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

PART SEVEN: SOULS AT ZERO

Presidents, messiahs, shamans, popes, saints and lunatics had attempted#8212;over the passage of a millennium#8212;to buy, murder, drug and flagellate themselves into Quiddity. Almost to a one, they'd failed. The dream-sea had been more or less preserved, its existence an exquisite rumor, never proved, and all the more potent for that. The dominant species of the Cosm had kept what little sanity it possessed by visiting the sea in sleep, three times in a life span, and leaving it, always wanting more. That hunger had fuelled it. Made it ache; made it rage. Made it do good in the hope, often unconscious, of being granted more regular access. Made it do evil out of the idiot suspicion that it was conspired against by its enemies, who knew the secret but weren't telling. Made it create gods. Made it destroy gods. The few who'd taken the journey that Howie, Jo-Beth, Tommy-Ray and twenty-two guests from Buddy Vance's house were taking now had not been accidental travellers. They'd been chosen, for Quiddity's purposes, and gone (for the most part) prepared. Howie, on the other hand, was no more prepared for this than any stick of furniture hauled into the throat of the schism. He was pitched first through loops of energy and then into what appeared to be the middle of a thunderhead, lightning setting brief, bright fires all around him. Any trace of sound from the house had disappeared the moment he'd entered the throat. So had the pieces of trash that had flown in along with him. Helpless to steer or orient himself, all he could do was tumble through the cloud, the lightning becoming less frequent and more brilliant, the passages of darkness between steadily more profound, until he wondered if perhaps his eyes were closing, and the darkness#8212;along with the falling sensation that accompanied it#8212;was in his head. If so, he was happy with its embrace, his thoughts now also in free-fall, fixing momentarily on images which appeared out of the darkness, seeming to be completely solid though he was almost certain they were in his mind's eye.

He conjured Jo-Beth's face over and over again, always glancing back at him over her shoulder. He recited words of love to her; simple words that he hoped she heard. If she did they didn't bring her any closer. He wasn't surprised. Tommy-Ray was dissolved in the same thought-shot cloud that he and Jo-Beth were falling through, and twin brothers had claims on their sisters that went back to the womb. They'd floated together in that first sea, after all, their minds and cords intertwining. Howie envied Tommy-Ray nothing in all the world#8212;not his beauty, his smile, nothing#8212;except that time of intimacy he'd shared with Jo-Beth, before sex, before hunger, before breath even. He could only hope that he'd be with her at the end of her life the way Tommy-Ray had been at the beginning, when age took sex, appetite and, finally, breath away.

Then her face, and the envy, were gone, and new thoughts came to fill his head, or snapshots of same. No people now, only places, appearing and vanishing again as though his mind was sifting through them looking for one in particular. It found what it was searching for. A blurred blue night, which flew into solidity all around him. The falling sensation ceased in a heartbeat. He was solid in a solid place, running on echoing boards, a fresh cold wind blowing in his face. At his back he heard Lem and Richie calling his name. He ran on, looking over his shoulder as he did so. The glance solved the mystery of where he was. Behind him was the Chicago skyline, its lights brilliant against the night, which meant that the wind on his face was coming off Lake Michigan. He was running along a pier, though he didn't know which, with the Lake slopping around its struts. It was the only body of water he'd ever been familiar with. It influenced the city's weather, and its humidity; it made the air smell a different way in Chicago than any other place; it bred thunderstorms and threw them against the shore. Indeed the Lake was so constant, so inevitable, that he seldom thought about it. When he did it was as a place where people who had money took their boats, and those who'd lost it drowned themselves.

Now, however, as he ran on down the length of the pier, Lem's calls fading behind him, the thought of the Lake waiting at the end moved him as never before. He was small; it was vast. He was full of contradictions; it simply embraced everything, making no judgments on sailors or suicides.

He picked up his pace, barely feeling the pressure of his soles on the boards, the sense growing in him that however real this scene felt it was another of his mind's inventions, shaped from fragments of memory to ease him through what would otherwise have driven him mad: a stepping stone between the dreaming wakefulness of the life he'd left and whatever paradox lay ahead. The closer he got to the end of the pier the more certain he became that this was the case. His step, already light, became lighter still, his strides longer and longer. Time softened, and extended. He had a chance to wonder if the dream-sea truly existed, at least in the way that Palomo Grove existed, or whether the pier he'd created jutted into pure thought.

If so, there were many minds meeting there; tens of thousands of lights moving in the waters ahead, some breaking surface like fireworks, others diving deep. Howie had found some incandescence of his own, he realized. Nothing to boast about, but there was a distinct glow in his skin, like a faint echo of an echo of Fletcher's light.

The barrier at the end of the pier was a few feet from him. Beyond it, the waters of what he'd now ceased to think of as the Lake. This was Quiddity, and in moments it would be closing over his head. He wasn't afraid. Quite the reverse. He couldn't get to the barrier quickly enough, throwing himself at it rather than waste time with steps. If any further proof had been required that none of this was real he had it on impact, the barrier flying into laughing splinters as he touched it. He flew too. A falling flight into the dream-sea.

The element he plunged into was unlike water in that it neither soaked nor chilled him. But he floated in it nevertheless, his body rising through brilliant bubbles to the surface without any effort on his part. He had no fear of drowning. Only the profoundest sense of gratitude that he was here, where he belonged.

He looked back over his shoulder (so many backward glances) at the pier. It had served its purpose, making a game of what might have been a terror. Now it was flying into pieces, like the barrier.

He watched it go, happily. He was free of the Cosm, and floating in Quiddity.

Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray had gone into the schism together, but their minds had found different ways to picture the journey and the plunge.

The horror Jo-Beth had felt as she'd been snatched had been wiped from her head in the thunder cloud. She forgot the chaos, and felt calm. It was no longer Tommy-Ray who gripped her arm, but Momma, in earlier years, when she'd still been able to face the world. They were walking in a soothing twilight, with grass underfoot. Momma was singing. If it was a hymn, she'd forgotten the words. She was making up nonsense to fill the lines, which seemed to have the rhythm of their step. Every now and then Jo-Beth would say something she'd learned at school, so Momma would know what a good student she was. All the lessons were about water. About there being tides everywhere, even in tears, about how the sea was where life had begun, and how bodies were made more of water than any other element. The counterpoint of fact and song went on a long, easy while, but she sensed subtle changes in the air. The wind became gustier, and she smelled the sea. She put her face up to it, forgetting her lessons. Momma's hymn had grown softer. If they were still holding hands, Jo-Beth couldn't feel it. She kept walking, not looking back. The ground wasn't grassy any longer, but bare, and somewhere up ahead it fell away into the sea, where there seemed to be countless boats bobbing, with candles lit on their prows and masts.

The ground went suddenly. There was no fear, even as she fell. Only the certainty that she'd left Momma behind.

Tommy-Ray found himself at Topanga, either at dawn or dusk, he wasn't sure which. Though the sun was no longer in the sky he wasn't alone here. He heard girls in the murk, laughing, and talking in breathy whispers. The sand beneath his bare feet was warm where they'd been lying, and sticky with suntan oil. He couldn't see the surf, but he knew which way to run. He started in the direction of the water, knowing that the girls were watching him. They always did. He didn't acknowledge their stares. When he was out there on the crests, really moving, he'd maybe flash them a smile. Then on the way back up the beach he'd let one of them get lucky.

Now, as the waves came in sight ahead of him, he realized that things weren't right here. Not only was the beach gloomy, and the sea dark, but there seemed to be bodies lolling in the surf, and, worse still, phosphorescence in their flesh. He slowed his pace, but knew he couldn't stop and turn around. He didn't want anyone on the beach, particularly the girls, to think he was afraid. He was, however; horribly. Some radioactive shit was in the sea. The surfers had fallen from their boards, poisoned, and were being washed up by the very crests they'd gone to ride. He could see them clearly now, their skin silvery in places and black in others, their hair like blond haloes. Their girls were with them, dead as the surfers in the tainted foam.

He had no choice but to join them, he knew. The shame of turning away and climbing back up the beach was worse than dying. They'd all be legends after this. Him, and the dead riders, carried off by the same tide. Steeling himself, he stepped into the sea, which instantly became deep, as though the beach had simply fallen away under his feet. The poison was already burning up his system; he could see his body getting brighter. He stared to hyperventilate, each breath more painful than the one before.

Something brushed his side. He turned, thinking it would be another dead surfer, but it was Jo-Beth. She said his name. He couldn't find any words to answer with. As much as he wanted not to show his fear he couldn't help it. He was pissing now in the sea; his teeth were chattering.

"Help me," he said. "Jo-Beth. You're the only one who can help me. I'm dying."

She looked at his chattering face.

"If you're dying, we both are," she said.

"How did I get here? And why are you here? You don't like the beach."

"This isn't the beach," she said. She took hold of his arms, their motion making them bob like buoys. "This is Quiddity, Tommy-Ray. Remember? We're on the other side of the hole. You pulled us through."

She saw memory flooding his face as he spoke.

"Oh my God...oh Jesus God..." he said.

"You remember?"

"Yes. Jesus, yes." The chattering turned into sobs, as he pulled them close together, wrapping his arms around her. She didn't resist. There was little purpose in being vengeful, when they were both in such jeopardy.

"Hush," she said, letting him bury his hot, stricken face against her shoulder. "Hush. There's nothing we can do."

Nothing needed to be done. Quiddity had him, and he would float, and float, and perhaps#8212;eventually#8212;catch up with Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray. Meanwhile, he liked being lost in this immensity. It made his fears#8212;his whole life, in fact#8212;seem inconsequential. He lay on his back and looked up at the sky. It was not, as he'd first thought, a night sky. There were no stars, either fixed or falling. No clouds, hiding a moon. In fact it seemed completely featureless at first, but as the seconds passed#8212;or minutes; or hours; he neither knew nor much cared#8212;he realized the subtlest waves of color were hundreds of miles across, moving over it. The Aurora Borealis seemed small stuff beside this show, in which, at intervals, he thought he saw forms swooping and climbing, like flocks of half-mile manta-rays, feeding in the stratosphere. He hoped they'd come down a little way, so he could see them more clearly, but perhaps, he mused, they had no more clarity to show. Not everything was available to the eye. Some sights defeated focus, and capture, and analysis. Like all he felt for Jo-Beth, for instance. That was every bit as strange and difficult to fix as the colors above his head, or the forms that made play there. Seeing them was as much a matter of feeling as of retina. The sixth sense was sympathy.

Content with his lot, he gently flipped himself over in the ether and experimented with swimming in it. The basic strokes worked well enough, though it was difficult to be certain he was making much progress with nothing to relate his motion to. The lights in the sea all around him#8212;fellow passengers like himself, he supposed, though they seemed not to have form as he did#8212;were too indistinct to be used as markers. Were they dreaming souls, perhaps? Infants, lovers and the dying, all travelling in Quiddity's waters as they slept, to be soothed and rocked, touched by a calm that would carry them, as the tide carried them, through the tempest they'd wake to? A life to be lived, or lost; love they'd go in fear of staling or disappearing after this epiphany. He put his face beneath the surface. Many of the light-forms were far below him, some so deep they were no larger than stars. Not all of them were moving in the same direction as he. Some, like the half-mile mantas above, were in groups, shoals, rising and falling. Others went side by side. The lovers, he assumed, though presumably not all the dreamers here, who were sleeping beside the lover of their lives, had that feeling reciprocated. Perhaps very few. Which thought led him back to the time he and Jo-Beth had travelled here; and to her present whereabouts. He had to be careful the calm didn't stupefy him; make him forgetful of her. He raised his face from the sea.

In doing so he avoided, by moments, a collision. Yards from him, its appearance shocking in the middle of such tranquility, was a fragment of garishly colored wreckage from the Vance house. And a few yards beyond that, more distressing still, a piece of flotsam far too ugly to belong here, yet not recognizably of the Cosm. It stood four or more feet above the water-line, and hung as far or further below; a gnarled, waxy island floating like pale dung in this pure sea. He reached out and took hold of the wreckage ahead of him, throwing himself on to it and kicking. His action carried him closer to the enigma.

It was alive. Not simply occupied by something living, but entirely made of living matter. He heard the thump of two heartbeats from it. Its surface had the unmistakable sheen of skin, or some derivative of same. But what it actually was didn't become apparent until he was almost brushing against it. Only then did he see the thin figures#8212;two of the party guests#8212;clutching each other with looks of fury on their faces. He hadn't been privileged to keep the company of Sam Sagansky, or hear the nimble fingers of Doug Frank on the keyboards. All he saw were two enemies, locked not only together but at the heart of an island that seemed to have sprung out of them. From their backs, like huge hunches. From their limbs, like further limbs that put up no defense against their enemy but fused with his flesh. The structure was still sprouting further nodules, the beginning of new growth, bursting along the limbs, each variation referring not to the root form#8212;an arm, a spine#8212;but to its immediate predecessor, so that each successive variation became less human, and less fleshy. The image was more fascinating than distressing, the focus of the combatants upon each other suggesting they felt no pain at this process. Watching the structure grow and spread Howie vaguely comprehended that this was the birth of solid ground. Perhaps the fighters would die and decay eventually, but the structure itself was not so corruptible. Already the perimeters of the island, and its heights, resembled coral rather than flesh, tough and encrusted. When the fighters died they'd become fossils buried in the heart of an island they themselves had created. The island itself would float on.

He let go of the raft of wreckage and kicked on, past the island. Flotsam and jetsam littered the surface of the sea now: furniture, clumps of plaster, lighting fixtures. He swam past the head and neck of a carousel horse, its painted eye glaring backwards as if horrified by its dismemberment. But there was no sign of island-making amid this litter. Quiddity didn't create, it seemed, from things without minds, though he wondered if its genius would respond#8212;given time#8212;to the evidence of the minds that had made these artifacts. Could Quiddity grow from the head of a wooden horse some island named for the horse's maker? Anything was possible.

Never a truer word said or thought.

Anything was possible.

They weren't alone here, Jo-Beth knew. It was not much comfort, but it was some. Every now and then she'd hear somebody calling out, their voices distressed on occasion, but just as often ecstatic, like a congregation half in terror, half in awe, spread across the surface of Quiddity. She didn't answer any of the calls. For one thing, she'd seen forms floating past, always at some distance, that suggested people didn't stay human here. They grew freakish. She had enough problems dealing with Tommy-Ray (who was the second reason she didn't reply to the calls) without inviting more bad news. He demanded her constant attention; speaking to her as they floated, his voice drained of all emotion. He had a good deal to say, between the apologies and the sobs. Some of it she already knew. About how good he'd felt when their father had returned, and how betrayed when she'd rejected them both. But there was a lot more, and some of it broke her heart. He told her first about the trip to the Mission, his story mostly fragments but suddenly becoming stream-of-consciousness descriptions of the horrors he'd witnessed and performed. She might have been tempted to disbelieve the worst of it#8212;the murders, the visions of his own decay#8212;but for his lucidity. She'd never in her life heard him so articulate as when he told her how it felt to be the Death-Boy.

"Remember Andy?" he said at one point. "He had a tattoo...it was a skull...on his chest, above his heart?"

"I remember," she said.

"He used to say one day he'd go out on the crests at Topanga#8212;one last ride#8212;and never come back. Used to say he loved Death. But he didn't Jo-Beth..."

"No."

"He was a coward. He made a lot of noise but he was a coward. I'm not, am I? I'm no momma's boy..."

He started to sob again, more violently than ever. She tried to hush him but this time none of her soothing worked.

"Momma..." she heard him saying, "Momma..."

"What about Momma?" she said.

"It wasn't my fault."

"What wasn't?"

"I only went looking for you. It wasn't my fault."

"I said what wasn't?" Jo-Beth demanded, pushing him off her a little way. "Tommy-Ray, answer me. Did you hurt her?"

He looked like a chided child, she thought. Any pretense to machismo had been stripped from him. He was a raw, snotty child. Pathetic and dangerous: the inevitable combination.

"You hurt her," she said.

"I don't want to be the Death-Boy," he protested. "I don't want to kill anybody#8212;"

"Kill?" she said.

He looked straight at her, as though his direct look might convince her of his innocence. "It wasn't me. It was the dead people. I went looking for you, and they followed me. I couldn't shake them off. I tried, Jo-Beth, I really tried."

"My God!" she said, thrusting him out of her arms.

Her action wasn't that violent, but it churned Quiddity's element out of all proportion to the size of her motion. She was vaguely aware that her repugnance was the cause of this; that Quiddity was matching her mental agitation with its own.

"It wouldn't have happened if you'd stayed with me," he protested. "You should have stayed, Jo-Beth."

She kicked away from him, her feelings making Quiddity boil.

"Bastard!" she yelled at him. "You killed her! You killed her!"

"You're my sister," he said. "You're the only one who can save me!"

He reached for her, his face a mess of sorrow, but all she could see in his features was Momma's murderer. He could protest his innocence to the end of the world (if they weren't beyond that already), she'd never forgive him. If he saw her revulsion he chose to ignore it. He began grappling with her, his hands clutching her face, then her breasts.

"Don't leave me!" he started to shout. "I won't let you leave me!"

How many times had she made excuses for him, because they'd been twin eggs in the same tube? Seen his corruption, and still extended a forgiving hand? She'd even coaxed Howie into putting his disgust at Tommy-Ray aside, for her sake. Enough was enough. This man might be her brother, her twin, but he was guilty of matricide. Momma had survived the Jaff, Pastor John and Palomo Grove, only to be killed in her own house, by her own son. His crime was beyond forgiveness.

He reached for her again, but this time she was ready. She hit him across the face, once, then once again, as hard as she could muster. Shock at the blows made him give up his hold on her for a moment and she started away from him, kicking the churning sea up in his face. He threw his arms in front of him to shield himself and she was gone out of his reach, vaguely aware that her body was not so sleek as it had been, but not taking time to discover why. All that was important now was to be as far from him as she could be; to keep him from touching her ever again; ever. She struck out strongly, ignoring his sobs. This time she didn't look behind her, at least until his din had faded. Then she slowed her pace, and glanced back. He wasn't in sight. Grief filled her up#8212;agonized her#8212;but a more immediate horror was upon her before the full consequences of Momma's death could touch her. Her limbs felt heavy as she pulled them from the ether. Tears half blinding her she raised her hands in front of her face. Through the blur she saw that her fingers were encrusted, as though she'd dipped her hands in oil and oatmeal; her arms were misshapen with some similar filth.

She started to sob, knowing all too clearly what this horror signified. Quiddity was at work on her. Somehow it was making her fury solid. The sea had made her flesh a fertile mud. Forms were springing from it as ugly as the rage which inspired them.

Her sobs became a yell. She'd almost forgotten what it was like to unleash a shout like this, tamed as she'd been by so many years being Momma's domesticated daughter, smiling for the Grove on Monday mornings. Now Momma was dead, and the Grove was probably in ruins. And Monday? What was Monday? Just a name arbitrarily attached to a day and a night in the long history of days and nights which were the life of the world. They meant nothing now: days, nights, names, towns or dead mothers. All that made sense to her was Howie. He was all she had left.

She tried to picture him, desperate to hold on to something in this insanity. His image slipped from her at first#8212; all she could see was Tommy-Ray's wretched face#8212;but she persevered, conjuring him by particulars. His spectacles, his pale skin, his odd gait. His eyes, full of love. His face, flushed with blood the way it was when he spoke with passion, which was often. His blood and love, in one hot thought.

"Save me," she sobbed, hoping against hope that Quiddity's strange waters carried her despair to him. "Save me, or it's over."

"Abernethy?"

It was an hour before dawn in Palomo Grove, and Grillo had quite a report to file.

"I'm surprised you're still in the land of the living," Abernethy growled.

"Disappointed?"

"You're an asshole, Grillo. I don't hear from you for days then you call up at six o'clock in the fucking morning."

"I've got a story, Abernethy."

"I'm listening."

"I'm going to tell it the way it happened. But I don't think you're going to print it."

"Let me be the judge of that. Spit it out."

"Piece begins. Last night in the quiet residential town of Palomo Grove, Ventura County, a community set in the secure hills of the Simi Valley, our reality, known to those who juggle such concepts as the Cosm, was torn open by a power that proved to this reporter that all life is a movie#8212;"

"What the fuck?"

"Shut up, Abernethy. I'm only going to tell you this once. Where was I? Oh yeah...a movie. This force, wielded by one Randolph Jaffe, broke the confines of what most of our species believed to be the only and absolute reality, and opened a door to another state of being: a sea called Quiddity#8212;"

"Is this a resignation letter, Grillo?"

"You wanted the story nobody else would dare print, right?" Grillo said. "The real dirt. This is it. This is the great revelation."

"It's ridiculous."

"Maybe that's the way all earth-shattering news sounds. Have you thought of that? What would you have done if I'd tried to file a report on the Resurrection? Crucified man rolls away the stone. Would you have printed that?"

"That's different," Abernethy said. "That happened."

"So did this. I swear to God. And if you want proof, you're going to get it real soon."

"Proof? From where?"

"Just listen," Grillo said, and picked up his report again. "This revelation about the fragile state of our being took place in the midst of one of the most glamorous gatherings in recent movie and TV history, when about two hundred guests#8212;Hollywood's movers and shakers#8212;assembled at the hill-top house of Buddy Vance, who died here in Palomo Grove earlier in the week. His death, under circumstances both tragic and mysterious, began a series of events which climaxed last night with a number of the guests at his memorial party being snatched out of the world as we know it. There are no details yet as to the complete list of victims; though Vance's widow Rochelle was certainly among them. Nor is there any way of knowing their fate. They may be dead. They may simply exist in another state of being which only the most foolhardy of adventurers would dare enter. To all intents and purposes they have simply vanished off the face of the earth."

He expected Abernethy to interrupt at this juncture, but here was silence from the other end of the line. So profound a silence, indeed, that Grillo said:

"Are you still there, Abernethy?"

"You're nuts, Grillo."

"So put the phone down on me. Can't do it, can you? See, there's a real paradox here. I hate your fucking guts but I think you're just about the only man with the balls to print this. And the world's got to know."

"You are nuts."

"You watch the news through the day. You'll see...there's a lot of famous people missing this morning. Studio executives, movie stars, agents#8212;"

"Where are you?"

"Why?"

"Let me make some calls, then get back to you."

"What for?"

"See if there's any rumors flying. Just give me five minutes. That's all I'm asking. I'm not saying I believe you. I don't. But it's one fuck of a story."

"It's the truth, Abernethy. And I want to warn people. They have to know."

"Like I said, give me five minutes. Are you at the same number?"

"Yeah. But you may not get through. The place is practically deserted."

"I'll get through," Abernethy said, and put down the phone.

Grillo looked across at Tesla.

"I did it," he said.

"I still don't think it's wise, telling people."

"Don't start again," Grillo said. "This is the story I was born to tell, Tesla."

"It's been a secret for so long."

"Yeah, for people like your friend Kissoon."

"He's not my friend."

"Isn't he?"

"For Christ's sake, Grillo, you heard what he did."

"So why do you talk about him with this sneaking envy in your voice, huh?"

She looked at him like he'd just slapped her.

"Call me a liar?" he said.

She shook her head.

"What's the appeal?"

"I don't know. You're the one who just kept watching the Jaff do his stuff. No attempt to stop him. What was the appeal of that?"

"I wouldn't have had a chance against him, you know that."

"You didn't try."

"Don't change the subject. I'm right, aren't I?"

Tesla had crossed to the window. Coney Eye was screened by trees. There was no telling from here whether the damage was spreading.

"Do you think they're alive?" she said. "Howie, and the others?"

"I don't know."

"You got to look into Quiddity, right?"

"I got a glimpse," Grillo said.

"And?"

"It was like one of our telephone calls. Cut off short. All I got to see was a cloud. There was no sign of Quiddity itself."

"And no Iad."

"No Iad. Maybe they don't exist."

"You wish."

"You're sure of your sources?"

"Couldn't be more sure."

"I love it," Grillo remarked somewhat bitterly. "I dig around for days and all I get is a fucking peek. But you#8212;you plug straight in."

"Is this what this is about?" Tesla said. "You getting a story?"

"Yeah. Maybe it is. And telling it. Making people understand what's going on in Happy Valley. But seems to me you don't really want that. You'd be happier if we kept this among the chosen few. You, Kissoon, the fucking Jaff#8212;"

"OK, you want to report the end of the world? You do it, Orson. Listeners across America are just waiting to panic. Meanwhile, I've got problems#8212;"

"You smug bitch."

"I'm smug! I'm smug! Listen to Mister Hotshot Tell Them The Truth Or Die Trying Grillo! Has it occurred to you that if Abernethy publishes what's going on up here we're going to have a major tourist industry in twelve hours? Freeways blocked in both directions? And won't that be nice for whatever's coming out of the throat, huh? Feeding time!"

"Shit."

"Didn't think of that, did you? And while we're talking turkey, you#8212;"

The telephone silenced her in mid-accusation. Grillo picked it up.

"Nathan?"

"Abernethy."

Grillo looked across at Tesla, who was standing with her back to the window glaring at him.

"I'm going to need a lot more than two paragraphs."

"What convinced you?"

"You were right. A lot of people didn't come home from the party."

"Has it made the news this morning?"

"Nope. So you've got an edge. Of course your explanation about where they've gone's crap. Biggest fiction I ever heard. But it's a great front page."

"I'll get back to you with the rest."

"An hour."

"An hour."

He put the phone down.

"All right," he said, looking at Tesla. "So suppose I hold off giving him the full story till noon? What can we do in that time?"

"I don't know," Tesla admitted. "Maybe find the Jaff."

"And what the hell can he do?"

"Not do much. But undo plenty."

Grillo stood up and went through to the bathroom, turning on the faucet and splashing cold water on his face.

"You think the hole can be closed?" he said, wandering back in, water dripping from his face.

"I told you, I don't know. Maybe. I don't have any other answers, Grillo."

"And what happens to the people inside? The McGuire twins. Katz. The rest."

"They're probably dead already," she sighed. "We can't help them."

"Easily said."

"Well you seemed ready enough to fling yourself in a few hours ago, so maybe you should go in after them. I'll get you a piece of string, to hold on to."

"All right," Grillo said, "I haven't forgotten you saved my life, and I'm grateful."

"Jeez, I've made some errors in my time..."

"Look, I'm sorry. I'm coming at this all wrong. I know I am. I should be planning some plan. Being a hero. But see...I'm not. The only response I've got to all this is the same old Grillo. I can't change. I see something, I want the world to know."

"It will," Tesla said quickly. "It will."

"But you...you've changed."

She nodded. "You got that right," she said. "I was thinking, when you were telling Abernethy he wouldn't have printed the Resurrection story: that's me. I'm resurrected. And you know what freaks me? I'm not freaked. I'm cool. I'm fine. I go walking around in a fucking time loop, and it's like..."

"What?"

"...it's like I was born for this, Grillo. Like I could be...oh shit, I don't know."

"Say it. Whatever's on your mind, say it."

"You know what a shaman is?"

"Sure," said Grillo. "Medicine-man. Witch-doctor."

"More than that," she said. "He's a mind-healer. Gets inside the collective psyche and explains it. Stirs it around. I think all the major performers in this#8212;Kissoon, the Jaff, Fletcher#8212;they're shamans. And Quiddity...is America's dream-space. The world's maybe. I've seen these men fucking it up, Grillo: All on their own trips. Even Fletcher couldn't get his shit together."

"So maybe what's needed is a change of shaman," Grillo said.

"Yeah. Why not?" Tesla replied. "I can't do any worse than they have."

"That's why you want to keep it to yourself."

"That's one of the reasons, sure. I can do this, Grillo. I'm weird enough, and most of these shamans, you know, were a little off in some way. Cross-dressers; gender-fuckers. All things to all men. Animal, vegetable and mineral. I want to be that. I've always wanted...," she trailed off. "...you know what I've always wanted."

"Not till now."

"Well now you do."

"You don't look very happy about it."

"I've done the resurrection scene. That's one of those scenes shamans have to do. Die and rise again. But I keep, thinking...it's not finished. I've got more to prove."

"You think you have to die again?"

"I hope not. Once was enough."

"It usually is," Grillo said.

His remark brought a smile to her lips, unbidden.

"What's funny?" he said.

"That. You. Me. Things don't get any weirder than this, do they?"

"That's a fair bet."

"What time is it?"

"About six."

"The sun'll be up soon. I'm thinking I should go out to look for the Jaff, before the light drives him into hiding."

"That's if he's not left the Grove."

"I don't think he's capable," she said. "The circle's closing. Getting tighter and tighter. Coney Eye's suddenly the center of the known universe."

"And the unknown."

"I don't know whether it is so unknown," Tesla said. "I think Quiddity's maybe more like home than we think."

The day was on its way by the time they stepped out of the hotel, the darkness giving way to an uneasy no-man's land between moonset and sunrise. As they crossed the hotel lot a wretched, grimy individual stepped out of the murk, his face ashen.

"I have to speak with you," he said. "You're Grillo, right?"

"Yeah. And you?"

"My name's Witt. I used to have offices in the Mall. And friends here at the hotel. They told me about you."

"What do you want?" Tesla said.

