"The Great and Secret Show" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barker Clive)

PART FIVE: SLAVES AND LOVERS

Any alcoholic would have recognized the behavior of the Grove the following morning. It was that of a man who'd been on a bender the night before and had to get up early the day after and pretend that nothing untoward had happened. He'd stand under a cold shower for a few minutes to shock his system into wakefulness, breakfast on Alka-Seltzer and black coffee, then step out into the day with a gait more purposeful than usual, and the permafrost smile of an actress who'd just lost an Oscar. There were more hellos and how-are-yous? that morning, more neighbors waving cheerily to each other as they backed out their cars, more radios playing weather reports (sun! sun! sun!) through windows thrown wide to prove that there were no secrets in this house. To a stranger, coming to the Grove that morning for the first time, it would have seemed as though the town were auditioning for Perfectsville, USA. The general air of enforced bonhomie would have curdled his stomach.

Down at the Mall, where the evidence of a Dionysian night could scarcely be ignored, the talk was of anything but the truth. Hell's Angels had ridden in from L.A., one story went, their sole purpose to wreak havoc. The explanation gained credibility with repetition. Some claimed to have heard the bikes. A few even decided to have seen them, embroidering the collective fiction knowing nobody would raise a doubting voice. By mid-morning the glass had been entirely swept away, and boards nailed up over the smashed panes. By noon, fresh windows had been ordered. By two, they were in. Not since the days of the League of Virgins had the Grove been so single-minded in its pursuit of equilibrium; nor so hypocritical. For behind closed doors, in bathrooms and bedrooms and dens, it was a different story entirely. Here the smiles dropped, and the intent gait gave way to nervous pacing, and weeping, and the swallowing of pills searched for with the passion of gold-diggers. Here people confessed to themselves#8212;not even to their partners or their dogs#8212;that something was awry today and would never be quite right again. Here people tried to remember tales they'd been told as children#8212;the old, fanciful stories adulthood had all but shamed from their memories#8212;in the hope of countering their present fears. Some tried to drink away their anxiety. Some took to eating. Some contemplated the priesthood.

It was, all in all, a damn strange day.

Less strange, perhaps, for those who had hard facts to juggle, however much those facts flew in the face of what yesterday would have passed for reality. For these few, blessed now with the certain knowledge that there were monsters and divinities loosed in the Grove, the question was not: is it true? Rather: what does it mean?

For William Witt, the answer was a shrug of surrender. He had no way to comprehend the horrors he'd been terrorized by at the house in Wild Cherry Glade. His subsequent conversation with Spilmont, dismissing his story as fabrication, had made him paranoid. Either there was a conspiracy afoot to keep the Jaff's machinations secret, or else he, William Witt, was losing his mind. Nor were these memories mutually exclusive, which was doubly chilling. In the face of such bitter blasts he'd kept himself locked up at home, with the exception of his brief trip down to the Mall the previous night. He'd been a late attender, and today he remembered very little of it, but he did recall getting home and the night of video Babylon that followed. Usually he was quite sparing with his porno sessions, preferring to select one or two films to view rather than pig out on a dozen. But last night's viewing had turned into a binge. When the Robinsons next door were taking their kids off to the playground the following morning he was still sitting in front of the television, the blinds drawn, the beer cans a small city at his feet, watching and watching. He had his collection organized with the precision of a master librarian, referenced and cross-referenced. He knew the stars of these sweaty epics by all their aliases; he knew their breast and cock sizes; their early histories; their specialities. He had the narratives, crude as they were, by heart; his favorite scenes memorized down to each grunt and spurt

But today the parade did not arouse him. He went from film to film like an addict among pillaged peddlers, looking for a fix no one could supply, until the videos were piled high around his television. Two-ways, three-ways, oral, anal, golden showers, bondage, discipline, lesbian scenes, dildo scenes, rape and romance scenes#8212;he went through them all but none provided the release he needed. His search became a kind of pursuit of himself. What will rouse me will be me, was his half-finished thought.

It was a desperate situation. This was the first time in his life#8212;excluding events with the League#8212;that voyeurism had failed to excite. The first time he wanted the performers sharing his reality as he shared theirs. He'd always been happy to turn them off when he'd shot his wad; even been faintly contemptuous of their charms once their hold on him had been mopped up. Now he mourned them, like lovers he'd lost without ever knowing them properly, whose every orifice he'd sight of, but whose intimacy was denied him.

Yet, some time after dawn, his spirits as low as he'd known them, the strangest thought occurred: that perhaps he could bring them to him; by the sheer heat of his desire foment them into being. Dreams could be made real. Artists did it all the time, and didn't everyone have a little art in them? It was that thought, barely formed, that kept him watching the screen, through The Last Lays of Pompeii and Bom to Be Made and Secrets of a Women's Prison; films he knew as well as his own history, but which, unlike his history, might yet live in the present tense.

He was not the only Grover visited by such thoughts, though none were as fixated on the erotic as William. The same idea#8212;that some precious, essential person, or persons, might be called up from the mind and made a boon companion#8212; occurred to every member of the crowd that had gathered in the Mall the evening before. Soap-opera stars, game-show hosts, dead or lost relations, divorced spouses, missing children, comic-book characters: there were as many names as there were minds to summon them.

For some, like William Witt, the face of their desire gathered momentum at such speed (fuelled in several cases by obsession, in others by longing or envy) that by dawn the following day there were already clots in corners of their rooms where the air had thickened in preparation for the miracle.

In the bedroom of Shuna Melkin, who was the daughter of Christine and Larry Melkin, a fabled rock princess#8212;dead of an overdose several years past but Shuna Melkin's sole and obsessive idol, was making herself known with croonings so subtle it could have passed for the breeze in the eaves but that Shuna knew the tune.

In Ossie Larton's loft there were scratchings he knew with an inward smile were the birth pangs of the werewolf he'd kept secret company with since he'd first known that such creatures were imaginable. His name was Eugene, this werewolf, which#8212;at the tender age of six, when Ossie had first created his companion#8212;had seemed an appropriate name for a man who grew fur under the full moon.

For Karen Conroy the three leads of her favorite movie, Love Knows Your Name, a little-seen romance she'd wept through six days running during a long-past trip to Paris, could be sensed as a delicate European perfume in the lounge.

And so on, and so forth.

By noon that day there wasn't any one of the crowd who hadn't had an intimation#8212;many of which were dismissed or ignored of course#8212;that they had unexpected visitors. The population of Palomo Grove, which had swelled by a hundred horrors at the Jaff's summons, was about to swell again.

"You've already admitted you don't really understand what happened last night#8212;"

"It's not a question of admitting anything, Grillo."

"OK. Let's not get mad at each other. Why do we always end up shouting?"

"We're not shouting."

"OK. We're not shouting. All I'm saying is, please consider the possibility that this errand he's sending you on#8212;"

"Errand?"

"Now you're shouting. I'm just saying, think a minute. This could be the last trip you ever make."

"Possibility accepted."

"So let me come with you. You've never been south of Tijuana."

"Neither have you."

"It's rough#8212;"

"Listen, I've pitched art movies to men perplexed by Dumbo. I know rough. If you want to do something really useful, stay here and get well."

"I'm well already. I never felt better."

"I need you here, Grillo. Watching. It's not over, by a long way."

"What am I supposed to be watching for?" Grillo asked, conceding the argument by no longer pursuing it.

"You've always had an eye for the hidden agenda. When the Jaff makes his move, however quietly, you'll know it. By the way, did you see Ellen last night? She was in the crowd, with her kid. You might start by seeing how she feels the morning after..."

It wasn't that Grillo's fears for her safety weren't legitimate, nor indeed that she wouldn't have taken pleasure in his company on the journey ahead. But for reasons she could find no gentle way of stating, and so didn't state at all, his presence would be an intrusion she had no right to risk, either for his good or for the good of the task ahead. It had been one of Fletcher's last acts to choose her to go to the Mission; he'd even indicated that it had somehow been preordained. Not so long ago she'd have dismissed such mysticism; but after last night she was obliged to be more open-minded. The world of mysteries she'd made light of in her spook and spaceship screenplays was not to be so easily mocked. It had come looking for her, found her, and pitched her#8212;cynicism and all#8212; among its heavens and its hells. The latter in the shape of the Jaff's army, the former's presence in Fletcher's transformation: flesh to light.

Charged with being the dead man's agent on earth she felt a curious relaxation, despite the jeopardy that lay ahead. She no longer had to keep her cynicism polished; no longer had to divide her imaginings from moment to moment into the real (solid, sensible) and the fanciful (vaporous, valueless). If (when) she got back to her typewriter she'd begin these tongue-in-cheek screenplays over from the top, telling them with faith in the tale, not because every fantasy was absolutely true but because no reality ever was.

Mid-morning she left the Grove, choosing a route that took her out of the town past the Mall, where the status quo was well on its way to being restored. With speed she'd be over the border by nightfall; and at the Mision de Santa Catrina, or#8212;if Fletcher's hope was well founded#8212;on the empty ground where it had stood, before dawn.

On his father's instructions Tommy-Ray had crept back to the Mall the previous night, long after the crowd had dispersed. The police had arrived by that point but he had no difficulty in achieving his purpose, which was the retrieval of the terata which he had attached with his own hands to Katz's flesh. The Jaff had other reasons for wanting the creature back than keeping it from being found by the police. It was not dead, and once returned to the hands of its creator it regurgitated all it had seen and heard, the Jaff laying his hands on the beast like a faith-healer and drawing the report from the terata's system.

When he'd heard what he needed to hear, he killed the messenger.

"Well now..." he said to Tommy-Ray, "...it seems you'll have the journey I told you about sooner than I planned."

"What about Jo-Beth? That bastard Katz has got her."

"We wasted effort last night trying to persuade her to join our family. She rejected us. We'll waste no more time. Let her take her chance in the maelstrom."

"But..."

"No more on this," the Jaff said. "Your obsession with her really is ludicrous. And don't sulk! You've been indulged for too long. You think that smile of yours can get you whatever you want. Well it won't get you her."

"You're wrong. And I'll prove it."

"Not now you won't. You've got some travelling to do."

"First, Jo-Beth," Tommy-Ray said, and made to move away from his father. But the Jaff's hand was on his shoulder before he'd moved more than a step. His touch made Tommy-Ray yelp.

"Shut the fuck up!"

"You're hurting me!"

"I meant to!"

"No...I mean really hurting. Stop it."

"You're the one death loves, right, son?"

Tommy-Ray could feel his legs start to give out beneath him. He began to leak from dick, nose and eyes.

"I don't think you 're half the man you say you are," the Jaff told him. "Not half."

"I'm sorry...don't hurt me any more, please..."

"I don't think men sniff after their sisters all the time. They find other women. And they don't talk about death like it was easy stuff then snivel if they start to hurt a little."

"OK! OK! I get the point! Just stop, will you? Stop!"

The Jaff released him. He fell to the ground.

"It's been a bad night for us both," his father said. "We've both had something taken from us...you, your sister...me, the satisfaction of destroying Fletcher. But there are fine times ahead. Trust me."

He reached down to pick Tommy-Ray up. The boy flinched, seeing the fingers at his shoulder. But this time the contact proved benign; even soothing.

"There's a place I want you to go for me," the Jaff said. "It's called the Mision de Santa Catrina..."

Howie hadn't realized until Fletcher had gone out of his life just how many questions he had left unanswered; problems only his father might have helped him solve. They didn't vex him through the night. He slept too soundly. It was only the next morning that he began to regret his refusal to learn from Fletcher. The only solution available to Jo-Beth and himself was to try to piece the story in which they clearly played such a vital role together from clues, and from the testimony of Jo-Beth's mother.

The previous night's invasion had brought about a change in Joyce McGuire. After years of attempting to hold the evil that had entered her house at bay, her failure, in the end, to do so had somehow freed her. The worst had happened: what more was there to fear? She had seen her personal hell created in front of her, and survived. God's agency#8212;in the form of the Pastor#8212;had been valueless. It had been Howie who had gone out in search of her daughter, and finally#8212;both of them ragged, and bloodied#8212;brought her back. She'd welcomed him into the house; even insisted he stay the night. The following morning she went about the house with the air of a woman who had been told a tumor in her body was benign, and she could expect a few more years of life.

When, in the early afternoon, all three of them sat down to talk, it took a little time to persuade her to unburden herself of the past, but the stories came, one by one. Sometimes, especially when she talked about Arleen, Carolyn and Trudi, she cried as she talked, but as the events she was describing became more tragic she told them more and more dispassionately. On occasion she'd go back to offer details she'd missed, or to praise somebody who'd helped her through the difficult years, when she was bringing up Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray alone knowing she was talked about as the hussy who'd survived.

"The number of times I thought about leaving the Grove," she said. "Like Trudi."

"I don't think it saved her any pain," Howie said. "She was always unhappy."

"I remember her a different way. Always in love with somebody or other."

"Do you know...who she was in love with before she had me?"

"Are you asking me do I know who your father is?"

"Yes."

"I have a good idea. Your middle name was his first. Ralph Contreras. He was a gardener at the Lutheran Church. He used to watch us when we came home from school. Every day. Your mother was very pretty, you know. Not in a movie-star kind of way, like Arleen, but with dark eyes...you've got her eyes...a sort of liquid look in them. I think she was always the one Ralph loved. Not that he said very much. He had a terrible stammer."

Howie smiled at this.

"Then it was him. I inherited that."

"I don't hear it."

"I know, it's strange. It's gone. It's almost like meeting Fletcher took it out of me. Tell me, does Ralph still live in the Grove?"

"No. He left before you were even born. He probably thought there'd be a lynch-mob out after him. Your mother was a middle-class white girl, and he..."

She stopped, seeing the look on Howie's face.

"He?" Howie said.

"#8212;was Hispanic."

Howie nodded. "You learn something new every day, right?" he said, playing lightly what clearly went deep.

"Anyway, that's why he left," Joyce went on. "If your mother had ever named him I'm sure he'd have been accused of rape. Which it wasn't. We were driven, all of us, by whatever the Devil had put inside us."

"It wasn't the Devil, Momma," Jo-Beth said.

"So you say," she replied, with a sigh. The energy suddenly seemed to go out of her, as the old vocabulary took its toll. "And maybe you're right. But I'm too old to change the way I think."

"Too old?" said Howie. "What are you talking about? What you did last night was extraordinary."

Joyce reached across and touched Howie's cheek. "You must leave me to believe what I believe. It's only words, Howard. The Jaff to you. The Devil to me."

"So what does that make Tommy-Ray and me, Momma?" Jo-Beth said. "The Jaff made us."

"I've wondered about that often," Joyce said. "When you were very young I used to watch you both all the time, waiting for the bad in you to show. It has in Tommy-Ray. His maker's taken him. Maybe my prayers have saved you, Jo-Beth. You went to church with me. You studied. You trusted in the Lord."

"So you think Tommy-Ray's lost?" Jo-Beth asked.

Momma didn't answer for a moment, though not, it was clear when the answer came, because she felt ambiguous on the subject.

"Yes," she said finally. "He's gone."

"I don't believe that," Jo-Beth said.

