; him on a crest knowing the girls were all watching him from the beach. But he'd always known those high times couldn't last forever. New heroes came along, summer after summer. He'd been one of them, supplanting surfers no more than a couple of years older, who weren't quite as lithe. Boy-men like himself who'd been the cream of the swell the season before, suddenly old news. He wasn't stupid. He knew it was only a matter of time before he joined their ranks.

But now, he had a purpose in his belly and brain he'd

never had before. He'd discovered ways to think and behave the airheads at Topanga never even guessed existed. Much of that he had to thank the Jaff for. But even his father, for all his wild advice, hadn't prepared him for what had happened at the Mission. He was a myth now. Death at the wheel of a Chevy, racing for home. He knew music that would have people dancing till they dropped. And when they dropped, and went to meat, he knew all about that too. He'd seen the spectacle at work on his own flesh. It gave him a boner remembering.

But the night's fun had only just started. Less than a hundred miles north of the Mission his route took him through a small village on the fringes of which lay a cemetery. The moon was still high. Its brightness gleamed on the tombs, washing the color from the flowers that were laid here and there. He stopped the car, to get a better look. After all, this was his territory from now on. It was home.

If he'd needed any further proof that what had happened at the Mission was not the invention of a crazyman, he got it when he pushed open the gate and wandered in. There was no wind to stir the grass, which grew to knee height in several places, where tombs had been left untended. But there was movement there nevertheless. He advanced a few more paces, and saw human figures rising into view from a dozen places. They were dead. Had their appearance not testified to the fact the luminescence of their bodies—which were as bright as the bone shard he'd found beside the car—would have marked them as part of his clan.

They knew who had come to visit them. Their eyes, or in the case of the ancients among them, their sockets, were set on him as they moved to do him homage. None even glanced at the ground as they came, though it was uneven. They knew this turf too well, familiar with the spots where badly built tombs had toppled, or a casket been pushed back up to the surface by some motion in the earth. Their progress was, however, slow. He was in no hurry. He sat himself down on the grave which contained, the stone recorded, seven children and their mother, and watched the ghosts come his way. The closer they came the more of their condition he saw. It wasn't pretty. A wind blew out of them, twisting them out of true. Their faces were either too wide or too long, their eyes bulging, their mouths blown open, cheeks flopping. Their ugliness put Tommy-Ray in mind of a film he'd seen of pilots enduring G-force, the difference being that these were not volunteers. They suffered against their will.

He was not disturbed in the least by their distortions; nor by the holes in their wretched bodies, or their slashed and severed limbs. It was nothing he hadn't seen in comic books by the age of six; or on a ghost-train ride. The horrors were everywhere, if you wanted to look. On bubble-gum cards, and Saturday morning cartoons, or in the stores on T-shirts and album covers. He smiled to think of that. There were outposts of his empire everywhere. No place was untouched by the Death-Boy's finger.

The speediest of these, his first devotees, was a man who looked to have died young, and recently. He wore a pair of jeans two sizes too big for him, and a muscle shirt adorned with a hand presenting the fuck sign to the world. He also wore a hat, which he took off when he came within a few yards of Tommy-Ray. The head beneath had been practically shaved, exposing several long cuts to view. The fatal wounds, presumably. There was no blood out of them now; just a whine of the wind that blew through the man's gut.

A little distance from Tommy-Ray he stopped.

"Do you speak?" the Death-Boy asked him.

The man opened his mouth, which was already wide, a little wider, and proceeded to make a reply as best he could, by working it up from his throat. Watching him, Tommy-Ray remembered a performer he'd seen on a late show, who'd swallowed and then regurgitated live goldfish. Though it was several years ago the sight had struck a chord in Tommy-Ray's imagination. The spectacle of a man able to reverse his system by practice, vomiting up what he'd held in his throat—not in the stomach surely; no fish, however scaly, could survive in acid—had been worth the queasiness he'd felt while watching. Now the Fuck-You-Man was giving a similar performance, only with words instead of fishes. They came at last, but dry as his innards.

"Yes," he said, "I speak."

"Do you know who I am?" Tommy-Ray asked.

The man made a moan.

"Yes or no?"

"No."

"I'm the Death-Boy, and you're the Fuck-You-Man. How 'bout that? Don't we make a pair?"

"You're here for us," the dead man said.

"What do you mean?"

"We're not buried. Not blessed."

"Don't look at me for help," Tommy-Ray said. "I'm burying nobody. I came to look because this is my kind of place now. I'm going to be King of the Dead."

"Yes?"

"Depend on it."

Another of the lost souls—a wide hipped woman—had approached, and puked up some words of her own.

"You..." she said, "...are shining."

"Yeah?" said Tommy-Ray. "Doesn't surprise me. You're bright too. Real bright."

"We belong together," the woman said.

"All of us," said a third cadaver.

"Now you're getting the picture."

"Save us," said the woman.

"I already told the Fuck-You-Man," Tommy-Ray said, "I'm burying nobody."

"We'll follow you," the woman, said.

"Follow?" Tommy-Ray replied, a shudder of excitement running down his spine at the idea of returning to the Grove with such a congregation in tow. Maybe there were other places he could visit along the way, and swell the numbers as he went.

"I like the idea," he said. "But how?"

"You lead. We'll follow," came the response.

Tommy-Ray stood up. "Why not?" he said, and started back towards the car. Even as he went he found himself thinking: this is going to be the end of me...

And thinking, didn't care.

Once at the wheel he looked back towards the cemetery. A wind had blown up from somewhere, and in it he saw the company that he'd chosen to keep seem to dissolve, their bodies coming undone as though they were made of sand, and being blown apart. Specks of their dust blew in his face..He squinted against it, unwilling to look away from the spectacle. Though their bodies were disappearing he could still hear their howls. They were like the wind, or were the wind, making their presence known. With their dissolution complete he turned from the blast, and put his foot on the accelerator. The car leapt forward, kicking up another spurt of dust to join the pursuing dervishes.

He had been right about there being more places along the route to gather ghosts. I'll always be right from now on, he thought. Death's never wrong; never, ever wrong. He found another cemetery within an hour's drive of the first, with a dust dervish of half-dissolved souls running back and forth along its front wall like a dog on a leash, impatiently awaiting the arrival of its master. Word of his coming had gone before him apparently. They were waiting, these souls, ready to join the throng. He didn't even have to slow the car. At his approach the dust storm came to meet him,, momentarily smothering the vehicle before rising to join the souls behind. Tommy-Ray just drove straight on.

Towards dawn his unhappy band found yet more adherents. There had been a collision at a crossroads, earlier in the night. There was broken glass scattered across the road; blood; and one of the two cars—now barely recognizable as such— overturned at the side of the road. He slowed to look, not expecting there to be any haunters here, but even as he did so he heard the now familiar whining wind and saw two wretched forms, a man and a woman, appear from the darkness. They'd not yet got the trick of their condition. The wind that blew through them, or out of them, threatened with every faltering step they took to throw them over on to their broken heads. But newly dead as they were, they sensed their Lord in Tommy-Ray, and came obediently. He smiled to see them; their fresh wounds (glass in their faces, in their eyes) excited him.

There was no exchange of words. As they drew closer they seemed to take a signal from their comrades in death behind Tommy-Ray's car, allowing their bodies to erode completely, and join the wind.

His legion swelled, Tommy-Ray drove on.

There were other such meetings along the way; they seemed to multiply the further north he drove, as though word of his approach went through the earth, from buried thing to buried thing, graveyard whispers, so that there were dusty phantoms waiting all along the way. By no means all of them had come to join the party. Some had apparently come simply to stare at the passing parade. There was fear on their faces when they looked at Tommy-Ray. He'd become the Terror in the ghost-train now, and they were the chilled punters. There were hierarchies even among the dead it seemed, and he was too elevated a company for many of them to keep; his ambition too great, his appetite too depraved. They preferred quiet rot to such adventure.

It was early morning by the time he reached the nameless hick-town in which he'd lost his wallet, but the daylight did not reveal the host in the dust storm that followed him. To any who chose to look—and few did, in such a blinding wind—a cloud of dirty air came in the car's wake; that was the sum of it.

He had other business here than the collecting of lost souls—though he didn't doubt for a moment that in such a wretched place life was quickly and violently over, and many bodies never laid to sanctified rest. No, his business here was revenge upon the pocket-picker. Or if not upon him, at least upon the den where it had happened. He found the place easily. The front door wasn't locked, as he'd expected at such an early hour. Nor, once he stepped inside, did he find the bar empty. Last night's drinkers were still scattered around the place, in various stages of collapse. One lay face down on the floor, vomit spattered around him. Another two were sprawled at tables. Behind the bar itself was a man Tommy-Ray vaguely remembered as the doorman who'd taken his money for the backroom show. A lump of a man, with a face that looked to have been bruised so many times it'd never lose the stain.

"Looking for someone?" he demanded to know.

Tommy-Ray ignored him, crossing to the door that let on the arena where he'd seen the woman and the dog performing. It was open. The space beyond was empty, the players gone home to their beds and their kennels. The barman was a yard from him when he turned back into the bar.

"I asked a fucking question," he said.

Tommy-Ray was a little taken aback by the man's blindness. Did he not recognize the fact that he was speaking to a transformed creature? Had his perception been so dulled by years of drinking and dog-shows he couldn't see the Death-Boy when he came visiting? More fool him.

"Get out of my way," Tommy-Ray said.

Instead, the man took hold of the front of Tommy-Ray's shirt. "You been here before," he said.

"Yeah."

"Left something behind, did you?"

He pulled Tommy-Ray closer, till they were practically nose to nose. He had a sick man's breath.

"I'd let go if I were you," Tommy-Ray warned.

The man looked amused at this. "You're looking to get your fucking balls ripped off," he said. "Or do you want to join the show?" His eyes widened at this notion. "Is that what you came looking for? An audition?"

"I told you..." Tommy-Ray began.

"I don't give a fuck what you told me. I'm doing the talking now. Hear me?" He put one vast hand over Tommy-Ray's mouth. "So...do you want to show me something or not?"

The image of what he'd seen in the room behind him came back into Tommy-Ray's head as he stared up at his assaulter: the woman, glassy-eyed; the dog, glassy-eyed. He'd seen death here, in life. He opened his mouth against the man's palm, and pressed his tongue against the stale skin.

The man grinned.

"Yeah?" he said.

He dropped his hand from Tommy-Ray's face. "You got something to show?" he said again.

"Here..." Tommy-Ray murmured.

"What?"

"Come in...come in..."

"What are you talking about?"

"Not talking to you. Here. Come...in...here. " His gaze went from the man's face to the door.

"Don't give me shit, kid," the man responded. "You're on your own."

"Come in!" Tommy-Ray yelled.

"Shut the fuck up!"

"Come in!"

His din maddened the man. He hit Tommy-Ray across the face, so hard the blow knocked the boy out of his grip to the floor. Tommy-Ray didn't get up. He simply stared at the door, and made his invitation one more time.

"Please come in," he said, more quietly.

Was it because he asked this time instead of demanded, that the legion obeyed? Or simply that they'd been mustering themselves, and were only now ready to come to his aid? Either way, they began to rattle the closed doors. The barman grunted and turned. Even to his bleary eyes it must have been perfectly apparent that it was no natural wind that was pushing to come in. It pressed too rhythmically; it beat its fist too heavily. And its howls, oh its howls were nothing like the howls of any storm he'd heard before. He turned back to Tommy-Ray.

"What the fuck's out there?" he said.

Tommy-Ray just lay where he'd been thrown and smiled up at the man, that legendary smile, that forgive-me-my-trespasses smile, that would never be the same again now that he was the Death-Boy.

Die, that smile now said, die while I watch you. Die slowly. Die quickly. I don't care. It's all the same to the Death-Boy.

As the smile spread the doors opened, shards of the lock, and splinters of wood, thrown across the bar before the invading wind. Out, in the sunlight the spirits in this storm had not been visible; but they made themselves so now, congealing their dust in front of the witnesses' eyes. One of the men slumped on the table roused himself in time to see three figures forming from the head down in front of him, their torsos trailing like innards of dust. He backed off against the wall, where they threw themselves upon him. Tommy-Ray heard his screech but didn't see what kind of death they gave him. His eyes were on the spirits that were coming at the bartender.

Their faces were all appetite, he saw; as though travelling together in that caravan had given them time to simplify themselves. They were no longer as distinct from each other as they'd been; perhaps their dust had mingled in the storm, and each had become a little like the other. Unparticularized, they were more terrible than they'd been at the cemetery wall. He shuddered at the sight, the remnants of the man he'd been in fear of them, the Death-Boy in bliss. These were soldiers in his army: eyes vast, mouths vaster, dust and want in one howling legion.

The bartender started to pray out loud, but he wasn't putting his faith in prayer alone. He reached down to his side and picked Tommy-Ray up one-handed, hauling him close. Then, with his hostage taken, he opened the door to the sex arena and backed through it. Tommy-Ray heard him repeating something as they went, the hook of the prayer perhaps? Santo Dios! Santo Dios! But neither words nor hostage slowed the advance of the wind and its dusty freight. They came after him, throwing the door wide.

Tommy-Ray saw their mouths grow huger still, and then the blur of faces was upon them both. He lost sight of what happened next. The dust filled his eyes before he had an opportunity to close them. But he felt the bartender's grip slide from him, and the next moment a rush of wet heat. The howling in the wind instantly rose in volume to a keening that he tried to stop his ears against, but it came anyway, boring into the bone of his head like a hundred drills.

When he opened his eyes he was red. Chest, arms, legs, hands: all red. The bartender, the source of the color, had been dragged on to the stage where the night before Tommy had seen the woman and the dog. His head was in one corner, upended; his arms, hands locked in supplication, in another; the rest of him lay center stage, the neck still pumping.

Tommy-Ray tried not to be sickened (he was the Death-Boy, after all) but this was too much. And yet, he told himself, what had he expected when he'd invited them over the threshold? This was not a circus he had in tow. It was not sane; it was not civilized.

Shaking, sickened and chastened, he got to his feet and hauled himself back out into the bar. His legion's labors here were as cataclysmic as those he'd turned his back upon. All three of the bar's occupants had been brutally slaughtered. Giving the scene only the most casual perusal, he crossed through the destruction to the door.

Events inside the bar had inevitably attracted an audience outside, even at such an early hour. But the velocity of the wind—in which his ghost army was once more dissolved—kept all but the most adventurous, youths and children, from approaching the scene, and even they were cowed by the suspicion that the air howling around them was not entirely empty.

They watched the blond, blood-spattered boy emerge from the bar and cross to his car, but made no attempt to apprehend him. Their scrutiny made Tommy-Ray take note of his gait. Instead of slouching he walked more upright. When they remembered the Death-Boy, he thought, let them remember someone terrible.

As he drove he began to believe he'd left the legion behind; that they'd found the game of murder more exciting than follow the leader and were going on to slaughter the rest of the town. He didn't much mind the desertion. Indeed he was in part thankful for it. The revelations that had seemed so welcome the previous night had lost some of their glamour.

He was sticky and stinking with another man's blood; he was bruised from the bartender's handling of him. Naively enough he'd believed that the touch of the Nuncio had made him immortal. What was the use of being the Death-Boy, after all, if death could still master you? In learning the error of his ways he'd come closer to losing his life than he cared to think too hard about. As to his saviors, his legion—he'd been equally naive in his belief that he had control of them.

They were not the shambling, fawning refugees he'd taken them for the previous night. Or if they had been, their being together had changed their nature. Now they were lethal, and would probably have slipped from his control sooner or later anyhow. He was better off without them.

He stopped to wipe the blood from his face before crossing the border, turned his bloodied shirt inside out to conceal the worst of the stains, then drove on. As he reached the border itself he saw the dust cloud in the mirror, and knew his relief at losing his legion had been premature. Whatever slaughter had detained them they'd done with it. He put his foot down, hoping against hope to lose them, but they had the scent of him, and followed like a pack of loyal but lethal dogs, closing on the car till they were once more swirling behind him.

Once over the border the cloud picked up its pace, so that instead of following, it surrounded the car to left and right. There was more purpose in the maneuver than mere intimacy. Spirits hauled the windows and rattled at the passenger door, finally pulling it open. Tommy-Ray reached to drag it closed again. As he did so the bartender's head, much battered by being carried by the storm, was pitched out of the dust on to the seat beside him. Then the door was slammed, and the cloud once more took its dutiful place as his train.

His instinct was to stop and throw the trophy out on to the street, but he knew that to do so would confirm his weakness in his legion's estimation. They'd not brought him the head simply to humor him, though that might be their pretense. There was a warning here; even a threat. Don't try to cheat or betray them, the dusty, bloody ball announced from its gaping mouth, or you and I'll be brothers.

He took the silent message to heart. Though he was still ostensibly the leader, the dynamic changed thereafter. Every few miles the cloud would once more pick up its pace and merge one way or another, pointing him towards more of their number; many waiting in the unlikeliest of places: squalid street corners and minor intersections (often at intersections); once in the lot of a motel; once outside a boarded-up gas station, where a man, a woman and a child all waited, as though they'd known this transport would be coming along.

As the numbers swelled, so did the scale of the storm that carried them, until its passage was sufficient to cause minor damage along the highway, driving cars off the road, and blowing down signs. It even made the news bulletin. Tommy-Ray heard the report as he drove. It was described as a freak wind, which had blown up off the ocean and was proceeding north towards Los Angeles County.

He wondered, as he listened, if anyone in Palomo Grove would hear the report. The Jaff maybe; or }o-Beth. He hoped so. He hoped they heard, and understood what was coming their way. The town had seen some strange sights since his father's return from the rock, but nothing, surely, the equal of the wind he had in tow, or the living dust that danced on its back.

It was hunger that drove William out from his home on Saturday morning. He went reluctantly, like a man at an orgy suddenly aware that his bladder had to be emptied, and exiting with many a backward glance. But hunger, like the need to piss, couldn't be ignored forever, and William had exhausted what few supplies his refrigerator had contained very quickly. Working as he did at the Mall he'd never stocked up on food, but taken a quarter of an hour every day to wander around the supermarket and pick up whatever got him salivating. But he'd not been shopping now for two days, and if he wasn't to starve to death in the lap of the tasty but inedible luxuries gathered behind the drawn blinds of his home he had to fetch himself something to eat. This was easier said than done. His mind was so wholly obsessed by the company he was keeping that the simple problem of making himself presentable for a public appearance and going down to the Mall became a major challenge.

Until recently, his life had been so very organized. The week's shirts were always washed and pressed on a Sunday, laid out on his dresser with the five bow ties selected from his hundred and eleven to complement the shade of the shirt; his kitchen could have been shot for an ad campaign, its surfaces always pristine; the sink smelled of lemon; the washing machine of his flower-scented fabric conditioner; his toilet bowl of pine.

But Babylon had taken control of his house. He'd last seen his best suit being worn by the notorious bisexual Marcella St. John, while she straddled one of her girlfriends. His bow ties had been purloined for a competition to see which of three erections could wear the most, a tournament won by Moses "The Hose" Jasper, who'd ended up sporting seventeen.

Rather than try and tidy up, or claim any of these belongings back, William decided to let the celebrants have their way. He rummaged in his bottom drawer and found a sweatshirt and jeans he'd not worn for several years, put them on, and wandered down to the Mall.

At about the time he was doing so Jo-Beth was waking with the worst hangover of her life. The worst, because the first.

Her memories of the previous night's events were uncertain. She remembered going to Lois's house, of course, and the guests, and Howie arriving, but how all of this had ended up she couldn't be sure. She got up feeling giddy and sick, and went to the bathroom. Momma, hearing her moving about, came upstairs and was waiting for her when she emerged.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"No," Jo-Beth freely admitted. "I feel terrible."

"You were drinking last night."

"Yes," she said. There was no purpose in denial.

"Where did you go?"

"To see Lois."

"There'd be no liquor in Lois's house," Momma said.

"There was last night. And a lot more besides."

"Don't lie to me, Jo-Beth."

"I'm not lying."

"Lois would never have that poison in the house."

"I think you should hear her tell it herself," Jo-Beth said, defying Momma's accusing looks. "I think we should both go down to the store and speak to her."

"I'm not leaving the house," Momma told her flatly.

"You went out into the yard the night before last. Today you can get in the car."

She spoke as she'd never spoken to Momma before, with a kind of rage in her tone which was in part response to Momma's calling her a liar, and in part against herself for not being able to think her way through the blur of the previous night. What had happened between Howie and herself? Had they argued? She thought so. They'd certainly parted on the street...but why? It was another reason to speak to Lois.

"I mean what I say, Momma," she said. "We're both of us going to go down to the Mall."

"No, I can't..." Momma said. "Really I can't. I feel so sick today."

"No you don't."

"Yes. My stomach..."

"No, Momma! Enough of that! You can't pretend to be sick for the rest of your life, just because you're afraid. I'm afraid too, Momma."

"It's good you're afraid."

"No it's not. It's what the Jaff wants. What he feeds on. The fear inside. I know that because I've seen it working and it's horrible."

"We can pray. Prayer—"

"—won't do us any good any longer. It didn't help the Pastor. It won't help us." She was raising her voice, which in turn made her head spin, but she knew this had to be said now before full sobriety returned, and with it, fear of offending.

"You always said it was dangerous outside," she went on, not liking to hurt Momma the way she surely was, but unable to stem the flow of feeling. "Well it is dangerous. Even more than you thought. But inside, Momma—" she jabbed at her chest, meaning her heart, meaning Howie and Tommy-Ray and the terror that she'd lost them both "—inside, it's worse. Even worse. To have things...dreams...just for a while...then have them taken away before you can get a hold of them properly."

"You're not making any sense, Jo-Beth," Momma said.

"Lois'll tell you," she replied. "I'm going to take you down to see Lois, and then you'll believe."

Howie sat at the window and let the sun dry the sweat on his skin. Its smell was as familiar to him as his own face in the mirror, more familiar, perhaps, because his face kept changing and the smell of sweat didn't. He needed the comfort of such familiarity now, with nothing certain in all the world but that nothing was certain. He could find no way through the tangle of feelings in his gut. What had seemed simple the day before, when he'd stood in the sun at the back of the house and kissed Jo-Beth, was no longer simple. Fletcher might be dead but he'd left a legacy here in the Grove, a legacy of dream-creatures which viewed him as some substitute for their lost creator. He couldn't be that. Even if they didn't share Fletcher's view of Jo-Beth, which after last night's confrontation they surely did, he still couldn't fulfill their expectations. He'd come here a desperado and become, albeit fleetingly, a lover. Now they wanted to make a general of him; wanted marching orders and battle plans. He could supply neither. Nor would Fletcher have been able to offer such direction. The army he'd created would have to elect a leader from its own ranks, or disperse.

