Barker, Clive The Great and Secret Show

PART ONE: THE MESSENGER

Homer opened the door.

"Come on in, Randolph. "

Jaffe hated the way he said Randolph, with the faintest trace of contempt in the word, as though he knew every damn crime Jaffe had ever committed, right from the first, the littlest.

"What are you waiting for?" Homer said, seeing Jaffe linger. "You've got work to do. The sooner it's started, the sooner I can find you more. "

Randolph stepped into the room. It was large, painted the same bilious yellow and battleship gray as every other office and corridor in the Omaha Central Post Office. Not that much of the walls was visible. Piled higher than head-height on every side was mail. Sacks, satchels, boxes and carts of it, spilling out onto the cold concrete floor.

"Dead letters, " Homer said. "Stuff even the good ol' U.S. Post Office can't deliver. Quite a sight, huh?"

Jaffe was agog, but he made sure not to show it. He made sure to show nothing, especially to wise guys like Homer.

"This is all yours, Randolph, " his superior said. "Your little corner of heaven. "

"What am I supposed to do with it?" Jaffe said.

"Sort it. Open it, look for any important stuff so we don't end up putting good money in the furnace. "

"There's money in them?"

"Some of "em," Homer said with a smirk. "Maybe. But most of it's just junk-mail. Stuff people don't want and just put back in the system. Some of it's had the wrong address put on and it's been flying backwards and forwards till it ends up in Nebraska. Don't ask me why, but whenever they don't know what to do with this shit they send it to Omaha."

"It's the middle of the country," Jaffe observed. "Gateway to the West. Or East. Depending on which way you're facing."

"Ain't the dead center," Homer countered. "But we still end up with all the crap. And it's all got to get sorted. By band. By you."

"All of it?" Jaffe said. What was in front of him was two weeks', three weeks', four weeks' work.

"ALL of it," said Homer, and didn't make any attempt to conceal his satisfaction. "All yours. You'll soon get the hang of it. If the envelope's got some kind of government marking, put it in the burn pile. Don't even bother to open it. Fuck 'em, right? But the rest, open. You never know what we're going to find." He grinned conspiratorially. "And what we find, we share," he said.

Jaffe had been working for the U.S. Post Office only nine days, but that was long enough, easily long enough, to know that a lot of mail was intercepted by its hired deliverers. Packets were razored open and their contents filched, checks were cashed, love-letters were laughed over.

"I'm going to be coming back in here on a regular basis," Homer warned. "So don't you try hiding anything from me. I got a nose for stuff. I know when there's bills in an envelope, and I know when there's a thief on the team. Hear me? I got a sixth sense. So don't you try anything clever, bud, 'cause me and the boys don't take kindly to that. And you want to be one of the team, don't you?" He put a wide, heavy hand on Jaffe's shoulder. "Share and share alike, right?"

"I hear," Jaffe said.

"Good," Homer replied. "So#8212;" He opened his arms to the spectacle of piled sacks. "It's all yours." He sniffed, grinned and took his leave.

One of the team, Jaffe thought as the door clicked closed, was what he'd never be. Not that he was about to tell Homer that. He'd let the man patronize him; play the willing slave. But in his heart? In his heart, he had other plans, other ambitions. Problem was, he wasn't any closer to realizing those ambitions than he'd been at twenty. Now he was thirty-seven, going on thirty-eight. Not the kind of man women looked at more than once. Not the kind of character folks found exactly charismatic. Losing his hair the way his father had. Bald at forty, most likely. Bald, and wifeless, and not more than beer-change in his pocket because he'd never been able to hold down a job for more than a year, eighteen months at the outside, so he'd never risen higher than private in the ranks.

He tried not to think about it too hard, because when he did he began to get really itchy to do some harm, and a lot of the time it was harm done to himself. It would be so easy. A gun in the mouth, tickling the back of his throat. Over and done with. No note. No explanation. What would he write anyway? I'm killing myself because I didn't get to be King of the World? Ridiculous.

But...that was what he wanted to be. He'd never known how, he'd never even had a sniff of the way, but that was the ambition that had nagged him from the first. Other men rose from nothing, didn't they? Messiahs, presidents, movie stars. They pulled themselves up out of the mud the way the fishes had when they'd decided to go for a walk. Grown legs, breathed air, become more than what they'd been. If fucking fishes could do it, why couldn't he? But it had to be soon. Before he was forty. Before he was bald. Before he was dead, and gone, and no one to even remember him, except maybe as a nameless asshole who'd spent three weeks in the winter of 1969 in a room full of dead letters, opening orphaned mail looking for dollar bills. Some epitaph.

He sat down and looked at the task heaped before him.

"Fuck you," he said. Meaning Homer. Meaning the sheer volume of crap in front of him. But most of all, meaning himself.

At first, it was drudgery. Pure hell, day after day, going through the sacks.

The piles didn't seem to diminish. Indeed they were several times fed by a leering Homer, who led a trail of peons in with further satchels to swell the number.

First Jaffe sorted the interesting envelopes (bulky; rattling; perfumed) from dull; then the private correspondence from official, and the scrawl from the Palmer method. Those decisions made, he began opening the envelopes, in the first week with his fingers, till his fingers became calloused, thereafter with a short-bladed knife he bought especially for the purpose, digging out the contents like a pearl-fisher in search of a pearl, most of the time finding nothing, sometimes, as Homer had promised, finding money or a check, which he dutifully declared to his boss.

"You're good at this," Homer said after the second week. "You're really good. Maybe I should put you on this full time."

Randolph wanted to say fuck you, but he'd said that too many times to bosses who'd fired him the minute after, and he couldn't afford to lose this job: not with the rent to pay and heating his one-room apartment costing a damn fortune while the snow continued to fall. Besides, something was happening to him while he passed the solitary hours in the Dead Letter Room, something it took him to the end of the third week to begin to enjoy, and the end of the fifth to comprehend.

He was sitting at the crossroads of America.

Homer had been right. Omaha, Nebraska, wasn't the geographical center of the USA, but as far as the Post Office was concerned, it may as well have been.

The lines of communication crossed, and recrossed, and finally dropped their orphans here, because nobody in any other state wanted them. These letters had been sent from coast to coast looking for someone to open them, and had found no takers. Finally they'd ended with him: with Randolph Ernest Jaffe, a balding nobody with ambitions never spoken and rage not expressed, whose little knife slit them, and little eyes scanned them, and who#8212;sitting at his crossroads#8212;began to see the private face of the nation.

There were love-letters, hate-letters, ransom notes, pleadings, sheets on which men had drawn round their hard-ons, valentines of pubic hair, blackmail by wives, journalists, hustlers, lawyers and senators, junk-mail and suicide notes, lost novels, chain letters, resumes, undelivered gifts, rejected gifts, letters sent out into the wilderness like bottles from an island, in the hope of finding help, poems, threats and recipes. So much. But these many were the least of it. Though sometimes the love-letters got him sweaty, and the ransom notes made him wonder if, having gone unanswered, their senders had murdered their hostages, the stories of, love and death they told touched him only fleetingly. Far more persuasive, far more moving, was another story, which could not be articulated so easily.

Sitting at the crossroads he began to understand that America had a secret life; one which he'd never even glimpsed before. Love and death he knew about. Love and death were the great clich#233;s; the twin obsessions of songs and soap operas. But there was another life, which every fortieth letter, or fiftieth, or hundredth, hinted at, and every thousandth stated with a lunatic plainness. When they said it plain, it was not the whole truth, but it was a beginning, and each of the writers had their own mad way of stating something close to un-stateable.

What it came down to was this: the world was not as it seemed. Not remotely as it seemed. Forces conspired (governmental, religious, medical) to conceal and silence those who had more than a passing grasp of that fact, but they couldn't gag or incarcerate every one of them. There were men and women who slipped the nets, however widely flung; who found back-roads to travel where their pursuers got lost, and safe houses along the way where they'd be fed and watered by like visionaries, ready to misdirect the dogs when they came sniffing. These people didn't trust Ma Bell, so they didn't use telephones. They didn't dare assemble in groups of more than two for fear of attracting attention to themselves. But they wrote. Sometimes it was as if they had to, as if the secrets they kept sealed up were too hot, and burned their way out. Sometimes it was because they knew the hunters were on their heels and they'd have no other chance to describe the world to itself before they were caught, drugged and locked up. Sometimes there was even a subversive glee in the scrawlings, sent out with deliberately indistinct addresses in the hope that the letter would blow the mind of some innocent who'd received it by chance. Some of the missives were stream-of-consciousness rantings, others precise, even clinical, descriptions of how to turn the world inside out by sex-magic or mushroom-eating. Some used the nonsense imagery of National Enquirer stories to veil another message. They spoke of UFO sightings and zombie cults; news from Venusian evangelists and psychics who tuned in to the dead on the TV. But after a few weeks of studying these letters (and study it was; he was like a man locked in the ultimate library) Jaffe began to see beyond the nonsenses to the hidden story. He broke the code; or enough of it to be tantalized. Instead of being irritated each day when Homer opened the door and had another half dozen satchels of letters brought in, he welcomed the addition. The more letters, the more clues; the more clues the more hope he had of a solution to the mystery. It was, he became more certain as the weeks turned into months and the winter mellowed, not several mysteries but one. The writers whose letters were about the Veil, and how to draw it aside, were finding their own way forward towards revelation; each had his own particular method and metaphor; but somewhere in the cacophony a single hymn was striving to be sung.

It was not about love. At least not as the sentimentalists knew it. Nor about death, as a literalist would have understood the term. It was#8212;in no particular order#8212;something to do with fishes, and the sea (sometimes the Sea of Seas); and three ways to swim there; and dreams (a lot about dreams); and an island which Plato had called Atlantis, but had known all along was some other place. It was about the end of the World, which was in turn about its beginning. And it was about Art.

Or rather, the Art.

That, of all the codes, was the one he beat his head hardest against, and broke only his brow. The Art was talked about in many ways. As The Final Great Work. As The Forbidden Fruit. As da Vinci's Despair or The Finger in the Pie or The Butt-Digger's Glee. There were many ways to describe it, but only one Art. And (here was a mystery) no Artist.

"So, are you happy here?" Homer said to him one May day.