"Even after what he was up to last night?" Howie put in.

"He doesn't know what lie's doing. The Jaff's controlling him, Howie. I know him better than a brother#8212;"

"Meaning?"

"He's my twin. I feel what he feels."

"There's evil in him," Momma said.

"Then there's evil in me too," Jo-Beth replied. She stood up. "Three days ago you loved him. Now you say he's gone. You've let the Jaff have him. I won't give up on him that way." So saying, she left the room.

"Maybe she's right," Joyce said softly.

"Tommy-Ray can be saved?" Howie said.

"No. Maybe the Devil's in her too."

Howie found Jo-Beth in the yard, face up to the sky, eyes closed. She glanced around at him.

"You think Momma's right," she said. "Tommy-Ray's beyond help."

"No, I don't. Not if you believe we can get to him. Bring him back."

"Don't just say that to please me, Howie. If you're not on my side in this I want you to tell me."

He put his hand on her shoulder. "Listen," he said, "if I'd believed what your mother said then I wouldn't have come back, would I? This is me remember? Mister Persistence. If you think we can break the Jaff's hold on Tommy-Ray then we'll damn well do it. Just don't ask me to like him."

She turned round fully, brushing her hair, which the breeze had caught, from her face.

"I never thought I'd be standing in your momma's backyard with my arms around you," Howie said.

"Miracles happen."

"No they don't," he said. "They're made. You're one, and I'm one, and the sun's one, and the three of us being out here together is the biggest of the lot."

Grillo's first call, after Tesla's departure, was to Abernethy. Whether to tell or not to tell was only one of the dilemmas with which he was presented. Now more than ever the real problem was how. He'd never had the instincts of a novelist. In his writing he'd sought a style that set the facts out as plainly as possible. No fancy footwork; no flights of vocabulary. His mentor in this was not a journalist at all but Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver s Travels, a man so concerned to communicate his satire with clarity that he'd reputedly read his works aloud to his servants to be certain his style did not confound his substance. Grillo kept that story as a touchstone. All of which was fine when reporting on the homeless in Los Angeles, or on the drug problem. The facts were plain enough.

But this story#8212;from the caves to Fletcher's immolation#8212;posed a knottier problem. How could he report what he'd seen last night without also reporting how it had felt? He kept his exchange with Abernethy oblique. It was useless to try to pretend nothing at all had happened in the Grove the night before. Reports of the vandalism#8212;though not a major story#8212;had already been carried on all the local newscasts. Abernethy was on to it.

"Were you there, Grillo?"

"Afterwards. Only afterwards. I heard the alarms and#8212;"

"And?"

"There's not much to report. There were some windows broken."

"Hell's Angels on the rampage."

"Is that what you heard?"

"Is that what I heard? You're supposed to be the fucking reporter, Grillo, not me. What do you need? Drugs? Drink? A visit from the fucking Mude?"

"That's Muse."

"Mude, Muse; who the fuck cares? Just get me a story the people want to read. There must have been injuries#8212;"

"I don't think so."

"Then invent some."

"I do have something..."

"What? What?"

"A story nobody's reported yet, I'll bet."

"It better be good, Grillo. Your job's on the fucking line here."

"There's going to be a shindig up at Vance's house. To celebrate his passing."

"OK. So you get inside the place. I want the works on him and his friends. The man was a no-good. No-goods have no-good friends. I want names and details."

"Sometimes you sound like you saw too many movies, Abernethy."

"Meaning what?"

"Skip it."

The image lingered, long after Grillo had put down the phone, of Abernethy sitting up nights rehearsing lines from newspaper epics, refining his performance as a hard-pressed, hard-bitten editor. He wasn't the only one, Grillo thought.

Everyone had a movie playing somewhere at the back of their heads in which they were the name above the title. Ellen was the wronged woman, with terrible secrets to keep. Tesla was the wild woman of West Hollywood, loose in a world she never made. Which line of thought invited the obvious question: what was he? Cub reporter on a hit scoop? Man of integrity, dogged by crimes against a corrupt system? Neither part suited him the way they might have done when he'd first arrived, hot foot from his hovel, to report the Buddy Vance story. Events had somehow marginalized him. Others, Tesla in particular, had taken the starring roles.

As he checked his appearance in the mirror he mused on what it meant to be a star without a firmament. Free to take up another profession perhaps? Rocket scientist; juggler; lover. How about lover? How about the lover of Ellen Nguyen? That had a nice ring.

She was a long time coming to the door, and when she arrived it seemed she took several seconds to even recognize Grillo. lust as he was about to prompt her a smile surfaced, and she said:

"Please...come in. Are you recovered from the flu?"

"A little shaky."

"I think maybe I'm catching it too..." she said as she closed the door. "I woke feeling...I don't know..."

The curtains were still drawn. The place looked even smaller than Grillo remembered it.

"You'd like coffee," she said.

"Sure. Thanks."

She disappeared through to the kitchen, leaving Grillo abandoned in the middle of a room in which every article of furniture was piled high with magazines, or toys, or unsorted washing. Only as he moved to clear a space for himself did he realize he had an audience. Philip was standing at the head of the passage that led to his bedroom. His outing to the Mall the evening before had been premature. He still looked frail.

"Hi," Grillo said. "How you doin'?"

Surprisingly, the boy smiled; a lavish, open smile.

"Did you see?" he said.

"See what?"

"At the Mall," Philip went on. "You did see. I know you did. The beautiful lights."

"Yes, I saw them."

"I told the Balloon Man all about it. That's how I know I wasn't dreaming."

He crossed to Grillo, still smiling.

"I got your drawing," Grillo said. "Thank you."

"Don't need them now," Philip said.

"Why's that?"

"Philip?" Ellen had returned with coffee. "Don't bother Mr. Grillo."

"It's no bother," Grillo said. He returned his gaze to Philip. "Maybe we can talk about Balloon Man later," he said.

"Maybe," the boy replied, as though this would be entirely dependent upon Grillo's good behavior. "I'm going now," he announced to his mother.

"Sure, sweetie."

"Shall I tell him hello?" Philip asked Grillo.

"Please," Grillo replied, not certain of what the boy meant, "I'd like that."

Satisfied, Philip made his way back to his bedroom.

Ellen was busying herself clearing a place for them to sit. With her back to Grillo she bent to her work. The plain kimono-style dressing gown she wore clung. Her buttocks were heavy for a woman of her height. When she turned back the sash of the gown had loosened. The folds fell away at her breastbone. Her skin was dark, and smooth. She caught his appreciation as she handed him his coffee, but made no attempt to tie the gown more tightly. The gap tempted Grillo's eye every time she moved.

"I'm glad you came around," she said once they were seated. "I was concerned when your friend#8212;"

"Tesla."

"Tesla. When Tesla told me you were ill. I felt responsible." She took a sip of coffee. She made a sharp backward motion when it touched her tongue. "Hot," she said.

"Philip was telling me you were down at the Mall last night."

"So were you," she replied. "Do you know if anybody was hurt? All that broken glass."

"Only Fletcher," Grillo replied.

"I don't believe I know him."

"The man who burned up."

"Somebody got burned?" she said. "Oh God, that's horrible."

"Surely you saw it."

"No," she replied. "We just saw the glass."

"And the lights. Philip was talking about the lights."

"Yes," she said, plainly puzzled. "He said the same to me. You know I don't remember any of that. Is it important?"

"What's important is that you're both well," he said, using the platitude to cover his confusion.

"Oh we're fine," she said, looking directly at him, her face suddenly cleansed of its bafflement. "I'm tired, but I'm fine."

She reached across to put the coffee cup down and this time the robe fell open enough for Grillo to catch sight of her breasts. He didn't have the slightest doubt that she knew exactly what she was doing.

"Have you heard any more from the house?" he asked, taking undeniable satisfaction from talking business while thinking sex.

"I'm supposed to go up there," Ellen said.

"When is the party?"

"Tomorrow. It's short notice, but I think a lot of Buddy's friends were expecting some kind of farewell celebration."

"I'd like to get in on the party."

"You want to report?"

"Of course. It's going to be quite a gathering, right?"

"I think so."

"But that's just part of it. We both know there's something extraordinary happening in the Grove. Last night, it wasn't simply the Mall..." He trailed off, seeing that her expression, upon mention of the previous evening, had once again become distracted. Was this self-induced amnesia, or part of the natural process of Fletcher's magic? The former, he suspected. Philip, less resistant to changes in the status quo, had no such memory problems. When Grillo turned the conversation back to the party her attention was once more upon him.

"Do you think you could get me in?" he asked.

"You'll have to be careful. Rochelle knows what you look like."

"Can't you invite me officially? As press?"

She shook her head. "There won't be any press," she explained. "It's a strictly private gathering. Not all of Buddy's associates are gluttons for publicity. Some of them had too much of it too soon. Some of them would prefer never to have it. He mixed with a lot of men...what did he call them?...heavy-duty players. I think, Mafia probably."

"All the more reason I should be there," Grillo said.

"Well, I'll do what I can, especially after you getting sick on my account. I guess if there's sufficient guests you could melt into the crowd..."

"I'd appreciate the help."

"More coffee?"

"No, thanks." He glanced at his watch, though didn't register the time.

"You're not going to go," she said. It was not a question, but a statement. The same was true of his response.

"No. Not if you'd prefer I stay."

Without another word she reached and touched his breastbone through his shirt.

"I'd prefer you stay," she said.

He instinctively looked towards Philip's room.

"Don't worry," she said. "He'll play for hours." She looped her finger between the buttons of Grillo's shirt. "Come to bed with me," she said.

She got up and led the way through to her bedroom. By contrast with the clutter outside, the room was spartan. She crossed to the window and half closed the blinds, which lent the whole room a parchment tint, then sat down on the bed and looked up at him. He leaned down and kissed her face, slipping his hand inside her robe and lightly rubbing her breast. She pressed his hand to her, insisting on severer treatment. Then she pulled him down on top of her. Their comparative heights meant his chin rested on the top of her head, but she turned this to erotic advantage, pulling his shirt open and licking at his chest, her tongue leaving wet trails from nipple to nipple. All the while her hold on his hand didn't relax for an instant. Her nails dug into his skin with painful force. He fought her, dragging his hand away to reach for the sash of her robe but her hand was there before him. He rolled off her, and was about to sit up to undress, but she took hold of his shirt, this grip as fierce as its predecessor, and kept him at her side, her face at his shoulder, while she untied the loose knot of the sash one-handed, then threw the robe open. She was naked underneath. Doubly naked in fact. Her groin was completely shaved.

Now she turned her face away, and closed her eyes. One hand still gripping his shirt, the other limp at her side she seemed to be offering her body to him as a plate to be dined from. He put his hand on her stomach, running his palm down towards her cunt, pressing hard on skin that looked and felt almost burnished.

Without opening her eyes she murmured:

"Anything you want."

The invitation momentarily flummoxed him. He was used to this being a contract between partners, but here was this woman waving such niceties away, offering him total command of her body. It made him uneasy. As an adolescent her passivity would have seemed unbearably erotic. Now it shocked his liberal sensibilities. He said her name, hoping for some sign from her, but she ignored him. It wasn't until he once again sat up to pull off his shirt that she opened her eyes and said:

"No. Like this, Grillo. Like this."

The expression both on her face and in her voice was like rage, and it unearthed in him a hunger to respond in kind. He rolled on top of her, taking her head in his hands and pushing his tongue into her mouth. Her body pressed up from the mattress, rubbing so hard against him he was sure there was as much pain as pleasure in it for her.

In the room they'd vacated the coffee cups trembled as though the mildest quake were underway. Dust crept across the table, disturbed by the motion of an almost invisible something which slid its wasted shoulders from the gloomiest corner of the room and drifted rather than walked towards the bedroom door. Its form, though rudimentary, was still too recognizable to be dismissed as mere shadow, yet there was too little of it to deserve the name ghost. Whatever it had been, or was to become, even in its present condition it had purpose. Drawn by the woman who was presently dreaming it into being, it approached the bedroom. There#8212;denied access#8212;it mourned against the door, awaiting instructions.

Philip emerged from his sanctum and wandered through to the kitchen in search of food. He opened the cookie jar, dug for chocolate chip, and headed back the way he'd come, a cookie in his left hand for himself, and three in his right for his companion whose first words had been:

"I'm hungry."

Grillo raised his head from Ellen's wet face. She opened her eyes.

"What is it?" she said.

"There's somebody outside the door."

She raised her head from the bed and bit on his chin. It hurt, and he winced.

"Don't do that," he said.

She bit harder.

"Ellen..."

"So bite back," she said. He didn't have time to curb his bemused look. Catching it, she said: "I mean it, Grillo," and hooked her finger into his mouth, the ball of her hand locked against his chin. "Open," she said. "I want you to hurt me. Don't be afraid. It's what I want. I'm not fragile. I'm not going to break."

He shook her hold off.

"Do it," she said. "Please, do it."

"You want that?"

"How many times, Grillo? Yes. "

Her dislodged hand had gone to the back of his head. He let her draw his face back down to hers and began to nibble at her lips and then her neck, testing her resistance. There was none. Instead, moans that became louder the harder he bit. Her response drowned all misgivings. He began to work down her neck to her breasts, her moans becoming steadily louder, his name breathed between, urging him on. Her skin began to redden, not just with bite-marks, but with arousal. Sweat broke out on her suddenly. He put his hand down between her legs, his other hand holding her arms above her head. Her cunt was wet, and took his fingers readily. He'd begun to pant with the exertion of holding her down, his shirt sticky on his back. Uncomfortable as he was, the scenario aroused him: her body utterly vulnerable, his closed up behind zipper and buttons. His cock hurt, hard at the wrong angle, but the ache only made him harder, hardness and ache feeding on each other as he fed on her, and on her insistence that he hurt her better, open her wider. Her cunt was hot around his straight fingers, her breasts covered with the twin crescents his teeth had left. Her nipples stood like arrow-heads. He sucked them in; chewed on them. Her moans became sobbing cries, her legs convulsing beneath him, almost throwing them both off the bed. When he relaxed his hold for an instant her hand took his and drove his fingers still deeper into her.

"Don't stop," she said.

He took up the rhythm she'd set, and doubled it, which had her pushing her hips against his hand to have his fingers inside her to the knuckles. His sweat dropped off his face on to hers as he watched her. Eyes clenched closed she raised her head and licked his forehead and around his mouth, leaving him unkissed but gummy with her saliva.

At last, he felt her entire body stiffen, and she arrested the motion of his hand, her breath coming short and shallow. Then her grip on him#8212;which had drawn blood#8212;relaxed. Her head dropped back. She was suddenly as limp as she'd been when she'd first lain down and exposed herself to him. He rolled off her, his heartbeat playing squash against the walls of his chest and skull.

They lay for a time out of time. He could not have said whether it was seconds or minutes. It was she who made the first move, sitting up and pulling her robe around her. The movement made him open his eyes.

She was tying the sash, pulling the front of her robe together almost primly. He watched her start towards the door.

"Wait," he said. This was unfinished business.

"Next time," she replied.

"What?"

"You heard," came the response. It had the tone of a command. "Next time."