"I was up at Coney Eye," he said. "When you came out. I wanted to speak to you then but I was hiding...I couldn't move myself." He glanced down at the front of his trousers, which were damp.

"What's going on up there?"

"I suggest you get out of the Grove as quickly as possible," Tesla advised. "There's worse on the way."

"There's no Grove to leave," Witt replied. "The Grove's gone. Finished. People have left on vacations and I don't think they're going to come back. But I'm not leaving. I've got nowhere to go. Besides#8212;" he looked close to tears as he spoke "#8212;this is my town. If it's going to get swallowed up somehow, then I want to be here when it goes. Even if the Jaff#8212;"

"Wait!" said Tesla. "What do you know about the Jaff?"

"I...met him. Tommy-Ray McGuire's his son, you know that?" Tesla nodded. "Well, McGuire introduced me to the Jaff."

"Here in the Grove?"

"Sure."

"Where?"

"In Cherry Tree Glade."

"Then that's where we start," said Tesla. "Can you take us there?"

"Of course."

"You think he'll have just gone back there?" Grillo said.

"You saw his condition," Tesla replied. "I think he'll go looking for someplace familiar, where he feels reasonably safe."

"Makes sense," said Grillo.

"If it does," said Witt, "it's the first thing tonight that has."

Dawn showed them what William Witt had already described: a town practically deserted, its occupants fled. A pack of domestic dogs roved the streets, having either been turned loose or escaped from owners whose minds were on the business of panicked departure. In the space of a day or two they'd become a small scavenging band. Witt recognized the dogs. Mrs. Duffin's poodles were in the pack; so were two dachshunds belonging to Blaze Hebbard, the pups of the pups of the pups of dogs owned by a Grover who'd died when Witt was a boy, one Edgar Lott. Died and left his money to be used to put up a memorial to the League of Virgins.

Besides the dogs there were other, perhaps more distressing signs of hurried exits. Garage doors left open; toys dropped on the front path or in the driveway as sleepy children were put into cars in the middle of the night.

"Everybody knew," Witt said as they drove. "They knew all along but nobody said anything. That's why most of them just slipped away in the middle of the night. They thought they were the only ones who were losing their minds. They all thought they were the only ones."

"You worked here, you said."

"Yeah," Witt told Grillo, "real estate."

"Looks like business may be booming tomorrow. Plenty of properties for sale."

"And who's going to buy?" Witt said. "This is going to be cursed ground."

"It's not the Grove's fault that all this happened," Tesla put in. "It's an accident."

"It is?"

"Of course. Fletcher and the Jaff ended up here because they ran out of power, not because the Grove was somehow chosen."

"I still think it'll be cursed ground," Witt began, breaking off to instruct Grillo: "This next turning's Cherry Tree Glade. And Mrs. Lloyd's house is the fourth or fifth on the right."

From the outside at least it looked unoccupied. When they broke in, that was confirmed. The Jaff hadn't been in the house since he'd taunted Witt in the upper room.

"It was worth a try," Tesla said. "I guess we just have to keep looking. The town's not that big. We just go from street to street till we get a sniff of him. Anybody got any better ideas?" She looked at Grillo, whose gaze and concentration were elsewhere. "What is it?" she said.

"Huh?"

"Somebody left water running," Witt said, following the direction of Grillo's gaze.

Water was indeed running out from under the front door of a house opposite the Lloyd house, a steady stream which made its way down the incline of the driveway, across the sidewalk and into the gutter.

"What's so interesting?" Tesla said.

"I just realized..." Grillo said.

"What?"

He kept staring at the water, disappearing down the sewer. "I think I know where he's gone."

He turned and looked at Tesla.

"A familiar place, you said. The place he knows best in the Grove isn't above ground, it's below. "

Tesla's face brightened. "The caves. Yeah. That makes perfect sense."

They got back into the car, and with Witt directing them by the fastest route, drove back through the town#8212;in defiance of red lights and one-way streets#8212;towards Deerdell.

"It's not going to be long before the police start to arrive," Grillo remarked. "Looking for lost movie stars."

"I should go up to the house and warn them away," Tesla said.

"You can't be in two places at one time," Grillo said. "Unless that's another talent I don't know about."

"Ha fucking ha."

"They'll have to find out the hard way. We've got more urgent stuff to do."

"True," Tesla conceded.

"If the Jaff is in the caves," Witt said, "how do we get down to him? I don't think he's just going to appear if we holler."

"You know a man called Hotchkiss?" Grillo said.

"Of course. Carolyn's father?"

"Yeah."

"We can get help from him. I betcha he's still in town. He can get us down there. Whether he can get us back up again's another problem, but he seemed confident enough a couple of days back. He tried to get me to go into the caves with him."

"Why?"

"He's obsessed with things buried under the Grove."

"I don't follow."

"I'm not sure I do. Let him explain it."

They'd reached the woods. There was no sound of a dawn chorus, however ragged. They stepped in among the trees, the silence oppressive.

"He's been here," Tesla said.

Nobody needed to ask how she knew. Even without the benefit of senses sharpened by the Nuncio it was clear the atmosphere in the woods was charged with anticipation. The birds hadn't left, they were just scared to sing.

It was Witt who led the way through to the clearing, his sense of direction that of a man who knew exactly where he was headed.

"You come here often?" Grillo said, half joking.

"Almost never," Witt replied.

"Stop," Tesla suddenly whispered.

The clearing was just ahead, visible through the trees. She nodded towards it.

"Look there," she said.

A yard or two beyond the police barricade, turning over and over in the grass, was proof positive that the Jaff had indeed taken refuge here. One of the terata, too weak and wounded to cover the last few yards to the safety of the caves, was living out its last moments, its dissolution giving off a sickly luminescence.

"It's not going to do us any harm," Grillo said, about to step into view.

Tesla took hold of his arm. "It can maybe alert the Jaff," she said. "We don't know what kind of contact he has with those things. We don't need to go any further. We know he's there."

"True."

"Let's go find Hotchkiss."

They began to retrace their steps.

"Do you know where he lives?" Grillo asked Witt, once they were a good distance from the clearing.

"I know where everybody lives," Witt said. "Or lived."

The sight of the caves seemed to have shaken him, fuelling Grillo's suspicion that despite the claim that he seldom ventured there it was some kind of place of pilgrimage.

"Take Tesla to Hotchkiss," Grillo said. "I'll meet you both there."

"Where are you going?" Tesla wanted to know.

"I want to be sure Ellen left the Grove."

"She's a sensible lady," came the reply, "I'm sure she has."

"I'm going to check anyhow," Grillo said, not about to be dissuaded.

He left them at the car, and started off in the direction of the Nguyen house, leaving Tesla to summon Witt from staring at the woods. When Grillo turned the corner she still hadn't succeeded. He was gazing towards the trees as though the clearing was calling him back into some shared past, and it was all he could do to keep himself from obeying the summons.

It wasn't Howie that came to help Jo-Beth in her solitary terror, but the tide, which picked her up and carried her#8212;her eyes often closed (and when they were open, blurred with tears)#8212;towards the place she'd glimpsed all too briefly when she and Howie had swum in Quiddity together: the Ephemeris. There was the beginnings of a disturbance in the element that bore her up, but she was as ignorant of that as she was of the proximity of the island. Others were not. Had she been more aware of her surroundings she'd have seen a subtle but undeniable agitation pass among the souls swimming in Quiddity's ether. Their motion was no longer so steady. Some#8212;perhaps those more sensitive to the rumor the ether was carrying#8212;stopped advancing and hung in the darkness like drowned stars. Others took themselves deeper, hoping to avoid the cataclysm that was being whispered. Still others, these very few as yet, went out altogether, waking in heir beds in the Cosm grateful to be out of danger. For most, however, the message was too hushed to be heard; or if it was heard the pleasure of being in Quiddity outweighed the anxiety. They rose and fell, rose and fell, their route more often than not taking them where Jo-Beth was going: to the island on the dream-sea.

Ephemeris.

The name had echoed in Howie's head since he'd first heard it spoken, by Fletcher.

What's on Ephemeris? he'd asked, imagining some paradise island. His father's reply hadn't been particularly illuminating. The Great and Secret Show, he'd said, an answer which begged a dozen more questions. Now, as the island came into view ahead of him, he wished he'd pursued his questions with more persistence. Even from a distance it was quite clear his picturing of the place had been spectacularly short of the mark. Just as Quiddity wasn't in any conventional sense a sea, so Ephemeris demanded a redefinition of the word island. For one, it was not a single land-mass But many, perhaps hundreds, joined by arches of rock, the whole archipelago resembling a vast, floating cathedral, the bridges like buttresses, the islands towers which mounted in scale as they approached the central island, from which solid pillars of smoke rose to meet the sky. The similarity was too strong to be coincidence. This image was surely the subconscious inspiration of architects the world over. Cathedral builders, tower raisers, even#8212;who knew?#8212;children playing with building blocks, had this dream place somewhere at the back of their minds, and paid homage as best they could. But their master-works could only be approximations, compromises with gravity and the limitations of their medium. Nor could they ever aspire to a work so massive. The Ephemeris was many miles across, Howie guessed, and there was no portion of it that had not been touched by genius. If it was a natural phenomenon (and who knew what natural was, in a place of mind?) then it was nature in a frenzy of invention. It made solid matter play games only cloud or light would be capable of in the world he'd left behind. Made towers as fine as reeds on which globes the size of houses balanced; made sheer cliff faces fluted like shells and canyon walls that seemed to billow like curtains at a window; made spiral hills; made boulders like breasts, and dogs, and the sweepings from some vast table. So many likenesses, but none he could be certain were intended. A fragment in which he'd seen a face was part of another likeness the glance after, each interpretation subject to change at a moment's notice. Perhaps they were all true, all intended. Perhaps none were, and this game of resemblances was, like the creation of the pier when he'd first approached Quiddity, his mind's way of taming the immensity. If so, there was one sight it failed to master: the island at the center of the archipelago, which rose straight out of Quiddity, sheer, the smoke that gouted from countless fissures on its walls rising with the same verticality. Its pinnacle was completely concealed by the smoke, but whatever mystery lay behind it was nectar to the spirit-lights, who rose to it unburdened by flesh and blood, not entering the smoke but grazing its blossom. He wondered if it was fear that kept them from moving into the smoke, or if it was a more solid barrier than it seemed. Perhaps when he got closer, he'd discover the answer. Eager to be there as quickly as possible, he aided the tide with strokes of his own, so that within ten or fifteen minutes of first seeing the Ephemeris he was hauling himself up on to its beach. It was dark, though not as dark as Quiddity, and harsh beneath his palms, not sand but encrustations, like coral. Was it possible, he suddenly wondered, that the archipelago had been created the way the island he'd seen floating among the flotsam from the Vance house had been created, formed around the presence of human beings in Quiddity? If so, how long ago must they have come into the dream-sea, to have grown so massive?

He started along the course of the beach, choosing left over right because whenever he was faced with two roads about which he knew equally little he always chose the left. He kept close to the edge of the sea, in the hope that he'd find Jo-Beth on the beach, brought by the same current that had caught him. Once out of the soothing waters, his body no longer borne up and caressed, anxieties the sea had lulled from him took hold. The first, that he might search the archipelago for days, weeks even, and never find Jo-Beth. Second, that even if he did, there was still Tommy-Ray to contend with. Nor was Tommy-Ray alone; he'd come to the Vance house with phantoms. Three#8212;and this was the least of his worries, in a sense, but it became steadily more important#8212; that something was changing in Quiddity. He no longer cared what words were most appropriate for this reality: whether it was another dimension or a state of mind was not relevant. They were probably one and the same anyhow. What did matter was the holiness of this place. He didn't doubt for a moment that all that he'd gleaned about Quiddity and the Ephemeris was true. This was the place in which all his species that knew of glory got their glimpses. A constant place; a place of comfort, where the body was forgotten (except for trespassers like himself) and the dreaming soul knew flight, and mystery. But there were subtle signs#8212;some so subtle he couldn't have pinpointed them#8212;that the dream place was not secure. The small waves splashing up on the beach, their surf bluish, were not as rhythmical as they'd been when he first stepped out of the sea. The motion of the lights in Quiddity seemed similarly changed, as though something was happening in the system that was distressing it. He doubted that the simple intrusion of flesh and blood from the Cosm was responsible. Quiddity was vast, and had ways of dealing with those who resisted the calm of its waters: he'd seen that process at work. No, whatever was souring the tranquillity had to be more significant than the presence of himself, or any of the invaders from the other side.

He began to come across evidence of that trespass, washed up on the shore. A door frame, pieces of smashed furniture, cushions, and, inevitably, fragments of Vance's collection. A short distance beyond this pitiful litter, around a bend in the beach, he found hope that the tide had brought Jo-Beth here: another survivor. She was standing at the very edge of Quiddity, gazing out over the sea. If she heard him approaching she didn't look his way. Her posture (hands limp at her sides, shoulders slumped) and the steadiness of her stare suggested someone mesmerized. Loath as he was to break her trance, if that was how she'd chosen to deal with the shock of dislocation, he had no choice:

"Excuse me," he said, knowing his politeness was pathetic in such circumstances, "are you the only one here?"

She looked around at him and he got a second surprise. He'd seen this face dozens of times, smiling out from the TV screen, extolling the virtues of shampoo. He didn't know her name. She was simply the Silksheen Woman. She frowned at him, as though she was having difficulty focusing on his face. He tried the question again, rephrased.

"Are there any other survivors?" he said. "From the house?"

"Yes," she said.

"Where are they?"

"Just keep on walking."

"Thank you."

"This isn't happening, is it?" she said.

"I'm afraid it is," he said.

"What happened to the world? Did they drop the bomb?"

"No."

"What then?"

"It's back there somewhere," he said. "Back over Quiddity. Over the sea."

"Oh," she said, though it was clear she hadn't quite grasped this information. "Do you have any coke?" she said. "Or pills? Anything?"

"Sorry."

She returned her gaze to Quiddity, leaving him to follow her instructions and make his way along the beach. The agitation in the waves was increasing with every step he took. Either that or he was simply becoming more sensitive to it. Perhaps the latter, because he was noticing other signs besides that of the wave-rhythm. In the air around his head a restlessness, as though conversations between invisibles were being conducted just out of hearing range. In the sky, the waves of color were breaking up into patches, like herring-bone cloud, their tranquil progressions replaced by the same agitation that had tainted Quiddity. Lights still passed overhead, moving towards the smoke tower, but there were fewer and fewer of them. The dreamers were definitely waking.

Ahead, the beach was partially blocked by a rock formation of chain-link boulders, between which he had to climb before continuing his search. The Silksheen Woman had offered good directions however. A little way beyond the boulders, around another sweep in the beach, he found several more survivors, both men and women. None seemed to have been able to climb more than a few yards from the sea. One of them was still lying with his feet in the waves, his body sprawled as though dead. Nobody went to help him. The same languor that kept the Silksheen Woman staring out over Quiddity had affected many of them, but several were inert for a different reason. They'd hauled themselves from Quiddity changed by floating in its waters. Their bodies were encrusted and misshapen, as though the same process that had turned the warring guests into an island was underway in them too. He could only guess what quality, or its absence, marked these people out from the rest. Why had he, and perhaps half the dozen here, crossed the same distance in the same element as these sufferers and stepped out of Quiddity unchanged? Had the victims entered the sea hot with emotion, and Quiddity battened on it, whereas he'd drifted much as the dreamers did, his life left behind in another place, and with it all ambition, obsession; all feeling indeed, but the quiescence Quiddity induced? It had even lulled from him his desire to find Jo-Beth, but not for long. That was his only thought now. He went among the survivors looking for her, but he was disappointed. She wasn't among this number, nor was Tommy-Ray.

"Are there any others?" he asked a heavily set man slumped by the shore.

"Others?"

"You know...like us."

There was the same puzzled and distracted air about this man as there'd been about the Silksheen Woman. He seemed to be laboring to put the words he'd heard together.

"Us," Howie said. "From the house."

There was no answer forthcoming. The man just kept on staring, his gaze glassy. Howie gave up and searched for a more useful source of information, electing the one man among the survivors who wasn't looking out over Quiddity. Instead he was standing high up on the beach, staring up at the smoke tower at the core of the archipelago. The journey here hadn't left him unmarked. There were signs of Quiddity's work on his neck and face, and running down his spine. He'd taken off his shirt and bound it around his left hand. Howie approached him.

No excuse me this time, just the plain statement:

"I'm looking for a girl. She's blonde. About eighteen. Have you seen her?"

"What's up there?" the man replied. "I want to go. I want to see."

Howie tried again. "I'm looking#8212;"

"I heard you."

"Have you seen her?"

"No."

"Do you know if there are any more survivors?"

The reply was the same deadpan syllable. It got Howie raging.

"What the fuck's wrong with everybody?" he said.

The man looked at him. His face was pock-marked and far from handsome, but he had a lop-sided smile that Quiddity's handiwork couldn't spoil.

"Don't get mad," he said. "It's not worth it."

"She's worth it."

"Why? We're all dead anyhow."

"Not necessarily. We got in, we can get out."

"What, you mean swim? Fuck that, man. I'm not going back in that fucking soup. I'd prefer to die. Somewhere up there."

He looked back towards the mountain. "There's something up there. Something wonderful. I know it."

"Maybe."

"You want to come with me?"

"Climb, you mean? You'll never make it."

"Not all the way, maybe, but I can get closer. Get a sniff of it."

His appetite for the mystery of the tower was welcome when everyone else was so lethargic, and Howie was loath to part company with him. But wherever Jo-Beth was, it wasn't on the mountain.

"Just come some of the way," the guy said. "You'll get a better view up there. Maybe spot your lady-friend."

That was no bad idea, especially when they had so little time. The unrest in the air was more palpable with every minute that passed.

"Why not?" Howie said.

"I've been looking for the easiest route. Seems to me we're best going back along the beach aways. By the way, who are you? I'm Garrett Byrne. Two R's. No u. Just in case you get to write the obit. You are?"

"Howie Katz."

"I'd shake your hand only mine isn't fit for shaking." He raised the shirt-swathed limb. "I don't know what happened out there but I'll never draft another contract. Maybe I'm glad, you know? It was a fucking dumb business anyhow."

"What was?"

"Entertainment lawyer. You know the joke? What have you got if you've got three entertainment lawyers up to their necks in shit?"

"What?"

"Not enough shit."

Byrne laughed out loud at this.

"Want to see?" he said, unwrapping his hand. It was scarcely recognizable as such. The fingers and thumb had fused and swollen.

"You know what?" he said. "I think it's trying to turn itself into a dick. All those years fucking people with this, just taking them up the ass, and it's finally got the message. It's a dick, don't you think? No, don't tell me. Let's just climb."

Tommy-Ray felt the dream-sea working upon him as he floated, but he didn't waste effort looking to see what changes it was making. He just let the fury that was fuelling those changes come.

Perhaps it was that#8212;the anger and the snot#8212;that brought the phantoms back. He became aware of them as a memory first, his mind picturing their pursuit of him down the empty highways of the Baja, their cloud like tin cans tied to a dog's tail. No sooner thought than felt. A cold wind blew on his face, which was the only part of him showing out of the sea. He knew what was coming. Smelled the tombs, and the dust in the tombs. It wasn't until the sea around him started to churn, however, that he opened his eyes and saw the cloud circling above him. It was not the great storm it had been in the Grove; the destroyer of churches and mommas. It was a mad runty spiral of dirt. But the sea knew it belonged to him, and it began new work on his body. He felt his limbs getting heavier. His face itched furiously. He wanted to say: this isn't my legion. Don't blame me for what they feel. But what was the use of denying it? He was, the Death-Boy, now and always. Quiddity knew it, and worked its work accordingly. There were no lies here. No pretenses. He watched as the spirits descended towards the surface of the sea, their circle centering on him. The fury in Quiddity's ether intensified. He was spun like a top, his motion screwing him down. He tried to throw his arms up over his head, but they were leaden, and the sea simply closed over his head. His mouth was open. Quiddity flooded his throat; his system. In the confusion one simple knowledge#8212;carried by Quiddity, now swallowed in its bitter whole#8212;touched him. That there was an evil coming he had never known the likes of; that no one had ever known the likes of. He felt it in his chest first, then in his stomach and bowels. Finally, in his head, like a blossoming night. It was called Iad, this night, and the chill it brought had no equal on any planet in the system; even those so far from the sun they could bear no life. None owned a darkness this deep, this murderous.

He rose to the surface again. The phantoms had gone, not away, but into him, subsumed into his transforming anatomy as part of Quiddity's work. He was suddenly, perversely, glad of it. There would be no salvation in the night that was coming, except for those who were its allies. Better he should be a death among many deaths, then, when he might have a hope of being passed over in the holocaust.

He took a breath, and expelled it in laughter, putting his remade hands, heavy as they were, up to his face. It had finally taken on the shape of his soul.

Howie and Byrne climbed for several minutes, but however high they got the best view was always above them: the spectacle of the smoke tower. The closer they got the more Byrne's obsession with the sight touched Howie. He began wondering, as he had when the tide had first brought him within sighting distance of the Ephemeris, what great unknown was hiding up there, so powerful it drew the sleepers of the world to its threshold. Byrne was by no means agile, given that he had only one hand available. He repeatedly slipped. But there was no murmur of complaint from him, though with every fall the number of cuts and scrapes on his bare body multiplied. Eyes fixed on the highest reaches of the mountain he pushed on, not seeming to give a damn what damage he did himself as long as he closed the gap between himself and the mystery. Howie found it easy enough to keep up with him, but had to halt every few minutes to survey the scene below from a new vantage point. There was no sign of Jo-Beth along any visible stretch of shore, and he now began to question the wisdom of his coming with Byrne. The journey was increasingly perilous, as the formations they were ascending became steeper, and the bridges they crossed narrower. Beneath the bridges it was a straight fall, usually on to rock. Sometimes, however, there was a glint of Quiddity at the bottom of these chasms, its waters as frenzied as they were beyond the shore.

There were fewer and fewer spirits in the air, but as they crossed an arch no broader than a plank a flight of them passed directly overhead and Howie saw that within each of the lights was a single sinuous line, like a bright snake. Genesis couldn't have been more misguided, or misguiding, he thought, to picture the serpent crushed beneath a human heel. The soul was that serpent, and it could fly.

The sight brought him to a halt, and a decision.

"I'm not going any further," he said.

Byrne looked back at him. "Why not?"

"I've got as good a view of the shore-line as I'm going to get."

The view was by no means comprehensive, but climbing higher wasn't going to improve it significantly. Besides, the figures on the beach below were now so small they were barely recognizable. Another few minutes' ascent and he'd not know Jo-Beth from any other survivor.

"Don't you want to see what's up there?" Byrne said.

"Yes, of course," Howie replied. "But another time." He knew the response was ridiculous. There'd be no other time this side of his death-bed.

"I'll leave you then," Byrne said. He didn't waste breath with a goodbye, fond or otherwise. Instead he turned back to the business of the climb. His body was running with blood and sweat, and he was stumbling now with every second step he took, but Howie knew it was a vain course trying to call him back. Vain, and presumptuous. Whatever kind of life he'd lived#8212;and it sounded to have been lacking charity#8212; Byrne was seizing his last chance to be touched by the holy. Maybe death was the inevitable consequence of such pursuit.

Howie returned his gaze to the scene below. He followed the line of the beach, looking for the least sign of movement. To his left lay the stretch of shore they'd climbed from. He could still see the party of survivors, at the margin of the sea, as mesmerized as ever. To their right, the solitary figure of the Silksheen Woman, the waves that broke against the shore#8212;their boom carried to his ears#8212;large enough to threaten her with acquisition. Beyond her again, the beach upon which he'd first found himself.

It wasn't empty. His heart did double time. There was somebody stumbling along the shore, keeping well away from the encroaching sea. Her hair shone, even at this distance. It could only be Jo-Beth. With the recognition came fear for her. It looked as though every step she took was an agony.

He immediately started down the way they'd come, the rock marked in several places by splashes of Byrne's blood. At one such spot, after ten minutes of descent, he looked back to see if he could spot the man, but the heights were dark and, as far as he could see, empty. The last remaining souls had gone from the smoke tower; and with them much of the light. There was no sign of Byrne.

When he turned back, there was. The man was standing two or three yards lower down the slope. The multitude of wounds he'd collected on his way up were nothing beside his newest. It ran from the side of his head to his hip, and had opened him up to his innards.

"I fell," he said simply.

"All the way down here?" Howie said, marvelling at the fact that the man was even standing.

"No. I came down of my own accord."

"How?"

"It was easy," Byrne replied. "I'm larvae now."

"What?"

"Ghost. Spirit. I thought maybe you'd seen me fall."

"No."

"It was a long drop, but it ended well. I don't think anybody ever died on the Ephemeris before. That makes me one of one. I can make my own rules. Play it any way I like. And I thought I should come help Howie#8212;" His obsessive heat had been replaced by a calm authority. "You have to be quick," he said. "I understand a lot of things suddenly, and the news isn't good."

"Something's happening, isn't it?"

"The Iad," Byrne said. "They're starting across Quiddity." Terms that he hadn't known minutes before were now commonplace from his lips.

"What are Iad?" Howie asked.

"Evil beyond words," Byrne said, "so I won't even try."

"Going to the Cosm?"

"Yes. Maybe you can get there ahead of them."

"How?"

"Trust to the sea. It wants what you want."

"Which is?"

"You, out, " Byrne said. "So go. And quickly."

"I hear."

Byrne stood aside to let Howie pass. As he did so he took hold of Howie's arm with his good hand.

"You should know#8212;" he said.

"What?"

"What's on the mountain. It's wonderful."

"Worth dying for?"

"A hundred times."

He let go of Howie.

"I'm glad."

"If Quiddity survives," Byrne said. "If you survive this, look for me. I'm going to be wanting words with you."

"I will," Howie replied, and began down the slope as fast as he was able, his descent veering between the ungainly and the suicidal. He started to yell Jo-Beth's name as soon as he came within what he guessed was hailing distance, but his call went unheeded. The blonde head didn't look up from its study. Perhaps the sound of the waves was drowning him out. He reached beach level in a scrambling, sweaty daze and began to race towards her.

"Jo-Beth! It's me! Jo-Beth!"

This time she did hear, and she looked up. Even with several yards between them he could see clearly the reason for her stumbling. Horrified, he slowed his pace, barely aware he was doing so. Quiddity had been at work on her. The face he'd fallen in love with at Butrick's Steak House, the face from the sight of which he dated his life, was a mass of spiky growths that spread down her neck and disfigured her arms. There was a moment, one he'd never quite forgive himself for, in which he wished she wouldn't know him, and he'd be able to walk on past her. But she did; and the voice that came from behind the mask was the same that had told him she loved him.

Now it said: "Howie...help me..."

He opened his arms and let her come into them. Her body was feverish, racked with shudders.

"I thought I'd never see you again," she said, her hands over her face.

"I wouldn't have left you."

"At least we can die together now."

"Where's Tommy-Ray?"

"He's gone," she said.

"We've got to do the same," Howie said. "Get off the island as quickly as possible. Something terrible's coming."

She dared to look up at him, her eyes as clear and blue as they'd ever been, staring out at him like the gleam of treasure in muck. The sight made him hold her tighter, as if to prove to her (and to himself) that he'd mastered the horror. He hadn't. It was her beauty that had first taken his breath away. Now that was gone. He had to look beyond its absence to the Jo-Beth he'd later come to love. That was going to be hard.

He looked away from her, towards the sea. The waves were thunderous.

"We have to go back into Quiddity," he said.

"We can't!" she said. "I can't!"

"We've got no choice. It's the only way back."

"It did this to me," she said. "It changed me!"

"If we don't go now," Howie said, "we never go. It's as simple as that. We stay here and we die here."

"Maybe that's for the best," she said.

"How can that be?" Howie said. "How's dying for the best?"

"The sea'll kill us anyway. It'll twist us up."

"Not if we trust it. Give ourselves over to it."

He remembered, briefly, his journey here, floating on his back, watching the lights. If he thought the return trip would be so mellow he was kidding himself. Quiddity was no longer a tranquil sea of souls. But what other choice did they have?

"We can stay," Jo-Beth said again. "We can die here, together. Even if we got back#8212;" she started to sob again, "#8212;even if we got back I couldn't live like this."

"Stop crying," he told her. "And stop talking about dying. We're going to get back to the Grove. Both of us. If not for our sakes, then to warn people."

"About what?"

"There's something coming across Quiddity. An invasion. Heading home. That's why the sea's going wild."

The commotion in the sky above them was every bit as violent. There was no sign, either in sea or sky, of the spirit-lights. However precious these moments on the Ephemeris were, every last dreamer had forsaken the journey, and woken. He envied them the ease of that passage. Just to be able to snap out of this honor and find yourself back in your own bed. Sweaty, maybe; scared, certainly. But home. Sweet and easy. Not so for the trespassers like themselves, flesh and blood in a place of spirit. Nor, now he thought of it, for the others here. He owed them a warning, though he suspected his words would be ignored.

"Come with me," he said.