Jaffe looked up from his work. There were letters strewn all around him. His skin, which had never been too healthy, was as pale and etched upon as the pages in his hand.

"Sure," he said to Homer, scarcely bothering to focus on the man. "Have you got some more for me?"

Homer didn't answer at first. Then he said: "What are you hiding, Jaffe?"

"Hiding? I'm not hiding anything."

"You're stashing stuff away you should be sharing with the rest of us."

"No I'm not," Jaffe said. He'd been meticulous in obeying Homer's first edict, that anything found among the dead letters be shared. The money, the skin magazines, the cheap jewelry he'd come across once in a while; it all went to Homer, to be divided up. "You get everything," he said. "I swear."

Homer looked at him with plain disbelief. "You spend every fucking hour of the day down here," he said. "You don't talk with the other guys. You don't drink with 'em. Don't you like the smell of us, Randolph? Is that it?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Or are you just a thief?"

"I'm no thief," Jaffe said. "You can look for yourself." He stood up, raising his hands, a letter in each. "Search me."

"I don't want to fucking touch you," came Homer's response. "What do you think I am, a fucking fag?" He kept staring at Jaffe. After a pause he said: "I'm going to have somebody else come down here and take over. You've done five months. It's long enough. I'm going to move you."

"I don't want#8212;"

"What?"

"I mean...what I mean to say is, I'm quite happy down here. Really. It's work I like doing."

"Yeah," said Homer, clearly still suspicious. "Well from Monday you're out."

"Why?"

"Because I say so! If you don't like it find yourself another job."

"I'm doing good work, aren't I?" Jaffe said.

Homer was already turning his back.

"It smells in here," he said as he exited. "Smells real bad."

There was a word Randolph had learned from his reading which he'd never known before: synchronicity. He'd had to go buy a dictionary to look it up, and found it meant that sometimes events coincided. The way the letter writers used the word it usually meant that there was something significant, mysterious, maybe even miraculous in the way one circumstance collided with another, as though a pattern existed that was just out of human sight.

Such a collision occurred the day Homer dropped his bombshell, an intersecting of events that would change every-thing. No more than an hour after Homer had left, Jaffe took his short-bladed knife, which was getting blunt, to an envelope that felt heavier than most. He slit it open, and out fell a small medallion. It hit the concrete floor: a sweet ringing sound. He picked it up, with fingers that had been trembling since Homer's exit. There was no chain attached to the medallion, nor did it have a loop for that purpose. Indeed it wasn't attractive enough to be hung around a woman's neck as a piece of jewelry, and though it was in the form of a cross closer inspection proved it not to be of Christian design. Its four arms were of equal length, the full span no more than an inch and a half. At the intersection was a human figure, neither male nor female, arms outstretched as in a crucifixion, but not nailed. Spreading out along the four routes were abstract designs, each of which ended in a circle. The face was very simply rendered. It bore, he thought, the subtlest of smiles.

He was no expert on metallurgy, but it was apparent the thing was not gold or silver. Even if the dirt had been cleaned from it he doubted it would ever gleam. But there was something deeply attractive about it nevertheless. Looking at it he had the sense he'd sometimes had waking in the morning from an intense dream but unable to remember the details. This was a significant object, but he didn't know why. Were the sigils spreading from the figure vaguely familiar from one of the letters he'd read, perhaps? He'd scanned thousands upon thousands in the last twenty weeks, and many of them had carried little sketches, obscene sometimes, often indecipherable. Those he'd judged the most interesting he'd smuggled out of the Post Office, to study at night. They were bundled up beneath the bed in his room. Perhaps he'd break the dream-code on the medallion by- careful examination of those.

He decided to take lunch that day with the rest of the workers, figuring it'd be best to do as little as possible to irritate Homer any further. It was a mistake. In the company of the good ol' boys talking about news he'd not listened to in months, and the quality of last night's steak, and the fuck they'd had, or failed to have, after the steak, and what the summer was going to bring, he felt himself a total stranger. They knew it too. They talked with their backs half-turned to him, dropping their voices at times to whisper about his weird look, his wild eyes. The more they shunned him the more he felt happy to be shunned, because they knew, even fuckwits like these knew, he was different from them. Maybe they were even a little afraid.

He couldn't bring himself to go back to the Dead Letter Room at one-thirty. The medallion and its mysterious signs was burning a hole in his pocket. He had to go back to his lodgings and start the search through his private library of letters now. Without even wasting breath telling Homer, he did just that.

It was a brilliant, sunny day. He drew the curtains against the invasion of light, turned on the lamp with the yellow shade, and there, in a jaundiced fever, began his study, taping the letters with any trace of illustration to the bare walls, and when the walls were full spreading them on the table, bed, chair and floor. Then he went from sheet to sheet, sign to sign, looking for anything that even faintly resembled the medallion in his hand. And as he went, the same thought kept creeping back into his head: that he knew there was an Art, but no Artist, a practice but no practitioner, and that maybe he was that man.

The thought didn't have to creep for long. Within an hour of perusing the letters it had pride of place in his skull. The medallion hadn't fallen into his hands by accident. It had come to him as a reward for his patient study, and as a way to draw together the threads of his investigation and finally begin to make some sense of it. Most of the symbols and sketches on the pages were irrelevant, but there were many, too many to be a coincidence, that echoed images on the cross. No more than two ever appeared on the same sheet, and most of these were crude renderings, because none of the writers had the complete solution in their hands the way he did, but they'd all comprehended some part of the jigsaw, and their observations about the part they had, whether haiku, dirty talk or alchemical formulas, gave him a better grasp of the system behind the symbols.

A term that had cropped up regularly in the most perceptive of the letters was the Shoal. He'd passed over it several times in his reading, and never thought much about it. There was a good deal of evolutionary talk in the letters, and he'd assumed the term to be a part of that. Now he understood his error. The Shoal was a cult, or a church of some kind, and its symbol was the object he held in the palm of his hand. What it and the Art had to do with each other was by no means clear, but his long-held suspicion that this was one mystery, one journey, was here confirmed, and he knew that with the medallion as a map he'd find his way from Shoal to Art eventually.

In the meantime there was a more urgent concern. When he thought back to the tribe of co-workers, with Homer at its head, he shuddered to think that any of them might ever share the secret he'd uncovered. Not that they had any chance of making any real progress decoding it: they were too witless. But Homer was suspicious enough to at least sniff along the trail a little way, and the idea of anybody#8212;but especially the boorish Homer#8212;tainting this sacred ground was unbearable. There was only one way to prevent such a disaster. He had to act quickly to destroy any evidence that might put Homer on the right track. The medallion he'd keep, of course: he'd been entrusted with it by higher powers, those faces he'd one day get to see. He'd also keep the twenty of thirty letters that had proffered the best information on the Shoal; the rest (three hundred or so) had to be burned. As to the collection in the Dead Letter Room, they had to go into the furnace too. All of them. It would take time, but it had to be done, and the sooner the better. He made a selection of the letters in his room, parcelled up those he didn't need to keep, and headed off back to the Sorting Office.

It was late afternoon now, and he travelled against the flow of human traffic, entering the Office by the back door to avoid Homer, though he knew the man's routine well enough to suspect he'd punched out at five-thirty to the second, and was already guzzling beer somewhere. The furnace was a sweaty rattling antique, tended by another sweaty rattling antique, called Miller, with whom Jaffe had never exchanged a single word, Miller being stone-deaf. It took some time for Jaffe to explain that he was going to be feeding the furnace for an hour or two, beginning with the parcel he'd brought from home, which he immediately tossed into the flames. Then he went up to the Dead Letter Room.

Homer had not gone guzzling beer. He was waiting, sitting in Jaffe's chair under a bare bulb, going through the piles around him.

"So what's the scam?" he said as soon as Jaffe stepped through the door.

It was useless trying to pretend innocence, Jaffe knew. His months of study had carved knowledge into his face. He couldn't pass for a na#239;f any longer. Nor#8212;now that it came to it#8212;did he want to.

"No scam," he said to Homer, making his contempt for the man's puerile suspicions plain. "I'm not taking anything you'd want. Or could use."

"I'll be the judge of that, asshole," Homer said, throwing the letters he was examining down among the rest of the litter. "I want to know what you've been up to down here. 'Sides jerking off."

Jaffe closed the door. He'd never realized it before, but the reverberations of the furnace carried through the walls into the room. Everything here trembled minutely. The sacks, the envelopes, the words on the pages tucked inside. And the chair on which Homer was sitting. And the knife, the short-bladed knife, lying on the floor beside the chair on which Homer was sitting. The whole place was moving, ever so slightly, like there was a rumble in the ground. Like the world was about to be flipped.

Maybe it was. Why not? No use pretending the status was still quo. He was a man on his way to some throne or other. He didn't know which and he didn't know where, but he needed to silence any pretender quickly. Nobody was going to find him. Nobody was going to blame him, or judge him, or put him on Death Row. He was his own law now.

"I should explain..." he said to Homer, finding a tone that was almost flippant, "...what the scam really is."

"Yeah," Homer said, his lip curling. "Why don't you do that?"

"Well it's real simple..."

He started to walk towards Homer, and the chair, and the knife beside the chair. The speed of his approach made Homer nervous, but he kept his seat.

"...I've found a secret," Jaffe went on.

"Huh?"

"You want to know what it is?"

Now Homer stood up, his gaze trembling the way everything else was. Everything except Jaffe. All the tremors had gone out of his hands, his guts and his head. He was steady in an unsteady world.

"I don't know what the fuck you're doing," Homer said. But I don't like it."

"I don't blame you," Jaffe said. He didn't have his eyes on the knife. He didn't need to. He could sense it. "But it's your job to know, isn't it?" Jaffe went on, "what's been going on down here."

Homer took several steps away from the chair. The loutish gait he liked to affect had gone. He was stumbling, as though the floor was tilting.

"I've been sitting at the center of the world," Jaffe said. "This little room...this is where it's all happening."

"Is that right?"

"Damn right."

Homer made a nervous little grin. He threw a glance towards the door.

"You want to go?" Jaffe said.

"Yeah." He looked at his watch, not seeing it. "Got to run. Only came down here#8212;"

"You're afraid of me," Jaffe said. "And you should be. I'm not the man I was."

"Is that right?"

"You said that already."