He'd rehearsed these arguments so often now he almost believed them; or rather, had almost convinced himself he wasn't a coward for wanting to believe them. But the trick hadn't worked. He came back and back to the same stark fact: that once, in the woods, Fletcher had warned him to make a choice between Jo-Beth and his destiny, and he'd flown in the face of that advice. The consequences of his desertion, whether direct or indirect was immaterial now, had been Fletcher's public death, a last, desperate attempt to seize some hope for the future. Now here was he, the unprodigal son, willfully turning his back on the product of that sacrifice.

And yet; and yet; always, and yet. If he sided with Fletcher's army then he became part of the war he and Jo-Beth had studiously attempted to remain untouched by. She would become one of the enemy, simply by birth.

What he wanted more than anything, ever in his life— more than the pubic hair he'd tried to will into growing at age eleven, more than the motorcycle he'd stolen at fourteen, more than his mother back from death for two minutes just so he could tell her how sorry he was for all the times he'd made her cry; more, at this moment, than Jo-Beth—was certainty. Just to be told which way was the right way, which act was the right act, and have the comfort that even if it turned out not to be the way or the act it was not his responsibility. But there was nobody to tell him. He had to think this out for himself. Sit in the sun and let the sweat dry on his skin, and work it out for himself.

The Mall was not as busy as it usually was on a Saturday morning, but William nevertheless met half a dozen people he knew on his way to the supermarket. One was his assistant Valerie.

"Are you all right?" she wanted to know. "I've been calling your house. You never answer."

"I've been ill," he said.

"I didn't bother to open the office yesterday. What with all the trouble the night before. It was a real mess. Roger went down, you know, when the alarms started?"

"Roger?"

She stared at him. "Yes, Roger."

"Oh yes," William said, not knowing whether this was Valerie's husband, brother or dog, and not much caring.

"He's been ill too," she said.

"I think you should take a few days off," William suggested.

"That would be nice. A lot of people are going away at the moment, have you noticed? Just taking off. We won't lose much business."

He made some polite remark about how she should treat herself to a rest, and parted from her.

The muzak in the market reminded him of what he'd left at home: it sounded so much like the soundtracks of some of his early movies, a wash of nondescript melodies bearing no relation to the scenes they accompanied. The memory hurried him up and down the long aisles, filling his basket more by instinct than planning. He didn't bother to cater for his guests. They only fed on each other.

He wasn't the only shopper in the store ignoring practical purchases (household cleaners, detergents and the like) in favor of quick-fix items and junk foods. Distracted as he was he noticed others doing just as he was doing, indiscriminately filling up their carts and baskets with trash, as though new reassurances had supplanted the rituals of cooking and eating. He saw on the purchasers' faces (faces he'd known by name once, but could only half remember now) the same secretive look he'd known had been on his own face all his life. They were going about their shopping pretending there was nothing different about this particular Saturday, but everything was different now. They all had secrets; or almost all. And those that didn't were either leaving town, like Valerie, or pretending not to notice, which was, in its way, another secret.

As he reached the checkout, adding two fistfuls of Hershey bars to his basketload, he saw a face he hadn't set eyes on in many a long year: Joyce McGuire. She came in with her daughter, Jo-Beth, arm-in-arm. If he had ever seen them together it must have been before Jo-Beth grew to be a woman. Now, side by side, the similarities in their faces was enough to take his breath away. He stared, unable to prevent himself from remembering the day at the lake and the way Joyce had looked as she'd stripped down. Did the daughter look that way now, beneath her loose clothes, he wondered; small dark nipples, long, tanned thighs?

He realized suddenly that he was not the only customer looking towards the McGuire women; practically everyone was doing the same. Nor could he doubt that similar thoughts were in every head: that here, in the flesh, was one of the first clues to the apocalypse that was stealing up over the Grove. Eighteen years ago Joyce McGuire had given birth in circumstances that had then seemed merely scandalous. Now she stepped back into the public eye at the very time the most ludicrous rumors surrounding the League of Virgins seemed to be being proved true. There were presences walking the Grove (or lurking beneath it) which had power over lesser beings. Their influence had made flesh children in the body of Joyce McGuire. Was it perhaps that same influence that had made his dreams? They too were flesh from mind.

He looked back at Joyce, and understood something about himself he'd never grasped before: that he and the woman (beholder and beheld) were forever and intimately associated. The realization lasted a moment only: it was too difficult to grasp for any longer. But it made him put down his basket and press his way past the line waiting at the checkout, then walk straight towards Joyce McGuire. She saw him coming, and a look of fear crossed her face. He smiled at her. She tried to back away but her daughter had hold of her hand.

"It's all right, Momma," he heard her say.

"Yes—" he said, extending his own hand to Joyce. "Yes, it is. Really it is. I'm...so pleased to see you."

The sincere emotion, simply stated, seemed to mellow her anxiety; the frown softened. She even began to smile.

"William Witt," he said, putting his hand in hers. "You probably don't remember me, but..."

"I remember you," she said.

"I'm glad."

"See, Momma?" Jo-Beth said. "This isn't so bad."

"I haven't seen you in the Grove for such a long time," William said.

"I've been...unwell," Joyce said.

"And now?"

She declined to answer at first. Then she said:

"I think I'm getting better."

"That's good to hear."

As he spoke the sound of sobbing came to them from one of the aisles. Jo-Beth noticed it more than any of the other customers: a strange tension between her mother and Mr. Witt (whom she'd seen most every morning of her working life, but never dressed in so disheveled a fashion) had claimed their attention utterly, and everyone else in the line seemed to be making a studied attempt not to notice. She let go of Momma's arm and went to investigate, tracing the sound of the weeping from aisle to aisle until she found its source. Ruth Gilford, who was the receptionist at the offices of Momma's doctor, and was familiar to Jo-Beth, was standing in front of a selection of cereals, a box of one brand in her left hand and of another in her right, tears pouring down her cheeks. The cart at her side was heaped high with more boxes of cereal, as though she'd simply taken one of each as she'd wheeled her way along the aisle. "Mrs. Gilford?" Jo-Beth ventured.

The woman didn't stop sobbing, but tried to speak through her tears, which resulted in a watery and at times incoherent monologue.

"...don't know what he wants..." she seemed to be saying. "...after all this time...don't know what he wants..."

"Can I help?" Jo-Beth said. "Do you want me to take you home?"

The word home made Ruth look around at Jo-Beth, attempting to focus on her through the tears.

"...I don't know what he wants..." she said again.

"Who?" Jo-Beth said.

"...all these years...and he's got something hiding from me..."

"Your husband?"

"...I said nothing, hut I knew...I always knew...he loved somebody else...and now he's got her in the house..."

The tears redoubled. Jo-Beth went to her, and very gently claimed the packets of cereal from her hands, putting them back on the shelves. With her talismans gone, Ruth Gil-ford took fierce hold of Jo-Beth.

"...help me..." she said.

"Of course."

"I don't want to go home. He's got somebody there."

"All right. Not if you don't want to."

She started to coax the woman away from the cereal display. Once out of their influence, her anguish diminished somewhat.

"You're Jo-Beth, aren't you?" she managed.

"That's right."

"Will you take me to my car...I don't think I can get there on my own."

"We're going, you'll be fine," Jo-Beth reassured her, moving to Ruth's right-hand side so as to protect her from the gaze of those waiting in line if they chose to stare. She doubted they would. Ruth Gilford's collapse was too tender a sight for them to look straight at; it would remind them all too forcibly of what secrets they themselves were barely holding in check.

Momma was at the door, with William Witt. Jo-Beth decided to forsake introductions, which Ruth was in no state to respond to anyway, and just tell Momma she'd meet her at the bookstore, which had still been closed when they'd arrived. For the first time in her life, Lois was late opening up. But it was Momma who took the initiative.

"Mr. Witt will bring me home, Jo-Beth," she said. "Don't worry about me."

Jo-Beth glanced at Witt, who had the look of a man almost mesmerized.

"Are you sure?" she said. It had never occurred to her before but perhaps the ever unctuous Mr. Witt was the type Momma had been warning her about all these years. The deep, silent type whose secrets were always the most depraved. But Momma was insistent; almost casual in the way she waved Jo-Beth off.

Crazy, Jo-Beth thought as she escorted Ruth to the car, the whole world's gone crazy. People changing at a moment's notice, as though the way they'd been all these years was just a pretense: Momma sick, Mr. Witt neat, Ruth Gilford in charge. Were they just reinventing themselves, or was this the way they'd always been?

As they got to the car Ruth Gilford was taken over by another, even more desperate, bout of crying, and tried to return to the supermarket, insistent that she couldn't go back home without cereal. Jo-Beth gently persuaded her otherwise, and volunteered to drive home with her, an invitation which was gratefully accepted.

Jo-Beth's thoughts returned to Momma as she drove Ruth home, but they were literally overtaken, as a convoy of four black stretch limos purred past and turned up the Hill, their presence so utterly alien they might just have driven in from another dimension.

Visitors, she thought. As if there weren't enough.

"So it begins," said the Jaff.

He was standing at the highest window of Coney Eye, looking down upon the driveway. It was a little before noon, and the limos gliding up the driveway announced the first of the party guests. He would have liked to have Tommy-Ray at his side at this juncture, but the boy had not yet returned from his trip to the Mission. No matter. Lamar had proved a more than able substitute. There had been one uncomfortable moment, when the Jaff had finally put off the mask of being Buddy Vance and presented his true face to the comedian, but it hadn't taken long to bring the man around. In some regard he was more preferable company to Tommy-Ray; more sensual, more cynical. What was more he had a thorough knowledge of the guests who would soon be gathering in Buddy Vance's memory; a more thorough knowledge, indeed, than the widow Rochelle. She had sunk deeper and deeper into a drug-induced stupor since the previous evening; a condition which Lamar had taken sexual advantage of, much to the Jaff's amusement. Once upon a time (so long ago) he might have done the same, of course. No, not might, would. Rochelle Vance was undoubtedly beautiful, and her addiction, informed as it was by a constant undercurrent of rage, made her even more attractive. But these were affairs of the flesh, and for another life. There were more urgent pursuits: namely, the power to be garnered from the guests who were even now gathering below. Lamar had run down the list with him, offering some savage observation or other on practically every one. Corrupt lawyers, addicted actors, reformed whores, pimps, priapists, hitmen, white men with black souls, hot men with cold, ass-kissers, coke-sniffers, the wretched high, the more wretched low, egotists, onanists and hedonists to a man. Where better to find the kind of forces he needed to keep him from harm when the Art opened? He would find fears in these addicted, bewildered, inflated souls of a kind he'd never have found in the mere bourgeois. From them he'd raise terata the like of which the world had never seen. Then he'd be ready. Fletcher was dead, and his army, if it had indeed manifested itself, was keeping its head low.

There was nothing left between the Jaff and Quiddity.

As he stood at the window and watched the victims disembark, greeting one another with rhinestone smiles and pinched kisses, his thoughts went—of all places—to that dead-letter room in Omaha, Nebraska, where, so many lives ago, he'd first had a hint of America's secret self. He remembered Homer, who'd opened the door to that treasure house, and later died against it, his life stabbed out by the blunt-bladed knife the Jaff still carried in his jacket pocket. Death had meant something then. Been an experience to go in dread of. It wasn't until he'd stepped into the Loop that he'd realized how irrelevant such fears were, when time could be suspended, even by a minor charlatan like Kissoon. Presumably the shaman was still secure in his refuge, as far from his spiritual creditors, or the lynch-mob, as it was possible to get. Lingering in the Loop, planning the getting of power. Or holding it at bay.

That last notion occurred to him now for the first time, like a long-postponed solution to a puzzle he hadn't even known he'd been gnawing at. Kissoon had been holding the moment because if he once let it slip he'd unleash his own death...

"Well..." he murmured.

Lamar was behind him. "Well, what?"

"Just musing," the Jaff said. He turned from the window. "Is the widow already downstairs?"

"I'm trying to rouse her."

"Who's greeting the guests?"

"Nobody."

"Go to it."

"I thought you wanted me here."

"Later. Once they've all arrived you can bring them up one by one."

"As you wish."

"One question."

"Only one?"

"Why aren't you afraid of me?"

Lamar narrowed his already narrow eyes. Then said:

"I've still got my sense of the ridiculous."

Without waiting for any riposte from the Jaff he opened the door and headed about his duties as host. The Jaff turned back to the window. Another limo was at the gates, this one white, its driver showing his passengers' invitations to the guards.

"One by one," the Jaff murmured to himself. "One by wretched one."

Grillo's invitation to the party at Coney Eye had been delivered by hand mid-morning, its courier Ellen Nguyen. Her manner was friendly but brisk; there was no trace of the intimacy that had flowered between them the previous afternoon. He invited her into his hotel room but she insisted that there was no time:

"I'm needed up at the house," she said. "Rochelle seems to be completely out of it. I don't think you need give a second thought to being recognized. But you will need the invitation. Fill in whatever name you want to invent. There'll be a lot of security so don't lose it. This is one party you won't be able to talk your way into."

"Where will you be?"

"I don't even think I'll be there."

"I thought you said you were going up there now."

"Just for the preparations. As soon as the party starts, I'm out. I don't want to mix with those people. Parasites, all of them. None of them really loved Buddy. It's just a show."

"Well I'll tell it like I see it."

"Do that," she said, turning to go.

"Could we just talk a moment?" Grillo said.

"About what? I haven't got much time."

"About you and me," Grillo said. "About what happened yesterday."

She looked at him without focusing her gaze. "What happened, happened," she said. "We were both there. What's to say?"

"Well for one: how about trying it again?"

Again, the unfixed look.

"I don't think so," she said.

"You didn't give me a chance—" he said.

"Oh no," she replied, eager to correct any error he was about to make. "You were fine...but things have changed."

"Since yesterday?"

"Yes," she said. "I can't quite tell you how..." She let the sentence hang, then took another thought up. "We're both adults. We know how these things work."

He was about to say that no, he didn't know how this or any other thing worked any longer, but that after this conversation his self-esteem was enfeebled enough without beating it to its knees with further confessions.

"Be careful at the party," she said as she once more turned to go.

He couldn't keep himself from saying, "Thanks for that at least."

She returned him a small, enigmatic smile, and left.

The trip back to the Grove had been lengthy for Tommy-Ray, but it was lengthier still for Tesla and Raul, though for less metaphysical reasons. For one, Tesla's car was not so hot, and it had taken quite a beating on the way down; it was now much the worse for wear. For another, though she had been raised from near death by the touch of the Nuncio, it had left her with side-effects the full extent of which she didn't really grasp until they were over the border. Though she was driving a solid car along a solid highway her grasp of that solidity was not as good as it had been. She felt a pull on her from other places and other states of mind. She'd driven high on drugs and drink in the past but what she was experiencing now was a wilder ride altogether, as though her brain had summoned up from memory fragments of every trip she'd ever taken, every hallucinogen, every tranquilizer, and was running her through the lot, giving her mind a shot of each. One moment she knew she was whooping like a wild thing (she could hear herself, like another voice), the next she was floating in ether with the highway dissolving in front of her, the next her thoughts were filthier than the New York subway, and it was all she could do to stop herself putting an end to the whole damn farce of living with one turn of the wheel. Through it all, two facts. One, that of Raul sitting beside her, gripping the dashboard with white-knuckled hands, his fear pungent. The other, the place that she'd visited in her Nunciate dream, Kissoon's Loop. Though it was not as real as the car she was travelling in, and the smell of Raul, it was no less insistent. She carried its memory with her every mile they covered. Trinity, he'd called it, and it, or Kissoon himself, wanted her back. She felt its pull, almost like a physical claim upon her. She resisted it, though not entirely willingly. Though she'd been glad to be delivered back into life, what she'd seen and heard in her time in Trinity made her curious to return; even anxious. The more she resisted the more exhausted she became, until by the time they reached the outskirts of L.A. she was like someone deprived of sleep: with waking dreams threatening to erupt at any moment into the texture of reality.

"We're going to have to stop for a while," she told Raul, aware that she was slurring as she spoke. "Or I'm going to end up killing us both."

"You want to sleep?"

"I don't know," she said, afraid that to sleep would invite as many problems as it would solve. "At least rest. Get some coffee inside me, and put my mind in order."

"Here?" said Raul.

"Here what?"

"We stop here?"

"No," she said. "We'll go back to my apartment. It's half an hour from here. That's if we fly—"

You already are, baby, her mind said, and you'll probably never stop. You're a resurrected woman. What do you expect? That life should simply fumble on as though nothing had happened? Forget it. Things'll never be the same again.

But West Hollywood hadn't changed; still Boy's Town prettified: the bars, the style stores where she bought her jewelry. She took a left off Santa Monica on to North Huntley Drive, where she'd lived for the five years she'd been in L.A. It was almost noon now, and the smog was burning off the city. She parked the car in the garage below the building, and took Raul up to Apartment V. The windows of her downstairs neighbor, a sour, repressed little man with whom she'd exchanged no more than three sentences in half a decade, and two of those invective, were open, and he doubtless saw her passing. She estimated it would take him twenty minutes at the most to inform the block that Miss Lonelyhearts, as she'd heard he called her, was back in town—looking like shit, and accompanied by Quasimodo. So be it. She had other things to worry about, like how to align her key with the lock, a trick which repeatedly defeated her confounded senses. Raul came to the rescue, taking the key from her trembling fingers and letting them both in. The apartment, as usual, was a disaster area. She left the door wide and opened the windows to let in some less stale air, then played her messages. Her agent had called twice, both times to report that there was no further news on the castaway screenplay; Saralyn had called, asking if she knew where Grillo was. Following Saralyn, Tesla's mother: her contribution more a litany of sins than a message—crimes committed by the world in general, and her father in particular. Finally there was a message from Mickey de Falco, who made spare bucks providing orgasmic grunts for fuck films, and needed a partner for a gig. In the background, a barking dog. "And as soon as you're back," he said in signing off, "come and get this fucking dog before it eats me outta house and home." She caught Raul watching her as she listened to the calls, his bemusement unconcealed.

"My peer group," she said when Mickey had said his farewells. "Aren't they a gas? Look, I'm going to have a little nap. It's obvious where everything is, right? Refrigerator; TV; toilet. Wake me in an hour, yeah?"

"An hour."

"I'd like tea, but we don't have the time." She stared at him, staring at her. "Am I making any sense?"

"Yes..." he replied doubtfully.

"Slurring my words?"

"Yes."

"Thought so. OK. The apartment's yours. Don't answer the phone. See you in an hour."

She stumbled through to the bathroom without waiting for further confirmation, stripped down completely, contemplated a shower, settled for a splash of cold water on her face, breasts and arms, then went through to the bedroom. The room was hot, but she knew better than to open the window. When her immediate neighbor Ron woke, which was around now, he would start to play opera. It was either the heat of the room or Lucia di Lammermoor. She chose to sweat.

Left to his own devices Raul found a selection of edibles in the refrigerator, took them to the open window, sat down, and shook. He could not remember being so afraid, back since the day Fletcher's madness had begun. Now, as then, the rules of the world had suddenly changed without warning, and he no longer knew what his purpose was to be. In his heart of hearts he'd given up hoping to see Fletcher again. The shrine he'd kept at the Mission, which had been a beacon at the start, had become a memorial. He'd expected to die there, alone, humored to the last as a half-wit, which in many ways he was. He could scarcely write, except to scrawl his own name. He couldn't read. Most of the objects in the woman's room were a total mystery to him. He was lost.

A cry from the next room stirred him from self-pity.

"Tesla?" he called.

There was no coherent reply: only further muted cries. He got up and followed the sound. The door to her bedroom was closed. He hesitated, hand on handle, nervous of entering without invitation. Then another round of cries reached him. He pushed the door open.

He'd never in his life seen a woman so exposed. The sight of Tesla sprawled on the bed transfixed him. Her arms were at her sides, gripping the sheet, her head rolled from side to side. But there was a fogginess about her body that reminded him of what had happened on the road below the Mission. She was moving away from him again. Back towards the Loop. Her shouts had become moans now. They were not of pleasure. She was going unwillingly.

He called her name again, very loudly. She suddenly sat bolt upright, eyes wide and staring at him.

"Jesus!" she said. She was panting, as though she'd just run a race. "Jesus. Jesus. Jesus."

"You were shouting..." he said, trying to begin to explain his presence in the room.

Only now did she seem to realize their situation: her nakedness, his embarrassed fascination. She reached for a sheet and started to haul it over her, but her intention was distracted by what she'd just experienced.

"I was there," she said.

"I know."

"Trinity. Kissoon's Loop."

As they'd driven back up the coast she'd done her best to explain to him the vision she'd had while the Nuncio had been healing her, both as a way to fix its details in her head and to keep a recurrence at bay by coaxing the memories out of the sealed cell of her inner life and into shared experience. She painted a repulsive picture of Kissoon.

"You saw him?" Raul said.

"I didn't get to the hut," she replied. "But he wants me there. I can feel him pulling. " She put her hand on her stomach. "I can feel him now, Raul."

"I'm here," he said. "I won't let you go."

"I know, and I'm glad."

She reached out. "Take hold of my hand, huh?" He tentatively approached the bed. "Please," she said. He did so. "I saw that town again," she went on. "It seems so real, except there's nobody there, nobody at all. It's...it's like a stage...like something's going to be performed there."

"Performed."

"This is making no sense, I know, but I'm just telling you what I feel. Something terrible's going to happen there, Raul. The worst thing imaginable."

"You don't know what?"

"Or maybe it already happened?" she said. "Maybe that's why there's nobody in the town. No. No. That's not it. It's not over, it's just about to happen."

She tried to make sense of her confusions the best way she knew. If she were setting a scene in that town, for a movie, what would it be? A gun-fight on Main Street? The citizens locked up behind their doors while the White Hats and the Black Hats shot it out? Possibly. Or a town vacated as some stomping behemoth appeared on the horizon? The classic fifties monster scenario: a creature woken by nuclear tests—

"That's closer," she said.

"What is?"

"Maybe it's a dinosaur movie. Or a giant tarantula. I don't know. That's definitely closer. Christ, this is frustrating! I know something about this place, Raul, and I can't quite get hold of it."

From next door, the strains of Donizetti's masterpiece. She knew it so well now she could have sung along with it had she had the voice.

"I'm going to make some coffee," she said. "Wake myself up. Will you go and ask Ron for some milk?"

"Yes. Of course."

"Just tell him you're a friend of mine."

Raul got up off the bed, detaching his hand from hers.