He took hold of Jo-Beth's hand and they headed back along the beach to where the rest of the survivors were gathered. Very little had changed, though the man who'd been lying in the waves had now gone, dragged away, Howie presumed, by the violence of the sea. Apparently nobody had gone to his aid. They were standing or sitting as before, their lazy gazes still on Quiddity. Howie went to the nearest of them, a man not much older than himself, with a face born for its present vacuity.

"You have to get out of here," he said. "We all have to."

The urgency in his voice did something to rouse the man from his torpor, but not much. He managed a wary "Yeah?" but did nothing.

"You'll die if you stay," Howie told him, then raised his voice above the waves to address them all. "You'll die!" he said. "You have to go into Quiddity, and let it take you back."

"Where?" said the young man.

"What do you mean, where?"

"Back where?"

"To the Grove. The place you came from. Don't you remember?"

There was no answer forthcoming from any of them. Maybe the only way to get an exodus going was to start it, Howie reasoned.

"It's now or never," he said to Jo-Beth.

There was still resistance, both in her expression and in her body. He had to take firm hold of her hand and lead her down towards the waves.

"Trust me," he said.

She didn't answer him, but nor did she fight to stay on the beach. A distressing docility had come over her, its only virtue, he thought, that maybe Quiddity would leave her alone this time. He was not so sure it would treat him with such indifference. He was by no means as detached from high emotion as he'd been on the outward journey. There were all kinds of feelings running rife in him, any or all of which Quiddity might want to make play with. Fear for their lives ranked highest, of course. Close after, the confusion of repugnance at Jo-Beth's condition and his guilt at that repugnance. But the message in the air was urgent enough to keep him moving down the beach in spite of such anxieties. It was almost a physical sensation now, which reminded him of some other time in his life, and of course of some other place; a memory he couldn't quite grasp. It didn't matter. The message was unambiguous. Whatever the Iad were, they brought pain: relentless, unendurable. A holocaust in which every property of death would be explored and celebrated but the virtue of cessation, which would be postponed until the Cosm was a single human sob for release. Somewhere he'd known a hint of this before, in a little corner of Chicago. Perhaps his mind was doing him service, refusing to remember where.

The waves were a yard ahead, rising in slow arcs and booming as they broke.

"This is it," he said to Jo-Beth.

Her only response#8212;one he was mightily grateful for#8212; was to tighten her hold on his hand, and together they stepped back into the transforming sea.

The door of the Nguyen house was answered to Grillo, not by Ellen, but by her son. "Is your mom in?" he asked.

The boy still looked far from well, though he was no longer dressed for bed, but in grubby jeans and a grubbier T-shirt.

"I thought you'd gone away," he said to Grillo.

"Why?"

"Everybody else has."

"That's right."

"You want to come in?"

"I'd like to see your mom."

"She's busy," Philip said, but opened the door anyway. The house was even more of a shambles than it had been before, the remains of several ad hoc meals spread around. The creations of a child gourmet, Grillo guessed: hot dogs and ice cream.

"Where is your mom?" Grillo asked Philip.

He pointed in the direction of the bedroom, picked up - plate of half-devoured food, and wandered away.

"Wait," Grillo said. "Is she ill?"

"Nope," said the boy. He looked as though he hadn't slept a full eight hours in weeks, Grillo thought. "She doesn't come out any more," he went on. "Except at night."

He waited for Grillo to answer with a nod, then headed to his room, having supplied all the information he felt obliged to offer. Grillo heard the boy's door close, leaving him to ponder the problem alone. Recent events hadn't given him much time for erotic daydreams, but the hours he'd spent here, in the very room where Ellen had holed herself up, exercised a strong hold on his mind and groin. Despite the hour of the morning, his general fatigue, and the desperation of circumstances in the Grove, a part of him wanted to conclude the business left unfinished last time: to make proper love to Ellen just once before he took the trip underground.

He crossed to Ellen's door, and knocked on it. The only sound from inside was a moan.

"It's me," he said. "Grillo. Can I come in?"

Without waiting for a reply he turned the handle. The door was not locked#8212;it opened half an inch#8212;but something prevented it from opening further. He pushed a little harder, and harder still. A chair, wedged under the handle on the far side, slid noisily to the floor. Grillo opened the door.

At first he thought she was alone in the room. Sick, and alone. She lay on an unmade bed in her dressing gown, which was untied, and spread open. Beneath, she was naked. Only very slowly did she turn her face in his direction, and when she did#8212;her eyes gleaming in the stale murk#8212;it took her several seconds to rouse any reply to his appearance.

"Is it really you?" she said.

"Of course. Yes. Who else#8212;?"

She sat up a little way on the bed, and pulled the bottom of the gown across her body. She hadn't shaved since he'd been here, he saw. Indeed he doubted she had been out of the room very much. It smelled of prolonged occupation.

"You shouldn't...see, " she said.

"I've seen you naked before," he murmured. "I wanted to see again."

"I don't mean me," she replied.

He didn't understand her remark until her eyes fell away from him and went to the furthest corner of the room. His gaze went with hers. At their destination, deep in the shadows, was a chair. In the chair was what he'd taken, on entering the room, to be a heap of clothes. It was not. The paleness wasn't linen but bare skin, the folds those of a man sitting naked in the chair, his body bent almost double, so that his forehead rested on his clasped hands. They were tied together at the wrists. The cord that bound them went on down to his ankles, which it also bound together.

"This," Ellen said softly, "is Buddy."

At the sound of his name the man raised his head. Grillo hadn't seen more than the last remnants of Fletcher's army, but it had been enough to recognize the look they'd had when their half-life began to run out. He saw that look now. This was not the real Buddy Vance, but a figment of Ellen's imagination, something her desires had summoned and shaped. The face was still very much intact: perhaps she'd imagined that with more precision than the rest of his anatomy. It was deeply lined#8212;almost plowed#8212;but undeniably charismatic. When he sat completely upright the second most detailed part of him came into view. Tesla's gossip had, as ever, been reliable. The hallucigenia was hung like a donkey. Grillo stared, only to be shaken from his envy when the man spoke.

"Who are you to come in here?" he said.

The fact that this artifact had sufficient self-will to speak shocked him.

"Hush," Ellen told him.

The man looked across at her, struggling against his bonds.

"He wanted to leave last night," she told Grillo. "I don't know why."

Grillo did, but said nothing.

"I wouldn't let him, of course. He likes to be kept this way. We used to play this game a lot."

"Who is this?" Vance said.

"Grillo," Ellen replied. "I told you about Grillo." She pulled herself up on the bed, until her back was against the wall, her arms resting on her raised knees. She was presenting her cunt to Vance's gaze. He ogled it, gratefully, while she continued to speak. "I told you about Grillo," she said. "We made love, didn't we, Grillo?"

"Why?" Vance said. "Why are you punishing me?"

"Tell him, Grillo," Ellen said. "He wants to know."

"Yes," Vance said, his tone suddenly tentative. "Tell me. Please tell me."

Grillo didn't know whether to throw up or laugh. He thought the last scene he'd played out in this room had been perverse enough, but this was something else again. A dream of a dead man in bondage, begging to be castigated with a report of sex with his mistress.

"Tell him," Ellen said again.

The strange undertow in her demand gave Grillo voice.

"This isn't the real Vance," he said, taking pleasure in the idea of stripping her of this dream. But she was there ahead of him.

"I know that," she said, letting her head loll as she regarded her prisoner. "He's out of my mind." She kept staring at him. "And so am I."

"No," Grillo said.

"He's dead," she replied softly. "He's dead but he's still here. I know he isn't real but he's here. So I must be mad."

"No, Ellen...this is just because of what happened at the Mall. You remember? The burning man? You're not the only one."

She nodded, her eyes half closing.

"Philip..."she said.

"What about him?"

"He had dreams too."

Grillo thought of the boy's face again. The pinched look; the loss in his eyes.

"So if you know this...man isn't real, why the games?" he said.

She let her eyes close completely.

"I don't know..." she began, "...what's real or not any more." There was a sentiment that struck a chord, Grillo thought. "When he appeared I knew he wasn't here the way he used to be here. But maybe that doesn't matter."

Grillo listened, not wanting to break Ellen's train of thought. He'd seen so much that confounded him of late#8212; miracles and mysteries#8212;and in his ambition to be a witness to these sights he'd held himself at a distance. Paradoxically, that made the telling of the story a problem. And it was his problem too. He was eternally the observer, keeping feelings at bay for fear they touched him too deeply and so drowned out his hard-earned disinterestedness. Was that why what had happened on this bed held such sway over his imagination? To be disconnected from the essential act; become a function of somebody else's desire, somebody else's heat and intention? Did he envy that more than Buddy Vance's twelve inches?

"He was a great lover, Grillo," Ellen was saying. "Especially when he's burning up, because somebody else is where he wants to be. Rochelle didn't like to play that game."

"Didn't see the joke," Vance said, his eyes still on what was out of sight to Grillo. "She never#8212;"

"My God!" Grillo said, suddenly realizing. "He was here, wasn't he? He was here when you and I..." The thought took the words away. All he could manage was "...outside the door."

"I didn't know at the time," Ellen said softly. "It wasn't planned that way."

"Christ!" Grillo said. "It was all a performance for him. You set me up. You set me up to get your fantasy heated up."

"Maybe...I had a suspicion," she conceded. "Why are you so angry?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

"No, it isn't," she said, her tone all reason. "You don't love me. You don't even know me, or you wouldn't be so shocked. You just wanted something from me, and you got it."

Her account was accurate; and hurt. It made Grillo mean.

"You know this thing's not here forever," he said, jabbing his thumb at Ellen's prisoner; or more correctly, at the truncheon.

"I know," she said, her tone betraying some little sadness at this fact. "But none of us are, right? Even you."

Grillo stared at her, willing her to look around at him; see his pain. But she only had eyes for the fabrication. He gave up on the possibility, and delivered the message he'd come here with.

"I advise you to leave the Grove," he said. "Take Philip and leave."

"Why's that?" she said.

"Just trust me. There's a good chance the Grove won't even be standing tomorrow."

Now she deigned to look around at him.

"I understand," she said. "Close the door, will you, when you leave?"

"Grillo." It was Tesla who opened the door to Hotchkiss's house. "You meet some damn weird people."

He'd never thought of Hotchkiss as weird. A man in mourning, yes. An occasional drunkard; who wasn't? But he wasn't prepared for the level of the man's obsession.

At the back of the house was a room given over entirely to the subject of the Grove and the ground it was built on. Geological maps covered the walls, along with photographs, taken over a period of years, and neatly dated, of cracks in the streets and sidewalks. Tacked up alongside were newspaper cuttings. Their single subject: earthquakes.

The obsessive himself sat unshaven in the midst of this information with a cup of coffee in his hand and a look of weary satisfaction on his face.

"Didn't I say?" were his first words to Grillo. "Didn't I tell you? The real story's beneath our feet. Always was."

"You want to do it?" Grillo asked him. -

"What? The climb? Sure." He shrugged. "What the fuck? It'll kill us all, but what the fuck? The question is: do you want to do it?"

"Not much," Grillo said. "But I've got a vested interest. I want the whole story."

"Hotchkiss has got an extra angle you don't know about," Tesla said.

"What's that?"

"Any more coffee?" Hotchkiss asked Witt. "I need to sober up."

Witt dutifully went off to get refills.

"Never liked that man," Hotchkiss remarked.

"What was he, the town flasher?" Tesla said.

"Shit, no. He was Mr. Clean. Everything I used to despise about the Grove."

"He's coming back," Grillo said.

"So what?" Hotchkiss went on, as Witt stepped into the room. "He knows. Don't you, William?"

"Know what?" Witt said.

"What a shithead you were."

Witt took the insult without a flicker.

"Never much liked me, right?"

"Right."

"And I never much liked you," Witt replied. "For what it's worth."

Hotchkiss smiled. "Glad we got that sorted out," he said.

"I want to know about this angle," Grillo said.

"Simple really," Hotchkiss said. "I got a call in the middle of the night, from New York. A guy I hired when my wife left, to find her. Or try at least. His name's D'Amour. He specializes#8212;I guess#8212;in supernatural stuff."

"Why'd you hire him?"

"My wife got involved with some very peculiar people after our daughter's death. She never really accepted that Carolyn was gone from us. She tried contacting her through spiritualists. Eventually joined a spiritualist church. Then she ran off."

"Why look for her in New York?" Grillo asked.

"She was born there. It seemed the likeliest place for her to go."

"And did D'Amour find her?"

"No. But he dug up a whole bunch of stuff about the church she'd joined. I mean...this guy knew what he was doing."

"So why did he call you?"

"He's coming to that," said Tesla.

"I don't know who D'Amour's contacts are, but the call was a warning."

"About what?"

"About what's happening here in the Grove."

"He knew?"

"Oh he knew all right."

"I think that maybe I should talk to him," Tesla said. What time's it in New York?"

"Just after noon," said Witt.

"You two make whatever arrangements you need to make about the climb," she said. "Where's D'Amour's number?"

"Here," Hotchkiss said, passing a pad over to Tesla. She pulled off the top sheet, with the digits and the name (Harry M. D'Amour, Hotchkiss had written) scrawled on it, and left the men to their deliberations. There was a phone in the kitchen. She sat down, and dialled the eleven numbers. It rang at the other end. An answering machine picked up.

"There's nobody here to take your call at the moment. Please leave a message after the beep. "

She started to do so. "This is a friend of Jim Hotchkiss, in Palomo Grove. My name's#8212;"

A voice broke into her message.

"Hotchkiss has friends?" it said.

"Is this Harry D'Amour?"

"Yeah. Who's this?"

"Tesla Bombeck. And yeah, he does have friends."

"Every day you learn something. What can I do for you?"

"I'm calling from Palomo Grove. Hotchkiss says you know what's going on here."

"I've got some idea, yeah."

"How?"

"I've got friends," D'Amour said. "People plugged in. They've been saying for months something was going to break out on the West Coast, so nobody's that surprised. Saying a lot of prayers, but not surprised. What about you? Are you one of the few?"

"You mean psychic? No."

"So what have you got to do with all this?"

"It's a long story."

"So cut to the chase," said D'Amour. "That's a movie expression."

"I know," Tesla said. "I work in movies."

"Oh yeah. What as?"

"I write them."

"You written anything I'd know? I see a lot of movies. Keeps my mind off my work."

"Maybe we'll meet sometime," Tesla said. "Talk about movies. Meanwhile, I need your take on a few things."

"Like what?"

"Well, for one: have you ever heard of the Iad Uroboros?"

There was a long, long-distance silence.

"D'Amour? Are you still there? D'Amour?"

"Harry," he said.

"Harry. So...have you heard of them or not?"

"As it happens, yes."

"Who from?"

"Does it matter?"

"As it happens, yes," Tesla returned. "There's sources and sources. You know that. People you trust and those you don't."

"I work with a woman called Norma Paine," D'Amour said. "She's one of the people I was talking about before. She's plugged in."

"What does she know about the Iad?"

"First," D'Amour said. "Around dawn something happened on the East Coast, in dreamland. Do you know why?"

"I've got a good idea."

"Norma keeps talking about a place called Oddity."

"Quiddity," Tesla corrected him.

"So you do know."

"No need for the trick questions. Yes, I know. And I need to hear what she has to say about the Iad."

"That they're the things about to break out. She's not sure where. She gets mixed messages."

"Do they have any weaknesses?" Tesla said.

"Not from what I hear."

"Just how much do you know about them? I mean, what will an Iad invasion be like? Are they going to bring an army through from Quiddity? Are we going to see machines, bombs, what? Shouldn't somebody be trying to tell the Pentagon?"

"The Pentagon already knows," D'Amour said.

"It does?"

"We're not the only people who've heard of the Iad, lady. People all over the world have got images of it built into their culture. They're the enemy. "

"You mean like the Devil? Is that what's coming through? Satan?"

"I doubt it. I think we Christians have always been a little naive," D'Amour said. "I've met demons, and they never look the way you think they're going to look."

"Are you kidding me? Demons? In the flesh? In New York?"

"Listen, it doesn't sound any more sane to me than it does to you, lady#8212;"

"My name's Tesla."

"Every time I finish one of these damn investigations I end up thinking: maybe that didn't happen. Till the next time. Then it's the same damn-fool process. You deny the possibility till it tries to bite off your face."

Tesla thought of the sights she'd seen in the last few days: the terata, Fletcher's death, the Loop, and Kissoon in the Loop; the Lix, seething on her own bed; finally, the Vance house, and the schism it contained. She couldn't deny any of that. She'd seen those sights, in hard focus. Almost been killed by them. D'Amour's talk of demons came as a shock only because the vocabulary was so archaic. She didn't believe in the Devil or Hell. The idea of demons in New York was therefore fundamentally absurd. But suppose what he called demons were the products of corrupt men of power like Kissoon? Things like the Lix, made of shit, semen and babies' hearts? She'd believe in them then, wouldn't she?

"So," she said. "If you know, and the Pentagon knows, why's there nobody here in the Grove now, to stop the Iad appearing? We're holding the fort with four guns, D'Amour#8212;"

"Nobody knew where the breakout would happen. I'm sure there's a file on the Grove somewhere, as a place where things weren't quite natural. But that's a long, long list."

"So we can expect help soon?"

"I'd guess so. But in my experience it usually comes too late."

"What about you?"

"What about me?"

"Any chance of help?"

"I've got problems here," D'Amour said. "There's all hell breaking loose. There've been a hundred and fifty cases of double suicides in Manhattan alone in the last eight hours."

"Lovers?"

"Lovers. Sleeping together for the first time. Dreaming of the Ephemeris, and getting a nightmare instead."

"Jesus."

"Maybe they did the right thing," D'Amour said. "At least they're out of it."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I think what those poor bastards saw for themselves we all guess, right?"

She remembered the lurching pain she'd felt as she'd come off the freeway the night before. The world tipping towards a maw.

"Yeah," she said. "We guess it."

"We're going to see a lot of folks responding to that in the next few days. Our minds are very finely balanced. Doesn't take much to push them over the edge. I'm in a city full of people ready to fall. I have to be here."

"And if the cavalry doesn't turn up?" Tesla said.

"Then somebody giving the orders in the Pentagon is a disbeliever#8212;and there's plenty of those#8212;or he's working for the Iad."

"They've got agents?"

"Oh yes. Not many, but enough. People have been worshipping the Iad, by other names. For them this is the Second Coming."

"There was a first?"

"That's another story, but yes, apparently there was."

"When?"

"There's no reliable accounts, if that's what you're asking. Nobody knows what the Iad look like. I think we should just pray they're the size of mice."

"I don't pray," Tesla replied.

"You should," D'Amour replied. "Now that you know how much is out there besides us, it makes sense. Look, I've got to go. I wish I could be more use."

"I wish you could."

"But the way I hear it, you're not completely alone."

"I've got Hotchkiss, and a couple of#8212;"

"No. I mean, Norma says there's a savior out there."

Tesla kept her laughter to herself.

"I don't see any savior," she replied. "What should I be looking for?"

"She's not sure. Sometimes she says it's a man, sometimes a woman. Sometimes not even human."

"Well that makes for easy identification."

"Whoever it is, he, she or it may just swing the balance."

"And if they don't?"

"Move out of California. Quick."

Now she did laugh, out loud. "Thanks a bunch," she said.

"Stay happy," D'Amour replied. "As my father used to say, you shouldn't have joined if you couldn't take a joke."

"Joined what?"

"The race," D'Amour said, and put down the phone. The line buzzed. She listened to the noise, and distant conversations laced through it. Grillo appeared at the door.

"This is looking more and more like a suicide trip," he announced. "We don't have the proper equipment, and we don't have any map of the system we're going into."

"Why not?"

"They don't exist. Apparently the whole town's built on ground which keeps shifting."

"Do you have any alternatives?" Tesla said. "The Jaff's the only man#8212;" She stopped for a moment.

"What?" Grillo said.

"I don't suppose he's really a man, is he?" she said.

"I don't follow."

"D'Amour said there was a savior in the vicinity. Someone not human. That has to be the Jaff, right? Nobody else fits the description."

"I don't see him as much of a savior," Grillo said.

"Then we'll have to persuade him," came the answer. "If it crucifies him."

The police had arrived in the Grove by the time Tesla, Witt, Hotchkiss, and Grillo left the house to start the descent. Lights were flashing at the top of the Hill; and ambulance sirens wailing. Despite all this din and activity there was no sign of any of the town's occupants, though presumably some of them were still in residence. They were either holed up with their deteriorating dreams, as Ellen Nguyen had been, or locked away, mourning their passing. The Grove was effectively a ghost-town. When the siren wails wound down there was a hush through the four villages more profound than any midnight. The sun beat down on empty sidewalks, empty yards, empty driveways. There were no children playing on the swings; no sound of televisions, radios, lawn-mowers, food-mixers, air conditioners. The lights still flipped colors at the intersections, but#8212;excepting patrol-cars and ambulances, whose drivers ignored them anyway#8212;nobody was on the roads. Even the packs of dogs they'd seen in the gloom before dawn had gone about business that didn't bring them into the open. The sight of the brilliant sun, shining upon the empty town, had spooked even them.

Hotchkiss had made a list of items they were going to need if they were to have a hope of making the proposed descent: ropes, torches and a few articles of clothing. So the Mall was first stop on the journey. Of the quartet it was William who was most distressed by the place when they got there. Every day of his working life he'd seen the Mall bustling, from early morning to early evening. Now there was nobody. The new glass in the store-fronts that had been damaged by Fletcher gleamed, the products stacked in the windows beckoned, but there were neither buyers nor sellers. The doors were all locked; the stores silent.

There was one exception: the pet store. Unlike every other business in the Mall it was open for business as usual, its door wide, its products yapping, squawking and making a general hullabaloo. While Hotchkiss and Grillo went to pillage their way through the shopping list, Witt took Tesla into the pet store. Ted Elizando was at work refilling the drip-feed water bottles along the rows of kittens' cages. He didn't look surprised to see customers. He didn't express anything in fact. Not even recognition of William, though from their first exchange Tesla gathered they knew each other.

"All alone this morning, Ted?" Witt said.

The man nodded. He hadn't shaved in two or three days; nor showered. "I...didn't want to get up, really...but I had to. For the animals."

"Of course."

"They'd die if I didn't look after them," Ted went on, with the slow, studied speech of one who was trying hard to keep his thoughts coherent. As he spoke he opened up the cage beside him and brought one of the kittens out from a nest of newspaper strips. It lay along his arm, head in the crook. He stroked it. The animal enjoyed the attention, arching its back to meet each slow motion of his hand.

"I don't think there's anybody left in town to buy them," William said.

Ted stared at the kitten.

"What am I going to do?" he asked softly. "I can't feed them forever, can I?" His voice dropped in volume with every word, until he was barely whispering. "What's happened to everyone?" he said. "Where did they go? Where did everyone go?"

"Away, Ted," William said. "Out of town. And I don't think they're going to be coming back."

"You think I should go too?" Ted said.

"I think maybe you should," William replied.

The man looked devastated.

"What will the animals do?" he said.

For the first time#8212;witnessing Ted Elizando's misery#8212; Tesla was struck by the scale of the Grove's tragedy. When she'd first wandered through its streets, message-carrying for Grillo, she'd plotted its fictional overthrow. The bomb-in-a-suitcase scenario, with apathetic Grovers throwing the prophet out just as the big bang came. That narrative had not been wide of the mark. The explosion had been slow and subtle rather than quick and hard, but it had come nevertheless. It had cleared the streets, leaving only a few#8212;like Ted#8212;to wander in the ruins, picking up whatever shreds of furry life remained. Her scenario had been a sort of imagined revenge upon the cozy, smug existence of the town. But in retrospect she'd been as smug as the Grove, as certain of her moral superiority as it had been of its invulnerability. There was real pain here. Real loss. The people who'd lived in the Grove, and fled it, had not been cardboard cut-outs. They'd had lives and loves, families, pets; they'd made their homes here thinking they'd found a place in the sun where they'd be safe. She had no right to judge them.

She couldn't bear to go on looking at Ted, who stroked the kitten with such tenderness, as though it was all he had of sanity. She left Witt to talk with him and went out into the brightness of the lot, walking around the corner of the block to see if she could locate Coney Eye among the trees. She studied the top of the Hill until she made out the row of shaggy palms that led up to the driveway. Just visible between them was the brightly colored facade of Buddy Vance's dream house. It was small comfort, but at least the fabric of the building was still standing. She'd feared the hole inside would simply keep getting bigger, unknitting reality until it consumed the house. She dared not hope it had simply closed up#8212;her gut knew that not to be the case. But as long as it had stabilized that was something. If they could move quickly, and locate the Jaff, perhaps some way of undoing the damage he'd done could be found.

"See anything?" Grillo asked her. He was coming around the corner with Hotchkiss, both weighed down with booty: loops of rope, torches, batteries, a selection of sweaters.

"It'll be cold down there," Hotchkiss explained when she queried them. "Damn cold. And probably wet."

"We get a choice," Grillo said with forced good humor. "Drown, freeze or fall."

"I like options," she said, wondering if dying a second time would be as distasteful as the first. Don't even think about it, she told herself. There's no second resurrection for you.

"We're ready," Hotchkiss said. "Or as ready as we'll ever be. Where's Witt?"

"He's at the pet store," she told him. "I'll go get him."

She headed back around the corner to find that Witt had left the store and was gazing through another window.

"Seen something?" she asked.

"These are my offices," he said. "Or were. I used to work there." He pointed a finger to the glass. "At the desk with the plant."

"Dead plant," she observed.

"It's all dead," Witt said, with a kind of vehemence.

"Don't be so defeatist," she told him, and hurried him back to the car, which Hotchkiss and Grillo had already finished loading up with equipment.

As they drove Hotchkiss laid his concerns out, plain and simple:

"I already told Grillo," he said, "that this is a completely suicidal thing for us all to be doing. Especially you," he said, catching Tesla's eye in the mirror. He didn't expand on that observation, but passed straight on to practicalities. "We haven't got any of the necessary equipment. The stuff we found in the stores is for domestic use; it won't save our lives in a crisis. And we're untrained. All of us. I've made a few climbs myself, but a long time ago. I'm really just a theoretician. And this is no easy system. There's good reason why Vance's corpse wasn't brought up. Men died down there#8212;"

"That wasn't because of the caves," Tesla said. "It was the Jaff."

"But they didn't go back in," Hotchkiss pointed out. "God knows, nobody wanted to leave a man down there without a decent burial, but enough was enough."

"You were ready to take me down," Grillo reminded him. "Just a few days ago."

"That was you and me," Hotchkiss said.

"Meaning that you didn't have a woman along?" Tesla said. "Well let's be real clear about this. Going underground when it looks like half the world's caving in isn't my idea of fun, but I'm as good as any man at anything that doesn't need a dick. I'm no more of a liability than Grillo. Sorry, Grillo, but it's true. We'll get down there, safely. The problem isn't the caves, it's what's hiding in them. And I've got a better chance with the Jaff than any of you. I've met Kissoon; I've heard the same lies the Jaff was told. I've got half a clue as to why he became what he became. If we're to have any chance of persuading him to help us, I've got to do the persuading."

There was no response from Hotchkiss. He kept his silence, at least until they'd parked the car and were unloading the gear. Only then did he take up his instructions again. This time there were no overt references to Tesla.

"I propose to take the lead," he said. "With Witt following. You next, Miss Bombeck. Grillo can bring up the rear."

String o'pearls, Tesla thought, and me in the middle, presumably because Hotchkiss lacked faith in her muscle power. She didn't argue. He was leading this expedition, which she didn't doubt was every bit as foolhardy as he'd stated, and attempting to undermine his authority when they were about to make the descent was lousy politics.

"We've got torches," he went on, "two each. One for us to pocket, the other to tie around our necks. We couldn't find much in the way of protective headgear; we'll just have to make do with knitted hats. We've got gloves, some boots, two sweaters and two pairs of socks for everyone. Let's get to it."

They carried the gear through the trees to the clearing, and there kitted up. The woods were as silent now as they'd been in the early morning. The sun that beat so strongly on their backs, bringing them out into sweat as soon as they put on the extra layers of clothing, could not coax a single bird to song. Once dressed, they roped themselves together, about ten feet apart. Hotchkiss the theoretician knew his knots, and made play with the fact, tying them, particularly Tesla's, with a theatrical casualness. Grillo was the last to be added to the chain. He was sweating more heavily than anyone else, and the veins at his temples were almost as fat as the rope round his waist.

"Are you OK?" Tesla asked him as Hotchkiss sat on the edge of the fissure and swung his feet into the hole.

"I'm fine," Grillo replied.

"Never a great liar," she replied.

Hotchkiss had one last instruction.

"When we're down there," he said, "let's keep the chatter to the minimum, huh? We've got to preserve our energy. Remember, getting down's only half the trip."

"It's always faster on the way home," Tesla said.

Hotchkiss gave her a disparaging look, and began the descent.

The first few feet were relatively easy, but the privations began no more than ten feet down, when, maneuvering themselves through a space that only just allowed access, the sunlight disappeared so suddenly and so totally it was as if it had never existed. Their torches were feeble substitutes.

"We'll wait here a moment," Hotchkiss called back up. "Let's get our eyes accustomed to the dark."

Tesla could hear Grillo breathing hard behind her; almost panting.

"Grillo," she murmured.

"I'm OK. I'm OK."