Again, Homer looked towards the door. It was five paces away; four if he ran. He'd covered half the distance when Jaffe picked up the knife. He had the door handle clasped when he heard the man approaching behind him.

He glanced round, and the knife came straight at his eye. It wasn't an accidental stab. It was synchronicity. His eye glinted, the knife glinted. Glints collided, and the next moment he was screaming as he fell back against the door, Randolph following him to claim the letter-opener from the man's head.

The roar of the furnace got louder. With his back to the sacks Jaffe could feel the envelopes nestling against each other, the words being shaken on the pages, till they became a glorious poetry. Blood, it said; like a sea; his thoughts like clots in that sea, dark, congealed, hotter than hot.

He reached for the handle of the knife, and clenched it. Never before in his life had he shed blood; not even squashed a bug, at least intentionally. But now his fist on the hot wet handle seemed wonderful. A prophecy; a proof.

Grinning, he pulled the knife out of Homer's socket, and before his victim could slide down the door stuck it into Homer's throat to the hilt. This time he didn't let it lie. He pulled it out as soon as he'd stopped Homer's screams, and he stabbed the middle of the man's chest. There was bone there, and he had to drive hard, but he was suddenly very strong. Homer gagged, and blood came out of his mouth, and from the wound in his throat. Jaffe pulled the knife out. He didn't stab again. Instead he wiped the blade on his handkerchief and turned from the body to think about his next move. If he tried to lug the sacks of mail to the furnace he risked being discovered, and sublime as he felt, high on the boor-slob's demise, he was still aware that there was danger in being found out. It would be better to bring the furnace here. After all, fire was a moveable feast. All it required was a light, and Homer had those. He turned back to the slumped corpse and searched in the pockets for a box of matches. Finding one, he pulled it out, and went over to the satchels.

Sadness surprised him as he prepared to put a flame to the dead letters. He'd spent so many weeks here, lost in a kind of delirium, drunk with mysteries. This was good-bye to all that. After this#8212;Homer dead, the letters burnt#8212;he was a fugitive, a man without a history, beckoned by an Art he knew nothing about, but which he wished more than anything to practice.

He began to screw up a few of the pages, to provide some initial fodder for the flame. Once begun, he didn't doubt that the fire would sustain itself: there was nothing in the room#8212; paper, fabric, flesh#8212;that wasn't combustible. With three heaps of paper made, he struck a match. The flame was bright, and looking at it he realized how much he hated brightness. The dark was so much more interesting; full of secrets, full of threats. He put the flame to the piles of paper and watched while the fires gained strength. Then he repeated to the door.

Homer was slumped against it, of course, bleeding from three places, and his bulk wasn't that easy to move, but Jaffe put his back into the task, his shadow thrown up against the wall by the burgeoning bonfire behind him. Even in the half minute it took him to move the corpse aside the heat grew exponentially, so that by the time he glanced back at the room it was ablaze from side to side, the heat stirring up its own wind, which in turn fanned the flames.

It was only when he was clearing out his room of any sign of himself#8212;eradicating every trace of Randolph Ernest Jaffe#8212;that he regretted doing what he'd done. Not the burning#8212;that had been altogether wise#8212;but leaving Homer's body in the room to be consumed along with the dead letters. He should have taken a more elaborate revenge, he realized. He should have hacked the body into pieces, packaged it up, tongue, eyes, testicles, guts, skin, skull, divided piece from piece#8212;and sent the pieces out into the system with scrawled addresses that made no real sense, so that chance (or synchronicity) was allowed to elect the doorstep on which Homer's flesh would land. The mailman mailed. He promised himself not to miss such ironic possibilities in the future.

The task of clearing his room didn't take long; He had very few belongings, and most of what he had meant little to him. When it came down to basics, he barely existed. He was the sum of a few dollars, a few photographs, a few clothes. Nothing that couldn't be put in a small suitcase and still leave room alongside them for a set of encyclopedias.

By midnight, with that same small suitcase in hand, he was on his way out of Omaha, and ready for a journey that might lead in any direction. Gateway to the East, Gateway to the West. He didn't care which way he went, as long as the route led to the Art.

JAFFE had lived a small life. Born within fifty miles of Omaha, he'd been educated there, he'd buried his parents there, he'd courted and failed to persuade to the altar two women of that city. He'd left the state a few times, and even thought (after the second of his failed courtships) of retreating to Orlando, where his sister lived, but she'd persuaded him against it, saying he wouldn't get on with the people, or the incessant sun. So he'd stayed in Omaha, losing jobs and getting others, never committing himself to anything or anybody for very long, and in turn not being committed to.

But in the solitary confinement of the Dead Letter Room he'd had a taste of horizons he'd never known existed, and it had given him an appetite for the open road. When there'd only been sun, suburbs and Mickey Mouse out there he'd not given a damn. Why bother to go looking for such banalities? But now he knew better. There were mysteries to be unveiled, and powers to be seized, and when he was King of the World he'd pull down the suburbs (and the sun if he could) and make the world over in a hot darkness where a man might finally get to know the secrets of his own soul.

There'd been much talk in the letters about crossroads, and for a long time he'd taken the image literally, thinking that in Omaha he was probably at that crossroads, and that knowledge of the Art would come to him there. But once out of the city, and away, he saw the error of such literalism. When the writers had spoken of crossroads they hadn't meant one highway intersecting with another. They'd meant places where states of being crossed, where the human system met the alien, and both moved on, changed. In the flow and flurry of such places there was hope of finding revelation.

He had very little money, of course, but that didn't seem to matter. In the weeks that followed his escape from the scene of his crime, all that he wanted simply came to him. He had only to stick out his thumb and a car squealed to a halt. When a driver asked him where he was headed, and he said he was headed as far as he, Jaffe, wanted to go, that was exactly as far as the driver took him. It was as if he was blessed. When he stumbled, there was someone to pick him up. When he got hungry, there was someone to feed him.

It was a woman in Illinois, who'd given him a lift then asked him if he wanted to stay the night with her, who confirmed his blessedness.

"You've seen something extraordinary, haven't you?" she whispered to him in the middle of the night. "It's in your eyes. It was your eyes made me offer you the lift."

"And offer me this?" he said, fingering between her legs.

"Yes. That too," she said. "What have you seen?"

"Not enough," he replied.

"Will you make love to me again?"

"No."

Every now and then, moving from state to state, he got a glimpse of what the letters had schooled him in. He saw the secrets peeping out, only daring to show themselves because he was passing through and they knew him as a coming man of power. In Kentucky he chanced to witness the corpse of an adolescent being hauled from a river, the body left sprawled on the grass, arms spread, fingers spread, while a woman howled and sobbed beside it. The boy's eyes were open; so were the buttons of his trousers. Watching from a short distance, the only witness not to be ordered away by the cops (the eyes, again) he took a moment to savor the way the boy was arrayed, like the figure on the medallion, and half wanted to throw himself into the river just for the thrill of drowning. In Idaho, he met a man who'd lost an arm in an automobile accident and while they sat and drank together he explained that he still had feeling in the lost limb, which the doctors said was just a phantom in his nervous system, but which he knew was his astral body, still complete on another plane of being. He said he jerked off with his lost hand regularly, and offered to demonstrate. It was true. Later, the man said:

"You can see in the dark, can't you?" Jaffe hadn't thought about it, but now that his attention ss drawn to the fact it seemed he could.

"How'd you learn to do that?"

"I didn't."

"Astral eyes, maybe."

"Maybe."

"You want me to suck your cock again?"

"No."

He was gathering up experiences, one of each, passing through people's lives and out the other side leaving them obsessed or dead or weeping. He indulged his every whim, going wherever instinct pointed, the secret life coming to find him the moment he arrived in town.

There was no sign of pursuit from the forces of law. Perhaps Homer's body had never been found in the gutted building, or if it had the police had assumed he was simply a victim of the fire. For whatever reason, nobody came sniffing after him. He went wherever he wanted and did whatever he desired, until he'd had a surfeit of desires satisfied and wants supplied, and it came time for him to push himself over the brink.

He came to rest in a roach-ridden motel in Los Alamos, New Mexico, locked himself in with two bottles of vodka, stripped, closed the curtains against the day, and let his mind go. He hadn't eaten in forty-eight hours, not because he didn't have money, he did, but because he enjoyed the light-headedness. Starved of sustenance, and whipped up by vodka, his thoughts ran riot, devouring themselves and shitting each other out, barbaric and baroque by turns. The roaches came out in the darkness, and ran over his body as he lay on the floor. He let them come and go, pouring vodka on his groin when they got too busy there, and made him hard, which was a distraction. He wanted only to think. To float and think.

He'd had all he needed of the physical; felt hot and cold, sexy and sexless; fucked and fucker. He wanted none of that again: at least not as Randolph Jaffe. There was another way to be, another place to feel from, where sex and murder and grief and hunger and all of it might be interesting again, but that would not be until he'd got beyond his present condition; become an Artist; remade the world.

Just before dawn, with even the roaches sluggish, he felt the invitation.

A great calm was in him. His heart was slow and steady. His bladder emptied of its own accord, like a baby's. He was neither too hot nor too cold. Neither too sleepy nor too awake. And at that crossroads#8212;which was not the first, nor would be the last#8212;something tugged on his gut, and summoned him.

He got up immediately, dressed, took the full bottle of vodka that remained, and went out walking. The invitation didn't leave his innards. It kept tugging as the cold night lifted and the sun began to rise. He'd come barefoot. His feet bled, but his body wasn't of great interest to him, and he kept the discomfort at bay with further helpings of vodka. By noon, the last of the drink gone, he was in the middle of the desert, just walking in the direction he was called, barely aware of one foot moving ahead of the other. There were no thoughts in his head now, except the Art and its getting, and even that ambition came and went.

So, finally, did the desert itself. Somewhere towards evening, he came to a place where even the simplest facts#8212;the ground beneath him, the darkening sky above his head#8212;were in doubt. He wasn't even sure if he was walking. The absence of everything was pleasant, but it didn't last. The summons must have pulled him on without his even being aware of its call, because the night he'd left became a sudden day, and he found himself standing#8212;alive, again; Randolph Ernest Jaffe again#8212;in a desert barer even than the one he'd left. It was early morning here. The sun not yet high, but beginning to warm the air, the sky perfectly clear.