"Ron's apartment's number four," she called after him, then went through to the bathroom and took her postponed shower, still vexed by the problem of the town. By the time she'd sluiced herself down and found a clean T-shirt and jeans Raul was back in the apartment, and the telephone was ringing. From the other end, opera and Ron.

"Where did you find him?" he wanted to know. "And does he have a brother?"

"Is it impossible to have a private life around here?" she said.

"You shouldn't have paraded him, girl," Ron replied. "What is he, a truck driver? Marines? He's so broad."

"That he is."

"If he gets bored just send him back over."

"He'll be flattered," Tesla said, and put the phone down. "You've got yourself an admirer," she told Raul. "Ron thinks you're very sexy."

Raul's look was less perplexed than she'd anticipated. It made her ask: "Are there gay apes, do you suppose?"

"Gay?"

"Homosexual. Men who like other men in bed."

"Is Ron?"

"Is Ron?" she laughed. "Yes, Ron is. It's that kind of neighborhood. That's why I like it."

She started to measure out the coffee into the cups. As she heard the granules slide from the spoon she felt the vision beginning in on her again.

She dropped the spoon. Turned to Raul. He was a long way from her, across a room that seemed to be filling with dust.

"Raul?" she said.

"What's wrong?" she saw him say. Saw rather than heard; the volume had been turned down to zero in the world she was slipping from. Panic set in. She reached out for Raul with both hands.

"Don't let me go—" she yelled at him. "—I don't want to go! I don't—"

Then the dust came between them, eroding him. Her hands missed his in the storm and instead of falling into his solid embrace she was pitched back into the desert, moving at speed across by now familiar terrain. The same baked earth she'd travelled twice before.

Her apartment had disappeared completely. She was back in the Loop, heading through the town. Above her, the sky was delicately tinted, as it had been the first time she'd travelled here. The sun was still close to the horizon. She could see it clearly, unlike that first time. More than see, stare at, without having to look away. She could even make out details. Solar flares leaping from its rim like arms of fire. A cluster of sun-spots marking its burning face. When she looked back to earth she was approaching the town.

With the first flush of panic over she began to take control of her circumstances, reminding herself sharply that this was the third time she'd been here, and she should be able to grasp the trick of it by now. She willed her pace to slow, and found that indeed she was slowing, giving her more time to study the town as she came to its fringes. Her instinct, seeing it for the first time, had been that it was somehow fake. That instinct was now confirmed. The boards of the houses were not weather-beaten, nor even painted. There were no curtains at the windows; no key-holes in the doors. And beyond those doors and windows? She told her floating system to veer towards one of the houses, and peered through the window. The roof of the house had been improperly finished; sunlight darted between the cracks and illuminated the interior. It was empty. There was no furniture, nor any other sign of human habitation. There was not even any division of the interior into rooms. The building was a complete sham. And if this one, then the next too presumably. She moved along the row to confirm the suspicion. It was also completely deserted.

As she drew away from the second window she felt the pull she'd experienced back in the other world: Kissoon was trying to bring her to him. She hoped now that Raul made no attempt to wake her, if indeed her body was still present in the world she'd left. Though she had a fear of this place, and a profound suspicion of the man who'd called her here, her curiosity laid stronger claim upon her. The mysteries of Palomo Grove had been bizarre enough, but nothing in Fletcher's hurried transfer of information about the Jaff, the Art and Quiddity went far towards explaining this place. The answers lay with Kissoon, she'd not the slightest doubt of that. If she could dig between the lines of his conversation, oblique as it was, she might have a hope of understanding. And with her newfound confidence in this condition she felt easier at the thought of returning to the hut. If he threatened her, or got a hard-on, she'd simply leave. It was within her power. Anything was within her power, if she wanted it badly enough. If she could look at the sun and not be blinded, she could certainly deal with Kissoon's fumbling claims on her body.

She started on through the town, aware that she was now walking, or had at least decided to present herself with that illusion. Once she'd imagined herself here, as she'd done the first time, the process of bringing her flesh with her was automatic. She couldn't feel the ground beneath her feet, nor did the act of walking take the least effort, but she had carried with her from the other world that idea of how to advance, and was using it here whether it was necessary or not. Probably not. Probably a thought was all that was required to whisk her around. But the more of the reality she knew best that she imported into this place, she reasoned, the more control she had over it. She would operate here by the rules she'd assumed were universal, until recently. Then, if they changed, she'd know it was not her doing. The more she thought this through the more solid she felt. Her shadow deepened beneath her; she began to feel the ground hot beneath her feet.

Reassuring as it was to have natural senses here, Kissoon clearly did not approve. She felt his pull on her strengthen, like he'd put his hand into her stomach and was tugging.

"All right..." she murmured "...I'm coming. But in my time, not in yours."

There was more than weight and shadow in the condition she was learning; there was smell and sound. Both of these brought surprises; both unwelcome. To her nostrils a sickening smell, one she knew without doubt to be that of putrefying meat. Was there a dead animal somewhere on the street? She could see nothing. But sound gave her a second clue. Her ears, sharper than they'd ever been, caught the seething of insect life. She listened closely to discover its direction, and guessing it, crossed the street to another of the houses. It was as featureless as those whose windows she'd peered through, but this one was not empty. The strengthening stench and the sound that came with it confirmed that instinct. There was something dead behind that banal facade. Many things, she began to suspect. The smell was getting to be overpowering; it made her innards churn. But she had to see what secret this town concealed.

Halfway across the street she felt another tug on her stomach. She resisted it, but Kissoon wasn't quite so ready to let her off the hook this time. He pulled again, harder, and she found herself moved down the street against her will. One moment she was approaching the House of the Stench, the next she was twenty yards from where she'd been.

"I want to see," she said through gritted teeth, hoping that Kissoon could hear her.

Even if he couldn't he pulled again. This time she was ready for the tug and actively fought against it, demanding that her body move back towards the House.

"You're not going to stop me," she said.

In reply, he pulled once more, and despite her best efforts hauled her even further from her target.

"Fuck you!" she yelled out loud, furious at his intervention.

He used her anger against her. As she burned energy in her outburst he pulled yet again, and this time succeeded in moving her almost all the way down the street to the other end of the town. There was nothing she could do to resist him. He was quite simply stronger than her, and the more furious she became the more his grip strengthened, until she was moving at some speed away from the town, prey to his summons the way she'd been the first time she'd come into the Loop.

She knew her anger was weakening her resistance, and calmly instructed herself to control it as the desert speeded by.

"Calm yourself, woman," she told herself. "He's just a bully. Nothing more. Nothing less. Chill out."

Her advice to herself worked. She felt self-determination beginning to swell in her again. She didn't allow herself the luxury of satisfaction. She simply exercised the power she'd claimed back to show herself once more. Kissoon didn't relinquish his claim, of course; she felt his fist in her gut pulling as hard as ever. It hurt. But she resisted, and went on resisting, until she had almost come to a dead stop.

He'd succeeded in one of his ambitions at least, however. The town was a speck on the horizon behind her. The trek back to it was presently beyond her. She was not certain, even if she began it, that she could resist his tugging for such a distance.

Again, she offered herself some silent advice: this time to stand still for a few moments and take stock of her situation. She'd lost the fight in the town, there was no two ways about that. But she'd gained a few sticky questions to ask Kissoon when she was finally face to face with him. One, what the source of the stench actually was, and two, why he was so afraid of her seeing it. But given the strength he clearly possessed, even at this distance, she knew she had to be careful. The greatest mistake she could make in these circumstances was to assume any government she had over herself was permanent. Her presence here was at Kissoon's behest, and whatever he'd told her about being a prisoner here himself he knew more about its rules than she did. She was prey every moment to his power, the limits of which she could only guess. She had to proceed with greater caution, or risk losing what little authority she had over her condition.

Turning her back on the town she began to move in the direction of the hut. The solidity she'd earned in the town had not been taken from her, but when she moved it was with a lightness of step utterly unlike anything she'd experienced hitherto. A moonwalk of a type: her strides long and easy, her speed impossible even for the fastest of sprinters. Sensing her approach Kissoon no longer hauled on her gut, though he maintained a presence there, as if to remind her of the strength he could use should he turn his will to it.

Ahead now she saw the second of the landmarks here: the tower. The wind whined in its tethering wires. Again she slowed her pace, so as to study the structure better. There was very little to see. It stood perhaps a hundred feet high, was made of steel, and had atop it a simple wood platform covered on three of its sides by sheets of corrugated iron. Its function defied her. As a viewing platform it seemed singularly useless, given that there was so little to view. Nor did it seem to be serving any technical purpose. Besides the corrugated iron up top—and some parcel hanging between—there was no sign of aerials or monitoring apparatus. She thought of Bunuel, of all people, and of her favorite of his films, Simon del Desierto, a satiric vision of St. Simon tempted by the Devil as he sat in penitence on the top of a pillar in the middle of nowhere. Perhaps the tower had been built for a similarly masochist saint. If so, he'd gone to dust, or Godhood.

There was nothing more to be seen here, she decided, and moved on past the tower, leaving it to its whining, enigmatic life. She could not yet see Kissoon's hut, but she knew it couldn't be far. There was no dust storm on the horizon to keep it from sight; the scene before her—the desert floor and the sky above—was exactly as she remembered it from her last trip here. The fact momentarily struck her as strange: that nothing whatsoever seemed to have changed. Maybe nothing ever changed here, she thought. Maybe it was forever, this place. Or like a movie, re-run and re-run, until the sprocket holes snapped or the picture burned up in the gate.

She'd no sooner imagined constancy than a rogue element she'd almost forgotten came into view. The woman.

Last time, with Kissoon drawing her to the hut, she'd had no chance to make contact with this other player on the desert stage. Indeed Kissoon had attempted to convince her that the woman had been a mirage; a projection of his erotic musings, and to be avoided. But now, with the woman close enough to call to, Tesla thought the explanation a likelier fantasy than the woman. However perverse Kissoon was, and she didn't doubt he'd had his moments, the figure before her was no masturbatory aid. True, she was close to naked, the shreds of clothing wrapped around her body pitifully inadequate. True, she had a face luminous with intelligence. But her long hair looked to have been torn out in several places, the blood dried to a dirty brown on her brow and cheeks. Her body was thin, and badly bruised, scratches on her thighs and arms only partially healed. There was a more profound wound, Tesla suspected, beneath the scraps of what might have once been a white dress. It was glued to the middle of her body, and she hugged herself there, almost bent double with pain. She was no pin-up; nor a mirage. She existed in the same plane of being as Tesla, and suffered here.

As she'd suspected Kissoon was aware that his warning had been ignored, and had begun to tug on Tesla once more. This time she was completely prepared for it. Instead of raging against his claim on her she stood quite still, preserving her calm. His mind-fingers fought for purchase, then began to slip through her innards. He snatched at them again; slipped again, and snatched. She didn't respond in any way, but simply kept her place, her eyes fixed on the woman all the time.

She'd stood upright, and was no longer holding her belly, but let her hands hang by her sides. Very slowly, Tesla began to walk towards her, preserving as best she could the calm that was denying Kissoon his hold. The woman made no move either to advance or retreat. With every step Tesla took she got a better impression of her. She was fifty, maybe, her eyes, though sunk in their sockets, the liveliest part of her; the rest was fatigue. Around her neck she wore a chain on which hung a simple cross. It was all that remained of the life she might once have had before she'd become lost in this wilderness.

Suddenly, she opened her mouth, a look of anguish crossing her face. She started to speak, but either her vocal cords weren't strong enough or her lungs large enough for the words to cover the space between them.

"Wait," Tesla told her, concerned the woman not exhaust what little energy she had. "Let me get closer."

If she understood, the woman ignored the instruction, and began to speak again, repeating something over and over.

"I can't hear you," Tesla shouted back, aware that her distress at the woman's distress was giving Kissoon a handle on her. "Wait, will you?" she said, picking up speed.

As she did so she realized that the look on the woman's face was not anguish at all, but fear. That her eyes were no longer looking at Tesla, but at something else. And that the word she was repeating was "Lix! Lix!"

In horror, she turned, to see the desert floor behind her alive with Lix: a dozen on first glance, twice that on second. They were all exactly the same, like snakes from which every distinguishing mark had been struck, reducing them to ten-foot lengths of writhing muscle, coming at her at full speed. She had thought the one she'd glimpsed previously, pulling open the door, mouthless. She'd been wrong. They had mouths, all right; black holes lined with black teeth, opened wide. She was readying herself for their attack when she realized (too late) they'd been summoned as a distraction. Kissoon clutched her gut and pulled. The desert slid away beneath her, the Lix dividing as she was hauled through their throng.

Ahead, the hut. She was at its threshold in seconds, the door opening on cue.

"Come on in," Kissoon said. "It's been too long."

Left behind in Tesla's apartment, Raul could only wait. He had no doubt of where she'd gone, or who'd claimed her, but without a means of access, he was helpless. Which wasn't to say he didn't sense her. His system had been touched by the Nuncio twice, and it knew she was not that far from him. When, in the car, Tesla had attempted to describe what her trip into the Loop had felt like, he'd badly wanted to articulate something he'd come to understand in the years he'd spent at the Mission. His vocabulary was not equal to the task, however. It still wasn't. But the feelings had borne strongly upon the way he now sensed Tesla.

She was in a different place, but place was just another kind of being, and all states could, if the means were found, speak with every other state. Ape with man, man with moon. It was nothing to do with technologies. It was about the indi--isibility of the world. Just as Fletcher had made the Nuncio from a soup of disciplines, not caring where science became magic, or logic nonsense; just as Tesla moved between realities like a dreaming fog, in defiance of established law; just as he had moved from the apparently simian to the apparently human, and never known where one became the other, or if it ever did, so he knew he might reach now, if only he had, the wit or the words, which he didn't, through to the place where Tesla was. It was very close, as were all spaces at all times; parts of the same landscape of mind. But he could shape none of this into action. It was beyond him, as yet.

All he could do was know, and wait, which in its way was more painful than believing himself forsaken.

"You're a fuckhead and a liar," she said when she'd closed the door.

The fire was burning brightly. There was very little smoke. Kissoon sat on its far side, staring up at her, his eyes brighter than she remembered. There was excitement in them.

"You wanted to come back," he said to her. "Don't deny it. I felt it in you. You could have resisted while you were out there in the Cosm but you really didn't want to. Tell me I'm a liar about that. I dare you."

"No," she said. "I admit it. I'm curious."

"Good."

"But that doesn't give you the right to just drag me here."

"How else was I to show you the way?" he asked her lightly.

"Show me the way?" she said, knowing he was infuriating her deliberately but unable to get the sensation of helplessness out of her head. She hated nothing more vehemently than to be out of control, and his hold of her made her mad as hell.

"I'm not stupid," she said. "And I'm not a toy you can just pull on when it suits you."

"I don't mean to treat you as either," Kissoon said. "Please, can't we make peace? We're on the same side after all?"

"Are we?"

"You can't doubt that."

"Can't I?"

"After all I told you," Kissoon said. "The secrets I shared with you."

"Seems to me there's a few you're not willing to share."

"Oh?" Kissoon said, his gaze moving from her to the flames.

"The town, for instance."

"What about it?"

"I wanted to see what was in the house, but no, you just hauled me away."

Kissoon sighed. "I don't deny it," he said. "If I hadn't, you wouldn't be here."

"I don't follow."

"Don't you sense the atmosphere there? I can't believe you don't. The sheer dread."

Now it was she who expelled breath, softly, between her teeth.

"Yes," she said. "I felt something."

"The Iad Uroboros has its agents everywhere," Kissoon said. "I believe one of them is in hiding in that town. I don't know what form it takes, and I don't want to know. But it would be fatal to look, I suspect. Anyway, I'm not about to risk it, and you shouldn't either, however curious you are."

It was difficult to argue with this point of view when it so closely approximated her own feelings. Only minutes ago, back in her apartment, she'd told Raul she sensed something about to happen in that empty Main Street. Now Kissoon was confirming her suspicion.

"I suppose I have to thank you then," she said reluctantly.

"Don't bother," Kissoon replied. "I didn't save you for your sake, I saved you for more important duties." He took a moment to dig at the core of the fire with a blackened stick. It blazed higher, and the hut was illuminated more brightly than ever. "I'm sorry," he went on, "if I frightened you when you were last here. I say if. I know I did and I can't apologize enough." He didn't look at her through this speech, which had a rehearsed quality to it. But coming from a man she suspected had a major ego, it was doubly welcome. "I was...moved, shall we say...by your physical presence in a way I hadn't quite taken account of, and you were right to be suspicious of my motives." He put one hand between his legs and took his penis between forefinger and thumb. "I'm chastened now," he said. "As you can see."

She looked. He was quite limp.

"Apology accepted," she said.

"So now, we can get back to business I hope."

"I'm not going to give my body to you, Kissoon," she said flatly. "If that's what you mean by business, no deal."

Kissoon nodded. "I can't say I blame you. Apologies sometimes aren't enough. But you must understand the gravity of this. Even now, up in Palomo Grove, the Jaff is preparing to use the Art. I can stop him. But not from here."

"Teach me then."

"There isn't time."

"I'm a quick learner."

Kissoon looked up at her, his face sharp.

"That really is a monstrous arrogance," he said. "You step into the middle of a tragedy that's been moving towards its final act for centuries and think you can just change its course with a few words. This isn't Hollywood. This is the real world."

His cold fury subdued her; but not much.

"All right, so I get feisty once in a while. Shoot me for it. I've told you I'll help but I won't do any of this body-swapping shit."

"Maybe, then..."

"What?"

"...you can find someone who is willing to give themselves over to me."

"That's a tough call. What am I supposed to tell them?"

"You're persuasive," he said.

She thought back to the world she'd stepped out of. The apartment building had twenty-one occupants. Could she persuade Ron, or Edgar, or one of her friends, Mickey de Falco perhaps, to step back into the Loop with her? She doubted it. It was only when her seeking centered on Raul that she glimpsed a little hope. Might he dare what she wouldn't?

"Maybe I can help," she said.

"Quickly?"

"Yes. Quickly. If you can get me back to my apartment."

"Easily done."

"I'm not promising anything, mind you."

"I understand."

"And I want something from you in return."

"What's that?"

"The woman I tried to speak to; the one you said was a sex-aid?"

"I wondered when you'd get to her."

"She's hurt."

"Don't believe it."

"I saw for myself."

"It's an Iad trick!" Kissoon said. "She's been wandering around out there for a while now, trying to get me to open the door to her. Sometimes she pretends she's hurt, sometimes she's all purrs, like a sex-kitten, Rubs herself against the door." He shuddered. "I hear her, rubbing herself, begging me to let her in. It's just another trick."

As with almost every statement Kissoon made Tesla found herself not knowing whether to believe or disbelieve. On her last visit he'd told her he thought the woman was most likely a dream-mistress. Now he was saying she was an Iad agent. One but not both.

"I want to speak to her myself," she said. "Make up my own mind. She doesn't look that dangerous."

"You don't know," Kissoon warned. "Appearances lie. I keep her at bay with the Lix out of fear of what she might do."

She contemplated asking what he could possibly fear about a woman so clearly in pain, then decided it was a question for a less desperate hour.

"I'll go back then," she said.

"You understand the urgency."

"You don't have to keep telling me," Tesla said. "Yes, I understand. But like I said you're asking a lot. People get attached to their bodies. Joke."

"If all goes well, and I can stop the Art being used, then the supplier gets his flesh back intact. If I fail it's the end of the world anyway, so what will it matter?"

"Nice," Tesla said.

"I try."

She turned back to the door.

"Go quickly," he said. "And don't get distracted—"

The door opened without her touching it.

"You're still a condescending fucker, Kissoon—" was Tesla's parting remark. Then she'd stepped out into the same early morning light.

Off to the left of the hut a cloud-shadow seemed to be moving over the desert floor. She studied it a moment, and saw that the sun-beaten ground was covered with Lix, a small sea of them. Sensing her gaze they stopped moving, and raised their heads towards her. Hadn't Kissoon said that he'd made these creatures?

"Go, will you?" she heard him say. "There isn't much time."

Had she acted upon his instructions immediately she'd have missed the sight of the woman appearing beyond the Lix. She didn't, so she didn't. And the sight of her, despite the warnings Kissoon had issued, held her on the step. If this was indeed one of the Iad Uroboros' agents, as Kissoon had claimed, it was a brilliant conceit to present herself in such a vulnerable guise. Try as she might she couldn't quite believe a villainy as vast or indeed as ambitious as the Iad would present itself in so wretched a manner. Wasn't evil too full of itself, even in its machinations, to come so undressed? She couldn't ignore her instinct, which told her unequivocally that in this at least Kissoon was wrong. The woman was no agent. She was a human being in pain. Tesla could turn her back on many appeals, but never on that.

Ignoring a further entreaty from the man in the hut behind her, she took a step towards the woman. The Lix were alive to her approach. They began to seethe as she stepped towards them, raising their heads like cobras. The sight quickened her approach rather than slowing it. If this was Kissoon's instruction, and it surely was, then their keeping her from the woman only further reinforced her suspicion that she was being misled. He was trying to keep them apart; why? Because this wretched, anguished woman was dangerous? No! Every fiber of Tesla's being refused that interpretation. He wanted to keep them apart because of something that might pass between them; something that might be said or done that would throw him into doubt.

The Lix had new instructions it seemed. To harm Tesla would be to keep the messenger from her purpose; so they instead turned their heads towards the woman. She saw their intention, and fear came over her face. It occurred to Tesla that she was familiar with their malice; that maybe she'd dared them before in an attempt to get to Kissoon, or one of his visitors. She certainly seemed versed in how best to confuse them, running back and forth quickly so that they tied their nest in knots trying to decide which way to lunge.

Tesla added her own contribution to the defense by yelling at them as she picked up her pace, suddenly certain that they dared not harm her as long as Kissoon was so desperate to be out of his prison, and she his only hope.

"Get away from her!" she yelled at them. "Leave her alone, fuckheads!"

But they had their target fixed, and weren't about to be deflected from it by shouts. As Tesla came within a few yards of them they started after their quarry.

"Run!" Tesla yelled.

The woman heeded the advice, but too late. The speediest from the nest was at her heels; then climbing her body to wind itself around her. There was a vile elegance to its motion, whipping around the woman's torso and pulling her to the ground. The Lix that followed were quickly upon her. By the time Tesla got within a few yards of the woman she was all but indistinguishable from her attackers. They'd virtually mummified her. Still she fought them, tearing at their bodies as they closed ranks around her.

Tesla didn't waste time with further words. She simply tore at the Lix with her bare hands, first attempting to free the woman's face for fear they smothered her, then, that done, pulling her arms free. Though they were many, they weren't particularly strong. Several simply broke apart as she hauled on them, yellow-white blood oozing from them over her hands, and spraying up in her face. She let disgust fuel her, fighting their every twisting trick, pulling and pulling at them until she was sticky with fluids. The woman they'd come so close to killing had taken fire from her rescuer, and was struggling free of her assassins' grip.