It was easily said, but it was very far from the way he felt. The symptoms were familiar from previous attacks: in elevators stuck between floors, or a crowded subway. His heart was working up a sweat in his chest, and it felt like a wire was tightening around his throat. But these were just externalizations. The real fear was of a panic that would rise to such an unbearable pitch that his sanity would simply switch off like a lamp, and darkness become a continuum, outside and in. He had a regime of remedies#8212;pills, deep breathing; in extremis, prayer#8212;none of which were the least use to him now. All he could do was endure. He said the word to himself. Tesla heard.

"Did you say enjoy?" she said. "Some pleasure trip."

"Keep it quiet back there," Hotchkiss hollered from the front. "We're going to move off again."

They continued, in a silence broken only by grunts, and a single call from Hotchkiss warning that progress ahead was going to get steeper. What had been a zig-zag descent, squeezing between rocks thrown up by the rush of water when the Nunciates had escaped, now became a straight climb down a shaft whose bottom was untouched by their torch-beams. It was deadly cold, and they were glad of the layers of clothing Hotchkiss had demanded they wear, though their bulk impeded easy movement. The rock beneath their gloves was wet in places, and twice sprays of water, hitting a shelf on the opposite side of the shaft, caught them.

The sum of discomforts left Tesla wondering what bizarre imperative drove men (surely they were all men: women wouldn't be so perverse) to pursue this as recreation. Was it, as Hotchkiss had said when she and Witt had first got to his house, that all the great secrets were underground? If so, she was keeping good company. Three men who could not have had stronger reasons for wanting to see those secrets and maybe haul one of them up into the light. Grillo, with his passion to tell the whole story to the world. Hotchkiss, still haunted by the memory of his daughter, who'd died because of events here. And Witt, who'd known the Grove to its length and breadth, but never to its depth, and was getting here a fundamental vision of the town he'd loved like a wife. There was another call from Hotchkiss, this one more welcome.

"There's a ledge down here," he said. "We can rest up a while." One by one they climbed down to join him. The ledge was wet, and narrow, only just affording space to accommodate them all. They perched there in silence. Grillo pulled a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket, and lit up.

"Thought you'd given up," Tesla remarked.

"So did I," he said. He passed the cigarette over to her. She took a lungful, savoring it, then passed it back to Grillo.

"Do we have any idea of how far down we have to go?" Witt asked.

Hotchkiss shook his head.

"But there is a bottom down there somewhere."

"Can't even say that."

Witt went down on his haunches and scrabbled around on the ledge.

"What are you looking for?" Tesla said.

He stood up again with the answer. A piece of rock the size of a tennis ball, which he tossed out into the darkness. There was silence for several seconds, then the sound of it striking the rock face below, shattering, and its pieces rattling away in all directions. It took a long time for the echoes to die, making it near impossible to tell anything about the distance below them.

"Good try," Grillo said. "It works in the movies."

"Wait up," Tesla said, "I hear water."

In the silence that followed her claim was verified. Water was running close by.

"Is that below us, or behind one of those walls?" Witt said. "I can't make it out."

"Could be both," Hotchkiss said. "There's two things that can stop us getting all the way down. A simple blockage, and water. If the system becomes flooded there's no way we can go on."

"Let's not get pessimistic," Tesla said. "Let's just go on."

"We already seem to have been here hours," Witt remarked.

"Time's different down here," Hotchkiss said. "We don't have the usual signals. Sun passing overhead."

"I don't tell the time by the sun."

"Your body does."

Grillo started to light up his second cigarette, but Hotchkiss said: "No time," and started to ease himself over the lip of the shelf. The drop was by no means straight down. Had it been, their lack of experience and equipment would have thrown them down the shaft after a few feet of the descent. But it was steep enough, and got steadily steeper, some stretches offering cracks and handholds that made for relatively easy progress, other stretches sheer, slippery and treacherous. These they descended almost inch by inch, Hotchkiss signalling to Witt where the best opportunities lay, Witt passing the message on to Tesla, and so on to Grillo. They kept such comments terse: breath and concentration were now at a premium.

They were just reaching the end of one such stretch when Hotchkiss called a halt.

"What is it?" Tesla said, looking down at him. The answer was one grim word.

"Vance," he said.

She heard Witt say oh Jesus in the darkness.

"We're at the bottom then," Grillo said.

"No," came the reply, "just another ledge."

"Shit."

"Is there a way around it?" Tesla called.

"Give me time," Hotchkiss snapped back, his voice betraying the shock he felt.

There was what seemed to be several minutes (but was probably less than one) during which they clung to whatever handhold they had while Hotchkiss surveyed the routes available to them. With one selected, he called them to begin the descent afresh.

The lack of light the torches offered had been galling, but now they offered too much. As the other three climbed past the ledge it was impossible not to look its way. There, sprawled on the glistening rock, was a bundle of dead meat. The man's head had cracked on the rock like a dropped egg. His limbs were bent back on themselves every which way, the bones surely broken from joint to joint. One hand was laid on the nape of his neck, palm up. The other was just in front of his face, its fingers a little open, as though he was playing hide and seek.

The sight was a reminder, if one were needed, of what a single slip on the descent might result in. They proceeded even more cautiously thereafter.

The sound of rushing water had diminished for a while but now it began afresh. This time it wasn't muted by the rock wall. It was clearly below them. They continued down towards it, taking time every ten feet or so for Hotchkiss to survey the darkness below them. He had nothing to report until the fourth such halt, when he called back over the din of water that there was good news and bad. The good, that the shaft ended here. The bad, that it was flooded.

"Is there no solid ground down there?" Tesla wanted to know.

"Not much," Hotchkiss replied. "And none of it looks reliable."

"We can't just climb straight back up," Tesla returned.

"No?" came the reply.

"No," she insisted. "We've come all this way."

"He's not down here," Hotchkiss yelled back.

"I want to see that for myself."

He didn't reply, though she pictured him cursing her in the darkness. After a few moments, however, he began the descent again. The din of the water became so loud any further conversation was out of the question, until they were finally gathered at the bottom, and could stand close to each other.

Hotchkiss had reported right. The small platform at the bottom of the shaft was no more than a collection of detritus, which the torrent was rapidly carrying away.

"This is recent," Hotchkiss said. As if to lend force to the observation the wall through which the flood broke crumbled a little more as he spoke, the force of water bearing a sizeable portion of it off into the roaring darkness. The water beat itself against the bank upon which they were standing with renewed gusto.

"If we're not out of here quick," yelled Witt over the din of the flood, "we're going to get washed away."

"I think we should begin back up," Hotchkiss agreed. "We've got a long climb ahead of us. We're all cold and tired."

"Wait!" Tesla protested.

"He's not here!" replied Witt.

"I don't believe that."

"What do you propose, Miss Bombeck?" Hotchkiss yelled.

"Well we can start by giving the Bombeck shit a rest, OK? Isn't it possible this stream's going to trickle out eventually?"

"Maybe. After a few hours. Meanwhile we'll freeze to death while we wait. And even if it stops#8212;"

"Yes?"

"Even if it stops we haven't got any clue which direction the Jaff went." Hotchkiss played his torch-beam around the shaft. It was only just strong enough to strike the four walls, but it was clear there were several tunnels leading off from this spot. "Want to make a guess?" Hotchkiss hollered.

The prospect of failure rose up and took a good long look at Tesla. She ignored it as best she could, but it was tough. She'd been too hopeful, thinking the Jaff would be simply sitting#8212;like a frog in a well#8212;waiting for them. He could have taken any one of the tunnels on the other side of the torrent. Some were probably cul-de-sacs; others led off to dry caverns. But even if they could walk on water (and she was out of practice) which would they choose? She put on her torch in order to scan the tunnels herself, but her fingers were numb with cold, and as she fumbled to turn the torch on it slid from her grasp, hitting the rock and rolling towards the water. She reached down to keep from losing it, and almost lost her balance with it, her foot#8212;perched on the eroding edge of the platform#8212;sliding across the wet rock. Grillo reached for her, snatching hold of her belt, and pulling her upright. The torch went into the water. She watched it go, then turned to thank him, but the look of alarm on his face diverted her eyes to the ground beneath her and her thanks to a shout of alarm. Even that never came, as the flood had its way with their little beach of rocks, finding a keystone that, once washed away, brought the capitulation of the rest.

She saw Hotchkiss fling himself at the shaft wall to find a purchase before the water took them. But he wasn't quick enough. The ground went from under him, under them all, and they were pitched into the brutally cold water. It was as violent as it was cold, seizing them in an instant and carrying them away, throwing them back and forth in a dark blur of hard water and harder rock.

Tesla managed to grab hold of somebody's arm in the torrent, Grillo's she thought. She managed to hold on for fully two seconds#8212;no mean achievement#8212;then a curve in the passage threw the torrent into fresh fits, and they were pulled apart. There was a passage of total confusion, the water a frenzy, then#8212;suddenly#8212;it became still, as it broke out into a wide, shallow place, its speed slowing sufficiently for Tesla to lay her arms out to either side of her and steady herself. There was no light whatsoever, but she felt the weight of the other bodies on the rope, and heard Grillo gasping behind her.

"Still alive?" she said.

"Just."

"Witt? Hotchkiss? You there?"

There was a moan from Witt, and from Hotchkiss an answering holler.

"I dreamed this..." she heard Witt say. "I dreamed I swam."

She didn't want to think about what it might mean for them all if Witt had dreamed of swimming#8212;of Quiddity#8212;but the thought was there anyhow. Three times to the dream-sea: at birth, in love, and on death's door.

"I dreamed this..." he said again, more softly now.

Before she could hush his prophecies she realized the speed of the water had picked up again, and there was a growing roar from the darkness ahead.

"Oh shit," she said.

"What?" Grillo yelled.

The water was really moving now, the din louder and louder.

"Waterfall," she said.

There was a tug on the rope, and a yell from Hotchkiss, not of warning but of horror. She had time to think pretend it's Disneyland then the tug became a hard pull and her black world tipped. The water encased her, a straitjacket of ice which pressed breath and consciousness out of her. When she came to Hotchkiss was hauling her face clear of the water. The cataract they'd ridden down was roaring beside them, its fury turning the water white. It didn't register that she could see, not until Grillo surfaced beside them, spluttering, and said:

"Light!"

"Where's Witt?" Hotchkiss gasped. "Where's Witt?"

They scanned the surface of the pool they'd been delivered into. There was no sign of him. There was, however, solid ground. They swam for it as best they could; ragged, desperate strokes which brought them to dry rock. Hotchkiss was first out, and dragged her out after him. The rope between them had snapped somewhere on the ride. Her body was a numb, shuddering weight, and she could barely move it.

"Anything broken?" Hotchkiss said.

"I don't know," she said.

"We're done for now," Grillo murmured. "Jesus, we're in the bowels of the fucking earth."

"There's light coming from somewhere," Tesla gasped. She mustered what scraps of muscle-power she had to raise her head from the rock and look for the source of the light. The motion told her things weren't well with her. There was a spasm in her neck, which ran down to her shoulder. She yelped.

"Hurt?" Hotchkiss said.

She sat up gingerly. "All over," she said. Pain was getting through numbness in a dozen places: head, neck, arms, belly. To judge by the way Hotchkiss moaned as he began to stand up, he had the same problem. Grillo was simply staring at the water that had claimed Witt, his teeth chattering.

"It's behind us," Hotchkiss said.

"What is?"

"The light. It's coming from behind us."

She turned, the aches in her side becoming short stabbing pains. She tried to keep her complaints to herself, but Hotchkiss caught her intake of breath.

"Can you walk?" he said.

"Can you?" she returned.

"Competition?" he said.

"Yeah."

She made a small sideways glance at him. There was blood coming from the region of his right ear, and he was nursing his left arm with his right.

"You look like shit," she said.

"So do you."

"Grillo? Are you coming?"

There was no reply; only chattering teeth.

"Grillo?" she said.

He had turned his eyes from the water and was looking up at the roof of the cavern.

"It's on top of us," she heard him murmur. "All that earth. On top of us."

"It's not going to fall," Tesla said. "We're going to get out."

"No we're not. We're fucking buried alive! We're buried alive!"

He was suddenly on his feet, and the chattering had become ringing sobs. "Get me out of here! Get me out of here!"

"Shut up, Grillo," Hotchkiss said, but Tesla knew no words were going to stop the panic running its course. She let him sob, and started towards the crack in the wall through which the light was coming.

It's the Jaff, she thought as she went. It can't be daylight, so it must be the Jaff. She'd planned what she was going to say to him, but the persuasions had been sluiced out of her head. All she could do was wing it. Confront the man and hope her tongue would do the rest.

Behind her, she heard Grillo's sobs stop, and Hotchkiss say:

"That's Witt."

She looked around. Witt's body had come to the surface of the pool, and was lying face down in the water, some way from the shore. She didn't stare, but turned back towards the crack and headed on, her pace painfully slow. She had a distinct sense of being drawn to the light, that sense stronger the closer she got, as though her cells, touched by the Nuncio, sensed the proximity of someone similarly touched. It gave her weary body the necessary momentum to cross to the crack. She leaned against the stone, and peered in. The cavern beyond was smaller than the one she was leaving. In the middle was what on first viewing she took to be a fire, but it was only a distant relation. The light it gave off was cold, and its flickering was far from steady. There was no sign of its maker.

She stepped inside, announcing her presence to be certain he didn't misread her approach and attack.

"Anyone here?" she said. "I want to speak with...with Randolph Jaffe."

She chose to call him by that name in the hope of appealing to the man he'd been rather than the Artist he'd aspired to being. It worked. From a fissure in the furthest corner of the chamber a voice as fatigued as her own emerged.

"Who are you?"

"Tesla Bombeck."

She started towards the fire, using it as an excuse to enter. "Don't mind do you?" she said, stripping off her sodden gloves and extending her palms to the joyless flames.

"There's no heat," Jaffe said. "It's not a real fire."

"So I see," she said. The fuel looked to be rotted matter of some kind. Terata. The smoky glow which she'd taken for flame was the last vestiges of their decay.

"Looks like we're on our own," she said.

"No," he said. "I'm on my own. You've brought people."

"Yes. I have. You know one of them. Nathan Grillo?"

The name brought Jaffe out of hiding.

Twice she'd seen insanity in his eyes. Once at the Mall, pointed out by Howie. The second time when he'd stumbled out of the Vance house, leaving the schism he'd opened roaring behind him. Now she saw it a third time, but intensified.

"Grillo is here?" he said.

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why are you here?"

"To find you," she explained. "We need...we need your help."

The lunatic eyes swivelled in Tesla's direction. There was, she thought, some vague other form hovering around him, like a shadow thrown through smoke. A head swollen to grotesque proportions. She tried not to think too hard about what it was, or what its appearance signified. There was only one issue here: getting this madman to unburden himself of his secrets. Best perhaps that she volunteered one of her own first.

"We've got something in common," she said. "Quite a few things in fact, but one in particular."

"The Nuncio," he said. "Fletcher sent you for it, and you couldn't resist it."

"That's true," she said, preferring to agree with him rather than argue and lose his attention. "But that's not the important thing."

"What is?"

"Kissoon," she said.

His eyes flickered.

"He sent you," he said.

Shit, she thought, that's blown it.

"No," she said quickly. "Absolutely not."

"What does he want from me?"

"Nothing. I'm not his go-between. He got me into the Loop for the same reason he got you in, all those years ago. You remember that?"

"Oh yes," he said, his voice totally devoid of color. "Difficult to forget."

"But do you know why he wanted you in the Loop?"

"He needed an acolyte."

"No. He needed a body. "

"Oh yes. He wanted that too."

"He's a prisoner there, Jaffe. The only way he could ever get out was by stealing a body."

"Why are you telling me this?" he said. "Haven't we got better things to do, before the end?"

"The end?"

"Of the world," he said. He put his back against the wall and allowed gravity to take him down on to his haunches. "That's what's going to happen, isn't it?"

"What makes you think that?"

Jaffe raised his hands in front of his face. They hadn't healed at all. The flesh had been bitten off down to the bone in several places. Two fingers and the thumb of his right hand had gone entirely.

"I get glimpses," he said, "of things Tommy-Ray is seeing. There's something coming..."

"Can you see what?" she asked him, eager for any clue, however small, as to the Iad's nature. Did they come bearing baubles or bombs?

"No. Just a terrible night. An everlasting night. I don't want to see it."

"You have to look," Tesla said. "Isn't that what Artists are supposed to do? To look and keep looking, even when the thing you're looking at is too much to bear. You're an Artist, Randolph#8212;"

"No. I'm not."

"You opened the schism didn't you?" she said. "I'm not saying I agree with your methods, I don't, but you did what nobody else dared do. Maybe could ever do."

"Kissoon planned it all this way," Jaffe said. "I see that now. He made me his acolyte even though I didn't know it. He used me."

"I don't think so," Tesla said. "I don't think even he could have plotted something so byzantine. How could he know you and Fletcher would discover the Nuncio? No. What happened to you wasn't planned...you were your own agent in this, not Kissoon's. The power's yours. And so's the responsibility."

She let her argument rest there for a little while, as much because she was exhausted as for any other reason. Jaffe didn't follow through. He just stared at the pseudofire, which would soon be guttering out, and then at his hands. It was only after a minute of this that he said:

"You came down here to tell me that?"

"Yes. Don't tell me I came on a fool's errand."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Help us."

"There's no help to be had."

"You opened the hole, you can close it."

"I'm not going near that house."

"I thought you wanted Quiddity," Tesla said. "I thought being there was your great ambition."

"I was wrong."

"You got all that way, just to discover you were wrong? What changed your mind?"

"You won't understand."

"Try me."

He looked back towards the fire. "That was the last of them," he said. "When the light goes, we're all in the dark."

"There must be other ways out of here."

"There are."

"Then we'll take one of them. But first...first...tell me why you changed your mind."

He took a lazy moment to contemplate his answer, or whether he was going to give it at all.

Then he said:

"When I first began looking for the Art, all the clues were about crossroads. Not all. But many. Yes, many. The ones that made any sense to me. And so I kept looking for a crossroads. I thought that was where I'd find the answer. Then Kissoon drew me into his Loop, and I thought, here he is, the last of the Shoal, in a hut in the middle of nowhere. No crossroads. I must have been wrong. And all that's happened since: at the Mission, in the Grove...none of it happened at a crossroads. I was being literal, you see. I've always been so damn literal. Physical. Actual. Fletcher thought of air and sky, and I thought of power and bone. He made dreams from people's heads, I made stuff from their guts and sweat. Always thinking the obvious. And all the time..." his voice was thickening with feeling; hatred in it, self-directed, "...all the time I didn't see. Until I used the Art, and realized what the crossroads were#8212;"

"What?"

He put the less injured of his hands to his shirt, fumbling inside it. There was a medallion around his neck, on a fine chain. He pulled, hard. The chain broke, and he tossed the symbol over to Tesla. She knew before she caught it what it was going to be. She'd played this scene once before, with Kissoon. But that time she'd not been ready to understand what she understood now, holding the Shoal's sign in her hand.

"The crossroads," she said. "This is its symbol."

"I don't know what symbols are any longer," he replied. "It's all one."

"But this stands for something," she said, looking again at the forms inscribed on the arm of the cross.

"To understand it is to have it," Jaffe said. "At the moment of comprehension it's no longer a symbol."

"Then...make me understand," Tesla said. "Because I look at this and it's still just a cross. I mean, it's beautiful an' all, but it doesn't mean a whole lot. There's this guy in the center, looks like he's being crucified, 'cept there's no nails. And then all these creatures."

"Doesn't it make any sense?"

"Maybe if I wasn't so tired."

"Guess."

"I'm not in the mood for guessing games."

A sly look came over Jaffe's face. "You want me to come with you#8212;help you stop whatever's coming through Quiddity#8212;but you haven't got any grasp of what's going on. If you did have, you'd understand what you've got in your hand."

She realized what he was proposing before he said it.

"So if I can work it out, you'll come?"

"Yeah. Maybe."

"Give me a few minutes," she said, looking down at the Shoal symbol with fresh eyes.

"A few?" he said. "What's a few? Five maybe. Let's say five. My offer's good for five minutes."

She turned the medallion over in her hand, suddenly self-conscious.

"Don't stare at me," she said.

"I like to stare."

"You're distracting me."

"You don't have to stay," he replied.

She took him at his word, and got up, her legs unsteady, returning to the crack she'd entered through.

"Don't lose it," he said, his tone almost satiric. "It's the only one I've got."

Hotchkiss was a yard beyond the entrance.

"You heard?" she said to him.

He nodded. She opened her palm and let him look at the medallion. The sole light source, the decaying terata, was fitful, but her eyes were well accustomed to it by now. She could read the expression of befuddlement on Hotchkiss's face. There'd be no revelations from that source.

She claimed the medallion from his fingers and looked over to Grillo, who hadn't moved.

"He's fallen apart," Hotchkiss said. "Claustrophobia."

She went to him anyway. He wasn't staring at the ceiling any longer, nor at the body in the water. His eyes were closed. His teeth were chattering.

"Grillo."

He chattered on.

"Grillo. It's Tesla. I need your help."

He shook his head; a small, violent motion.

"I have to know what this means."

He didn't even open his eyes to find out what she was talking about.

"Thanks a bunch, Grillo," she said.

On your own, babe. No help to be had. Hotchkiss doesn't get it, Grillo won't; and Witt's dead in the water. Her eyes went to the body, momentarily. Face down, arms spread. Poor bastard. She'd not known him at all, but he'd seemed decent enough.

She turned away, opened her palm, and looked at the medallion again, her concentration completely fucked by the fact that the seconds were ticking by.

What did it mean?

The figure in the center was human. The forms that spread from it were not. Were they familiars, maybe? Or the central figure's children? That made more sense. There was a creature between the spread legs like a stylized ape; beneath that something reptilian; beneath that#8212;

Shit! They weren't children, they were ancestors. It was devolution. Man at the center, ape below; lizard, fish and protoplasm (an eye, or a single cell) below that. The past is below us, Hotchkiss had said once. Maybe he'd been right.

Assuming that to be the correct solution, what did it imply about the designs on the other three arms? Above the figure's head something seemed to be dancing, its head huge. Above that the same form, only simplified; and again above that, a simplification, which reached its conclusion as another eye (or single cell) which echoed the shape below. In the light of the first interpretation this wasn't so difficult to understand. Below were images of life leading up to man; above, surely, beyond man, the species elevated to a perfect spiritual state.

Two out of four.

How long did she have?

Don't think about the time, she told herself, just solve the problem.

Reading from right to left across the medallion, the sequence was by no means as easy as south to north. At the extreme left was another circle, with something like a cloud in it. Beside it, closer to the figure's outstretched arm, a square, divided into four; closer still what looked to be lightning; then a splash of some kind (blood from the hand?); then the hand itself. On the other side a series of even less comprehensible symbols. What might have been another spurt from the figure's left hand; then a wave, perhaps, or snakes (was she committing Jaffe's sin here? being too literal?); then what could only be described as a scrawl, as though some sign had been scratched out, and finally the fourth and final circle, which was a hole, bored in the medallion. From solid to insolid.

From a circle with a cloud to an empty space. What the hell did it mean? Was it day and night? No. Known and unknown, maybe? That made better sense. Hurry, Tesla, hurry. So what was round, and cloudy, and known?

Round, and cloudy. The world. And known. Yes. The world; the Cosm! which implied that the empty space on the other arm, the un-known, was the Metacosm! Which left the figure in the middle: the crux of the whole design.

She started back towards the cave, where Jaffe was waiting for her, knowing there could only be seconds left.

"I've got it!" she shouted through to him, "I've got it!" It wasn't quite true, but the rest would have to be instinct.

The fire inside the cave was very low, but there was a horrible brightness in Jaffe's eyes.

"I know what it is," she said.

"You do?"

"It's evolution on one axis, from a single cell to God-hood."

She knew by the look on his face that she'd got that part right at least.

"Go on," he said. "What's the other axis?"

"It's the Cosm and the Metacosm. It's what we know and what we don't know."

"Very good, "he said. "Very good. And in the middle?"

"Us. Human beings."

His smile spread. "No," he said.

"No?"

"That's an old mistake, isn't it? It's not as simple as that."

"But it's a human being, right there!" she said.

"You still see the symbol."

"Shit. I hate this! You're so damn smug. Help me!"

"Time's up!"

"I'm close! I'm really close, aren't I?"

"You see how it is? You can't work it out. Even with a little help from your friends."

"I didn't get any help. Hotchkiss can't do it. Grillo's lost his mind. And Witt's#8212;"

Witt's lying in the water, she thought. But didn't say that, because the image had suddenly struck her with revelatory force. He was lying sprawled in the water with his arms spread out and his hands open.

"My God," she said. "It's Quiddity. It's our dreams. It's not flesh and blood at the crossroads, it's the mind."

Jaffe's smile disappeared, and the light in his eyes got brighter; a paradoxical brightness that didn't illuminate but took light from the rest of the chamber, into itself.

"It is, isn't it?" she said. "Quiddity's the center of everything. It's the crossroads."

He didn't answer her. He didn't need to. She knew without the least doubt that she'd got it right. The figure was floating, in Quiddity, arms spread out as he, she, or it dreamed in the dream-sea. And somehow that dreaming was the place where everything originated: the first cause.

"No wonder," she said.

He spoke now as if from the grave.

"No wonder what?"

"No wonder you couldn't do it," she replied. "When you realized what you faced in Quiddity. No wonder."

"You may regret this knowledge," he said.

"I never regretted knowing anything in my life."

"You'll change your mind," he said. "I guarantee it."

She allowed him his sour grapes. But a deal was a deal, and she was ready to insist upon it.

"You said you'd come with us."

"I know I did."

"You will, won't you?"

"It's useless," he said.

"Don't try and get out of it. I know what's at stake here just as much as you do."

"And what do you propose we do about it?"

"We go back to the Vance house and we try and close the schism."

"How?"

"Maybe we have to take some advice from an expert."

"There are none."

"There's Kissoon," she said. "He owes us one. In fact he owes us several. But first, we have to get out of here."

Jaffe looked at her for a long time, as though he wasn't yet certain whether to acquiesce or not.

"If you don't do this," she said, "you'll end up here in the dark where you spent how long...twenty years? The Iad will break through and you'll be here, underground, knowing the planet's been taken. Maybe they'll never find you. You don't eat, do you? You're beyond eating. You can survive, perhaps a hundred years, a thousand years. But you'll be alone. Just you and the dark and certain knowledge of what you did. Does that sound tasty enough for you? Personally, I'd prefer to die trying to stop them getting through#8212;"

"You're not very persuasive," he said. "I can see right through you. You're a talkative bitch, but the world's full of them. Think you're clever. You're not. You don't know the first thing about what's coming. But me? I can see, I've got that fucking son of mine's eyes. He's moving towards the Metacosm, and I can feel what's up ahead. Can't see it. Don't want to. But I feel it. And let me tell you, we don't have a fucking chance."

"Is this some last-ditch effort to stay put?"

"No. I'll come. Just to watch the look on your face when you fail, I'll come."

"Then let's do it," she said. "You know a way out of here?"

"I can find one."

"Good."

"But first#8212;"

"Yes?"

He extended his less broken hand.

"My medallion."

Before they could begin the climb she had to coax Grillo from his catatonia. He was still sitting beside the water when she emerged from her conversation with Jaffe, his eyes closed tight.

"We're getting out of here," she said to him softly. "Grillo, do you hear me? We're getting out of here."

"Dead," he said.

"No," she told him. "We're going to be all right." She put her arm through his, the pains in her side stabbing her with every movement she made. "Get up, Grillo. I'm cold and it's going to get dark soon." Pitch black, in fact; the luminescence from the decaying terata was dimming fast. "There's sun up there, Grillo. It's warm. It's light."

Her words made him open his eyes.

"Witt's dead," he said.

The waves from the cataract had pushed the corpse to the shore.

"We're not going to join him," Tesla said. "We're going to live, Grillo. So get the fuck up."

"We...can't...swim up..."he said, looking at the cataract.

"There's other ways out," Tesla said. "Easier ways. But we have to be quick."

She looked across the chamber to where Jaffe was surveying the cracks in the walls, looking, she presumed, for the best exit. He was in no better shape than the rest of them, and a strenuous climb was going to be out of the question. She saw him call Hotchkiss over, and put him to work digging out rubble. He then moved on to survey other holes. It crossed Tesla's mind that the man didn't have any more clue how to get out of here than they did, but she distracted herself from that anxiety by returning to the business of getting Grillo to his feet. It took some more coaxing, but she succeeded. He stood up, his legs almost buckling beneath him until he rubbed some life back into them.

"Good," she said. "Good. Now let's go."

She allowed herself one last glance at Witt's body, hoping that wherever he was, it was a good place. If everybody got their own Heaven she knew where Witt would be now. In a celestial Palomo Grove: a small, safe town in a small, safe valley, where the sun always shone and the realty business was good. She silently wished him well, and turned her back on his remains, wondering as she did so if perhaps he'd known all along that he was going to die today, and was happier to be part of the foundation of the Grove than wasted in smoke from a crematorium.