Now he felt pain, and sickness, but the pull in his gut was irresistible. He had to stagger on though his whole body was wreckage. Later, he remembered passing through a town, and seeing a steel tower standing in the middle of the wilderness. But that was only when the journey had ended, at a simple stone hut, the door of which opened to him as the last vestiges of his strength left him, and he fell across its threshold.

The door was closed when he came round, but his mind wide open. On the other side of a guttering fire sat an old man with doleful, slightly stupid features, like those of a clown who'd worn and wiped off fifty years of makeup, his pores enlarged and greasy, his hair, what was left of it, long and gray. He was sitting cross-legged. Occasionally, while Jaffe worked up the energy to speak, the old man raised a buttock and loudly passed wind.

"You found your way through," he said, after a time. "I thought you were going to die before you made it. A lot of people have. It takes real will."

"Through to where?" Jaffe managed to ask.

"We're in a Loop. A loop in time, encompassing a few minutes. I tied it, as a refuge. It's the only place I'm safe."

"Who are you?"

"My name's Kissoon."

"Are you one of the Shoal?"

The face beyond the fire registered surprise.

"You know a great deal."

"No. Not really. Just bits and pieces."

"Very few people know about the Shoal."

"I know of several," said Jaffe.

"Really?" said Kissoon, his tone toughening. "I'd like their names."

"I had letters from them..." Jaffe said, but faltered when he realized he no longer knew where he'd left them, those precious clues that had brought him through so much hell and heaven.

"Letters from whom?" Kissoon said.

"People who know...who guess...about the Art."

"Do they? And what do they say about it?"

Jaffe shook his head. "I've not made sense of it yet," he said. "But I think there's a sea#8212;"

"There is," said Kissoon. "And you'd like to know where to find it, and how to be there, and how to have power from it."

"Yes. I would."

"And in return for this education?" Kissoon said. "What are you offering?"

"I don't have anything."

"Let me be the judge of that," Kissoon said, turning his eyes up to the roof of the hut as though he saw something in the smoke that roiled there.

"OK," Jaffe said. "Whatever I've got that you want. You can have it."

"That sounds fair."

"I need to know. I want the Art."

"Of course. Of course."

"I've had all the living I need," Jaffe said.

Kissoon's eyes came back to rest on him.

"Really? I doubt that."

"I want to get...I want to get..." (What? he thought. What do you want?) "Explanations, " he said.

"Well, where to begin?"

"The sea," Jaffe said.

"Ah, the sea."

"Where is it?"

"Have you ever been in love?" Kissoon replied.

"Yes. I think so."

"Then you've been to Quiddity twice. Once the first night you slept out of the womb. The second occasion the night you lay beside that woman you loved. Or man, was it?" He laughed. "Whichever."

"Quiddity is the sea."

"Quiddity is the sea. And in it are islands, called the Ephemeris."

"I want to go there," Jaffe breathed.

"You will. One more time, you will."

"When?"

"The last night of your life. That's all we ever get. Three dips in the dream-sea. Any less, and we'd be insane. Any more#8212;"

"And?"

"And we wouldn't be human."

"And the Art?"

"Ah, well...opinions differ about that."

"Do you have it?"

"Have it?"

"This Art. Do you have it? Can you do it? Can you teach me?"

"Maybe."

"You're one of the Shoal," Jaffe said. "You've got to have it, right?"

"One?" came the reply. "I'm the last. I'm the only."

"So share it with me. I want to be able to change the world."

"Just a little ambition."

"Don't fuck with me!" Jaffe said, the suspicion growing in him that he was being taken for a fool.

"I'm not going to leave empty-handed, Kissoon. If I get the Art I can enter Quiddity, right? That's the way it works."

"Where'd you get your information?"

"Isn't it?"

"Yes. And I say again: where'd you get your information?"

"I can put the clues together. I'm still doing it." He grinned as the pieces fitted in his head. "Quiddity's somehow behind the world, isn't it? And the Art lets you step through, so you can be there any time you like. The Finger in the Pie."

"Huh?"

"That's what somebody called it. The Finger in the Pie."

"Why stop with a finger?" Kissoon remarked.

"Right! Why not my whole fucking arm?"

Kissoon's expression was almost admiring. "What a pity," he said, "you couldn't be more evolved. Then maybe I could have shared all this with you."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying you're too much of an ape. I couldn't give you the secrets in my head. They're too powerful, too dangerous. You'd not know what to do with them. You'd end up tainting Quiddity with your puerile ambition. And Quiddity must be preserved."

"I told you...I'm not leaving here empty-handed. You can have whatever you want from me. Whatever I've got. Only teach me."

"You'd give me your body?" Kissoon said. "Would you?"

"What?"

"That's all you've got to bargain with. Do you want to give me that?"

The reply flummoxed Jaffe.

"You want sex?" he said.

"Christ, no."

"What then? I don't understand."

"The flesh and blood. The vessel. I want to occupy your body."

Jaffe watched Kissoon watching him.

"Well?" the old man said.

"You can't just climb into my skin," Jaffe said.

"Oh but I can, as soon as it's vacated."

"I don't believe you."

"Jaffe, you of all people should never say I don't believe. The extraordinary's the norm. There are loops in time. We're in one now. There are armies in our minds, waiting to march. And suns in our groins and cunts in the sky. Suits being wrought in every state#8212;"

"Suits?"

"Petitions! Conjurations! Magic, magic! It's everywhere. And you're right, Quiddity is the source, and the Art its lock and key. And you think it's tough for me to climb inside your skin. Have you learned nothing?'"

"Suppose I agree."

"Suppose you do."

"What happens to me, if I was to vacate my body?"

"You'd stay here. As spirit. It's not much but it's home. I'll be back, after a while. And the flesh and blood's yours again."

"Why do you even want my body?" Jaffe said. "It's utterly fucked up."

"That's my business," Kissoon replied.

"I need to know."

"And I choose not to tell you. If you want the Art then you damn well do as I say. You've got no choice."

The old man's manner#8212;his arrogant little smile, his shrugs, the way he half closed his lids as though using all his gaze on his guest would be a waste of eyesight#8212;all of this made Jaffe think of Homer. They could have been two halves of a double-act; the lumpen boor and the wily old goat. When he thought of Homer he inevitably thought of the knife in his pocket. How many times would he need to slice Kissoon's stringy carcass before the agonies made him speak? Would he have to take off the old man's fingers, joint by joint? If so, he was ready. Maybe cut off his ears. Perhaps scoop out his eyes. Whatever it took, he'd do. It was too late now for squeamishness, much too late.

He slid his hand into his pocket, and around the knife.

Kissoon saw the motion.

"You understand nothing, do you?" he said, his eyes suddenly roving violently to and fro, as though speed-reading the air between him and Jaffe.

"I understand a lot more than you think," Jaffe said. "I understand I'm not pure enough for you. I'm not#8212;how did you say it?#8212;evolved.Yeah,evolved."

"I said you were an ape."

"Yeah, you did."

"I insulted the ape."

Jaffe's hold on the knife tightened. He started to get to his feet.

"Don't you dare," Kissoon said.

"Red rag to a bull," Jaffe said, his head spinning from the effort of rising, "#8212;saying dare to me. I've seen stuff...done stuff..." He started to take the knife out of his pocket

"...I'm not afraid of you."

Kissoon's eyes stopped their speed-reading and settled on the blade. There was no surprise on his face, the way there'd been on Homer's; but there was fear. A small thrill of pleasure coursed through Jaffe, seeing that expression.

Kissoon began to get to his feet. He was a good deal shorter than Jaffe, almost stunted, and every angle slightly askew, as though all his bones and joints had once been bro-ken and reset in haste.

"You shouldn't spill blood," he said hurriedly. "Not in a Loop. It's one of the rules of the looping suit, not to spill blood. "

"Feeble," said Jaffe, beginning to step around the fire towards his victim.

"That's the truth," Kissoon said, and he gave Jaffe the strangest, most misbegotten smile, "I make it a point of honor not to lie."

"I had a year working in a slaughterhouse," Jaffe said. in Omaha, Nebraska. Gateway to the West. I worked for a whole year, just cutting up meat. I know the business."

Kissoon was very frightened now. He'd backed against the wall of the hut, his arms spread out to either side of him for support, looking, Jaffe thought, like a silent-movie heroine. His eyes weren't half-open now, but huge and wet. So was his mouth, huge and wet. He couldn't even bring himself to make threats; he just shook.

Jaffe reached out and put his hand around the man's tui-key throat. He gripped hard, fingers and thumb digging into the sinew. Then he brought his other hand, bearing the blunt knife, up to the corner of Kissoon's left eye. The old man's breath smelled like a sick man's fart. Jaffe didn't want to inhale it, but he had no choice, and the moment he did he realized he'd been fucked. The breath was more than sour air. There was something else in it, being expelled from Kissoon's body and snaking its way into him#8212;or at least attempting to. Jaffe took his hand from the scrawn of the neck, and stepped away.

"Fucker!" he said, spitting and coughing out the breath before it occupied him.

Kissoon didn't concede the pretense.

"Aren't you going to kill me?" he said. "Am I reprieved?"

It was he who advanced now; Jaffe the one retreating.

"Keep away from me!" Jaffe said.

"I'm just an old man!"

"I felt the breath!" Jaffe yelled, slamming his fist against his chest. "You're trying to get inside me!"

"No," Kissoon protested.

"Don't fucking lie to me. I felt it!"

He still could. A weight in his lungs where there'd not been weight before. He backed towards the door, knowing that if he stayed the fucker would have the better of him.

"Don't leave," Kissoon said. "Don't open the door."

"There's other ways to the Art," Jaffe said.

"No," Kissoon said. "Only me. The rest are dead There's nobody can help you but me."

He tried that little smile of his, bowing his wretched body, but the humility was as much a sham as the fear had been. All tricks to keep his victim near, so as to have his flesh and blood. Jaffe wasn't buying the routine a second time. He tried to block out Kissoon's seductions with memories. Pleasures taken, that he'd take again if he could only get out of this trap alive. The woman in Illinois, the one-armed man in Idaho, the caress of roaches. The recollections kept Kissoon from getting any further hold on him. He reached behind him and grabbed the door handle.

"Don't open that," Kissoon said.