Sensing that victory was available, albeit snatched, Tesla readied herself for escape. She could not go alone, she knew. The woman had to come with her, back to the apartment in North Huntley Drive, or she'd be prey to further attacks, and after such an assault she'd have little power to resist them. Kissoon had taught her to imagine her way into the Loop. Could she now do the same in the opposite direction, not only for herself but on the woman's behalf? If not they'd both fall to the Lix, who seemed to be appearing from all sides now, as though an alarm call had been sent out from their maker. Putting their approach out of her mind as best she could, Tesla pictured herself and the woman in front of her out of this place and into another. Not any other. Into West Hollywood. North Huntley Drive. Her apartment. You do this, she told herself. If Kissoon can do it, you can.

She heard the woman cry out—the first sound she'd actually made. There was a disturbance in the scene around them, but not the instant transfer from Kissoon's Loop to West Hollywood she'd hoped for; and the Lix were massing around them in greater and yet greater numbers.

"Again," Tesla told herself. "Do it again."

She focused on the woman in front of her, who was still tearing pieces of the Lix from around her body, and pulling them from her hair. It was this mirage she had to focus on. The other passenger, herself, was easily imagined.

"Go!" she said. "Please God, go!"

This time the images in her head jelled; she not only saw herself and the woman clearly, she saw them in flight, the world around them dissolving and reconfiguring like a jigsaw blown to pieces and remade as another puzzle.

She knew the scene. It was the very spot she'd left from. The coffee was still spilled across the floor; the sun was pouring in through the window; Raul was standing in the middle of the room, waiting for her return. She knew by the look on his face that she'd succeeded in bringing the woman through with her. What she hadn't realized until she looked was that she'd brought the whole image, including the Lix that had been battening upon her. Though they were separated from Kissoon their unnatural life was no less fevered here than in the Loop. The woman dropped them to the floor of the apartment where they continued to writhe, their shit-smelling blood oozing on the floor. But they were only pieces: heads, tails, mid-sections. And already the violence of their motion was slowing. Rather than waste time stomping them out Tesla called Raul to her, and together they carried the woman through to the bedroom and laid her down.

She'd fought hard, and was the worst for it. The wounds on her body had reopened. But she seemed not so much in pain as simply exhausted.

"Watch over her," Tesla told Raul, "I'm going to get some water to clean her up."

"What happened?" he wanted to know.

"I almost sold your soul to a fuckhead and a liar," Tesla said. "But don't worry. I just bought it back."

A week previous, the arrival in Palomo Grove of so many of the brightest stars in Hollywood's firmament would have brought the inhabitants of the town out on to the streets in significant numbers, but today there was barely a witness on the sidewalks to watch them appear. The limos eased their way up the Hill unnoticed, their passengers either getting high or fixing their make-up behind smoked-glass windows; the older ones wondering how long it would be before people gathered to pay hypocritical tribute to them the way they were to Buddy Vance, the younger assuming a cure for death would have been found by the time mortality threatened. There were few among the gathering assembly who had truly loved Buddy. Many had envied him; some had lusted after him; nearly all had taken some pleasure in his fall from grace. But love came infrequently in company such as this. It was a flaw in armor they could ill afford to shed.

The passengers in the limos were aware of the absence of admirers. Even though many of them had no desire to be recognized it offended their tender egos being greeted with such indifference. They quickly turned the insult to good purpose. In car after car the same subject arose: why the dead man had chosen to hide himself away in a God-forsaken shit-hole like Palomo Grove. He'd had secrets; that was why. But what? His drink problem? Everybody knew about that. Drugs? Who cared? Women? He'd been the first to boast about his dick and its doings. No, there must have been some other dirt that drove him to this hell-hole. Theories flowed like vitriol as the mourners turned over the possibilities, breaking off from their bitchery to step out of their cars and offer their condolences to the widow at the threshold of Coney Eye, only to pick it up again as soon as they stepped inside.

Buddy's collection of Carnivalia caused considerable comment, dividing its audience down the middle. Many considered it a perfect encapsulation of the dead man: vulgar, opportunist and now, out of its context, useless. Others declared it a revelation, a side of the deceased they'd never known existed. One or two approached Rochelle to see if any of the pieces were available for sale. She told them that nobody yet knew to whom the Will would ascribe them, but that if they came to her she'd happily give them away.

Jokemeister Lamar went among the celebrants with a smile plastered from ear to ear. In all the years since his parting from Buddy he'd never dared believe he'd be where he now was, lording himself over Buddy's court. He made no attempt to disguise his pleasure. What was the use? Life was too short. Better take pleasure where there was pleasure to be taken, before it was snatched away. The thought of the Jaff only two floors above added an extra glitter to his smile. He didn't know what the man's full intentions were, but it was entertaining to think of these people as fodder. He held all of them in contempt, having seen them or their like perform acts of moral acrobatics that would have shamed a Pope, all for the achieving of profit, position or profile. Sometimes all three. He'd come to view with disgust the self-obsession of his tribe, the ambition that drove so many of them to bring down their betters, and smother the little good in themselves. He'd never let that contempt show, however. He had to work among them. It was better to conceal his feelings. Buddy (poor Buddy) had never been able to achieve such detachment. With a little too much drink in his system he'd railed loud and long against fools he refused to suffer. It was this indiscretion, above all others, that had been his downfall. In a town where words were cheap, talk could be expensive. They'd forgive embezzlement, addiction, molestation of minors, rape and even, on occasion, murder. But Buddy had called them fools. They'd never forgiven him that.

Lamar worked the room, kissing the beauties, acknowledging the studs, shaking the hands of the hirers and firers of both. He imagined Buddy's revulsion at this ritual. Time and time again during their years-together he'd had to coax Buddy out of a party just like this one because he couldn't keep his insults to himself. Time and time again he'd failed.

"You're looking good, Lam."

The overnourished face in front of him was Sam Sagansky, one of Hollywood's most successful power-brokers. At his side stood a big-breasted waif, one in a long line of big-breasted waifs Sam had raised to glitterdom then parted from in public dramas that had left the women's careers destroyed and his reputation as a ladykiller enhanced.

"What does it feel like?" Sagansky wanted to know, "being at his funeral?"

"It's not exactly that, Sam."

"Still, he's dead, and you're not. Don't tell me it doesn't make you feel good."

"I guess so."

"We're survivors, Lam. We've got a right to scratch our balls and laugh. Life's good."

"Yeah," Lamar said, "I suppose it is."

"We're all winners here, eh, honey?" He turned to his wife, who displayed her dental work. "Don't know any better feeling than that."

"I'll catch you later, Sam."

"Are there going to be fireworks?" the waif wondered.

Lamar thought of the Jaff, waiting upstairs, and smiled.

Once round the room, then he headed up to see his master.

"Quite a crowd," the Jaff said.

"You approve?"

"Wholly."

"I wanted a word before things got too...busy."

"About what?"

"Rochelle."

"Ah."

"I know you're planning something heavy-duty, and believe me I couldn't be happier. If you wipe them all off the face of the fucking earth you'll be doing the world a favor."

"I'm sorry to disappoint you," said the Jaff. "They won't all be joining the great Power Breakfast in the sky. I may take a few liberties with them but I'm not interested in death. That's more my son's area of endeavor."

"I just want to be certain Rochelle can be kept out of it."

"I won't lay a finger on her," the Jaff replied. "There? Does that satisfy you?"

"It does, yes. Thanks."

"So. Shall we begin?"

"What are you planning?"

"I just want you to bring the guests up to see me, one by one. Let them get a little liquor in their systems first, then...show them the house."

"Men or women?"

"Bring the men first," the Jaff said, wandering back over to the window. "They're more pliable. Is it my imagination or is it getting dark?"

"Just clouding over."

"Rain?"

"I doubt it."

"Pity. Ah, more guests at the gate. You'd better go down and welcome them in."

It was an empty gesture, Howie knew, to go back to the woods on the edge of Deerdell. There could be no repetition of the meeting he'd had there. Fletcher had gone, and with him, so much clarification. But he went back anyway, vaguely hoping that returning to the place he'd met his father would spark some memory, however vestigial, which would help him dig through to the truth.

The sun was veiled with a hazy layer of cloud, but it was as hot beneath the trees as it had been on the other two occasions he'd come here. Hotter perhaps; certainly clammier. Though he'd intended to make directly for the place where he'd met Fletcher his route became as wandering as his thoughts. He didn't try to correct it. He'd made his gesture of respect, coming here; figuratively tipped his hat to his mother's memory, and to the man who'd reluctantly fathered him.

But chance, or some sense he was not even aware of, brought him back on to his intended course, and without even realizing it at first he stepped from the trees into the circle of clear ground where, eighteen years before, his life had been conjured. That was the right word. Not conceived; conjured. Fletcher had been a magician, of a kind. That was the only word Howie had been able to find to describe him. And he, Howie, had been a trick. Except that instead of applause and bouquets all they'd got—Howie, his mother and the magician—was misery and pain. He'd wasted valuable years in failing to come here sooner, and learning this essential fact about himself: that he was no desperado at all. Just a rabbit pulled from a hat, held up by the ears, and squirming.

He wandered towards the cave entrance, which was still fenced off and marked with police notices warning adventurers away. Standing at the barricade he peered down into the gaping hole in the ground. Somewhere down there in the dark his father had waited and waited, holding on to his enemy like death itself. Now there was only the comedian down there, and from what he'd gathered the corpse would never be recovered.

He looked up, and his whole system somersaulted. He wasn't alone. On the far side of the grave stood Jo-Beth.

He stared, convinced that she was going to disappear. She couldn't be here; not after last night. But his eyes kept seeing her.

They were too far apart for him to ask what she was doing here without raising his voice, which he didn't want to do. He wanted to hold the spell. And besides, did he really need an answer? She was here because he was here because she was here; and so on.

It was she who moved first, her hand going up to the button of the dark dress she wore, and undoing it. The expression on her face didn't seem to change, but he couldn't be certain he wasn't missing nuances. He'd taken off his spectacles when he'd stepped among the trees, and short of digging for them in his shirt pocket he could only watch, and wait, and hope the moment would come for them to approach each other. Meanwhile, she had unbuttoned the top of her dress, and now she slipped the buckle of the belt. Still he resisted making any approach, though it was barely within his power to control himself. She was letting the belt of her dress drop now, and, crossing her arms, took the hem in her hands to pull it up over her head. He didn't dare breathe, for fear he miss an instant of this ritual. She was wearing white underwear, but her breasts, when they came into view, were bare.

She had made him hard. He moved a little to adjust his position, which motion she took as her cue, dropping the dress to the ground and moving towards him. One step was enough. He started to walk towards her in his turn, each keeping close to their barricade. He shrugged off his jacket as he walked, and dropped it behind him.

As they came within a few feet of each other she said:

"I knew you'd be here. I don't know how. I was driving up from the Mall with Ruth—"

"Who?"

"That doesn't matter now. I just wanted to say I'm sorry."

"About what?"

"Last night. I didn't trust you and I should have."

She put her hand to his face.

"Do you forgive me?"

"Nothing to forgive," he said.

"I want to make love to you."

"Yes," he said, as though she hadn't needed to tell him, which was true.

It was easy. After all that had happened to separate them, it was easy. They were like magnets. However or whoever pulled them apart they were bound to come back together, like this; they couldn't help themselves. Didn't want to.

She started to pull his shirt from his trousers. He helped her, hauling it over his head. There were two seconds of darkness while it covered his face, in which her image, face, breasts and underwear, was as sharp in his head as a scene lit by lightning. Then she was there again, unbuckling his belt. He heeled off his shoes, then performed a monopodal dance to pull his socks off: Finally, he let his trousers drop and stepped out of them.

"I was afraid," she said.

"Not now. You're not afraid now."

"No."

"I'm not the Devil. I'm not Fletcher's. I'm yours."

"I love you."

She put her palms on his chest, and ran them outwards, as if smoothing pillows. He put his arms around her and pulled her towards him.

His dick was doing push-ups in his shorts. He placated it by kissing her, moving his hands down her back to the band of her panties, then sliding beneath. Her kisses were moving from his nose to chin, he licking at her lips when her mouth crossed his. She pressed her body against him.

"Here," she said softly.

"Yes?"

"Yes. Why not? No one to see us. I want to, Howie."

He smiled. She stepped away from him, going down on her knees in front of him and pulling his shorts down far enough that his dick sprang into view. She took hold of it gently, then suddenly harder, using her hold to bring him down to ground level. He knelt in front of her. She still didn't relinquish her hold, but rubbed him until he put his hand over hers and coaxed her fingers away.

"Not good?" she said.

"Too good," he breathed. "I don't want to shoot."

"Shoot?"

"Come. Spurt. Lose it."

"I want you to lose it," she said, lying down in front of him. His dick was now solid against his belly. "I want you to lose it in me."

He leaned over and put his hands on her hips, then began to pull her panties down. The hair around her slit was a darker blonde than her hair, but not much. He put his face to her, and licked between the lips. Her body tensed beneath him, then relaxed.

He ran his tongue up from her cunt to her navel, from her navel to her breasts, from her breasts to her face, until he was lying on top of her.

"I love you," he said, and entered her.

It was only as she was washing the bloodstains from the woman's neck that Tesla came to look more closely at the cross around her neck. She recognized it instantly, as a companion to the medallion Kissoon had shown her. The same central figure, spreadeagled; the same four lines of variations on the human spreading from it.

"Shoal," she said.

The woman opened her eyes. There was no period of coming-to. One moment she was to all intents and purposes asleep. The next her eyes were wide and alert. They were dark.

"Where am I?" she said.

"My name's Tesla. You're in my apartment."

"In the Cosm?" the woman said. Her voice was frail; eroded by heat, wind and fatigue.

"Yes," Tesla said. "We're out of the Loop. Kissoon can't get us here."

This she knew was not altogether true. The shaman had twice reached Tesla in this very apartment. Once in her sleep; once while coffee-making. There was nothing, presumably, to stop him doing the same again. But she'd felt no touch from him, nothing at all. Perhaps he was too concerned that she get about her labors on his behalf to interfere. Perhaps he had other plans. Who knew?

"What's your name?" she asked.

"Mary Muralles," she said.

"You're one of the Shoal," Tesla said.

Mary's eyes flickered towards Raul, who was at the door.

"Don't worry," Tesla said. "If you can trust me you can certainly trust him. If you won't trust either of us then we're all lost. So tell me..."

"Yes. I'm one of the Shoal."

"Kissoon told me he was the last."

"He and I."

"The rest were murdered, like he said?"

She nodded. Again her gaze went to Raul.

"I told you," Tesla began.

"Something strange about him," Mary said. "He's not human."

"Don't worry, I know," Tesla said.

"Iad?"

"Ape," she said. She turned to Raul. "Don't mind me telling her do you?"

Raul said and did nothing by way of response.

"How?" Mary wanted to know.

"It's quite a story. I thought maybe you'd know more about it than me. Fletcher? A guy called Jaffe; or the Jaff? No?"

"No."

"So...we've both got things to learn."

Back in the wastes of the Loop, Kissoon sat in his hut and called for help. The Muralles woman had escaped. Her wounds were surely profound, but she'd survived worse. He had to reach her, which meant stretching his influence into real time. He'd done it before of course. He'd brought Tesla to him that way. Before her, there'd been a few others who'd strayed along the fornada del muerto. Randolph Jaffe had been one such wanderer, whom he'd been able to guide into the Loop. It wasn't so difficult. But the influence he wished to exercise now was not upon a human mind, it was upon creatures who had no mind, nor in any legitimate sense were even alive.

He pictured the Lix now, lying inert on a tile floor. They'd been forgotten. Good. They weren't particularly subtle beasts. To work their mischief best they needed the victims distracted. That, at the moment, they surely were. If he was quick he could still silence the witness.

His call had been answered. Help was coming, in crawling hundreds, under the door. Beetles, ants, scorpions. He unlocked his crossed legs and drew his feet up to his body, to give them free access to his genitals. Years ago he'd been able to achieve erection and ejaculation by will alone, but age, and the Loop, had taken its toll. He needed help now, and given that the laws of this suit explicitly forbade the conjuror to touch himself a little artificial aid was required. They knew their business, crawling up over him, the motion of their limbs, and their bites and stings, arousing him. This was the way he'd made the Lix, ejaculating on to his own excrement. Seminal suits had always been his favorite kind.

Now, as they worked on him, he let his thoughts return to the Lix on the tiles, allowing the rolls of sensation climbing his thronged perineum and balls to push his intention out towards the place where they lay.

A little life was all they needed, to bring a little death...

Mary Muralles had asked to be told Tesla's story before she told her own, and for all her quiet voice she spoke like a woman whose requests were seldom denied. This one certainly wasn't. Tesla was happy to tell her story, or rather the story (so little of it was hers), as best she could, hoping that Mary would be able to throw some light on its more puzzling details. She held her silence however, until Tesla had finished, which—by the time she'd told what she knew about Fletcher, the Jaff, the children of both, the Nuncio and Kissoon—was close to half an hour. It might have been much longer but that she'd had practice in the craft of concision preparing plot summaries for studios. She'd practiced with Shakespeare (the tragedies were easy, the comedies a bitch) until she'd had the trick of it down pat. But this story was not so easily pigeonholed. When she started to tell the tale it spilled out in all directions. It was a love story and an origin of species. It was about insanity, apathy and a lost ape. When it was tragic, as in Vance's death, it was also farcical. When its settings were most mundane, as at the Mall, its substance was often visionary. She could find no way to tell all this neatly. It refused. Every time she thought she had a clear line to a point something would intersect.

If she said, "It's all connected..." once in her telling she said it a dozen times, though she didn't always know (in fact seldom) how or why.

Perhaps Mary could furnish the connections.

"I'm about done," Tesla said. "It's your turn."

The other woman took a moment to gather her strength. Then she said:

"You've certainly got a good grasp of recent events, but you want to know what happened to shape those events. Of course. They're a mystery to you. But I have to say much of it's a mystery to me too. I can't answer all the problems. There's a lot I don't know. If your account proves anything, it's that there's a good deal neither of us knows. But I can tell you some facts straight off. First, and simplest: it was Kissoon who murdered the rest of the Shoal."

"Kissoon? Are you kidding me?"

"I was one of them, remember?" Mary said. "He'd been conspiring against us for years."

"Conspiring with whom?"

"At a guess? The Iad Uroboros. Or their representatives in the Cosm. With the Shoal dead, he might have intended to use the Art, and let the Iad through."

"Shit! So what he told me about the Iad, and Quiddity...all of that's true?"

"Oh yes. He only tells lies when he needs to. He told you the truth. That's part of his brilliance—"

"I don't see what's so brilliant about hiding in a hut—" Tesla said, then: "Wait a minute. This doesn't figure. If he's responsible for the deaths of the Shoal, what's he got to fear? Why's he hiding at all?"

"He isn't hiding. He's trapped there. Trinity's his prison. The only way he can get out—"

"Is by finding another body to get out in. "

"Exactly."

"Me."

"Or Randolph Jaffe before you."

"But neither of us fell for it."

"And he doesn't get many visitors. It takes a very extraordinary set of circumstances to bring anyone within sighting distance of the Loop. He created it to hide his crime. Now it hides him. Once in a while somebody like the Jaff—driven half insane—gets to the point where Kissoon can take control, and guide him in. Or you, with the Nuncio in your system. But otherwise, he's alone."

"Why's he trapped?"

"I trapped him. He thought I was dead. Had my body brought into the Loop with the others. But I rose. Confronted him. Angered him to the point where he attacked me, putting my blood on his hands."

"And chest," Tesla said, remembering the glimpse she'd had of Kissoon's blood-spattered body, when she'd first escaped him.

"The conditions of the looping suit are explicit. Blood may not be spilled inside the Loop, or the conjuror becomes its prisoner."

"What do you mean by suit?"

"Petition. Maneuver. Trick."

"Trick? You call making a loop in time a trick?"

"It's an ancient suit," Mary said. "A time out of time.

You'll find accounts of it everywhere. But there are laws pertaining to all conditions of matter, and I made him break one. He became his own victim."

"And you were trapped there too?"

"Not strictly. But I wanted him dead, and I knew nobody in the Cosm who could do it. Not with the rest of the Shoal murdered. I had to stay and hope to kill him."

"Then you'd have shed blood too."

"Better that, and be trapped, than he go on living. He'd killed fifteen great men and women. Pure, good souls. Just had them slaughtered. Tortured some of them, for the pleasure of it. Not personally of course. He'd had agents. But he'd masterminded the whole thing. Arranged that we be separated from each other, so that he could dispatch us one by one. Then had our bodies taken back in time to Trinity, where he knew no trace would remain."

"Where are they?"

"In the town. What's left of them."

"My God," Tesla remembered the House of the Stench, and shuddered, "I almost got to see them for myself."

"Kissoon prevented you of course."

"Not forcibly. It was more a matter of persuasion. He's very convincing."

"Certainly. He had us all fooled for years. The Shoal is—I mean was—the most difficult society to join in the world. There are means, incredibly elaborate, to test and purify possible members before they even realize the society exists. Somehow Kissoon faked his way through those procedures. Or else the Iad somehow tainted him once he was a member, which is possible."

"Is as little known about the Iad as he said?"

"Scarcely any information emerges from the Metacosm. It's a sealed condition of being. What we know about the Iad can be summed up in a few words. They are many; their definition of life is not that of you humans—indeed may be its antithesis; and they want the Cosm."

"What do you mean, you humans?" Tesla said. "You're as human as I am."

"Yes and no," Mary replied. "I certainly was once as you are. But the processes of purification change your nature. If I'd been human I couldn't have survived in Trinity for twenty odd years, with scorpions to eat and mud to drink. I'd be dead, the way Kissoon intended."

"How come you survived the murder attempt and the others didn't?"

"Luck. Instinct. Sheer refusal to let that bastard win. It isn't just Quiddity that's at stake, though that's valuable enough. It's the Cosm. If the Iad break through nothing on this plane of being will survive intact. I believe—" She stopped talking suddenly, and sat up in bed.

"What is it?" Tesla said.

"I heard something. Next door."

"Grand opera," Tesla said. Lucia di Lammermoor still trailed through.

"No," Mary said. "Something else."

Raul was already off in search of the sound's source before Tesla asked him. She turned her attention back to Mary.

"There's still some stuff I haven't got straight," she said. "A lot of stuff. Like, why Kissoon went to the trouble of taking the bodies into the Loop. Why didn't he destroy them out here in the normal world? And why did you let him take you?"