Hotchkiss had been called away from his rubble-cleaning at one crack to the same duties on another, fuelling Tesla's unwelcome suspicion that Jaffe didn't know his way out of here. She went to Hotchkiss's aid, bullying Grillo out of his lethargy to do the same. The air from the hole smelled stale. There was no breath of anything fresh from above. But then perhaps they were too deep for that.

The work was hard, and harder still in the gathering darkness. Never in her life had she felt so close to complete collapse. There was no sensation in her hands whatsoever: her face was numb; her body sluggish. She was sure most corpses were warmer. But an age ago, somewhere in the sun, she'd told Hotchkiss she was as able as any man, and she was determined to make that claim good. She drove herself hard, pulling at the rocks with the same gusto as he did. But it was Grillo who did the bulk of the work, his eagerness undoubtedly fuelled by desperation. He cleared the largest of the rocks with a strength she'd not have thought him capable of.

"So," she said to Jaffe. "Do we go?"

"Yes."

"This is the way out?"

"It's as good as any," he said, and took the lead.

There began a trek that was in its way more terrifying than the descent. For one, they had only a single torch between them, which Hotchkiss, who followed after Jaffe, carried. It was pitifully inadequate, its light more like a beam for Tesla and Grillo to follow than a means to illuminate the path. They stumbled, and fell, and stumbled again, the numbness welcome in a way, postponing as it did any knowledge of what harm they were doing themselves.

The first part of the route didn't even take them up, it merely wound through several small compartments, the sound of water roaring in the rock around them. They passed along one tunnel that had clearly been a recent water-course. The mud was thigh-deep; and dripped from the ceiling on to their heads, for which, a little while on, they were duly grateful, when the passage narrowed to the point where had they not been slick with the stuff they'd have been hard pressed to squeeze through. Beyond this point they began to climb, the gradient gentle at first, then steepening. Now, though the sound of water diminished, there was a new threat in the walls: the grinding of earth on earth. Nobody said anything. They were too exhausted to waste breath on the obvious, that the ground that the Grove was built upon was in revolt. The sounds got louder the higher they climbed, and several times dust fell from the tunnel roof, spattering them in the darkness.

It was Hotchkiss who felt the breeze first.

"Fresh air," he said.

"Of course," said Jaffe.

Tesla looked back towards Grillo. Her senses were so whacked out she wasn't sure of them any longer.

"You feel it?" she said to him.

"I think so," he said, his voice barely audible.

The promise speeded their advance, though it was tougher going all the time, the tunnels actually shaking at several points, such was the violence of the motion in the ground around them. But there was more than a hint of clean air to coax them on now; there was the faintest suspicion of light somewhere above them, which became more of a certainty by and by, until they could actually see the rock they were climbing up, Jaffe hauling himself one-handed, with a strange, almost floating ease, as though his body weighed next to nothing. The others scrambled after, barely able to keep up with him despite the adrenaline that had begun to pump through their weary systems. The light was strengthening, and it was that which led them on, its glare making them squint. It continued to get brighter, and brighter still. They climbed to it with fervor now, all caution in their hand and footholds forgotten.

Tesla's thoughts were a ragged bundle of non sequiturs, more like daydreams than conscious thought. Her mind was too exhausted to organize itself. But time and again it visited the five minutes she'd had to solve the problem of the medallion. Quite why she only grasped as the sky finally came in sight: that this ascent from the darkness was like a climb out of the past; out of death, too. From the coldblooded thing to the warmblooded. From the blind and immediate to the far-sighted. Vaguely she thought: this is why men go underground. To remember why they live in the sun.

At the very last, with the brightness from above overwhelming, Jaffe stood back and let Hotchkiss overtake him.

"Changing your mind?" Tesla said.

There was more than doubt on his face, however.

"What's to be afraid of?" she asked him.

"The sun," he said.

"Are you two moving?" Grillo said.

"In a moment," Tesla told him. "You go on."

He pressed past them both, scrabbling up the remaining feet to the surface. Hotchkiss was already there. She heard him laughing to himself. Postponing the pleasure of joining him was hard but they hadn't come this far to leave their prize behind.

"I hate the sun," Jaffe said.

"Why?"

"It hates me."

"You mean it hurts? Are you some kind of vampire?"

Jaffe squinted up at the light.

"It was Fletcher who loved the sky."

"Well maybe you should learn something from him."

"It's too late."

"No it isn't. You've done some shit stuff in your time, but you've got a chance to make good. There's worse coming than you. Think about that."

He didn't respond.

"Look," she went on, "the sun doesn't care what you did. It shines on everyone, good and bad. I wish it didn't but it does."

He nodded.

"Did I ever tell you..." he said, "...about Omaha?"

"Don't try and put it off, Jaffe. We're going up."

"I'll die," he said.

"Then all your troubles will be over, won't they?" she said. "Come an!"

He stared hard at her, the gleam she'd seen in his eyes when they'd been in the cave entirely gone. Indeed there was nothing about him that signalled any supernatural capacity. He was completely unremarkable: a gray, wretched husk of a man, whom she wouldn't have given a second glance to on the street, except perhaps to wonder what trauma had brought him so low. They'd spent a lot of time, effort (and Witt's life) getting him out of the earth. He didn't look like much of a reward for that. Head bowed against the glare, he climbed on up the last few feet and into the sun. She followed, the brightness becoming dizzying, almost nauseating. She closed her eyes against it, until the sound of laughter made her open them.

It was more than relief that had Hotchkiss and Grillo chuckling to themselves. The route home had brought them out in the middle of the parking lot of the Terrace Motel.

"Welcome to Palomo Grove," the sign read. "The Prosperous Haven."

As Carolyn Hotchkiss had liked to remind her three best friends all those years ago, the earth's crust was thin, and the Grove had been built along a flaw in that crust, which would one day crack and drop the town into an abyss. In the two decades since she'd silenced her own prophecies with pills, the technology for predicting that moment had advanced by leaps and bounds. Hairline cracks could be mapped, their activity closely monitored. In the event of the big one the warnings would hopefully come fast enough to save the lives of millions, not only in San Francisco and Los Angeles, but in smaller communities like the Grove. None of these monitors and mapmakers, however, could have predicted the suddenness of events up at Coney Eye, or the scale of their consequences. The skewing of the interior of the Vance house had sent a subtle but persuasive message into the Hill, and out through the caves and tunnels below the town, urging a system that had been murmuring for years to roll over and shout. Though the most spectacular consequences of that mutiny occurred on the lower reaches of the Hill, where the ground opened up as though the big one was indeed underway, tipping one of the Crescents into a fissure two hundred yards long and twenty wide, every village sustained damage. The destruction didn't die down after the first shock-wave, as might have been expected with a conventional quake. It escalated, the message of anarchy spreading, minor subsidence becoming significant enough to devour houses, garages, sidewalks and stores. In Deerdell, the streets closest to the woods were the first to suffer damage, the few residents remaining warned of the coming destruction by a mass exodus of animals, who made their escape before the trees began to try to uproot themselves and follow. Failing, they fell. The houses followed soon after, street on street toppling like dominoes. Stillbrook and Laureltree sustained equally comprehensive damage, but without due warning or any discernible pattern. Crevasses opened suddenly in the middle of streets and back yards. Pools drained of water in a matter of seconds; driveways turned into models of the Grand Canyon. But whether arbitrary or systematic, sudden or signalled, in the end it came down to the same thing from village to village. The Grove was being swallowed up by the ground it had been built upon.

There were deaths, of course; many. But for the most part they went unnoticed, being those of people who'd stayed locked up alone in their houses for several days, nursing suspicions about the world they dared not take out into the light. Nobody missed them because nobody knew who'd left town and who'd stayed. The Gravers' show of solidarity, after that first night at the Mall, had been strictly cosmetic. There'd been no emergency community meetings called; no sharing of mutually held fears. As things got steadily worse families had simply sloped away, often by night, still more often without saying anything to the neighbors. The loners who'd remained were buried under the rubble of the roofs without anybody even knowing they'd been there in the first place. By the time the authorities became aware of how widespread the damage was, many of the streets were no-go areas, and finding the victims was a task for another day, when the more urgent issue of what had happened (and was still happening) in the Buddy Vance residence was not so pressing.

It had been apparent to the first investigators#8212;seasoned patrolmen who'd thought they'd seen everything#8212;that some power had been released in Coney Eye that wasn't going to be easily defined. An hour and a half after the first car reached Coney Eye, and the patrolman reported to his superiors the condition of the house, several FBI men were on the scene, and two professors#8212;a physicist and a geologist#8212;were on their way from L.A. The house was entered, and the phenomenon in its interior, which defied all easy explanation, judged to be potentially lethal. What was perfectly clear, among countless uncertainties, was the fact that the Grovers had somehow been aware of some fundamental disruption occurring (or about to occur) in their midst. They'd started to desert their town hours or perhaps days before. Why none of them had chosen to alert anyone beyond the perimeters of the Grove to the danger there was just one of countless mysteries the site presented.

Had the investigators known where to look they'd have had their answers from any one of the individuals who'd dragged themselves up out of the ground in front of the Terrace Motel. They'd probably have dismissed those answers as lunacy, but even Tesla#8212;who'd been passionately determined that Grillo not tell his story#8212;would have told it freely now, had she had the strength. The warmth of the sun, indeed the sight of it, had revived her somewhat, but it had also dried the mud and blood on her face and body, and sealed in the deep chill in her marrow. Jaffe had been the first to seek the shadows of the motel. After only a few minutes, she followed. The motel had been deserted by guests and staff alike, and with good reason. The fissure in the lot was one of many, the largest of which spread through the front door of the building, its cracks climbing its facade like earth-born lightning. Inside there were ample signs of how hurried a departure the last occupants had made, luggage and personal items scattered up and down the stairs, the doors that hadn't been unseated by the tremors thrown wide. She wandered along the row of rooms till she found some abandoned clothes, ran herself a shower, the water as hot as she could stand, stripped and stepped in. The warmth made her dreamy, and it was all she could do to drag herself out of its bliss and dry herself. There were mirrors, unfortunately. Her bruised, aching body was a pitiful sight. She covered it as quickly as possible, with items that neither fitted nor matched, which pleased her#8212;Hobo had always been her preferred aesthetic. While dressing she availed herself of cold coffee, left in the room. It was three-twenty when she emerged: almost seven hours since the four of them had driven to Deerdell to make the descent.

Grillo and Hotchkiss were in the office. They'd brewed hot coffee. They'd also washed, though not as thoroughly as she, instead scrubbing masks of clean skin out of the surrounding muck. They'd also stripped off their sodden sweaters and found jackets to wear. Both were smoking.

"We got it all," Grillo said, his manner that of a man profoundly embarrassed, and determined to brave it out. "Coffee. Cigarettes. Stale doughnuts. All we're missing's serious drugs."

"Where's Jaffe?" Tesla wanted to know.

"Don't know," Grillo said.

"What do you mean, you don't know?" Tesla said. "For Christ's sake, Grillo, we shouldn't let him out of our sight."

"He came this far, didn't he?" Grillo replied. "He's not going to walk away now."

"Maybe," Tesla conceded. She poured herself coffee. "Is there any sugar?"

"No, but there's pastries and cheesecake. Stale but edible. Somebody had a sweet tooth. You want?"

"I want," Tesla said. She sipped the coffee. "I suppose you're right#8212;"

"About the sweet tooth?"

"About Jaffe."

"He doesn't give a fuck for us," Hotchkiss said. "Makes me sick to look at him."

"Well, you've got reason," Grillo said.

"Damn right," said Hotchkiss. He gave Tesla a sideways glance. "When this is done with," he said, "I want him to myself. OK? We've got scores to settle."

He didn't wait for a reply. Taking his coffee he headed back out into the sun.

"What was that about?" Tesla said.

"Carolyn," Grillo said.

"Of course."

"He blames Jaffe for what happened to her. And he's right."

"He must be going through hell."

"I don't think the trip's anything new to him," Grillo said.

"I suppose not." She emptied her mug of coffee. "That's wired me for a while," she said. "I'm going to find Jaffe."

"Before you do#8212;"

"Yeah?"

"I just want to say...what happened to me down there...I'm sorry I wasn't more use. I've always had this thing about being buried alive."

"Sounds reasonable to me," Tesla said.

"I want to make it up to you. Want to help any way I can. Just say the word. I know you've got a take on all of this. I haven't."

"Not really."

"You persuaded Jaffe to come with us. How'd you do that?"

"He had a puzzle. I solved it."

"You make it sound real simple."

"Thing is, I think maybe the whole thing's simple. What we're facing's so big, Grillo, we just have to go on instinct."

"Yours was always better than mine. I like facts."

"They're simple too," she said. "There's a hole, and something coming through it from the other side which people like you and me don't even have the capacity to imagine. If we don't close the hole, we're fucked."

"And the Jaff knows how?"

"How what?"

"To close the hole."

Tesla stared at him.

"At a guess?" she said. "No."

She found him, of all places, on the roof, which was literally the last place in the motel she'd chosen to look. Surprisingly, he was engaged in the last activity she'd have expected from him. He was staring at the sun.

"I thought maybe you'd left us to our own devices," she said.,

"You were right," he replied, not looking at her. "It shines on everyone, good and bad. But it doesn't make me warm. I've forgotten what it was like to feel warm or cold. Or hungry. Or full. I miss that so much."

The sour self-confidence he'd evidenced in the caves had entirely drained from him. He was almost cowed.

"Maybe you'll get that back," she said. "The human stuff, I mean. Undo what the Nuncio did."

"I'd like that," he said. "I'd like to be Randolph Jaffe of Omaha, Nebraska. Turn the clock back and not go into that room."

"What room?"

"The Dead Letters Room at the Post Office," he said, "where all this began. I should tell you about that."

"I'd like to hear. But first#8212;"

"I know. I know. The house. The schism."

Now he did look at her; or rather, beyond her, at the Hill.

"We have to go up there sooner or later," she reminded him. "I'd prefer we do it now, while it's light, and I've got some energy left."

"And when we get there?"

"We hope for inspiration."

"That has to come from somewhere," he said. "And we've neither of us got gods, have we? That's what I've traded on all these years, people being godless. That's us now."

She remembered what D'Amour had said when she'd told him she didn't pray. Something about praying making sense once you knew how much there was out there.

"I'm coming round to being a believer," she said. "Slowly."

"A believer in what?"

"In higher forces," she said, with a faintly embarrassed shrug. "The Shoal had their aspirations, why shouldn't I?"

"Did they?" he said. "Were they guarding the Art because Quiddity had to be preserved? I don't think so. They were just afraid of what might break out. They were watch dogs."

"Maybe their duties elevated them."

"Into what? Saints? Didn't do much for Kissoon, did it? All he worshipped was himself. And the Iad."

That was a grim thought. What more perfect counterpoint to D'Amour's talk of faith in mysteries than Kissoon's revelation that all religions were masks for the Shoal; ways to keep the hoi-polloi distracted from the secret of secrets.

"I keep getting glimpses," Jaffe said, "of where Tommy-Ray is."

"What's it like?"

"Darker and darker," Jaffe replied. "He was moving for a long while, but now he's stopped. Maybe the tide's changed. There's something coming, I think, out of the darkness. Or maybe it is the darkness, I don't know. But it's getting closer."

"The moment he sees anything," Tesla said, "let me know. I want details."

"I don't want to look, with his eyes or mine."

"You may not have any choice. He's your son."

"He's failed me over and over. I don't owe him anything. He's got his phantoms."

"Perfect family unit," Tesla said. "Father, Son and#8212;"

"#8212;Holy Ghost," Jaffe said.

"That's right," she replied, another echo coming back to her from the past. "Trinity. "

"What about it?"

"That was what Kissoon was so afraid of."

"The Trinity?"

"Yeah. When he brought me into the Loop the first time, he dropped the name. It was an error, I think. When I challenged him on it he was so damn flustered he let me go."

"I never took Kissoon for a Christian," Jaffe remarked.

"Me neither. Maybe he meant some other god. Or gods. Some force the Shoal could invoke. Where's the medallion?"

"In my pocket. You'll have to get it for yourself. My hands are very weak."

He took them from his pockets. In the guttering light of the cave their mutilation had been sickening, but here in bright sunlight they were more disgusting still, the flesh blackened and dewy, the bone beneath crumbling.

"I'm coming apart," he said. "Fletcher used fire. I used my teeth. Both of us suicides. It's just that his was faster."

She reached into his pocket and took the medallion out.

"You don't seem to mind," she said.

"What about?"

"Falling apart."

"No, I don't," he admitted. "I'd like to die, the way I would have done if I'd stayed in Omaha and just got old. I don't want to live forever. What's the use of going on and on if you can't make sense of anything?"

The rush of pleasure she'd experienced solving the medallion's enigmas came back to her as she studied it. But there was nothing in the design, even when examined in daylight, which could be interpreted as a Trinity. There were quartets, certainly. Four arms, four circles. But no trios.

"This is no use," she said. "We could waste days trying to work it out."

"Work what out?" said Grillo, emerging into the sunlight.

"The Trinity," she said. "Have you any idea what that means?"

"Father, Son and#8212;"

"Besides the obvious."

"Then no, I don't. Why?"

"Just a little hope I had."

"How many Trinities can there be?" he said. "It shouldn't be that hard to find out."

"Where from? Abernethy?"

"I could start with him," Grillo said. "He's a Godfearing man. Or at least he claims to be. Is it that important?"

"At this stage everything's important," she said.

"I'll get on to it," he replied, "if the phone lines are still working. You just want to know#8212;"

"Anything about the Trinity. Anything. "

"Hard facts, that's what I like," he said. "Hard facts."

He headed off down the stairs. As he did so Tesla heard Jaffe mutter:

"Look away, Tommy. Just look away#8212;"

He'd closed his eyes. Now he began to shake.

"Can you see them?" she said to him.

"It's so dark."

"Can you see them?"

"I can see something moving. Something huge. So huge. Why don't you move, boy? Get away before they see you. Move!"

His eyes suddenly sprang open.

"Enough!" he said.

"Have you lost him?" Tesla said.

"I told you: enough!"

"He's not dead?"

"No, he's...he's riding the waves."

"Surfing on Quiddity?" she said.

"Doing his damnedest."

"And the Iad?"

"Are behind him. I was right, the tide has changed. They're coming."

"Describe what you saw," she said.

"I told you. They're vast."

"That's all?"

"Like mountains, moving. Mountains covered in locusts, or fleas. Big and small. I don't know. None of it makes much sense."

"Well we just have to close the schism as quickly as we can. Mountains I can take. But let's keep the fleas out, huh?"

Hotchkiss was at the front door when they got down there. Grillo had already spoken to him about the Trinity, and he had a better idea than asking Abernethy.

"There's a book store in the Mall," he said. "Do you want me to go look up Trinities there?"

"It can't hurt," Tesla said. "If the Trinity scared Kissoon, maybe it'll scare his paymasters. Where's Grillo?"

"Out looking for a car. He'll take you up the Hill. That's where you're both going?" He glanced in Jaffe's direction, repugnance on his face.

"That's where we're going," Tesla said. "And that's where we'll stay. So you know where to find us."

"Right to the end?" Hotchkiss said, not taking his eyes off Jaffe.

"Right to the end."

Grillo had found and hot-wired a car that had been left in the motel lot.

"Where'd you learn to do that?" she asked him as they drove up towards the Hill. The Jaff sat slumped on the back seat, his eyes closed.

"I did a piece, way back in my investigative phase#8212;"

"On car thieves?"

"That's right. I picked up a few tricks of the trade, and I've never forgotten them. I'm a mine of useless information. Always something new out of Grillo."

"But nothing about Trinity?"

"You keep coming back to that."

"Desperation," she said. "We haven't got much else to hold on to."

"Maybe it's something to do with what D'Amour said, about the Savior."

"A last-minute intervention from on high?" Tesla said. "I'm not going to hold my breath waiting."

"Shit."

"Problem?"

"Up ahead."

A crevasse had opened up at the intersection they were approaching. It was across both street and sidewalk. There was no way past it up the Hill.

"We'll have to try another way," Grillo said. He put the car into reverse, backed up, and took a cross-street for three blocks. There was evidence of the Grove's growing instability on every side. Lampposts and trees felled, sidewalks buckled, water running from fractured pipes.

"It's all going to blow," Tesla said.

"Ain't that the truth."

The next street he tried gave them clear access to the Hill, and they headed up. As they began the ascent Tesla caught sight of a second car, coming off the feed road from the freeway. It wasn't a police car, unless the local cops had taken up driving Volkswagens and painting them fluorescent yellow.

"Foolhardy," she said.

"What is?"

"Somebody coming back into town."

"Probably a salvage operation," Grillo said. "People taking what they can, while they can."

"Yep."

The color of the car, so garishly inappropriate, lingered with her for a little while. She wasn't sure why; perhaps because it was so very West Hollywood, and she doubted she'd ever see her apartment in North Huntley Drive again.

"Looks like we've got a welcome committee," Grillo said.

"Perfect movie moment," Tesla said. "Step on it, driver."

"Lousy dialogue."

"Just drive."

Grillo swerved to avoid collision with the patrol car, put his foot on the accelerator, and was past the vehicle before its driver had a chance to block him.

"There'll be more at the top," he said.

Tesla looked back at the car they'd left behind. There was no attempt to give chase. Its driver would simply be alerting the rest of the unit.

"Do whatever you've got to do," Tesla told Grillo.

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning trash 'em if they get in our way. We've got no time to make nice."

"The house is going to be crawling with cops," he warned.

"I doubt it," she said. "I think they'll be keeping their distance."

She was right. As they came in sight of Coney Eye it was apparent that the patrolmen had decided this whole mess was beyond them. The cars were parked well down from the gate, the men themselves standing a good way behind their vehicles. Most were just staring up at the house, but there was a contingent of four officers waiting at a barricade that had been set up, blocking the Hill.

"You want me to drive straight through?" Grillo said.

"Damn right!"

He put his foot down. Two of the quartet ahead went for their guns; the other two threw themselves aside. Grillo rammed the barricade at speed. The wood splintered and broke, a piece shattering the windshield. He thought he heard a shot in the confusion but as he was still driving, assumed it hadn't killed him. The car struck one of the patrol vehicles a glancing blow, its back end slewing around and striking another, before Grillo regained control and headed it for the open gates of Buddy Vance's house. Engine revved, they roared up the driveway.

"Nobody's following," Tesla said.

"I don't fucking blame them," Grillo replied. As they reached the bend in the driveway he put on the brakes. "This is near enough," he said. "Jesus. Will you look at that?"

"I'm looking."

The facade of the house resembled a cake that had been left out all night in a heavy rain, the whole thing softened and thrown out of whack. There were no straight lines in the door frames, no right angles in the windows#8212;even those at the very top of the house. The power Jaffe had unleashed here had sucked everything towards its maw, distorting the bricks, the tiles, the panes of glass; the whole house tending towards the schism. When Tesla and Grillo had staggered out through the doorway the place had been a maelstrom, but the hole, once opened, seemed to be pacified. There was no sign of further violence. There was no doubting the proximity of the schism, however. When they stepped from the car they felt its energies in the air. It made the hair on the back of their necks stand up straight, and their guts shudder. It was as quiet as the eye of a hurricane. A tremulous calm just begging to be broken.

Tesla glanced through the car window at their passenger. Jaffe, sensing her scrutiny, opened his eyes. The fear in him was perfectly plain. However much skill he'd had at concealing his feelings in the past#8212;and she suspected he'd had much#8212;he was beyond such pretenses now.

"Do you want to come see?" she said.

He didn't leap at the offer, so she left him where he was. She had a duty to perform before they actually ventured inside, and she could give him time to work up his courage while she performed it. She headed back the way they'd come, until she emerged from behind the line of palms that bordered the driveway. The cops had followed as far as the gate, but no further. It occurred to her that it wasn't simply fear that kept them from following, but orders from their superiors. She didn't dare hope the cavalry would be rolling up the Hill in the next few minutes, but perhaps they were mustering, and these footsoldiers had been instructed to keep their distance until the full force arrived. They were certainly nervous. She emerged with her hands up, to face a row of levelled muzzles.

"This property's off-limits," somebody shouted from below. "Come back down with your hands in the air. All of you."

"I'm afraid I can't do that," Tesla replied. "Just keep it off-limits, will you? We've got business here. Who's in charge?" she asked, feeling like a visitor from space, asking to be taken to their leader.

A man in a well-cut suit stepped into view from behind one of the vehicles. He was not, she guessed, a policeman. More likely FBI.

"I'm in charge," he said.

"Are you getting back-up?" she asked.

"Who are you?" he demanded to know.

"Are you getting back-up?" she said again. "You're going to need more than a few patrol cars, believe me. There's going to be a major invasion starting from this house."

"What are you talking about?"

"Just get the Hill surrounded. And seal the Grove. We're not going to get a second chance."

"I'm only going to ask one more time#8212;" the leader began, but she cut him off short, slipping out of sight before he could finish his demands.

"You're good at that," Grillo said.

"You know what practice makes," she said.

"They could have shot you," Grillo observed.

"But they didn't," she said, returning to the car and opening the door. "Shall we?" she said to Jaffe. He ignored her invitation at first. "The sooner we start the sooner we finish," she said. Sighing, he got out. "I want you to stay here," she told Grillo. "If any of them make a move, holler."

"You just don't want me inside," he said.

"That too."

"Do you have any clue what you're going to do in there?"

"We're going to make like a couple of critics," Tesla said. "We're going to fuck the Art."

Hotchkiss had been an avid reader in his younger days, but Carolyn's death had killed his taste for fiction. Why bother to read thrillers written by men who'd never heard gunfire? They were all lies. Not just the novels. These books, too, he thought, as he dug through the shelves in the Mormon Book Store. Volumes of stuff about revelation and God's work on earth. There were a few that listed Trinity in their index, but the reference was always in passing, and illuminated nothing. The only satisfaction he got from the search was the pleasure of throwing the place into disarray, tossing the books aside. Their pat certitudes disgusted him. If he'd had the time he might have set a match to the lot.

As he moved deeper into the shop he saw a bright yellow Volkswagen turn into the lot. Two men stepped out. They couldn't have looked more unalike. One was dressed in a dusty ragbag of ill-fitting garments, and had#8212;even from a distance#8212;a face ugly enough to make a mother weep. His companion was a tanned Adonis by comparison, dressed in peacock casuals. Neither, Hotchkiss judged, knew where they were, nor the danger they were in being here. They looked around at the empty lot in bewilderment. Hotchkiss went to the door.

"You guys should get out of here," he called across to them.

The peacock looked in his direction.

"This is Palomo Grove?"

"Yeah."

"What happened? Was there a 'quake?"

"It's coming," Hotchkiss said. "Listen, just do yourselves a favor. Get the fuck out of here."

The ugly one spoke now, his face looking more misshapen the closer he got.

"Tesla Bombeck," he said.

"What about her?" Hotchkiss said.

"I have to see her. My name's Raul."

"She's up the Hill," Hotchkiss said. He'd heard Tesla mention the name Raul when speaking to Grillo; he didn't recall in what context.

"I've come to help her," Raul said.

"And you?" Hotchkiss asked the Adonis.

"Ron," came the reply. "I'm just the chauffeur," he shrugged. "Hey, if you want me out of here I'm happy to go."

"It's up to you," Hotchkiss said, returning into the store. "It's not safe here. That's all I'm saying."

"I hear you," Ron said.

Raul had lost interest in the conversation, and was scanning the stores. He seemed to be sniffing as he did so.

"What do you want me to do?" Ron called over to him.

The man looked back at his friend.

"Go home," he said.

"You don't want me to take you up to find Tesla?" Ron replied.

"I'll find her myself."

"It's a long walk, man."

Raul cast a glance in Hotchkiss's direction. "We'll work something out," he said.

Hotchkiss didn't volunteer for duty, but went back to his search, paying only half an ear's attention to the conversation that continued in the lot.

"Are you sure you don't want us to go find Tesla? I thought this was urgent?"

"It was. It is. I just...need to spend a little time here first."

"I can wait. I don't mind."

"I told you, no."

"You don't want me to take you back? I thought maybe we could hang out tonight. You know, go to a few bars..."

"Another time, maybe."

"Tomorrow?"

"Just another time."

"I get it. This is thanks but no thanks, right?"

"If you say so."

"You're fucking weird, man. First you come on to me. Now you don't want to know. Well, fuck you. I can get my dick sucked plenty of places."

Hotchkiss glanced round to see the Adonis stalking back to his car. The other man was already out of sight. Pleased to have the distraction over with he went back to searching the shelves. The section of books on Motherhood didn't look too promising, but he began to make his way through it anyhow. It was, as he'd anticipated, all pap and platitudes. There was nothing in the pages that made reference, even obliquely, to any Trinity. Only talk of motherhood as a divine calling, woman in partnership with God, bringing new life into the world, her greatest and most noble task. And for the offspring, trite advice. "Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right."

He dutifully went through every title, throwing the volumes aside when they proved useless, until he'd exhausted the shelves. There were only two sections remaining to be searched. Neither of them seemed too promising. He stood up and stretched, looking out towards the sun-beaten lot. A sickening sense of foreboding was churning in his guts. The sun was shining, but for how long?