"I'm getting out of here."

"I made a mistake. I'm sorry. I underestimated you. We can come to some arrangement surely? I'll tell you all you want to know. I'll teach you the Art. I don't have the skill myself. Not in the Loop. But you could have it. You could take it with you. Out there. Back into the world. Arm in the pie! Only stay. Stay, Jaffe. I've been alone here a long time. I need company. Someone to explain it all to. Share it with."

Jaffe turned the handle. As he did so he felt the earth beneath his feet shudder, and a brightness seemed to appear momentarily beyond the door. It seemed too livid to be mere daylight, but it must have been, because there was only sun awaiting him on the step outside.

"Don't leave me!" he heard Kissoon yelling, and with the yell felt the man clutching at his innards the way he had bringing him here. But the hold was nowhere near as strong as it had been. Either Kissoon had burned up too much of his energy in attempting to breathe his spirit into Jaffe, or his fury was weakening him. Whichever, the hold was resist-able, and the farther Jaffe ran the weaker it became.

A hundred yards from the hut he glanced back, and thought he saw a patch of darkness moving across the ground towards him, like dark rope uncurling. He didn't linger to dis-cover what new trick the old bastard was mounting, but ran and ran, following his own trail across the ground, until the steel tower came in sight. Its presence suggested some attempt to populate this wasteland, long abandoned. Beyond it, an aching hour later, was further proof of that endeavor. The town he half-remembered staggering through on his way here, its street empty not only of people and vehicles but of any distinguishing marks whatsoever, like a film-set yet to be dressed for shooting.

Half a mile beyond it an agitation in the air signalled that he had reached the perimeters of the Loop. He braved its confusions willingly, passing through a place of sickening disorientation in which he was not certain he was even walking, and suddenly he was out the other side, and back in a calm, starlit night.

Forty-eight hours later, drunk in an alleyway in Santa Fe, he made two momentous decisions. One, that he'd keep the beard he'd grown in the last few weeks, as a reminder of his search. Two, that every wit he possessed, every hint of knowledge he'd gained about the occult life of America, every iota of power his astral eyes lent him, would go to the possessing of the Art (Fuck Kissoon; Fuck the Shoal), and that only when he'd got it would he once again show his face unshaven.

HOLDING to the promises he'd made himself was not easy. Not when there were so many simple pleasures to be had from the power he'd gained; pleasures he made himself forfeit for fear of depleting his little strength before he stole his way to greater.

His first priority was to locate a fellow quester; someone who could aid him in his search. It was two months before his enquiries threw up the name and reputation of a man perfectly suited to that role. That man was Richard Wesley Fletcher, who'd been#8212;until his recent fall from grace#8212;one of the most lauded and revolutionary minds in the field of evolutionary studies; the head of several research programs in Boston and Washington; a theorist whose every remark was scrutinized by his peers for clues to his next breakthrough. But his genius had been flawed by addiction. Mescaline and its derivatives had brought him low, much to the satisfaction of many of his colleagues, who made no bones about their contempt for the man once his guilty secret came out. In article after article Jaffe found the same smug tone, as the academic community rounded on the deposed Wunderkind, condemning his theories as ludicrous and his morals as reprehensible. Jaffe couldn't have cared less about Fletcher's moral standing. It was the man's theories that intrigued him, dovetailing as they did with his own ambition. Fletcher's researches had been aimed at isolating, and synthesizing in a laboratory, the force in living organisms that drove them to evolve. Like Jaffe, he believed heaven could be stolen.

It took persistence to find the man, but Jaffe had that in abundance, and found him in Maine. The genius was much the worse for despair, teetering on the brink of complete mental breakdown. Jaffe was cautious. He didn't press his suit at first, but instead ingratiated himself by supplying drugs of a quality Fletcher had long since been too poor to afford. Only when he'd gained the addict's trust did he begin to make oblique reference to Fletcher's studies. Fletcher was less than lucid on the subject at first, but Jaffe gently fanned the embers of his obsession, and in time the fire flared. Once burning, Fletcher had much to tell. He believed he'd twice come close to isolating what he called the Nuncio, the messenger. But the final processes had always eluded him. Jaffe offered a few observations of his own on the subject, garnered from his readings in the occult. The two of them, he gently suggested, were fellow seekers. Though he, Jaffe, used the vocabulary of the ancients#8212;of alchemists and magicians#8212;and Fletcher the language of science, they had the same desire to nudge evolution's elbow; to advance the flesh, and perhaps the spirit, by artificial means. Fletcher poured scorn on these observations at the outset, but slowly came to value them, finally accepting Jaffe's offer of facilities in which to begin his researches afresh. This time, Jaffe promised, Fletcher wouldn't have to work in an academic hothouse, constantly required to justify his work to hold on to his funding. He guaranteed his dope-fiend genius a place to work that would be well hidden from prying eyes. When the Nuncio had been isolated, and its miracle reproduced, Fletcher would reappear from the wilderness and put his vilifiers to flight. It was an offer no obsessive could have resisted.

Eleven months later, Richard Wesley Fletcher stood on a granite headland on the Pacific Coast of the Baja and cursed himself for succumbing to Jaffe's temptations. Behind him, in the Mision de Santa Catrina where he'd labored for the best part of a year, the Great Work (as Jaffe liked to call it) had been achieved. The Nuncio was a reality. There were surely few less likely places for labors most of the world would have judged ungodly than an abandoned Jesuit Mission, but then from the outset this endeavor had been shot through with paradox.

For one, the liaison between Jaffe and himself. For another, the intermingling of disciplines that had made the Great Work possible. And for a third the fact that now, in what should have been his moment of triumph, he was minutes away from destroying the Nuncio before it fell into the hands of the very man who'd funded its creation.

As in its making, so in its unmaking: system, obsession and pain. Fletcher was too well versed in the ambiguities of matter to believe that the total destruction of anything was possible. Things couldn't be undiscovered. But if the change that he and Raul wrought on the evidence was thorough enough it was his belief that nobody would easily reconstruct the experiment he'd conducted here in the wilds of Baja California. He and the boy (it was still difficult to think of Raul as a boy) had to be like perfect thieves, rifling their own house to remove every last trace of themselves. When they'd burned all the research notes and trashed all the equipment it had to be as though the Nuncio had never been made. Only then could he take the boy, who was still busy feeding the fires in front of the Mission, to this cliff edge, so that hand in hand they could fling themselves off. The fall was steep, and the rocks below plenty sharp enough to kill them. The tide would wash their blood and bodies out into the Pacific. Then, between fire and water, the job would have been done.

None of which would prevent some future investigator from finding the Nuncio all over again; but the combination of disciplines and circumstances which had made that possible were very particular. For humanity's sake Fletcher hoped they would not occur again for many years. There was good reason for such hope. Without Jaffe's strange, half-intuitive grasp of occult principles to marry with his own scientific methodology, the miracle would not have been made, and how often did men of science sit down with men of magic (the suit-mongers, as Jaffe called them) and attempt a mingling of crafts? It was good they didn't. There was too much dangerous stuff to discover. The occultists whose codes Jaffe had broken knew more about the nature of things than Fletcher would ever have suspected. Beneath their metaphors, their talk of the Bath of Rebirth, and of golden Progeny begotten by fathers of lead, they were ambitious for the same solutions he'd sought all his life. Artificial ways to advance the evolutionary urge: to take the human beyond itself. Obscurum per obscurius, ignotum per ignotius, they advised. Let the obscure be explained by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown. They knew whereof they wrote. Between his science and theirs Fletcher had solved the problem. Synthesized a fluid that would carry evolution's glad tidings through any living system, pressing (so he believed) the humblest cell towards a higher condition. Nuncio he'd called it: the Messenger. Now he knew he'd misnamed it. It was not a messenger of the gods, but the god itself. It had a life of its own. It had energy, and ambition. He had to destroy it, before it began to rewrite Genesis, beginning with Randolph Jaffe as Adam.

"Father?"

Raul had appeared behind him. Once again the boy had stripped off his clothes. After years of going naked, he was still unable to get used to their constrictions. And once again he used that damn word.

"I'm not your father," Fletcher reminded him. "I never was and never will be. Can't you get that into your head?"

As ever, Raul listened. His eyes lacked whites, and were difficult to read, but his steady gaze never failed to mellow Fletcher.

"What do you want?" he said more softly.

"The fires," the boy replied.

"What about them?"

"The wind, father#8212;" he began.

It had got up in the last few minutes, coming straight off the ocean. When Fletcher followed Raul round to the front of the Mission, in the lee of which they'd built the Nuncio's pyres, he found the notes being scattered, many of them far from consumed.

"Damn you," Fletcher said, as much irritated by his own lack of attention to the task as the boy's. "I told you: don't put too much paper on at the same time."

He took hold of Raul's arm, which was covered in silky hair, as was his entire body. There was a distinct smell of singeing, where the flames had risen suddenly and caught the boy by surprise. It took, he knew, considerable courage on Raul's part to overcome his primal fear of fire. He was doing it for his father's sake. He'd have done it for no other. Contrite, Fletcher put his arm around Raul's shoulder. The boy dung, the way he'd clung in his previous incarnation, burying his face in the smell of the human.

"We'd better just let them go," Fletcher said, watching as another gust of wind took leaves off the fire and scattered them like pages from a calendar, day after day of pain and inspiration. Even if one or two of them were to be found, and that was unlikely along such a barren stretch of coast, nobody should be able to make any sense of them. It was only his ob-sessiveness that made him want to wipe the slate completely clean, and shouldn't he know better, when that very obses-siveness had been one of the qualities that had brought this and tragedy about?

The boy detached himself from around Fletcher and turned back to the fires.

"No Raul..." he said, "...forget them...let them go..."

The boy chose not to hear; a trick he'd always had, even before the changes the Nuncio's touch had brought about. How many times had Fletcher summoned the ape Raul had been only to have the wretched animal willfully ignore him? It was in no small measure that very perversity which had encouraged Fletcher to test the Great Work on him: a whisper of the human in the simian which the Nuncio turned into a shout.

Raul wasn't making an attempt to collect the dispersed papers, however. His small, wide body was tensed, his head tilted up. He was sniffing the air.

"What is it?" Fletcher said. "You can smell somebody?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Coming up the hill."