"I was wounded; almost dead. Near enough for him and his assassins to think I was dead. It was only when they were tossing me on a pile of bodies I came to my senses."

"So what happened to his assassins?"

"Knowing Kissoon he probably let them die in the Loop, trying to find their way out. That sort of thing would amuse him."

"So for twenty odd years the only human beings in the Loop—or near human—were you and Kissoon."

"Me half mad. And him all the way."

"And those fucking Lix, whatever they are."

"His shit and semen is what they are," Mary said. "His turds, got fat and frisky."

"Jesus."

"They're trapped there the way he is," Mary said, with some satisfaction. "At Zero, if Zero can be—"

Raul's yell from the next room stopped her in mid-thought. Tesla was up and through into the kitchen in seconds, to find him wrestling with one of Kissoon's shit-creatures. Her assumption, that they'd been dying when they were brought through from the Loop, could not have been farther off the mark. If anything the beast in his hands looked stronger than those she and Mary had fought, despite being only the head-end. Its mouth was wide and closing on Raul's face. It had already struck there twice at least. There was blood pouring from a wound in the center of his forehead. She crossed to him and took hold of it with both hands, more disgusted by its feel and smell than ever now she knew its origins. Even with four hands to keep it from doing further damage it was not about to be subdued. It had the strength of three of its earlier incarnations. She knew it was only a matter of time before it wore them both down, and got to Raul's face again. This time it wouldn't be just his frown it bit off.

"I'm going to let go," Tesla said, "and get a knife. OK?"

"Be quick about it."

"You betcha. On a count of three, right? Get ready to take the whole thing."

"I'm ready."

"One...two...three!"

She let go on three, and ran through to the sink. There were piles of unwashed dishes beside it. She rummaged amongst the chaos looking for a suitable weapon, the dishes sliding in every direction, several of them smashing as they fell to the floor. But the avalanche uncovered steel; one of a set of kitchen knives her mother had given her two Christmases ago. She picked it up. Its handle was sticky with last week's lasagna and the mold it had sprouted since, but it felt good in her hand.

As she turned back to go to Raul's aid it struck her that there had been more than one of the Lix pieces brought through from the Loop—five or six at least, she thought—and that only one was visible. The others had gone from the floor. She had not time to concern herself any further. Raul cried out. She rushed to his aid, stabbing at the body of the Lix with the knife. The beast responded instantly to the attack, snapping its head around, black needle-teeth bared. She aimed a stab at its face, opening a wound in its jaw, from which the dirty yellow muck that she'd taken for blood 'til minutes ago spat in fat spurts. Its gyrations became a frenzy, which Raul was only barely able to control.

"Count of three—" she said to him.

"What this time?"

"Throw it!"

"It can move quickly."

"I'll stop it," she said. "Just do as I say! On three! One...two...three!"

He did as instructed. The Lix flew across the room and hit the floor. As it struggled to get itself ready to attack again Tesla raised the knife and brought it down in one two-handed stab that transfixed the creature. Mother had good taste in knives. The blade sliced into the creature and buried itself in the floor, effectively nailing it down, while its life-fluids continued to leak from the wounds.

"Got you, you fucker!" she said, then turned to Raul. The attack had left him shaking, and the blood was still flowing copiously from his face.

"Better wash those wounds," Tesla told him. "You don't know what kind of poison's in those things."

He nodded, and headed through to the bathroom, while she returned her gaze to the death-throes of the Lix. Just as she recaptured the thought she'd had as she'd emerged with the knife (where were the rest of them?) she heard Raul say:

"...Tesla."

and she knew where they'd gone.

He was standing at the door of her bedroom. It was clear from the expression of horror on his face what he was looking at. But it still brought a sob of revulsion from her to see what Kissoon's beasts had done to the woman she'd left lying on her bed. They were still busy with their murder. Six of them in all, like the one that had attacked Raul, stronger than those they'd encountered in the Loop. Mary's resistance had profited her not at all. While Tesla had been busy digging for a blade to protect Raul—an attack mounted as a distraction— they'd crawled on her and wound themselves around her neck and head. She'd struggled fiercely, her fight throwing her half off the bed, where her body, a racked bag of bones, still lay. One of the Lix unravelled itself from around her face. It had crushed her features beyond recognition.

She was suddenly aware of Raul, still shuddering at her shoulder.

"Nothing to be done," she said. "You should go wash." He nodded grimly, and left her side. The Lix were running down, their motions becoming sluggish. Presumably Kis-soon had better things to do with his energies than waste them pressing his agents to further mischief. She closed the door on the sight, sickened to her stomach, and went back through to check under the furniture that there were no others lurking around. The creature she'd nailed to the floor was now completely dead; or at least inert. She stepped past it and went to find another weapon before checking the rest of the apartment.

In the bathroom Raul let the bloodied water run from the sink, and peered at the hurt the Lix had done him. It was superficial. But some of its poison had got into his system, as Tesla had warned. His whole body seemed to be shaking from the inside out, and the arm that had been touched by the Nuncio was throbbing as though he'd just plunged it into boiling water. He looked down. The arm was insubstantial in front of him, the sink behind it showing through more solid flesh and bone. Panicking, he looked back up at his reflection. That too was growing hazy, the bathroom wall blurring, and some other image—harsh and bright—demanding to be seen behind it.

He opened his mouth to cry for Tesla's help but before he could do so his image disappeared from the mirror entirely; and so—a moment of utter dislocation later—did the mirror itself. The glare grew blinding around him, and something took hold of his Nunciate arm. He remembered Tesla describing Kissoon's grip on her gut. Now that same mind took his hand, and pulled.

As the last trace of Tesla's apartment gave way to an endless, burning horizon, he threw his untainted arm out to where the sink had been. He seemed to connect with something in the world he'd left, but he couldn't be sure.

Then all hope was gone, and he was in Kissoon's Loop.

Tesla heard something drop in the bathroom.

"Raul?" she said.

There was no answer.

"Raul? Are you all right?"

Fearing the worst she went quickly, knife in hand. The door was closed but not locked.

"Are you there?" she said. When she received no reply a third time she opened the door. A bloody towel had been dropped on the floor, or fallen, carrying a number of toiletry items with it: the noise she'd heard. But Raul was not there.

"Shit!"

She turned off the faucet, which was still gushing, and about-faced, calling his name again, then going through the apartment, dreading with every turn she was going to find him prey to the same horror that had claimed Mary. But there was no sign of him; nor of any further Lix. Finally, steeling herself for the sight on the sheets, she opened her bedroom door. He was not there either.

Standing at the door brought back to Tesla the look of horror on his face when he'd seen Mary's corpse. Had that simply been too much for him? She shut off the sight of the body on the bed and went to the front door. It was ajar, the way she'd left it when they'd first come in. Leaving it that way she started down the stairs and along the side of the building, calling after him as she went, the certainty growing in her that he'd simply decided he could stand no more of this madness and had taken to the streets of West Hollywood. If he had he was exchanging one madness for another, but that was his choice and she couldn't be responsible for the consequences.

He wasn't in the street when she reached it. In the porch of the house opposite two young men were sitting enjoying the last light of the afternoon. She knew the names of neither, but she crossed to them and said:

"Have you seen a man?" which raised eyebrows and smiles from both.

"Recently?" one of them said.

"Just now. Ran out of the building opposite?"

"We just came out here," said the other. "Sorry."

"What'd he do?" the first said, looking at the knife in Tesla's hand. "Too much or not enough?"

"Not enough," Tesla said.

"Fuck him," came the reply. "There's plenty more."

"Not like him," she replied. "Trust me. Not like him. Thanks anyhow."

"What did he look like?" came the question as she re-crossed the street.

A little vengeful part of Tesla, one she wasn't much proud of but which always came to the fore when someone did the dirty on her like this, replied: "Like a fucking monkey," in a voice that must have been heard halfway down Santa Monica and Melrose. "He looked like a fucking monkey."

So, Tesla babe, what now?

She poured herself a Tequila, sat herself down, and reviewed the overall picture. Raul gone; Kissoon in league with the Iad; Mary Muralles dead in the bedroom. Not a lot to take comfort from. She poured herself a second Tequila, not unaware that drunkenness, like sleep, might put her closer to Kissoon than she'd strictly like to be, but needing the burn of it in her throat and belly.

There was no purpose in staying in the apartment. The real action was back in Palomo Grove.

She put a call through to Grillo. He was not at the hotel. She asked the hotel operator to put her through to the front desk and enquired there if anyone knew where he was. Nobody did. He'd gone out in the middle of the afternoon she was told. It was now four-twenty-five. They estimated he'd been gone an hour at least. To the party on the Hill she guessed.

With nothing to detain her at North Huntley Drive but mourning her sudden loss of allies, her best move now, she decided, was to go find Grillo, before circumstance took him from her too.

Grillo hadn't come to the Grove with garb appropriate for the gathering up at Coney Eye, but this being California, where sneakers and jeans were formal dress, he thought he wouldn't be conspicuous in his casual gear. That was the first of the afternoon's many errors. Even the guards at the front gate were wearing tuxedos and black ties. But he had the invitation, on which he'd inscribed a false name (Jon Swift), and it was not questioned.

This was not the first time he'd slipped into a gathering under an assumed identity. Back in his days as an investigative reporter (as opposed to his present role as muckraker) he'd attended a neo-Nazis' revival meeting in Detroit as a distant relation of Goebbels, several faith-healing sessions by a defrocked priest whose scam he'd later uncovered in a series of pieces that had earned him a Pulitzer nomination, and, most memorably, a gathering of sado-masochists, his account of which had been smothered by the senator he'd seen chained up eating dog food. In those various companies he'd felt like a just man in dangerous company, going in search of truth: Philip Marlowe with a pen. Here he simply felt nauseous. A beggar sickened at the feast. From Ellen's account of the party he'd expected to see famous faces; what he hadn't anticipated was the strange authority they'd had over him, quite out of proportion to their skills. Gathered under Buddy Vance's roof were dozens of the most well-known faces in the world; legends, idols, style-makers. Around them, faces he couldn't have put names to but he recognized from copies of Variety and Hollywood Reporter. The potentates of the industry—agents, lawyers and studio executives. Tesla, in her frequent railings against the New Hollywood, saved the sourest venom for these, the business-school types who'd superseded the old-style studio bosses, Warner, Selznick, Goldwyn and their clan, to rule the dream factories with their demographics and their calculators. These were the men and women who chose next year's deities, and put their names on audiences' lips around the world. It didn't always work of course. The public was fickle, sometimes positively perverse, deciding to deify an unknown against all expectation. But the system was prepared for such anomalies. The rank outsider would be drawn into the pantheon-at startling speed, and everyone would claim how they'd known all along the man was a star.

There were several such stars among this gathering, young actors who could not have known Buddy Vance personally but were presumably here because this was the Party of the Week; the place to be seen, and the company to be seen in.

He caught sight of Rochelle across the room, but she was engaged in being flattered—a whole gamut of admirers gathered around her, feeding on her beauty. She didn't look Grillo's way. Even if she had he doubted she would have recognized him. She had the distracted, dreamy air of one high on something other than admiration. Besides which, experience had taught him that his face was interchangeable with many others. There was a blandness about him which he'd put down to being so much a mongrel. Swedish, Russian, Lithuanian, Jewish and English trails could be found in his blood. They effectively cancelled each other out. He was everything and nothing. In such circumstances as these it gave him a strange confidence. He could pass himself off as any number of characters and not be called on it unless he made a major faux pas, and even then he could usually extricate himself.

Accepting a glass of champagne from one of the waiters he mingled with the crowd, mentally noting the names of faces he recognized; and the names of the company they kept. Though nobody in the room, other than Rochelle, had the slightest idea who he was he garnered nods from almost everyone whose eyes he met, and even a wave or two from individuals who were presumably scoring points among their circle as to how many of this dazzling congregation they were acquainted with. He fuelled the fiction, nodding when he was nodded at, waving when he was waved at, so that by the time he'd crossed the room his credentials were firmly established: he was one of the boys. This in turn led to an approach by a woman in her late fifties, who buttonholed him with a glance and a sharp:

"So who are you?"

He hadn't prepared a detailed alter-ego, as he had with the neo-Nazis and the faith-healer, so he simply said:

"Swift. Jonathan."

She nodded, almost as though she knew.

"I'm Evelyn Quayle," she said. "Please call me Eve. Everyone does."

"Eve it is."

"What do people call you?"

"Swift," he said.

"Fine," she said. "Would you catch that waiter and get me a fresh glass of champagne? They move so damn fast."

It was not the last she drank. She knew a great deal about the company they were keeping, which she furnished in greater detail the more glasses of champagne and compliments Grillo provided, one of the latter quite genuine. He'd guessed Eve to be in her mid-fifties. In fact she admitted to seventy-one.

"You don't look anything like that."

"Control, my dear," she said. "I have every vice, but none to excess. Would you reach for another of those glasses before they slip by?"

She was the perfect gossip: beneficent in her bitchery. There was scarcely a man or woman in the room she couldn't supply some dirt about. The anorexic in scarlet, for instance, was the twin sister of Annie Kristol, darling of the celebrity game shows. She was wasting away at a rate that would prove fatal, Eve opined, within three months. By contrast, Merv Turner, one of the recently sacked board of Universal, had put on so much weight since exiting the Black Tower his wife refused to have sex with him. As for Liza Andreatta, poor child, she'd been hospitalized for three weeks after the birth of her second child having been persuaded by her therapist that in nature the mother always ate the placenta. She'd eaten her own and been so traumatized she'd almost orphaned her child before it had seen its mother's face.

"Madness," she said, smiling from ear to ear, "isn't it?"

Grillo had to agree.

"A wonderful madness," she went on. "I've been part of it all my life and it's as wild now as it ever was. I'm getting rather warm; shall we step outside for a while?"

"Sure."

She took Grillo's arm. "You listen well," she said as they stepped out into the garden. "Which is unusual in this kind of company."

"Really?" said Grillo.

"What are you: a writer?"

"Yes," he said, relieved not to have to lie to the woman. He liked her. "It's not much of a trade."

"None of us have much of a trade," she said. "Let's be honest. We're not finding a cure for cancer. We're indulging, sweetheart. Just indulging."

She drew Grillo across to the locomotive facade which stood out in the garden. "Will you look at this? So ugly, don't you think?"

"I don't know. They've got a certain appeal."

"My first husband collected American Abstract Expressionists. Pollock, Rothko. Chilly stuff. I divorced him."

"Because of the painting?"

"Because of the collecting, the relentless collecting. It's a sickness, Swift. I said to him towards the end—Ethan, I don't want to be just another of your possessions. They go or I go. He chose the stuff that didn't talk back at him. He was that kind of man. Cultured, but stupid."

Grillo smiled.

"You're laughing at me," she chided.

"Absolutely not. I'm enchanted."

She sparkled at the compliment. "You don't know anybody here, do you?" she remarked suddenly.

The observation left him flummoxed.

"You're a gatecrasher. I watched you when you first came in, eyeing the hostess in case she set eyes on you. I thought—at last!—someone who knows nobody and wants to, and me who knows everybody and wishes she didn't. A marriage made in heaven. What's your real name?"

"I told you—"

"Don't insult me," she said.

"My name's Grillo."

"Grillo."

"Nathan Grillo. But please...just Grillo. I'm a journalist."

"Oh how boring. I thought you were maybe an angel, come down to judge us. You know...like Sodom and Gomorrah. Christ knows, we deserve it."

"You don't like these people much," he said.

"Oh my dear I'd rather be here than Idaho, but only for the weather. The conversation's shit." She pressed close to him. "Don't look now but we've got company."

A short, balding and faintly familiar man was approaching.

"What's his name?" Grillo whispered.

"Paul Lamar. He was Buddy's partner."

"Comedian?"

"So his agent'd claim. Have you seen any of his films?"

"No."

"There's more laughs in Mein Kampf."

Grillo was still attempting to suppress his guffaws when Lamar presented himself to Eve.

"You look wonderful," he said. "As ever." He turned to Grillo. "And who's your friend?" he asked.

Eve glanced at Grillo with a tiny smile on her face. "My guilty secret," she said.

Lamar turned his spotlight smile on Grillo. "I'm sorry, I didn't catch your name."

"Secrets shouldn't have names," Eve said. "It spoils their charm."

"I'm suitably slapped down," Lamar said. "Allow me to correct the error and give you a tour of the house."

"I don't think I can manage the stairs, sweetheart," Eve said.

"But this was Buddy's palace. He was very proud of it."

"Never proud enough to invite me," she returned.

"It was a retreat," Lamar said. "That's why he lavished so much attention on it. You should come and look, if only for him. Both of you."

"Why not?" said Grillo.

Evelyn sighed. "Such curiosity," she said. "Well...lead on."

Lamar did so, taking them back into the lounge, where the tempo of the gathering had subtly altered. With drinks imbibed and the buffet scavenged the guests were settling into a quieter mode, eased on by a small band offering languid versions of the standards. A few people were dancing. Conversation was no longer raucous, but subdued. Deals were being done; plots being laid.

Grillo found the atmosphere unnerving, and so, clearly, did Evelyn. She took his arm as they ran the gauntlet of whispers and followed Lamar out the other side to the stairs. The front door was closed. Two of the guards from the gate stood with their backs to it, hands fisted in front of their crotches. Despite the drifting melody of show-tunes all celebration had gone out of the place. What remained was paranoia.

Lamar was already a dozen steps up the flight.

"Come along, Evelyn..." he said, beckoning to her. "It's not steep."

"It is at my age."

"You don't look a day over—"

"Don't sweet-talk me," she said. "I'll come in my own good time."

With Grillo at her side she started to climb the stairs, her age evidencing itself for the first time. There were a few guests at the top of the flight, Grillo saw, empty glasses in hand. None of them were speaking, even in whispers. The suspicion grew on him that all was far from well here; an instinct confirmed when he glanced back down the stairs. Rochelle was standing at the bottom, looking up. She stared straight at him. He, certain he'd been recognized and was about to have his bluff called, stared back. But she said nothing. She looked at him until he looked away. When he glanced back down to the hallway she'd gone.

"There's something wrong here," he murmured in Eve's ear. "I don't think we should do this."

"Darling, I'm halfway up," she replied loudly, and tugged on his arm. "Don't desert me now."

Grillo glanced up at Lamar, to find the comedian's eyes were on him just as Rochelle's had been. They know, he thought. They know and they're saying nothing.

Again he tried to dissuade Eve. "Can't we go later?" he said.

She was not about to be turned. "I'm going with or without you," she said, and carried on climbing.

"This is the first landing," Lamar announced when they got there. Besides the curious, silent guests there was not much to see, given that Eve had already stated her aversion to Vance's art collection. She knew several of the loiterers by name, and said hello. They acknowledged her, but only distractedly. There was something about their languor that put Grillo in mind of addicts who'd just found a fix. Eve was not one to be so lightly treated.

"Sagansky," she said to one of their number. He had the looks of a matinee idol gone to seed. Beside him, a woman who seemed to have all trace of animation drained from her. "What are you doing up here?"

Sagansky looked up at her. "Sssh...," he said.

"Did somebody die?" Eve said. "Besides Buddy."

"Sad," Sagansky said.

"Happens to us all," was Eve's unsentimental response. "You too. See if it doesn't. Have you had the grand tour of the house?"

Sagansky nodded. "Lamar..." he said, his eyes swivelling in the comedian's direction and overshooting their target, then coming back to settle on him, "Lamar showed us around."

"It better be worth it," Eve said.

"It is," was Sagansky's response. "Really...it is. Especially the upper rooms."

"Ah yes," Lamar said. "Why don't we just go straight up there?"

Grillo's paranoia hadn't been mellowed an iota by encountering Sagansky and wife. Something deeply weird was going on here.

"I think we've seen enough," Grillo said to Lamar.

"Oh, I'm sorry," the comedian replied. "I was forgetting about Eve. Poor Eve. It must be all too much for you."

His condescension, beautifully pitched, created precisely the effect he intended.

"Don't be ridiculous," she snorted. "I may be getting on, but I'm not senile. Take us up!"

Lamar shrugged. "Are you sure?"

"Sure I'm sure."

"Well, if you insist..." he said, and led on, past the loiterers, to the bottom of the next flight of stairs. Grillo followed. As he passed Sagansky he heard the man muttering snatches of his previous exchange with Eve. Dead fish floating around in the back of his head.

"...it is...really, it is...especially the upper rooms..."

Eve was already a little way up the flight, determined she could match Lamar step for step.

Grillo called after her, "Eve. Don't go any further."

She ignored him.

"Eve?" he said again.

This time she glanced round.

"Are you coming, Grillo?" she said.

If Lamar realized that she'd let slip the name of her secret he didn't register anything. He simply led her to the top of the stairs and round a corner, out of sight.

More than once in his career Grillo had avoided a beating up by taking notice of the very danger signals he'd been getting since they'd started the climb. But he wasn't about to see Eve's ego undo her. In the space of an hour he'd become fond of the lady. Cursing himself and her in equal measure, he followed where she and her seducer had gone.

Outside, a minor fracas was occurring at the gate. It had begun with a wind that had blown up out of nowhere, running up through the trees that overhung the Hill like a tide. It was dry and dusty, and drove several late-arriving guests back into their limos to fix their streaming mascara.

Emerging from the gusts was a car; in the car a filthy young man who casually demanded entry to the house.

The guards kept their cool. They'd dealt with countless gatecrashers like this in their time; kids with more balls than brains who just wanted to get a glimpse of the high life.

"No invitation, son," one of them told the boy.

The gatecrasher got out of his car. There was blood on him; not his own. And in his eyes a rabid look that had the guards' hands moving towards the weapons beneath their jackets.

"I have to see my father," the boy said.

"Is he a guest?" the guard wanted to know. It was not impossible this was some rich kid from Bel-Air, head fucked with drugs, come looking for Papa.

"Yeah, he's a guest," said Tommy-Ray.

"What's his name?" the guard asked. "Give me the list, Clark."

"He's not on any of your lists," Tommy-Ray said. "He lives here."

"You've got the wrong house, son," Clark told him, having to raise his voice over the roar of wind in the trees, which continued unabated. "This is Buddy Vance's house. Unless you're one of his bastards!" He grinned at a third man, who didn't return the smile. His gaze was on the trees themselves, or on the air stirring them up. He narrowed his eyes, as if he could almost see something in the dust-dirtied sky.

"You're going to regret this, nigger," the kid was telling the first guard. "I'm coming back, and I'm telling you—you're the first to go." He stabbed a finger at Clark. "You hear me? He's the first. You come right after."

He got back into the car, and backed up, then turned around and headed down the Hill. By some unnerving coincidence, the wind seemed to go with him, back down into Palomo Grove.