He got up from the bed, aware that his arousal probably seemed ridiculous to her now, but infuriated by her lack of reciprocity. She watched his approach with a half-smile on her face.

"That's just the start," she said to him. She rubbed at the places on her neck where he'd bitten her.

"And what am I supposed to do?" Grillo asked.

She opened the door. Cooler air brushed against his face.

"Lick your fingers," she said.

Only now did he remember the sound he'd heard, and half-expected to see Philip retreating from his spyhole. But there was only the air, drying the spittle on his face to a fine, taut mask.

"Coffee?" she said. She didn't wait for an answer, but headed to the kitchen. Grillo stood and watched her go. His body, weakened by his sickness, had begun to respond to the adrenaline pumped around it. His extremities trembled, as though from the marrow outwards.

He listened to the sound of the coffee-making: water running, cups being rinsed. Without thinking he put his fingers, which smelled strongly of her sex, to his nose and lips.

Jokemeister Lamar got out of the limo at the front of Buddy Vance's house and tried to wipe the smile off his face. It was difficult for him at the best of times, but now#8212;at the worst, with his old partner dead and so many harsh words never healed between them#8212;it was virtually impossible. For every action there was a reaction, and Lamar's reaction to death was a grin.

He'd read once about the origins of the smile. Some anthropologist had theorized that it was a sophisticated form of the ape's response to those unwanted in the tribe: the weak or unstable. In essence it said: You're a liability. Get out of here! From that exiling leer had evolved laughter, which was the baring of teeth to a professional idiot. It too announced contempt, at root. It too proclaimed the object of mirth a liability: one to be kept at bay with grimaces.

Lamar didn't know how the theory stood up to analysis, but he'd been in comedy long enough to believe it plausible. Like Buddy he'd made a fortune acting the fool. The essential difference, in his opinion (and that of many of their mutual friends), was that Buddy had been a fool. Which wasn't to say he didn't mourn the man; he did. For fourteen years they'd been lords of all they'd convulsed, a shared success which left Lamar feeling the poorer for his ex-partner's death despite the breach that had opened between them.

That breach had meant Lamar had met the sumptuous Rochelle once only, and that by accident, at a charity dinner in which he and his wife Tammy had been seated at an adjacent table to Buddy and his bride of the year. That description was one he'd used#8212;to gales of laughter#8212;on several talk shows. At the dinner he'd taken the opportunity of putting one over on Buddy by insinuating himself with Rochelle while the groom was emptying his bladder of champagne. It had been a brief meeting#8212;Lamar had returned to his table as soon as he saw that Buddy had seen him#8212;but must have made some impression because Rochelle had called personally to invite him up to Coney Eye for the party. He had persuaded Tammy that she'd be bored by the shindig and arrived a day early to have some time with the widow.

"You look wonderful," he told her as he stepped over Buddy's threshold.

"It could be worse," she said, a reply which didn't mean that much until, an hour later, she told him that the party thrown in Buddy's honor had been suggested by the man himself.

"You mean he knew he was going to die?" Lamar said.

"No. I mean he came back to me."

Had he been drinking he might well have done the old choking and spraying routine, but he was glad he hadn't when he realized she was deadly serious.

"You mean...his spirit?" he said.

"I suppose that's the word. I don't really know. I don't have any religion, so I don't quite know how to explain it."

''You're wearing a crucifix," Lamar observed.

"It belonged to my mother. I never put it on before."

"Why now? Are you afraid of something?"

She sipped at the vodka she'd poured. It was early for cocktails, but she needed its comfort.

"Maybe, a little," she said.

"Where's Buddy now?" Lamar asked, impressed by his ability to keep a straight face. "I mean...is he in the house?"

"I don't know. He came to me in the middle of the night, said he wanted this party throwing, then he left."

"As soon as the check arrived, right?"

"This isn't a joke."

"I'm sorry. You're right of course."

"He said he wanted everyone to come to the house and celebrate."

"I'll drink to that," Lamar said, raising his glass. "Wherever you are, Buddy. Skol. "

Toast over, he excused himself to go to the bathroom. Interesting woman, he thought as he went. Nuts of course, and#8212;rumor had it#8212;addicted to every chemical high to be had, but he was no saint himself. Ensconced in the black marble bathroom, leered down upon by a row of ghost-ride masks, he set up a few lines of cocaine and snorted himself high, his thoughts turning back to the beauty below. He'd have her; that was the long and short of it. Preferably in Buddy's bed, with Buddy's towels to wipe himself off afterwards.

Leaving his smirking reflection he stepped back on to the landing. Which was Buddy's bedroom? he wondered. Did it have mirrors on the ceiling, like the whore-house in Tucson they'd patronized together once upon a time, and Buddy had said, as he put that damn snake of a dick of his away: one day, Jimmy, I want a bedroom like this?

Lamar opened half a dozen doors before he found the master bedroom. It, like all the other rooms, was decorated with carnivalia. There was no mirror on the ceiling. But the bed was large. Big enough for three, which had always been Buddy's favored number. As he was about to return downstairs Lamar heard water running in the en suite bathroom.

"Rochelle, is that you?"

The light was not on inside, however. Obviously a tap had simply been left to run. Lamar pushed the door open.

From inside, Buddy spoke:

"No light, please."

Without the coke in his system Lamar would have been out of the house before the ghost spoke again, but the drug pumped him up long enough for Buddy to reassure his partner that there was nothing to be afraid of.

"She said you were here," Lamar breathed.

"You didn't believe her?"

"No."

"Who are you?"

"What do you mean: who am I? It's Jimmy. Jimmy Lamar."

"Of course. Come in. We should have words."

"No...I'll stay out here."

"I can't hear you too well."

"Turn off the water."

"I need it to piss."

"You piss?"

"Only when I drink."

"You drink?"

"Do you blame me, with her down there and me unable to touch her?"

"Yeah. That's too bad."

"You'll have to do it for me, Jimmy."

"Do what?"

"Touch her. You're not gay are you?"

"You know better than that."

"Of course."

"The number of women we had together."

"We were friends."

"The best. And I must say you're real sweet, letting me have Rochelle."

"She's yours. And in return#8212;"

"What?"

"Be my friend again."

"Buddy. I missed you."

"I missed you, Jimmy."

"You were right," he said when he got downstairs. "Buddy is here."

"You saw him."

"No, but he spoke to me. He wants us to be friends. Him and me. And you and me. Close friends."

"Then we will be."

"For Buddy."

"For Buddy."

Upstairs, the Jaff turned this new and unexpected element in the game over, and judged it good. He had intended to pass himself off as Buddy#8212;a trick all too easy, given that he'd drunk down the man's thoughts#8212;to Rochelle only. In that form he'd come visiting two nights before, and found her drunk in her bed. It had been easy to coax her into believing he was her husband's spirit; the only difficult part had been preventing himself from claiming marital rights. Now, with the partner under the same delusion, he had two agents in the house to assist him when the guests arrived.

After the events of the previous night he was glad he'd had the foresight to organize the party. Fletcher's machinations had caught him off-guard. In that act of self-destruction his enemy had contrived to put a sliver of his hallucigenia-producing soul into a hundred, maybe two hundred minds. Even now the recipients were dreaming up their personal divinities; and making them solid. They would not, on past evidence, be particularly barbaric; certainly not the equals of his terata. Nor, without their instigator alive to fuel them, would they linger long on this plane of being. But they could still do his well-laid plans much mischief. He might well need the creatures he could summon from the hearts of Hollywood to prevent Fletcher's last testament from interfering.

Soon, the journey that had begun the first time he'd heard of the Art#8212;so long ago he couldn't even remember from whom#8212;would end with his entering Quiddity. After so many years of preparation it would be like coming home. He'd be a thief in Heaven, and therefore King of Heaven, given that he'd be the only presence there qualified to steal the throne. He would own the dreamlife of the world; be all things to all men, and never be judged.

There were two days left, then. The first, the twenty-four hours it would take him to realize that ambition.

The second, the day of the Art, when he would reach the place where dawn and dusk, noon and night, occurred at the same perpetual moment.

Thereafter, there was only forever.

For Tesla, leaving Palomo Grove was like waking from sleep in which some dream-tutor had instructed her that all life was dreaming. There would be no simple division from now on between sense and nonsense; no arrogant assumption that this experience was real and this one not. Maybe she was living in a movie, she thought as she drove. Come to think of it that wasn't a bad idea for a screenplay: the story of a woman who discovered that human history was just one vast family saga, written by that underrated team Gene and Chance, and watched by angels, aliens and folks in Pittsburgh who had tuned in by accident and were hooked. Maybe she'd write that story, once this adventure was over.

Except that it would never be over; not now. That was one of the consequences of seeing the world this way. For better or worse she would spend the rest of her life anticipating the next miracle; and while she waited, inventing it in her fiction, so as to prick herself and her audience into vigilance.

The drive was easy, at least as far as Tijuana, and left room for such musings. Once she had crossed the border, however, she had to consult the map she'd bought, and was obliged to postpone any further plottings or prophecies. She had committed Fletcher's instructions to memory like an acceptance speech, and they#8212;with help from the map#8212;proved good. Never having travelled the peninsula before she was surprised to find it so deserted. This was not an environment in which man and his works had much hope of sustained existence, which led to the expectation that the Mission ruins, when she reached them, would most likely have been eroded, or swept away into the Pacific, whose murmur grew in volume as her route took her closer to the coast.

She could not have been more wrong in that expectation. As she rounded the bend of the hill Fletcher had directed her to, it was immediately apparent that the Mision de Santa Catrina was very much intact. The sight made her innards churn. A few minutes' drive, and she'd be standing before the site at which an epic story#8212;of which she knew only the tiniest part#8212;had begun. For a Christian, perhaps Bethlehem would have aroused the same excitement. Or Golgotha.

It was not a place of skulls, she found. Quite the reverse. Though the fabric of the Mission had not been rebuilt#8212;its blasted rubble was still spread over a substantial area#8212;somebody had clearly preserved it from further dissolution. The reason for that preservation only became apparent once she'd parked the car, some way off from the building, and approached on foot across the dusty ground. The Mission, built for holy purpose, deserted, then turned to an endeavor its architects would surely have deemed heretical, was once again sanctified.

The closer she approached the jigsaw walls, the more evidence she found before her. First, the flowers, laid in rough bunches and wreaths among the scattered stones, their colors brilliant in the clear sea air.

Second, and more poignant, the small bundles of domestic items#8212;a loaf, a jug, a door handle#8212;that had been bound up with scraps of scrawled-upon paper and laid among the blossoms in such profusion she could scarcely take a step without treading on something. The sun was slipping away now, but its deepening gold only served to enhance the sense that this was a haunted place. She negotiated the rubble as quietly as she could, for fear of disturbing its occupants, human or otherwise. If there were miraculous beings in Ventura County (walking the streets, no less, unabashed) how much more likely that here, on this lonely headland, there should be wonder-workers?

Who they might be, and what shape (if any) they took, she didn't even concern herself to try to guess. But if the number of gifts and supplications laid underfoot testified to anything it was that prayers were answered here.

The bundles and the messages left outside the Mission were affecting enough, but those inside were more moving still. She stepped through a gap in one of the walls into a silent crowd of portraits: dozens of photographs and sketches of men, women and children fixed to the stone along with a fragment of clothing, or a shoe; even spectacles. What she'd wandered through outside had been gifts. These, she guessed, were items for some bloodhound god to sniff. They belonged to missing souls, brought here in the hope that the powers would usher the lost back on to a familiar road and so bring them home.

Standing in the gilded light, surveying this collection, she felt like an intruder. Religious displays had seldom if ever moved her. The sentiments were so smug in their certainty, the images so rhetorical. But this display of simple faith touched a nerve she'd thought numbed by cant. She recalled the way she'd felt the first time she'd returned home for Christmas after a self-imposed exile from the family bosom of five years. It had been as claustrophobic as she'd anticipated, but at midnight on Christmas Eve, walking on Fifth Avenue, a forgotten feeling had sucked all the breath from her, and brought her to tears in an instant: that once she had believed. That belief had come from inside, out. Not taught, not bullied, just there. The first tears that had come were gratitude for the bliss of knowing belief again; their sisters, sadness that it passed as quickly as it had come, like a spirit moving through her and away.

This time, it didn't go. This time it deepened in her, as the sun deepened in color, sinking towards the sea.

The sound of somebody moving, deep in the ruins, broke her reverie. Startled, she let her quickened pulse slow a little before asking:

"Who's there?"

There was no reply. Cautiously she ventured past the wall of lost faces and through a lintel-less door into a second chamber. It had two windows, like eyes in the brick, through which the setting sun delivered two ruddy beams. She had nothing except instinct to support the feeling, but she didn't doubt that this was the temple's most sacred place. Though it had no roof, and its eastern wall was grievously damaged, the place seemed charged, as though forces had accrued in it over a period of years. Its function, when Fletcher had occupied the Mission, had evidently been that of laboratory. There were benches overturned on every side, the equipment that had toppled from them apparently left where it had fallen. Neither offerings nor portraits had been allowed to disrupt this sense of a place preserved. Though sand had gathered around the fallen furniture, and seedlings sprouted here and there, the chamber was as it had been: testament to a miracle; or to its passing.

The protector of the sanctum stood in the corner furthest from Tesla, beyond the shafts from the window. She could make out little about him. Only that he was either masked or had features as broadly formed as those of a mask. Nothing she'd experienced here so far led her to fear for her safety. Though she was alone, she felt no anxiety. This was a sanctuary not a place of violence. Besides, she came on the business of the deity that had once worked in this very chamber. She had to speak with his authority.

"My name's Tesla," she said. "I was sent here by Doctor Richard Fletcher."

She saw the man in the corner respond to the name with a slow upward motion of the head; then heard him sigh.

"Fletcher?" he said.

"Yes," Tesla replied. "Do you know who he is?"

The answer was another question delivered with a heavily Hispanic accent: "Do I know you?"

"I told you," Tesla said. "He sent me here. I've come to do what he himself asked me to do."

The man stepped away from the wall, far enough for his features to touch the beams.

"Could he not come himself?" he said.

It took Tesla a few moments to muster a reply. The sight of the man's heavy brow and lumpen nose had thrown her thoughts into a spin. Quite simply she'd never seen in the flesh a face so ugly.

"Fletcher isn't alive any more," she replied after a moment, her thoughts half on repugnance, half on how instinctively she'd avoided using the word dead.

The wretched features in front of her became sorrowful, something in their plasticity almost making a caricature of that emotion.

"I was here when he left," the man said. "I've been waiting for him to...come back."

She knew who he was as soon as he proffered this information. Fletcher had told her there might be a living remnant of the Great Work left.

"Raul?" she said.

The deep-set eyes grew wide. They showed no whites. "You do know him," he said, and took another quicker step into the light, which carved his features so cruelly she could barely look at him. She'd countless times seen creatures on the screen more studiedly vile than this#8212;and the night before been bloodied by a beast of nightmare design#8212;but the confusion of signals from this hybrid distressed her more than anything she'd set eyes on. It was so close to being human, yet her innards were not deceived. The response taught her something, though she wasn't quite certain what. She put the lesson aside for more urgent stuff.