Fletcher knew better than to question Raul's observation. The fact that he, Fletcher, could hear and smell nothing was simply a testament to the decadence of his senses. Nor did he need to ask from which direction their visitor was coming. There was only one route up to the Mission. Forging a single road through such inhospitable terrain, then up a steep hill, must have taxed even the masochism of Jesuits. They'd built one road, and the Mission, and then, perhaps failing to find God up here, vacated the place. If their ghosts ever drifted through, they'd find a deity now, Fletcher thought, in three vials of blue fluid. So would the man coming up the hill. It could only be Jaffe. Nobody else knew of their presence here.

"Damn him," Fletcher said. "Why now? Why now?"

It was a foolish question. Jaffe had chosen to come now because he knew his Great Work was being conspired against. He had a way of maintaining a presence in a place where he wasn't; a spying echo of himself. Fletcher didn't know how. One of Jaffe's suits, no doubt. The kind of minor mind-tricks Fletcher would have dismissed as trickery once, as he would have dismissed so much else. It would take Jaffe several more minutes to get all the way up the hill, but that wasn't enough time, by any means, for Fletcher and the boy to finish their labors.

There were two tasks only he might yet complete if he was efficient. Both were vital. First, the killing and disposal of Raul, from whose transformed system an educated enquirer might glean the nature of the Nuncio. Second, the destruction of the three vials inside the Mission.

It was there he returned now, through the chaos he had gladly wreaked on the place. Raul followed, walking barefoot through the smashed instrumentation and splintered furniture, to the inner sanctum. This was the only room that had not been invaded by the clutter of the Great Work. A plain cell that boasted only a desk, a chair, and an antiquated stereo. The chair was set in front of the window which overlooked the ocean. Here, in the first days following Raul's successful transmutation, before the full realization of the Nuncio's purpose and consequence had soiled Fletcher's triumph, man ind boy had sat, and watched the sky, and listened to Mozart together. All the mysteries, Fletcher had said, in one of his first lessons, were footnotes to music. Before everything, music.

Now there'd be no more sublime Mozart; no more sky-watching; no more loving education. There was only time for a shot. Fletcher took the gun from beside his mescaline in the desk drawer.

"We're going to die?" Raul said.

He'd known this was coming. But not so soon.

"Yes."

"We should go outside," the boy said. "To the edge."

"No. There isn't time. I've...I've got some work to do before I join you."

"But you said together."

"I know."

"You promised together."

"Jesus, Raul! I said: I know! But it can't be helped. He's coming. And if he takes you from me, alive or dead, he'll use you. He'll cut you up. Find out how the Nuncio works in you."

His words were intended to scare, and they succeeded. Had let out a sob, his face knotted up with terror. He took a step backwards as Fletcher raised the gun.

"I'll be with you soon," Fletcher said. "I swear it. Just

as soon as I can."

"Please, father..."

"I'm not your father! Once and for all, I'm nobody's father!"

His outburst broke any hold he had on Raul. Before Fletcher could take a bead on him the boy was away through the door. He still fired wildly, the bullet striking the wall, then he gave chase, firing a second time. But the boy had simian agility in him. He was across the laboratory and out into the sunlight before a third shot could be fired. Out, and away.

Fletcher threw the gun aside. It was a waste of what little time remained to follow Raul. Better to use those minutes to dispose of the Nuncio. There was precious little of the stuff, but enough to wreak evolutionary havoc in any system that it tainted. He'd plotted against it for days and nights now, working out the safest way to be rid of it. He knew it couldn't simply be poured away. What might it do if it got into the earth? His best hope, he'd decided#8212;indeed his only hope#8212;was to throw it into the Pacific. There was a pleasing neatness about that. The long climb to his species' present rung had begun in the ocean, and it was there#8212;in the myriad configurations of certain marine animals#8212;that he'd first observed the urge things had to become something other than themselves. Clues to which the three vials of Nuncio were the solution. Now he'd give that answer back to the element that had inspired it. The Nuncio would literally become drops in the ocean, its powers so diluted as to be negligible.

He crossed to the bench where the vials still stood in their rack. God in three bottles, milky blue, like a della Francesca sky. There was movement in the distillation, as though it was stirring up its own internal tides. And if it knew he was approaching, did it also know his intention? He had so little idea of what he'd created. Perhaps it could read his mind.

He stopped in his tracks, still too much the man of science not to be fascinated by this phenomenon. He'd known the liquor was powerful, but that it possessed the talent for self-fermentation it was now displaying#8212;even a primitive propulsion, it seemed; it was climbing the walls of the vials#8212; astonished him. His conviction faltered. Did he really have the right to put this miracle out of the world's sight? Was its appetite really so unhealthy? All it wanted to do was speed the ascent of things. Make fur of scales. Make flesh of fur. Make spirit, perhaps, of flesh. A pretty thought.

Then he remembered Randolph Jaffe, of Omaha, Nebraska, sometime butcher and opener of Dead Letters; collector of other people's secrets. Would such a man use the Nuncio well? In the hands of someone sweet-natured and loving, the Great Work might begin a universal papacy, every living being in touch with the meaning of its Creation. But Jaffe wasn't loving, nor sweet-natured. He was a thief of revelations, a magician who didn't care to understand the principles of his craft, only to rise by it.

Given that fact the question was not did he have the right to dispose of the miracle, but rather, how dare he hesitate?

He stepped towards the vials, charged with fresh conviction. The Nuncio knew he meant it harm. It responded with a frenzy of activity, climbing the glass walls as best it could, churning against its confines.

As Fletcher reached out to snatch the rack up, he realized its true intention. It didn't simply desire escape. It wanted to work its wonders on the very flesh that was plotting its harm.

It wanted to recreate its Creator.

The realization came too late to be acted upon. Before he could withdraw his outstretched hand, or shield himself, one of the vials shattered. Fletcher felt the glass cut his palm, and the Nuncio splash against him. He staggered away from it, raising his hand in front of his face. There-were several cuts there, but one particularly large, in the middle of his palm, for all the world as though someone had driven a nail through it. The pain made him giddy, but it lasted only a moment, giddiness and pain. Coming after was another sensation entirely. Not even sensation. That was too trivial a description. It was like mainlining on Mozart; a music that bypassed the ears and went straight to the soul. Hearing it, he would never be the same again.

Randolph had seen the smoke rising from the fires outside the Mission as he rounded the first bend in the long haul up the hill, and had confirmed, in that sight, the suspicion that had been gnawing in him for days: that his hired genius was in revolt. He revved the jeep's engine, cursing the dirt that slid away in powder clouds behind his wheels, slowing his ascent to a laboring crawl. Until today it had suited both him and Fletcher that the Great Work be accomplished so far from civilization, though it had required a good deal of persuasion on his part to get equipped a laboratory of the sophistication Fletcher had demanded in a setting so remote. But then persuasion was easy nowadays. The trip into the Loop had stoked the fires in Jaffe's eyes. What the woman in Illinois, whose name he'd never known, had said: You've seen something extraordinary, haven't you? was true now as never before. He'd seen a place out of time, and himself in it, driven beyond sanity by his hunger for the Art. People knew all that though they could never have put words to the thought. They saw it in his look, and either out of fear or awe simply did as he asked.

But Fletcher had been an exception to that rule from the outset. His peccadilloes, and his desperation, had made him pliable, but the man still had a will of his own. Four times he'd refused Jaffe's offer to come out of hiding and recommence his experiments, though Jaffe had reminded him on each occasion how difficult it had been to trace the lost genius, and how much he desired that they work together. He'd sweetened each of the four offers by bringing mescaline in modest supply, always promising more, and promising too that any and every facility Fletcher required would be provided if he could only be persuaded back to his studies. Jaffe had known from first reading about Fletcher's radical theories that here was the way to cheat the system that stood between him and the Art. He didn't doubt that the route to Quiddity was thronged with tests and trials, designed by high-minded gmws or lunatic shamans like Kissoon to keep what they judged lower-class minds from approaching the Holy of Holies. Nothing new about that. But with Fletcher's help he could trip the gurus; get to power over their backs. The Great Work would evolve him beyond the condition of any of the self-elected wise men, and the Art would sing in his fingers.

At first, having set up the laboratory to Fletcher's specifications, and offered the man some thoughts on the problem he'd gleaned from the Dead Letters, Jaffe left the maestro alone, dispatching supplies (starfish, sea urchins; mescaline; an ape) as and when they were requested, but visiting only once a month. On each occasion he'd spent twenty-four hours with Fletcher, drinking and sharing gossip which Jaffe had plucked from the academic grapevine to feed Fletcher's curiosity. After eleven such visits, sensing that the researches at the Mission were beginning to move towards some conclusion, he began to make the journey more regularly. He was less welcome each time. On one occasion Fletcher had even attempted to keep Jaffe out of the Mission altogether, and there'd been a short, mismatched struggle. Fletcher was no fighter. His stooping, undernourished body was that of a man who'd been bent at his studies since adolescence. Beaten, he'd been obliged to allow access. Inside, Jaffe had found the ape, transformed by Fletcher's distillation, the Nuncio, into an ugly but undeniably human child. Even then, in the midst of this triumph, there'd been hints of the breakdown which Jaffe couldn't doubt Fletcher had finally succumbed to. The man had been uneasy about what they'd achieved. But Jaffe had been too damned pleased to take the warning signs seriously. He'd even suggested he try the Nuncio for himself, there and then. Fletcher had counselled against it; suggested several months of further study to be undertaken before Jaffe risk such a step. The Nuncio was still too volatile, he argued. He wanted to examine the way it worked on the boy's system before any further tests. Suppose it simply proved fatal to the child in a week? Or a day? That argument was enough to cool Jaffe's ardor for a while. He left Fletcher to undertake the proposed tests, returning on a weekly basis now, becoming more aware of Fletcher's disintegration with each visit, but assuming the man's pride in his own masterwork would prevent him trying to undo it.

Now, as flocks of scorched notes flew across the ground towards him, he cursed his trust. He stepped from the jeep and began to make his way through the scattered fires towards the Mission. There had always been an apocalyptic air about this spot. The earth so dry and sandy it could sustain little more than a few stunted yucca; the Mission, perched so close to the cliff-edge that one winter the Pacific would inevitably claim it, the boobies and tropic birds making din overhead.