"Fucking strange," the sky-watcher said, as the last of the motion in the trees died away.

"Go up to the house," the first guard told Clark. "Just check everything's OK up there..."

"Why shouldn't it be?"

"Just fucking do it, will you?" the man replied, still staring down the Hill after the boy and the wind.

"Keep your tits on," Clark replied, and did as ordered.

With the wind gone, the two remaining guards were aware of just how quiet it was. No sound from the town below.

No sound from the house above. And them in a silent alleyway of trees.

"Ever been under fire, Rab?" the sky-watcher asked.

"Nope. Have you?"

"Sure," came the reply. He snorted dust into the handkerchief his wife Marci had pressed for the top pocket of his tux. Then, sniffing, he surveyed the sky.

"Between attacks..." he said.

"Yeah?"

"It feels just like this."

Tommy-Ray, the Jaff thought, turning from his business momentarily, and going to the window. He'd been distracted by his work, and hadn't realized his son was near until he was driving away down the Hill. He tried to send a call out to the youth, but the message was not received. The thoughts the Jaff had found it easy to manipulate on previous occasions were not so simple any longer. Something had changed; something of great significance which the Jaff couldn't interpret. The boy's mind was no longer an open book. What signals he did receive were confounding. There was a fear in the boy he'd never felt before; and a chill, a profound chill.

It was no use trying to make sense of the signals; not with so much else to occupy him. The boy would come back. In fact that was the only clear message he was receiving: that Tommy-Ray intended to return.

Meanwhile there were more urgent demands upon the Jaff's time. The afternoon had proved profitable. In a matter of two hours his ambition for this gathering had been realized. It had produced allies possessed of a profound purity undreamed of among the Gravers' terata. The egos that had yielded them had resisted his persuasions at first. That was to be expected. Several of them, thinking they were about to be murdered, had produced their wallets and attempted to bribe their way out of the upper room. Two of the women had bared their silicone breasts and offered their bodies rather than die; one of the men had attempted a similar bargain.

But their narcissism had crumbled like a sugar wall, their threats, negotiations, pleas and performances been silenced as soon as they started to sweat out their fears. He'd sent them al] back to the party, milked and passive.

The assembly that now lined the walls was purer for its fresh recruits, a message of entropy passing from one terata to another, their multiplicity devolving in the shadows to something more ancient; darker, simpler. They'd become un-particularized. He could no longer ascribe to any of them the names of their creators. Gunther Rothbery, Christine Sea-pard, Laurie Doyle, Martine Nesbitt: where were they now? Become a common clay.

He had as large a legion as he could hold sway over; many more and his army would become unruly. Indeed perhaps it had already become so. Yet he continued to put off the moment when he finally let his hands do what they had been created, and re-created, to do: use the Art. It was twenty years since that life-shattering day when he'd found the symbol of the Shoal, lost in transit in the wilds of Nebraska. He'd never returned. Even during his war with Fletcher the trail of battle had never led him back to Omaha. He doubted there'd be anybody left he knew. Disease and despair would have taken a good half of them. Age, the other half. He, of course, had remained untouched by such forces. The passage of years had no authority over him. Only the Nuncio had that, and there was no way back from such alteration. He had to go forward, to see realized the ambition which had been laid in him that day, and the days following. He'd flown from the banality of his life into strange territories, and seldom looked back. But today, as the parade of famous faces had appeared before him in the upper room, and wept and shuddered and bared their breasts then their souls for him, he couldn't help but glance back to the man he'd been, who would never have dared hope to keep such celebrated company. When he did, he found something in himself he'd hidden, almost successfully, all these years. The very thing he was sweating from his victims: fear.

Though he'd changed out of all recognition a little part of him was still and would always be Randolph Jaffe, and that part whispered in his ear, and said: this is dangerous. You don't know what you 're taking on. This could kill you.

After so many years it came as a shock to hear the old voice in his head, but it was also strangely reassuring. Nor could he entirely ignore it, because what it warned was true: he didn't know what lay beyond the using of the Art. Nobody really did. He'd heard all the stories; he'd studied all the metaphors. But they were only stories, only metaphors. Quiddity was not literally a sea; the Ephemeris was not literally an island. These were a materialist's way of describing a state of mind. Perhaps the State of Mind. And now he stood minutes from opening the door to that condition, in almost complete ignorance of its true nature.

It might lead to lunacy, hell and death as easily as to heaven and life everlasting. He had no way of knowing, but to use the Art.

Why use it at all? the man he'd been thirty years before whispered in him. Why not just enjoy the power you've got? It's more than you ever dreamed of, isn't it? Women coming in here offering their bodies to you. Men falling down on their knees with snot running from their noses begging for mercy. What more do you want? What more could anybody want?

Reasons, was the answer. Some meaning behind the tits and the tears; some glimpse of a larger picture.

You've got all there is, the old voice said. This is as good as it gets. There is no more.

There was a light tapping on the door: Lamar's code.

"Wait," he murmured, trying to hold on to the argument he'd been running in his head.

Outside the door, Eve tapped Lamar on the shoulder:

"Who's up here?" she said.

The comedian offered a small smile.

"Somebody you should meet," he said.

"A friend of Buddy's?" she said.

"Very much so."

"Who?"

"You don't know him."

"So why bother meeting him?" Grillo said. He took hold of Eve's arm. Suspicion had given way to certainty now. There was a rank smell up here, and the sound of more than one presence on the other side of the door.

The invitation to enter came. Lamar turned the doorhandle, and opened up.

"Come along, Eve," he said.

She pulled her arm from Grillo's grip and allowed Lamar to escort her up a step into the room.

"It's dark," Grillo heard her say.

"Eve," he said, pushing past Lamar and reaching through the door after her. As she'd said, it was indeed dark. Evening had come over the Hill, and what little light fell through the far window scarcely etched the interior. But Eve's figure was visible in front of him. Again, he took hold of her arm.

"Enough," he said, and started to turn towards the door. As he did so Lamar's fist met the middle of his face, a solid, unexpected blow. His hand slipped from Eve's arm; he fell to his knees, smelling his own blood in his nose. Behind him, the comedian slammed the door.

"What's happening?" he heard Eve say. "Lamar! What's going on?"

"Nothing to worry about," the man murmured.

Grillo raised his head, causing a hot gush of blood to run from his nose. He put his hand to his face to stem it, and looked around the room. In the brief moment he'd had to glimpse the interior he'd thought it piled with furniture. He'd been wrong. This was living stuff.

"Lam..." Eve said again, all bravado gone from her voice now. "Lamar...who's up here?"

"Jaffe..." a soft voice said. "Randolph Jaffe."

"Shall I put on the light?" Lamar said.

"No," came the answer from the shadows. "No, don't. Not yet."

Despite his buzzing head Grillo recognized the voice and the name. Randolph Jaffe: the Jaff. Which fact gave him the identity of the forms that lurked in the darkest corners of his huge room. It was lavish with the beasts he'd made.

Eve had seen them too.

"My God..." she murmured. "My God, my God, what's going on?"

"Friends of friends," Lamar said.

"Don't hurt her," Grillo demanded.

"I'm not a murderer," the voice of Randolph Jaffe said. "Everyone who came in here has walked out alive. I just want a little part of you..."

His voice didn't carry the same weight of confidence it had when Grillo had heard him at the Mall. He'd spent much of his professional life listening to people talk; looking for signs of the life beneath the life. How had Tesla put it? Something about having an eye for the hidden agenda. There was certainly subtext to the Jaff's voice now. An ambiguity that had not been there before. Did it offer some hope of escape? Or at least a stay of execution.

"I remember you," Grillo said. He had to draw the man out: make subtext text. Make him tell his doubts. "I saw you catch fire."

"No..." said the voice in the darkness, "...that wasn't me..."

"My mistake. Then who...may I ask...?"

"No you may not," Lamar said behind him. "Which of them do you want first?" he asked the Jaff.

The inquiry was ignored. Instead the man said: "Who am I? Strange you should ask." His tone was almost dreamy.

"Please," Eve murmured. "I can't breathe up here."

"Hush," Lamar said. He had moved to take hold of her. In the shadows, the Jaff shifted in his seat like a man who couldn't find a comfortable way to be.

"Nobody knows..." he began, "...just how terrible it is."

"What is?" Grillo said.

"I have the Art," the Jaff replied. "I have the Art. So I have to use it. It'd be a waste not to, after all this waiting, all this change."

He's shitting himself, Grillo thought. He's close to the edge and he's terrified of slipping over. Into what, he didn't know, but it was surely an exploitable condition. He decided to stay on the floor, where he offered no physical threat to the other man. Very softly he said:

"The Art. What is that?"

If the Jaff's next words were intended as an answer they were oblique.

"Everybody's lost, you know. I use that. Use the fear in them."

"Not you?" Grillo said.

"Not me?"

"Lost."

"I used to think I found the Art...but maybe the Art found me."

"That's good."

"Is it?" he said. "I don't know what it's going to do—"

So that's it, Grillo thought. He's got his prize and now he's afraid of unwrapping it.

"It could destroy us all."

"That's not what you said," Lamar muttered. "You said we'd have dreams. All the dreams America ever dreamt; that the world ever dreamt."

"Maybe," said the Jaff.

Lamar let go of Eve and took a step towards his master.

"But now you're saying we could die?" he said. "I don't want to die. I want Rochelle. I want the house. I've got a future. I'm not giving that up."

"Don't try and slip the leash," the Jaff said. For the first time since these exchanges had begun Grillo heard an echo of the man he'd seen at the Mall. Lamar's resistance was winning the old spirit back. Grillo cursed him for his rebellion. It bore one useful fruit only: it allowed Eve to step back towards the door. Grillo kept his place on the ground. Any attempt to join her would only draw attention to them both, and prevent any chance of escape for either. If she could get out she could raise the alarm.

Lamar's complaints, meanwhile, had multiplied.

"Why did you lie to me?" he said. "I should have known from the beginning you weren't going to do me any good. Well, fuck you—"

Silently, Grillo egged him on. The deepening dusk had kept pace with his eyes' attempt to pierce it, and he could see no more of his captor than he'd been able to see when he first came in, but he saw the figure stand. The motion caused consternation in the shadows, as the beasts hidden there responded to their creator's discomfiture.

"How dare you?" the Jaff said.

"You told me we were safe," Lamar said.

Grillo heard the door creak behind him. Though he wanted to turn he resisted the temptation.

"Safe, you said!"

"It's not that simple!" the Jaff said.

"I'm out of here!" Lamar replied, and turned to the door. It was too dark for Grillo to see the expression on his face, but a spill of light from behind him, and the sound of Eve's footsteps as she fled the room, was evidence enough. Grillo stood up as Lamar, cursing, crossed to the door. He was woozy from the blow, and reeled as he stood, but got to the door a pace before Lamar. They collided, their joint weights toppling against the door and slamming it again. There was a moment of confusion, almost farcical, in which they each fought for the handle of the door. Then something intervened, looming behind the comedian. It was pale in the darkness; gray against black. Lamar made a small noise in his throat as the creature took hold of him from behind. He reached out towards Grillo, who slipped from beneath his fingers, back towards the middle of the room. He couldn't work out how the terata was battening upon Lamar, and he was glad of the fact. The man's flailing limbs and guttural sounds were enough. He saw the comedian's bulk slump against the door, then slide down it, his body increasingly eclipsed by the terata. Then both were still.

"Dead?" Grillo breathed.

"Yes," said the Jaff. "He called me a liar."

"I'll remember that."

"You should."

The Jaff made a motion in the darkness, which Grillo failed to make sense of. But it had consequences that made a great deal plain. Beads of light broke from the man's fingers, illuminating his face, which was wasted, his body, which was clothed as it had been at the Mall, but seemed to spill darkness, and the room itself, with terata, no longer the complex beasts they'd been but barbed shadows, lining every wall.

"Well, Grillo...," the Jaff said, "...it seems I must do it."

After love, sleep. They hadn't planned it that way, but neither Jo-Beth nor Howie had slept more than a handful of uninterrupted hours since they'd met, and the ground they'd made love on was soft enough to tempt them. Even when the sun slipped behind the trees, they didn't waken. When finally Jo-Beth opened her eyes it wasn't the chill: the night was balmy. Cicadas made music in the grass around them. There was a gentle motion in the leaves. But beneath these reassuring sights and sounds was a strange, unfixable glow between the trees.

She rocked Howie out of sleep as gently as possible. He opened his eyes reluctantly, until they focused on his waker's face.

"Hi," he said. Then: "We overslept, huh? What time is—"

"There's somebody here, Howie," she whispered.

"Where?"

"I just see lights. They're all around us. Look!"

"My glasses," he whispered. "They're in my shirt."

"I'll get them."

She moved away from him in search of the clothes he'd dropped. He squinted at the scene. The police barricades, and the cave beyond: the abyss where Buddy Vance was still lying. It had seemed so natural to make love here in the full light of day. Now it seemed perverse. There was a dead man lying down there somewhere, in the same darkness where their fathers had waited all those years.

"Here," she said.

Her voice startled him. "It's OK," she murmured. He dug his glasses from the pocket of his shirt and hooked them on. There were indeed lights in between the trees, but their source was undefined.

Jo-Beth not only had some luck with his shirt, but with the rest of their clothes. She started to put on her underwear. Even now, with his heart thumping hard for quite another reason, the sight of her aroused him. She caught his look, and kissed him.

"I don't see anyone," he said, still keeping his voice low.

"Maybe I was wrong," she said, "I just thought I heard somebody."

"Ghosts," he said, then regretted inviting the thought into his head. He began to pull on his shorts. As he did he caught a movement between the trees. "Oh shit," he murmured.

"I see," she said. He looked towards her. She was looking in the opposite direction. Following her gaze he saw motion there too, in the shadows of the canopy. And another movement. And another.

"They're on all sides," he said, pulling on his shirt and reaching for his jeans. "Whatever they are they've got us surrounded."

He stood up, pins and needles in his legs, his thoughts turning desperately to how he might arm himself. Could he trash one of the barricades perhaps, and find a weapon in the wreckage? He glanced at Jo-Beth, who'd almost finished dressing, then back at the trees.

From beneath the canopy a diminutive figure emerged, trailing a phantom light. Suddenly it all came clear. The figure was that of Benny Patterson, whom Howie had last seen in the street outside Lois Knapp's house, calling after him. There was no sunny smile on his face now. Indeed his face was somehow blurred, his features like a picture taken by a palsied photographer. The light he'd brought from his TV appearances came with him, however. That was the radiance that haunted the trees.

"Howie," he said.

His voice, like his face, had lost its individuality. He was holding on to being Benny, but only just.

"What do you want?" Howie asked.

"We've been looking for you."

"Don't go near him," Jo-Beth said. "It's one of the dreams."

"I know," Howie said. "They don't mean us any harm. Do you, Benny?"

"Of course not."

"So show yourselves," Howie said, addressing the whole ring of trees. "I want to see you."

They did as they were instructed, stepping from the corner of the trees on every side. All of them, like Benny, had undergone a change since he'd seen them at the Knapp house, their honed and polished personalities smudged, their dazzling smiles dimmed. They looked more like each other than not, smeared forms of light who held on to the remains of identities only tenuously. The imaginations of the Grovers had conceived them, and shaped them, but once gone from their creator's company they slid towards a plainer condition: that of the light that had emanated from Fletcher's body as he'd died at the Mall. This was his army, his hallucigenia, and Howie didn't need to ask them what they'd come here searching for. Him. He was the rabbit from Fletcher's hat; the conjuror's purest creation. He'd fled before their demands the previous night, but they'd sought him out nevertheless, determined to have him as their leader.

"I know what you want from me," he said. "But I can't supply it. This isn't my war."

He surveyed the assembly as he spoke, distinguishing faces he'd seen at the Knapp house, despite their decay into light. Cowboys, surgeons, soap-opera queens and game-show hosts. Besides these there were many he hadn't seen at Lois's party. One form of light that had been a werewolf; several that might have been comic-book heroes; several more, four in fact, who had been incarnations of Jesus, two bleeding light from brow, side, hands and feet; another dozen who looked as though they'd stepped from an X-rated movie, their bodies wet with come and sweat. There was a balloon man, colored scarlet; and Tarzan; and Krazy Kat. And mingled with these identifiable deities, others who'd been private imaginings, called, he guessed, from the wish-list of those Fletcher's light had touched. Lost spouses, whose passing no other lover could replace; a face seen on a street whom their dreamers had never had the nerve to approach. All of them, real or unreal, bland or Technicolored, touchstones. The true stuff of worship. There was something undeniably moving about their existence. But he and Jo-Beth had been passionate in their desire to stay apart from this war; to preserve what was between them from taint or harm. That ambition hadn't changed.

Before he could reiterate the point one of the number he couldn't name, a woman in early middle age, stepped out of the ranks to speak.

"Your father's spirit's in all of us," she said. "If you turn your back on us, you turn your back on him."

"It's not as simple as that," he told her. "I've got other people to consider." He extended his hand to Jo-Beth, who rose to stand beside him. "You know who this is. Jo-Beth McGuire. Daughter of the Jaff. Fletcher's enemy, and therefore, if I understand you right, your enemy. But let me tell you...she's the first person I ever met in my life...I can really say I love. I put her before everything. You. Fletcher. This damn war."

Now a third voice rose from the ranks.

"It was my error—"

Howie looked round to see the blue-eyed cowboy, Mel Knapp's creation, moving forward. "My error thinking you wanted her killed. I regret it. If you don't wish harm done to her—"

"Don't wish harm? My God, she's worth ten of Fletcher! Value her as I value her or you can all go to Hell."

There was a resounding silence.

"Nobody's arguing," Benny said.

"I hear."

"So you'll lead us?"

"Oh Jesus."

"The Jaff's on the Hill," the woman said. "About to use the Art."

"How do you know?"

"We're Fletcher's spirit," the cowboy said. "We know the Jaff's purpose."

"And you know how to stop him?"

"No," the woman returned. "But we have to try. Quiddity must be preserved."

"And you think I can help? I'm no tactician."

"We're decaying," Benny said. Even in the brief time since he'd appeared his facial features had become more smudged. "Getting...dreamy. We need someone to keep us to our purpose."

"He's right," said the woman. "We're not here long. Many of us won't make it through to morning. We have to do what we can. Quickly."

Howie sighed. He'd let Jo-Beth's hand slip from his when she'd stood up. He took it again.

"What do I do?" he asked her. "Help me."

"You do what feels right."

"What feels right..."

"You said to me once, you wished you'd known Fletcher better. Maybe—"

"What? Say it."

"I don't like the idea of us going up against the Jaff with these...dreams as an army...but maybe doing as your father would have done is the only way to be true to him. And...be free from him."

He looked at her with fresh understanding. She had a grasp of his deepest confusions, and could see a way through the maze to a clear place, where Fletcher and the Jaff would have no hold on either of them. But payment had to be made first. She'd paid: losing her family for him. It was his turn now.

"All right," he said to the assembly. "We'll go up the Hill."

Jo-Beth squeezed his hand.

"Good," she said.

"You want to come?"

"I have to."

"I wanted so much for us to be out of this."

"We will be," she said. "And if we don't escape it...if something happens to one or both of us...we've had our time."

"Don't say that."

"It's more than your momma had, or mine," she reminded him. "More than most people here. Howie, I love you."

He put his arms around her, and hugged her to him, glad that Fletcher's Spirit, albeit in a hundred different shapes, was there to see.

I suppose I'm ready to die, he thought. Or as ready as I'll ever be.

Eve had left the room at the top of the stairs breathless and terrified. She'd glimpsed Grillo getting up and crossing to the door and Lamar intercepting him. Then the door was slammed in her face. She waited long enough to hear the Jokemeister's death-cough, then she hurried down the flight to raise the alarm.

Though darkness had now descended upon the house there were more lights burning outside than in: colored floods illuminating the various exhibits she and Grillo had wandered among earlier. The wash of mingled colors, scarlet, green, yellow, blue and violet, lit her way to the landing where she and Lamar had encountered Sam Sagansky. He was still there, with his wife. They seemed not to have moved at all, except to cast their eyes towards the ceiling.

"Sam!" Eve said, hurrying to him. "Sam!" Panic, and the speed of her descent, had made her breathless. Her description of the horrors she'd seen in the room above came in a series of gasps and non sequiturs.

"...You have to stop him...you never saw anything...terrible things...Sam, look at me...Sam, look!..."

Sam didn't oblige. His whole posture was one of complete passivity.

"For Christ's sake, Sam, what are you on?"

Giving up on him she turned and sought help elsewhere among the loiterers. There were perhaps twenty guests gathered around. None of them had moved since she'd appeared, either to help or hinder her. None, now she looked at them, was even looking in her direction. Like Sagansky and his wife they all had their eyes turned ceilingward, as if in expectation. Panic hadn't taken Eve's wits from her. She needed no more than a scanning of this crowd to realize that they'd be of no use to her. They knew perfectly well what was going on a floor above them: that was why they turned their eyes up like dogs awaiting judgment. The Jaff had them on a leash.

She started down to the ground floor, clinging to the banister, her pace slowing as breathlessness and stiff joints took their toll. The band had finished playing but somebody was still at the piano, which comforted her. Rather than waste energy shouting from the stairs she waited until she was at the bottom to buttonhole somebody. The front door was open. Rochelle was standing on the step. A party of half a dozen, Merv Turner and his wife, Gilbert Kind and his girlfriend of the moment, plus two women she didn't recognize, were making their farewells. Turner saw her coming, and a look of distaste came over his fat face. He returned his gaze to Rochelle, speeding up his departure speech.

"...so sad," Eve caught him saying. "But very moving. Thank you so much for sharing this with us."

"Yes—" his wife began, but was cut off before she could offer platitudes of her own by Turner, who, glancing back at Eve, hurried away into the open air.

"Merv—" his wife said, clearly irritated.

"No time!" Turner replied. "It's been wonderful, Rochelle. Hurry up, Gil. The limos are waiting. We're going on ahead."

"No, wait," said the girlfriend. "Oh, shit, Gilbert, he's going without us."

"Please excuse us," Kind said to Rochelle.

"Wait!" Eve called after him. "Gilbert, wait/"

Her call was too loud to be ignored, though to judge by the look on Kind's face when he turned back to her he'd have preferred it that way. He put a less than radiant smile over his feelings and opened his arms, not in welcome but in a shrug.

"Isn't it always the way?" he called to her. "We didn't get to talk, Eve. So sorry. So sorry. Next time." He took hold of the girlfriend's arm. "We'll call you," he said. "Won't we, hon?" He blew her a kiss. "You look wonderful!" he said, and hurried after Turner.