Beyond the lot#8212;a long way beyond#8212;he caught sight of the yellow Beetle, making its way out of the Grove towards the freeway. He didn't envy the Adonis his liberty. He had no wish to get in a car and drive. As places to die went, the Grove was as good as any: comfortable, familiar, empty. If he died screaming, nobody would hear his cowardice. If he died silently, nobody would mourn him. Let the Adonis go. He presumably had his life to live, somewhere. And it would be brief. If they failed in their endeavors here in the Grove#8212; and the night beyond this world broke through#8212;it would be very brief. If they succeeded (small hope) it would still be brief.

And always better in the ending than the beginning, the interval between being what it was.

If the exterior of Coney Eye had been the eye of a hurricane, the interior was a glint in that eye. A sharper stillness, which made Tesla alive to every tic in her cheek and temple, every small raggedness in her breath. With Jaffe following in after her she crossed the hallway towards the lounge where he'd committed his crime against nature. The evidence of that crime was everywhere around them, but cold now, the distortions set like so much melted wax.

She stepped through into the room itself. The schism was still in place: the entire environment pulled towards a hole no more than six feet across. It was quiescent. There was no visible sign that it was trying to make itself any wider. If and when the Iad reached the threshold of the Cosm, they'd have to step over it one by one, unless, with this lesion begun, they could simply hack it open till it gaped.

"It doesn't look too dangerous," she said to Jaffe. "We've got a chance if we move quickly."

"I don't know how to seal it."

"Try. You knew how to open it."

"That was instinct."

"And what do your instincts tell you now?"

"That I haven't got the power left in me," he said. He raised his broken hands. "I ate it up and spat it out."

"It was all in your hands?"

"I think so."

She remembered the night at the Mall: the Jaff passing poison into Fletcher's system from fingers which seemed to be sweating potency. Now those same hands were decaying wreckage. And yet she couldn't bring herself to believe power was a matter of anatomy. Kissoon had been no demigod, but his scrawny body was a reservoir of the direst suits. Will was the key to authority, and Jaffe seemed to have none left.

"So you can't do it," she said simply.

"No."

"Then maybe I can."

He narrowed his eyes. "I doubt that," he said, with the faintest trace of condescension in his tone. She pretended not to have noticed.

"I can try," she said. "The Nuncio got into me too, remember? You're not the only God in the squad."

This remark bore the fruit it had been planted to produce.

"You?" he said. "You've not a hope in hell." He looked down at his hands, then back up at the schism. "I'm the one who opened it. I'm the only one who ever dared do that. And I'm the only one who can seal it up again."

He walked past her towards the schism, that same lightness in his step as she'd noticed when they were climbing out of the caves. It allowed him to negotiate the uneven floor with relative ease. It was only when he came within a yard or two of the hole that his pace slowed. Then he stopped completely.

"What is it?" she said.

"Come look for yourself."

She started across the room towards him. It wasn't simply the visible world that was twisted and dragged towards the hole, she realized; so was the invisible. The air, and the minute particles of dust and dirt it carried, was hauled out of true. Space itself was knotted up, its convolutions pliable enough to be pressed through but only with the greatest difficulty. The effect got stronger the closer to the hole she went. Her body, already bruised and battered within an inch of its Lazarite life, was barely equal to the challenge. But she persevered. And step by step she achieved her goal, coming close enough to the hole to see down its throat. The sight was not easy to take. The world she'd assumed all her life to be complete and comprehensible was here undone utterly. It was a distress she'd not felt since childhood when somebody (she'd forgotten who) had taught her the trick of looking at infinity by putting two mirrors face to face, each staring into the other's reflection. She'd been twelve, thirteen at most, and completely spooked by the idea of this emptiness echoing emptiness, back and forth, back and forth, until they reached the limits of light. For years after she'd remembered that moment, confronted with a physical representation of something her mind revolted at. Here was the same process. The schism, defying her every idea about the way the world was. Reality as a comparative science.

She looked into its maw. Nothing that she saw was certain. If it was cloud, then it was cloud half turned to rain. If it was rain, then it was rain on the verge of combusting, and becoming a falling fire. And beyond the cloud, and rain, and fire, another place entirely, as ambiguous as the confusion of elements that half hid it: a sea that became a sky with no horizon to divide or define them. Quiddity.

She was seized by a fierce, barely controllable desire to be there, to climb through the schism and taste the mystery beyond. How many thousands of seekers, glimpsing in fever dreams and drug dreams the possibility of being where she now stood, had woken wanting to die rather than live another hour, knowing they could never have that access? Woken, mourned, and still gone on living, hoping, in the agonized, heroic way her species hoped, that miracles were possible; that the epiphanies of music and love were more than self-deception, were clues to a greater condition, where hope was rewarded with keys and kisses, and doors opened to the everlasting.

Quiddity was that everlasting. It was the ether in which being had been raised, as humanity had been raised from the soup of a simpler sea. The thought of Quiddity tainted by the Iad was suddenly more distressing to her than the fact of their imminent invasion. The phrase she'd first heard from Kissoon revisited her. Quiddity must be preserved. As Mary Muralles had said, Kissoon only told lies when he needed to. That was no small part of his genius: to hold to the truth as long as it served his purpose. And Quiddity did need to be preserved. Without dreams, life was nothing. Perhaps it would not even have come into being.

"I suppose I must try," Jaffe said, and took one more step towards the maw, bringing himself within touching range of it. His hands, which had seemed completely devoid of strength a minute before, had a lick of power about them, all the more visible because it oozed from such wounded flesh. He raised them towards the schism. That it sensed his presence and purpose became apparent before he'd even made contact. A spasm passed out from its lips, running up through the room it had hauled into itself. The frozen distortions shuddered, softening once again.

"It's wise to us," Jaffe said.

"We've still got to try," Tesla replied. The floor beneath their feet was suddenly jittery; pieces of plaster dropped from the walls and ceiling. Inside the maw the clouds of fiery rain bloomed towards the Cosm.

Jaffe laid his hands on the softening intersection, but the schism was having no truck with undoers. It threw a second spasm off, its violence sufficient to throw Jaffe back into Tesla's arms.

"No good!" he said. "No good!"

Worse than no good. If they'd needed evidence of the Iad's approach they had it now, as the cloud darkened, its motion unmistakable. As Jaffe had guessed, the tide had changed. The throat of the schism was not concerned with swallowing, but with vomiting up whatever was choking it. To do so, it started to open.

With that motion the beginning of the end began.

The book in Hotchkiss's hands was called Preparing for Armageddon, and it was a manual instructing faithful brethren on how to do just that, a step-by-step guide to surviving the imminent Apocalypse. There were chapters on Livestock, on Water and Grain, on Clothing and Bedding, Fuel, Heat and Light. There was a five-page checklist entitled Commonly Stored Foods that ran the gamut from Molasses to Venison jerky. And as if to whip up fear in any procrastinators who might be tempted to put off their preparations, the book interspersed these lists with photographs of calamities that had occurred across America. Most of them were natural phenomena. Forest fires raging, unchecked and uncheckable; hurricanes laying towns flat in their passage. There were several pages given over to a flood in Salt Lake City in May of 1983, accompanied by pictures of Utahans building walls of sandbags to contain the water. But the image that loomed largest amid this catalogue of final acts was the mushroom cloud. There were several photographs of that cloud, underneath one of which Hotchkiss found the simple legend:

The first atom-bomb was detonated at 0530 hours July 16, 1945, at a location named Trinity by the bomb's creator, Robert Oppenheimer. With that detonation, Mankind's last age began.

There was no further explanation. The purpose of the book was not to explain the atomic bomb and its construction, but to offer guidance on how the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints might survive it. No matter. He didn't need details. All he needed was that one word, Trinity, in some other context than Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Here it was. The Three-in-One reduced to a single place#8212; a single event, indeed. This was the Trinity that superseded all others. In the imagination of the twentieth century the mushroom cloud loomed larger than God.

He stood up, Preparing for Armageddon in his hand, and crossed through the chaos of discarded books to the front of the store. Awaiting him outside was a sight that stopped him in his tracks. There were dozens of animals running free in the lot. Puppies rolling around, mice running for cover with kittens on their tails; lizards basking on the hot asphalt. He looked along the row of store-fronts. A parrot flew out through the open door of Ted Elizando's store. Hotchkiss didn't know Ted at all, but he knew the stories about the man. As a source of gossip himself he'd always attended closely to what was said about others. Elizando had lost his mind, his wife and his baby. Now he was losing his little ark in the Mall as well; setting it free.

The task of getting the information on Trinity to Tesla Bombeck was more important than offering words of comfort or warning to Elizando, even if he'd had any words to offer. The man clearly knew what danger he was in or he wouldn't have been releasing his stock. And as to comfort: what words were there to offer? Decision made, Hotchkiss started across the lot to his car, only to be stopped again, not by a sight this time but by a sound: a short, anguished human cry. Its source was the pet store.

He was at the open door in ten seconds. Inside there were more animals underfoot, but no sign of their liberator. He called the man's name.

"Elizando? Are you OK?"

There was no answer, and it occurred to Hotchkiss that the man had killed himself. Set the animals free then slit his wrists. He picked up his speed, weaving through the displays, the perches and the cages. Halfway down the store he saw Elizando's body slumped on the far side of a sizeable cage. The occupants, a small flock of canaries, were panicked, fluttering back and forth, feathers dashed from their wings against the wire.

Hotchkiss dropped the book and went to Ted's aid.

"What have you done?" he said as he approached. "Jesus, man, what have you done?"

As he got closer to the body he realized his error. This was no suicide. The wounds on his face#8212;which was pressed against the wire#8212;were not self-inflicted. They were traumatic; cobs of flesh torn out of his cheek and neck. The blood had spilled through the mesh and covered the bottom of the canaries' cage, but it had ceased to pump with any gusto. He'd been dead for several minutes.

Hotchkiss stood up, very slowly. If it hadn't been Elizando's cry he'd heard, what had it been? He took a step towards the book to reclaim it, but as he stooped to pick it up a motion between the cages distracted him. What seemed to be a black snake was gliding across the floor just beyond Elizando's corpse. It moved quickly, its clear intention to come between him and the exit. Had he not had to pick up the book he might have outrun it, but by the time he had Preparing for Armageddon in his hand it was at the door. Now that it was in full sight several facts became clear. That this was no escapee from the store (no household in the Grove would have given it a home). That it bore as much resemblance to a Moray eel as it did to a snake, but even that likeness was vague: it was, in truth, like nothing he'd seen before. And finally, that it had left smears of blood on the tiles to mark its advance; and that the interior of its mouth was also wet with blood. This was Elizando's killer. He retreated in front of it, evoking the name of the Savior he'd long ago forsaken:

"Jesus."

The word brought laughter from somewhere at the back of the store. He turned. The door to Ted's office was wide open. Though the room beyond had no windows, and the lights weren't on, he could make out the figure of a man sitting cross-legged on the floor. He could even make a guess at his identity: the misshapen features of Tesla Bombeck's friend Raul were unmistakable, even in the gloom. He was naked. It was that fact#8212;his nakedness, and therefore his vulnerability#8212;that tempted Hotchkiss into taking a step towards the open door. Given the choice between fighting the snake or its charmer#8212;and they were surely in league#8212;he chose the charmer. A naked man, squatting, was not much threat.

"What the fuck's going on here?" Hotchkiss demanded as he approached.

The man grinned in the murk. His smile was wet and wide.

"I'm making Lix," he replied.

"Lix?"

"Behind you."

Hotchkiss didn't need to turn around to know his exit was still blocked. He had no choice but to stand his ground, even though he was increasingly appalled by the sight in front of him. Not only was the man naked, but his body, from the middle of his chest to the middle of his thigh, was swarming with bugs, the store's supply of lizard food and fish food, here assuaging another appetite. Their motion had him hard, his crooked member the focus of their endeavors. But there was a sight as repulsive or worse on the ground in front of him: a small heap of animal excrement, droppings gathered from the cages, in the midst of which a creature was nesting. No, not nesting, being born, swelling and unknotting itself in front of Hotchkiss. It raised its head from the shit, and he saw it was another of what this monster-maker had called Lix.

Nor was it the only one. Glistening forms uncoiled in the corners of the little room, all lengths of featureless muscle, malice in their every squirming motion. Two emerged from behind their maker. Another was climbing up the counter to the right of Hotchkiss, and wriggling towards him. In order to avoid it, he took a backward step, and realized too late that the maneuver had put him within reach of another of the beasts. It was at his leg in two beats, ascending it in three. He dropped Armageddon a second time and reached down to strike at the thing, but its gaping mouth struck first, the twin motions throwing him off balance. He staggered back against a shelf of cages, his flailing arms bringing several of them down. A second snatch, this time at the shelf itself, was just as fruitless. Built only to bear kittens and their cages, it gave way beneath his weight, and he fell to the ground, the shelf and its load coming down after him. Had it not been for the cages he might have been slaughtered on the spot, but they delayed the Lix converging on him from front door and back. He was granted ten seconds' reprieve while they tried to worm their way between the cages, during which he managed to roll over and prepare to get to his feet, but the creature fixed to his leg brought such hope to an end, its jaws sinking into the flesh of his hip. The pain took his sight for a moment, and when it returned the other beasts had found their way to him. He felt one of them at the back of his neck; another wrapped itself around his torso. He started to yell for help, before the breath was squeezed out of him.

"There's only me," came the reply.

He gazed up at the man called Raul who was no longer squatting in ordure, but standing over him#8212;still hard, still swarming#8212;one of the Lix draped around his neck. He had the first two fingers of his hand in its open mouth, stroking the back of its throat.

"You're not Raul," Hotchkiss gasped.

"No."

"Who...?"

The last word he heard before the Lix wound around his chest tightened its knot, was the answer to that question. A name, made up of two gentle syllables. Kiss and soon. It was these words he thought of at the last, like a prophecy. Kiss; soon. Carolyn, waiting on the other side of death, lips ready to press to his cheek. It made his last moments bearable, after all the horrors.

"I think what we've got here is a lost cause," Tesla said to Grillo as she emerged from the house.

She was shaking from head to foot, hour upon hour of exertion and hurt taking its toll. She longed to sleep, but she had a terror that if she did she'd have the dream Witt had had the night before: the visit to Quiddity that meant dying was very close. Maybe it was, but she didn't want to know about it.

Grillo took hold of her arm, but she waved him away.

"You can't hold me up any more than I can hold you#8212;"

"What's happening in there?"

"The hole's started to open again. It's like a dam's going to burst."

"Shit."

The entire house was creaking now; the palms lining the driveway were shaking down dead fronds as they rocked, the driveway cracking as though it was sledge-hammered from below.

"I should warn the cops," Grillo said. "Tell them what's coming."

"I think we lost this one, Grillo. Do you know what happened to Hotchkiss?"

"No."

"I hope he gets out before they come through."

"He won't."

"He should. No town's worth dying for."

"I think it's time I made my call, don't you?"

"What call?" she said.

"To Abernethy? Break the bad news."

Tesla made a small sigh. "Yeah, why don't you? The Last Scoop."

"I'll be back," he said. "Don't think you're getting out of here alone, you're not. We're going together."

"I'm not leaving."

He got into the car not really aware until he tried to align his hand with the ignition key just how violent the shaking in the ground had become. When he finally succeeded in getting the car started, and backed it down the driveway to the gate, he found any warning to the cops was redundant. The bulk of them had withdrawn a good distance down the Hill, leaving a single vehicle just outside the gates, with two men posted as observers. They paid little notice to Grillo. Their twin concerns#8212;one professional, one personal#8212;were watching the house, and preparing for a rapid retreat if the fissures spread in their direction. Grillo drove on past them, and down the Hill. There was a half-hearted attempt by one of the officers lower down the slope to halt him, but he simply drove on by, heading to the Mall. There he'd hope to find a public telephone in which to make his call to Abernethy. There too he'd find Hotchkiss, and warn him, if he didn't already know, that the game was up. As he negotiated the rat maze of streets blocked or plowed up or turned into chasms, he experimented with headlines for this last report. The End of the World Is Nigh was so commonplace. He didn't want to be just another in a long line of prophets promising the Apocalypse, even if this time (finally) it was true. As he turned into the Mall, just before his eyes alighted on the animal jamboree going on there, he had an inspiration. It was Buddy Vance's collection that brought it to mind. Though he suspected he'd have a hard time selling the idea to Abernethy he knew there was no more appropriate headline for this story than The Ride Is Over. The species had enjoyed its adventure, but it was coming to an end.

He stopped the car at the entrance to the lot, and stepped out to survey the bizarre spectacle of animal playtime. A smile came to his lips, despite himself. What bliss they knew, knowing nothing: playing in the sun without the least suspicion of how short their span was. He crossed the lot to the book store but Hotchkiss wasn't there. The stock was scattered over the floor, evidence of a search that had presumably ended in failure. He headed along to the pet store, in hope of finding some human company, and a phone. There was a din of birds from inside: the store's last captives. If he had time he'd set them free himself. No reason why they shouldn't get a glimpse of the sun.

"Anyone home?" he said, putting his head around the door.

A gecko ran out between his legs. He watched it go, the same inquiry on his tongue. It went unsaid. The gecko had run through blood on its way out the door; blood smeared and spattered everywhere he looked. He saw Elizando's body first, then the companion corpse, half buried beneath cages.

"Hotchkiss?" he said.

He began to haul the cages off the body. There was more than a smell of blood in the air, there was the stench of shit too. It came off on his hands, but he kept up his labors until he'd seen enough of Hotchkiss to be certain he was dead. Uncovering his head confirmed that fact. The skull had been crushed to smithereens, shards of bone sticking up like broken crockery from the mush of his mind and senses. No animal housed in a store this size could have committed such violence; nor was it easy to see what weapon might have caused it. He didn't linger to ponder the problem, not with the very real possibility that those responsible were still in the vicinity. He scanned the floor, looking for some weapon. A leash, a studded collar, anything to ward off the slaughter. His search took him to a book, dropped on the floor a little way from Hotchkiss's body.

He read the title aloud:

"Preparing for Armageddon?"

Then he picked it up, flipping through it quickly. It seemed to be a manual on how to survive the Apocalypse. These were words of wisdom from Mormon Brethren to members of the Church, telling them that all would be well; that they had God's living oracles, the First Presidency and the Council of the Twelve Apostles to watch over them and advise them. All they needed to do was take of that advice, spiritual and practical, and whatever the future brought could be survived.

"If ye are prepared, ye need, not fear" was the hope#8212;no, certainty#8212;of these pages. "Be pure in heart, love many, be just, and stand in holy places. Maintain a year's supply. "

He flipped on through it. Why had Hotchkiss selected this book? Hurricanes, forest fires and floods? What did they have to do with Trinity?

And then there it was: a grainy photograph of a mushroom cloud, and the words beneath, identifying the place where it had been detonated.

Trinity, New Mexico.

He read no further. Book in hand he ran out into the lot, animals scattering in front of him, and got into the car. His call to Abernethy would have to wait. How the simple fact that Trinity was the birthplace of the bomb fitted into this story he didn't know, but perhaps Tesla would. And even if she didn't he'd have the satisfaction of bringing her the news. It was absurd, he knew, to be so suddenly pleased with himself, as though this information made some difference to things. The world was going to end (The Ride Is Over) yet having this small piece of the puzzle in his hands was enough to momentarily put the terror of that fact aside. He knew no greater pleasure than to be a bringer of news, a messenger, a Nuncio. It was the closest he'd ever got to understanding the word happy.

Even in the short time#8212;no more than four or five minutes#8212;that he'd spent at the Mall the Grove's stability had deteriorated further. Two streets that had been accessible on his way down from the Hill now no longer were. One had virtually disappeared entirely#8212;the earth had simply opened up and guzzled it#8212;the other was strewn with wreckage from two toppled houses. He found a third route that was still passable, and began up the Hill, the tremors in the ground becoming so violent that on occasion he could barely control the car. A few observers had appeared on the scene during his absence, in three unmarked helicopters, the largest of which was hovering directly over the Vance house, its passengers attempting to make, no doubt, an assessment of the situation. They must have guessed by now that this was no natural phenomenon. Perhaps they even knew the root cause. D'Amour had told Tesla the existence of the Iad was known to the highest of the high. If so, there should have been firepower ranged around the house hours before, instead of a few frightened cops. Had they not believed the evidence in their hands, the generals and the politicians? Were they too pragmatic to think that their empire could be put in jeopardy by something that belonged on the other side of dreams? He couldn't blame them. He wouldn't have lent that notion a moment's credibility seventy-two hours ago. He'd have judged it a nonsense: like the talk of God's living oracles in the book on the seat beside him, an overheated fantasy. If the observers stayed where they were, directly over the schism, they'd have a chance to change their minds. Seeing was believing. And see they would.

The gates of Coney Eye had been toppled; so had its perimeter wall. He left the car in front of the pile of rubble, and clutching the book climbed towards the house, upon the face of which something he took to be a cloud-shadow seemed to sit. The ructions had opened up the fissures in the driveway and he had to tread with care, his concentration befuddled by a distressing quality in the atmosphere around the house. The closer he got to the door the darker the shadow seemed to get. Though the sun was still beating down on the back of his head, and on Coney Eye's cake-in-the-rain facade, the whole scene was grimy, as though a layer of dirty varnish had been painted over everything. It made his head ache to see it; his sinuses pricked, his ears popped. More distressing than these minor discomforts was a palpable sense of dread that grew stronger in him with every step he took. His head started to fill up with sickening images, culled from his years in the newsrooms of a dozen papers, looking at photographs no editor, however squalid, would have put to the press. There were automobile wrecks, of course, and plane crashes#8212;bodies in pieces that would never be reassembled. Inevitably, there were murder scenes. But it wasn't these that headed this assault. It was pictures of innocents, and the harm done to them. Babies and children, beaten, maimed, dumped out with the trash; the sick and the old brutalized; the retarded humiliated. So many cruelties, all filling up his head.

"The Iad," he heard Tesla say, and swung his eyes around in the direction of her voice. The air between them was thick, her face grainy, as though reproduced. Not real. None of it real. Pictures on a screen.

"It's the Iad coming," she said. "That's what you're feeling. You should get away from here. There's no use in your staying#8212;"

"No," he said, "I've got...a message."

He was having difficulty holding on to that thought. The innocents kept appearing, one after the other, bearing every kind of wound.

"What message?" she said.

"Trinity."

"What about it?"

She was shouting, he realized, but still her voice was barely audible.

"You said Trinity, Grillo."

"Yes?"

"What about it?"

So many eyes, looking at him. He couldn't think past them; past their hurt and their powerlessness.

"Grillo!"

He focused his attention as best he could on the woman shouting his name in a whisper.

"Trinity, " she said again.

The book in his hand had the answer to her question, he knew, though the eyes, and grief in the eyes, kept on distracting him. Trinity. What was Trinity? He raised the book and gave it to her, but as she took it from him he remembered.

"The bomb," he said.

"What?"

"Trinity is where they exploded the first atomic bomb."

He saw a look of comprehension cross her face.

"You understand?" he said.

"Yes. Jesus! Yes!"

She didn't bother to open the book he'd brought, she just told him to get away, back towards the road. He listened as best he could but he knew there was another piece of information he needed to convey. Something almost as vital as Trinity; and as much about death. Try as he might he couldn't bring it to mind.

"Go on back," she told him again. "Out of this filth."

He nodded, knowing he was useless to her, and stumbled away through the dirty air, the sunlight brightening the further he got from the house, the images of the dead innocents no longer dominating his thoughts. As he turned the corner of the driveway, and came in sight of the Hill again, he remembered the information he'd failed to convey. Hotchkiss was dead; murdered; head crushed. Somebody or something had committed that murder, and they were still loose in the Grove. He had to go back and tell her; warn her. He waited a moment, to let the images the Iad's proximity had induced clear from his cortex. They didn't go entirely; he knew that the instant he went back towards the house they'd return with fresh intensity. The poisoned air that had brought them on was spreading, and had already caught up with him again. Before it befuddled him afresh he pulled out a pen he'd brought from the motel in case he'd needed to take notes. He'd brought a paper too, from the receptionist's desk, but the parade of cruelties was coming at him again and he feared losing the thought while finding the pad, so he simply scrawled the word on the back of his hand.

"Hotchk#8212;" was as much as he could manage. Then his fingers lost the power to write, and his mind the power to hold anything but grief for dead innocents and the thought that he had to see Tesla again. Message and messenger one flesh, he turned about and stumbled back into the Iad's cloud of influence. But when he reached the place where the woman who shouted in whispers had been, she'd gone closer still to the source of these cruelties, where he doubted his sanity could survive to follow.

So much suddenly made sense to Tesla, not least the atmosphere of anticipation she'd always felt in the Loop, particularly when passing through the town. She'd seen films of the bomb's detonation, and of the destruction of the town, on documentaries about Oppenheimer. The houses and stores she'd puzzled over had been built to be blasted to ash, so that the bomb's creators could observe their baby's wrath at work. No wonder she'd tried to set a dinosaur movie there. Her dramatic instinct had been on the button. This was a town waiting for doomsday. It was just the monster she'd got wrong. What better place for Kissoon to hide the evidence of his crime? When the flash came the bodies would be utterly consumed. She could well imagine what perverse pleasure he'd have taken in plotting such an elaborate creation, knowing that the cloud that destroyed the Shoal was one of the most indelible images of the century.

But he'd been outplotted. Mary Muralles had trapped him in the Loop, and until he could find a new body to leave in he was its prisoner, his will perpetually holding the moment of detonation at bay. He'd lived like a man with his finger on a crack in a dam, knowing that the moment he neglected his duty the dam would burst and overwhelm him. No wonder the word Trinity had thrown his thoughts into confusion. It was the name of his terror.

Was there a way to use this knowledge against the Iad? An outlandish possibility occurred to her as she returned into the house, but she'd need Jaffe's assistance.

It was hard to hold on to any coherent thought process in the cess-pool that was spilling from the schism, but she'd fought off influences before, from movie producers and shamans, and she was able to hold the worst of it at bay. It was getting stronger, however, the closer the Iad came to the threshold. She tried not to contemplate the extent of their corruption if this, the merest rumor of their approach, could so profoundly affect the psyche. Not in all her attempts to imagine the nature of that invasion had she considered the possibility that their weapon would be madness. But perhaps it was. Though she was able to ward off this assault of vileness for a time she knew she'd capitulate to it sooner or later. No human mind could keep it at bay forever, and would have no choice, drawing in such horrors, but to take refuge in insanity. The Iad Uroboros would rule a planet of lunatics.

Jaffe was already well on his way to mental collapse, of course. She found him standing at the door of the room where he'd practiced the Art. The space behind him had been entirely commandeered by the schism. Looking through the door she truly understood for the first time why Quiddity was called a sea. Waves of dark energy were beating against the shore of the Cosm, their surf spilling through the schism. Beyond it she saw another motion, which she was only able to glimpse briefly. Jaffe had talked about mountains that moved; and fleas. But Tesla's mind fixed upon another image to characterize the invaders. They were giants. The living terrors of her earliest nightmares. Often, in those childhood encounters, they'd had the faces of her parents, a fact her analyst had made much of. But these were giants of a different order. If they had faces at all, which she doubted, they were impossible to assimilate as such. One thing she was certain of: caring parents they weren't.

"Do you see?" Jaffe said.

"Oh yes," she said.

He asked the question again, his voice lighter than she'd ever heard it.

"Do you see, Poppa?"

"Poppa?" she said.

"I'm not afraid, Poppa," the voice out of the Jaff went on. "They won't hurt me. I'm the Death-Boy."

Now she understood. Jaffe wasn't simply seeing with Tommy-Ray's eyes, he was speaking with the boy's voice. She'd lost the father to the son.

"Jaffe!" she said. "Listen to me. I need your help! Jaffe?" He made no reply. Avoiding sight of the schism as best she could she went to him and took hold of his tattered shirt, hauling him towards the front door. "Randolph!" she said. "You've got to speak to me."

The man grinned. It wasn't an expression that had ever belonged on that face. It was the grin of a Californian prince, wide and toothy. She let him go.

"A lot of good you'll do me," she said.

She couldn't afford the time to try to coax him back from the adventure he was sharing with Tommy-Ray. She'd have to do what she was planning alone. It was a notion simple in the conceiving and, she guessed, damn difficult#8212;if not impossible#8212;in the execution. But she had no alternative. She was not a great shaman. She couldn't seal the schism. But she might move it. She'd proved twice before that she had the power to pass in and out of the Loop. To dissolve herself#8212;and others#8212;in thought, and remove them to Trinity. Could she also jump dead matter? Wood, and plaster? A piece of a house, for instance? This part of this house, for instance? Could she dissolve the slice of the Cosm she and the schism occupied, and remove it to Point Zero, where a force was ticking that might fell the giants before they spread their madness?

There was no answer to the questions this side of attempting the suit. If she failed, the answer was no. Simple as that. She'd have a few moments the wiser for her failure before wisdom, failure and her aspirations to shamanhood became academic.

Tommy-Ray had started to speak again, his monologue now deteriorated to a ragged babble.

"...up like Andy..." he was saying, "...only higher...see me, Poppa?...up like Andy...I can see the shore! I can see the shore!"