"I've come to destroy whatever remains of the Nuncio," she said.

"Why?"

"Because Fletcher wants it that way. His enemies are still in the world, even though he isn't. He fears for the consequences if they come here and find the experiment."

"But I've waited..." Raul said.

"It's good that you did. It's good you guarded the place."

"I haven't moved. All these years. I've stayed where my father made me."

"How have you survived?"

Raul looked away from Tesla, squinting into the sun, which was almost gone from sight.

"The people look after me," he said. "They don't understand what happened here, but they know I was a part of it. The Gods were on this hill, once. That's what they believe. Let me show you."

He turned and led Tesla out of the laboratory. Beyond the door was another, barer chamber; this with a single window. The walls had been painted, she saw; murals whose naive rendering merely emphasized the passion with which they were felt.

"This is the story of that night," Raul said, "as they believe it happened."

There was no more light here than in the room they'd exited, but the murk lent mystery to the images.

"Here's the Mission as it was," Raul said, indicating an almost emblematic picture of the cliff upon which they were standing. "And there's my father."

Fletcher stood in front of the hill, face white and wild against its darkness, his eyes twin moons. Strange forms sprang from his ears and mouth, and hung around his head like satellites.

"What are those?" Tesla enquired.

"His ideas," came Raul's reply. "I painted those."

"What kind of ideas look like that?"

"Things from the sea," came the reply. "Everything comes from the sea. Fletcher told me that. At the beginning, the sea. At the end, the sea. And between#8212;"

"Quiddity," said Tesla.

"What?"

"He didn't tell you about Quiddity?"

"No."

"Where humans go to dream?"

"I'm not human," Raul gently reminded her. "I'm his experiment."

"Surely that's what made you human," Tesla said. "Isn't that what the Nuncio does?"

"I don't know," Raul said simply. "Whatever it did to me, I don't thank it for. I was happier...being an ape. If I'd stayed an ape I'd be dead by now."

"Don't talk that way," Tesla said. "Fletcher wouldn't want to hear you full of regrets."

"Fletcher left me," Raul reminded her. "He taught me enough to know what I could never be, then he left me."

"He had his reasons. I've seen his enemy, the Jaff. The man has to be stopped."

"There#8212;" said Raul, pointing to a place further along the wall. "There's Jaffe."

The portrait was able enough. Tesla recognized the devouring stare, the swollen head. Had Raul actually seen Jaffe in his evolved condition or was this portrait of man as monstrous babe an instinctive response? She had no opportunity to enquire. Raul was coaxing her away again.

"I'm thirsty," he said. "We can look at the rest later."

"It'll be too dark."

"No. They'll come up and light candles when the sungoes. Come and talk with me for a while. Tell me how my father died."

It took Tommy-Ray longer to reach the Mision de Santa Catrina than the woman he was racing against because of an incident along the route which, though minor, showed him a place in himself he would later come to know very well. In a small town south of Ensenada, stopping in the early evening to get something for his parched throat, he found himself in a bar that offered#8212;for a mere ten bucks#8212;access to an entertainment undreamed of in Palomo Grove. It was too tasty an offer to refuse. He put his money down, bought a beer, and was allowed entrance to a smoke-filled space which could only have been twice the size of his bedroom. There was an audience of maybe ten men, sprawled on creaking chairs. They were watching a woman having sex with a large black dog. He found nothing about the scene arousing. Neither, apparently, did the rest of the audience; at least not in the sexual sense. They leaned forward to watch the display with an excitement he didn't understand until the beer began to work on his wearied system, tunnelling his vision until the woman's face mesmerized him. She might once have been pretty, but her face, like her body, was wasted now, her arms showing plain proof of the addiction that had brought her so low. She teased the hound with the expertise of one who'd done this countless times before, then went on all fours before it. It sniffed, then lazily put itself to the task. Only once it had mounted her did Tommy-Ray realize what claim her expression had upon him, and, presumably, upon the others. She looked like somebody already dead. The thought was a door in his head opening on to a stinking yellow place; a wallowing place. He'd seen this look before, not just on the faces of girls in the skin mags, but on celebrities trapped by cameras. Sex-zombies, star-zombies; dead folks passing for living. When he plugged back into the scene in front of him the dog had found its rhythm, and was making at the girl with doggy lust, foam dripping from its mouth on her back; and this time#8212;thinking of the girl as dead#8212;it was sexy. The more excited the animal became the more excited he became and the more dead the woman looked to him, feeling the dog's dick in her and his eyes on her, until it became a race between him and the dog as to which was going to finish first.

The dog won, working itself up into a stabbing frenzy then stopping suddenly. On cue one of the men sitting in the front row stepped up and separated the pair, the animal instantly uninterested. Her partner led away, the woman was left center stage to gather up a scattering of clothes she'd presumably shed before Tommy-Ray had entered. She then exited through the same side door where the dog and its pimp had gone, her face the same slack mask it had been from the outset. There was apparently another part of the show to follow, because nobody vacated their seats. But Tommy-Ray had seen all he needed to see. He made his way back towards the door, pushing through a soft-bodied knot of newcomers, and out into the dusky bar.

It was only much later, when he was almost at the Mission, that he realized his pockets had been picked. There was no time to go back, he knew; nor indeed any purpose. The thief could have been any of the men who'd crowded his path as he'd left. Besides, it had been worth the lost dollars. He had found a new definition of death. Not even new. Simply his first and only.

The sun had long set by the time he drove up the hill towards the Mission, but as he began the ascent a distinct sense of deja vu crept over him. Was he seeing the place with the Jaff's eyes? Whether or not, the recognition proved useful. Knowing that Fletcher's agent had undoubtedly arrived ahead of him he decided to leave the car a little way down the hill and climb the rest of the way on foot so as not to alert her to his coming. Dark though it was, he didn't travel blind. His feet knew the way even though his memory didn't.

He'd come prepared for violence, should the occasion demand. The Jaff had provided him with a gun#8212;courtesy of one of the many victims the Jaff had relieved of their terata#8212; and the idea of using it was undoubtedly appealing. Now, after a climb which had made his chest ache, he was within sight of the Mission. The moon had risen behind him, the color of a shark's underbelly. It lit the ruined walls, and the skin of his arms and hands, with its sickly light, making him long for a mirror in which to study his face. Surely he'd be able to see the bones beneath the meat; the skull gleaming the way his teeth gleamed when he smiled. After all, wasn't that what a smile said? Hello world, this is the way I'll look when the wet parts are rotted.

His head tender with such thoughts, he trod through the withering blossoms to the Mission.

Raul's hut was fifty yards beyond the main building, a primitive structure in which two occupants were a crowd. He depended, he explained to Tesla, entirely on the generosity of the local people, who supplied him with food and clothing in return for his being caretaker of the Mission. Despite the poverty of his means he had been at pains to elevate the hut from a hovel. There were signs everywhere of a delicate sensibility at work. The squat candles on the table were seated in a ring of stones chosen for their smoothness; the blanket on the simple cot had been decorated with the feathers of sea-birds.

"I have one vice only," Raul said, once he'd set Tesla down in the single chair. "I have it from my father."

"What's that?"

"I smoke cigarettes. One a day. You'll share with me."

"I used to smoke," Tesla began, "but I don't any longer."

"Tonight you will," Raul said, leaving no room for dissension. "We'll smoke to toast my father."

He brought a hand-rolled cigarette from a small tin, along with matches. She watched his face as he went about the business of lighting it up. All that she'd found unnerving about him at first sight remained unnerving. His features were neither simian nor human, but the unhappiest of marriages between the two. And yet in every other respect#8212;his speech, his manners, the way he was even now holding the cigarette between his long, dark fingers#8212;he was so very civilized. The kind of man, indeed, mother might have wished her to marry, had he not been an ape.

"Fletcher hasn't gone, you know," he said to her, handing the cigarette across. She took it reluctantly, not particularly eager to put to her lips what had been between his. But he watched her, candle light flickering in his eyes, until she obliged, smiling with pleasure at her sharing with him. "He became something else, I'm sure," he went on. "Something other."

"I'll toast that," she said, taking another drag. Only now did it occur to her that perhaps the tobacco they smoked down here was a little more potent than in L.A.

"What's in this?" she said.

"Good stuff," he replied. "You like it?"

"They bring you dope as well?"

"They grow it themselves," Raul said in a matter-of-fact way.

"Good for them," she said, and claimed a third hit before handing it back to him. It was indeed strong stuff. Her mouth was already half way through a sentence her mind had no idea of how to finish before she knew she was even speaking.

"...this is the night I tell my kids about...except that I won't have any kids...well, my grandchildren then...I'll tell them when I sat with a man who used to be a monkey...you don't mind me telling you that do you? Only it's my first time...and we sat and we talked about his friend...and my friend...who used to be a man..."

"And when you tell them," Raul said, "what will you say about yourself?"

"About myself?"

"Where will you fit into the pattern? What are you going to become?"

She mused on this. "Do I have to become anything?" she asked eventually.

Raul passed the remnants of the cigarette back to her. "Everything is becoming. Sitting here, we're becoming."

"What?"

"Older. Closer to death."

"Oh shit. I don't want to be closer to death."

"No choice," Raul said simply. Tesla shook her head. It kept moving, long after the motion had ceased.

"I want to understand," she said finally.

"Anything in particular?"

She mused a little more, running through all the possible options, and came up with one.

"Everything?" she said.

He laughed, and his laughter sounded like bells to her. Good trick, she was about to tell him, until she realized that he was up and at the door.

"Somebody's at the Mission," she heard him say.

"...come to light the candles," she suggested, her head seeming to precede her body in pursuit of him.

"No," he said to her as he stepped out into the darkness. "They don't step where the bells are..."

She had been staring into the candle flame as she'd mulled over Raul's questions, and its image was imprinted on the darkness she now stumbled through, a will o' the wisp that might have led her over the cliff-edge had she not followed his voice. As they approached the walls he told her to stay where she was but she ignored him and followed anyway. The candlelighters had indeed come visiting; their handiwork threw its glamour through from the room of portraits. Though the contents of Raul's cigarette had put space between her thoughts they were cogent enough to fear that she'd idled too long, and that her purpose here was now in jeopardy. Why hadn't she just found the Nuncio immediately and pitched it into the ocean as Fletcher had directed? Her irritation with herself made her bold. In the murk of the mural room she managed to overtake Raul and so step through into the candlelit laboratory first.

It was not candles that had been lit here, nor was the visitor a supplicant.

In the middle of the chamber a small, smoky fire had been lit, and a man#8212;with his back at present turned to her#8212; was ferreting through the tangle of equipment with his bare hands. She had not expected to recognize him when he looked in her direction, which was, on reflection, foolish. In the last few days she'd come to know most of the actors in this piece, if not by name then at least by sight. This one she knew by both. Tommy-Ray McGuire. He turned full face. In the perfect symmetry of his features a little ball of lunacy#8212; the Jaff's inheritance#8212;bounded back and forth, glittering.

"Hi!" he said; a bland, casual greeting. "I wondered where you were. The Jaff said you'd be here."

"Don't touch the Nuncio," she told him. "It's dangerous."

"That's what I'm hoping," he said with a grin.

There was something in his hand, she saw. Catching her glance he proffered it. "Yeah, I got it," he said. The vial was indeed as Fletcher had described it.

"Throw it away," she advised, attempting to be cool.

"Was that what you were going to do?" he asked.

"Yes. I swear, yes. It's lethal."

She saw his eyes flit from her face to Raul, whose breath she heard behind and a little to the side of her. Tommy-Ray looked in no way concerned at being outnumbered. Indeed she wondered if there was any threat to life or limb that would dislodge the smug satisfaction from his face. The Nuncio, perhaps? God Almighty, what possibilities would it find waiting in his barbaric heart, to praise and magnify?

Again she said: "Destroy it, Tommy-Ray, before it destroys you."

"No way," he said. "The Jaff's got plans for it."

"And what about you, when you've finished working for him? He doesn't care about you."

"He's my father and he loves me," Tommy-Ray replied, with a certainty that would have been touching in a sane soul.

She began to move towards him, talking as she went. "Just listen to me for a few moments, will you...?"

He pocketed the Nuncio, and reached into his other pocket as he did so. He brought out a gun.

"What did you call the stuff?" he asked, pointing the weapon at her.

"Nuncio," she said, slowing her advance but still approaching steadily.

"No. Something else. You called it something else."

"Lethal."

He grinned. "Yeah," he said, slurring the word. "Lethal. That means it kills you, right?"

"Right."

"I like that."

"No, Tommy..."

"Don't tell me what I like," he said. "I said I like lethal and I mean it."

She suddenly realized she'd entirely miscalculated this scene. If she'd written it, he'd have held her at gunpoint till he made his escape. But he had his own scenario.

"I'm the Death-Boy," he said, and pulled the trigger.

Unnerved by the episode at Ellen's house, Grillo had taken refuge in writing, a discipline he felt more in need of the deeper this pool of ambiguities became. At first it was easy. He struck out for the dry ground of fact, and stated it in prose Swift would have been proud of. Later he could extract from this account the sections to be sent through to Abernethy. For now his duty was to set down as much as he could remember.

Mid-way through the process, he got a call from Hotchkiss, who suggested that they might have an hour drinking and talking together. The Grove had only two bars, he explained, Starky's, in Deerdell, being the less tame of the two and consequently the preferable. An hour after the conversation, with the bulk of the previous night's events securely laid on paper, Grillo left the hotel and met with Hotchkiss. Starky's was practically empty. In one corner an old man sat quietly singing to himself, and there were two kids at the bar who looked too young to be drinking; otherwise they had the place to themselves. Even so, Hotchkiss barely raised his voice above a whisper throughout the entire conversation.

"You don't know much about me," he said at the outset. "I realized that last night. It's time you knew."

He didn't need any further encouragement to tell. His account was offered without emotion, as though the burden of feeling were so heavy it had long ago squeezed the tears from him. Grillo was glad of the fact. If the teller could be dispassionate then it freed him to be the same, probing between the lines of Hotchkiss's account for details the man had passed over. He spoke of Carolyn's part in the story first, of course, not praising or damning his daughter, merely describing her and the tragedy that had taken her from him. Then he threw the net of his story wider, and drew in others, first giving a thumbnail portrait of Trudi Katz, Joyce McGuire and Arleen Farrell, then relating how each of them had fared. Grillo was busily filling in details for himself as Hotchkiss spoke: creating a family tree whose roots went where Hotchkiss's account so often returned: underground.

"That's where the answers are," he said more than once. "I believe Fletcher and the Jaff, whoever they are, whatever they are, were responsible for what happened to my Carolyn. And to the other girls."

"They were in the caves all this time?"

"We saw them escape didn't we?" Hotchkiss said. "So yes, I think they waited down there all these years." He swallowed a mouthful of Scotch. "After last night at the Mall I just stayed up, trying to work it all out. Trying to make sense of it all."

"And?"

"I've decided to go down into the caves."

"What the hell for?"