The two women followed, not even concerning themselves to make their goodbyes to Rochelle. She didn't seem to care. If common sense hadn't already told Eve that Rochelle was in league with the monster on the upper floor, she saw evidence of it now. As soon as the guests had gone from the door she rolled her eyes up in an all too recognizable fashion, her muscles relaxing so that she lay against the door jamb as though barely able to stand upright. No help to be had there, Eve thought, and headed through to the lounge.

Again, the only illumination came from outside the house, the garish colors of the Carnivalia. The light was bright enough for Eve to see that in the half hour she'd been detained by Lamar the party had wound down almost to a dead stop. Fully half of the guests had gone, sensing perhaps the change that had come over the gathering as more and more people had been touched by the evil on the upper floor. Another group was in the act of departing as she got to the door, bustle and loud talk covering their anxiety. She knew none of them, but wasn't about to let that stop her. She took hold of a young man's arm.

"You've got to help me," she said.

She knew the face from the billboards on Sunset. The boy was Rick Lobo. His prettiness had made him a sudden star, though his love scenes looked like lesbianism.

"What's wrong?" he said.

"There's something upstairs," she said. "It's got a friend of mine—"

The face was only capable of a smile and a sultry pout; with those responses inappropriate, all it could do was look blankly back at her.

"Please come," she said.

"She's drunk," somebody in Lobo's party said, not caring to conceal the accusation.

Eve looked the way of the speaker. The whole pack of brats was young. None of them over twenty-five. And most, she guessed, well high. But untouched by the Jaff.

"I'm not drunk," Eve said. "Please listen—"

"Come on, Rick," a girl in the party said.

"Do you want to come with us?" Lobo asked.

"Rick!" the girl said.

"No. I want you to come upstairs—"

The girl laughed. "Bet you do," she said. "Come on, Rickv."

"I have to go. Sorry," Lobo said. "You should go too. This party's a bummer."

The boy's incomprehension was solid as a brick wall, but Eve wasn't about to let go.

"Trust me," she said. "I'm not drunk. There's something horrible happening here." She threw a glance towards the rest of them. "You all feel it," she said, feeling like a cut-rate Cassandra but knowing no other way to put it. "There's something going on here—"

"Yeah," said the girl. "There is. We're leaving."

Her words had touched a nerve in Lobo, however.

"You should come with us," he said, "it's getting weird in here."

"She doesn't want to go," said a voice on the stairs. Sam Sagansky made the descent. "I'll look after her, Ricky, don't you worry."

Lobo was clearly happy to be relieved of the responsibility. He let Eve's arm go.

"Mr. Sagansky'll look after you," he said.

"No—" Eve insisted, but the group was already heading towards the door, the same anxiety fuelling their hurried exit as had fuelled that of the Turner party. Eve saw Rochelle lift herself up from her languor to accept the proffered thanks. Any attempt to follow after them was blocked by Sam. All Eve could do was seek some help in the room behind her.

The pickings looked slim. Of the remaining thirty or so guests most seemed beyond helping themselves, never mind her. The pianist was providing a soporific medley of songs for dancing in the dark, and four couples were doing just that, draped about each other as they shuffled around on the same spot. The rest of the room's occupants seemed to be drugged or drunk or touched with the Jaff's torpor, some sitting, many lying on the furniture, barely aware of their surroundings. The anorexic Belinda Kristol was among them, her wasted frame no possible use in this jeopardy. On the sofa beside her, his head in her lap, was the son of Buddy's agent, equally wasted.

Eve glanced back towards the door. Sagansky was following her. She scanned the room in desperation, looking for the best hope of a bad hand and decided upon the pianist. She wove between the dancers, her panic getting the better of her again.

"Stop playing," she said when she reached him.

"Want something different?" he said, looking around at her. His gaze was blurred by drink but at least his eyes didn't roll up.

"Yeah, something loud. Really loud," she said. "And fast. Let's get the party going, shall we?"

"Little late for that," he said.

"What's your name?"

"Doug Frankl."

"OK, Doug. You keep playing..." She looked back towards Sagansky, who was standing beyond the dancers, watching her. "...I need your help, Doug."

"And I need a drink," he slurred. "Any chance of getting one for me?"

"In a moment. First, you see that man on the other side of the room?"

"Yeah, I know him. Everyone knows him. He's a fuck-head."

"He just tried to assault me."

"He did?" Doug said, frowning up at Eve. "That's disgusting."

"And my partner...Mr. Grillo...is at the top of the house..."

"That's really disgusting," Doug said again. "You're old enough to be his mother."

"Thanks, Doug."

"That's really disgusting."

Eve leaned in towards her unlikely knight. "I need your help, " she whispered. "And I need it now. "

"Got to keep playing," Doug said.

"You can come back and play when we've got a drink for you and Mr. Grillo for me."

"I really need a drink."

"You do. I can see that. And you deserve one. Playing like this. You deserve a drink."

"I do. I really do."

She reached over, put her hands around Frankl's wrists, and lifted his hands from the keys. He didn't protest. Though the music stopped the dancers continued to shuffle.

"Get up, Doug," she whispered.

He struggled to his feet, kicking over the piano stool as he did so.

"Which way for the drinks?" he said. He was further gone than she'd thought. His playing must have been on remote control because he could barely take a step ahead of him. But he was company at least. She took his arm, hoping Sagansky would interpret Doug as the supporting strength rather than the other way about. "This way," she murmured to him, and led them both around the perimeter of the dance floor towards the door. From the corner of her eye she saw Sagansky moving in their direction, and attempted to pick up their pace, but he came between them and the door.

"No more music, Doug?" he said.

The pianist tried hard to focus on Sagansky's face.

"Who the fuck are you?" he said.

"It's Sam," Eve told him.

"Get the music going, Doug. I want to dance with Eve."

Sagansky reached to claim Eve, but Frankl had ideas of his own.

"I know what you think," he said to Sagansky. "I heard the things you say and you know what? I don't give a fuck. If I want to suck cock, I'll fucking suck cock and if you won't employ me Fox will! So fuck you!"

A small thrill of hope touched Eve. There was a psychodrama here she hadn't counted on. Sagansky was notoriously homophobic. He'd obviously offended Doug somewhere down the line.

"I want the lady," Sagansky said.

"Well you're not going to have her," came the response, Doug pushing Sagansky's arm away. "She's got better things to do."

Sagansky wasn't about to give up so easily. He reached for Eve a second time, was slapped away, and instead put his hands on Doug, dragging the man from Eve's grip.

Eve took her chance while it was offered, slipping away towards the door. Behind her she heard both men's voices raised in rage, and glanced back to see that they were scattering the dancers as they staggered around each other, fists flailing. Sagansky landed the first blow, sending Frankl reeling back against the piano. The glasses he'd lined up there went west, smashing noisily. He came after Eve with a lunge.

"You're wanted," he said, snatching her. She stepped back to avoid him, her legs giving out as she did so. Before she hit the floor two arms were there to catch her, and she heard Lobo say: "You should come with us."

She tried to protest, but her mouth wouldn't make the words between gasps. She was half-carried to the door, trying to explain that she couldn't go, couldn't leave Grillo, but unable to make her point clear. She saw Rochelle's face swim past her, then the night air was cold on her face, its shock merely worsening her disorientation.

"Help her...help her..." she heard Lobo saying, and before she knew it she was inside his limo, stretched out on the fake fur seat. He followed her in.

"Grillo—" she managed to say as the door was slammed. Her pursuer was at the step, but the limo was already moving off, down towards the gate.

"Weirdest fucking party I ever went to," Lobo said. "Let's get the fuck out of here."

Sorry, Grillo, she thought as she passed out. Be well.

At the gate Clark waved Lobo's limo off, and turned to look back at the house.

"How many more to go?" he asked Rab.

"Another forty maybe," Rab replied, scanning the list. "We won't be here all night."

The cars that were waiting for the remaining guests had no room to park on the Hill, so were in the Grove below, circling, awaiting radio orders to come back up and collect their passengers. It was a routine they were well used to, its boredom usually broken by a stream of banter between cars. But tonight there was no gossip about the sex-lives of the passengers, or horny talk about what the drivers were going to do when the job was finished. Most of the time the airwaves were silent, as if the drivers didn't want to advertise their locations. When it was broken, it was by someone making a would-be casual remark about the town.

"Deadwood Gulch," one of them called it. "It's like a fucking cemetery."

It was Rab who silenced the man. "If you've got nothing worth saying, don't say it," he remarked.

"What's your problem?" the man said. "Getting spooked?"

The reply was interrupted by a call from another car.

"You there, Clark?"

"Yeah. Who is this?"

"Are you there?"

Contact was bad, and worsening, the voice from the car breaking up into static.

"There's a fucking dust storm blowing up down here—" the driver was saying. "I don't know if you can hear me, but it's just come out of nowhere."

"Tell him to get out of there," Rab said. "Clark! Tell him!"

"I hear you! Driver? Back off! Back off!"

"Can anybody hear me?" the man yelled, the message almost drowned out by a spiralling howl of wind.

"Driver! Get the fuck out of there!"

"Can anybody—"

In place of the question the sound of the car coming to grief, the driver's voice cut off in the din of wreckage.

"Shit!" Clark said. "Any of you out there know who that was? Or where he was?"

There was silence from the other cars. Even if any of them knew, nobody was volunteering to go help. Rab stared through the trees lining the toad, down towards the town.

"That's it," he said. "Enough of this shit. I'm out of here."

"There's only us left," Clark reminded him.

"If you've got any sense you'll get out too," Rab said, pulling on his tie to unknot it. "I don't know what's going on here, but let the rich folks sort it out."

"We're on duty."

"I just came off!" Rab said. "I ain't being paid enough to take this shit! Catch!" He tossed his radio to Clark. It spat white noise. "Hear that?" he said. "Chaos. That's what's coming."

In the town below Tommy-Ray slowed his car to get a look at the wrecked limo. The ghosts had simply picked it up, and thrown it over. Now they were dragging the driver from his seat. If he wasn't already primed to be one of their number they were quick to put that right, their violence reducing his uniform to tatters and the body beneath it the same.

He'd led the ghost-train away from the Hill to give himself space to plot his way into the house. He didn't want a repeat of the humiliation at the bar, with the guards bruising him then all hell breaking loose. When his father saw him in his new incarnation as the Death-Boy, he wanted to be in control. But that hope was fading fast. The longer he delayed his return the more unruly they became. They'd already demolished the Lutheran Prince of Peace Church, proving, as if any proof were needed, that stone was as ripe for undoing as flesh. A part of him, the part that hated Palomo Grove to its foundations, wanted to let them rampage. Let them level the whole town. But if he gave in to that urge he knew he'd lose power over them completely. Besides, somewhere in the Grove was the one human being he wanted to preserve from harm: Jo-Beth. Once loosed the storm would make no distinctions. Her life would be forfeit, along with every other.

Knowing he had only a short time left before their impatience got the better of them, and they destroyed the Grove anyway, he drove to his mother's house. If Jo-Beth was in town, she'd be here; and if worst came to worst he'd snatch her, and take her back up to the Jaff, who would know how best to subdue the storm.

Momma's house, like most of the houses in the street, indeed in the Grove, was in darkness. He parked and got out of the car. The storm, no longer content to tag along behind, came to meet him, buffeting him.

"Back off," he told the gaping faces that flew in front of him. "You'll get what you want. Everything you want. But you leave this house, and everyone in it, alone. Understand me?"

They sensed the force of his feelings. He heard their laughter, mocking such pitiful sensibilities. But he was still the Death-Boy. They owed him a dwindling devotion. The storm receded down the street a little way, and waited.

He slammed the car door and went up to the house, glancing back down the street to be certain his army was not going to cheat him. It stayed at bay. He knocked at the door.

"Momma?" he shouted. "It's Tommy-Ray, Momma. I got my key but I'm not coming in 'less you ask me. Can you hear me, Momma? Nothing to be afraid of. I'm not going to hurt you." He heard a sound on the other side of the door. "Is that you, Momma? Please answer me."

"What do you want?"

"Just let me see you, please. Let me see you."

The door was unbolted, and opened. Momma Was dressed in black, her hair unbraided. "I was praying," she said.

"For me?" said Tommy-Ray.

Momma didn't answer.

"You weren't, were you?" he said.

"You shouldn't have come back, Tommy-Ray."

"This is home," he said. The sight of her hurt him more than he'd thought possible. After the revelations of the trip to the Mission (the dog and the woman), then events at the Mission and the horrors of his return trip, he'd thought himself beyond what he was feeling now: a choking sorrow.

"I want to come in," he said, knowing even as he said it that there was no way back. The family bosom had never been a place he'd much wanted to lay his head. Jo-Beth's had. It was her his thoughts went to now. "Where is she?" he said.

"Who?"

"Jo-Beth?"

"She's not here," Momma replied.

"Where then?"

"I don't know where."

"Don't tell me lies. Jo-Beth!" he started yelling. "Jo-Beth!"

"Even if she were—"

Tommy-Ray didn't let her finish. He pushed past her and stepped over the threshold. "Jo-Beth! It's Tommy-Ray! I need you, Jo-Beth! I need you, baby!"

It didn't matter any longer if he called her baby, told her he wanted to kiss her and lick her cunt: that was OK. It was love, and love was the only defense he had, or anyone had, against the dust and the wind and all that howled in it: he needed her more than ever. Ignoring Momma's shouts he started through the house from room to room in search of her. Each had a scent of its own, and with the scent a sum of memories—things he'd said, done or felt in this place or that—which flooded over him as he stood in the doorways.

Jo-Beth wasn't downstairs, so he headed up, throwing each door open along the landing: first Jo-Beth's, then Momma's. Finally, his own. His room was as he'd left it. The bed unmade, the wardrobe open, his towel on the floor. Standing at the door he realized he was looking at the belongings of a boy who was as good as dead. The Tommy-Ray who'd lain in that bed, sweated, jerked off, slept and dreamed of Zuma and Topanga, had gone forever. The grime on the towel and the hairs on the pillow were the last of him. He wouldn't be remembered well.

Tears started to run down his cheeks. How had it happened that half a week ago he'd been alive and going about his business and now be so changed he did not belong here, nor could ever belong here again? What had he wanted so badly it had taken him from himself? Nothing that he'd got. It was useless being the Death-Boy: only fear and shining bones. And knowing his father: what use was that? The Jaff had treated him well at the beginning, but it had been a trick to make a slave of him. Only Jo-Beth loved him. Jo-Beth had come after him, tried to heal him, tried to tell him what he hadn't wanted to hear. Only she could make things good again. Make sense of him. Save him.

"Where is she?" he demanded.

Momma was at the bottom of the stairs. Her hands were clasped in front of her as she looked up at him. More prayers. Always prayers.

"Where is she, Momma? I have to see her. "

"She's not yours," Momma said.

"Katz!"Tommy-Ray yelled, starting down towards her. "Katz has got her!"

"Jesus said...I am the resurrection, and the life..."

"Tell me where they are or I won't be responsible—"

"He that believeth in me..."

"Momma!"

"...though he were dead..."

She'd left the front door open, and dust had begun to blow over the threshold, insignificant amounts at first, but growing. He knew what it signalled. The ghost-train was getting up steam. Momma looked towards the door, and the gusty darkness beyond. She seemed to grasp that fatal business was at hand. Her eyes, when they settled on her son again, were filling up with tears.

"Why did it have to be this way?" she said softly.

"I didn't mean it to be."

"You were so beautiful, son. I thought sometimes that'd save you."

"I'm still beautiful," he said.

She shook her head. The tears, dislodged from the rims of her eyes, ran down her cheeks. He looked back towards the door, which the wind had begun to throw back and forth.

"Stay out," he told it.

"What's out there?" Momma said. "Is it your father?"

"You don't want to know," he told her.

He hurried down the stairs to try to close the door, but the wind was gathering strength, gusting into the house. The lamps started to swing. Ornaments flew from their places along the shelves. As he got to the bottom of the flight windows shattered at the front of the house and back.

"Stay out!" he yelled again, but the phantoms had waited long enough. The door flew off its hinges, thrown down the length of the hallway to smash against the mirror. The ghosts came howling after. Momma screamed at the sight of them, their faces drawn and hungry, smears of need in the storm.

Gaping sockets, gaping maws. Hearing the Christian woman scream, they turned their venom in her direction. Tommy-Ray yelled a warning to her but dusty fingers tore the words to nonsense, then flew past him to Momma's throat. He reached back towards her but the storm had hold of him, and threw him round towards the door. The ghosts were still flying in. He was pitched through their speeding faces, against the tide, and across the threshold. Behind him he heard Momma let out another shriek, as with one shattering every window left unbroken in the house burst outwards. Glass showered around him. He fled the rain, but didn't escape unscathed.

It was little harm, however, compared with the damage the house and its occupant were sustaining. When he stumbled to the safety of the sidewalk and looked back he saw the storm weaving in and out of every window and door like a demented ghost-ride. The structure was not the equal of the assault. Cracks were gaping in the walls, the ground at the front of the house opening up as the riders got into the basement and wreaked havoc there. He looked towards the car, half-fearing they'd destroyed that in their impatience. But it was still intact. He fled towards it as the house began to growl, its roof thrown up in surrender, its walls bowing out. Even if Momma had been alive to call after him, she could not have been heard over the din, nor seen in the confusion.

He got into the car, sobbing. There were words on his lips he didn't even realize he was saying until he began to drive:

"...I am the resurrection and the life..."

In the rear-view mirror he saw the house give up entirely, as the vortex in its guts threw it outwards. Bricks, slate, beams and dirt burst in all directions.

"...he that believeth in me...my God, Momma, Momma...he that believeth in me..."

Brick shards flew against the back window, shattering it, and fell on the roof in rattling percussion. He put his foot down and drove, half blind with tears of sorrow and terror.

He'd tried to outrun them once, and failed. Still he hoped he might succeed a second time, racing through the town by the most circuitous route he knew, praying he'd confound them. The streets were not entirely empty. He passed two limos, both black stretches, cruising the streets like sharks. And then, on the edge of Oakwood, staggering into the middle of the street, someone he knew. Loath as he was to stop, he needed the comfort of a familiar face more than he'd ever needed anything, even if it was William Witt. He slowed.

"Witt?"

William took a little time to recognize him. When he did Tommy-Ray expected him to retreat. Their last meeting, up at the house on Wild Cherry Glade, had ended with Tommy-Ray in the pool, wrestling Martine Nesbitt's terata, and Witt running for his sanity. But the intervening period had taken as much toll on William as it had on Tommy-Ray. He looked like a hobo, unshaven, clothes stained and in disarray, a stare of complete despair on his face.

"Where are they?" was his first question.

"Who?" Tommy-Ray wanted to know.

William reached through the window and stroked Tommy-Ray's face. His palm was clammy. His breath smelt of bourbon.

"Have you got them?" he asked.

"Who?" Tommy-Ray wanted to know.

"My...visitors," William said. "My...dreams."

"Sorry," Tommy-Ray said. "You want a ride?"

"Where are you going?"

"Getting the fuck out of here," Tommy-Ray said.

"Yeah. I want a ride."

Witt got in. As he slammed the door Tommy-Ray saw a familiar sight in the mirror. The storm was following. He looked across at William.

"It's no good," he said.

"What isn't?" Witt asked, his eyes barely focusing on Tommy-Ray.

"They're going to come after me wherever I go. There's no stopping them. They'll come and come."

William glanced over his shoulder at the wall of dust advancing down the street towards the car.

"Is that your father?" he said. "Is he in there somewhere?"

"No."

"What is, then?"

"Something worse."

"Your momma—" Witt said "—I talked with her. She said he was the Devil."

"I wish it were the Devil," Tommy-Ray said. "You can cheat the Devil."

The storm was gaining on the car.

"I have to go back up the Hill," Tommy-Ray said, as much to himself as Witt.

He swung the wheel round and started in the direction of Windbluff.

"Is that where the dreams are?" Witt said.

"That's where everything is," Tommy-Ray replied, unaware of how much truth he spoke.

The party's over," the Jaff said to Grillo. "Time we went down."

Little had been said between them since Eve's panicked departure. The man had simply sat back down in the seat from which he'd risen to deal with Lamar's mutiny, and waited there while raised voices drifted from below, limos drove up to the front door, took their passengers and left, and—finally—the music stopped. Grillo had made no attempt to slip away. For one, Lamar's slumped body blocked the door, and by the time he'd attempted to move it the terata, indistinct as they now were, would surely have claimed him. For another, and more significantly, he'd come by chance into the company of the first cause, the entity responsible for the mysteries he'd been encountering in Palomo Grove since he'd arrived. Here, slumped before him, was the man who'd shaped the horrors, and by extension therefore comprehended the visions that were loose in the town. To attempt to leave would be a dereliction of duty. Diverting as his short run as Ellen Nguyen's lover had been, he had only one role to play in all of this. He was a reporter; a conduit between the known world and the unknown. If he turned his back on the Jaff he committed a crime worse than any he knew: he failed to be a witness.

Whatever else the man was (insane; lethal; monstrous) he was not what so many of the people Grillo interviewed or investigated in his professional life had proved: a fake. Grillo had only to look around the room at the creatures the Jaff had spawned, or caused to be spawned, to know that he was in the company of a power with the capacity to change the world. He dared not turn his back on such a power. He would go with it wherever it went, and hope to understand its workings better.

The Jaff stood up.

"Make no attempt to intervene," he said to Grillo.

"I won't," Grillo told him. "But let me come with you."

The Jaff looked at him for the first time since Eve's escape. It was too dark for Grillo to see the eyes turned upon him, but he felt them, sharp as needles, probing him.

"Move the body," the Jaff instructed.

Grillo said: "Sure," and moved to the door. He'd needed no further reminder of the Jaff's strength, but picking up Lamar's corpse offered it to him anyhow. The body was wet and hot. His hands, when he dumped it down again, were sticky with the comedian's blood. The feel and smell made Grillo nauseous.

"Just remember..." the Jaff said.

"I know," Grillo replied. "Don't intervene."

"So. Open the door."

Grillo did so. He hadn't been aware of how fetid the room had become until a wave of cool, clean air swept in and over his face.

"Lead on," the Jaff said.

Grillo stepped out on to the landing. The house was completely silent, but it was not empty. At the bottom of the first flight of stairs he saw a small crowd of Rochelle's guests waiting. Their eyes all turned up towards the door. There was no sound nor movement from any of them. Grillo recognized many of their faces; they'd been waiting here when he and Eve had been ascending. Now the awaited moment had come. He began down the stairs towards them, the thought shaping in his head that the Jaff had sent him down to be torn apart by these worshippers. But he moved through their eye line, and out, without their gazes following him. It was the organ-grinder they were here to see, not the monkey.