That at least did make sense. He was within sighting distance of the Cosm, which meant the Iad were almost as close.

"...Death-Boy..." he started to say again, "...I'm the Death-Boy..."

"Can't you tune him out?" she said to Jaffe, knowing her words were falling on deaf ears.

"Whoo-ee!" the kid was shouting. "Here we come! Here#8212;we#8212;come!"

She didn't look back towards the schism to see if the giants were visible, though she was sorely tempted. The moment would come when she'd have to look it in the eye but she wasn't yet ready; wasn't calm, wasn't girded. She took another step back to the front door, and seized firm hold of the door jamb. It felt so damn solid. Her common sense protested at the idea of being able to think such solidity into another place and time. She told her common sense to go get fucked. It and the madness that was spewing from the schism were not opposites. Reason could be cruel; logic could be lunacy. There was another state of mind that put aside such naive dichotomies; that made power from being in between conditions.

All things to all men.

She remembered suddenly what D'Amour had said, about there being a savior rumored. She'd thought he'd meant Jaffe, but she'd been looking too far afield. She was that savior. Tesla Bombeck, the wild woman of West Hollywood, reversed and resurrected.

The realization gave her new faith; and with the faith, a simple grasp of how she might make the suit work. She didn't try to block out Tommy-Ray's idiot whoops, or the sight of Jaffe limp and defeated, or the whole nonsense of the solid becoming thought and thought moving the solid. It was all a part of her, even the doubt. Perhaps especially that. She didn't need to deny the confusions and contradictions to be powerful; she needed to embrace them. Devour them with the mouth of her mind, chew them up, swallow them. They were all devourable. The solid and insolid, this world and that, all edible and moveable feasts. Now she knew that, nothing could keep her from the table.

She looked at the schism, dead on.

"Not even you," she said, and began to eat.

As Grillo had got within two steps of the front door the innocents had come back to claim him, their assault more pitiless than ever, this close to the schism. He lost the power to move forward or back, as brutalities rose around him. He seemed to be treading on small, bloody bodies. They turned their sobbing faces up to him, but he knew there was no help for them. Not now. The shadow that was moving across Quiddity brought with it an end to mercy. Nor would its reign ever end. It would never be judged; never be brought to account. Somebody moved past him towards the door, a form barely visible in an air thick with suffering. Grillo tried hard to grasp a solid sight of the man, but garnered only the briefest glimpse of a thuggish face, heavy-boned and lantern-jawed. Then the stranger went into the house. A movement on the ground around his feet took his glance from door to floor. The children's faces were still visible, but now the horror had a new twist. Black snakes, as thick as his arm, were crawling over the children as they followed the man inside. Appalled, he took a step forward in the vain hope of stamping one or all of them out. The step took him closer to the edge of insanity, which paradoxically lent force to his crusade. He took a second step, and a third, trying to put his heel on the heads of these black beasts. The fourth step took him over the threshold of the house, and into another madness entirely.

"Raul?"

Of all people, Raul.

Just as she'd got a grip on the task before her he stepped through the door, his appearance here so shocking she might have put it down to some mental aberrance, had she not been certain of her mind's workings now as she'd never been certain in her life before. This was no hallucination. He was here in the flesh, her name on his lips and a look of welcome on his face.

"What are you doing here?" she said, feeling her grasp of the suit slipping from her.

"I came for you," was his reply. On its heels, and on his, came grim comprehension of what he meant by that. There were Lix slithering over the doorstep into the house.

"What have you done?" she said.

"I told you," he replied. "I came for you. We all did."

She took a step away from him, but with the schism occupying half the house and the Lix guarding the door, the only route of escape available to her was up the stairs. At best that promised a temporary reprieve. She'd be trapped up there, waiting for them to find her in their own good time, except that they wouldn't need to bother. In minutes, the Iad would be in the Cosm. After which, death might very well be desirable. She had to stay put, Lix or no Lix. Her business was here, and it had to be done quickly.

"Keep away from me," she said to Raul. "I don't know why you're here, but just keep your distance!"

"I came to see the arrival," Raul replied. "We can wait here together if you like."

Raul's shirt was unbuttoned, and around his neck she caught sight of a familiar object: the Shoal medallion. With the sight came a suspicion: that this wasn't Raul at all. His manner wasn't that of the frightened Nunciate she'd met at the Mision de Santa Catrina. There was somebody else behind his semi-simian face: the man who'd first shown her the Shoal's enigmatic sigil.

"Kissoon," she said.

"Now you've spoiled my surprise," he replied.

"What have you done to Raul?"

"Unhoused him. Occupied the body. It wasn't difficult. He'd got a lot of Nuncio in him. That made him available. I pulled him into the Loop, the same way I did with you. Only he didn't have the wits to resist me the way you or Randolph resisted. He gave in quickly enough."

"You murdered him."

"Oh no," Kissoon said lightly. "His spirit's alive and kicking. Keeping my flesh from the fire till I go back for it. I'll reoccupy it once it's out of the Loop. I certainly don't want to stay in this. It's repulsive."

He came at her suddenly, agile as only Raul could be, leaping to catch hold of her arm. She yelled at the force of his grip. He smiled at her again, closing on her in two quick steps, his face inches from hers in a heartbeat.

"Gotcha," he said.

She looked past him to the door, where Grillo was standing, staring into the schism, against which Quiddity's waves were breaking with mounting frequency and ferocity. She yelled his name, but he didn't respond. Sweat ran down his face; saliva dribbled from his slack jaw. Wherever he was out wandering, he wasn't home.

Had she been able to sit in Grillo's skull she'd have understood his fascination. Once over the threshold the innocents had disappeared from his mind's eye, superseded by a sharper distress. His eyes were drawn to the surf, and in it he saw horrors. Closest to the shore were two bodies, thrown towards the Cosm then dragged back by an undertow which threatened to drown them. He knew them, though their faces were much changed. One was Jo-Beth McGuire. The other was Howie Katz. Further out in the waves he thought he glimpsed a third figure, pale against the dark sky. This one he didn't know. There appeared to be no flesh left on his face to recognize. He was a death's-head, riding the surf.

It was further out still, however, where the real horror began. Forms massive and rotting, the air around them dense with activity, as though flies the size of birds were feeding on their foulness. The Iad Uroboros. Even now, mesmerized, his mind (inspired by Swift) looked for words to describe the sight, but the vocabulary was impoverished when it came to evil. Depravity, iniquity, godlessness: what were those simple conditions in the face of such unredeemable essences? Hobbies and entertainments. Palate cleansers between viler courses. He almost envied those closer to the abominations the comprehension that might come with proximity#8212;

Tossed in the tumult of the waves, Howie could have told him a thing or two. As the Iad had closed on them, he'd remembered where he'd sensed this horror before: in the Chicago slaughterhouse where he'd worked two years previous. It was memories of that month that filled his head. The slaughterhouse in summer, blood congealing in the gutters, the animals emptying their bladders and bowels at the sound of the deaths that went before them. Life turned to meat with a single shot. He tried to look beyond these loathsome images to Jo-Beth, with whom he'd come so far, on a tide which had conspired to keep them together, but couldn't get them to the shore fast enough to save them from the slaughterers at their backs. The sight of her, which might have sweetened these last despairing moments, was denied him. All he could see was the cattle beaten on to the ramps, and the shit and blood being hosed away, and kicking carcasses being hooked up by one broken leg and sent down the line for disembowelment. The same horror filling his head forever and forever.

The place beyond the surf was as invisible to him as Jo-Beth, so he had no idea of how far#8212;or indeed how near#8212; they were to its shores. Had he had the power of sight he'd have seen Jo-Beth's father, stricken, and speaking with Tommy-Ray's voice:

"...here we come!...here we come...,"

#8212;and Grillo staring out at the Iad; and Tesla, on the verge of losing her life to a man she called#8212;

"Kissoon! For pity's sake! Look at them! Look!"

Kissoon glanced towards the schism, and the freight being brought by the tide.

"I see them," he said.

"You think they give a fuck about you? If they come through you're dead like all of us!"

"No," he said. "They're bringing a new world, and I've earned my place in it. A high place. You know how many years I've waited for this? Planned for it? Murdered for it? They'll reward me."

"Signed a contract did you? Got it in writing?"

"I'm their liberator. I made this possible. You should have joined the team back in the Loop. Lent me your body for a while. I'd have protected you. But no. You had your own ambitions. Like him." He looked at Jaffe. "Him the same. Had to have a piece of the pie. You both choked on it." Knowing Tesla couldn't leave now, when there was nowhere to leave to, he let her go and took a step towards Jaffe. "He got closer than you did, but then he had the balls."

Tommy-Ray's whoops of exhilaration were no longer issuing from Jaffe. There was only a low moan, which might have been the father, or the son, or a combination of both.

"You should see," Kissoon said to the tormented face. "Jaffe. Look at me. I want you to see!"

Tesla looked back towards the schism. How many waves were there left to break before the Iad reached the shore? A dozen? Half that number?

Kissoon's irritation with Jaffe was growing. He began to shake the man.

"Look at me, damn you!"

Tesla let him rage. It granted her a moment's grace; a moment in which she might just begin the process of removal to the Loop afresh.

"Wake up and see me, fucker. It's Kissoon. I got out! I got out!"

She let his haranguings become part of the scene she was picturing. Nothing could be excluded. Jaffe, Grillo, the doorway out to Cosm, and of course the doorway to Quiddity, all of it had to be devoured. Even she, the devourer, had to be part of this removal. Chewed up and spat into another time.

Kissoon's shouts suddenly stopped.

"What are you doing?" he said, turning to look at her. His stolen features, not used to expressing rage, were knotted up in a grotesque fashion. She didn't let the sight distract her. That too was part of the scene to be swallowed. She was equal to it.

"Don't you dare!" Kissoon said. "Hear me?"

She heard, and ate.

"I'm warning you," he said, moving back in her direction. "Don't you dare!"

Somewhere in the recesses of Randolph Jaffe's memory those three words, and the tone of their delivery, started an echo. He'd been in a hut once, with the man who'd delivered them in just that fashion. He remembered the hut's stale heat, and the smell of his own sweat. He remembered the scrawny old man squatting beyond the fire. And most of all he remembered the exchange now delivered into his head out of the past:

"Don't you dare."

"Red rag to a bull, saying dare to me. I've seen stuff...done stuff..."

Prompted by the words, he remembered a motion. His hand going down to the pocket of his jacket, to find a blunt-bladed knife that was waiting there. A knife with an appetite for opening up sealed and secret things. Like letters; like skulls.

He heard the words again#8212;

"Don't you dare."

#8212;and opened his sight to the scene in front of him. His arm, a parody of the strong limb he'd once owned#8212;went down to his pocket. All these years he'd never let the knife out of his possession. It was still blunt. It was still hungry. His withered digits closed around the handle. His eyes focused on the head of the man who'd spoken from his memories. It was an easy target.

Tesla saw the motion of Jaffe's head from the corner of her eye; saw him push himself away from the wall and start to raise his right arm up from the vicinity of his pocket. She didn't see what was in it, not until the last possible moment, by which time Kissoon's fingers were tight around her neck, and the Lix around her shins. She'd not let his assault stop the removal. It too became part of the picture she was devouring. And now Jaffe. And his raised hand. And the knife she finally saw glinting in his raised hand. Raised, and falling, driving into the back of Kissoon's neck.

The shaman screamed, his hands dropping from her throat and going around the back of his head to protect himself. She liked his cry. It was the pain of her enemy, and her power seemed to rise on its arc, the task she'd undertaken suddenly easier than it had ever been, as though part of Kissoon's strength was passing to her in the sound. She felt the space they occupied in her mind's mouth, and chewed on it. The house shuddered as a significant piece of it was wrenched away and removed into the closed moments of the Loop.

Instantly, light.

The light of the Loop's perpetual dawn, pouring in through the door. With it the same wind that had blown on her face whenever she'd been here. It blew through the hallway, and took a portion of the Iad's taint with it, off across the wasteland. With its passing she saw the glazed look leaving Grillo's face. He grabbed hold of the door jamb, squinting against the light and shaking his head like a dog maddened with fleas.

With their maker wounded, the Lix had left off their attack, but she didn't hope they'd leave her be for long. Before he could redirect them she made for the door, pausing only to push Grillo ahead of her.

"What in God's name have you done?" he said as they stepped out on to bleached desert earth.

She hurried him away from the relocated rooms, which without a structure around them to spread the load of Quiddity's breakers were already coming apart at every corner.

"You want the good news or the bad?" she said.

"The good."

"This is the Loop. I brought part of the house through#8212;"

Now she'd done it she could barely believe she'd succeeded.

"I did," she said, as though Grillo had contradicted her. "Fuck me, I did!"

"Including the Iad?" Grillo said.

"The schism and whatever's on the other side came too."

"So what's the bad news?"

"This is Trinity, remember? Point Zero?"

"Oh Jesus."

"And that#8212;" she pointed to the steel tower, which was no more than a quarter of a mile from where they stood, "#8212; is the bomb."

"So when does it blow? Have we got time#8212;"

"I don't know," she said. "Maybe it won't detonate as long as Kissoon's alive. He's held that moment, all these years."

"Is there any way out?"

"Yes."

"Which direction? Let's do it."

"Don't waste time wishing, Grillo. We're not getting out of here alive."

"You can think us out. You thought us in."

"No. I'm staying. I have to see it to the end."

"This is the end," he said, pointing back towards the fragment of the house. "Look."

The walls were toppling in clouds of plaster dust, as Quiddity's waves were thrown against them. "How much more end do you want? Let's get the fuck out of here."

Tesla looked for some sign of either Kissoon or Jaffe in the confusion, but the ether of the dream-sea was spilling out in all directions, too thick now to be dispersed by the wind. They were in it somewhere, but out of sight.

"Tesla? Are you listening to me?"

"The bomb won't go till Kissoon's dead," she said. "He's holding the moment#8212;"

"So you said."

"If you want to run for the exit, you might make it. It's in that direction." She pointed beyond the cloud through the town and out the other side. "You'd better get going."

"You think I'm a coward."

"Did I say that?"

A wave of ether curled towards them.

"If you're going to go, go," she said, her gaze fixed on the rubble of Coney Eye's lounge and hall. Above it, just visible through Quiddity's spillage, was the schism, hanging in the air. It doubled in size in the space between blinks, tearing itself open. She readied herself for the sight of the giants. But it was human forms she saw first, two of them, thrown up and out on to this arid shore.

"Howie?" she said.

It was. And beside him, Jo-Beth. Something had happened to them, she saw. Their faces and bodies were a mass of growths, as though their tissue had sprouted some vile blossom. She braved the next wave of ether to go back to them, shouting their names as she went. It was Jo-Beth who looked up first. Leading Howie by the hand she sought Tesla out in the turmoil.

"This way," Tesla said. "You have to get away from the hole#8212;"

The tainted ether was inducing nightmares. They itched to be seen. But Jo-Beth seemed able to think her way through them to a simple question.

"Where are we?"

There was no simple answer.

"Grillo will tell you," she said. "Later. Grillo?"

He was there, already getting that same distracted look she'd seen in his eyes at the door of Coney Eye.

"Children," he said. "Why's it always children?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," she told him. "Listen to me, Grillo."

"I'm...listening," he said.

"You wanted to get out. I told you the way, remember?"

"Through the town."

"Through the town."

"Out the other side."

"Right."

"Take Howie and Jo-Beth with you. Maybe you can still outrun it."

"Outrun what?" Howie said, only raising his head with difficulty. It was weighed down with monstrous growths.

"The Iad or the bomb," Tesla told him. "Take your pick. Can you run?"

"We can try," Jo-Beth said. She looked at Howie. "We can try."

"Then go to it. All of you."

"I still...don't see..." Grillo began, his voice betraying the Iad's influence.

"Why I have to stay?"

"Yes."

"It's simple," she said. "This is the final trial. All things to all men, remember?"

"Damn stupid," he said, holding her gaze, as though the sight of her helped him keep the insanity at bay.

"Damn right," she said.

"So many things..." he said.

"What?"

"I haven't said to you."

"You didn't need to. And I hope neither did I."

"You were right."

"Except one. Something I should have told you."

"What?"

"I should have said#8212;" she began; then grinned a wide, almost ecstatic grin that she didn't need to fake because it came from some contented place in her; and with it terminated her sentence as she'd terminated so many telephone calls between them and turned away, heading off into the next wave out of the schism, where she knew he couldn't follow.

Somebody was coming her way; another swimmer in the dream-sea, thrown up on the beach.

Tommy-Ray, the Death-Boy. The changes wrought in Jo-Beth and Howie had been profound, but they were kindness itself compared with what he'd sustained. His hair was still Malibu gold, and his face still bore the grin which had once charmed Palomo Grove to its knees. But his teeth were not the only gleam about him. Quiddity had bleached his flesh so that it resembled bone. His brows and cheeks had swollen up, his eyes sunk. He looked like a living skull. He wiped a thread of saliva from his chin with the back of his hand, the pinpoints of his gaze directed past Tesla to where his sister stood.

"Jo-Beth..." he said, moving through the wash of dark air. Tesla saw Jo-Beth look back towards him, then take a step away from Howie as though she was ready to part from him. Though she had urgent business to finish Tesla could not help but watch, as Tommy-Ray moved to claim his sister. The love that had ignited between Howie and Jo-Beth had begun this whole story, or at least its most recent chapter. Was it possible that Quiddity had undone that love?

She had the answer a beat later, as Jo-Beth took a second step from Howie's side, till they were at arm's length, her right hand still holding his left. With a thrill of comprehension Tesla saw what Jo-Beth was displaying to her brother. She and Howie Katz were not simply holding hands. They were joined. Quiddity had fused them, their interlocked fingers became a knot of forms that bound them together.

There was no need for words. Tommy-Ray let out a shout of disgust, and stopped in his tracks. Tesla could not see the expression on his face. Most probably there was none. Skulls could only grin and grimace; opposites collided in one expression. She saw Jo-Beth's look, however, even through the intervening murk. There was a little pity in it. But only a little. The rest was dispassion.

Tesla saw Grillo speak, words to summon the lovers away. They went immediately; all three. Tommy-Ray didn't move to follow.

"Death-Boy?" she said.

He looked around at her. The skull was still capable of tears. They welled on the curve of his sockets.

"How far are they behind you?" she asked him. "The Iad?"

"Iad?" he said.

"The giants."

"There are no giants. Just darkness."

"How far?"

"Very close."

When she looked back towards the schism she understood what he meant by darkness. Clots of it were emerging, carried out on the waves like gobs of tar the size of boats, then rising up into the air above the desert. They had some kind of life, propelling themselves with rhythmic motions that ran down through the dozens of limbs arrayed along their flanks. Filaments of matter as dark as their bodies trailed beneath them, like coils of decaying gut. This was not, she knew, the Iad itself; but they couldn't be far behind.

She glanced away from the sight towards the steel tower, and the platform on top of it. The bomb was her species' ultimate idiocy, but it might justify its existence if it was quick in its detonation. There was no flicker from the platform, however. The bomb hung in its cradle like a bandaged baby, refusing to wake.

Kissoon was still alive; still holding the moment. She started back towards the rubble in the hope of finding him, and in the vainer hope of stopping his life with her own hands. As she approached she realized the clots had purpose in their upward movement. They were assembling themselves in layers, their filaments knotting so as to create a vast curtain. It was already thirty feet in the air, and each wave that broke brought more clots, their number rising exponentially as the schism widened.

She searched the maelstrom for a sign of Kissoon, and found both him and Jaffe on the far side of the rubble that had been the rooms. They were standing face to face, hands at each other's throats, the knife still in Jaffe's fist but held from further work by Kissoon. It had been busy. What had once been Raul's body was covered in stab wounds, from which blood was freely running. The cuts seemed not to have impaired Kissoon's strength. Even as she came in sight of them the shaman tore at Jaffe's throat. Pieces of his flesh came away. Kissoon went back for more instantly, opening the wound further. She directed him from his assault with a cry.

"Kissoon!"

The shaman glanced her way.

"Too late," he said. "The Iad's almost here."

She took what comfort she could from that almost.

"You both lost," he said, taking a back-handed swipe at Jaffe which threw the man off him to the ground. The frail, bony body didn't land heavily; it had too little weight. But it rolled some distance, the knife going from Jaffe's hand. Kissoon offered his opponent a contemptuous glance, then laughed.

"Poor bitch," he said to Tesla. "What did you expect? A reprieve? A blinding flash to wipe them all away? Forget it. It can't happen. The moment's held."

He started towards her as he talked, his approach slower than it might otherwise have been had he not sustained so many wounds.

"You wanted revelation," he said. "And now you've got it. It's almost here. I think you should show your devotion to it. That's only right. Let it see your flesh."

He raised his hands, which were bloody, the way they'd been in the hut when she first heard the word Trinity, and glimpsed him daubed with Mary Muralles's blood.

"The breasts," he said. "Show it the breasts."

A long way behind him, Tesla saw Jaffe getting to his feet. Kissoon failed to notice the motion. His eyes were all for Tesla.

"I think I should bare them for you," he said. "Allow me to do you that kindness. "

She didn't retreat; didn't put up any resistance. Instead she dropped all expression from her face, knowing how much he liked the pliant. His bloody hands were repulsive, the hard-on pressing against the soaked fabric of his trousers more disgusting still, but she succeeded in concealing her repugnance.

"Good girl," he said. "Good girl."

He put his hands on her breasts.

"What say we fuck for the millennium?" he said.

She couldn't quite discipline the shudder that ran through her at the touch and the thought.

"Don't like it?" he said, suddenly suspicious. His eyes flickered off to his left as he understood the conspiracy. There was a glint of fear in them. He started to turn. Jaffe was two yards from him, and closing, the knife raised above his head, the glint on its blade an echo of the glint in Kissoon's eyes. Two lights that belonged together.

"Don't#8212;" Kissoon began, but the knife dared to descend before he could forbid it, sliding into his wide right eye. Kissoon didn't scream this time, but expelled his breath as a long moan. Jaffe pulled the knife out and stabbed again, the second stab as accurate as the first, puncturing the left eye. He drove the blade in to the hilt, and pulled it out. Kissoon flailed, his moan becoming sobs as he fell to his knees. With both his fists wrapped around the knife Jaffe delivered a third blow to the top of the shaman's skull, then went on stabbing, the force of the blows opening wound after wound.

Kissoon's sobs stopped as suddenly as they'd begun. His hands, which had been scrabbling at his head to ward off further cuts, fell to his sides. His body stayed upright for two beats. Then he fell forward.

A spasm of pleasure ran through Tesla that was indistinguishable from the highest pleasure. She wanted the bomb to detonate at that moment, matching its completion with her own. Kissoon was dead and it would not be bad to die now, knowing the Iad would be swept away in the same moment.

"Go on, "she said to the bomb, trying to sustain the bliss she felt until the flesh was burned off her bones. "Go on, will you? Go on."

But there was no explosion. She felt the rush of pleasure start to drain from her, and the realization appear in its place that she'd missed some vital element in all of this. Surely with Kissoon dead the event he'd sweated all those years to hold at bay had to come? Now; on delay. But there was nothing. The steel tower still stood.

"What have I missed?" she asked herself. "What in God's name have I missed?"

She looked towards Jaffe, who was still staring down at Kissoon's corpse.

"Synchronicity," he said.

"What?"

"I killed him."

"It doesn't seem to have answered the problem."

"What problem?"

"This is Point Zero. There's a bomb, just waiting to detonate. He was holding that moment at bay."

"Who was?"

"Kissoon! Isn't it obvious?"

No, babe#8212;she told herself#8212;it's not. Of course it's not. The thought was suddenly clear in her head that Kissoon had left the Loop in Raul's body intending to come back to claim his own. Once out in the Cosm he hadn't been able to hold the moment. Somebody else must have done it for him. That somebody, or rather, that some-spirit, was still doing it.

"Where are you going?" Jaffe wanted to know as she started in the direction of the wastes beyond the tower. Could she even find the hut? He followed after her, still asking questions.

"How did you get us here?"

"Ate it up and spat it out."

"Like my hands?"

"No, not like your hands. Not at all."

The sun was steadily being blocked out by the mesh of clots, the light only breaking through in patches.

"Where are you going?" he said again.

"The hut. Kissoon's hut."

"Why?"

"Just come with me. I need help."

A cry in the gloom slowed progress a moment.

"Poppa?"

She looked round to see Tommy-Ray stepping out of shadow into a patch of light. The sun was strangely kind to him, its brilliance bleaching out the worst details of his transformed state.

"Poppa?"

Jaffe stopped following Tesla.

"Come on," she urged him, but she already knew she'd once more lost him to Tommy-Ray. The first time it had been to his thoughts. This time it was to his presence.

The Death-Boy started to stumble towards his father.

"Help me, Poppa," he said.

The man opened his arms, saying nothing, nor needing to. Tommy-Ray fell into them, clutching at Jaffe in return.

Tesla offered him one last chance to assist her.

"Are you coming or not?"

The answer was simple:

"Not," he said.

She didn't bother to waste breath on the issue. The boy had a prior claim; a primal claim. She watched their embrace tighten, as though they were squeezing the breath from each other, then she again set her sights on the tower and began to run.

Though she forbade herself a backward glance, as she came to the tower#8212;her lungs already aching, and still a bruising distance to go before she found the hut#8212;she looked. Father and son had not moved. They stood in a patch of brightness, wrapped around each other, with the clots still assembling behind them. From this distance their construction resembled the work of a monumental and funereal lace-maker. She studied the curtain a moment, her mind racing through interpretations and finding a solution to its existence both preposterous and plausible: that this was a veil behind which the Iad Uroboros were going to rise. Indeed there seemed to be motion behind its folds already; a greater darkness, assembling.

She took her gaze from the sight, glanced up briefly at the tower and its lethal load, then started off again in the direction of the hut.

The trip in the opposite direction, through the town towards the perimeter of the Loop, was no easier than Tesla's. They'd all been on too many journeys: into the earth, into the sea, to islands, caves and to the limits of their sanity. This last trip demanded energies they scarcely had to give. With every other step their bodies threatened to give out, the hard desert floor looking comfortable by contrast with the agony of advancing. But the oldest fear known to man drove them on: that of the pursuing beast. It had neither claws nor fangs, of course, but it was all the more lethal for that. A beast of fire. It was only when they reached the town that they slowed their pace long enough to exchange a few gasping words.

"How much farther?" Jo-Beth wanted to know.

"Just on the other side of the town."

Howie was staring back at the Iad curtain, which had now mounted a hundred feet and more.

"Do you think they see us?" he said.

"Who?" said Grillo. "The Iad? If they do they don't seem to be following."

"That isn't them," Jo-Beth said. "That's just their veil."

"So we've still got a chance," Howie said.

"Let's take it," said Grillo, and set the pace down the Main Street. It wasn't chance. Tesla's mind, befuddled as it was, had the route across the desert to the hut inscribed deep into it. As she trotted (running was beyond her) it was the conversation she'd had with Grillo back at the motel that she went over in her mind, the exchange in which she'd confessed to him the extent of her spiritual ambition. If she died here in the Loop#8212;and that was virtually inevitable#8212;she knew she'd come to understand more about the workings of the world in the days since she'd arrived in Palomo Grove than in all the years previous. She'd had adventures beyond her body. She'd encountered incarnations of good and evil, and learned something of her condition because she resembled neither. If she was gone from this life soon, either at the instant of detonation, or at the Iad's arrival, she had no complaint at that.

But there were so many souls who had not yet made their peace with extinction, nor should have to. Infants, children, lovers. Peaceable people the planet over, whose lives were still in the making and enriching, who, if she failed now, would wake up tomorrow with any chance to taste the same adventures in spirit she'd had denied them. Slaves of the Iad. What justice was there in that? Before coming to the Grove she'd have given the twentieth century's answer to that question. There was no justice because justice was a human construct and had no place in a system of matter. But mind was in matter, always. That was the revelation of Quiddity. The sea was the crossroads, and from it all possibilities sprang. Before everything, Quiddity. Before life, the dream of life. Before the thing solid, the solid thing dreamt. And mind, dreaming or awake, knew justice, which was therefore as natural as matter, its absence in any exchange deserving of more than a fatalistic shrug. It merited a howl of outrage; and a passionate pursuit of why. If she wished to live beyond the impending holocaust it was to shout that shout. To find out what crime her species had committed against the universal mind that it should now be tottering on execution. That was worth living to know-The hut was in sight. Behind her the suspicion she'd had that the Iad were rising behind the veil of clots, was confirmed. The giants of her childhood nightmares were emerging from the schism, and would soon draw that veil away. When they did they'd surely see her, and come in a few thunderous strides to stamp her out. But they didn't hurry. Their vast limbs took time to draw up from Quiddity; their heads (the size of houses, every window blazing) were immense, and needed the full machinery of their anatomies before they could be raised. When she began again towards the hut the glimpse she'd had of the emergents began to resolve itself in her mind's eye, her wits making coherence of their titanic mystery.

The door of the hut was closed, of course. But it wasn't locked. She pulled it open.