"All those years, locked away, they must have been doing something. Maybe they left clues. Maybe we can find a way to destroy them down there."

"Fletcher's already gone," Grillo reminded him.

"Has he?" Hotchkiss said. "I don't know any more. Things linger, Grillo. They seem to disappear, but they linger, just out of sight. In the mind. In the ground. You climb down a little way and you're in the past. Every step another thousand years."

"My memory doesn't go back that far," Grillo quipped.

"But it does," Hotchkiss said, in deadly earnest. "It goes back to being a speck in the sea. That's what haunts us." He raised his hand. "Looks solid, doesn't it?" he said. "But it's mostly water." He seemed to be struggling for another thought, but it wouldn't come.

"The creatures the Jaff made look like they've been dug up," Grillo said. "You think that's what you're going to find down there?"

Hotchkiss's response was the thought he'd been unable to shape a moment earlier. "When she died," he said. "Carolyn I mean...when Carolyn died I had dreams of her just dissolving in front of me. Not rotting. Dissolving. Like the sea took her back."

"Do you still have those dreams?"

"Nope. I never dream now."

"Everybody dreams."

"Then I don't allow myself to remember them," Hotchkiss said. "So...are you with me?"

"With you on what?"

"The descent."

"You really want to do it? I thought it was virtually impossible to get down there."

"So, we die trying," Hotchkiss said.

"I've got a story to write."

"Let me tell you, my friend," Hotchkiss said. "That's where the story is. The only story. Right beneath our feet."

"I should warn you...I'm claustrophobic."

"We'll soon sweat that out of you," Hotchkiss replied, with a smile Grillo thought might have been a jot more reassuring.

Though Howie had valiantly fought off sleep through most of the afternoon, by early evening he could barely keep his eyes open. When he told Jo-Beth he wanted to return to the hotel Momma intervened, telling him she'd feel much comforted if he remained in the house. She made up the spare room (he'd spent the previous night on the sofa) and he retired to it. His body had taken a considerable beating in the last few days. His hand was still badly bruised, and his back, though the punctures- inflicted by the terata were not deep, still ached. None of which kept him from sleep for more than a few moments.

Jo-Beth prepared food for Momma#8212;salad for Momma, as ever#8212;and herself, going through the familiar domestic processes as though nothing in the world had changed since a week ago, and for short spaces of time, involved in her labors, forgetting the horrors. Then a look on her mother's face, or the sight of the shiny new lock on the back door, brought the memories back. She could no longer put them into any kind of order: there was just humiliation and pain upon further humiliation and further pain. Leering through it all the Jaff; near to her, too near to her, coming so close on occasion to persuading her to his vision the way he'd persuaded Tommy-Ray. Of all her fears the one that distressed her the most was that she might actually have been capable of joining the enemy. When he'd explained to her how he wanted reasons rather than feelings, she'd understood. Even been moved to sympathy. And that teasing talk of the Art, and the island he wanted to show her...

"Jo-Beth?"

"Momma?"

"Are you all right?"

"Yes. Of course. Yes."

"What were you thinking of? The expression on your face..."

"Just...about last night."

"You should put it out of your head."

"Maybe I'll drive over to see Lois; talk with her for a while? Would you mind?"

"No. I'll be fine here. Howard's with me."

"Then I'll go."

Of all her friends in the Grove none represented the normality from which her life had departed as perfectly as Lois. For all her moral strictures she had a strong and simple faith in what was good. In essence, she wanted the world a peaceful place, where children raised in love could in their turn raise children. She knew evil too. It was any force mounted against that vision. The terrorist, the anarchist, the lunatic. Now Jo-Beth knew that such human forces had allies on a more rarefied plane of being. One of those was her father. It was never more important that she sought the company of those whose definition of good was unshakable.

She heard noise and laughter from Lois's house as she got out of the car; which was welcome after the hours of fear and unease she'd spent. She knocked on the door. The raucousness continued unabated. It sounded to be quite a crowd.

"Lois? " she called, but such was the level of hilarity from within both calls and knocks went unheard, so she rapped on the window, again calling. The drapes were drawn aside and Lois's quizzical face appeared, mouthing Jo-Beth's name. The room behind her was full of people. She was at the door ten seconds later, with an expression on her face so unusual Jo-Beth almost failed to recognize her: a smile of welcome. Behind her every light in the house seemed to be burning; a dazzling wash of light that spilled on to the step.

"Surprise," said Lois.

"Yes, I just thought I'd call round. But you've...got company."

"Sort of," Lois replied. "It's a little difficult just at the moment."

She cast a glance back into the house. It seemed to be a costume party she was flinging. A man dressed in a full cowboy outfit sauntered up the stairs, spurs glinting, past another in full military garb. Crossing the hall, arm in arm with a woman in black, was a guest who'd come as a surgeon, of all things, his face masked. That Lois should have planned such a jamboree without mentioning it to Jo-Beth was odd enough; Lord knows they had spare time enough at the store to chat. But that she was throwing it at all#8212;staid, reliable Lois#8212;was doubly odd.

"I don't suppose it matters," Lois was saying. "You're a friend after all. You should be a part of it, right?"

A part of what was the question on Jo-Beth's lips, but she had no time to ask it before she was drawn inside by Lois, who took her arm with proprietorial force, and the door was shut hard behind her.

"Isn't it wonderful?" Lois said. She was positively glowing. "Have you had the people come to see you?"

"People."

"The Visitors."

Jo-Beth merely nodded, which was sufficient to set Lois bubbling in a new direction. "Next door, the Kritzlers had Visitors from Masquerade#8212;you know, that series about the sisters?"

"The TV show?"

"Of course the TV show. And my Mel...well, you know how much he loves the old westerns .

None of this made much, if any, sense but Jo-Beth let Lois race on, for fear that asking a question out of turn might mark her as uninitiated, and she'd be denied any further confessions.

"Me? I'm the luckiest one," Lois burbled. "So, so lucky. All the people from Day by Day came over. The whole family. Alan, Virginia, Benny, Jayne. They even brought Morgan. Imagine."

"Where did they come from, Lois?"

"They just appeared in the kitchen," came the answer. "And of course they've been telling me all the gossip about the family#8212;"

Only the store obsessed Lois as much as Day by Day, the story of America's favorite family. She would regularly sit and tell Jo-Beth every detail of the previous night's episode as though it were part of her own life. Now it seemed the delusion had taken hold of her. She was talking about the Pattersons as though they were actually guests in her house.

"They're every bit as sweet as I knew they'd be," she was saying, "though I didn't think they'd mix with the people from Masquerade. You know, with the Pattersons being so ordinary; that's what I love about them. They're so..."

"Lois. Stop this."

"What's wrong?" she said.

"You tell me."

"Nothing's wrong. Everything's wonderful. The Visitors are here and I couldn't be happier."

She smiled at a man in a pale blue jacket who waved a welcome.

"That's Todd, from The Last Laugh#8212;" she said.

Late-night satire was no more to Jo-Beth's taste than Day by Day but the man did look vaguely familiar. As did the girl he'd been showing card-tricks to; and the man who was clearly competing with him for her affections, who might have passed#8212;even at this range#8212;for the host of Momma's favorite game show, Hideaway.

"What's going on here?" Jo-Beth said. "Is it a look-alike party or something?"

Lois's smile, which had been a permanent fixture since her greeting Jo-Beth at the door, slipped a little.

"You don't believe me," she said.

"Believe you?"

"About the Pattersons."

"No. Of course not."

"But they came, Jo-Beth," she said, now, suddenly, in deadly earnest. "I suppose I'd always wanted to meet them, and they came. " She took hold of Jo-Beth's hand, her smile igniting again. "You'll see," she said. "And don't worry, you'll have somebody come to you if you want them badly enough. It's happening all over town. Not just TV people. People from billboards and magazines. Beautiful people; wonderful people. There's no need to be frightened. They belong to us." She drew a little closer. "I never really understood that, until last night. Only they need us just as much, don't they? Maybe more. So they won't do us any harm..."

She pushed open the door from which much of the laughter was coming. Jo-Beth followed Lois in. The lights that had first dazzled her in the hallway were brighter here, though there was no source apparent. It was as if the people in the room came already lit, their hair gleaming, their eyes and teeth the same. Mel was standing at the mantelpiece, portly, bald and proud, surveying a room filled with famous faces.

Just as Lois had promised, the stars had come to Palomo Grove. The Patterson family#8212;Alan and Virginia, Benny and Jayne#8212;even their mutt, Morgan#8212;were holding court in the center of the room, with several other characters from the series#8212;Mrs. Kline from next door, the bane of Virginia's life; the Haywards, who owned the corner store#8212;also in attendance. Alan Patterson was engaged in an animated discussion with Hester D'Arcy, much abused heroine of Masquerade. Her oversexed sister, who had poisoned half the family to gain control of incalculable wealth, was in the corner making eyes at a man from an ad for briefs, who'd come as he was best known: almost naked.

"Everybody!" Lois said, raising her voice above the hub-Dub. "Everybody please, I want you all to meet a friend of mine. One of my very best friends#8212;"

The familiar faces all turned to look, like the covers of a dozen TV Guides all staring Jo-Beth's way. She wanted to get out of this insanity before it touched her, but Lois had a firm grip of her hand. Besides, this was part of the whole insanity. If she was to understand it she had to stay put.

"#8212;this is Jo-Beth McGuire," Lois said.

Everybody smiled; even the cowboy.

"You look as though you need a drink," Mel said, when Lois had taken Jo-Beth on one complete circuit of the room.

"I don't drink liquor, Mr. Knapp."

"Doesn't mean you don't look as though you need it," came the reply. "I think we've all got to change our ways after tonight, don't you? Or maybe last night." He glanced over at Lois, whose laughter was rising in peals. "I've never seen her so happy," he said. "And that makes me happy."

"But do you know where all these people come from?" Jo-Beth said.

Mel shrugged. "Your guess is as good as mine. Come through, will you? I need a drink if you don't. Lois has always denied herself these little pleasures. I always said: God isn't looking. And if He is, He doesn't care."

They pressed their way through the guests to the hallway. Numbers of people had gathered there to escape the crush in the lounge, among them several church members: Maeline Mallett; Al Grigsby; Ruby Sheppherd. They smiled at Jo-Beth, no sign on their faces that they found this gathering untoward. Had they perhaps brought Visitors of their own?

"Did you go down to the Mall last night?" Jo-Beth asked Mel as she watched him pour her orange juice.

"I did indeed," he said.

"And Maeline? And Lois? And the Kritzlers?"

"I think so. I forget who was there exactly, but yes, I'm sure most of them...are you sure you wouldn't like something in the juice?"

"Maybe I will," she said vaguely, her mind putting the~ pieces of this mystery together.

"Good for you," said Mel. "The Lord isn't looking, and even if He is..."

"...He doesn't care."

She took the drink.

"That's right. He doesn't care."

She sipped it; then gulped.

"What's in it?" she said.

"Vodka."

"Is the world going mad, Mr. Knapp?"

"I think it is," came the reply. "What's more, I like it that way."

Howie woke at a little after ten, not because he was sufficiently rested but because he'd rolled over in sleep and trapped his wounded hand under his body. Pain soon slapped him conscious. He sat up and studied his throbbing knuckles in the moonlight. The cuts had opened again. He dressed and went to the bathroom to wash them of blood, then went in search of a bandage. Jo-Beth's mother provided one, along with the expertise to bind his hand properly, plus the information that Jo-Beth had gone to Lois Knapp's house.

"She's late now," Momma said.

"It's not ten-thirty yet."

"Even so."

"You want me to go look for her?"

"Would you? You can take Tommy-Ray's car."

"Is it far?"

"No."

"Then I think I'll walk."

The warmth of the night and his being out in it without hounds on his heels put him in mind of his first night here in the Grove: seeing Jo-Beth in Butrick's Steak House; speaking with her; falling, in a matter of seconds, in love. The calamities that had come upon the Grove since were a direct result of that meeting. But significant as his feelings for Jo-Beth were, he couldn't quite bring himself to believe they'd brought such vast consequence. Was it possible that beyond the enmity between the Jaff and Fletcher#8212;beyond Quiddity and the struggle for its possession#8212;lay an even vaster plot? He'd always vexed himself with such imponderables; like trying to imagine infinity, or what it would feel like to touch the sun. The pleasure lay not in a solution, but in the stretch it took to tackle the question. The difference, in this case, lay with his place in the problem. Suns and infinities vexed far greater minds than his. But what he felt for Jo-Beth vexed only him, and if#8212;as some buried instinct in him (Fletcher's echo, perhaps?) suggested#8212;the fact of their meeting was a tiny but vital part of some massive tale, then he could not leave the thinking to those greater minds. The responsibility, at least in part, devolved upon him; upon them both. How much he wished it didn't. How much he longed to have time to court Jo-Beth like any small-town suitor. To lay plans for the future without the weight of an inexplicable past pressing upon them. But that couldn't be, any more than a written thing could be unwritten, or a wished-for thing unwished.

If he'd wanted any more concrete proof of that, none could have been had but the scene that awaited him beyond the door of Lois Knapp's house.

"There's someone here to see you, Jo-Beth."

She turned and met the same expression that must have been on her face when, two hours and more before, she'd stepped into the lounge.

"Howie," she said.

"What's going on here?"

"A party."

"Yeah, I can see that. But all these actors. Where'd they come from? They can't all live in the Grove."

"They're not actors," she said. "They're people from the TV. And a few movies too. Not many, but#8212;"

"Wait, wait."

He moved closer to her. "Are these Lois's friends?" he said.

"They sure are," she said.

"This town just keeps on going, doesn't it? Just when you think you've got it fixed in your head#8212;"

"But they're not actors, Howie."

"You just said they were."

"No. I said they were people from TV. See the Patterson family, over there? They even have that dog with them."

"Morgan," Howie said. "My mother used to watch that show."

The dog, a lovable mongrel in a long tradition of lovable mongrels, heard his name called and scooted over, followed by Benny, the youngest of the Patterson children.

"Hi," the kid said. "I'm Benny."

"I'm Howie. This is#8212;"

"Jo-Beth. Yeah, we met. You want to come outside and play ball with me, Howie? I'm bored."

"It's dark out there."

"No it isn't," Benny said. He directed Howie's gaze towards the patio doors. They were open. The night beyond was, as Benny had said, far from dark. It was as if the odd radiance that permeated the house, about which he'd had no time to speak with Jo-Beth, had seeped out into the yard.

"See?" Benny said.

"I see."

"So come on, huh?"

"In a minute."

"Promise?"

"I promise. By the way, what's your real name?"

The kid looked puzzled. "Benny," he said. "Always was." He and the mutt headed off for the bright night.

Before Howie could put the countless questions in his head into askable order he felt a friendly pat on the back and a rotund voice enquired:

"Something to drink?"

Howie raised his bandaged hand in apology for the absence of a handshake.

"Good to have you here anyhow. Jo-Beth was telling me about you. I'm Mel, by the way. Lois's husband. You met Lois already, I gather."

"That's right."