Today there were only words on the wing. The Mission's walls were stained with smoke where fires had been built close to them. The earth was dusted with ash, even less fertile than sand.

Nothing was as it had been.

He called Fletcher's name as he stepped through the open door, the anxiety he'd felt coming up the hill now close to fear, not for himself but for the Great Work. He was glad he'd come armed. If Fletcher's grasp on sanity had finally slipped he might be obliged to coerce the formula for the Nuncio from him. It would not be the first time he'd gone seeking knowledge with a weapon in his pocket. It was sometimes necessary.

The interior was all ruin; several hundred thousand dollars' worth of instrumentation#8212;coaxed, bullied or seduced from academics who'd given him what he asked for just to get Jaffe's eyes off them#8212;destroyed; table-tops cleared with the sweep of an arm. The windows had all been thrown open and the Pacific wind blew through the place, hot and salty. Jaffe navigated the wreckage and made his way through to Fletcher's favorite room, the cell he'd once (high on mescaline) called the plug in the hole in his heart.

He was there, alive, sitting in his chair in front of the flung window, staring up at the sun: the very act that had blinded him in his right eye. He was dressed in the same shabby shirt and overlarge trousers he always wore; his face presented the same pinched, unshaven profile; the pony-tail of graying hair (his only concession to vanity), was in place. Even his posture#8212;hands at his lap, the body sagging#8212;was one Jaffe had seen innumerable times. And yet there was something subtly wrong with the scene, enough to hold Jaffe at the door, refusing to step into the cell. It was as if Fletcher was too much himself. This was too perfect an image of him: the contemplative, staring at the sun, his every pore and pucker demanding the attention of Jaffe's aching retina, as if his portrait had been painted by a thousand miniaturists, all of whom had been granted an inch of their subject and with brushes bearing a single hair rendered their portion in nauseating detail. The rest of the room#8212;the walls, the window, even the chair on which Fletcher sat#8212;swam out of focus, unable to compete with the too-thorough reality of this man.

Jaffe closed his eyes against the portrait. It overloaded his senses. Made him nauseous. In the darkness, he heard Fletcher's voice, as unmusical as ever.

"Bad news," he said, very quietly.

"Why?" Jaffe said, not opening his eyes. Even with them closed he knew damn well the prodigy was speaking to him without use of tongue or lips.

"Just leave," Fletcher said. "And yes. "

"Yes what?"

"You're right. I don't need my throat any longer."

"I didn't say#8212;"

"You don't need to, Jaffe. I'm in your head. It's in there, Jaffe. Worse than I thought. You must leave..."

The volume faded, though the words still came. Jaffe tried to catch them, but most slipped by. Something about do we become sky?, was it? Yes, that's what he said:

"...do we become sky?"

"What are you talking about?" Jaffe said.

"Open your eyes," Fletcher replied.

"It makes me sick to look at you."

"The feeling's mutual. But still...you should open your eyes. See the miracle at work."

"What miracle?"

"Just look."

He did as Fletcher urged. The scene was exactly as it had been when he'd closed them. The wide window; the man sitting before it. The same exactly.

"The Nuncio's in me," Fletcher announced in Jaffe's head. His face didn't move at all. Not a twitch of the lips. Not a flicker of an eyelash. Just the same terrible finishedness.

"You mean you tested it on yourself?" Jaffe said. "After all you told me?"

"It changes everything, Jaffe. It's the whip to the back of the world."

"You took it! It was supposed to be me!"

"I didn't take it. It took me. It's got a life of its own, Jaffe. I wanted to destroy it, but it wouldn't let me."

"Why destroy it in the first place? It's the Great Work."

"Because it doesn't operate the way I thought it would. It's not interested in the flesh, Jaffe, except as an afterthought. It's the mind it plays with. It takes thought for its inspiration, and runs with that. Makes us what we'd hope to be, or fear we are. Or both. Maybe both."

"You haven't changed," Jaffe observed. "Still sound the same."

"But I'm talking in your head," Fletcher reminded him. "Did I ever do that before?"

"So, telepathy's in the future of the species," Jaffe replied. "No surprise there. You've just accelerated the process. Leap-frogged a few thousand years."

"Will I be sky?" Fletcher said again. "That's what I want to be."

"Then be it," Jaffe said. "I've got more ambition than that."

"Yes. Yes, you have, more's the pity. That was why I tried to keep it out of your hands. Stop it using you. But it distracted me. I saw the window open and I couldn't keep away. The Nuncio made me so dreamy. Made me sit, and wonder: will I...will I be sky?"

"It stopped you cheating me," Jaffe said. "It wants to be used, that's all."

"Mmmm."

"So where's the rest? You didn't take it all."

"No," Fletcher said. The power to deceive had been sluiced from him. "But please, don't..."

"Where?" Jaffe said, advancing into the room now. "You've got it on you?"

He felt myriad tiny brushes against his skin as he stepped forward, as though he'd walked into a dense cloud of invisible gnats. The sensation should have warned him against tackling Fletcher, but he was too eager for the Nuncio to take notice. He put his fingers on the man's shoulder. Upon contact the figure seemed to fly apart, a cloud of motes#8212;gray, white and red#8212;breaking against him like a pollen storm.

In his head he heard the genius begin to laugh, not, Jaffe knew, at his expense but at the sheer liberation of shrugging off this skin of dulling dust, which had begun to gather upon him at birth, accruing steadily until all but the brightest hints of brightness were stopped. Now, when the dust blew away, Fletcher was still sitting in the chair as he had been. But now he was incandescent.

"I am too bright?" he said. "I'm sorry."

He turned down his flame.

"I want this too!" Jaffe said. "I want it now."

"I know," Fletcher replied. "I can taste your need. Messy, Jaffe, messy. You're dangerous. I don't think I ever really knew till now how dangerous you are. I can see you inside out. Read your past." He stopped for a moment, then let out a long, pained moan. "You killed a man," he said.

"He deserved it."

"Stood in your way. And this other I'm seeing...Kis-soon is it? Did he die too?"

"No."

"But you'd like to have done it? I can taste hatred in you."

"Yes, I'd have killed him if I'd had the chance." He smiled.

"And me as well, I think," Fletcher said. "Is that a knife in your pocket," he asked, "or are you just pleased to see me?"

"I want the Nuncio," Jaffe said. "I want it, and it wants me..."

He turned away. Fletcher called after him.

"It works on the mind, Jaffe. Maybe on the soul. Don't you understand? Nothing outside that doesn't begin inside. Nothing real that isn't dreamed first. Me? I never wanted my body except as a vehicle. Never really wanted anything at all, except to be sky. But you, Jaffe. You! Your mind's full of shit. Think of that. Think what the Nuncio's going to magnify. I beg you#8212;"

The entreaty, breathed in his skull, made Jaffe halt a moment, and look back at the portrait. It had risen from its chair, though by the expression on Fletcher's face it was a torment to tear himself away from the view.

"I beg you," he said again. "Don't let it use you."

Fletcher extended a hand towards Jaffe's shoulder, but he retreated out of touching range, stepping through into the laboratory. His eyes almost instantly came to rest on the bench and the two vials left in the rack, their contents boiling up against the glass.

"Beautiful," Jaffe said, and stepped towards them, the Nuncio leaping up in the vials at his approach, like a dog wanting to lick its master's face. Its fawning made a lie of Fletcher's fears. He, Randolph Jaffe, was the user in this exchange. The Nuncio, the used.

In his head, Fletcher continued to issue his warning:

"Every cruelty in you, Jaffe, every fear, every stupidity, every cowardice. All making you over. Are you prepared for that? I don't think so. It'll show you too much."

"No such thing as too much," Jaffe said, tuning the protests out and reaching for the nearest of the vials. The Nuncio couldn't wait. It broke the glass, its contents jumping to meet his skin. His knowledge (and his terror) were instantaneous, the Nuncio communicating its message on contact. The moment Jaffe realized Fletcher was right was the same moment he became powerless to correct the error.

The Nuncio had little or no interest in changing the order of his cells. If that happened it would only be as a consequence of a profounder alteration. It viewed his anatomy as a cul-de-sac. What minor improvements it could make in the system were beneath its notice. It wasn't going to waste time sophisticating finger-joints or taking the kinks out of the lower bowel. It was an evangelist not a beautician. Mind was its target. Mind which used body for its gratification, even when that gratification harmed the vehicle. Mind which was the source of the hunger for transformation and its most ardent and creative agent.

Jaffe wanted to beg for help, but the Nuncio had already taken control of his cortex, and he was prevented from uttering a word. Prayer was no more plausible. The Nuncio was God. Once in a bottle; now in his body. He couldn't even die, though his system shook so violently it seemed ready to throw itself apart. The Nuncio forbade everything but its work. Its awesome, perfecting work.

Its first act was to throw his memory into reverse, shooting him back through his life from the moment it touched him, piercing each event until he struck the waters of his mother's womb. He was granted a moment of agonizing nostalgia for that place#8212;its calm, its safety#8212;before his life came to drag him out again, and began the return journey, revisiting his little life in Omaha. From the beginning of his conscious life there'd been so much rage. Against the petty and the politic; against the achievers and the seducers, the ones who made the girls and the grades. He felt it all over again, but intensified: like a cancer cell getting fat in the flick of an eye, distorting him. He saw his parents fading away, and him unable to hold on to them, or#8212;when they'd gone#8212;to mourn them, but raged nevertheless, not knowing why they'd lived, or bothered to bring him into the world. He fell in love again, twice. Was rejected again, twice. Nurtured the hurt, decorated the scars, let the rage grow fatter and fatter. And between those notable lows the perpetual grind of jobs that he couldn't hold, and people who forgot his name day after day, and Christmases coming on Christmases, and only age to mark them. Never getting closer to understanding why he'd been made#8212;why anyone was made, when everything was a cheat and a sham and went to nothing anyway.

Then, the room at the crossroads, filled with Dead Letters, and suddenly his rage had echoes from coast to coast, wild, bewildered people like him stabbing at their confusion and hoping to see sense when it bled. Some of them had. They'd tumbled mysteries, albeit fleetingly. And he had the evidence. Signs and codes; the Medallion of the Shoal, falling into his hands. A moment later he had his knife buried in Homer's head, and he was away, with only a parcel of clues, on a trip that had taken him, growing more powerful with every step, to Los Alamos, and the Loop, and finally to the Mision de Santa Catrina.