Kissoon was waiting for her. The shock of the sight of him took her breath away, and she was about to retreat out into the sun until she realized that the body propped up against the far wall was vacated by spirit, its system ticking on to preserve it from mortification. There was nobody behind the glazed eyes. The door slammed closed, and without wasting any more time she named the only spirit here that could possibly be holding the moment in Kissoon's stead.

"Raul?"

The weary air in the hut whined with his unseen presence.

"Raul? For God's sake, I know you're here. I know you're afraid. But if you can hear me, show me somehow, will you?"

The whine intensified. She had the sense that he was circling the hut, like a fly trapped in a jar.

"Raul, you've got to let go. Trust me and let go. "

The whine was beginning to hurt her.

"I don't know what he did to you to make you give up your body, but I know it wasn't your fault. He tricked you. He lied to you. He did the same to me. Do you understand? You're not to blame."

The air began to settle somewhat. She took a deep breath and began her persuasions again, remembering how she'd first bullied him into coming with her, back at the Mission.

"If it's anybody's fault, it's mine," she said. "Forgive me, Raul. We've both of us come to the end. But if it's any comfort, so's Kissoon. He's dead. He won't be coming back. Your body...won't be coming back. It's destroyed. There was no other way of killing him."

The hurt of the whine had been replaced by another, deeper ache: that of knowing how much his spirit must be suffering, dislocated and frightened, unable to let go of the moment. Kissoon's victim, as they'd both been. In some ways, so much alike. Nunciates both, learning to climb out of their limitations. Strange bedfellows, but bedfellows nevertheless. Which thought inspired another.

She spoke it.

"Can two minds occupy the same body?" she said. "If you're afraid...come into me. "

She let that notion hang in the silence, not pressing him for fear his panic would escalate. She waited beside the cold ashes of the fire, knowing every second he remained unper-suaded gave the Iad another foothold, but devoid of further arguments or invitations. She'd offered him more than she'd offered anyone in her life: total possession of her body. If he didn't accept she had no more persuasions.

After a few, breathless seconds something seemed to brush the nape of her neck, like lover's fingers, the stroke suddenly becoming a needle point.

"Is this you?" she said.

In the beat it took her to ask the question it became self-directed, as his spirit entered her head.

There was no dialogue, nor any need for dialogue. They were twin ghosts in the same machine, and in the instant of his entering entirely conversant with each other. She read from his memories the method by which Kissoon had claimed him, pulling him through to the Loop from the bathroom in North Huntley Drive, using his confusion to subdue him He'd been easy meat. Weighed down by leaden smoke, mesmerized into performing one duty and one alone, the holding of the moment, then wrenched from his body to do that duty in a blind round of terror that had not ceased until she'd opened the door. She had no more need to instruct him in their next act they had to perform together than he'd had to tell her his story. He shared her comprehension.

She went back to the door, and opened it.

The Iad's curtain was huge enough now that its shadow touched the hut. There were still some shafts of sun breaking through, but none near the threshold upon which Tesla stood. Here there was darkness. She looked towards the veil, seeing the Iad assembled behind it. Their silhouettes were the size of thunderheads, their limbs like whips plaited to beat mountains with.

Now, she thought. Or never. Let the moment go.

Let#8212;it#8212;go.

She felt Raul do just that, his will releasing its hold and shedding the burden Kissoon had laid upon him. A wave seemed to move from them towards the tower above which the Iad loomed. After years of suspension, time was unfettered. Five-thirty on the sixteenth of July was moments away, and so was the event that marked that innocent instant as the beginning of Mankind's Last Madness.

Her thoughts went to Grillo, and to Jo-Beth and Howie, urging them on through the exit and into the safety of the Cosm, but her urgings were interrupted as a brightness began in the heart of the shadow. She couldn't see the tower, but she saw the shock spring from the platform, the ball of fire becoming visible and a second flash appearing the instant after, the brightest light she'd ever seen, from yellow to white in a blink#8212;

We can do no more, she thought, as the fire began to swell obscenely. I could be home.

She pictured herself#8212;woman, man and ape in one bruised body#8212;standing on the step of the hut, the light of the bomb blazing on her face. Then she imagined that same face and body in another place. She had only seconds to work with. But thought was fast.

Across the desert she saw the hosts of the Iad drawing their veil of clots aside, as the blazing cloud grew to eclipse them. Their faces were like flowers the scale of mountains, and they kept opening, throat upon throat upon throat. It was an awesome display, their hugeness seeming to conceal labyrinths, which turned inside out as they uncovered themselves. Tunnels becoming towers of flesh, if it was flesh they had, and turning again, and turning, so that every part of them was in constant transformation. If singularity was indeed their appetite, then it was as salvation from this prodigious flux.

Mountains and fleas, Jaffe had said, and she saw now what he'd meant by that. The Iad was either a nation of leviathans, itching with numberless parasites and opening their guts, over and over, in the vain hope of shedding them, or the parasites themselves, so numerous they imitated mountains. She would not know which, this side of life, or Trinity. Before she could interpret the countless forms they took, the explosion eclipsed them, burning their mystery out.

At the same moment Kissoon's Loop#8212;its task fulfilled in a fashion its creator could never have anticipated#8212;disappeared. If the device on the tower failed to consume them utterly they were undone nevertheless, their madness and their appetite sealed up in a moment of lost time.

As Howie, Jo-Beth and Grillo had entered the confounding terrain at the perimeter of the Loop, the tiny time to either side of 5:30 a.m., July 16th 1945, which Kissoon had created, commandeered and been captive of, a light had bloomed behind them. No, not bloomed. Mushrooms had no flowers. None of them looked back, but pushed their exhausted bodies to one last, superhuman effort, which carried them, the fire at their backs, into the safety of real time. They'd lain on the desert floor, unable to move, for a long while, only dragging themselves to their feet when the risk of being fricasseed where they lay became impossible to discount.

It was a long and difficult haul back to California. They found a highway after an hour of wandering, and after another hour a deserted garage along that highway. There Grillo left the lovers, knowing that hitching a ride with such freaks in tow would be impossible. He found a ride himself, after some considerable time, and in a small town bought a beaten-up truck with the entire contents of his wallet, including his credit cards, then headed back to the garage to pick Jo-Beth and Howie up and drive them back to Ventura County. They lay in the back of the truck in a deep sleep, their exhaustion so utter nothing woke them. They arrived back at the Grove just before dawn of the following day, but there was no possibility of access. The same authorities who'd been so slow, negligent, or#8212;as was Grillo's suspicion#8212;complicit in not defending the Grove against the forces erupting in its midst had now, with the eclipse of those forces, become obsessively cautious. The town was sealed off. Grillo didn't challenge the edict. He simply turned around before he came to the barricades, and headed along the highway until he found a place to park the truck and sleep. Their slumbers weren't interrupted. Some hours later, when he woke, he found the back seat empty. His every joint aching he got out, took a piss, then went to look for the lovers. He found them up an incline, sitting in the sun. The transformations that Quiddity had worked upon them both were already in retreat. Their hands were no longer fused, the bizarre forms that had remade their faces had burned away in the sunlight, until they were no more than marks on once flawless skin. With time they too would probably disappear. What he doubted would ever fade was the look in their eyes when they met his gaze: the stare of two people who had shared an experience nobody else in the world had shared, and had become, in that sharing, possessed by each other. More than a minute spent in their presence and he felt like an intruder. The three of them talked briefly of what was wisest to do now, and concluded that staying in the vicinity of the Grove was best. They made no mention of events in the Loop, or in Quiddity, though Grillo burned to ask what it had been like to float in the dream-sea. With rough plans laid, Grillo went back to the truck and waited for them to come down. They came after a few minutes, hand in hand.

There had been no paucity of witnesses to Tesla's relocation of a part of Coney Eye. Observers and photographers both parked on the Hill and hovering above it saw the facade grow smoky, become transparent and finally vanish entirely. With a portion of its structure summarily removed the entire house succumbed to gravity. Had there been only two or three witnesses, doubts might have been cast on the veracity of these accounts. It was only in the pages of the National Enquirer and its fanciful ilk that solid wood and slate were whisked off into another plane of being. But there were twenty-two spectators in all. They each had their vocabularies to describe what they'd seen#8212;some stark, some flowery#8212;but the root facts remained a constant. A substantial part of Buddy Vance's museum to the true Art of America had been snatched into a different reality.

Some of the witnesses (those weariest among the number) even claimed to have caught a glimpse of that place. A white horizon and a bright sky; dust blowing around. Nevada, maybe; or Utah. Any one of a thousand wide open places. America had no shortage of those. The country was huge, and still full of emptiness. Places where a house could reappear and never be found; where mysteries could be happening every day of the week and nobody be any the wiser for it. For a few of the witnesses, seeing what they'd seen, it was the first time it had ever occurred to them that maybe a country could be too big, too full of open space. But it occurred now, and it haunted them.

One of those spaces, at least for the foreseeable future, would be the ground upon which Palomo Grove had been built.

The steady process of its destruction didn't end with Coney Eye's relocation into the Loop. Far from it. The earth had been waiting for a sign, and had got it. Cracks widened to fissures and fissures became chasms, overturning entire streets. The most affected of the villages were Windbluff and Deerdell, the latter virtually flattened by shock-waves from the vicinity of the wood, which disappeared in its entirety, leaving churned, smoking earth in its place. The Hill and its sumptuous properties were dealt as severe a blow; or several blows. It was not the houses immediately below the place where Coney Eye had stood that took the brunt of the destruction (though it would scarcely have mattered#8212;their owners had been among the first to leave, vowing they'd not return). It was the Crescents. Emerson moved south two hundred yards, its houses concertinaed in the process. Whitman went west, the houses, by some quirk of geology, pushed and tipped into their own pools. The other three Crescents were simply laid flat, much of the debris finding its way down the Hill and damaging countless houses in its descent. AH of which was academic. Nobody would be salvaging anything from their houses; the entire area was deemed unstable for six days, during which time fires raged unattended, destroying a large part of the property which the ground had not overturned or swallowed. In this regard the unluckiest village was Stillbrook, the sometime occupants of which might have eventually claimed some of their personal belongings from their houses had a fire not flared in a house on Fellowship Street on a night when the kind of wind that had once brought Grovers out into their yards to smell the ocean been blowing, the gusts driving the flames through the village with devastating speed. By morning half the village was ashes. By the evening of the same day, the other half.

It was that night, the night after Stillbrook burned, and six days after events on the Hill, that Grillo came back to the Grove. He had slept more than half of the intervening time, but he didn't feel that much better for the rest. Sleep was not the palliative it had been. He wasn't eased by it, soothed and comforted by it. When he closed his eyes his head played out scene after scene from the past. Mostl of the show was recent. Ellen Nguyen featured strongly, asking him over and over again to give up kisses and use his teeth; so did her son, sitting in bed surrounded by Balloon Men. There were guest appearances by Rochelle Vance, who did and said nothing. but offered her beauty to the parade: there'was Good Man Fletcher, down at the Mall. There was the Jaff in the upper room at Coney Eye, sweating out power. And Witt alive. And Witt dead, face down in the water.

But starring in the story was Tesla, who'd played out her last trick on him, smiling and not saying goodbye even though she knew it was. They'd not been lovers; not even close. In a sense he'd never quite understood what he felt for her. Love certainly, but of a kind difficult to express; perhaps impossible. Which made mourning her equally problematic.

It was that sense of unfinished business between Tesla and himself which kept him from returning any of the calls Abernethy left on his answering machine back home, though God knows the story itched in him, and itched, and itched. She'd always expressed ambiguity about his making the truth public, even though she'd sanctioned his doing so at the end. But that had only been because she'd thought the issue academic, the world almost finished and little hope left for the saving of it. But the end hadn't come, and she'd died in the act of preservation. He felt honor-bound to keep his silence. Discreet as he was being, however, he couldn't keep from returning to the Grove to find out how its demise was progressing.

The town was still a no-go area when he arrived, police barricades surrounding it. They weren't difficult to bypass. The Grove's guardians had become lax in their duties in the days since it had been sealed off, given that very few people, whether sightseers, looters or residents, had been foolhardy enough to want to tread its turbulent streets. He slipped through the cordon with ease, and started his exploration of the town. The wind that had driven the fire through Stillbrook the day before had dropped away completely. The smoke of that conflagration had now settled, its taste almost sweet in his mouth, like the smoke from a fire of good wood. It might have been elegiac under different circumstances, but he'd learned too much about the Grove and its tragedies to indulge such sentiments. It was impossible to view the destruction without regretting the Grove's passing. Its worst sin had been hypocrisy#8212;going on its blithe, sunny way willfully concealing its secret self. That self had sweated out fears, and made dreams real for a while, and it had been those fears and dreams, not Jaffe and Fletcher, which had finally torn the Grove apart. The Nunciates had used the town for their arena, but they'd invented nothing in their war that the Grove had not already nurtured and fed in its heart.

He found himself wondering as he walked if perhaps there was some other way to tell the story of the Grove without flying in the face of Tesla's edict. If he forsook Swift, perhaps, and tried to find some poetic mode in which to couch all he'd experienced. It was a route he'd contemplated taking before, but now (as then) he knew without attempting it he'd fail. He'd come to the Grove a literalist, and nothing it had shown him would ever dissuade him from the cult of the re-portable fact.

He made a circuit of the town, only avoiding areas where trespass would have amounted to suicide, making mental notes of the sights he saw even though he knew he couldn't use them. Then he slipped out again, unchallenged, and returned to L.A., and to more nights filled with replayed memories.

It wasn't the same for Jo-Beth and Howie. They'd had their dark night of the soul on Quiddity's tide, and the nights that followed, back in the Cosm, were dreamless. At least, they woke remembering nothing.

Howie tried to persuade Jo-Beth that they were best going back to Chicago, but she insisted that any such plans were premature. As long as the Grove remained a danger zone, and the bodies there were unrecovered, she wasn't going to leave the vicinity. She didn't doubt that Momma was dead. But until she was found and brought out of the Grove to be given a Christian burial any thought of a life for them both beyond this tragedy was not to be contemplated.

In the meanwhile, they had a lot of healing to do, which they did behind closed doors in a motel in Thousand Oaks close enough to the Grove so that when it was deemed safe to return Jo-Beth would be among the first to do so. The marks that Quiddity had left upon them soon receded into memory, and they were left in a strange limbo. Everything was finished, but nothing new could begin. And, while they waited, a distance grew between them that neither encouraged or intended but neither could prevent. The love that had begun in Butrick's Steak House had instigated a series of cataclysms for which they knew they could not be held responsible, but which haunted them nevertheless. Guilt began to weigh on them as they waited in Thousand Oaks, its influence growing as they healed, and came to realize that unlike dozens, perhaps hundreds, of innocent Grovers they'd emerged physically unscathed.

On the seventh day after events in Kissoon's Loop the morning news informed them that search-parties were going into the town. The destruction of the Grove had been a big story, of course, theories being advanced from countless sources as to why the town had been singled out for such devastation when the rest of the Valley had survived with no more than a few tremors and some cracks in the freeway. There was no mention amid these reports of the phenomena witnessed at Coney Eye; governmental pressure had silenced all those who'd seen the impossible happen in front of their eyes.

The entry into the Grove was cautious at first, but by the end of the day a large number of survivors were back in the town, looking to salvage keepsakes and souvenirs from the wreckage. A few were lucky. Most weren't. For every Grover who came back to a once familiar street to find their house intact there were six who met a scene of total ruination. Everything gone; splintered, smashed or simply vanished into the ground. Of all the neighborhoods the one least damaged was paradoxically the least populated: the Mall and its immediate environs. The polished pine Palomo Grove Shopping Center sign at the entrance to the parking lot had slid into a hole, as had a fair portion of the lot itself, but the stores themselves were virtually undamaged, which meant, of course, that a murder investigation (never solved) got underway as soon as the bodies in the pet store were discovered. But corpses aside, had there been Grovers to shop the Mall could have opened for business that day without much more than a dusting off. Marvin Jr., of Marvin's Food and Drug, was the first to organize a removal of unspoiled stock. His brother had a store in Pasadena, and customers who couldn't give a damn where their bargains originated. He made no apology for the haste with which he got about his profiteering. Business was business, after all.

The other removal from the Grove, of course, and this a business of a grimmer sort, was that of bodies. Dogs and sound-sensitive equipment were brought in to establish whether anybody was left alive, the efforts of both drawing a blank. Then came the grisly task of retrieval. By no means every Grover who'd lost his life was found. When the final calculations were made, almost two weeks after the search began, forty-one of the town's members were unaccounted for. The earth had claimed them, then closed over their corpses. Or else the individuals in question had slipped away into the night, taking this opportunity to re-invent themselves and start afresh. One of the latter group, so rumor went, was William Witt, whose body was never recovered but whose house, upon investigation, was found to contain enough pornography to keep the Combat Zones of several cities supplied for months. He'd had a secret life, had William Witt, and the general suspicion was that he'd chosen to go and live it elsewhere.

When the identity of one of the two corpses in the pet store was revealed to be that of Jim Hotchkiss one or two of the astuter journalists noted that his had been a life dogged by tragedy. His daughter, they reminded their readers, had been one of the so-called League of Virgins, and in remarking on this the writers took a paragraph to comment on just how much grief the Grove had endured in its short life. Had it been doomed from the outset, the more fanciful commentators asked, built on cursed ground? There was some shred of solace in that thought. If not, if the Grove had simply been a victim of chance, then how many of the thousands of such communities across America were vulnerable to the same outrages?

On the second day of the search Joyce McGuire's body was found in the ruins of her house, which had sustained considerably worse damage than any of the surrounding property. It was taken for identification, as were the bulk of the bodies, to a makeshift mortuary in Thousand Oaks. That onerous duty fell to Jo-Beth, whose brother would be numbered among the missing forty-one. Identification made, arrangements were begun for her burial. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints looked after its own. Pastor John had survived the levelling (indeed he'd left the Grove the night of the Jaff's attack on the McGuire house and hadn't come back till the dust had settled) and it was he who organized Momma's funeral. Only once in that time did he and Howie cross paths, and Howie was quick to remind the Pastor of the night he'd blubbered beside the refrigerator. The Pastor insisted he remembered no such incident.

"Pity I haven't got a photo," Howie said. "To jog your memory. But I've got one up here." He pointed to his temples, upon which the last traces of Quiddity's reconfiguration of his flesh was fading. "Just in case I ever get tempted."

"Tempted to what?" the Pastor asked.

"To be a believer."

Momma McGuire was consigned into the embrace of her chosen God two days after that exchange. Howie didn't attend the ceremony, but was waiting for Jo-Beth when it was all over. They left for Chicago twenty-four hours later.

Their part in events was very far from over, however. The first sign that the adventure of Cosm and Quiddity had made them part of a very select band of players came half a week after they'd got to Chicago, with the arrival on their doorstep of a tall, handsome-gone-to-harrowed stranger, dressed too lightly for the weather, who introduced himself as D'Amour.

"I'd like to talk to you about what happened at Palomo Grove," he said to Howie.

"How did you find us?"

"It's my job, finding people," Harry explained. "You may have heard Tesla Bombeck mention me?"

"No, I don't think so."

"Well you can check with her."

"No I can't," Howie reminded him. "She's dead."

"So she is," D'Amour said. "So she is. My mistake."

"And even if you did know her there's nothing Jo-Beth and me have to say. We just want to forget about the Grove."

"There's not much chance of that," a voice from behind him observed. "Who is this, Howie?"

"He says he knew Tesla."

"D'Amour," the stranger said, "Harry D'Amour. I really would appreciate a few minutes of your time. Just a few. It's very important."

Howie glanced at Jo-Beth.

"Why not?" she said.

"It's damn cold out there," D'Amour observed as he stepped inside. "What happened to summer?"

"Things are bad all over," Jo-Beth said.

"You noticed," D'Amour replied.

"What are you two talking about?"

"The news," she said. "I've been watching it, you haven't."

"It's like a full moon every night," D'Amour said. "A lot of people are acting very strange. The suicide rate's doubled since the Grove Breakout. There's riots in asylums across the country. And I'd lay money we're only seeing a little part of the whole picture. There's a lot being kept under wraps."

"Who by?"

"The government. The church. Am I the first one to find you?"

"Yes," said Howie. "Why? Do you think there's going to be others?"

"For certain. You two are at the center of all this#8212;"

"It wasn't our fault!" Howie protested.

"I'm not saying it was," D'Amour replied. "Please. I haven't come here to accuse you of anything. And I'm sure you deserve to be left in peace to get on with living. But it's not going to happen. That's the truth. You're "too important. You've seen too much. Our people know it, and so do theirs."

"Theirs?" Jo-Beth said.

"The Iad's people. The infiltrators who kept the army at bay when it looked like the Iad were about to break out."

"How do you know so much about all this?" Howie wanted to know.

"I have to be a little careful about my sources just at the moment, but I hope I can reveal them to you eventually."

"You make it sound like we're in this with you," Howie said. "We're not. You're right, we do want to get on with living our lives, together. And we'll go wherever we have to#8212; Europe, Australia, wherever#8212;to do that."

"They'll find you," D'Amour said. "The Grove brought them too close to succeeding for them to give up now. They know they've got us spooked. Quiddity's tainted. Nobody's going to have many sweet dreams from now on. We're easy meat, and they know it. You might want to live ordinary lives but you can't. Not with fathers like yours."

It was Jo-Beth's turn to express shock at his words.

"What do you know about our fathers?" she said.

"They're not in Heaven, I know that," D'Amour said. "Sorry. Bad taste. Like I said, I've got my sources, and very soon I hope I can reveal them. In the meantime I need to understand what happened at the Grove better, so that we can learn by it."

"I should have done that," Howie said softly. "I had a chance to learn from Fletcher, but I never took it."

"You're Fletcher's son," D'Amour said. "His spirit's in you. It's just a question of listening to it "

"He was a genius," Howie told Harry. "I really believe that. I'm sure he was out of his mind on mescaline half the time, but he was still a genius."

"I want to hear," said D'Amour. "Do you want to tell me?"

Howie stared at him for a long moment. Then he sighed, and with a tone very like surprise said:

"Yes. I think I do."

Grillo was sitting in the 50's Cafe on Van Nuys Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, trying to remember what it was like to enjoy food, when somebody came and sat opposite him in the booth. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the cafe wasn't full. He raised his head to request some privacy but instead said:

"Tesla?"

She was dressed in quintessential Bombecksquerie: a flock of ceramic swans pinned to a midnight-blue blouse, a red bandanna, dark glasses. Her face was pale, but her lipstick, which clashed with the bandanna, was glitzy. Her eyeshadow, when she slipped her glasses down her nose, was the same shade of riot.

"Yes," she said.

"Yes what?"

"Yes Tesla."

"I thought you were dead."

"I've made that mistake. It's easily done."

"This isn't some illusion?" he said.

"Well the whole damn thing's that, isn't it? All a show. But us, are we any more illusory than you? No."

"Us?"

"I'll come to that in a minute. First you. How are things?"

"There's not much to tell. I went back to the Grove a couple of times, just to see who survived."

"Ellen Nguyen?"

"She wasn't found. Nor was Philip. I went through the rubble personally. God knows where she went."

"Want us to look for her? We've got contacts now. It hasn't been much fun, as far as homecomings go. I had a body to deal with, back at the apartment. And a lot of people asking difficult questions. But we've got some influence now, and I'm using it."

"What is this we business?"

"Are you going to eat that cheeseburger?"

"No."

"Good." She pulled the plate over to her side of the table. "You remember Raul?" she said.

"I never met the mind, only the body."

"Well you're meeting him now."

"I beg your pardon?"

"I found him, in the Loop. At least I found his spirit." She smiled, ketchup round her mouth. "It's difficult to make this sound wholesome...but he's inside me. Him, and the ape he used to be, and me, all in one body."

"Your dream come true," Grillo said. "All things to all men."

"Yes, I suppose so. I mean, we suppose so. I keep forgetting to include us all. Maybe it's best I don't try."

"You've got cheese on your chin."

"That's it, bring us down."

"Don't get me wrong. I'm glad to see you. But...I was just beginning to get used to the fact that you weren't around. Should I still call you Tesla?"

"Why not?"

"Well you're not, are you? You're more than that."

"Tesla's fine. A body's called by what it seems to be, right?"

"I suppose so," Grillo said. "Do I look like I'm freaked out by all this?"

"No. Are you?"

He shook his head. "Weird, but no. I'm cool."

"That's my Grillo."

"You mean our Grillo."

"No. I mean mine. You can fuck all the great beauties in Los Angeles and I've still got you. I'm the great imponderable in your life."

"It's a plot."

"You don't like it?"

Grillo smiled. "It's not bad," he said.

"Don't be coy," she said. She took hold of his hand. "We've got some times ahead, and I need to know you're with me."

"You know I am."

"Good. Like I said, the ride's not over."

"Good. Where'd you get that from? That was my headline."

"Synchronicity," Tesla said. "Where was I? D'Amour thinks they'll try New York next. They've got footholds there. Had them for years. So I'm gathering half the team together, he's gathering the other half."

"What can I do?" Grillo said.

"How do you fancy Omaha, Nebraska?"

"Not much."

"That's where this last phase began, believe it or not. In the Omaha Post Office."

"You're kidding me."

"That's where the Jaff got his half-witted idea of the Art."

"What do you mean: half-witted?"

"He only got a piece of the thing, not the whole solution."

"I don't follow."

"Even Kissoon didn't know what the Art was. He had clues, but only clues. It's vast. It collapses time and place. It makes everything one again. The past, the future and the dreaming moment between...one immortal day..."

"Beautiful," Grillo said.

"Would Swift approve?"

"Fuck Swift."

"Somebody should have."

"So...Omaha?"

"That's where we start. That's where all the lost mail of America ends up, and it may have some clues for us. People know stuff, Grillo. Even without realizing it, they know. That's what makes us wonderful."

"And they write it down?"

"Yes. Then they send the letters out."

"And they end up in Omaha."

"Some of them. Pay for the cheeseburger. I'll be waiting outside."

He did, and she was.

"I should have eaten," he said. "I'm suddenly hungry."

D'Amour didn't leave until late in the evening, and when he did he left two exhausted storytellers behind him. He took copious notes, flipping the pages of his pad back and forth as he tried to make sense of the way fragments of information related to one another.

When Howie and Jo-Beth were talked out, he gave them his card with a New York address and number on it, scrawling another, private number on the back.

"Move as soon as you can," he advised. "Tell nobody where you're going. Nobody at all. And when you get there#8212; wherever it is#8212;change your names. Pretend you're married."

Jo-Beth laughed.

"Old-fashioned, but why not?" D'Amour said. "People don't gossip about married folks. And as soon as you've arrived, call me and tell me where I'll be able to find you. I'll be in contact from then on. I can't promise guardian angels, but there are forces that can watch out for you. I've got a friend called Norma I'd like you to meet. She's good at finding watchdogs."

"We can buy a dog for ourselves," Howie said.

"Not her kind you can't. Thank you for all you've told me. I have to get going. It's a long drive."

"You driving to New York?"

"I hate flying," he said. "I had a bad experience in the air one time, minus plane. Remind me to tell you about it. You should know the dirt on me now I know it about you."

He went to the door, and let himself out, leaving the small apartment reeking of European cigarettes.

"I need some fresh air," Howie said to Jo-Beth once he'd gone. "Want to walk with me?"

It was well past midnight, and the cold from which D'Amour had stepped five hours before had worsened, but it stirred them from their exhaustion. As their torpor lifted they talked.

"There was a lot you told D'Amour that I didn't know," Jo-Beth said.

"Like what?"

"The stuff that happened on the Ephemeris."

"You mean Byrne?"

"Yes. I wonder what he saw up there."

"He said he'd come back and tell me, if we all survived."

"I don't want secondhand reports. I'd like to see for myself."

"Go back to the Ephemeris?"

"Yes. As long as it was with you, I'd like that."

Perhaps inevitably, their route had brought them down to the Lake. The wind had teeth, but its breath was fresh.

"Aren't you afraid of what Quiddity could do to us," Howie said, "if we ever go back?"

"Not really. Not if we're together."

She took hold of his hand. They were both suddenly sweating, despite the cold, their innards churning the way they had the first time, when their eyes had met across Butrick's Steak House. A little age had passed since then, transforming them both.

"We're both desperadoes now," Howie murmured

"I suppose we are," Jo-Beth said. "But it's all right. Nobody can separate us."

"I wish that was true. "

"It is true. You know it is. "

She raised her hand, which was still locked in his, between them.

"Remember this?" she said. "That's what Quiddity showed us. It joined us together. "

The shudders in her body passed through her hand, through the sweat that ran between their palms, and into him.

"We have to be true to that. "

"Marry me?" he said.

"Too late, " she replied. "I already did. "

They were at the Lake's edge now, but of course it wasn't Michigan they saw as they looked out into the night, it was Quiddity. It hurt, thinking of that place. The same kind of hurt that touched any living soul when a whisper of the dream-sea touched the edge of consciousness. But so much sharper for them, who couldn't dismiss the longing, but knew Quiddity was real; a place where love might found continents.

It would not be long before dawn, and at the first sign of the sun they'd have to go to sleep. But until the light came#8212;until the real insisted upon their imaginations#8212;they stood watching the darkness, waiting, half in hope and half in fear, for that other sea to rise from dreams and claim them from the shore.