"I don't know where she got to. I think one of those cowboys is having his way with her." He raised his glass. "To which I say, better him than me." He faked a look of shame. "What am I saying? I should have the bastard out in the street. Gun him down, eh?" He grinned. "That's the New West for you, right? Can't be fucking bothered. You want another vodka, Jo-Beth? You're going to have something, Howie?"

"Why not?"

"Funny, isn't it?" Mel said. "It's only when these damn dreams come in you realize who you are. Me...I'm a coward. And I don't love her." He turned from them. "Never did love her," he said as he reeled away. "Bitch. Fucking bitch."

Howie watched him enveloped by the crowd, then looked back at Jo-Beth. Very slowly he said:

"I don't have the slightest clue what's happening. Do you?"

"Yes."

"Tell me. Words of one syllable."

"This is because of last night. What your father did."

"The fire?"

"Or what came from it. All these people..." She smiled, surveying them, "...Lois, Mel, Ruby over there...all of them were at the Mall last night. Whatever came from your father#8212;"

"Keep your voice down, will you? They're staring at us."

"I'm not talking loud, Howie," she said. "Don't be so paranoid."

"I tell you they're staring."

He could feel the intensity of their gazes: faces he'd only ever seen in glossy magazines, or on the television screen, staring at him with strange, almost troubled, looks.

"So let them stare," she said. "They don't mean any harm."

"How do you know that?"

"I've been here all evening. It's just like a normal party#8212;"

"You're slurring your words."

"So why shouldn't I have a little fun once in a while?"

"I'm not saying you shouldn't. I'm just saying you're in no state to judge whether they're dangerous or not."

"What are you trying to do, Howie?" she said. "Keep all these people to yourself?"

"No. No, of course not."

"I don't want to be a part of the Jaff#8212;"

"Jo-Beth."

"He may be my father. Doesn't mean I like it that way."

The room had fallen entirely silent at the mention of the Jaff. Now everyone in the room#8212;cowboys, soap-opera stars, sitcom folks, beauties and all#8212;were looking their way.

"Oh shit," said Howie, softly. "You shouldn't have said that." He scanned the faces surrounding them. "That was a mistake. She didn't mean it. She's not...she doesn't belong...what I mean is, we're together. She and me. We're together, see? My father was Fletcher, and hers...hers wasn't." It was like being in sinking sand. The more he struggled, the deeper he sank.

One of the cowboys spoke first. He had eyes the press would call ice-blue.

"You're Fletcher's son?"

"Yes...I am."

"So you know what we're to do."

Howie suddenly understood the significance of the stares he'd been garnering since he'd entered. These creatures#8212;hallucigenia, Fletcher had called them#8212;knew him; or at least thought they did. Now he'd identified himself, and the need in their faces couldn't have been plainer.

"Tell us what to do," one of the women said.

"We're here for Fletcher," said another.

"Fletcher's gone," said Howie.

"Then for you. You're his son. What are we here to do?"

"Do you want the child of the Jaff destroyed?" said the cowboy, turning his blue eyes on Jo-Beth.

"Jesus Christ, no!"

He reached out to take hold of Jo-Beth's arm but she'd already retreated from him, slow steps towards the door. "Come back," he said. "They're not going to hurt you."

From the look on her face his words were scant comfort in such company.

"Jo-Beth..." he said, "...I'm not going to let them hurt you."

He started towards her, but his father's creatures weren't about to let their only hope for guidance go. Before he could reach her he felt a hand snatch at his shirt, and then another and another, until he was entirely surrounded by pleading, adoring faces.

"I can't help you, " he yelled. "Let me alone!"

From the corner of his eye he saw Jo-Beth, running scared to the door, opening it and slipping away. He called after her, but the din of pleas had risen around him until his every syllable was drowned out. He started to push harder through the crowd. Dreams they might be, but they were solid enough; and warm; and, it seemed, frightened. They needed a leader, and they'd elected him. It was not a role he was prepared to accept, especially not if it separated him from Jo-Beth.

"Get the fuck out of my way!" he demanded, clawing his way through the back-lit, glossy faces. Their fervor didn't diminish, but grew in proportion to his resistance. It was only by ducking down and tunnelling his way through his admirers that he got free of them. They followed him out into the hallway. The front door stood open. He sprinted for it like a star besieged by fans, and was out into the night before they caught up with him. Some instinct kept them from coming after him into the open, though one or two, Benny and the dog Morgan leading, followed, the boy's shout#8212;"Come back and see us some time soon!"#8212;pursuing him like a threat down the street.

The bullet struck Tesla in the side, like a blow from a heavyweight champ. She was thrown backwards, the sight of Tommy-Ray's grinning face replaced with the stars through the open roof. They got bigger in moments, swelling like bright sores, edging out the clean darkness.

What happened next was beyond her powers of comprehension. She heard a commotion, and a shot, followed by shrieks from the women Raul had told her would be gathering about this time. But she couldn't find the will to be much interested in what was happening on earth. The ugly spectacle above her claimed all her attention: a sick and brimming sky about to drown her in tainted light.

Is this death? she wondered. If so, it was overrated. There was a story to be had there, she began to think. About a woman who#8212;

The thought went the way of consciousness: out. The second shot she'd heard had been fired at Raul, who'd come at Tesla's assassin at speed, leaping over the fire. The bullet missed him, but he threw himself aside to avoid another, giving Tommy-Ray time to dart out of the door he'd entered through, into a crowd of women which he parted with a third shot aimed over their veiled heads. They put up a clamor and fled, hauling their children after them. Nuncio in hand, he headed off down the hill to where he'd left the car. A backward glance confirmed that the woman's companion#8212;whose misbegotten features and weird turn of speed had taken him aback#8212;was not giving chase.

Raul put his hand to Tesla's cheek. She was feverish, but alive. He took off his shirt and clamped the bundle to her wound, laying her limp hand upon it to keep it in place. Then he went out into the darkness and called the women out of hiding. He knew all of them by name. They in turn knew and trusted him. They came when called.

"Look after Tesla," he instructed them. Then he went after the Death-Boy and his prize.

Tommy-Ray was within sight of the car, or rather its ghost-form in the moonlight, when his foot slid from beneath him. In his effort to keep hold of gun and vial, both went from his hands. He fell heavily, face down in sharp dirt. Stones stabbed his cheek, chin, arms and hands. As he got to his feet blood began to run.

"My face!" he said, hoping to God he'd not damaged his looks.

There was more bad news to come. He could hear the sound of the Ugly Fuck following down the hill.

"Want to die, do you?" he grunted to his pursuer. "No problem. We can supply. No problem."

He scrabbled for the gun but it had skidded some distance from him. The vial was there beneath his hand, however. He picked it up. Even as he did so he realized it was no longer passive. It was warm in his bloodied palm. There was motion behind the glass. He grasped it more tightly, to be certain it didn't slip from him again. It responded instantly, the fluid glowing between his fingers.

Many years had passed since the rest of the Nuncio had worked its work upon Fletcher and Jaffe. This, the remnants, had been buried, out of sight, amid stones too revered to be turned. It had grown cold; forgetful of its message. But it remembered now. Tommy-Ray's enthusiasm woke old ambition.

He saw it push against the walls of the vial, bright as a knife, as a gun-flash. Then it broke its cage, and came at him, between his fingers#8212;spread now against its attack#8212;up towards his already wounded face.

Its touch seemed light enough#8212;a spatter of warmth, like a jism when he jerked off, hitting his eye and the corner of his mouth. But it flipped him over on to his back#8212;the stones bringing blood to his elbows, ass and spine. He tried to yell but no sound came. He tried to open his eyes, so as to see where he was lying, but he couldn't do that either. Jesus! He couldn't even breathe. His hands, touched by the Nuncio as it leapt, were clamped to his face, blocking eyes, nose and mouth. It was like being screwed down in a coffin made for someone two sizes smaller than he. Again, he cried out against the gag of his palm, but it was a lost cause. Somewhere at the back of his head a voice said:

"Let go. This is what you want. To be the Death-Boy, you first have to know Death. Feel it. Understand it. Suffer it."

In this, as in perhaps no other lesson in his short life, he was a good pupil. He stopped resisting the panic, and went with it, riding it like a wave at Zuma, towards the darkness of some unmapped shore. The Nuncio went with him. He felt it make new stuff of him with every sweating second, prancing on the points of his stiffened hair, beating a rhythm, death's rhythm, between the throbs of his heart.

Suddenly, it was full of him; or he of it; or both. His hands came off his face like suckers, and he breathed again.

After half a dozen gasps he sat up and looked down at his palms. They were bloody, both from his cut face and from their own injuries, but the stains faded before a more insistent reality. Granted a grave-dweller's sight, he saw his own flesh corrupting before his eyes. The skin darkened and swelled with gases, then broke open, the lesions spilling pus and water. Seeing, he grinned, and felt the grin spreading up from the corners of his mouth to his ears as his face split. It wasn't just the bone of his smile he was showing; the rods of his arms, wrists and fingers were appearing now, as decay uncovered them. Beneath his shirt, his heart and lungs sank into sewerage and drained away; his balls were washed with them; his withered dick the same.

And still the grin grew wider, until all the muscle had gone from his face and he was smiling the Death-Boy's smile, wide as any smile could get.

The vision didn't linger. Once given, it was gone, and he was left kneeling on the sharp stones, staring down at his bloody palms.

"I'm the Death-Boy," he said, and stood up, turning to face the lucky fuck who'd be the first to see him transfigured.

The man had stopped in his tracks, a few yards off.

"Look at me," Tommy-Ray said. "I'm the Death-Boy."

The poor shit just stared, not understanding. Tommy-Ray laughed. All desire to kill the man had gone out of him. He wanted this witness alive, to testify in days to come. To say: I was there, and it was awesome, seeing Tommy-Ray McGuire die and rise again.

He took a moment to look at the remains of the Nuncio-fragments of the vial and a few spots of spilled fluid on the stones. There was not enough to gather up and take back to the Jaff. But he was bringing something better now. Himself, changed; cleansed of fear, cleansed of flesh. Without looking back at the witness, he about-faced and left him to his confusion.

Though the glory of corruption had left him now, a subtle aftersight remained#8212;which he didn't comprehend until a piece of stone underfoot caught his eye. He bent to pick it up; a pretty thing for Jo-Beth, maybe. Once in his hand he realized it was not stone at all, but a bird's skull, fractured and dirty. To his eyes, it gleamed.

Death shines, he thought. When I see it, it shines.

Pocketing the skull he sauntered back to the car and reversed down the hill until the road offered space enough for him to turn. Then he was away at a speed that would have been suicidal on such bends and in such darkness had suicide not been one of his many playthings now.

Raul put his fingers to one of the splashes of Nuncio. It rose in beads to meet his hand, winding into the spirals of his fingerprints, then climbing up through the marrow of hand, wrist and forearm, before petering out at his elbow. He felt, or imagined he felt, some subtle reconfiguration in his muscle, as though his hand, which had never quite lost its simian proportions, was being coaxed a little closer to the human. He let the sensation delay him only a moment; Tesla's condition concerned him more than his own.

It was as he went to make his way back up the hill that it occurred to him that the drops of Nuncio left in the ground might somehow help heal the woman. If she didn't have comfort of some kind soon she'd surely die. What was there to lose in letting the Great Work do what it could?

With that thought in mind he started back towards the Mission, knowing that were he to attempt to touch the broken vial it would be he who received its benefit. Tesla would have to be carried down the road to where these precious drops were scattered.

The women had set their candles all around Tesla. She looked like a corpse already. He was swift with his instructions. They wrapped her up and helped him carry her down the road a little way. She wasn't heavy. He took her head and shoulders and two of the women supported her lower half, a third held the bundled shirt, now thoroughly soaked, to the bullet hole.

It was a slow process, stumbling in the darkness, but having been twice touched by the Nuncio, Raul had no difficulty finding the spot again. Like called to like. Warning the women to keep feet and fingers clear of the spilled fluid he took Tesla's weight entirely into his own arms and laid her down, her head haloed by splashes of the Nuncio. The remains of the vial itself still contained the bulk of the fluid; at most, a teaspoonful. With great gentleness, he turned her head towards the vial. At her proximity the fluid inside had begun a firefly dance#8212;

#8212;the poison brightness that had rained on Tesla as she fell before Tommy-Ray's bullet had solidified in seconds: become a gray, featureless place where she lay now without any sense of how she'd come to be there. She couldn't remember the Mission, Raul, or Tommy-Ray. Even her own name was beyond her. It was all outside the wall, where she couldn't go. Perhaps would never go again. She had no feelings either way about this. With no memory, she had nothing to mourn.

But now something began to scratch at the wall from the other side. She heard it humming to itself as it worked, like a lover digging at the stone of her cell, determined to reach her. She listened, and waited, no longer quite so forgetful, nor so indifferent to escape.. Her name came back to her first, heard in the hum from outside. Then a memory of the pain the bullet had brought with it, and the grinning face of Tommy-Ray, and Raul, and the Mission, and#8212;

Nuncio.

That was the power she'd come looking for, and now in its turn it was looking for her, eroding the walls of limbo. Her exchanges with Fletcher about its transforming talents had been all too brief, but she understood its basic function well enough. It ran with whatever baton it was passed; a race against entropy towards some conclusion not even its client/victim could guess, much less its subject. Was she ready for such a proving touch? It had made a swollen evil of Jaffe, and a bewildered saint of Fletcher. What might it make of her?

At the last possible moment Raul doubted the wisdom of this medicine, and reached to take Tesla out of the way of the Nuncio's touch, but it was already leaping from the shattered vial towards her face. She inhaled it like a liquid breath. Around her head the other drops flew towards her scalp and neck.

She gasped, her whole body responding with tremors to the entry of the messenger. Then, just as suddenly, every jitter in her joints and nerves ceased.

Raul murmured:

"Don't die. Don't die."

He was about to put his mouth to hers in one last snatch at preserving her when he saw the motion behind her closed lids. Her eyes were roving back and forth wildly, scanning some sight only she could see.

"Alive..."he murmured.

Behind him, the women#8212;who'd witnessed this entire scene without comprehending any of it#8212;began to pray and wail, either out of gratitude or of fear of what they'd seen. He didn't know. But he added his own muttered prayers, no more certain of his reasons than of theirs.

The walls went suddenly. Like a dam first breached in a tiny place, then broken from side to side by the flood behind it. She had expected the world she'd left to be waiting when the walls were rubble. She was wrong. There was no sign of the Mission, nor of Raul. Instead there was laid before her a desert lit by a sun which had yet to reach its full ferocity, and crossed by a gusting wind which picked her up the instant the walls fell, and carried her over the ground. Her velocity was terrifying, but she had no way to slow herself, or indeed change direction, because she possessed neither limbs nor body. She was thought here; pure, in a pure place.