And still he didn't know why he'd been made, but he'd accrued enough in his four decades for the Nuncio to give him a temporary answer. For rage's sake. For revenge's sake. For the having of power and the using of power.

Momentarily he hovered over the scene, and saw himself on the floor below, curled round in a litter of glass, clutching at his skull as though to keep it from splitting. Fletcher moved into view. He seemed to be haranguing the body, but Jaffe couldn't hear the words. Some self-righteous speech, no doubt, on the frailty of human endeavor. Suddenly he rushed at the body, his arms raised, and brought his fists down upon it. It came apart, like the portrait at the window. Jaffe howled as his dislocated spirit was claimed for the substance on the floor, drawn down into his Nunciate anatomy.

He opened his eyes and looked up at the man who'd struck off his crust, seeing Fletcher with new comprehension.

From the beginning they'd been an uneasy partnership, the fundamental principles of which had confounded both. But now Jaffe saw the mechanism clearly. Each was the other's nemesis. No two entities on earth were so perfectly opposed. Fletcher loving light as only a man in terror of ignorance could; one eye gone from looking at the sun's face. He was no longer Randolph Jaffe, but the Jaff, the one and only, in love with the dark where his rage had found its sustenance and its expression. The dark where sleep came, and the trip to the dream-sea beyond sleep began. Painful as the Nuncio's education had been, it was good to be reminded of what he was. More than reminded, magnified through the glass of his own history. Not in the dark now, but of it, capable of using the Art. His hand already itched to do so. And with the itch came a grasp of how to snatch the veil aside and enter Quiddity. He didn't need ritual. He didn't need suits or sacrifices. He was an evolved soul. His need could not be denied, and he had need in abundance.

But in reaching this new self he had accidentally created a force that would, if he didn't stop here and now, oppose him every step of the way. He got to his feet, not needing to hear a challenge from Fletcher's lips to know that the enmity between them was perfectly understood. He read the revulsion in the flame that flared behind his enemy's eye. The genius sauvage, the dope-fiend and Pollyanna Fletcher had been dissolved and reconstructed: joyless, dreamy and bright. Minutes ago he'd been ready to sit by the window, longing to be sky, until longing or death did its work. But not now.

"I see the whole thing," he announced, choosing to use his voice-box now that they were equal and opposite. "You tempted me to raise you up, so you could steal your way to revelation."

"And I will," the Jaff replied. "I'm halfway there already."

"Quiddity won't open to the likes of you."

"It'll have no choice," the Jaff replied. "I'm inevitable now." He raised his hand. Beads of power, like tiny ballbearings, came sweating from it. "You see?" he said, "I'm an Artist."

"Not till you use the Art you're not."

"And who's going to stop me? You?"

"I've got no choice. I'm responsible."

"How? I beat you to a pulp once. I'll do it again."

"I'll raise visions to oppose you."

"You can try." A question came into the Jaff mind as he spoke, which Fletcher had begun to answer before the other had even voiced it.

"Why did I touch your body? I don't know. It demanded I did. I kept trying to shout it down, but it called."

He paused, then said:

"Maybe opposites attract, even in our condition."

"Then the sooner you're dead, the better," the Jaff said, and reached to tear out his enemy's throat.

In the darkness that was creeping over the Mission from the Pacific, Raul heard the first din of battle begin. He knew from echoes in his own Nunciate system that the distillation had been at work behind the walls. His father, Fletcher, had gone out of his own life and into something new. So had the other man, the one he'd always distrusted, even when words like evil were just sounds from a human palate. He understood them now; or at least put them together with his animal response to Jaffe: revulsion. The man was sick to his core, like fruit full of rot. To judge by the sound of violence from inside, Fletcher had decided to fight that corruption. The brief, sweet time he'd had with his father was over. There'd be no more lessons in civility; no more sitting together by the window, listening to "the sublime Mozart" and watching the clouds change shape.

As the first stars appeared, the sounds from the Mission ceased. Raul waited, hoping that Jaffe had been destroyed, but fearing his father had gone too. After an hour in the cold he decided to venture inside. Wherever they'd gone#8212; Heaven or Hell#8212;he couldn't follow. The best he could do was put on his clothes, which he'd always despised wearing (they chafed and caged) but which were now a reminder of his master's tuition. He'd wear them always, so as not to forget the Good Man Fletcher.

Reaching the door, he realized that the Mission had not been vacated. Fletcher was still there. So was his enemy. Both men still possessed bodies that resembled their former selves, but there was a change in them. Shapes hovered over each: a huge-headed infant, the color of smoke, over Jaffe; a cloud, with the sun somewhere in its cushion, over Fletcher. The men had their hands at each other's throats and eyes. Their subtle bodies were similarly intertwined. Perfectly matched, neither could gain victory.

Raul's entrance broke the impasse. Fletcher turned, his one good eye focusing on the boy, and in that instant the Jaff took his advantage, flinging his enemy back across the room.

"Out!" Fletcher yelled to Raul. "Get out!"

Raul did as he was ordered, darting between the dying fires as he raced from the Mission, the ground trembling beneath his bare soles as new furies were unleashed behind him. He had three seconds' grace to fling himself a little way down the slope before the leeway side of the Mission#8212;walls which had been built to survive until the end of faith#8212;shattered before an eruption of energy. He didn't cover his eyes against it. Instead he watched, glimpsing the forms of Jaffe and the Good Man Fletcher, twin powers locked together in the same wind, fly out from the center of the blast over his head, and away into the night.

The force of the explosion had scattered the bonfires. Hundreds of smaller fires now burned around the Mission. The roof had been almost entirely blown off. The walls bore gaping wounds.

Lonely already, Raul limped back towards his only refuge.

There was a war waged in America that year, perhaps the bitterest and certainly the strangest ever fought on, in or above its soil. For the most part it went unreported, because it went unnoticed. Or rather its consequences (which were many, and often traumatic) seemed so unlike the effects of battle they were consistently misinterpreted. But then this was a war without precedent. Even the most crackpot prophets, the kind who annually predicted Armageddon, didn't know how to interpret the shaking of America's entrails. They knew something of consequence was afoot, and had Jaffe still been in the Dead Letter Room in the Omaha Post Office he would have discovered countless letters flying back and forth, filled with theories and suppositions. None, however#8212;even from correspondents who'd known in some oblique fashion about the Shoal .and the Art#8212;came close to the truth.

Not only was the combat without precedent, but its nature developed as the weeks went by. The combatants had left the Mision de Santa Catrina with only a rudimentary understanding of their new condition and the powers that went with it. They soon explored and learned to exploit those powers, however, as the necessity of conflict threw their invention into overdrive. As he'd sworn, Fletcher willed an army from the fantasy lives of the ordinary men and women he met as he pursued Jaffe across the country, never giving him time to concentrate his will and use the Art he had access to. He dubbed these visionary soldiers hallucigenia, after an enigmatic species whose fossil remains recorded their existence five hundred and thirty million years previously. A family which, like the fantasies now named for them, bore no antecedents. These soldiers had lives barely longer than that of butterflies. They soon lost their particularity, becoming smoky and vague. But gossamer as they were, they several times carried the day against the Jaff and his legions, the terata, primal fears which Randolph now had the power to call forth from his victims, and make solid for a time. The terata were no less fleeting than the battalions shaped against them. In that, as in everything else, the Jaff and Good Man Fletcher were equally matched.

So it proceeded, in feints and counterfeints, pincer movements and sweeps, the intention of each army to slaughter the leader of the other. It was not a war the natural world took kindly to. Fears and fantasies were not supposed to take physical form. Their arena was the mind. Now they were solid, their combat raging across Arizona and Colorado, and into Kansas and Illinois, the order of things undone in countless ways by its passage. Crops were slow to show their shoots, preferring to stay in the earth rather than risk their tender heads when creatures in defiance of all natural law were abroad. Flocks of migrating birds, avoiding the paths of haunted thunderheads, came late to their resting grounds, or lost their way entirely and perished. There was in every state a trail of stampedes and gorings, the panicked response of animals who sensed the scale of the conflict being waged to extinction around them. Stallions set their sights on cattle and boulders, and gutted themselves mounting cars. Dogs and cats turned savage overnight, and were shot or gassed for the crime. Fish in quiet rivers tried to take to the land, knowing there was ambition in the air, and perished aspiring.

Fear in front and bedlam behind, the conflict ground to a halt in Wyoming, where the armies, too equally matched for anything but a war of attrition, fought each other to a complete standstill. It was the end of the beginning, or near it. The sheer scale of the energies required by Good Man Fletcher and the Jaff to create and lead these armies (no warlords these, by any stretch of the definition; they were merely men in hate with each other) had taken a terrible toll. Weakened to the point of near collapse they punched on like boxers who'd been battered into a stupor, but who fought because they knew no other sport. Neither would be satisfied until the other was dead.

On the night of July 16th the Jaff broke from the field of battle, shedding the remnants of his army as he made a dash for the southwest. His intended destination was the Baja. Knowing that the war against Fletcher could not be won under present conditions, he wanted access to the third vial of the Nuncio, with which he might re-invest his much diminished power.

Ravaged as he was, Fletcher gave chase. Two nights later, with a spurt of agility that would have impressed his much-missed Raul, he overtook the Jaff in Utah.

There they met, in a confrontation as brutal as it was inconclusive. Fuelled by a passion for each other's destruction which had long ago escalated beyond the issue of the Art and its possessing, and was now as devoted and as intimate as love, they fought for five nights. Again, neither triumphed. They beat and tore at each other, dark matched with bright, until they were barely coherent. When the Wind took them they lacked all power to resist it. What little strength remained they used to prevent one another from making a break for the Mission, and the sustenance there. The Wind carried them over the border into California, dropping them closer to the earth with every mile they covered. South-southeast over Fresno, and towards Bakersfield they travelled, until#8212; on Friday, July 27th, 1971, their powers so depleted they could no longer keep themselves aloft#8212;they fell in Ventura County, on the wooded edge of a town called Palomo Grove, during a minor electrical storm which brought not so much as a flicker to the roving searchlights and illuminated billboards of nearby Hollywood.