From the room above emerged the sound of mass movement: the terata were coming. Reaching the bottom of the flight Grillo turned and looked back the way he'd come. The first of the creatures was emerging through the doorway. He'd seen that they were changed, but he'd not been prepared for the degree of change. Their busy foulness had been purged. They'd become plainer, most of their features veiled by the darkness they emitted.

Following the first few came the Jaff. Events since the final confrontation with Fletcher had taken their toll on him. He looked used up, almost skeletal. He started his descent, passing through pools of color from the lights outside the house, their vividness flooding his pallid features. Tonight the movie was The Masque of the Red Death, Grillo thought; and The Jaff was the name above the title.

The supporting cast of terata followed, pushing their bodies through the door and shambling down the stairs in pursuit of their maker.

Grillo glanced around at the silent assembly. They still had their fawning eyes upon the Jaff. He headed on, down the second flight. There was a second assembly waiting at the bottom, Rochelle among them. The sight of her extraordinary beauty momentarily reminded Grillo of his first encounter with her, descending the stairs just as the Jaff was now doing. Seeing her had been a revelation. She had seemed inviolate in that beauty. He'd learned differently. First from Ellen, with her account of Rochelle's past profession and present addiction, and now with the evidence of his own eyes, seeing the woman as lost to the depravities of the Jaff as any of his victims. Beauty was no defense. Most likely there was no defense. He reached the bottom of the stairs and waited for the Jaff to finish his descent, his legions trailing after. In the short time since his appearance at the top of the flight a change had come over him, subtle but unnerving. His face, which had betrayed tremors of apprehension, was now as blank as that of his congregation, his muscles so completely drained of tone his descent was a barely controlled walking fall. All the forces of his power had gone to his left hand, the hand which—back at the Mall—had bled the motes of power which had almost destroyed Fletcher. It was doing the same now, beads of bright corruption dripping from it like sweat as it hung by his side. They couldn't be the power itself, Grillo presumed, only its by-product, because the Jaff was making no attempt to prevent their breaking into small dark blooms on the stairs.

The hand was charging itself, draining power from every other part of its owner (perhaps, who knew? from the assembly itself); stoking its strength in preparation for the labors ahead. Grillo tried to study the Jaff's face for some sign of what he was feeling, but his eyes kept being drawn back and back to the hand, as though all lines of force led to it, all the other elements in the scene rendered irrelevant.

The Jaff moved through into the lounge. Grillo followed. The shadow legion remained on the stairs.

The lounge was still occupied, mostly by recumbent guests. Some were like disciples, their eyes fixed on the Jaff. Some were simply unconscious, sprawled on the furniture, undone by excess. On the floor lay Sam Sagansky, his shirt and face bloody. A little way from him, his hand still grasping Sagansky's jacket, lay another man. Grillo had no idea what had started the fracas between them but it had ended in a knockout.

"Turn on the lights," the Jaff told Grillo. His voice was as expressionless as his face had become. "Turn them full on. No mystery now. I want to see clearly."

Grillo located the switches in the gloom, and flipped them all on. Any theatricality in the scene was abruptly banished. The light brought growls of complaint from one or two of the slumberers, who threw their arms across their faces to shut it out. The man clasping Sagansky opened his eyes, and moaned, but didn't move, sensing his jeopardy. Grillo's gaze went back to the Jaff's hand. The beads of power had stopped dropping from it now. It had ripened. It was ready.

"No use delaying..." he heard the Jaff say, and saw him raise his left arm to eye level, his hand open. Then he walked to the far wall and laid his palm upon it.

Then, hand still pressed against solid reality, he began to make a fist.

Down at the gates Clark saw the lights go on in the house, and breathed a sigh of relief. That could only signal an end to the party. He put a general call out to the circling drivers (those that had not taken fright, and gone) instructing them to make their way back up the Hill. Their passengers would be emerging soon.

Coming off the freeway at the Palomo Grove exit, with four miles to cover to the outskirts of the town, a shudder ran through Tesla. The kind her mother had said meant someone was walking over your grave. Tonight, she knew better. The news was worse than that.

I'm missing the main event, she realized. It's begun without me. She felt something change around her, something vast, as though the flat-earthists had been right all along and the whole world had suddenly tipped a few degrees, everything on it sliding towards one end. She didn't flatter herself for an instant she was the only, one sensitive enough to be experiencing this. Perhaps she had a perspective that allowed her to confess the feeling, but she didn't doubt that across the country at this moment, most likely across the world, people were waking in a cold sweat, or thinking of their loved ones and fearing for them. Children crying without quite knowing why. Old people believing their last moment was upon them.

She heard the din of a collision on the freeway she'd just left, followed by another and another, as cars—their drivers distracted by a moment of terror—piled up. Horns began to blare in the night.

The world's round, she told herself, like the wheel I'm Holding. I can't fall off. I can't fall off. Gripping that thought and the wheel with equal desperation, she drove on towards the town.

Watching for the returning cars, Clark saw lights coming up the Hill. Their advance was too slow to be headlamps, however. Curious, he left his post and started down the incline a little way. He got maybe twenty yards before the bend in the road revealed the source of the light. It was human. A mob of fifty, maybe more, climbing towards the summit, their bodies and faces blurred, but all glowing in the dark like Halloween masks. At the head of the group were two kids who looked to be normal enough. But given the gang they had in tow he doubted that. The boy looked up the Hill towards him. Clark backed away, turning around to put some distance between him and the mob.

Rab had been right. He should have gone a lot earlier, and left this damn town to its own devices. He'd been hired to keep gatecrashers out of the party, not to stop whirlwinds and walking torches. Enough was enough.

He threw his radio down, and clambered over the fence opposite the house. On the other side the shrubbery was thick, and the ground fell off steeply, but he slid away through the darkness not caring if he reached the other side of the Hill in tatters, simply wanting to be as far from the house when the mob reached the gate as he could get.

Grillo had seen sights in the last few days that had slapped the breath out of him, but he'd found a way to slot them into his world-view. But in front of him now was a sight so utterly beyond his comprehension all he could do was say no to it.

Not once, a dozen times.

"No...no..." and so on, "no."

But denial didn't work. The sight refused to pack its bag and leave. It stayed. Demanded to be seen.

The Jaff's fingers had entered the solid wall, and clutched it. Now he took a step back, and a second step, pulling the substance of reality towards him as though it were made of sun-softened candy. The carnival pictures hanging on the wall began to twist out of true; the intersection of wall and ceiling and wall and floor eased in towards the Artist's fist, losing their rigor.

It was as if the whole room were projected on a cinema screen and the Jaff had simply snatched hold of the fabric, dragging it towards him. The projected image, which moments before had seemed so life-like, was revealed for the sham it was.

It's a movie, Grillo thought. The whole fucking world's a movie.

And the Art was the calling of that bluff. A snatching away of the sheet, the shroud, the screen.

He wasn't the only one reeling before this revelation. Several of Buddy Vance's mourners, shaken from their stupor, had opened their eyes to see a sight their worst bad trips had never proffered.

Even the Jaff seemed to be shocked by the ease of the task. A tremor was running through his body, which had never looked so frail, so vulnerable, so human, as now. Whatever trials he'd undergone to anneal his spirit for this moment, they were not enough. Nothing could be enough. This was an art in defiance of the condition of flesh. All the profoundest certainties of being were forfeit in the face of it. From somewhere behind the screen, Grillo heard a rising sound, which filled his skull like the thud of his heart. It summoned the terata. He glanced around to see them coming through the door to lend their maker aid in whatever was imminent. They were uninterested in Grillo; he knew he could leave at any moment and not be challenged. But he could not turn his back on this, however it wrenched his gut. Whatever played behind the screen of the world was about to be seen, and his eyes wouldn't be coaxed from the sight. If he fled now, what would he do? Run to the gate and watch from a safe distance? There was no safe distance, knowing what he now knew. He'd spend the rest of his life touching the solid world and knowing that had he the Art at his fingertips, it would melt.

Not everyone was so fatalistic. Many of those conscious enough were attempting to make for the door. But the disease of malleability that had infected the walls had spread across half the floor. It became glutinous beneath the escapees, pitching as the Jaff pulled, two-handed now, at the matter of the room.

Grillo sought out some solid place in the shifting environment, but could only find a chair, which was as prone to the new vagaries of physics as any other item in the room. It slipped from his grasp, and he fell to his knees, the impact re-starting the flow of the blood from his nose. He let it run.

Looking up, he saw that the Jaff had pulled so hard on the far end of the room that it was distorted out of all recognition. The brilliance of the lights in the yard outside were dimmed, had gone, smeared into a featureless sweep so taut it could not be long before it broke. The sound from the other side had not grown any louder, but became, in a matter of seconds, almost inevitable, as though it had always been there, just out of hearing range.

The Jaff pulled another handful of the room's stuff into his grasp, and in doing so pressed the screen beyond endurance. It didn't tear in one place but in several. The room tipped again. Grillo clung to the heaving floor as bodies rolled past him. In the chaos he glimpsed the Jaff, who seemed at this last moment to be regretting all he'd done, struggling with the raw substance of reality he'd gathered up as if attempting to throw it away. Either his fists wouldn't obey him and release it or else it had its own momentum now and was opening itself without his aid, because a look of wild terror crossed his face, and he screamed a summons to his legions. They started towards him, their anatomies finding some purchase in this shifting chaos. Grillo was pressed to the ground as they clambered over him. No sooner had they begun their advance, however, than something brought them to a halt. Grasping the hides to right and left of him, no longer afraid of them with so much worse on view, Grillo hauled himself upright, or as near upright as was possible, and looked back towards the door. That end of the room was still more or less intact. Only a subtle twisting of the architecture gave any clue to what was happening behind him. He could see through into the hall, and beyond to the front door. It was open. In it stood Fletcher's son.

There were calls greater than that of makers and masters, Howie understood. There was the call of a thing to its opposite, to its natural enemy. That was what fuelled the terata now, as they turned back towards the door, leaving whatever chaos was unleashed inside the house to the Jaff's control.

"They're coming!" he yelled to Fletcher's army, backing off as the tide of terata approached the door. Jo-Beth, who'd stepped inside with him, lingered on the threshold. He took hold of her arm and pulled her away.

"It's too late," she said. "You see what he's doing? My God! You see?"

Lost cause or not, the dream-creatures were ready to face the terata, pouncing as soon as the flood emerged from the house. Climbing the Hill Howie had expected the fight ahead to be somehow refined; a battle of wills or wits. But the violence that erupted all around him now was purely physical. All they had was their bodies to pitch into the battle, and they put themselves to the task with a ferocity he'd not have guessed the melancholy souls gathered at the woods—much less the civil folk they'd been at the Knapp house—capable of. There was no distinction between children and heroes.

They were barely recognizable now, as the last traces of the people they'd been dreamt into being faded in the face of an equally plain enemy. It was essential stuff now. Fletcher's love of light against the Jaff's passion for the dark. Beneath both was a single intention, which unified them. The destruction of the other.

He'd done as they requested, he thought; he'd led them up the Hill, calling the stragglers when they forgot themselves, and began to dissolve. With several, those less coherently conjured in the first place, perhaps, he'd lost. Their bodies had dispersed before he could get them within scenting distance of their enemy. For the rest, the sight of the terata was stimulus enough. They'd fight until torn apart.

Grievous damage was already being done on both sides. Fragments of sleek darkness torn from the bodies of the terata; washes of light breaking from the dream-army when they were opened up. There was no sign of pain among the warriors. No blood from the wounds. They endured assault after assault, fighting on having sustained damage that would have incapacitated anything remotely alive. Only when more than half their substance had been torn from them did they unravel, and disperse. Even then the air they dissolved into wasn't empty. It buzzed and shook as though the war was continuing on a sub-atomic level, negative and positive energies fighting to impasse, or the extinction of both.

The latter, most likely, if the forces warring in front of the house were any model. Equally matched, they were simply eradicating each other, countering harm with harm, their numbers dwindling.

The battle had spread down to the gate by the time Tesla reached the top of the Hill, and was spilling out on to the road. Forms that might once have been recognizable but were now abstractions, smears of darkness, smears of light, tearing at each other. She stopped the car, and started up towards the house. Two combatants emerged from the trees that lined the driveway, and fell to the ground a few yards ahead, their limbs locked around—and it seemed through—each other. She looked on, appalled. Was this what the Art had released? How they escaped from Quiddity?

"Tesla!"

She looked up. Howie was in sight. His explanation was quick and breathless.

"It's started," he said. "The Jaff's using the Art."

"Where?"

"In the house."

"And these?" she said.

"The last defense," he replied. "We were too late."

What now, babe? she thought. You don't have any way of stopping this. The world's on a tilt and everything's sliding.

"We should all get the hell out of here," she told Howie.

"You think?"

"What else can we do?"

She looked up towards the house. Grillo had told her it was a folly, but she hadn't expected architecture as wild as this. The angles all subtly off, no upright that wasn't askew by a few degrees. Then she understood. It wasn't some postmodernist joke. It was something inside the house, pulling it out of shape.

"My God," she said. "Grillo's still in there."

Even as she spoke the facade bent a little more. In the face of such strangeness the remnants of the battle all around her were of little consequence. Just two tribes tearing at each other like rabid dogs. Men's stuff. She skirted it, ignored.

"Where are you going?" Howie said.

"Inside."

"It's mayhem."

"And it isn't out here? I've got a friend in there."

"I'll come with you," he said.

"Is Jo-Beth here?"

"She was."

"Find her. I'll find Grillo and we'll both get the fuck out of here."

Without waiting for a reply she headed on towards the door.

The third force loose in the Grove tonight was halfway up the Hill when Witt realized that however profound his grief at losing his dreams, tonight he didn't want to die. He started to struggle with the door handle, fully ready to pitch himself out, but the dust storm on their tail dissuaded him. He looked across at Tommy-Ray. The boy's face had never sung out intelligence, but its slackness now was shocking. He looked almost moronic. Spittle ran from his lower lip, his face was glossy with sweat. But he managed a name as he drove. "Jo-Beth," he said.

She didn't hear that call, but she heard another. From inside the house a cry, put out mind to mind, from the man who'd made her. It was not directed at her, she guessed. He didn't know she was even near. But she caught it: an expression of terror which she couldn't ignore. She crossed through the matter-thickened air to the front door, the uprights of which were blowing in.

The scene was worse inside. The whole interior had lost its solidity, and was being drawn inexorably to some central point. It wasn't difficult to find that point. The whole softening world was moving in its direction.

The Jaff was there of course, at the core. In front of him a hole in the very substance of reality, which was exercising this claim on living and non-living alike. What was on the other side of the hole she couldn't see, but she could guess. Quiddity; the dream-sea; and on it an island both Howie and her father had told her about, where time and space were laughable laws, and spirits walked.

But if that was the case—he'd succeeded in his ambition, used the Art to gain access to the miracle—why was he so afraid? Why was he trying to retreat from the sight, tearing at his own hands with his teeth to make them let go the matter his fingers had penetrated?

All her reason said: go back. Go back while you can. The pull of whatever lay beyond the hole already had a hold of her. She could resist it for a short time, but that window was getting smaller. What she couldn't resist, however, was the hunger that brought her into the house in the first place. She wanted to see her father's pain. Not a sweet, daughterly desire, but he was not the sweetest of fathers. He'd caused her pain, and Howie too. He'd corrupted Tommy-Ray out of all recognition. He'd broken Momma's heart and life. Now she wanted to see him suffer, and she couldn't take her eyes off the sight. His self-mutilation was increasingly manic. He spat out pieces of his fingers, shaking his head back and forth in an attempt to deny whatever he saw beyond the hole the Art had made.

She heard a voice behind her say her name, and looked around to see a woman whom she'd never met, but Howie had described, beckoning her back to the safety of the threshold. She ignored the summons. She wanted to see the Jaff undo himself completely; or be dragged away and destroyed by his own mischief. She hadn't realized until this moment, how much she hated him. How much cleaner she'd feel when he was gone out of the world.

Tesla's voice had found other ears besides Jo-Beth's. Clinging to the ground a couple of yards behind the Jaff, on the eroding island of solidity around the Artist, Grillo heard Tesla call, and turned—against the call of Quiddity—to look her way. His face felt fat with blood, as the hole pulled his fluids up through his body. His head pounded as if ready to burst. The tears were being sucked from his eyes, his eyelashes plucked out. His nose poured two bloody streams, which ran straight from his face towards the hole.

He'd already seen most of the room snatched away into Quiddity. Rochelle had been one of the first to go, relinquishing what little hold her addicted body had on the solid world. Sagansky and his punched-out opponent had gone. The party-goers had followed, despite their attempts to get to the door. The pictures had been stripped from the walls, then the plaster cladding from the wood underneath; now the wood itself was giving up and bending to the call. Grillo would have joined them, walls, guests and all, had it not been for the fact that the Jaff's shadow offered a tenuous solidity in this chaotic sea.

No, not sea. That was what he'd glimpsed on the other side of the hole, and it shamed every other image of the world.

Quiddity was the essential sea; the first, the fathomless. He'd given up all hope of escaping its summons. He'd come too close to its shore to turn away. Its undertow had already hauled most of the room away. It would soon take him.

But seeing Tesla he suddenly dared hope he might survive to tell the tale. If he was to have the least chance he'd have to be quick. What little cover the Jaff afforded was being eroded by the moment. Seeing Tesla reach for him, he reached back in her direction. The distance was too great. She couldn't stretch any further into the room without losing her hold on the relative solidity beyond the door.

She gave up the attempt, and stepped away from the opening.

Don't desert me now, he thought. Don't give me hope and then desert me.

He should have known better. She'd simply withdrawn in order to pull her belt from the loops of her trousers, then she was back at the door, letting Quiddity's pull unroll the belt and put it within his grasp.

He snatched hold.

Outside on the battlefield, Howie had found the remains of the light that had been Benny Patterson. It had almost lost all trace of the boy it had been, but there was enough left for Howie to recognize. He went down on his knees beside it, thinking it was nonsense to mourn the passing of something so transitory, then correcting that thought with another. That he too was transitory, and no more certain of his purpose than this dream, Benny Patterson, had been.

He put his hand to the boy's face, but it was already dissolving, and blew away like bright pollen beneath his fingers. Distressed, he looked up to see Tommy-Ray at the gate of Coney, starting up towards the house. Behind him, lingering at the gate, was a man Howie didn't know. And behind them both, a wall of moaning dust that followed Tommy-Ray in a swirling cloud.

His thoughts went from Benny Patterson to Jo-Beth. Where was she? In the confusion of the last few minutes he'd neglected her. He didn't doubt she was Tommy-Ray's target.

He stood up, and moved to intercept his enemy, who was as changed from the tanned, gleaming hero he'd first met in the Mall as it was possible to get. Blood-spattered now, eyes sunk in their sockets, he threw back his head and yelled:

"Father!"

The dust on his heels flew at Howie as he came within striking distance of Tommy-Ray. Whatever haunted it, hate-bloated faces, with mouths like tunnels, swatted him aside, and moved in to better business, uninterested in his little life. He fell to the ground, covering his head until they'd passed over him. When they had, he got to his feet. Tommy-Ray, and the cloud that had followed him, had disappeared inside.

He heard Tommy-Ray's voice raised above the din of the Art.

"Jo-Beth!" he bellowed.

She was inside the house, he realized. Why she'd gone there was beyond him, but he had to get to her before Tommy-Ray, or the bastard would take her.

As he raced to the front door, he saw the last of the dust storm snatched by a force inside, and dragged out of sight.

The power that had taken it was visible the moment he stepped over the threshold; he saw the last, chaotic trails of the cloud being pulled into a maelstrom which was claiming the entire house. In front of it, his hands barely recognizable, stood the Jaff. Howie got only a glimpse of the scene before Tesla yelled for his attention.

"Help me! Howie? Howie? For Christ's sake help me!"

She was clinging to the inner door, its geometry gone to hell, her other hand holding on to somebody who was about to be claimed by the maelstrom. He was with her in three strides, a hail of crap flying past him (the step which he'd just crossed), and seized her hand. As he did so he recognized the figure standing a yard beyond Tesla, and closer to the maw the Jaff had opened. Jo-Beth!

His recognition came as a cry. She turned in his direction, half-blinded by the assault of debris. As their eyes met he saw Tommy-Ray move towards her. The machine had taken a beating of late but it still had power. He pulled on Tesla, dragging her and the man she'd been struggling to save out of the most chaotic zone into the hall. It was the moment Tommy-Ray needed to reach Jo-Beth, flinging himself at her with sufficient force to throw her off her feet.

He saw the terror in her eyes as she lost her balance. Saw Tommy-Ray's arms close around her, in the tightest of em-braces. Then the Quiddity claimed them both, sweeping them across the room past their father, and away, into the mystery.

Howie let out a howl.

Behind him Tesla was yelling his name. He ignored the call. His eyes on the place where Jo-Beth had gone he took a step towards the door. The power egged him on. He took another step, vaguely aware that Tesla was yelling for him to stop, to turn back before it was too late.

Didn't she know it had been too late the moment after he'd seen Jo-Beth? Everything had been lost, way back then.

A third step, and the whirlwind snatched him up. The room turned over and over. He saw his father's enemy for an instant, gaping, followed by the hole, gaping wider still.

Then he was gone, where his beautiful Jo-Beth had gone, into Quiddity.

"Grillo?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you stand up?" "I think so."

He'd tried twice, and failed, and Tesla had no strength left to pick him up and carry him down to the gate.

"Give me a moment," he said. Not for the first time his eyes went back to the house they'd barely escaped from.

"There's nothing to see, Grillo," she said.

That wasn't true, by any means. The facade was like something from Caligari, the door sucked in, the windows going the same way. And inside, who knew?

As they stumbled down to the car a figure emerged from the chaos and stumbled out into the moonlight. It was the Jaff. The fact that he'd stood on Quiddity's shore and resisted its waves was testament to his power, but that resistance had taken its toll. His hands were reduced to gnawed flesh, the remains of the left hanging from the bones of his wrist in strips. His face was as brutally devoured, not by teeth but by what he'd seen. Blank-eyed and broken, he staggered down to the gate. Wisps of darkness, the last of the terata, followed him.

Tesla badly wanted to ask Grillo what glimpse he'd had of Quiddity, but this wasn't the moment. It was enough to know that he was alive to tell. Flesh in a world where flesh was forfeit every moment. Alive, when life ended with each exhalation and began again with every snatched breath.

In the trough between, there was such jeopardy. And now, as never before. She didn't doubt that the worst had come to pass, and that somewhere on Quiddity's furthest shore the Iad Uroboros were sharpening their envy and starting across the dream-sea.