Then, ahead, a sight that gave the lie to that. There was sign of human occupancy on the horizon; a town set in the middle of this nowhere. Her speed didn't slow as she approached. This, apparently, was not her destination, if indeed she had one. It occurred to her that perhaps she could simply travel and travel. That this state of being was simply one of motion; a journey without purpose or conclusion. She had time, as she passed through the Main Street, to register that though the town was solidly constructed stores and houses arrayed to either side#8212;it was also completely characterless. That is, unpeopled, and unparticularized. There were no signs on the stores or at the cross-streets; no mark of human presence whatsoever. Even as she registered this weirdness she was at the other side of the town, and once more speeding over sun-scorched ground. The sight of the town, however brief, had given weight to her suspicion that she was utterly alone here. Not only was her journey to be endless, but unaccompanied too. This was Hell, she thought; or a good working definition of same.

She began to wonder how long it would be before her mind took refuge from this horror in insanity. A day? A week? Were there even such distinctions here? Did the sun set, and rise again? She strained to turn her sight skyward, but the sun was behind her, and having no body she neither threw a shadow by which to read its position nor possessed the power to turn and see it for herself.

There was something else to see, however, more curious than the town: a single tower or pylon, built of steel, standing in the middle of the desert, with wires tethering it as though it might at any moment float away. Again she was at it and past in seconds. Again, it gave her no comfort. But once beyond it a new sensation crept over her: that she, and the clouds and the sand beneath her were all fleeing from something. Had some entity been lurking in that blank town, just out of sight, and now, aroused by a human presence here, was coming after her? She couldn't turn, she couldn't hear, she couldn't even feel its footsteps in the earth as it approached. But it would come. If not now, then soon. It was relentless, inevitable. And the first moment she saw it would be her last.

Then, refuge! A fair distance away yet, but growing in size as she speeded towards it, what appeared to be a small stone hut, its walls painted white. Her sickening pace slowed. The ride apparently had a destination after all: this hovel.

Her sight was fixed upon the place, looking for signs of occupancy, but her peripheral vision nevertheless caught sight of a movement way off to the right of the hut. Though slowing, her speed was still considerable, and her inability to scan the scene prevented her catching more than a glimpse of the figure. But it was human; female; clothed in rags: that much she did grasp. Even if the hut turned out to be as empty as the town, she had the comfort#8212;albeit slight#8212;that some other soul wandered these wastes. She looked hard for the woman again, but she'd come and gone. And there was more urgent business: the fact that the hut was almost upon her, or her upon it, and her speed was still sufficient to demolish hovel and visitor on impact. She readied herself, reflecting that a death by dashing would be preferable to the unending journey she'd feared.

And then, she was at a dead stop; and at the door. From two hundred miles an hour to zero in half a heartbeat.

The door was closed, but she sensed something over her shoulder (bodiless though she was, it was impossible not to think of over and behind) which reached into her field of vision. It was serpentine, the thickness of her wrist, and so dark that even in bright sunlight she could make out no detail of its anatomy. It had no patterning; no head; no eyes; no mouth; no digits. It had strength however. Enough to push the door open. Then it withdrew, leaving her undecided as to whether she'd seen the whole beast, or merely one of its limbs.

The hut was not large; one glance and she'd taken it in. The walls unadorned stone, the floor bare earth. There was no bed, nor any furniture. Only a small fire, burning in the middle of the floor, its smoke given an escape route through a hole in the middle of the roof but instead choosing to stay and dirty the air between her and the hut's sole occupant.

He looked as old as the stone of this hovel's walls, naked and grimy, his paper skin stretched to splitting point over bird's bones. He'd singed off his beard patchily, leaving clumps of gray hairs in places. She wondered he had the wit to do that. The expression on his face suggested a mind in an advanced state of catatonia.

But no sooner had she entered than he looked up at her, seeing her despite the fact that she had no substance. He cleared his throat, splitting the phlegm into the fire.

"Close the door," he said.

"You can see me?" she replied. "And hear me?"

"Of course," he replied. "Now close the door."

"How do I do that?" she wanted to know. "I've got...no hands. Nothing."

"You can do it," he replied. "Just imagine yourself."

"Huh?"

"Oh for fuck's sake how difficult can it be? You've looked at yourself often enough. Picture what you look like. Make yourself real. Go on. Do it for me." His tone veered between that of bully and wheedler. "You have to close the door..."

"I'm trying."

"Not hard enough," came the reply.

She paused a moment before daring the next question.

"I'm dead, aren't I?" she said.

"Dead? No."

"No?"

"The Nuncio preserved you. You're alive and kicking, but your body's still back at the Mission. I want it here. We've got business to do."

The good news, that she was still alive, albeit separated flesh from spirit, fuelled her. She thought hard of the body she'd almost lost, the body she'd grown into over a period of thirty-two years. It was by no means perfect, but at least it was all hers. No silicone; no nips and tucks. She liked her hands and her fine-boned wrists, her squinty breasts with the left nipple twice the size of the right, her cunt, her ass. Most of all she liked her face, with its quirks and laugh-lines.

To imagine it was the trick. To picture its essentials, and so bring it into this other place where her spirit had come. The old man was aiding her in the process, she guessed. His gaze, though still on the door, was directed inward. The sinews of his neck stood out like harp strings; his lipless mouth twitched.

His energies helped. She felt herself losing her lightness, becoming substantial here, like a soup thickening in the heat of her imagining. There was a moment of doubt, when she almost regretted losing the ease of being thought, but then she remembered her face smiling back at her when she stepped from the shower in the morning. It was a fine feeling, maturing in that flesh, learning to enjoy it for its own sake. The simple pleasure of a good belch, or better yet a solid fart: the kind that had Butch blaming himself. Teaching her tongue to distinguish between vodkas; her eyes to appreciate Matisse. There were more gains than losses in bringing her body to her mind.

"Almost," she heard him say.

"I feel it."

"A little more. Conjure."

She looked down at the ground, aware that she had the freedom to do so. Her feet were there, standing on the threshold, naked. So, solidifying in front of her eyes, was the rest of her body. She was stark naked.

"Now..." said the man at the fire. "Close the door."

She turned and did so, her nakedness embarrassing her not at all, particularly after the effort she'd used bringing her body here. She worked out at the gym three times a week. She knew her belly was trim and her ass tight. Besides, her host was unconcerned, both with his own nudity and, it seemed, with giving her more than a cursory glance. If there'd ever been lechery in those eyes it had long ago dried up.

"So," he said. "I'm Kissoon. You're Tesla. Sit. Talk with me."

"I've got a lot of questions," she told him.

"I'd be surprised if you hadn't."

"I can ask?"

"Ask. But first, sit."

She squatted down on the opposite side of the fire to him. The floor was warm; the air too. Within thirty seconds her pores had begun to ooze. It was pleasant.

"First#8212;" she said "#8212;how did I get here? And where am I?"

"New Mexico is where you are," Kissoon replied. "And the how of it? Well, that's a more difficult question, but what it comes down to is this: I've been watching you#8212;you and several others#8212;waiting for a chance to bring someone here. Your near-death, and the Nuncio, helped erode your resistance to the journey. Indeed you had little choice."

"How much do you know about what's happening in the Grove?" she asked him.

He made dry sounds with his mouth, as though trying to summon saliva. When he finally replied it was with a weary tone.

"Oh God in Heaven, too much," he said, "I know too much."

"The Art, Quiddity...all that?"

"Yes," he said, with the same dispirited air. "All that. It was me began it, fool that I am. The creature you know as the Jaff once sat where you're sitting now. He was just a man then. Randolph Jaffe, impressive in his way#8212;he had to have been to have got here in the first place#8212;but still just a man."

"Did he come the way I came?" she asked. "I mean, was he near death?"

"No. He just had a greater hunger for the Art than most who went after it. He wasn't put off by the smoke screens, and the shams, and all the tricks that throw most people off the scent. He kept looking, until he found me."

Kissoon regarded Tesla with eyes narrowed, as if he might sharpen his sight that way, and get inside her skull.

"What to tell," he said. "Always the same problem: what to tell."

"You sound like Grillo," she remarked. "Have you spied on him?"

"Once or twice, when he crossed the path," Kissoon said. "But he's not important. You are. You're very important."

"How do you figure that?"

"You're here, for one. Nobody's been here since Randolph, and look what consequences that brought. This is no normal place, Tesla. I'm sure you've already guessed that. This is a Loop#8212;a time out of time#8212;which I made for myself"

"Out of time?" she said. "I don't understand."

"Where to begin," he said. "That's the other question, isn't it? First, what to tell. Then, where to begin...Well. You know about the Art. About Quiddity. Do you also know about the Shoal?"

She shook her head.

"It is, or was, one of the oldest orders in world religion. A tiny sect#8212;seventeen of us at any one time#8212;who had one dogma, the Art, one heaven, Quiddity, and one purpose, to keep both pure. This is its sign," he said, picking a small object up from the ground in front of him and tossing it across to her. At first glance she thought it was a crucifix. It was a cross, and at its center was a man, spreadeagled. But a closer perusal gave the lie to that. On each of the four arms of the symbol other forms were inscribed, which seemed to be corruptions of, or developments from, the central figure.

"You believe me?" he said.

"I believe you."

She threw the symbol back over to his side of the fire.

"Quiddity must be preserved, at any cost. No doubt you understood this from Fletcher?"

"He said that, yes. Was he one of the Shoal?"

Kissoon looked disdainful. "No, he'd never have made the grade. He was just an employee. The Jaff hired him to provide a chemical ride: a short-cut to the Art, and Quiddity."

"That was the Nuncio?"

"It was."

"Did it do the job?"

"It might have done, if Fletcher hadn't been touched with it himself."

"That was why they fought," she said.

"Yes," Kissoon replied. "Of course. But you know this. Fletcher must have told you."

"We didn't have much time. He explained bits and pieces. A lot of it was vague."

"He was no genius. Finding the Nuncio was more luck than talent."

"You met him?"

"I told you, nobody's been here since Jaffe. I'm alone."

"No you're not," Tesla said. "There was somebody outside#8212;"

"The Lix, you mean? The serpent that opened the door? Just a little creation of mine. A doodle. Though I have enjoyed breeding them..."

"No. Not that," she said. "There was a woman, in the desert. I saw her."

"Oh really?" Kissoon said, a subtle shadow seeming to cross his face. "A woman?" He made a little smile. "Well, forgive me," he said. "I do dream still, once in a while. And there was a time when I could conjure whatever I desired by dreaming it. She was naked?"

"I don't think so."

"Beautiful?"

"I didn't get that close."

"Oh. A pity. But best for you. You're vulnerable here and I wouldn't want you hurt by a possessive mistress." His voice had lightened, become almost artificially casual.

"If you see her again, keep your distance," he advised. "On no account approach her."

"I won't."

"I hope she finds her way here. Not that I could do much now. The carcass..." He looked down at his withered body, "...has seen better days. But I could look. I like to look. Even at you, if you don't mind me saying."

"What do you mean, even?" Tesla said.

Kissoon laughed, low and dry. "Yes, I'm sorry. I meant it as a compliment. All these years alone. I've lost my social graces."

"You could go back, surely," she said. "You brought me here. Isn't there a two-way traffic?"

"Yes and no," he said.

"Meaning?"

"Meaning, I could, but I can't."

"Why?"

"I'm the last of the Shoal," he said. "The last living preserver of Quiddity. The rest have been murdered, and all attempts to replace them brought to nothing. Do you blame me for keeping out of sight? For watching from a safe distance? If I die without somehow re-establishing the tradition of the Shoal, Quiddity will be left unguarded, and I think you understand enough to know how cataclysmic that could be. The only possible way I can get out into the world and begin that vital work is in another shape. Another...body."

"Who are the murderers? Do you know?"

Again, that subtle shadow.

"I have my suspicions," he replied.

"But you're not telling."

"The history of the Shoal's littered with attempts on its integrity. It's got enemies human; sub; in; ab. If I started to explain we'd never be finished."

"Is any of this written down?"

"You mean, can you research it? No. But you can read between the lines of other histories, and you'll find the Shoal everywhere. It's the secret behind all other secrets. Entire religions were seeded and nurtured to distract attention from it, to direct spiritual seekers away from the Shoal, the Art and what the Art opened onto. It wasn't difficult. People are easily thrown off track if the right scent is laid down. Promises of Revelation, Resurrection of the Body, that sort of thing#8212;"

"Are you saying#8212;"

"Don't interrupt," Kissoon said. "Please. I'm getting into my rhythm here."

"I'm sorry," Tesla said.

It's almost like a pitch, she thought. Like he's trying to sell me this whole extraordinary story.

"So. As I was saying...you can find the Shoal everywhere, if you know how to look. And some people did. There were several men and women down the years, like Jaffe, who managed to look through the shams and the smoke screens, and just kept on digging up the clues, breaking the codes, and the codes within the codes, until they got close to the Art. Then of course, the Shoal would be obliged to step in and act as we thought fit on a case-by-case basis. Some of these seekers, Gurdjieff, Melville, Emily Dickinson; an interesting cross-section, we simply initiated into a most sacred and secret adepthood, to train them to take over in our stead when death depleted our numbers. Others we judged unfit."

"What did you do with them?"

"Used our skills to blank all memory of their discovery from their heads. Which often proved fatal of course. You can't take a man's search for meaning away one day and expect him to survive it, especially if he's come close to finding an answer. It's my suspicion one of our rejects had remembered himself, or herself#8212;"

"And murdered the Shoal."

"It seems the likeliest theory. It has to be somebody who knows about the Shoal and its workings. Which brings me to Randolph Jaffe."

"It's hard for me to think of him as Randolph, " Tesla said. "Even as human."

"Believe me, he is. He's also the greatest error of judgment I ever made. I told him too much."

"More than you're telling me?"

"The situation's desperate now," Kissoon said. "If I don't tell you, and get help from you, we're all lost. But with Jaffe...it was my stupidity. I wanted someone to share my loneliness with, and I chose badly. Had the others been alive they would have stepped in, stopped me making such a crass decision. They would have seen the corruption in him. I didn't. I was pleased he'd found me. I wanted the company. Wanted somebody to help me carry the burden of the Art. What I created was a worse burden. Someone with the power to get access to Quiddity but without the least spiritual refinement."

"He's got an army too."

"I know."

"Where do they come from?"

"The same place everything originates. The mind."

"Everything?"

"You're asking questions again."

"I can't help it."

"Yes, everything. The world and all its works; its makings and unmakings; gods, lice and cuttlefish. All from the mind."

"I don't believe you."

"Why assume I care?"

"The mind can't create everything."

"I didn't say the human mind."

"Ah."

"If you listened more closely you wouldn't ask so many questions."

"But you want me to understand, or you wouldn't be spending all this time."

"Time out of time. But yes...yes, I want you to understand. Given the sacrifice you'll have to make it's important you know why."

"What sacrifice?"

"I told you: I can't get out of this place in my body. I'll be found, and murdered, like the others..."

She shuddered, despite the warmth.

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

"Yes you do."

"You want me to get you out somehow? Carry your thoughts."

"Near enough."

"Can't I simply act for you?" she said. "Be your agent? I'm good out there."

"I'm sure you are."

"You brief me, I'll do what it takes."

Kissoon shook his head. "There's so much you don't know," he said. "So vast a picture, I haven't even tried to unveil. I doubt your imagination could cope with it."

"Try me," she said.

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Well, the issue here isn't simply the Jaff. He may taint Quiddity, but it'll survive."

"So what's the big problem?" Tesla said. "You give me all this shit about needing sacrifice. What for? If Quiddity can look after itself, what for?"

"Will you not simply trust me?"

She looked hard at him. The fire had sunk low but her eyes were by now well used to the amber gloom. Part of her wanted very much to put her trust in someone. But she'd spent most of her adult life learning the danger of that. Men, agents, studio executives, so many of-them had asked her for her trust in the past, and she'd given it, and been fucked over. It was too late to learn a new way now. She was cynical to the marrow. If she ever stopped being that she'd stop being Tesla, and she liked being Tesla. It therefore followed#8212;as night, day#8212;that cynicism suited her too.

So she said:

"No. I'm sorry. I can't trust you. Don't take it personally. I'd be the same whoever you were. I want to know the bottom line."

"What does that mean?"

"I want the truth. Or I don't give you anything."

"Are you so sure you can refuse?" Kissoon said.

She half turned her face from him, glancing back, tight-lipped, the way her favorite heroines did, with a look of accusation.

"That was a threat," she said.

"You could construe it that way," he observed.

"Well, fuck you#8212;"

He shrugged. His passivity#8212;the almost lazy way he regarded her#8212;inflamed her further.

"I don't have to sit and listen to this, you know!"

"No?"

"No! You're hiding something from me."

"Now you're being ridiculous."

"I don't think so."

She stood up. His eyes didn't follow her face, but lingered at groin height. She was suddenly uncomfortable being naked in his presence. She wanted the clothes that were presumably still back at the Mission, stale and bloody as they'd be. If she was to get back there, she'd better start walking. She turned to the door.

Behind her, Kissoon said:

"Wait, Tesla. Please wait. The error's mine. I concede; the error's mine. Come back, will you?"

His tone was placating, but she read a less benign undertow. He's riled, she thought; for all his spiritual poise, he's pissed. It was a lesson in the facilities of dialogue to hear the bristle beneath the purr. She turned back to hear more, no longer certain that she could get the truth from this man. She only had to be threatened once to doubt.

"Go on," she said.

"You won't sit?"

"That's right," she said. She had to pretend she wasn't afraid, though suddenly she was; had to think of her skin as fashion enough. Stand, and be defiantly naked. "I won't sit."

"Then I'll try to explain as quickly as I can," he said. He'd effectively smoothed out every ambiguity in his manner. He was considerate; even humble.

"Even I, you must understand, don't have all the facts at my disposal," he said. "But I have enough, I hope, to convince you of the danger we're in."

"Who's we?"

"The inhabitants of the Cosm."

"Again?"

"Fletcher didn't explain this to you?"

"No."

He sighed.

"Think of Quiddity as a sea," he said.

"I'm thinking..."

"On one side of that sea is the reality we inhabit. A continent of being, if you like, the perimeters of which are sleep and death."

"So far, so good."

"Now...suppose there's another continent, on the other side of the sea."

"Another reality."

"Yes. As vast and complex as our own. As full of energies and species and appetites. But dominated, as the Cosm is, by one species in particular, with strange appetites."

"I don't like the sound of this."

"You wanted the truth."

"I'm not saying I believe you."

"That other place is the Metacosm. That species is the Iad Uroboros. They exist."

"And the appetites?" she said, not certain she really wanted to know.

"For purity. For singularity. For madness. "

"Some hunger."

"You were right when you accused me of not telling the truth. I told a part of it only. The Shoal did stand guard at the shores of Quiddity to prevent the Art from being misused by human ambition; but it also stood to watch the sea..."

"For an invasion?"

"That's what we feared. Maybe even expected. It wasn't simply our paranoia. The profoundest dreams of evil are those in which we scent the Iad across Quiddity. The deepest terrors, the foulest imaginings that haunt human heads are the echoes of their echoes. I am giving you more reason to be afraid, Tesla, than you could hear from any other lips. I'm telling you what only the strongest psyches can bear."

"Is there any good news?" Tesla said.

"Who ever promised that? Who ever said there'd be good news?"

"Jesus," she replied. "And Buddha. Mohammed."

"Fragments of stories, massaged into cults by the Shoal. Distractions."

"I can't believe that."

"Why not? Are you a Christian?"

"No."

"Buddhist? Muslim? Hindu?"

"No. No. No."

"But you insist on believing the good news anyway," Kissoon said. "Convenient."

She felt she'd been struck, very hard, across the face, by a teacher who'd been three or four steps ahead of her throughout the entire argument, leading her steadily and stealthily to a place where she could not help but mouth absurdities. And absurd it was, to cling to hopes for Heaven when she poured piss on every religion that passed beneath her window. But she reeled not because Kissoon had scored a solid debating point. She'd taken her lumps in countless arguments, and come back to give worse. What made her sick to her stomach was that her defense against so much else he'd said was forfeit at the same moment. If even a part of what he'd told her was true, and the world she lived in#8212;the Cosm#8212;was in jeopardy, then what right did she have to value her little life over his desperate need for assistance? Even assuming she could find her way out of this time out of time she couldn't return to the world without wondering every moment if in leaving him she'd lost the Cosm's one chance for survival. She had to stay; had to give herself over to him, not because she entirely believed him, but because she couldn't risk being wrong.

"Don't be afraid," she heard him say. "The situation's no worse than it was five minutes ago, when you were quite the debater. You just know the truth now."

"Not much comfort," she said.

"No," he replied softly. "I do see that. And you must see that this burden has been hard to carry alone, and that without assistance my back'll break."

"I understand," she said.

She'd stepped away from the fire, and was standing against the wall of the hut, both for its support and for its coolness against her spine. Leaning there, she stared at the ground, aware that Kissoon had started to stand up. She didn't look at him, but she heard his grunts. And then his request.

"I need to occupy your body," he said. "Which means, I'm afraid, that you must vacate it."

The fire had dwindled to almost nothing, but its smoke was thickening. It pressed the top of her skull, making it impossible for her to raise her head and look at him even if she'd wanted to. She started to tremble. First her knees, then her fingers. Kissoon continued to talk as he approached. She heard his soft shuffling.

"This won't hurt," he said. "If you just stand still, and keep your eyes on the ground#8212;"

A slow thought came: was he making the smoke heavy, by some means, in order to stop her looking at him?

"It'll be over quickly#8212;"

He sounds like an anesthetist, she thought. The trembling intensified. The smoke pressed more heavily upon her the closer he came. She was certain now that this was indeed his doing. He didn't want her looking up at him. Why? Was he coming at her with knives, to scoop out her brain so he could slip in behind her eyes?

Resisting curiosity had never been one of her stronger points. The closer he came the more she wanted to push against the weight of smoke, and look directly at him. But it was difficult. Her body was weak, as though her blood had gone to dishwater. The smoke was like a lead hat; its brim too tight around her brow. The harder she pushed, the heavier it became.

He really doesn't want me to look, she thought, that thought feeding her passion to do so. She braced herself against the wall. He was within two yards of her now. She could smell him; his sweat was bitter and stale. Push, she told herself, push! It's only smoke. He's making you think you're being crushed, but it's only smoke.

"Relax," he murmured; the anesthetist again.

Instead she put one last surge of effort into raising her head. The lead hat dug into her temples; her skull creaked beneath the weight of the crown. But her head moved, trembling as she fought the weight. Once begun, the motion became easier. She lifted her chin an inch, then another two, raising her eyes at the same moment until she was looking straight at him.

Standing, he was crooked in every place but one, each joint and juncture a little askew, shoulder on neck, hand on arm; thigh on hip, a zig-zag with a single straight line prodding from his groin. She stared, appalled.

"What the fuck's that for?" she said.

"Couldn't help myself," he said. "I'm sorry."

"Oh yeah?"

"When I said I want your body, I don't mean that way."

"Where have I heard that before?"

"Believe me," he said. "It's just my flesh responding to yours. Automatic. Be flattered."

She might have laughed, in different circumstances. Had she been able to open the door and walk away, for instance, instead of being lost out of time, with a beast on the threshold and a desert beyond. Every time she thought she had a grasp of what was going on here she lost it again. The man was one surprise after another, and none of them pleasant.

He reached towards her, his pupils vast, crowding out the whites. She thought of Raul; of how there was beauty in his gaze, despite his hybrid's face. There was no beauty here; nothing even vaguely readable. No appetite; no anger. If there was feeling at all, it was eclipsed.

"I can't do this," she said.

"You must. Give up the body. I have to have the body or the Iad wins. You want that?"

"No!"

"Then stop resisting. Your spirit'll be safe in Trinity."

"Where?"

Momentarily he let something show in his eyes, a spark of fury#8212;self-directed, she thought.

"Trinity:'" she said, throwing the question out to delay his touching and claiming her. "What's Trinity?"

As she asked this question several things happened simultaneously, their speed defying her power to divide one from the other, but central to them all the fact that his hold on the situation slipped as she asked him about Trinity. First she felt the smoke dissolving above her, its weight no longer bearing her down. Taking her chance while it was still available she reached for the handle of the door. Her eyes were still on him however, and in the same instant as her release she saw him transfigured. It was a glimpse, no more, but so powerful as to be unforgettable. He appeared with his upper body covered in blood, splashes of it reaching as far as his face. He knew she saw, because his hands went up to cover the stains, but his hands and arms were also running with blood. Was it his? Before she could look to find a wound he had control of the vision once again, but like a juggler attempting to hold too many balls in the air catching one meant losing another. The blood vanished, and he appeared before her unscathed again, only to unleash some other secret his will had kept in check.

It was far more cataclysmic than the blood splashes: its shock wave striking the door behind her. Too powerful for the Lix, even if they were massed, it was a force Kissoon was clearly in terror of. His eyes went from her to the door itself, his hands dropping to his sides and all expression gone from his face. She sensed that every particle of his energies was being put to a single purpose: the stilling of whatever raged on the threshold. This too had its consequence, as the hold he'd had upon her#8212;bringing her here, and keeping her#8212;finally and comprehensively slipped. She felt the reality she'd left catch hold of her spine, and pull. She didn't even attempt to resist. It was as inevitable a claim as gravity.

The last glimpse she had of Kissoon he was once more bloodstained, and standing, his face still drained of expression in front of the door. Then it threw itself open.

There was a moment when she was certain whatever had beaten against the door would be waiting on the step to devour her, and Kissoon too. She thought she even glimpsed its brightness#8212;so bright, so blindingly bright#8212;flood Kis-soon's features. But his will got the better of it at the last moment, and its glare diminished at the very moment the world she'd left claimed her and hauled her through the door.

She was flung back the way she'd come, at ten times the speed of her arrival, so fast she wasn't even able to interpret the sights she was passing#8212;the steel tower, the town#8212;until she was miles beyond them.

She wasn't alone this time, however. There was somebody near to her, calling her name.

"Tesla? Tesla! Tesla!"

She knew the voice. It was Raul.

"I hear you," she muttered, aware that through the blur of speed another, darker reality was vaguely visible. There were points of light in it#8212;candle flames perhaps#8212;and faces.

"Tesla!"

"Almost there," she gasped. "Almost there. Almost there."

Now the desert was being subsumed; the darkness took precedence. She opened her eyes wide to see Raul more clearly. There was a wide smile on his face as he went down on his haunches to greet her.

"You came back," he said.

The desert had gone. It was all night now. Stones beneath her, stars above; and, as she guessed, candles, being carried by a ring of astonished women.

Beneath her, between body and ground, were the clothes she'd slipped from when she'd called her body to her, recreating it in Kissoon's Loop. She reached up to touch Raul's face, as much as to be certain she was indeed back in the solid world as for the contact. His cheeks were wet.

"You've been working hard," she said, thinking it was sweat. Then she realized her error. Not sweat at all; tears.

"Oh, poor Raul," she said, and sat up to embrace him. "Did I disappear completely?"

He pressed himself to her. "First like fog," he said. "Then...just gone."

"Why are we here?" she said. "I was in the Mission when he shot me."

Thinking of the shot, she looked down at where the bullet had struck. There was no wound; not even blood.

"The Nuncio," she said. "It healed me."

The fact was not lost on the women. Seeing the unmarked skin they muttered prayers, and backed away.

"No..." she murmured, still looking down at her body. "It wasn't the Nuncio. This is the body I imagined."

"Imagined?" said Raul.

"Conjured," she replied, scarcely even aware of Raul's confusion because she had a puzzle of her own. Her left nipple, twice the size of its neighbor, was now on the right. She kept staring at them, shaking her head. It wasn't the kind of thing she'd make a mistake about. Somehow, on the journey to the Loop, or back, she'd been flipped. She brought her legs up for study. Several scratches#8212;Dutch's work#8212;that had adorned one shin now marked the other.

"I can't figure it," she said to Raul.

Not even understanding the question he was hard-pressed to reply, so simply shrugged.

"Never mind," she said, and started to get dressed.

Only then did she ask what had happened to the Nuncio.

"Did I get it all?" she said.

"No. The Death-Boy got it."

"Tommy-Ray? Oh Jesus. So now the Jaff has a son and a half."

"But you were touched too," Raul said. "So was I. It got into my hand. Climbed up to the elbow."

"So it's us against them."

Raul shook his head. "I can't be of use to you," he said.

"You can and you must," she said. "There's so many questions we have to have answered. I can't do it on my own. You must come with me."

His reluctance was perfectly apparent without his voicing it.

"I know you're afraid. But please, Raul. You brought me back from the dead#8212;"

"Not me."

"You helped. You wouldn't want that wasted, would you?"

She could hear something of Kissoon's persuasions in her own, and didn't much like the sound. But then she'd never experienced a steeper learning curve in her life than in the time she'd spent with Kissoon. He'd made his mark without so much as laying a finger on her. But if she'd been asked whether he was a liar or a prophet, a savior or a lunatic, she couldn't have said. Perhaps that ambiguity was the steepest part of the curve, though what lesson she'd gained from it she couldn't say.

Her thoughts went back to Raul, and his reluctance. There was no time for involved argument. "You simply have to come," she told him. "There's no getting out of it."

"But the Mission#8212;"

"#8212;is empty, Raul. The only treasure it had was the Nuncio, and that's gone."

"It had memories," he said softly, the tense of his reply signalling his acceptance.

"There'll be other memories. Better times to remember," she said. "Now...if you've got people to say goodbye to, say it, because we're rolling#8212;"

He nodded, and began to address the women in Spanish. Tesla had a smattering of the language; enough to confirm that he was indeed making his farewells. Leaving him to it, she headed up the hill towards the car.

As she walked the solution to the puzzle of the flipped body appeared in her head, without the problem being consciously turned. In Kissoon's hut she'd imagined herself the way she most often saw herself: in a mirror. How many times in her thirty odd years had she looked at her own reflection, building up a portrait in which right was left, and vice versa?

She'd come back from the Loop a different woman, literally; a woman who'd only ever existed as an image in glass. Now that image was flesh and blood, and walking the world. Behind its face the mind remained the same, she hoped, albeit touched by the Nuncio, and by knowing Kissoon. Not, in sum, negligible influences.

What with one thing and another she was a whole new story. No better time to tell herself to the world than the present.

Tomorrow might never come.